Desmond Rebellions

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The Desmond Rebellions occurred in the 1560s, 1570s and 1580s in Munster in southern Ireland. They were rebellions of the Earl of Desmond dynasty—the Fitzgerald family or Geraldines—and their allies against the efforts of the Elizabethan English government to extend their control over the province of Munster. The rebellions were primarily about the independence of feudal lords from their monarch but also had an element of religious conflict (Roman Catholic against Protestant). The result of the rebellions was the destruction of the Desmond dynasty and the subsequent plantation or colonisation of Munster with English settlers. See also Tudor re-conquest of Ireland

Contents

1 Causes
2 The First Desmond Rebellion
3 The Second Desmond Rebellion
4 The Aftermath
5 Sources
6 See also

Causes

The south of Ireland (the provinces of Munster and southern Leinster) was dominated by the Old English Butlers of Ormonde and Fitzgeralds of Desmond, who formed what were essentially miniature feudal principates. Even so, Henry Sidney, as Lord Deputy of Ireland, was charged with establishing the authority of the English government over the independent lordships there. His solution was the formation of "lord presidencies"—provincial military governors who would replace the local lords as military powers and keepers of the peace.

The local dynasties saw the presidencies as intrusions into their sphere of influence, and into their traditional violent competition over the balance of power. This had seen the Butlers and Fitzgeralds fight a pitched battle against each other at Affane in Waterford in 1565. This was a blatant defiance of the Elizabethan state's law. Elizabeth I summoned the heads of both houses to London to explain their actions. However, the treatment of the dynasties was not even handed. Thomas Butler, 3rd Earl of Ormonde — who was the Queen's cousin — was pardoned, while both Gerald Fitzgerald, 15th Earl of Desmond and his brothers, John and James, were arrested and detained in the Tower of London.

This decapitated the natural leadership of the Munster Geraldines and left the Desmond Earldom in the hands of a soldier, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, the "captain general" of the Desmond military. Fitzmaurice had little stake in a new de-militarised order in Munster. He was also a devout Catholic, influenced by the counter-reformation, which made him see the Protestant Elizabethan governors as his enemies. To discourage these interlopers and re-establish Desmond primacy, he planned a rebellion, to show that the powers-that-be in Munster were not to be lightly tangled with. A factor that drew wider support for Fitzmaurice was the prospect of land confiscations, which had been mooted by Sidney and Peter Carew, an English colonist. This ensured Fitzmaurice the support of important clans, notably MacCarthy Mor, O'Sullivan Beare and O'Keefe.

The First Desmond Rebellion

Fitzmaurice launched his rebellion by attacking the English colony at Kerrycurihy in north Cork in June 1569. In response, Sidney mobilised large forces of English troops, Gaelic clans antagonistic to the Geraldines, and Ormonde's men, and began devastating the lands of Fitzmaurice's allies. Fitzmaurice's forces broke up, as individual lords had to retire to defend their own territories.

Sidney forced Fitzmaurice into the mountains of Kerry, from where he launched hit and run attacks on the English and their allies. By 1570, most of Fitzmaurice's allies had submitted to Sidney. Nevertheless, the guerrilla campaign dragged on for three more years until Fitzmaurice finally submitted in February 1573, after which he fled to the continent to seek help from the Catholic powers. Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, and his brother John were released from prison to stabilise the situation and to reconstruct their shattered territory. Although all of the local chiefs had submitted by the end of the rebellion, the methods used to suppress it provoked lingering resentment, especially among the Irish mercenaries; gall oglaigh or "gallowglass" as the English termed them, who had rallied to Fitzmaurice. Drury, the new Lord President of Munster, executed around 700 of them in the aftermath of the rebellion. Furthermore, Gaelic customs such as Brehon Laws, Irish dress, bardic poetry and the maintaining of private armies were outlawed. Fitzmaurice, by contrast, had deliberately emphasised the Gaelic character of the rebellion, wearing the Irish dress, speaking only Irish and referring to himself as the captain (taoiseach) of the Geraldines.

The Second Desmond Rebellion

The second Desmond rebellion was sparked when James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald launched an invasion of Munster in 1579. During his exile in Europe, he had reinvented himself as a soldier of the counter-reformation, arguing that since the Pope's excommunication of Elizabeth I in 1570 Irish Catholics no longer owed loyalty to a heretic monarch. The Pope granted Fitzmaurice an "indulgence" and supplied him with troops and treasure. The Catholic King of Spain accepted Ireland into his possessions, pending the expulsion of the English. Fitzmaurice landed in Dingle (modern County Kerry) in July 1579 with various officers and 700 Spanish and Italian troops. He was immediately joined in rebellion by John of Desmond, a brother of the Earl, who had a large following among his kinsmen and the disaffected swordsmen of Munster. Other Gaelic clans and Old English families also joined in the rebellion.

Gerald, the Earl of Desmond, initially resisted the call of the rebels, but gave in once the authorities had declared him a traitor. Fitzmaurice was killed shortly after he landed, leaving the rebellion under the command of John and Gerald Fitzgerald. The rebels sacked the towns of Youghal and Kinsale, and devastated the country of the English and their allies. In 1580, the rebellion spread to Leinster, under the leadership of Gaelic Irish chieftain Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne and the Pale lord Viscount Baltinglass—motivated by Catholicism and hostility to the English. A large English force under Earl Grey de Wilton were sent to subdue them, only to be ambushed and massacred at the battle of Glenmalure, losing over 800 dead. The rebels temporarily bestowed the title of King of Leinster on Creon MacMurrough Kavanagh, whose ancestors had held this title before the English conquest.

However, the tide in Munster was already turning against the rebels. English troops and locally raised forces under Ormonde succeeded in re-taking the south coast, destroying the lands of the Desmonds and their allies in the process, and killing their tenants. By capturing Carrigafoyle, the principal Desmond castle at the mouth of Shannon river, they cut off the Geraldine forces from the rest of the country and prevented a landing of foreign troops into the main Munster ports. When the Catholic reinforcements did arrive, they were only 600 Papal troops, and they were bottled up in a castle at Smerwick in Kerry before being captured and massacred. By relentless scorched earth tactics, the English broke the momentum of the rebellion. By 1581, most of the Fitzgerald's allies in Munster and Leinster had submitted on terms.

For the Geraldine Earl, however, there would be no pardon, and he was pursued by crown forces until the end. From 1581 to 1583, the war dragged on, with the remaining Geraldines evading capture in the mountains of Kerry. The rebellion was finally ended in November 1583 when the earl was hunted down and killed in the Slieve Mish mountains of Kerry by the local clan O'Moriarty. The clan chief, Maurice, received 1000 pounds of silver from the English government for Desmond's head, which was triumphantly displayed on the walls of Cork.

The Aftermath

After three years of scorched earth warfare, famine hit Munster. In April 1582, the provost marshal of Munster, Sir Warham St Leger, estimated that 30,000 people had died of famine in the previous six months. Plague broke out in Cork city, where the country people fled to avoid the fighting. People continued to die of famine and plague long after the war had ended, and it is estimated that by 1589 one third of the province's population had died. Grey was recalled by Elizabeth I for his excessive brutality. Two famous accounts tell us of the devastation of Munster after the Desmond rebellion. The first is from the Gaelic Annals of the Four Masters:

the whole tract of country from Waterford to Lothra, and from Cnamhchoill to the county of Kilkenny, was suffered to remain one surface of weeds and waste… At this period it was commonly said, that the lowing of a cow, or the whistle of the ploughboy, could scarcely be heard from Dun-Caoin to Cashel in Munster.

The second is from the View of the Present State of Ireland, written by English poet Edmund Spenser, who fought in the campaign:

''In those late wars in Munster; for notwithstanding that the same was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle, that you would have thought they could have been able to stand long, yet ere one year and a half they were brought to such wretchedness, as that any stony heart would have rued the same. ''Out of every corner of the wood and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked Anatomies [of] death, they spoke like ghosts, crying out of their graves; they did eat of the carrions, happy where they could find them, yea, and one another soon after, in so much as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithal; that in a short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast.

The wars of the 1570s and 1580s marked a watershed in Ireland. Although English control over the country was still far from total, the Geraldine axis of power had been annihilated, and Munster was "planted" with English colonists following the parliamentary arrangements of 1585. The thousands of English soldiers and administrators who had been imported to deal with the rebellion were allocated land in the Munster Plantation of Desmond's confiscated estates. The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland was completed after the subsequent Nine Years War in Ulster and the extension of plantation policy to other parts of the country.

Sources

Colm Lennon, Sixteenth Century Ireland – The Incomplete Conquest, Dublin 1994.
Edward O'Mahony, Baltimore, the O'Driscolls, and the end of Gaelic civilisation, 1538-1615, Mizen Journal, no. 8 (2000): 110-127.
Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, Harvester Press Ltd, Sussex 1976.
Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580-1650, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001.