CHAPTER XIII
Wane of Irish Resistance—O’Neill Surrenders to Mountjoy at Mellifont
WITH the fall of Dunboy, Ireland’s heroic day was almost at an end for that generation. O’Sullivan and some other Munster chiefs still held out, but their efforts were only desultory. O’Neill, accompanied by Richard Tyrrell, the faithful Anglo-Irish leader, rallied the remnants of his clan and attempted to hold again the line of the Blackwater. But the English were now too many to be resisted by a handful of brave men. They closed upon him from every side, and advanced their posts through the country, so as to effectually cut him off from communication with Tyrconnel, whose chief on hearing of the death of his noble brother, Red Hugh, in Spain, made terms with the Lord Deputy. So, also, did many other Ulster chiefs, who conceived their cause to be hopeless. O’Neill, still hoping against hope, and thinking that a Spanish army might yet come to his aid, burned his castle of Dungannon to the ground, and retired to the wooded and mountainous portions of his ancient principality, where he held out doggedly. But the Lord Deputy resorted to his old policy of destroying the growing crops, and, very soon, Tyrone, throughout its fairest and most fertile regions, was a blackened waste. Still the Red Hand continued to float defiantly throughout the black winter of 1602-3; but, at length, despair began to shadow the once bright hopes of the brave O’Neill. His daring ally, Donal O’Sullivan Beare, having lost all he possessed in Munster, set out at this inclement season on a forced march from Glengariff, in Cork, to Breffni, in Leitrim, fighting his enemies all the way, crossing the Shannon in boats extemporized from willows and horsehides; routing an English force, under Colonel Malby, at the “pass of Aughrim,” in Galway, destined to be more terribly memorable in another war for liberty; and, finally, reached O’Ruarc’s castle, where he was hospitably welcomed, with only a small moiety of those who followed him from their homes,
“—Marching
Over Murkerry’s moors and Ormond’s plain,
His currochs the waves of the Shannon o’erarching
And pathway mile-marked with the slain.”
Even the iron heart of Hugh O’Neill could not maintain its strength against conditions such as those thus described by Moryson, the Englishman, who can not be suspected of intensifying the horrid picture at the expense of his own country’s reputation: “No spectacle,” he says, “was more frequent in the ditches of towns, and especially of wasted countries, than to see multitudes of poor people dead, with their mouths all colored green, by eating nettles, docks, and all things they could rend up above ground.” There were other spectacles still more terrible, as related by the English generals and chroniclers themselves, but we will spare the details. They are too horrible for the average civilized being of this day to contemplate, although the age is by no means lacking in examples of human savagery which go to prove that the wild beast in the nature of man has not yet been entirely bred out.
Baffled by gold, not by steel, by the torch rather than the sword, deprived of all his resources, deserted by his allies, and growing old and worn in ceaseless warfare, it can hardly be wondered at that O’Neill sent to the Lord Deputy, at the end of February, 1603, propositions of surrender. Mountjoy was glad to receive them—for the vision of a possible Spanish expedition, in great force, still disquieted him—and arranged to meet the discomfited Irish hero at Mellifont Abbey, in Louth, where died, centuries before, old, repentant, and despised, that faithless wife of O’Ruarc, Prince of Breffni, whose sin first caused the Normans to set foot in Ireland. So anxious was Mountjoy to conclude a peace, that nearly all of O’Neill’s stipulations were concurred in, even to the free exercise of the Catholic religion in the subjugated country. He and his allies were allowed to retain, under English “letters patent,” their original tribe-lands, with a few exceptions in favor of the traitors who had fought with the English against their own kindred. It was insisted, however, by the Deputy, that all Irish titles, including that of “The O’Neill,” should be dropped, thenceforth and forever, and the English titles of “nobility” substituted. All the Irish territory was converted into “shire-ground.” The ancient Brehon Law was abolished, and, for evermore, the Irish clans were to be governed by English methods. Queen Elizabeth had died during the progress of the negotiations, and a secret knowledge of this fact no doubt influenced Mountjoy in hurrying the treaty to its conclusion, and granting such, comparatively, favorable conditions to Hugh O’Neill and the other “rebellious” Irish chiefs. Therefore, it was to the representative of King James I that Tyrone, at last, yielded his sword—not to the general of Elizabeth. It is said that in the bitter last moments of that sovereign, her almost constant inquiry was: “What news from Ireland and that rascally O’Neill?” The latter’s most elaborate historian estimates that the long war “cost England many millions in treasure, and the blood of tens of thousands of her veteran soldiers, and, from the face of Ireland, it swept nearly one-half of the entire population.” (Mitchel.) And, he continues: “From that day (March 30, 1603, when O’Neill surrendered at Mellifont), the distinction of ‘Pale’ and ‘Irish country’ was at an end; and the authority of the kings of England and their (Anglo) Irish parliaments became, for the first time, paramount over the whole island. The pride of ancient Erin—the haughty struggle of Irish nationhood against foreign institutions and the detested spirit of English imperialism, for that time, sunk in blood and horror, but the Irish nation is an undying essence, and that noble struggle paused for a season, only to recommence in other forms and on wider ground—to be renewed, and again renewed, until—Ah! quousque, Domine, quousque?”