Red Hugh's escape from Dublin Castle

A house is rarely broken by the loss of its lord. More often it is broken quietly, in a side chamber of a foreign keep, by the taking of its heir at fifteen and the holding of him until the father learns to keep his peace. The Tudor administration in Ireland understood this and made of it a settled policy: the sons of the great Gaelic houses were lifted from their fathers' galleys and lodged in Dublin Castle as the crown's pupils, which is to say its hostages, against the good behaviour of the north. The policy held, in the main. It did not hold against Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill.

THE TAKING AT RATHMULLAN

In September 1587 a merchant ship called the Matthew lay at anchor off Rathmullan on the western shore of Lough Swilly, flying Spanish colours and offering wine for sale. Aodh Ruadh, fifteen years old, son of Aodh Dubh Ó Domhnaill and Iníon Dubh of the Scots, came aboard with a small company to drink. The hatches were closed behind him. The ship was an English ship, the wine an English bait, and the voyage already plotted to Dublin. He was put in the upper keep of Dublin Castle and held there as the surety against his father's quiet. The system was unsentimental and worked as designed: while the heir of Tír Chonaill sat in stone above the Poddle, the lordship of the O'Donnells made no war. He sat there four years and seven months. He learned the Castle's English, its corridors, its hours, the rhythm of its sentries, and the slope of its drains. He learned that a privy is a hole cut down to the earth and that the earth, in the end, opens onto a river.

THE NIGHT OF THE TWENTY-FOURTH

On the night of the twenty-fourth of December 1591, snow on the slates and a hard wind off the Liffey, he is eighteen years old and is in the privy of the upper keep. Behind him in the chamber stand Henry and Art, sons of the O'Neills of Tyrone, taken as he was taken and held as he is held. Henry is twenty. Art is in his middle twenties and the eldest of them, and the weakest; he has been in the keep six years and has the lung-rot, and his being here is the leverage that has kept his father out of the rebellion in the north. A rope of greased hemp, forty feet long, weighted at its end with a stone, has been lowered to him through the seat of the privy shaft by Henry O'Hagan, his cousin's man, and made fast above to the leg of the bench. The rope smells of grease and rotted hemp. Outside the wall of the keep, two miles down the Tallaght road, a horseman is meant to be waiting with mounts for three. The plan, written on no paper and held in three heads, is to drop forty feet into the cesspit, crawl two hundred yards under the wall through the sewer that empties the Castle drains into the Poddle, come up in the river at Dame Gate, walk out of the city, ride the three miles to Tallaght, and from Tallaght go up by night into the Wicklow hills to the stronghold of Fiach Mac Aodha Ó Broin at Glenmalure. From Glenmalure, north.

THE SECOND IN THE PRIVY

He has the rope in his hand and the cold of the stone shaft coming up at him through the seat. The shaft is forty feet of running wet stone down to a half-frozen cesspit, and beyond the cesspit two hundred yards on hands and knees in two inches of running filth, and at the end of that the open river under the bridge. He can do that himself. Henry can do that. He looks once at Art, who has been coughing into his sleeve for an hour and whose face in the candle is the colour of tallow, and the calculation arranges itself in him without his consent. Art's lungs will not take the cold. The thought is not cruel; it is a measurement, the same kind he has been making of corridors and sentries for four years. Art is here because of who his father is. I am here because of who my father is. The choice is the same choice for both of us. He could go down alone and leave Art to the morning bell and the cell and the eventual quiet death of a hostage no longer of any use; he could go down with Art and carry him as far as carrying will carry, knowing what the snow on the slates outside means for a man with rotted lungs. He kneels at the seat of the privy. He puts his hand on the rope. He decides for the second thing. I will get him as far as I can. He goes down first.

THE SEWER AND THE POOL

The cesspit takes him to the knee. The smell is bad enough that he keeps his mouth shut for the descent and the wading. He crawls the two hundred yards of low sewer on his hands and knees in the dark, the running filth cold around his wrists, the stone overhead close enough to touch with his shoulder, and comes out into the Poddle on the city side of the wall a quarter of an hour after he started. He stands up in the running water under the bridge at Dame Gate. Henry comes down two minutes later. Art comes down after Henry. They are three sodden hostages in a winter river under the wall of the Castle that has held them, and the Castle does not yet know they are gone. They walk out of the city. The horseman is not at Tallaght. The horseman is two miles short of Tallaght with a single horse, a guide, and a bag of bread, because the snowstorm was not in the plan and his fellows turned back. The three of them walk, in soaked clothes, in a ten-degree wind, the three miles to where the horseman is, and from there up onto the white road that climbs into the Wicklow hills.

LUGNAQUILLA

By the morning of the twenty-sixth of December they are at the head of the Glenmalure pass on the slopes of Lugnaquilla, in a sleet that has turned to ice on their cloaks. Art has been on the horse and off the horse and on it again, and for the last four hours he has been off it, slipping in and out of speech. On the bare side of the mountain he sits down in the snow against a peat-hag and will not stand. Red Hugh kneels beside him. He has had nothing to eat for two days and Henry is worse than he is and the guide is at the end of his strength and the litter-men of O'Byrne, if O'Byrne has sent any, are still hours below in the glen. If we sit here we die with him. If we go on he dies alone. He says to Art, in Irish, that the men of O'Byrne are waiting at the foot of the glen, that they will go down for them and come back. Art does not answer. Art is past the point of being lied to. He kisses the top of Art's head. He takes his own cloak from his shoulders and lays it across Art's. He stands up and he and Henry and the guide walk down the snowfield into Glenmalure. When the men of O'Byrne come up the slope with a litter at first light, Art is dead, and the snow has covered him to the waist. They mark the place with a cairn of three stones.

THE HALL AT GLENMALURE

Red Hugh is carried the last miles on a litter of his own. At the chief's hall a barber-surgeon of the O'Byrnes lays him on a board two days after Christmas and cuts off both his big toes with a knife taken hot from the fire, the flesh under them already black to the second joint. He does not speak through it. Fiach Mac Aodha Ó Broin, the captain of Glenmalure who has spent twenty years making the Wicklow hills ungovernable to Dublin, sits on a stool by the hearth and watches the cutting and says nothing, knowing what is on the board in front of him. A boy of eighteen with no toes and no cloak and a stink of the sewer still on him is, by the simple fact of being out of the Castle and in this hall, the breaking of a Tudor policy that has held the north quiet for a generation. Word goes by runner that night to Donegal and to Dungannon. In the Council chamber in Dublin a fortnight on, the Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam will read the report of the escape, of the rope and the privy and the sewer and the boy in Wicklow, and will understand without needing it spelled that the policy of hostages is finished and the war that the policy was designed to prevent is now a question of months.

THE RETURN

He was hidden in Glenmalure through January and February of 1592, taken north in stages through Mellifont and Fermanagh, and inaugurated as the Ó Domhnaill at the Rock of Doon in Kilmacrenan on the third of May 1592, aged twenty, walking to the inauguration stone on shoes modified for the missing toes. From May 1593 he was at war. The Nine Years War, which ran from 1593 to 1603 and was the longest sustained Gaelic war ever fought against the Tudor crown, was led on the western front by Red Hugh and on the central front by his cousin Aodh Ó Néill of Tyrone, and between them they came within sight of expelling the crown administration from Ireland. The defeat at Kinsale on Christmas Eve 1601, ten years to the night after the rope went down the privy shaft, broke them. He sailed for Spain in the new year to ask Philip III for an army, and died at Simancas in September 1602, aged twenty-nine, the shoes still modified.

THE CAIRN AND THE SHAFT

The houses that survive are seldom the ones whose heirs were kept quiet. They are the ones whose heirs found, in the cold geometry of a side chamber, the one move that had not been counted on. A small cross stands today on the slope of Slievemaan above Glenmalure, at the peat-hag where Art O'Neill sat down in the snow. The privy shaft of the upper keep of Dublin Castle, the same stone shaft the boy climbed down on the night of the twenty-fourth of December 1591, is still there beneath the building and is shown to visitors without further commentary, the keepers knowing that the people who come for it have come knowing already.