Sorley Boy MacDonnell(c. 1505–1590)

Sorley Boy MacDonnell, Somhairle Buidhe Mac Domhnaill, was born about 1505 at Dunaneeny Castle on the north Antrim coast near Ballycastle, a son of Alexander MacDonnell, 5th Chief of the Glens of Antrim. The MacDonnells of the Glens were the Gaelic-Catholic lordship of the north Antrim coast, descended through the male line from the senior cadetage of Clan Donald of the Hebrides, holding the Glens and the Route from the 1399 grant of land at the eastern Antrim coast.

He inherited the Lordship of the Route in 1558, when he was about fifty-three, and held the leadership of the family through the Tudor reconquest of Ireland that the Elizabethan administration conducted across the 1560s, 1570s and 1580s. The central contest was the administration's demand that the Gaelic chiefs of Ulster surrender their lordships on the English feudal model or be reduced by force. Sorley Boy held the alternative course for thirty years.

The cost of that resistance was heavy. In July 1575 an English force under Captain John Norreys, sent on the Earl of Essex's colonisation project, fell on Rathlin Island, where the MacDonnell women and children had been sent for safety, and killed the household there, including Sorley Boy's wife and his eldest son. It was an atrocity of the Tudor reconquest, done to his family for its defence of its own country; that the line endured it and held on is the measure of what was held.

He fought on. In 1584 he retook Dunluce Castle, the clifftop fortress on the north Antrim coast that the English had garrisoned, by a night assault in which his Hebridean galley-force scaled the sea-cliff under the castle on a single rope. The retaking of Dunluce demonstrated that the Tudor administration could not hold the north Antrim coast against the Scottish-Hebridean galley-force the MacDonnells could put across the North Channel, and London made the decision to negotiate.

He was offered the surrender-and-regrant of the Lordship of the Route and the Glens, the Constableship of Dunluce Castle for his lifetime, and the recognition of his sons as heirs to the family lordship. He accepted and swore the submission at Dublin Castle on 21 March 1586, on terms that left his line at the head of Catholic-Gaelic Antrim. He died at Dunaneeny Castle in 1590, about eighty-five years old, and is buried at the family's Bonamargy Friary at Ballycastle, where the carved MacDonnell armorial slab is still preserved. His son Randal was created 1st Earl of Antrim by James VI and I in 1620, and the Glenarm-MacDonnell line holds the Antrim viscountcy still. The MacDonnell name, the Hebridean-Gaelic patronymic Mac Domhnaill of the senior cadet line of Clan Donald, Sorley Boy carried through the forty-year defence of north Antrim, and his family carry the Antrim viscountcy on his Bonamargy grave still.