Maguire · 1600
Hugh the Hospitable at Coll's Crossroads
On the morning of the first of March 1600, on a bog-crossing at Coll's Crossroads near Mallow in north County Cork, Hugh *the Hospitable* Maguire, then about thirty-five years old, the chief of Fermanagh and the Maguire warrior of the Nine Years' War, met in single combat the English Marshal of Munster Sir Warham St Leger and killed him with a horse-pistol-shot to the chest. St Leger, in the same exchange, hit Maguire with a pistol-shot to the head; both men were dead within minutes. Maguire had been on a twelve-hundred-mile cavalry-raid from the Fermanagh lake-country south through Roscommon, Tipperary and Limerick to engage the English Munster garrison-force in the rear of Sir George Carew's Munster campaign of the spring of 1600. The Coll's Crossroads action was the furthest-south military penetration by the Ulster confederacy in the whole of the Nine Years' War (1593–1603); the Maguire-St-Leger mutual kill is, by every careful judgment of Irish-historiography of the period (Hiram Morgan, John McGurk), the most-romanticised single-combat death of the Tudor wars in Ireland.
It is twenty past nine on the morning of Wednesday the first of March 1600, on the narrow bog-crossing at Coll's Crossroads (the modern name Cregg or Crois Bhaile Choll), about three miles north of Mallow in north County Cork, in the cold March morning light off the Awbeg river-valley. He is about thirty-five years old (the Maguire birth-record of the 1560s Fermanagh has not survived in precise form). He is Hugh Maguire (Aodh Mag Uidhir), called Aodh an Fhealsóra (Hugh the Hospitable) by the Fermanagh poet-tradition for his table-hospitality at the Enniskillen Castle great-hall, chief of the Maguires of Fermanagh since the death of his father Cuconnacht in 1589, in his eighth year of the Nine Years' War against the Crown.
He is in three-quarter-plate over a buff coat, on a grey horse (the Maguire family's favoured horse-colour of the 1590s), with a pair of horse-pistols in the saddle-bow holsters, a broad-sword at the belt, a escort of about ten Maguire cavalry coming up behind him on the bog-crossing. He has, on the cavalry-raid since the twenty-third of February, ridden south from Fermanagh through Roscommon and Tipperary into north Cork, about three hundred miles, in the rear of Sir George Carew's Munster campaign.
Coming up the bog-crossing from the south is Sir Warham St Leger, fifty-five, the Marshal of Munster under Carew, in similar plate-and-buff with a similar pair of horse-pistols. St Leger has, on his Sunday-morning patrol, come on the Maguire cavalry by accident on the narrow crossing. The two parties have about a hundred yards to close the distance and reach single-combat-range.
Maguire thinks: St Leger is the most-senior English commander I will engage in this raid. The political-effect of taking him on the bog-crossing will be significant in the Tudor-Munster-Carew-campaign accounts.
He thinks: St Leger has the bog-side cover. I have the uphill position. The pistol-exchange will be at about ten yards.
He thinks: Cuconnacht is twelve. If I die on the bog-crossing, Cuconnacht inherits Fermanagh. Cuconnacht will, on the Nine-Years-War political-trajectory, sail with the Earls from Lough Swilly in seven years.
He rides at the canter. St Leger rides at the canter. At ten yards both men fire their first pistols. Maguire's ball takes St Leger in the chest; St Leger's ball takes Maguire in the forehead. Both men are unhorsed within seconds. Both are dead before the Maguire escort and the St-Leger escort can come up to them. The bog-crossing action runs about five minutes in total.
The Maguire body was carried by his escort back north through the Munster-Tipperary-Roscommon route to Fermanagh, a three-hundred-mile journey of about three weeks. He was buried at Devenish Island on Lower Lough Erne, the traditional Maguire burying-ground, in the late March 1600. The St-Leger body was returned to Carew at Cork and was buried at the Christ Church Cathedral Cork on the fourth of March 1600. The Maguire-St-Leger mutual kill became, in the Fermanagh-bardic tradition of the seventeenth century, the foundational chivalric-tragedy of the Nine-Years-War. Hugh's son Cú Connacht Óg Maguire inherited the Fermanagh chieftaincy at twelve, was at Kinsale in December 1601, and sailed with the Flight of the Earls from Lough Swilly on the fourteenth of September 1607. The Coll's Crossroads is, in 2025, a bog-crossing on the N73 road north of Mallow; the Fermanagh County Council and the Cork County Council put up a joint bronze memorial at the crossing on the four-hundredth anniversary in 2000.