Doherty · 1608
Cahir O'Doherty burns Derry
On the morning of Tuesday the nineteenth of April 1608, in the small wooden-and-thatch Plantation town of Derry on the west bank of the lower Foyle, Sir Cahir Rua Ó Dochartaigh, twenty years old, the last Gaelic lord of Inishowen and one of the few O'Donnell-affiliated Gaelic chiefs the Mountjoy administration had retained on its estates after the Flight of the Earls of September 1607, rose without warning in personal revolt against the English Governor of Derry, Sir George Paulet, who four months earlier had publicly insulted him and struck him in the face at the Governor's House. Cahir took the small Culmore Fort at the mouth of the Foyle in a dawn assault on the eighteenth of April; marched the seventy Doherty fighting men on Derry through the early hours of the nineteenth; took the unwalled town in a single charge; killed Paulet personally; and burnt the town and its three hundred Plantation houses to the ground in a single night. He held Inishowen and the lower Foyle country against the response from Dublin Castle for the next ten weeks. He was killed at Kilmacrenan in north-east Donegal on the fifth of July 1608, shot in the head at close range by a single musket-ball in a small cavalry skirmish on the steep ground above the Glashagh river; his head was severed by the English captain who took the field, was sent down to Dublin, and was spiked over the Castle gate. His lands were attainted within three months. The Plantation of Ulster, formally proposed at Whitehall in October 1608 on the strength of the forfeitures, was implemented from 1610 across the six confiscated Ulster counties. The pattern of Ulster history for the next four centuries was set in significant part by the twenty-year-old O'Doherty's furious response to a personal insult on the Foyle.
A country's history is sometimes turned by an old slight, repaid in a single morning by a young man who had not intended a war. Cahir O'Doherty rode out of Burt Castle on the eighteenth of April 1608 with seventy men and the small grudge of a Governor's hand on his face. He rode out of the country he had grown up in. By the morning of the nineteenth he had set in train a chain of events that would, within twenty months, end the seven-hundred-year Gaelic political order of Ulster and open the territory to the Lowland Scots and English Protestant tenants whose descendants are there still.
THE LAST OF THE INISHOWEN CHIEFS
Sir Cahir Rua Ó Dochartaigh was born around 1587 at the family stronghold of Burt Castle on the south shore of Lough Swilly in eastern Donegal, only son of Sir John Ó Dochartaigh, lord of Inishowen, and Rose O'Neill of the Tír Eoghain royal house. He was raised in the foster-care system of the great Gaelic houses (he was fostered with the O'Donnells of Tír Chonaill at Donegal Castle, the standard fostering-relationship between the O'Donnell overlords and the Doherty sub-kings of Inishowen), was schooled in the bardic-and-genealogical tradition, and on his father's death in 1601 succeeded as the fourteen-year-old chief of the Ó Dochartaigh kindred and lord of Inishowen.
He took, against his foster-fathers' wishes, the English side in the closing campaigns of the Nine Years' War. Mountjoy knighted him in person at Dublin Castle in 1601 for siding with the Crown against Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone. The knighthood was the youngest English knighthood granted to a Gaelic chief in Irish history; he was fourteen. He held Inishowen quietly through the Mountjoy years, attended the Dublin parliament of 1605, and was through 1605 to 1607 a settled feature of the Mountjoy administration's careful management of the post-Mellifont Ulster gentry.
THE FLIGHT OF THE EARLS
On the night of the fourth of September 1607, the Earl of Tyrone (Hugh O'Neill, Cahir's mother's first cousin), the Earl of Tyrconnell (Rory O'Donnell, Cahir's foster-brother), the Maguire chief and approximately ninety further Gaelic lords and household members slipped out of Rathmullan on the western shore of Lough Swilly aboard the small French ship Le Lévrier and sailed for the Continent. The Flight of the Earls (the moment universally taken in Irish historical memory as the end of the seven-hundred-year Gaelic political order of Ulster) left Cahir, with the O'Cahans and a handful of other smaller chiefs, as the only senior Gaelic lord remaining on his ancestral estates in the six Ulster counties. He was twenty years old. He had committed to the English administration. The administration committed back to him: the patent confirming his estates in Inishowen was reissued on the twenty-eighth of December 1607.
SIR GEORGE PAULET
The new Governor of Derry, Sir George Paulet, arrived in the spring of 1607 on the recommendation of his cousin Lord Treasurer Salisbury at Whitehall. Paulet was a middle-aged English Hampshire gentleman with no Irish experience and no particular policy except the standard early-Stuart English-Plantation contempt for the Gaelic-Irish gentry. He took the Governorship of the small wooden Plantation town of Derry (the predecessor settlement to the later walled Londonderry), was administratively responsible for the management of the lower Foyle country including the Doherty estates of Inishowen, and conducted across his first year a sustained personal animus against Cahir on the standard grounds (in Paulet's own complaint-letters to Dublin Castle of October 1607) of the chief's papistical-and-Gaelic carriage at the Derry Governor's House and his insufficient deference to the new English protocol.
On the twelfth of December 1607, at a public dinner at the Governor's House in Derry, an argument broke out between Paulet and Cahir over a question of military escort. Paulet struck Cahir in the face with the back of his hand in front of the dinner-party (the act is recorded by three independent witnesses, including the English Bishop of Derry George Montgomery, in the dispatches sent to Dublin Castle the following week). Cahir left the Governor's House without speaking and rode back to Burt Castle on the south shore of Lough Swilly. He did not return to Derry for the next four months.
THE NIGHT OF THE EIGHTEENTH
He assembled the Doherty fighting men quietly through the early months of 1608 at the small Doherty stronghold at Burt and at the secondary fortress at Buncrana further up the eastern shore of Lough Swilly. He had perhaps seventy men under arms by the second week of April 1608: the senior Doherty kinsmen, the household guard, and a small contingent of MacSweeney gallowglasses from Doe Castle north of Cresslough whom he had taken into Doherty service through the Inishowen-MacSweeney foster-relationship. He moved the column across the Inishowen peninsula on the night of the seventeenth of April 1608 to the small Culmore Fort at the mouth of the Foyle, took the Fort in a dawn assault on the eighteenth (the Fort had a garrison of fourteen English soldiers under Captain Henry Hart; Cahir's force took it by escalade in twenty minutes), and held the Fort through the daylight hours of the eighteenth.
He marched on Derry across the night of the eighteenth-to-nineteenth of April, came on the town from the north at first light on the nineteenth, and took it in a single dawn charge. The town was an unwalled Plantation settlement of about three hundred wooden-frame houses on a small grid on the west bank of the Foyle. The English garrison at the Castle and the Governor's House offered scattered resistance; Sir George Paulet, attempting to organise the defence at the Governor's House on the strength of about twenty household servants and the small Castle garrison, was killed by Cahir personally in the courtyard of the House (Cahir was carrying his father's sword and used it; the act is the closing scene of the contemporary ballad The Burning of Derry which has been carried in the Inishowen oral tradition for four centuries). The town was burnt to the ground across the day of the nineteenth: every house in the Plantation settlement, the Governor's House, the church, the Castle outbuildings, and the small Bishop's House on the rise above the river. The bishop George Montgomery had been absent in Dublin on the morning of the burning and survived; he wrote the despatch to Salisbury at Whitehall on the twenty-fifth of April reporting the event.
KILMACRENAN AND THE PLANTATION
Cahir held Inishowen and the lower Foyle for the next ten weeks. The Dublin Castle response (an English-and-Scots army of approximately fifteen hundred men under the Lord Deputy Sir Arthur Chichester) marched north from Dublin in mid-May, took Burt and Buncrana through June, and met Cahir's small force in a cavalry skirmish at Kilmacrenan in north-east Donegal on the fifth of July 1608. Cahir was shot through the head at close range by a single musket-ball from an English trooper of the Castle company at the opening of the skirmish; he was killed instantly, the head was severed by the English Captain Thomas Phillips at the close of the engagement, was carried south to Dublin in a leather bag, and was spiked over the gate of Dublin Castle the next month. He had been the only Gaelic chief in Irish history to receive an English knighthood at fourteen, and the only one to die in revolt against the Crown at twenty.
The forfeiture of his Inishowen estates was issued on the twenty-seventh of August 1608. The Plantation of Ulster, the formal proposal that the six Ulster counties forfeited by the Flight of the Earls and the O'Doherty rising should be settled on Lowland Scots and English Protestant tenants under a Crown-administered land grant scheme, was drafted at Whitehall through September and October 1608 by the Lord Treasurer Salisbury and the Attorney General Sir John Davies in significant part on the strength of the additional forfeitures that the O'Doherty rising had brought into the available land pool. The Plantation was approved in principle by the Privy Council in November 1608, the detailed Articles of Plantation were published in March 1609, and the first Plantation settlers (the Lowland Scots and Northern English tenants who would become the foundation of the modern Northern Irish Protestant community) began arriving in the six Ulster counties from 1610. The Doherty name in modern Irish historical memory carries the weight of the morning at Culmore Fort and the night-and-day at Derry of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April 1608.