O’NEILL, when he perceived the hopelessness of the Irish situation in Munster, conducted what remained of his defeated army back to the north and cantoned it along the Blackwater for the winter months, where he felt quite sure the English, worn out by their exertions at the siege and battle of Kinsale, would not attack him. Red Hugh O’Donnell, exasperated beyond endurance at the disregard of his bold advice to attack the beleaguering English, in conjunction with the Spaniards, on the first arrival of the Irish army before Kinsale, gave up the command of his clan to his brother, Roderick, and, with a few followers, sailed for Spain, in search of further aid. He resolved to ask King Philip for an army, not a detachment. The chief landed at Coruna, and was received with high honors by the Spanish authorities. He finally reached the Spanish Court and placed the whole Irish situation clearly before Philip, who promised a powerful force and actually gave orders to prepare at once for a new expedition to Ireland. The sad sequel is well told in the eloquent words of Mitchel:
“But that armament never sailed, and poor O’Donnell never saw Ireland more; for news reached Spain, a few months after, that Dunboy Castle, the last stronghold in Munster that held out for King Philip, was taken, and Beare-haven, the last harbor in the South that was open to his ships, effectually guarded by the English; and the Spanish preparations were countermanded; and Red Hugh was once more on his journey to court to renew his almost hopeless suit, and had arrived at Samancas, two leagues from Valladolid, when he suddenly fell sick. His gallant heart was broken and he died there on the 10th of September, 1602. He was buried by order of the king with royal honors, as befitted a prince of the Kinel-Conal; and the stately city of Valladolid holds the bones of as noble a chief and as stout a warrior as ever bore the wand of chieftaincy or led a clan to battle.”
While we do not believe in “painting the devil blacker than he is,” we think it proper to state here that more recent researches would seem to have fixed the crime of assassination on the Earl of Mountjoy. In an account, quoted in several lectures by Frank Hugh O’Donnell, ex-member of the British Parliament, it is definitely stated that Red Hugh O’Donnell was poisoned at the inn in Samancas, where he died, by a hired murderer, named Blake, who acted for the English Lord Deputy. Such, if the statement is true, were the political ethics of the Elizabethan era.
Donal O’Sullivan Beare, the bravest of all the Munster leaders, wrested his castle of Dun-buidhe (Dunboy), in English, “Yellow Fort,” from the Spaniards after De Aguila had agreed to surrender it to the English. He justified his conduct to the King of Spain in a pathetic letter in which he said: “Among other places that were neither yielded nor taken to the end that they might be delivered to the English, Don Juan tied himself up to deliver my castle and haven, the only key to mine inheritance, whereupon the living of many thousand persons doth rest, that live some twenty leagues upon the seacoast, into the hands of my cruel, cursed, misbelieving enemies.”
The defence of this castle by the Irish garrison of one hundred and forty-three men, commanded by O’Sullivan’s intrepid lieutenant, McGeoghegan, was one of the finest feats of arms recorded in history. Although only a square tower, with outworks, it held out against General Carew, the Lord President, for fifteen days. It was bombarded by the fleet from the haven, and battered by artillery from the land side. Indeed, Carew had an army of 4,000 veteran soldiers opposed to McGeoghegan’s 143 heroes. A breach was finally effected in the castle, but the storming parties were repeatedly repulsed. The great hall was finally carried, and the little garrison, under the undaunted McGeoghegan, retreated to the vaults beneath it, where they sustained the unequal conflict for four-and-twenty hours, and, by the exertion of unexampled prowess, at last cleared the hall of the English. The latter replied with an overwhelming cannonade, and the walls of the castle crumbled about the ears of its heroic defenders. The latter made a desperate sortie with only forty men and all perished. The survivors in the castle continued the defence, but, in the end, their noble commander, McGeoghegan, was mortally wounded and they laid down their arms. While their wounded chief lay gasping in the agonies of approaching death, on the floor of the vault, he saw the English enter the place. The sight seemed to renew his life and energy. He sprang to his feet, seized a torch, and made a rush for an open barrel of powder, intending to blow assailants and assailed into the sky. But an English soldier was too quick for the dying hero. He seized him in his arms, and a comrade wrested the torch from the failing hand and extinguished it. Then they ran their swords through McGeoghegan’s body, and his glorious deeds and great sufferings were at an end. It should have been stated that ten of the garrison, who were of the party that made the sortie, on the failure of their bold effort, attempted to reach the mainland by swimming across the haven. This movement was anticipated by the English commander. Soldiers were stationed in boats to intercept the swimmers, and all were stabbed or shot, as if they had been beasts of prey. The survivors of the band of Irish Spartans, who made Dunboy forever memorable in the annals of martial glory, were instantly hanged by order of Carew, so that not one of the heroic 143 was left. Ruthless as he was, the Lord President himself, in an official letter, bore this testimony to their valor: “Not one man escaped; all were slain, executed, or buried in the ruins, and so obstinate a defence hath not been seen within this kingdom.” The defence of Dunboy Castle deserves to rank in history with Thermopylæ and the Alamo of Texas, and the butchery of its surviving defenders, in cold blood, was a disgrace to English manhood. How differently the gallant O’Neill treated the English prisoners taken at Armagh, Portmore, and other places in Ulster during the period of his amazing victories. It is cruelties of this character that made the English name abhorred in Ireland, not the prowess, or even the bloodthirstiness, of the English soldiery in the heat of battle. The massacre at Dunboy is an indelible stain on the memory of Lord President Carew.
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