NO, life doesn’t always go as you planned, as George Carew was discovering. Marching on tortuous mud tracks through impenetrable forests as he tried to track an elusive and unseen enemy, the English general must have felt he was truly entering the heart of darkness.
At every hamlet, suspicious and hostile eyes stared out at him from behind long flops of hair – the traditional Gaelic fashion that hid the face in a discomfitingly similar way to a mask. Each sight of a hooded figure in some dank, dripping woodland track could make a man clutch his sword for fear of an ambush. Those old women grinding corn and muttering to each other – were they villagers conversing in Irish, or hags casting some witch-like spell?
Carew did not enjoy this sort of war – the long, wearying march through ambiguous territories, trying to pin down an enemy who was as hard to capture as a will-o’-the-wisp. He would have been quite happy to have stayed in the camp, supervising artillery by day and dictating his memoirs by night over a cordial glass of claret. He was most at home in the murky world of espionage and dirty tricks. He had left his comfort zone a long way behind as he trekked north into the deep, unfathomable heartland of middle Ireland.
Maybe that was why Blount had sent him on this mission.
In early November, a council of war at Kinsale camp had decided to despatch Carew with around 2,500 men to intercept the Irish insurgent army. Blount believed that Hugh O’Neill was already on the march south and that he would reach Kinsale within a few days. (In reality, when Carew set off on 7 November, O’Neill was still at home.)
Carew was joined on the way by a contingent of Irish troops from the Dublin area. They were commanded by Sir Christopher St Lawrence, a Howth nobleman from an ancient Norman-Irish family. St Lawrence had been kidnapped as a child by the legendary pirate queen Grace O’Malley. He later served under Essex in Ireland, and was notorious for hot-headedly offering to kill Lord Grey – the butcher of Smerwick – after he offended Essex by riding past him without saluting.
With these reinforcements, Carew’s intercepting army totalled an impressive 4,500 infantry and 500 cavalry, easily outnumbering any force O’Neill could assemble at the time.
As he continued his march into the dark core of the heavily forested countryside, Carew became increasingly uneasy. He was spooked by the silent hostility, and convinced that his retreat route could be cut off. He believed – wrongly as it turned out – that he was about to meet an insurgent force of 6,000. Blount constantly had to talk him down. ‘In good faith, my Lord,’ he wrote to Carew on 15 November, ‘… they are not yet above 1,300 fighting men … their whole number will not exceed 3,000.’ He advised Carew that the insurgent force would not meet him in battle, but instead would try ‘to steal by you’.
In one letter, Carew hinted that he should return to Kinsale, let the insurgents follow, and do the fighting there. Blount refused – Carew’s very presence showed the Irish that they meant business. ‘Therefore, although … I desire your presence, I fear I shall not enjoy it as soon as I covet,’ he wrote. Reading between the lines, you get a feeling that Blount was actually relishing his rival’s discomfiture.
After a ‘long and weary march’, Carew’s force reached Ardmayle, near Cashel in Tipperary. It was at this point that real life made one of its frustrating departures from the script. Carew discovered that he would not be encountering O’Neill after all. The chieftain he would be meeting – or, more accurately, not meeting – was Red Hugh O’Donnell.
When he had heard of the Spanish landing, Red Hugh had been ‘full of satisfaction and joy’. According to his seventeenth-century biographer, Lughaidh O’Cleary, he was so confident of the success of the invasion that he had no hesitation in leaving his Donegal homeland to march south. He was certain he could reclaim it later.
He and his allies assembled their three thousand troops in Ballymote, County Sligo, on 22 October. Marching south, he crossed the Shannon near Athlone, where he was joined by the mercenary forces of Richard Tyrrell, an insurgent captain paid by the Spanish. Tyrrell had been promised that, after victory, he would rule large swathes of the midlands.
O’Donnell’s march south has become the stuff of legend. In the popular imagination, he storms south from the outset at a cracking pace, crossing ‘many a river bridged with ice’ and ‘past quaking fen and precipice’ to reach his allies. It’s hard to know how this perception arose, since his biographer, O’Cleary, makes it clear that he proceeded ‘by very slow marches’, taking time to plunder Irish-owned territories on the way. One region was ‘plundered and spoiled entirely’ and left under ‘a heavy cloud of fire’. He paused for quite some time in north Tipperary, ‘searching and seeking, plundering and exploring’ throughout mid-November before arriving at Holycross, south of Thurles. It was easy plunder at the time – but his men were later to pay a high price for it on their way home.
O’Donnell wasn’t fazed when he heard that Carew’s army was blocking his way. ‘Neither fear nor dread nor death-shiver seized him,’ Lughaidh O’Cleary recorded colourfully.
Red Hugh had encamped only eight kilometres away from the English. He had scattered his troops over a wide range of woodland – some of his camps were seven kilometres apart – and had burrowed deep into the densest thickets. According to Carew, they were camped ‘in a strong fastness of bog and wood’ with all approaches plashed – sealed with interwoven branches. But fortunately for Carew, he did not have to ferret O’Donnell out of his forest bolthole. His job was merely to stop him joining the Spaniards … and Carew’s armies were blocking the only routes southward. ‘He blocked up the passes and narrow roads,’ wrote Philip O’Sullivan. True, there was another route which led west across the boggy Slievefelim mountains to Limerick. However, the torrential rains had turned the mountain pass into a quagmire. Some light-footed troops might be able to flounder through the muck, but the main army with its heavy equipment would become bogged down within minutes. It wasn’t even an option.
Yet again – as so often in this saga – the gods of weather had other ideas. The same Siberian frost that had gripped Kinsale hit Slievefelim with a vengeance, freezing the quagmires into concrete and transforming the squelching goat-tracks into serviceable pathways.
Red Hugh saw his chance and didn’t waste a moment. Assembling his troops in the dead of night, he silently stole out of the woods and into the mountains. It was in these circumstances that the tough Irish rural guerrillas showed their superiority over the English. They slogged uphill without a pause, jettisoning heavy baggage if it threatened to slow them down. Eager hands coaxed and pushed the beasts of burden up impossible slopes, through the freezing peaks and down the other side to safety. ‘He marched on due west … [and then] south-eastwards, day and night, without stop or halt,’ reported O’Cleary.
By 11am on 22 November, Red Hugh’s force was nearly seventy kilometres away, at Croom in Limerick – an astonishing march for infantry alone, but an almost unbelievable achievement for a column burdened down with equipment.
Carew was dismayed. For once, his intelligence had let him down. He force-marched his men forty kilometres to intercept the Irish at a likely point, only to find that Red Hugh had already passed and was more than twenty kilometres further on. Highly embarrassed, he had no choice but to praise his enemy’s achievement. It was ‘the greatest march with carriage … that hath been heard of’, he said in grudging admiration. ‘This long march is incredible, but upon my reputation … it is true.’
Red Hugh allowed his men just one night’s sleep before resuming his march. As he waited for O’Neill to join him, he headed southwest to friendly territory to recuperate and gather support. Meanwhile, Carew’s weary troops began their sad footslog back to Kinsale. On the way, however, they met a man whose irrepressible energy and enthusiasm could only boost their spirits. He was a remarkable soldier-poet who was destined to play a decisive role in the battle to come.
His name was Richard de Burgh.
‘Gaillimh abú!’
The rolling Irish warcry greeted Carew’s despondent troops as they trudged back across the border into County Cork. Carew’s men must have gripped their pikes and firearms, convinced that they were about to be attacked by O’Neill’s insurgents.
Every fighting clan in Ireland had its warcry – it usually consisted of the name or area followed by the word ‘abú’ or ‘victory’. It was howled not in unison but in a rolling, shuddering Mexican wave of sound. This unearthly human baying would always spook the English troops – and ‘abú’ was turned into a new English word for clamour: ‘hubbub’.
But for now, Carew’s men could relax. The Galwaymen who faced them on the road to Kinsale were pro-Queen Irish, led by the twenty-eight-year-old Richard de Burgh, the new Earl of Clanrickard.
De Burgh thundered up on his stallion and saluted Carew. He explained that he was en route from Galway to Kinsale with fifty cavalry and 150 infantry in response to Blount’s summons.
The clichéd description ‘dashing young cavalry officer’ could have been coined especially for Richard de Burgh. Fearless and impulsive, he was one of the rising stars of the Queen’s forces in Ireland. He was good-looking, personally charming, and a popular figure at the London court, where he had already become a firm favourite of Elizabeth. In both looks and attitude, he reminded the ageing monarch of a younger – but more biddable – version of her beloved Earl of Essex.
The resemblance had also been noticed by another woman – Frances Walsingham, the beautiful daughter of Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham. As the widow of poet Philip Sidney, she had married the roving Earl of Essex but had recently taken Richard de Burgh as her secret lover. Now that Essex had been executed, they could finally marry.
The new Earl was a true renaissance man in the spirit of the age. He had matriculated at Oxford at the age of twelve, and had become a talented poet. His writing, tense and spare, resembles the works of John Donne. ‘My love doth fly with wings of fear,’ went one verse, ‘And doth a flame of fire resemble / Which mounting high and burning clear / Yet ever more doth move and tremble.’
But what made Richard de Burgh’s success truly remarkable – even astonishing – was his national and religious identity. He was not some English colonist, but an Irishman from County Galway whose true-green credentials were impeccable. More than that, he was a proud Catholic recusant who continued to practise his preferred religion with a daring defiance. That was a dangerous attitude with people like George Carew around – and even more so when you consider Richard’s volatile family background. The de Burghs – or Bourkes, or Burkes – had been hard-core rebels for many years.
They were an old and venerable family – according to Debrett’s Peerage, the de Burghs ‘rank amongst the most ancient in the united kingdoms’ – who came over with the Normans and later adopted the Irish language, customs and dress. Another thing the de Burghs enthusiastically adopted was the Irish hostility towards English authority. In 1576, the de Burghs torched the pro-English town of Athenry and put everyone to the sword ‘out of a barbarous hatred against the inhabitants’. The rebel family went on the run, to be hunted across the countryside ‘from bush to bush and from hill to hill’ by the exasperated authorities.
However, young Richard went to England at an early age and fell under the spell of Essex and his entourage. Among his mentors were Essex and his wife Frances, the bewitching Penelope Rich, and of course, Charles Blount.
During the 1590s, Richard de Burgh supported the English against Hugh O’Neill. Blount relied upon him to hold Connaught against the insurgents. According to Fynes Moryson, he ‘served the Queen … nobly, valiantly and faithfully’. But many true-blue English officers fiercely resented the Irishman’s rise to power.
Like Blount, Richard de Burgh was now in bad odour for his association with the Essex circle. Protesting his own ‘innocency’, de Burgh wrote to Secretary Cecil swearing that just ‘as I unfainedly loved him [Essex] whom I esteemed her Majesty’s most dutiful and worthy servant’, he was now offering the same devotion to Cecil.
Fortunately for de Burgh, he shared another advantage with Blount – the favour of the Queen. She refused to believe the ‘many scandalous rumours’ that surrounded him, and she ordered the reluctant Carew to advance his career. Carew had no option but to obey. But as the enlarged convoy marched back to Kinsale, de Burgh must have wondered which enemy he needed to fear most – the Spaniards ahead of him, or George Carew at his back.
When Juan del Águila heard how an overnight frost had facilitated O’Donnell’s miraculous escape, he must have experienced a sense of déjà vu. Because sixteen years before, in the Low Countries, he and his men had been saved from slaughter by exactly the same phenomenon.
It was in the winter of 1585 – a dreadful, pitiless winter just like this one. Juan del Águila had been leading a Spanish tercio regiment against the Dutch Protestant insurgents in an area of reclaimed marshland near Empel, south of Amsterdam. The Dutch had pinned down his force. They threw open the river dams, flooding the entire region and leaving Águila’s men stranded on an island of high ground. The Dutch sent a naval fleet into the flooded zone. It surrounded the island. There was no escape.
The rain poured down relentlessly, raising the water level even higher. Stuck for five days on a bare islet, drenched and chilled, with no food supplies, Águila and his troops seemed doomed to annihilation. Yet Águila never gave up. He kept the Dutch ships at bay, buying time.
But buying time for what? Everyone agreed his situation was hopeless.
Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Empel, there was an eerie coincidence. A Spanish sapper unearthed a buried image of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. It was the eve of the same feast-day, 8 December. The Spaniards were in no doubt – this was a sign from God. They installed the image in a church.
December 8 dawned to reveal a dramatic change in the weather. The rains had ceased and the region had been blast-frozen by an arctic wind. The flood surface turned to solid ice. The encircling ships were forced to retreat before they were crushed. Astonishingly, unbelievably, Águila’s troops simply strolled off their island prison to freedom.
‘God turned into a Spaniard,’ a Dutch leader declared with stunned incredulity.
The freak incident marked a turning point in Águila’s career. He went on to capture a string of townships and to establish his reputation as the man born without fear.
Ever since 1585, the feast of 8 December has been a special day for Spain’s military forces. Parades and celebrations are held to mark the escape of Águila and his fellow officers in the ‘Miracle at Empel’.