The Battle of Affane

The end of an age is rarely closed by those who oppose it. More often it is closed, neatly and without ceremony, by a man who has grown up inside the new dispensation and learned, before the older men around him, that the road he is on no longer ends where it used to. Such a man does not break the old order. He hands it over, dressed and ready, to the new one, and watches to see what is done with it. He keeps his estates. He keeps his head. The age ends behind him, and he rides home.

THE TWO EARLS

Thomas Butler, tenth Earl of Ormond, was thirty-three years old in the winter of 1565. He had been sent at twelve to the court of Henry VIII as a companion to Prince Edward, had been schooled in Greek and theology alongside the future king, and had returned to Ireland on his father's death in 1546 already more English than Anglo-Irish in his carriage. He spoke both tongues. He paid both clergies. He was called Black Tom for the colouring of his hair, and he was the most courtly of the Anglo-Irish nobility.

His mother was Joan FitzGerald, daughter of the previous Earl of Desmond and aunt by blood to Gerald, the fifteenth Earl, who now opposed him. The Butler-FitzGerald quarrel was two centuries old by the standard reckoning. It concerned, in the immediate term, six months of cattle-driving and rent-driving along the Lismore boundary, and a dispute over the customs at Youghal. It concerned, on the longer view, which of the two great Anglo-Irish houses held the political weight of the south of Ireland; and on this question the Crown had, for two centuries, declined to find an opinion.

Butler had spent the autumn writing letters to Sir William Cecil at the English court, in his neat Tudor secretary hand, setting out his case. The letters had been received, acknowledged, and filed. By Christmas he understood that he would have to settle the matter himself, with the understanding that whichever way he settled it, the Crown would in the end be obliged to ratify what he had done.

THE MORNING AT THE FORD

It is twenty past eleven on the eighth of February. Cold winter sun. Above the ford on the south bank of the Blackwater the ground rises in a low shoulder, and Butler is on it, in three-quarter plate over a quilted doublet, on a bay horse. Behind him the standard of the Earls of Ormond, the three covered cups of the hereditary butlership, is carried by his standard-bearer five paces to the rear.

Half a mile to the west, on the flat ground at the ford itself, his cousin's army is drawing into line. Two thousand by the scout's count: kerne and gallowglass under the FitzGerald system, foot-heavy, short on horse. Butler has fifteen hundred and the better cavalry. The numerical balance is against him. He does not regard the numerical balance as load-bearing. He has fought beside the Butler horse in three campaigns, and he knows what a professional Anglo-Irish line will do on a ford in cold weather against a foot-heavy enemy without the cavalry weight to threaten his flanks.

A QUARTER-HOUR'S ARITHMETIC

He looks at the field. He looks at his cousin's standard, at the rear of the FitzGerald line, conspicuous and unmoving.

He has been turning the same calculation for three weeks. Today it resolves itself, on the rising ground in the cold sun, into a single sentence in his own head. If the action ends with Desmond dead, the quarrel passes to the next generation of FitzGeralds and the country bleeds for it. If the action ends with Desmond fled, the same. If the action ends with Desmond taken alive on the field and delivered to her Majesty in person, the matter passes from the south of Ireland to the Privy Council at Greenwich, and from the Privy Council to the Queen's own hand; and the Crown will be obliged, for the first time in two centuries, to settle it.

The Queen's hand is, on balance, the outcome he prefers.

A second consideration follows the first, of the kind that men brought up at court learn to weigh in the same breath. The Queen will not love either of them for it. She values neither private war nor private wit. There will be a price.

He has decided, in advance, that the price is acceptable.

He raises his hand. The trumpeter beside him sounds the call. The Butler horse begin to move.

THE CHARGE

At twenty to twelve the line goes across the ford at a canter, opening into a charge in the last fifty yards. The FitzGerald centre under Sir Maurice FitzGerald breaks at contact and falls back onto its second rank, which is already disordered by the spray and the noise. The wing under James FitzMaurice, the FitzGerald cavalry commander and a competent man in better ground, holds the riverbank for ten minutes and is then broken in the angle between the ford and the cattle-crossing.

Desmond, on his bay horse at the rear of his own line, attempts to bring his reserve forward into the breach. In the press at the ford his horse is brought down by an unrecorded man-at-arms of the Butler foot. He is unhorsed, disarmed, his sword taken from him with his cloak still on his shoulders, and brought across the water under guard. The action has lasted an hour and a quarter. Three hundred FitzGeralds lie dead on the riverbank. Butler counts forty-eight of his own.

He rides down to meet his cousin at the water's edge. He removes his helmet. He greets Desmond by his Christian name and gives orders, in front of him and audibly, that the Earl of Desmond is to be treated with the full courtesy due to his rank, and conveyed to Kilkenny Castle the next morning.

THE LONG GALLERY AT KILKENNY

For nine weeks Gerald FitzGerald is held at Kilkenny Castle in the Long Gallery, with fires and books and the table of an earl. He is permitted his own steward. He is permitted to write. He is not permitted to leave.

In the mornings he walks the length of the Long Gallery. The Butlers had built it forty years before in the modern Tudor fashion, with leaded windows on the south wall and the heraldry of the house carved in the spandrels. He looks at the three covered cups in the stone above the fireplace, and he considers, with the time captivity allows him, what his cousin Tom has done.

The action at the ford was the smaller half of it. He, Desmond, has been delivered like a sealed parcel to the Queen at Greenwich; Tom Butler will be standing beside him, in court dress, when the parcel is opened. This is not the work of a soldier. This is the work of a man who learned, at the English court, how a Tudor question is properly framed and to whom it is properly addressed.

THE PRESENCE CHAMBER

On the morning of the seventeenth of June, in the Presence Chamber at Greenwich, before the Privy Council in formal session, Queen Elizabeth, dressed in her parliamentary state, addresses Desmond directly. The record is Sir James Ware's, in his De Hibernia et Antiquitatibus eius of 1654, taken from his father, who had it from a clerk of the Council present that morning.

The Queen's question, in the Ware text:

My Lord of Desmond, on what authority did you, my subject, fight a battle in my country without my royal commission?

Desmond bows. He answers in plain English, in front of the assembled Council.

May it please your Majesty, we fought it without our own.

The Council, by the same tradition, takes two beats and laughs. The Queen, who values the wit, does not.

Both earls are committed to the Tower for eighteen months. They are released in the autumn of 1567 on Anglo-Irish surety, on terms drawn up by the Council; and the terms, when drawn, place the southern Irish question for the first time in the hands of the central administration. The Butler-FitzGerald quarrel, from this date forward, is no longer a private matter between two great houses. It is a matter of state.

THE RETURN

Black Tom Butler held the earldom of Ormond for fifty-two further years, a record for an Anglo-Irish earldom of the period. He died at Carrick-on-Suir in 1614, eighty-three years old, on his own estates and in the full favour of two successive sovereigns. His tomb in St Canice's Cathedral at Kilkenny lies ten paces from the high altar, the effigy in plate, the three covered cups of the butlership cut on the base.

Gerald, fifteenth Earl of Desmond, was killed in flight during the second Desmond Rebellion in 1583. His line was attainted, his lands carved into the Munster Plantation, his name effaced from the rolls of the Anglo-Irish nobility.

The age of the private noble battle, of two great Anglo-Irish houses in private quarrel for two centuries, closed on the morning of the eighth of February 1565 on the rising ground above the ford at Affane. It closed because a man of thirty-three, in three-quarter plate, who had been brought up at the English court and who understood the new dispensation before most of his peers did, looked at the field, made a quiet political calculation, and gave the order at twenty to twelve.

Tradition holds that the bog above the ford has not, since that morning, been ploughed.