Kinsale is a famous sepulchre to [the Spaniards’] honour: that climate perhaps having as natural an antipathy to intruders, as to noisome and venomous beasts.
– Paolo Sarpi, A Discourse, 1628
INSIDE the town, Águila was fighting another, more insidious, battle. Some half a dozen captains were secretly plotting against him – and it came as no surprise that the nucleus of all this dissent was Brother Mateo de Oviedo. ‘Jealousies and disputes arose between [Águila] and his captains, and Matthew Oviedo,’ Philip O’Sullivan recorded.
Oviedo was a prickly individual who fell out with most people, including, eventually, King Felipe. He even detested Fr Archer. (His rages were legendary. When one finance official queried Oviedo’s accounts at Kinsale, Oviedo threatened to excommunicate him.)
Águila learned about the plots from a loyal officer who had spotted the captains creeping into Oviedo’s house for confessions. In reality, they were voicing grievances against Águila and speculating that he was in league with the English. To these aggrieved officers, it all seemed to add up. If this were not true, why were they in such a weak fortress? Why hadn’t Águila moved on? Since he’d stayed, why hadn’t he built better fortifications? Why hadn’t he installed more soldiers in the two forts? And why had he spurned O’Sullivan Beare’s offer of two thousand troops?
Throughout it all, Brother Mateo nodded sympathetically. Oviedo seems to have been one of those people who crop up in every crisis – the carping critic who quickly identifies the spark of negativity in others, stokes it up into a roaring flame, and then uses the dissidents as a proxy for his own disaffection.
Oviedo was carefully keeping a log of all Águila’s mistakes. This deflected attention from his own errors – for instance, his choice of destination and his misjudgement of local support. He would later plead to Lerma: ‘Failure to succeed is commonly blamed on those least at fault.’
He maintained that more Irish would have supported the invaders if they had fortified Kinsale. ‘[The] entire country would have joined us if they had seen we were serious about defending our position,’ he claimed confidently. Instead, ‘like women, we let ourselves be surrounded and besieged by land and sea’.
Águila was furious about the meetings. He knew it was not the first time that Oviedo had undermined a commander in mid-campaign. It had happened before – in a place whose very name evoked dread among the Spanish troops. It was a place of horror called Smerwick.
It was a September day in 1580. A much younger and more idealistic Brother Mateo stepped ashore at the isolated port of Smerwick in County Kerry, after a four-week voyage from Spain. He watched with pride as 300 crack Spanish and Italian troops marched ashore, carrying the crossed-keys banner of Pope Gregory XIII. Eyes afire with religious fervour, Oviedo was determined to free the Irish from ‘that yoke imposed by the English heretics’.
It was the thirty-three-year-old theologian’s second stab at the same task. The previous summer, in July 1579, he had sailed into Smerwick on a secret mission to Ireland ‘to bring that isle back to Christ’. He hadn’t achieved this ambitious goal, but he had returned to Spain with glowing reports. Oviedo was convinced that a quarter of the Irish population was in rebellion and that the other three-quarters would follow as soon as military aid arrived. These statistics were insanely optimistic, but he had managed to convince both Pope Gregory and King Felipe II that just a slight push would send Ireland tumbling into full-scale religious revolt.
Now, in 1580, Brother Mateo was back in Smerwick again, leading a second force. He was much more than just a chaplain. According to one authority on the invasion, Oviedo was ‘the principal promoter of this undertaking’. The invasion was ostensibly a religious expedition sponsored by Pope Gregory. Its commander was an experienced Italian colonel named Sebastiano di San Giuseppe. As the expedition’s ‘apostolic commissary’, Oviedo brandished a letter from the Pope and promised the bemused locals the same indulgences that were granted to the Crusaders.
San Giuseppe had more earthly considerations. Fearing an imminent English blockade, he dug in at Dún an Óir (the Fortress of Gold) a natural fastness surrounded by rocks. Immediately, Oviedo began to question his authority.
—This is not a good place to fortify, he told San Giuseppe.
—I am the military commander here, San Giuseppe replied. This is my decision and it stands.
Furious, Oviedo invoked the Pope’s name. But San Giuseppe was not for turning.
What happened next was open to different interpretations. Brother Mateo’s supporters claimed that Oviedo quit ‘in disgust’, left the expedition, and ‘retired … to the interior of the country’.
But in San Giuseppe’s eyes, it was simple desertion – especially since Oviedo had persuaded most of the Irish insurgents and some key members of the invasion force to leave with him. Alone and abandoned on his exposed rock at the world’s end, San Giuseppe didn’t stand a chance without the mass Irish support that Oviedo had first promised and then snatched away. The insurgents had left a few hundred ‘chosen troops’ at the fort, but they were not nearly enough.
Oviedo stayed in Ireland a mere six weeks. In October, with the drama still escalating, he sailed back to the safety of Spain. The reason, or perhaps the pretext, was that he would plead for more troops. Despite San Giuseppe’s protests, Oviedo took the best ships with him. The commander was left only with three smaller craft.
In November, the English battered the fort from land and sea. Although seriously outnumbered, the invaders repulsed one attack and left many English dead. But their position became hopeless – and with no sign of any relief from the Irish insurgent force, San Giuseppe was forced to plead for terms.
After a parlay with Lord Arthur Grey, the English commander, San Giuseppe believed that the invaders’ lives would be spared if they surrendered. The English commander later claimed he made no such commitment, but told them that they would be treated as stateless adventurers who must yield to his will, for life or death. The distinction hardly matters: what followed was equally inexcusable.
As one English writer approvingly – and chillingly – recorded: ‘[Lord Grey] decided their quarrel by sheathing his sword in their bowels.’
Here’s how Grey himself recalled it: ‘Morning came … [and they] presented [their ensigns] unto me with their lives and the fort … then I put in certain bands, who straight fell to execution. There were 600 slain.’
San Giuseppe was spared to tell of the slaughter. He returned to a frosty welcome in a Spanish prison cell. Oviedo had already condemned him in his absence to anyone who would listen.
A year later, a friend wrote to San Giuseppe hoping that he would soon be freed ‘to plead your cause … against Father Matthew de Oviedo … [who has] accused you of a thousand things’.
However, another source said that San Giuseppe obtained affidavits from officers testifying it was Oviedo’s indiscipline that led to the force’s destruction.
There was never any doubt about who would come off better in the dispute.
Oviedo retreated to the tranquillity of his rural convent. But he couldn’t get Ireland out of his system. He had been bitten by the bug. He would continue to dream up plans for further Spanish missions to Ireland – probably never suspecting that, nearly two decades after Smerwick, he would be back in another indefensible coastal fortress, trying to explain away the lack of support from his beloved insurgent allies, and collecting evidence against yet another military commander who, infuriatingly, would not do what he was told.
In Kinsale, the dissident captains continued their secret meetings. But in attacking Águila, they may have had a hidden agenda which had nothing to do with this expedition. The underlying factors could have had more to do with social class, power and ambition. According to one source, these disaffected officers were annoyed because they were not receiving promotions.
If this is the case, it reflected the tensions that were tearing apart the Spanish army throughout Europe at this time. Old-style commanders like Juan del Águila had little in common with the new generation of young officers. They seemed to inhabit different worlds.
Although a nobleman, Águila had joined the army as a grunt soldier. There was a reason for this. When he was a teenager, the Spanish tercio regiments had risen to unprecedented prestige under the brilliant but brutal general the Duke of Alba. Known as the Iron Duke, Alba had insisted that all aspiring officers work their way up through the ranks. They had to drill until they dropped. They had to become masters of the pike and musket. Only the best candidates would be selected. Alba fostered a sense of individualism as well as obedience, camaraderie and esprit de corps. His elite officers were given freedom to dress as they chose. One regiment was known as ‘the dandies’ because of their ‘plumes, finery and bright colours’. Another, ‘the sextons’, wore fashionable black. What they rarely wore was a military uniform. As one veteran remarked disdainfully, they did not want to look like shopkeepers.
In the 1590s, a decade or so after Alba died, his methods were allowed to die with him. New officers no longer had to serve probation. The nobles, who comprised a tenth of Spain’s population, were allowed to go straight into positions of army command. In one unintentionally hilarious exchange, some courtiers fretted that nobles should get at least some military training. Very well, said others, quite seriously: we’ll teach them how to tilt with lances in jousting tournaments.
An unexpected side-effect was a logjam of young officers awaiting promotion. These pressures often exploded into mutiny.
Was this a factor behind the insubordination at Kinsale? It’s interesting to speculate. Were the disaffected captains at Kinsale part of this widespread campaign against class bias, or part of the new influx of favoured courtiers who resented having to take orders from anyone?
Only one thing is clear: this was a clash of generations and of ideologies. Águila was from the old school of hard training and unquestioning obedience. These captains, with their constant criticism and resentment of authority, represented the new wave of Spanish officers – a generation who would live to see Alba’s dreams turn to dust as the golden years of the tercios came to an end.
Meanwhile, tensions were rising between the townspeople and the invaders. Beef was running short. There were maggots in the bread. Águila reported home that his men could buy ingredients for tortillas locally ‘but so expensively that it is an incredible thing. Now everything is gone.’
With no food to be purchased anywhere, the Spanish started to requisition what few supplies the townsfolk had. John Clerk, the Scots merchant, witnessed cows being commandeered. This was a shift from Águila’s original position – ‘we pay them what they demand’ – and it created widespread resentment. ‘The townspeople forsake [the Spanish],’ Clerk said, ‘because they kill up their cattle without payment.’
There were also disputes over living space. With a normal population of up to two thousand, and only two hundred houses within the walls, it had always been a bit crowded in Kinsale. With the arrival of 3,700 troops, the town became claustrophobic. The best and most spacious premises had gone to the officers, and other homes were requisitioned to cope with the overflow from the hospital.
The plague of dysentery exacerbated the problem. Águila summed up the increasingly horrific situation in a letter to the King. ‘We have many sick and they are collapsing every day,’ he wrote. ‘They have too little food and too much work to do. The sentries can never leave their guns out of their hands. The winter alone is bad enough.’
Winter. It was the invisible enemy that devastated both sides in this conflict, and for those men used to warmth and sunshine, it must have been particularly hard. ‘[One] can readily picture the gloom and horror of the position of its defenders fresh from the sunny lands of Spain,’ wrote Florence O’Sullivan, a local historian, in 1905. ‘The almost incessant rain and fog of these months, the narrow ill-paved streets, dark as Erebus, the few hours of daylight, the deep depression of the position dominated by dark frowning cliffs … all combined to render the task of the Spaniards an heroic one.’
Meanwhile, another sound was drowning out the Spaniards’ shouted orders and the locals’ cries of protest. It came from outside. It was the rhythmic tramp of marching boots.