Red Hugh O'Donnell(c. 1572–1602)

Aodh Ruadh O'Donnell, Red Hugh, was born about 1572 the heir of the O'Donnell lords of Tyrconnell, the great Gaelic ruling family of what is now County Donegal in the north-west of Ireland. He was a boy of promise and high blood at a time when the Tudor state was pressing its conquest into the last independent Gaelic lordships of Ulster, and his promise made him dangerous. In 1587, still only about fifteen, he was lured aboard a ship by a trick of the English administration in Dublin and seized as a hostage, to be held against the good behaviour of his powerful family.

He was imprisoned in Dublin Castle for several years, and the story of his escape became famous across Ireland. After one failed attempt he broke out again in the depth of winter, getting clear of the castle and crossing the snow-covered Wicklow Mountains on foot in a desperate flight north toward freedom, an ordeal that cost him terribly, two of his toes lost to frostbite, but from which he came through to reach his own country and his own people again.

He came home hardened and determined, was inaugurated lord of his people in the old Gaelic rite, and threw himself into the defence of the north. Allied with Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, he became one of the two great leaders of the confederacy of northern lords in the long war against the Elizabethan conquest known as the Nine Years War. He carried the fight across the north and west of Ireland, and in August 1599 at the Curlew Mountains he met and routed an English army under Sir Conyers Clifford, who was killed in the action, one of the sharpest Irish victories of the war.

The great crisis came in 1601, when a Spanish army landed in the far south of Ireland, at Kinsale, to aid the Catholic cause, and the northern lords marched the length of the country in winter to join it. The combined attempt to break the English siege of the Spaniards at Kinsale failed, and with it the best hope of the war. O'Donnell, refusing to give up, took ship for Spain to plead in person with King Philip III for a fresh army to renew the struggle.

He was received with honour at the Spanish court but died in Castile on 10 September 1602, still pressing Ireland's cause, before any new help could be sent, and was buried with great ceremony among the Spanish nobility. The O'Donnell name carries his memory as the boy-hostage who escaped through the winter snows, grew into one of the two great captains of Gaelic Ireland's last stand, broke an army at the Curlews, and died in a foreign land still seeking the means to free his country.