Great was this victory [at Kinsale] … the Queen’s authority was restored; the insolency of wicked persons restrained; the hearts of honest men were cheered up and confirmed; and a perfect and solid peace afterwards established in all parts of the island.
– William Camden, historian, 1551–1623
CAMDEN could not have been more mistaken. Like a slow-burning fuse on an infantryman’s musket, the legacy of Kinsale smouldered acridly and malevolently for many years. Eventually, inevitably, it touched a powerfully volatile mixture of pent-up hatred and resentment and exploded with terrifying force … in 1641, in 1916 in 1968, and at many times in between.
Most Irish people are familiar with the narrative. The defeat at Kinsale and the exit of the Spanish resulted in Ireland’s Gaelic nobility departing to the Continent, first at Castlehaven and then in the ‘Flight of the Earls’, and this in turn resulted in the long, slow decline of the Gaelic Order that once dominated politics and culture in Ireland. It left the already-depopulated north open to King James’s large-scale plantations of Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. The inevitable tensions between dispossessed locals and assertive newcomers resulted in a massive blow-up in 1641. Irish Catholics rose in rebellion. The cold-blooded massacre of thousands of Protestant settlers in Ulster and the equally ruthless butchery of the Irish by Oliver Cromwell in 1649 created the template for centuries of mistrust and violence. The atavistic memory of these atrocities sank deep into the national psyche. In the late 1960s, the simmering tensions erupted in the thirty years of conflict known as The Troubles.
In broad-brush terms, that picture of events is accurate, although the finer details are as complex as everything else in history. Yet, as shorthand terms for the defeat of Gaelic Ireland and the departure of its hierarchy to the Continent, Kinsale and the Flight of the Earls still generally hold true. All these epic processes began near a small County Cork town on Christmas Eve, 1601.
But first, let’s look at the international repercussions.
Kinsale put an end to Spain’s long-cherished dream of conquering England. The Spanish had several times tried to invade England directly by sea: that had failed. Elizabeth had blocked them in northern Europe. The most promising route – the hop, skip and jump up the coast of Brittany which was so brilliantly road-tested by Juan del Águila in Cornwall – had been taken away from them. All that remained was the back-door route through Ireland. But that had made huge demands of their Irish hosts, the insurgents, and the debacle of the battle made it crystal clear that O’Neill had neither the unity nor the resources to facilitate an invasion. At Kinsale, the ‘King of Spain’s bridge into England’ collapsed forever.
Spain had no option but to suspend its religious wars and accept peace with England – a process made easier by the amicable contacts developed in post-siege Kinsale and accelerated by the death of Elizabeth, for whom the war was a fiercely personal matter. The resultant treaty altered not only the map of Europe, but of the globe – for instance, peace in the Atlantic enabled the English to move into a whole new world in North America and to build up their naval power.
However, the financial strain of fighting the Irish and Spanish had pushed England almost into bankruptcy. The Crown became increasingly dependent upon Parliament, creating the great power clashes that resulted in the English Civil War and, ultimately, the drift towards democracy.
Within Ireland, the effect of Kinsale was cataclysmic for the Gaels. For centuries England had been trying unsuccessfully to assert control over its first colony. The O’Neill rebellion presented Ireland’s greatest opportunity to defeat the intruders. But since the country was deeply divided – and since O’Neill failed to achieve unity through persuasion, force or religious edict – he depended upon outside help. He got it in 1601, but the defeat at Kinsale, and the departure of O’Donnell immediately afterwards, tore the heart out of the chieftains’ alliance and effectively ended the insurgency as a nationwide movement. The peace deal between Spain and England meant O’Neill would never have another chance.
His departure in the Flight of the Earls left Gaelic Ireland bereft, although the decline would resemble a long and slow twilight rather than an instant plunge into darkness. Eventually even the pro-English Gaelic lords were left powerless. The old political structure was steadily dismantled, and a centuries-old culture with a rich legacy of laws, social structure, poetry and literature began to wither and die.
‘There was not lost in any defeat … so much as was lost [at Kinsale],’ lamented Ludhaigh O’Cleary. He said the Gaelic nobles had been ‘robbed of their patrimony and their noble land which they left to their enemies in defeat. There was lost besides nobility and honour, generosity and great deeds, hospitality and kindliness, courtesy and noble birth … [and] the authority and sovereignty of the Gaels of Ireland to the end of time.’
The plantation that followed the English conquest was shamelessly politically and religiously motivated. Almost 1.5 million hectares of land was confiscated and only a fifth of it went back to the Irish. Yet this process was far from clear-cut. There were several attempts at plantations: the most radical followed a regional, post-O’Neill, rebellion in 1608 which hardened attitudes on all sides. The six counties that were planted were not the ones you might expect – for instance, Donegal and Cavan were included, but Down and Antrim were not part of the official plantation.
The idea that the ‘Gaels’ of the north were ousted by ‘Sasanachs’ or Saxons does not stand up to scrutiny. More than 80 percent of the settlers were Scots, and many of them were fellow Gaels – in fact, quite a few spoke the Gaelic language. To complicate things further, Ireland is so close to Scotland that the two populations have always intermingled and interbred. Large numbers of Scots families fled to Ireland in the 1630s and late 1600s to escape farming famines (in the same way as Irish people fled west to America in the 1800s). Today, in most cases, it’s pretty much impossible to distinguish between those people of Scots descent whose forebears were planters, and those whose ancestors were ‘natural’ migrants – or even starving refugees seeking nothing more than basic survival.
The greater truth is that the small island of Ireland has always been a mishmash of bloodlines – Celt, Viking, Norman, Spanish, and so on to infinity. Our diversity is worth celebrating. It is more fascinating, by far, than the discredited old notion of a land neatly divided between pure-bred Gaels and foreign usurpers.
Before we leave this saga, let’s indulge in a bit of ‘what-if’ speculation.
What if the Gaelic Order had been left intact and even allowed to thrive? This is a fascinating question. Over the ensuing centuries, the Gaelic culture would have had to change and evolve anyway. In its original form, it could not have survived the great social pressures that followed – large-scale international trade, the rise of the middle classes, the great agricultural and industrial revolutions, the worldwide hunger for democracy.
We can imagine a twenty-first-century Gaelic culture that would enrich the world with its music, poetry and literature, while offering some imaginative alternatives to traditional western ideas on family life and childrearing. Politically it might have turned its patchwork of fiefdoms into a Swiss-style canton democracy. Who knows?
Second ‘what-if’: What might have happened if the Spanish invasion had succeeded? It is commonly, and counter-intuitively, assumed that being conquered by Spain would have advanced the cause of Irish freedom. Yet the Last Armada was a mission to colonise, with the Irish chieftains clearly declared as vassals. The idea that the new Spanish overlords would have sympathetically nurtured the Gaelic Order and cherished the Irish language is a rather large assumption. The slightest glance at Spain’s treatment of its conquered peoples – whether in northern Europe, Peru or the hellish silver mines of Bolivia – shows a far from rosy picture.
Anyway, as we know from Venetian intelligence, a Spanish victory would have brought rival French troops into Ireland. Rather than becoming a haven of peace, Ireland might have become one more bloodstained theatre of war in a protracted European conflict.
We will never know. The important thing is not to gaze into alternative universes, but to learn lessons from our experience of history in the real world. We cannot change the past, but we can work to alter the future.
In the votes following the Good Friday Agreement, the people of the island voted overwhelmingly to put the past behind them and accept each other’s right to co-exist in peace. It has been a long road from Kinsale … but perhaps the worst of that journey is over. From that icebound winter of 1601, Ireland may yet emerge into a brighter, happier and more harmonious springtime.