Sorley Boy MacDonnell(c. 1505–1590)

Sorley Boy MacDonnell (Somhairle Buidhe Mac Domhnaill, *Yellow-haired Sorley son of Donald*) was born about 1505 at Dunaneeny Castle on the north Antrim coast near Ballycastle, fourth surviving son of Alexander MacDonnell, 5th Chief of the Glens of Antrim, and Caitríona Maguinness. The MacDonnells of the Glens were the Gaelic-Catholic lordship of the north Antrim coast, descended through the male line from John Mor MacDonald (the second son of John of Islay, the Hebridean lord of the late fourteenth century) and from the senior cadetage of Clan Donald of the Hebrides. The lordship of the Glens had been held continuously by the family from the 1399 grant of land at the eastern Antrim coast through to the post-Reformation period, and Sorley Boy's father held the Glens and the Route (the modern parishes of north Antrim from Ballycastle to Coleraine) as a Gaelic chief of the Tudor-era unincorporated north Ulster.

He inherited the Lordship of the Route on the death of his elder brother Colla in 1558, when he was about fifty-three; the Lordship of the Glens passed to another elder brother James MacDonnell, who held it until his death in 1565. The forty-year career as chief that followed ran across the Tudor reconquest of Ireland that the Elizabethan administration was conducting through the 1560s, 1570s and 1580s. The senior contest was the central Tudor-administration position that the Gaelic chiefs of Ulster (Sorley Boy MacDonnell, Shane O'Neill, Turlough Luineach O'Neill, the O'Donnells of Tír Conaill) had to either submit-and-surrender-and-regrant their lordships on the English feudal-tenancy model or be reduced by military force. Sorley Boy fought the alternative course for thirty years.

The 1575 Rathlin Island massacre was the atrocity of the period. The Earl of Essex, Walter Devereux, on the Elizabeth-and-Burghley colonisation-of-the-Glens project, sent Captain John Norreys with a flotilla of three vessels and a hundred and twenty men to Rathlin Island in late July 1575, where the MacDonnell women and children had been sent for safety while Sorley Boy was campaigning against Essex on the Antrim mainland. The English party landed on Rathlin on 25 July, took the Bruce's Castle fortification by escalade on 26 July, and killed the entire MacDonnell household party on the island: about two hundred women, children and elderly retainers, including Sorley Boy's own wife Mary Maclean and his eldest son Alexander Carragh MacDonnell. The senior Elizabeth-and-Burghley correspondence on the event, preserved in the Calendar of State Papers Ireland, records the English-court satisfaction at the operation (*the heart's blood of the family is in our hands*); Sorley Boy, watching from the mainland with his remaining force, is recorded by the Irish-Gaelic annalist of Rathlin as having gone *like a madman* through the Antrim hills for the three days following the news.

He fought on. He retook Dunluce Castle, the clifftop fortress on the north Antrim coast that the Essex administration had garrisoned in 1577, by a night assault in 1584 in which his Scottish-Hebridean galley-force scaled the sea-cliff under the castle by a single hempen rope his sons Aengus and James had carried across from the mainland. The retaking of Dunluce was the political and military demonstration 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 from Islay and the southern Hebrides. The Elizabeth-and-Walsingham administration in London made the policy decision in 1585 to negotiate. Sorley Boy was offered the surrender-and-regrant of the Lordship of the Route and the Glens on the Tudor-feudal model, the Constableship of Dunluce Castle for his lifetime, and the recognition of his sons as the heirs to the family lordship. He accepted in February 1586 at Dublin Castle, swore the Oath of Submission to Elizabeth I in the Dublin Castle ceremony of 21 March 1586, and was given the Dunluce constableship for his lifetime and a titled-English gentleman's rights of land tenure.

He lived four further years in the lordship he had spent his life defending. He died at Dunaneeny Castle in 1590, about eighty-five years old; the Antrim-Gaelic annalists record that he was buried at Bonamargy Friary at Ballycastle, the Franciscan-Observant friary the family had patronised through the previous century, in the MacDonnell mortuary chapel on the north side of the friary church. The Bonamargy chapel-tomb is still preserved with the carved sandstone armorial slab of the MacDonnell-Maclean alliance. His son Randal MacDonnell succeeded to the Route lordship and was created 1st Earl of Antrim by James VI/I in 1620; the Catholic-Gaelic Antrim earldom thus established ran through to the Williamite confiscation of 1690 and to the Glenarm-MacDonnell line that holds the Antrim viscountcy still. The MacDonnell name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic of *Mac Domhnaill* (son of Domhnall), the Hebridean-Gaelic surname carried by the senior cadet line of Clan Donald into the Antrim Glens and Route at the 1399 grant; Sorley Boy carried it through the forty-year defence of north Antrim against the Tudor reconquest, and his family carry the Antrim viscountcy on his Bonamargy grave still.