Ireland

O'Brien

In April 1014 Brian Bóramha, called Brian Boru, high king of Ireland, was seventy-three years old and twelve years into a reign that had unified Ireland under a single hand for the first time in its recorded history. The kingdoms of Leinster and Norse Dublin rose against him, summoning Hebridean and Manx and Orcadian Norse to their aid. Brian's army marched up from the south and met them on the strand at Clontarf, north of the Liffey. The battle was fought on Good Friday, the twenty-third of April. By Christian custom Brian himself could not bear arms on the day. He watched from his tent on a low hill above the field. The dynasty he founded would rule Thomond for the next six hundred years. The high kingship he had won by force did not survive him by twelve hours.

McCarthy

The legend of the Blarney Stone, that a kiss bestows the gift of fluent and persuasive speech, is a global tourist anchor that draws four hundred thousand visitors a year up the parapet of Blarney Castle in County Cork. The kissing tradition is no older than the 1820s. What is genuinely sixteenth-century, and what is genuinely owed to a McCarthy, is the underlying English word blarney itself: plausible verbal evasion. Cormac Teige McCarthy, lord of Muskerry under Elizabeth I, was repeatedly summoned by the Tudor administration to submit formally to the crown. He played the diplomatic correspondence as no one in Tudor Ireland played it before or after, an extended decade of courteous letters of intent, missed deadlines, plausible delays. Elizabeth, by tradition, gave him the word.

Lynch

By the Galway tradition set down in print in 1820 by James Hardiman, in the year of our Lord fourteen hundred and ninety-three the Mayor of Galway, James Lynch FitzStephen, hanged his own son Walter from the upper window of his own house in Lombard Street, having sentenced him personally for the murder of a Spanish guest. The city's executioner refused to attend; the gathered crowd would not let any other man approach the gallows. Lynch did the work himself. The window, Lynch's Window, is still marked in the building, with a stone tablet bearing a crow-and-skull motif and the Latin inscription Remember death. Whether the English word lynch descends from this Galway hanging is etymologically contested. The story itself is one of the most compactly affecting in the city's chronicle.

FitzGerald

On the eleventh of June 1534, Thomas FitzGerald, twenty-one years old and deputy-governor of Ireland in his father's absence in London, rode into the council chamber at St Mary's Abbey in Dublin with a hundred and forty horsemen of his Kildare retainers, threw the Sword of State on the table, and renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII. He had heard a false rumour that his father had been executed in the Tower. The Geraldines of Kildare had been the effective government of Ireland for almost a century. The renunciation was, by the lights of any participant in the room, a more serious thing than a Continental noble's defiance: it was the largest private army in Ireland declaring against the king. The campaign that followed cost him his life and the dynasty its earldom.

Fitzpatrick

On Wednesday the eleventh of June 1541, in the Council Chamber of Dublin Castle, the senior Gaelic chief Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig of Ossory, in his early forties, the last reigning king of the small but ancient Leinster sub-kingdom of Osraighe (Ossory) between the Slieve Bloom Mountains and the Suir in modern County Laois and County Kilkenny, knelt before the Lord Deputy of Ireland Sir Anthony St Leger and made the formal surrender of his Gaelic-Irish royal-lordship of the Ossory territory under the new Tudor policy of surrender-and-regrant proposed by Henry VIII. He received back in the same ceremony the surrendered lands in formal Crown grant as the new English-style title Baron of Upper Ossory, the first Gaelic-Irish chief in the history of the Tudor English administration to accept the surrender-and-regrant arrangement, and on the strength of the surrender adopted the new English-style surname Fitzpatrick (the Mac of his original Gaelic patronymic Mac Giolla Phádraig translated into the Norman Fitz, with the Phádraig component retained), the unique single example in the surname-history of Ireland of a Gaelic Mac translated into a Norman Fitz. The surrender-and-regrant of 1541 was the foundational Tudor administrative-and-political instrument by which the Gaelic-Irish lordships were brought into the Crown peerage-and-tenure system across the next forty years of the Henrician-and-Elizabethan Tudor settlement, and the Mac Giolla Phádraig acceptance was the central single test-case on which the policy was demonstrated to be administratively viable.

O'Donnell

Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill, Red Hugh O'Donnell, was kidnapped at fifteen by agents of the Tudor administration off Rathmullan in Donegal in 1587. He was held in Dublin Castle as a hostage to keep his father quiet, the system of taking teenage heirs from the great Gaelic families as pupils of crown justice being systematic policy in those years. He escaped once in January 1591 and was recaptured. He escaped again on Christmas night the same year, eighteen years old, by descending into the castle's privy and walking out through the sewer. The walk through a December blizzard up into the Wicklow Mountains cost him his fellow escapee Art O'Neill, frozen to death in the snow, and his own two big toes to frostbite. He went home to Donegal a fortnight later and within two years was leading half the Nine Years War.

Maguire

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.

O'Sullivan

On the last day of December 1602 a thousand O'Sullivans, men, women and children, set out from the burnt country of Beara on the south-west tip of Munster to walk to safety in Leitrim, two hundred and fifteen Irish miles north, through country garrisoned by their enemies, in midwinter. Their leader was Donal Cam O'Sullivan Beare, the last Gaelic lord of the peninsula, whose strongholds had been taken one by one through the year and whose cattle had been driven off and whose harbour had been blockaded. The walk took fifteen days. Thirty-five reached the gates of Leitrim Castle. The march itself, recorded in detail in the Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium of 1621, is one of the most affecting episodes of seventeenth-century Europe.

O'Neill

On the evening of the fourteenth of September 1607, two of the great Gaelic earls of Ulster, Hugh O'Neill of Tyrone and Rory O'Donnell of Tyrconnell, with ninety of their kinsmen, household, scholars, monks, wives and children, boarded a French ship lying at anchor in the deep water of Lough Swilly off Rathmullan in Donegal. The ship sailed on the morning tide. None of them ever saw Ireland again. The Plantation of Ulster, the systematic settlement of the surrendered counties by Lowland Scots and English Protestant tenants, began on the back of the forfeitures three years later. The Flight of the Earls is the date the Irish historians take as the end of the political existence of Gaelic Ireland.

Doherty

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.

Boyle

In the spring of 1661, in the laboratory Robert Boyle had built behind the house of his sister Lady Ranelagh at Pall Mall in central London, Boyle, thirty-four years old, the seventh son of the Great Earl of Cork (Richard Boyle, the Anglo-Irish planter who had been the wealthiest man in Ireland at his 1643 death), former resident-experimenter at Oxford 1656–58 under the Cromwell government, founding member of the Royal Society (chartered in 1662, but operative as the Invisible College since 1645), completed the dialogue treatise The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts and Paradoxes, touching the Experiments whereby vulgar Spagyrists are wont to endeavour to evince their salt, sulphur and mercury, to be the true Principles of Things, a octavo of about three hundred and eighty pages, published in London by F. Crooke in November 1661. The book, written in the dialogue form of four natural-philosophers in conversation, dismantled the Aristotelian four-element theory (earth, water, air, fire) and the Paracelsian three-principle theory (salt, sulphur, mercury) that had been the twin-foundation of European alchemy for two thousand years. In their place Boyle proposed the modern operational definition of a chemical element: a substance that cannot, by any laboratory technique then known, be reduced to a simpler form. The Sceptical Chymist is, by every careful judgment of the history-of-science (Marie Boas Hall, Lawrence Principe), the foundational text of modern Western chemistry.

Swift

Between the second of March and the second of December 1724, in the Deanery of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift, fifty-six years old, the Dean of St Patrick's since 1713, wrote and published anonymously seven pamphlets attacking the patent granted by the British Crown in 1722 to the Wolverhampton hardware merchant William Wood for the minting of about £108,000-worth of copper half-pennies and farthings for circulation in Ireland. The pamphlets, published in the form of letters from a fictitious Dublin draper M. B. Drapier, argued by progressive escalation that the English commercial domination of Ireland was incompatible with the constitutional position of Ireland as a kingdom under the same Crown, and that the country's legal-political autonomy required the rejection of the patent. The political effect was the largest mass-popular Irish political mobilisation of the eighteenth century: by the end of November 1724, no merchant or shopkeeper in Dublin would accept Wood's coinage, the Lord Lieutenant Lord Carteret was unable to enforce its circulation, and on the eleventh of August 1725 the patent was withdrawn by the Walpole ministry in London. The reward of three hundred pounds offered by Carteret for the Drapier's identity was never claimed; the printer John Harding had been arrested in November 1724 and the grand jury under Lord Chief Justice Whitshed had refused to find a true bill against him.