The Flight of the Earls

Hugh O'Neill had surrendered to Lord Mountjoy at Mellifont on 30 March 1603 — six days after Elizabeth I had died, news of which Mountjoy did not share with him during the negotiation. By the terms of the surrender Hugh kept his earldom of Tyrone and his lands; in fact he was now living under English military supervision in Dungannon, with sheriffs riding through what had been an unconquered Gaelic palatinate the year before.

Through the summer of 1607 rumours reached Hugh and Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, that they were to be charged with treason for renewed correspondence with Spain. The truth of the charges is disputed by historians to this day; the certainty was that Hugh in particular knew Tudor politics well enough to know that the charge could be manufactured at need. He chose flight.

On the evening of 14 September 1607 a French ship lay at anchor in the deep water of Lough Swilly off Rathmullan in Donegal. Hugh O'Neill, Rory O'Donnell, the heir Cathbharr O'Donnell, Maguire of Fermanagh, and ninety of their kindred and household — wives, children, principal retainers, scholars, monks — were rowed out and aboard. The ship sailed on the morning tide, was driven by storms past her intended port of La Coruña, and made landfall instead at the mouth of the Seine three weeks later. The party crossed the Spanish Netherlands, and after the longest land journey of any of their lives reached Rome in April 1608.

None of them ever returned to Ireland. Rory O'Donnell died in Rome in 1608 of a fever; his brother Cathbharr died the same year. Hugh O'Neill lived another eight years in the city, attended Mass with the Pope, petitioned successive Spanish kings for an army that would never be raised, and died on 20 July 1616. He is buried in the church of San Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum hill, with Rory and several of their household around him.

The Plantation of Ulster — a systematic settlement of the six surrendered counties (Donegal, Derry, Tyrone, Armagh, Cavan, Fermanagh) by Lowland Scots and English Protestant tenants — began on the back of the forfeitures three years later. Whatever the legal pretext, the Flight ended the political existence of Gaelic Ireland. The Annals of the Four Masters, written within thirty years of the event, marked the date with a single line: '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.'