The Flight of the Earls

A country does not always fall in battle. Sometimes it falls on a tide, in good weather, with the lords of it standing on a foreign deck and looking back at a shoreline they have decided, in the space of a fortnight, never to see again. The sword has already been laid down four years before. What is given up on the water is something quieter and more final: the idea that the old order can be defended at all.

THE EARL AT THE RAIL

He is thirty-two years old and he is Ruaidhrí Ó Domhnaill, first Earl of Tyrconnell by the grant of King James in 1603, taoiseach of the Cenél Conaill, lord of Donegal and most of west Ulster by the older reckoning that the grant was meant to overwrite. His house has held this country for seven hundred years. His brother Red Hugh died at Simancas in 1602 on the errand of an army the Spanish king promised and did not send. His other brother Cathbharr is on the deck behind him with the household. His wife Brigid, who is with child, is below in the cabin with the women. The man at the bow in the Spanish cloak, with his right hand on the forestay, is Aodh Ó Néill, Earl of Tyrone, who surrendered at Mellifont in 1603 to a queen already a week in her grave, and who has decided that he will not surrender a second time.

LOUGH SWILLY, EVENING

The ship is a French bark of perhaps two hundred and fifty tons, riding at anchor in the deep water off Rathmullan since the eighth of the month. Her master is Breton. Ninety-nine souls have come aboard in the course of the day: the two earls, their wives, their sons, their brothers, the Maguire of Fermanagh, scholars, priests, the ollamh who keeps the genealogies, household servants, two of the wives with child besides Brigid. The provision is hurried. The wind is off the Inishowen hills to the east, a clean wind for going. It is the evening of the fourteenth of September in the year sixteen hundred and seven, and the light is going off Knockalla and off Fanad at the same hour. The country of his fathers is half a mile off the starboard rail.

THE INDICTMENT IN DUBLIN

He knows, because the Maguire has ridden down from the north with the word, that the indictment is being drawn up in Dublin Castle this week. The charge is to be treason: renewed correspondence with the Spanish court. The correspondence is real. He has written it himself, and Aodh has written more of it, and the priests have carried it. The charge will be true in its matter and false in its intention; the Crown wants the letters because the Crown wants the land, and the letters will serve. Sir Arthur Chichester in the Castle is a patient man and a thorough one. If they stay until the Michaelmas term, they will be in irons by Christmas and in the Castle yard by the spring. The country will lose its earls in a single week of assize and have no army to put up for them. It is the calculation of a man who has read the warrant before it is signed.

A SECOND OF TIME AT THE RAIL

He stands at the rail and the calculation runs through him as cleanly as the wind through the shrouds. To stay is to hang, and to hang is to forfeit, and the forfeit comes either way; better to forfeit standing on a deck than kneeling on a scaffold, better to carry the taoiseachas of the Cenél Conaill into Madrid and into Rome than to have it stripped from a dead man's shoulders in a Dublin court. Aodh has chosen flight and Aodh is the elder; Aodh fought the nine years' war and signed the peace and knows the weight of both. The Spanish king will pay them pensions. The Spanish king will, the Lord willing, raise an army. He thinks of his father Aodh Dubh, of Red Hugh in the vault at Valladolid, of the lake at Kilmacrenan where the kings of his name were made under the open sky on the stone of the O'Donnells, and he thinks, quietly and without flourish, I will see Donegal again or I will not. I will not. He turns from the rail. He walks forward past the mainmast. Aodh Ó Néill does not turn from the bow. They do not speak. They have not spoken for two hours. The master gives the order in Breton French. The capstan turns. The topsails take the wind. The Cigne de Saint-Malo, or so the chroniclers afterwards called her, stands out of Lough Swilly on the ebb and goes north-west into the Atlantic.

THE VOYAGE

They intended for La Coruña and the court at Valladolid. The Atlantic took them past it. For three weeks the bark was driven north and east by westerlies until she made landfall, badly battered, at the mouth of the Seine on the fourth of October. From Normandy they crossed into the Spanish Netherlands, where the Archdukes received them with the honour due to Catholic princes and the firmness due to a peace newly signed with King James: lodging, audiences, pensions, no army. They wintered at Louvain among the Irish Franciscans who were already at work on the Annála Ríoghachta Éireann, the great compilation the Four Masters would finish a quarter of a century later. In the spring they crossed the Alps. They came down into the Italian plain and on into Rome, and on the twenty-ninth of April 1608 Paul V received them in audience at the Quirinal as the Catholic earls of a Catholic country lost to a Protestant Crown.

SAN PIETRO IN MONTORIO

Rory O'Donnell, first Earl of Tyrconnell, died of a Roman fever on the twenty-eighth of July 1608, three months after the audience, three weeks after his thirty-third year began. His brother Cathbharr died of the same fever in September. The Maguire of Fermanagh died the following year. Aodh Ó Néill lived in the city eight years more, attended Mass with the Pope, petitioned Philip III and then Philip IV for the army that would never be raised, went blind in his last summer, and died on the twentieth of July 1616, aged sixty-six. They lie together in the church of San Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum hill, in the chapel to the left of the high altar, the slab cut with Irish names in Roman letters. The Cenél Conaill of Donegal, kings of the north-west for seven hundred years, are buried in a row in a hill above the Vatican.

THE PLANTATION

The forfeitures were declared in 1608. The Plantation of Ulster, a systematic settlement of six surrendered counties, Donegal, Derry, Tyrone, Armagh, Cavan and Fermanagh, by Lowland Scots and English Protestant tenants under articles drawn up by the Crown, began in 1610 and continued for a generation. The Catholic Gaelic gentry who had not flown were dispossessed by writ within two generations. The native population was driven up onto the worst land, the bog and the mountain. The Irish-language schools went under, the brehon courts went under, the bardic schools went under. The Penal Laws of 1695 to 1829 would later set out to dismantle in law what had already been undone in fact. The Annals of the Four Masters, compiled at Donegal and at Louvain in the years between 1632 and 1636 by men who had grown up under the new dispensation, marked the fourteenth of September 1607 with one sentence, given here in Owen Connellan's nineteenth-century English: Woe to the heart that meditated, woe to the mind that conceived, woe to the council that decided on the project of their voyage from Ireland.

CODA

A country can be lost in an afternoon by men who have understood, with great clarity, that to stay is to lose it more slowly and on worse terms. The choice at Rathmullan was not between flight and fight; the choice at Rathmullan was between flight and the gallows, and the men who made it were not deceived about which it was. What they could not have known, standing at the rail in the clean east wind off Inishowen, was that the country they were carrying with them, in the persons of ninety kinsmen and three unborn children and one ollamh with the genealogies in his head, would survive them in Louvain and in Rome and in Salamanca after it had been broken at home. The slab in San Pietro in Montorio still has the Irish names cut into it, in Roman letters, on the Janiculum hill above the river.