The Nine Years War in Ireland took place from 1594 to 1603. It was fought between the forces of Gaelic Irish chieftains Hugh O'Neill, Hugh Roe O'Donnell and their allies against the Elizabethan English government of Ireland. The war was primarily fought in the northern Irish province of Ulster. It ended in defeat for the Irish chieftains and ultimately their exile in the Flight of the Earls and to the Plantation of Ulster. It should not be confused with the Nine Years War of the 1690s, part of which was also fought in Ireland.

Causes

The Nine Years War was essentially caused by the collision between the ambition of the Gaelic Irish chieftain Hugh O’Neill and the advance of the English state in Ireland from control over the Pale to ruling the whole island. In resisting this advance, O’Neill managed to rally other Irish clans who were dissatisfied with English government and those Roman Catholics who opposed the spread of Protestantism in Ireland.

The rise of Hugh O’Neill

Hugh O'Neill came from the powerful O’Neill clan of Tyrone. His father was killed and he was banished from Ulster as a child by Shane O'Neill. He was brought up in the Pale and was sponsored by the English authorities as a reliable lord. In 1587, he persuaded Elizabeth I to make him Earl of Tyrone (or Tir Eoin), the English title his father had held. However the real power in Ulster was not the legal title of Earl of Tyrone, but the position of The O’Neill, or chief of the O’Neill clan, then held by Turlough Luineach O'Neill. It was this title that entitled its holder to command the obedience of all the O’Neills and their dependants in central Ulster. After much bloodshed Hugh O’Neill finally won this title in 1595. Within the O’Neill lands, he tied the peasantry to the land, making them effectively serfs and pressing them into military service. From Red Hugh O'Donnell, his ally, he got a supply of Scottish mercenaries or Redshanks. To arm his soldiers, he bought muskets, ammunition and pikes from Scotland and England. Ultimately, he was able to arm and feed over 8000 men, unprecedented for a Gaelic lord. O’Neill was therefore well prepared to resist any English attempts to govern Ulster.

Government advances into Ulster

By the early 1590’s, northern Ireland was attracting the attention of the Lord Deputy, Fitzwilliam, who had to bring it under Crown control. It was envisaged that the northern province would be governed by a provincial president - probably Harvey Bagenel, an English colonist settled in Newry. The law would be imposed by English appointed Sheriffs. In 1591, Fitzwilliam broke up the MacMahon lordship in Monaghan when the Lord resisted the imposition of an English Sheriff. Hugh MacMahon was hanged and his lordship divided. Similar solutions were applied in Longford and Breifne (Cavan). Any attempts to do the same in the O’Neill and O’Donnell territories were going to be resisted with force of arms.

War Breaks Out

In 1592, Red Hugh O'Donnell drove an English Sheriff, Captain Willis out of his territory, Tir Connell. In 1593, Maguire and O’Donnell combined to resist Willis’ introduction as Sheriff into Maguire’s Fermanagh and began attacking the English outposts along the southern edge of Ulster. As yet, O’Neill stood aloof from the rebellion, hoping as a compromise to be named as Lord President of Ulster himself. Elizabeth I, though, had correctly perceived that O’Neill had no intention of being a simple landlord. Rather, his ambition was to usurp her sovereignty and be, "a Prince of Ulster". For this reason she refused to grant O’Neill provincial presidency or any other position which would have given him authority to govern Ulster on the crown’s behalf. In 1595 O’Neill joined his allies in open rebellion by attacking the English fort on the Blackwater river. Since 1591, O’Donnell, on O’Neill’s behalf, had been in contact with Phillip II of Spain, appealing for military aid against their common enemy and citing also their shared Catholicism. The Spaniards sent them weapons, advisors and money throughout the war.

Rebel victory at Yellow Ford

The English authorities in Dublin Castle soon realised that they had a nation-wide insurrection on their hands. When, after abortive negotiations in 1596, English armies tried to break into Ulster, they were met with thousands of musketeers in prepared positions. Successive English offensives were driven back. At the battle of the Yellow Ford in 1598, up to 2000 English troops were killed, along with their commander Harvey Bagenell, having been ambushed on the march to Armagh. The victory prompted rebellions all over Ireland, assisted by contingents from Ulster. Hugh O’Neill appointed his supporters as chieftains and Earls around the country, notably James Fitzthomas as the Earl of Desmond and Florence MacCarthy as the MacCarthy Mór. In Munster as many as 9000 men came out in rebellion. The Munster Plantation , the colonisation of the province with English settlers, was utterly destroyed, the colonists, among them Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh, fled for their lives Only a handful of native lords remained consistently loyal to the crown and even these found their kinsmen and followers defecting to the rebels. However all the fortified cities and towns of the country sided with the government. Hugh O’Neill, unable to take walled towns, made repeated overtures to inhabitants of the Pale to join his rebellion, appealing to their Catholicism and to their alienation from the Lord Deputies and the English. For the most part, however, the Old English remained hostile to their hereditary enemies.

The Earl of Essex’s command

In 1599, the Earl of Essex arrived in Ireland with over 17,000 English reinforcements. He dispersed them in garrisons all over the country to stamp out rebellion, but was unable to meet the Ulster forces in battle, instead signing a humiliating truce with O’Neill. Those expeditions he did organise were disastrous, especially an expedition crossing the Curlew mountains to Sligo, which was mauled by O’Donnell. Thousands of his troops, shut up in unsanitary garrisons, died of diseases such as typhoid and dysentery. Essex was recalled to England in disgrace in 1600, where he was executed after attempting a court putsch. He was succeeded in Ireland by Lord Mountjoy, who proved to be far more able commander. Veterans of warfare in Ireland named George Carew , and Arthur Chichester were given commands in Munster and Ulster respectively.

The end of the rebellion in Munster

Carew managed to more or less quash the rebellion in Munster by mid 1601 by a mixture of conciliation and military force. By the summer of 1601 he had retaken most of the principle castles in Munster and scattered the rebel forces. Fitzthomas and Florence MacCarthy were arrested and sent to the Tower of London, where both of them eventually died in captivity. Most of the rest of the local lords submitted once O’Neills mercenaries had been expelled from the province.

The Battle of Kinsale and the Collapse of the Rebellion

Mountjoy managed to penetrate the interior of Ulster by sea-borne landings at Derry under Henry Dowcra and Carrigfergus under Arthur Chichester. Dowcra and Chichester, helped by Niall Garbh O’Donnell, a rival of Red Hugh, devastated the countryside and killed the civilian population at random. Their military assumption was that without crops and people, the rebels could neither feed themselves nor raise new fighters. This attrition quickly began to bite, and it also meant that the Ulster chiefs were tied down in Ulster to defend their own territories. Although O’Neill managed to repulse another land offensive by Mountjoy at Moyry Pass near Newry in 1600, his position was becoming desperate.

In 1601, the long promised Spanish expedition finally arrived in the form of 3500 soldiers at Kinsale, Cork, virtually the southern tip of Ireland. Mountjoy immediately besieged them with 7000 men. O’Neill, O’Donnell and their allies marched their armies south to sandwich Mountjoy, whose men were starving and wracked by disease, between them and the Spaniards. On the 24 of December, O’Neill and O’Donnell took the decision to attack the English. The rebels however were not used to fighting pitched battles and were routed by the English forces in what is known as the battle of Kinsale.

The Irish headed home to Ulster to defend their own lands. The Ulstermen lost many more men in the retreat through freezing and flooded country than they had at the actual battle of Kinsale. Red Hugh O'Donnell left for Spain, where he died in 1602, pleading in vain for another Spanish landing. He left his son Rory to defend Tir Connell. Both he and Hugh O’Neill were reduced to guerrilla tactics, fighting in small bands, as Mountjoy, Dowcra, Chichester and Niall Garbh O’Donnell swept the countryside.

The End of the War

Mountjoy smashed the O’Neill’s inauguration stone at Tullaghogue, symbolically destroying the O’Neill clan. Famine soon hit Ulster as a result of the English scorched earth strategy. Chichester’s forces found that the locals were reduced to cannibalism. O’Neill’s uirithe or sub-lords (O’Hagan, O’Quinn, MacCann) began to surrender and Rory O'Donnell surrendered on terms at the end of 1602. However, with a secure base in the large and dense forests of Tir Eoin, O’Neill held out until 30 March 1603, when he surrendered on good terms to Mountjoy. Elizabeth I had died a week before.

Aftermath

The rebels got surprisingly good terms from the new King of England James I, at the end of the war. O’Neill, O’Donnell and the other surviving Ulster chiefs received full pardons and the return of their estates. The stipulations were that they abandon their Irish titles, their private armies, their control over their dependants and swear loyalty only to the Crown of England. In 1604, Mountjoy declared an amnesty for rebels all over the country. The reason for this apparent mildness was that the English could not afford to continue the war any longer. Elizabethan England did not have a standing army, nor could it force its Parliament to pass enough taxation to pay for long wars. Moreover, it was already involved in a war in the Spanish Netherlands. As it was, the war in Ireland (which cost over £2 million) came very close to bankrupting the English exchequer by its close in 1603.

Irish sources claimed that as many as 60,000 people had died in the Ulster famine of 1602-3 alone. Even if this is an exaggeration, counting the unknown number killed in battle or massacred, an Irish death toll of over 100,000 is possible. At least 30,000 English soldiers died in Ireland in the Nine Years War, mainly from disease. So the total death toll for the war was probably at least 100,000 people, if not more.

Although O’Neill and his allies got good terms at the end of the war, they were never trusted by the English authorities and the distrust was mutual. O’Neill, O’Donnell and the other Gaelic lords from Ulster left Ireland in 1607 in what is known as the Flight of the Earls. They intended to organise an expedition from a Catholic power in Europe to re-start the war, but were unable to find any military backers. As a result, their lands were confiscated and colonised in the Plantation of Ulster. The Nine Years War was therefore an important step in the English colonisation of Ireland.

Sources

Colm Lennon, Sixteenth Century Ireland – The Incomplete Conquest, Dublin 1994.

G. A. Hayes McCoy, Irish Battles, Belfast 1990.

Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, Harvester Press Ltd, Sussex 1976.

Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580-1650, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001.

See also

• Tudor re-conquest of Ireland
• History of Ireland
• Elizabeth I
• Desmond Rebellions