Butler · 1565
The Battle of Affane
On the eighth of February 1565, on the open ground above the ford at Affane on the lower Blackwater River in County Waterford, the Anglo-Irish house of Butler (under Thomas, tenth Earl of Ormond, called Black Tom, in his thirty-fourth year) met its hereditary rival house of FitzGerald (under Gerald, fifteenth Earl of Desmond) in what is, by the reckoning of every careful Irish historian, the last private battle fought between two great noble houses on Irish soil. About two thousand men were on the FitzGerald side, fewer on the Butler. The Butler line broke the FitzGerald centre by the standard cavalry charge across the ford; the FitzGerald wing under James FitzMaurice was broken on the riverbank; Desmond himself was captured wounded and brought to Kilkenny Castle. The two earls were summoned to court at Greenwich within the year. Queen Elizabeth, in person, by the tradition recorded in James Ware's *De Hibernia* of 1654, asked the captive Earl of Desmond, in front of the assembled court, on what grounds he had fought a private battle without her royal commission. Desmond, by the same tradition, answered: *May it please your Majesty, we fought it without our own.* The remark was preserved as the example of Anglo-Irish wit; Elizabeth held the two earls in close confinement in London for the next eighteen months until they would compose. The Affane battle was the last private noble pitched battle on the island.
It is twenty past eleven on the morning of the eighth of February 1565, on the rising ground above the ford at Affane on the south bank of the Blackwater, in County Waterford, in cold winter sun. He is thirty-three years old. He is Thomas Butler, tenth Earl of Ormond, called Black Tom for the colouring of his hair and complexion, son of James the ninth Earl and Joan FitzGerald (daughter of the late Earl of Desmond, his present opponent's aunt by blood), brought up at the English court of Henry VIII as a companion of Prince Edward, fluent English-and-Irish, the most courtly of the Anglo-Irish nobility. He is in three-quarter plate over a quilted doublet, on a bay horse, with the standard of the Earls of Ormond (the three covered cups of the hereditary butlership) carried by his standard-bearer five yards behind him.
On the open ground at the ford, half a mile to the west, is the army of his cousin and neighbour Gerald FitzGerald, fifteenth Earl of Desmond, of the FitzGerald line. The Desmond army is, by Butler's scout's count, about two thousand kerne and gallowglass under the FitzGerald system. Butler has, on his own side, about a thousand five hundred. The numerical balance is against him, but the Butler horse are professional cavalry of the standard Anglo-Irish kind and the FitzGerald line is foot-heavy.
He thinks: the cause of this is six months of cattle-driving and rent-driving along the Lismore boundary. The cause of this is, on the longer view, two centuries of FitzGerald-Butler land-disputes that the Crown has not had the political will to resolve.
He thinks: Desmond is on the field. Desmond is in person. If Desmond is taken alive on the field today, the matter is in the Queen's hand by Lent.
He thinks: the Queen's hand is, on balance, an outcome I prefer to the alternative.
He gives the order at twenty to twelve. The Butler horse charge across the ford. The FitzGerald centre under Sir Maurice FitzGerald breaks at the cavalry contact. The FitzGerald wing under James FitzMaurice (the FitzGerald cavalry commander) holds for ten minutes and is broken on the riverbank. Desmond himself, on a horse on the rear of his line, is unhorsed in the press at the ford by an unrecorded man-at-arms, taken alive, and brought across the river under guard. The action lasts about an hour and a quarter. The casualties on the FitzGerald side are about three hundred dead. The Butler casualties are under fifty.
Black Tom Butler had Desmond brought to Kilkenny Castle, where he was held in honourable confinement in the Long Gallery for the next nine weeks. Both earls were summoned to court at Greenwich by royal warrant of the third week of March 1565. They appeared before the Privy Council, in formal session in the Presence Chamber at Greenwich, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth in person, on the morning of the seventeenth of June.
By Sir James Ware's De Hibernia et Antiquitatibus eius of 1654, the contemporary record (which Ware had from his father, who had it from a clerk of the Council present that morning), Elizabeth, dressed in her parliamentary state, addressed Desmond directly with the question: my Lord of Desmond, on what authority did you, my subject, fight a battle in my country without my royal commission? Desmond is reported to have answered, in plain English and with a bow: May it please your Majesty, we fought it without our own. The Council, by the same tradition, took two beats and laughed. Elizabeth, who valued the wit, did not. Both earls were committed to the Tower for eighteen months and were released in the autumn of 1567 on Anglo-Irish surety, on terms.
The Affane battle was, by every careful judgment of subsequent Irish historiography, the last private pitched battle between two great Anglo-Irish noble houses on the island of Ireland. The wider Crown policy of the next decade (the cess, the surrender-and-regrant, the Munster plantation) drew the political weight of the matter into the central administration. The Butler-FitzGerald rivalry continued in private feud through the 1570s and was effectively closed by the destruction of the Desmond line in the Desmond Rebellions of 1579–83. Black Tom Butler held the Ormond earldom for fifty-two more years (a record for an Anglo-Irish earldom of that period) and died at Carrick-on-Suir in 1614, eighty-three years old. His tomb is in St Canice's Cathedral, Kilkenny, ten yards from the cathedral's high altar, with the recumbent effigy of the earl in plate armour and the standard heraldic three covered cups of the Butlers cut on the base. Tradition holds that the bog at Affane, the marshy field above the ford, has not, since 1565, been ploughed.