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| Spanish Intervention in Kinsale Battle - too little, too late | |
| Dr Hiram Morgan, History, spoke to The College Courier recently about the context, significance and consequences of the battle. "Kinsale was the most decisive engagement of The Nine Years War (1594-1603). During the early stages of the war the Gaelic Irish alliance led by Hugh O'Neill and Hugh O'Donnell had achieved considerable success. They had gained victories at the battles of Clontribret, Curlew Mountains and most notably at the Yellow Ford. As a result their war of defence had become, with the overthrow of the Munster plantation in 1598, a nationwide revolt. An attempt to win over the English speakers of the Pale and the port towns by an appeal to a common nationality and religion - faith and fatherland - fell on deaf ears. Instead outright victory depended on foreign intervention by the leading power of the day, - Catholic Spain. However the Spanish arrival at Kinsale in September 1601 was too little and too late. O'Neill and O'Donnell marched their forces the length of Ireland and committed themselves - unnecessarily, as Lord Deputy Mountjoy's army was trapped and starving - to a pitched battle. The Irish were probably overconfident going into battle as they had considerably modernised their army and tactics especially the organisation of the foot. However the battle was determined by an English cavalry charge that caused the aristocratic and undisciplined Irish cavalry to flee the field. The Irish lost 1,200 dead and 800 wounded, the English only one though they had lost 6,000 to disease in the course of the three-month siege of Kinsale. A week after the battle, Don Juan del Áquila, the Spanish commander agreed to surrender Kinsale on the promise of an unfettered return to Spain for his expeditionary force. The following year Mountjoy in Ulster and Carew in Munster reduced the Irish to submission in a brutal war that spared neither man, woman, child nor beast. Kinsale was a turning point. It ensured the establishment of a functional English sovereignty throughout Ireland for the first time since the Norman Invasion and was the culmination of a closer English engagement that had been gathering pace since the reign of Henry VIII. Of course the outcome might have been different and we might be speaking Spanish now. A successful Spanish intervention at Kinsale might have dominoed Ireland into Spanish control, upset the Stuart succession to the English throne in 1603 and prevented the establishment of an English colony across the Atlantic at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. At the very least Ireland, enjoying Spanish protection, might have achieved a measure of independence from England. "The Irish were probably overconfident going into battle as they had considerably modernised their army and tactics especially the organisation of the foot" Even under Spanish control or an independent Counter-Reformation regime, Gaelic Ireland would have been subjected to fundamental change, though not in such a dramatic and wrenching fashion as took place under subsequent English domination. Gaelic lordship, - the rule of the Macs and Oes, - was symbolically destroyed when Mountjoy broke up the O'Neill inaugural stone at Tullyhoge. The defeated Gaels went into exile in Hapsburg territories - many evacuated with the Spanish forces at Kinsale but none quite as dramatic as in the Flight of the Earls in 1607. Then followed the plantation of Ulster that began the process of transforming the most Gaelic of the four provinces into what eventually became Northern Ireland. Gaelic aristocratic society did not survive flight, plantation and the general capitalisation of landownership. At first the majority of the population were glad to be rid of the tyranny of the great lords, but quickly found themselves being subjected to severe discrimination on racial and ethnic grounds. Nevertheless, amongst them a vibrant Gaelic folk culture flourished until its almost total destruction in the Famine. The Gaelic Irish haven't gone away. The destruction of the Gaelic political system at the start of the seventeenth century and Gaelic popular culture in the middle of the nineteenth century has not led to their disappearance. They are more influential than ever as a result of nineteenth-century democratisation and land reform. About 60 per cent of elected parliamentarians - TDs and Members of the Local Assembly at Stormont - and a similar percentage of those on the latest list of the 100 richest people in Ireland - bear Gaelic surnames!"  |
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