Original subtitles

The Irish are a people forged from many migrations.

From earliest times, the sea has carried waves of newcomers to Ireland -

Stone-Age hunter-gatherers, Christian missionaries, Viking warriors.

Each has been successfully absorbed.

But in the middle of the 12th century,

Ireland will face an invasion unlike anything seen before.

It will set in motion one of the longest conflicts in human history...

...in which land and faith will divide the nations.

The destinies of Ireland and Britain will be changed by what begins 800 years ago.

Ireland stands on the verge of the age of conquest.

Ripped By mstoll

"Kings fought and the ground trembled."

So did the Annals Of The Four Masters

describe the Ireland of the early 12th century.

It was a land of farmers ruled by clan chieftains

who in turn paid homage to five provincial kings.

There was a High King of Ireland,

but he had only limited power.

But in the hands of a man ruthless and cunning enough

to crush his political enemies,

this High Kingship could mean something unprecedented in Irish history -

a land ruled from the centre by one powerful figure,

the beginnings of a united political entity.

It takes a ruthless man for ruthless times.

Dermot MacMurrough was King of Leinster, an area of fertile land

strategically close to the country's great urban settlement at Dublin.

It was said of Dermot that he preferred to be feared rather than loved,

and he probably would have agreed.

Those who stood in his way were either killed or they were ritually blinded

and castrated so they wouldn't produce any heirs.

Here on the site of a 12th-century abbey,

Dermot displayed his characteristic ruthlessness.

The abbeys were important symbols of kingly power,

so in 1132, when a rival dynasty appointed their woman as Abbess of Kildare,

Dermot was furious.

He, as King of Leinster, wanted control of this very important office.

So he attacked and plundered Kildare

and, as the Annals say,

he had the Abbess of Kildare,

the most important female in the entire Irish Church,

put into a soldier's bed and raped to disqualify her from the office she held.

Ireland found that shocking.

Certainly, the annalists' report indicate

a certain degree of shock at this kind of thing.

By the middle of the 12th century,

Dermot had managed to make enemies of most of the provincial kings

and when he abducted the wife of one of them, they united against him.

Dermot knew his likely fate.

As a child, he'd seen his father murdered and buried with a dead dog,

a humiliating mark of disrespect.

Dermot lost his throne and his lands, but he fled in time to save his life.

And that fleetness of foot would alter the course of Irish history.

Irish kings had often made alliances with warriors on the west coast of Britain,

but none of these could offer the kind of help

Dermot now sought to reclaim his throne.

The fugitive king sailed boldly further,

to the heart of Western Europe's mightiest empire.

In the traditional telling of the Irish story,

Dermot is seen as the father figure for generations of traitors,

the man who callously sold out his country to the English,

but it simply wasn't like that. In reality, Dermot was doing

what any desperate or ambitious chieftain would have done -

seeking the help of somebody more powerful.

The crucial difference was that the people he went to

were the most organised military power in the medieval West.

These were the lands of the Normans.

By 1160, the Norman empire extended from the Mediterranean to Britain.

Here they'd imposed a rigid system - feudalism -

where power flowed from the King to his nobles.

The Normans are driven by wealth,

honour, reputation, prestige and the acquisition of land.

And military prowess is key to their identity.

It's key to identity and, of course, also to success.

The Normans were superior in that they possessed cavalry

and were capable of large-scale, co-ordinated military operations.

The Norman King Henry II would now be wooed by Dermot MacMurrough.

Henry was the great-grandson of William the Conqueror.

Although he often kept his court at Anjou in France, he was King of England.

Henry had contemplated attacking Ireland

long before Dermot came to his French court in 1166.

Henry II was more than a match in political cunning

for the Irishman who now came seeking his help.

In what history might call the first ever Anglo-Irish summit,

the rough king from the western fringes of Christendom met Henry at his court.

A Norman poem described the explicitly feudal nature

of the contract between the two.

Dermot addresses Henry -

"Henceforth, all the days of my life

"On condition that you be my helper So that I do not lose everything

"You I shall acknowledge as Sire and Lord."

What Dermot means is, "I will give you land, if you give me an army."

This suits a king with restless, land-hungry knights

and who cleaves to that great alibi of conquerors -

the belief that he has a civilising mission. This will become

an enduring theme of England's actions in Ireland.

A decade earlier, when he'd first thought about invading Ireland,

Henry had sought the support of a higher power.

Ireland is linked to Europe not only by trade,

but by that most central of medieval realities, religion.

The Pope isn't just spiritual master of Christendom.

He's a temporal power broker as well.

If he lends his support to an invasion,

then Irish chiefs are obliged to offer their allegiance

to the man who carries his blessing.

Pope Adrian IVhad his own agenda.

The Irish Church had become worryingly independent.

Granting permission for an invasion, the Pope told King Henry

that in order to enlarge the borders of the Church

and set bounds to the progress of wickedness,

he should take possession of that island.

Henry promised to levy an annual tax of a penny per hearth in Ireland.

The money would be sent to Rome.

This is a period of spectacular upheaval across Europe.

Indeed. This is the time of the Crusades, it is the time of the wars against Islam,

but it is also the time of the expansion

of Western Christendom into what we call Eastern Europe,

into other parts of the British Isles, into the Iberian Peninsula.

So the Irish are just one of a number of people

- seen as barbaric and ripe for conquest? - Absolutely.

With Henry's backing, Dermot now recruited an Anglo-Norman baron from Wales

to lead the invasion -

Richard de Clare, known to friends and enemies as Strongbow.

Strongbow was a man of restless energy and ambition.

And in front of this knight, Dermot dangled a tantalising prospect -

lush acres of Irish land and his daughter's hand in marriage.

On 23rd of August 1170, an Anglo-Norman force led by a friend of Strongbow's

arrived here in County Wexford.

They were used to raiders along this coast,

so when the Irish looked out and saw the Norman vessel,

they could have been forgiven for thinking this was just another passing incursion.

But a new history was about to come bearing in from the sea.

The contemporary accounts tell us the Irish ran naked into battle

against the English. They lacked armour.

They were literally

throwing stones at these Anglo-Norman knights.

The battle was a savage encounter.

The invaders hacked and cleaved their way through the Irish.

In one refinement of the art of murder,

they broke people's legs before hurling them into the sea.

They had one notable killer who went by the name of Alice the Vicious.

She's said to have killed 70 men in revenge for the death of her lover.

This was the same Norman ferocity that had routed the Arab defenders of Sicily

and the warriors of Harold's England a century before.

It was ferocity with a message - submit or be annihilated.

When Strongbow stormed the city of Waterford, the defenders were overwhelmed.

And the victor moved to claim the first part of his Irish bargain.

Surrounded by the Irish dead and in the smoking ruins of a church,

the priest in Daniel Maclise's 19th-century painting

blesses the union of Strongbow and Dermot's daughter Aoife.

Irish nationalists would cast this

as the beginning of 800 years of English oppression.

This painting is one of those great examples

of how both sides in the Irish story can look at a representation

of an historic event and take from it totally different meanings.

Nationalists see this as a moving evocation of their subjugation -

the forced marriage of Ireland and England.

But the painter was a Cork-born Unionist who represented a complex Irishness.

He felt a deep attachment to an ancient Gaelic past,

but also to the British Empire.

Of course, what really matters is how Strongbow saw things.

And for him and the rest of the Anglo-Irish knights,

this was the beginning of a great land grab.

Dermot died soon after, before he could enjoy the fruits of victory,

and he was succeeded as King of Leinster by Strongbow.

Here begins a great theme of Ireland's story -

the fear of English monarchs that Ireland will be used as a base to attack them.

For King Henry had never trusted Strongbow

and now feared he would set up a stronghold in Ireland.

In 1171, Henry brought a large army to Ireland

and received Strongbow's submission,

but he also confronted the Gaelic chiefs.

When Henry lands with his army, his archers, his horsemen,

it's a pretty formidable sight

for the Irish chiefs and they're faced a dilemma -

do you resist this man or do you make peace?

What is the choice they eventually make?

For about four years, Irish kings were suffering

and their lands were literally being taken from them by Anglo-Norman barons

who they considered to be freebooters.

They looked at Henry's arrival and they considered him to be, perhaps,

a stabilising force.

The Irish kings welcomed Henry II to Ireland.

We didn't hear too much about that when I was learning my history

as a youngster in national school.

No, we didn't. But again, it was considered by them, I think,

as the better of two options.

They accepted the English King as their lord

and feasted with him on a Norman dish they hated - roast crane,

the culinary symbol of Irish submission.

Henry left Ireland the following year...

...but the legacy of the conquest he launched can be seen here

in this unique 14th-century charter of Waterford.

What does this extraordinary series of documents tell us

about the Irish relationship with the English crown?

This great charter roll of Waterford could have come from an English city.

The earliest contemporary portraits of a King of England that still survive

are here in Waterford, a city that is anxious to impress the King

and protest their loyalty to him.

It is, for all intents and purposes, an English city.

Over the next 50 years,

the Anglo-Normans established power bases in the main population centres

and, crucially, they moved to set up great estates on the best land in the country.

Ireland was about to be transformed.

Historically, we've tended to curse the English a great deal,

but the Normans did quite a bit for us, didn't they?

If you look around Ireland today,

the most characteristically Irish traits are English.

Our parliamentary system was brought to Ireland by the Anglo-Normans.

The system of law that we have is the English common law system.

And, of course, the language that has produced

most of the great writers of Ireland - Joyce and Yeats -

is the English language.

The division of the country into 32 counties,

that process began within about 20 years of the Anglo-Normans.

When we look around the countryside in Ireland,

we think of fields and hedges -

almost non-existent in Ireland before the 12th century.

Your classical image of rural Ireland is actually a product

of the arrival of the English in the 12th century.

The Normans embraced a Roman tradition which saw conquered races as barbarians.

It would become a recurring theme of how the colonists described the Irish.

In the English telling of the Irish story, a stock figure starts to emerge -

wild, violent, a buffoon. A creature not of intellect, but of instinct.

Now, of course, colonised peoples are referred to in this way

in the language of the conqueror across the globe.

But in Ireland, the roots of this stereotype

lie in the writings of a man who came here

not as a soldier, but on a spiritual mission.

The 12th-century priest and chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales,

profiled the Irish in his Topographia Hibernica.

Seated on the throne, he's the classic boring churchman - canon lawyer,

great advocate of celibacy, lover of the Pope, lover of the rich, well-connected.

What he does is produce this remarkable book with maps, with drawings

and accounts of the Ireland that he found at that time.

And he says, "My book is a mixture

"of reading books and eye witness and therefore has the surety of truth."

Of course, just because he says he went to Ireland and saw lots of things

doesn't mean he hadn't an agenda.

One of the drawings in here is of a woman having sex with a goat.

And it's full of attempts to portray the Irish as barbarous,

pernicious, as he puts it himself,

- "wallowing in vice". - Yes.

Here you have a group of men taking part in a kingship ritual.

He doesn't see this as an ancient ritual.

This ritual was first described 400 years before this book was produced.

- Ritual slaughter... - Ritual slaughter of a horse.

But he sees this as an example of how they are lawless,

they are outside the sphere of Roman law.

They have never had the benefits of the Roman Empire,

so they're doing the wildest and most bizarre things you could imagine.

This is a medieval precursor to imperialism

and the justifications which one had for imperialism.

The same rhetoric of looking at the unusual behaviour and the unusual rituals

of anthropologists in India in the 19th century

that same attitude can be found here.

200 years into the conquest and the colony is unfinished.

Beyond the towns, the Anglo-Normans hold no sway.

The Irish raid and retreat into the mountains.

The Gaelic chiefs saw in the buildings of the Normans the mark of permanence.

The colonists had thrown their world -

pastoralist, based on the loyalties of clan - into retreat.

A stone curtain separated English from native.

The old aristocracy seethed with resentment.

The Irish chieftains decide to launch Ireland's first diplomatic mission,

appealing for help to the most powerful figure in Christendom.

As it was a pope who'd first given legal sanction for the invasion of Ireland,

it was to Rome that the Irish chiefs now complained

about their unjust treatment at the hands of the colonists.

Written in 1317,

their document is known as the Remonstrance Of The Princes.

Tell me what we see in this document.

This is the worst picture of English rule since the invasion.

Not a document that minces words.

It certainly isn't.

It talks about how the Irish are savaged by the vicious teeth of the English

and have fallen into an abyss of slavery. It's very, very vivid imagery.

There's one particularly gruesome example where Thomas de Clare

has had a banquet with one of the Gaelic rulers

and at the end of the banquet,

he is taken from the table and his head is amputated.

- "Amputato quoque capite". - Exactly.

And this is being sent to the Pope. "This is what the English are doing to us."

Yeah.

But Irish complaints were of little matter in Rome.

The Pope passed the document to King Edward II, who did nothing.

The simple truth was that English kings, mired in struggles of their own,

were little bothered with Ireland.

English influence remained strong

in the fertile area around Dublin and North Leinster,

lands they called The Pale, until, as would happen so often,

the stories of other places collided with that of Ireland.

The first was war. A Scottish army fighting the English

opened a new front here in Ireland. But the worst disaster of all

arrived here at the port of Howth in July 1348.

The Black Plague ravaged the towns and ports

where the Anglo-Normans were strongest.

A witness described how the disease

would carry off a man, his wife and their children

all, as he put it, in the common way of death.

Many of the English lords began to abandon their castles and lands

and fled back to England.

Others had their property forcibly taken

as the Gaelic lords exploited English weakness.

What we see in this period is a resurgent Gaelic chiefdom.

People are coming back, taking lands abandoned by the Anglo-Norman overlords,

but it seems like a real cultural renaissance

of a people who feel confident in themselves again.

What we see is a regrouping.

From 1150, we have basically no Irish manuscripts, no Gaelic manuscripts.

But from 1350, we have a large number of very well-decorated,

beautifully put together manuscripts.

It does seem to be a century during which the Gaelic aristocracy

and Gaelic learned classes are trying to find new ways

of asserting their cultural distinctiveness.

Why in this period does poetry assume such importance?

In the unstable political climate of Ireland at this time,

art or gold work or tapestry might not be such a good investment,

but in terms of securing your status, securing your fame,

a poem can travel across the entire Gaelic world from Kerry to the Hebrides.

When O'Neill comes to London, someone observes with distaste

that his poets are sitting with him at the same table and eating from the same dish.

We get these glimpses, sometimes, of Gaelic custom

and the high status accorded to the poet.

As Gaelic Ireland revives, the English colony retreats.

There are a few military expeditions by the Crown

and an attempt to separate English and Irish by law,

but Ireland simply isn't a strategic priority

until, near the end of the 15th century, the Crown is given a rude awakening.

After years of civil war in England,

two different pretenders to the throne attack from Ireland,

supported by Irish lords.

In their castles, the lords were local emperors.

There was no strong central government to contain them.

London might as well have been the moon

for all the real influence the monarch could bring to bear.

The great Anglo-Norman families had symbolised English power,

but now they could make alliances with Gaelic chiefs.

Over three centuries, they'd become, if not entirely Irish,

certainly no longer truly English.

This is an unsettled land where warlords squabble

and London's writ does not run.

But the ascent to the throne of a new king in 1509

will bring about the most concerted attempt yet to subdue the Irish lords.

Henry VIII will come to see these free-roving lords

as a threat to his power

and men who need to be taught a lesson.

Henry sought to create the state ruled by a single king

that had eluded Brian Boru and Dermot MacMurrough -

the first ever united Ireland,

but under the control of an English king and his officials.

Under the centralising rule of the Tudors,

Ireland will no longer be a wild colonial fringe

where Old English and Gaelic lords rule themselves.

Here is an English administration coming along saying, "We'll tidy this up for you.

"We will impose a legal framework in which your position

"will not be threatened at all. You'll continue to be local, regional boss.

"You'll continue to have this wealth that you treasure so much,

"but we'll do this by legal means."

But such promises fail to impress the powerful FitzGeralds,

the Old English lords of Kildare.

They'd been the King's representatives in Ireland.

Now they saw their power slipping away.

In 1534, they rebelled.

Just as he had done with the troublesome lords in England,

Henry crushed them ruthlessly.

As the Tower of London beckoned to any troublesome nobles,

Henry declared himself King of Ireland.

But Henry would never settle his Irish problem

for at home, he was moving towards a fateful entanglement.

Henry's enduring legacy to Ireland was forged in the chambers of his court.

There, a domestic imperative propelled him into action

that would profoundly change the way the Irish and the English saw each other.

Henry had failed to obtain a male heir from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

In 1533, he disobeyed the Pope

by divorcing Catherine and marrying Anne Boleyn.

Henry created the Church of England with himself at its head.

In this manner, England joined the great European Reformation,

the Protestant revolution which was already challenging Church corruption,

doctrine and the power of the papacy.

Henry imposed his new church on a reluctant English clergy

through terror and the seizing of church lands.

But in Ireland he lacked a standing army

that could enforce observance of the new faith.

And so Ireland remained Catholic.

Henry's unfinished business here left a dangerous legacy

in a Europe where religion was becoming a battleground.

Political loyalty and religious loyalty were increasingly seen as equal,

one to the other.

Where you had communities that were divided on grounds of religion,

you almost invariably had civil conflict.

So, the diversity in religion meant a challenge to the authority of monarchs.

In Europe, the Pope led a powerful movement against the Reformation.

Religious orders like the Jesuits enforced a new militant Catholicism.

In Spain, the inquisitions crushed the Protestant faith

and it was sent into retreat across much of the rest of Europe.

Even in England, the Reformation was overthrown

as Henry's Catholic daughter Mary succeeded to the throne.

In the terror that followed, Mary's Protestant sister Elizabeth

saw hundreds of her co-religionists killed.

Elizabeth and her supporters remembered that terror

when she became queen in 1558.

They saw Catholicism as being the ogre

which was always threatening the liberties of Protestantism.

This was represented by the tyranny of Spain,

which had threatened the invasion of England itself.

At forts like this on the Kent coast,

her soldiers scanned the horizon for the foreign invasion fleets.

But they were not the only threat,

because to the west lay Catholic Ireland.

There are an increasing number of young people from Ireland

who have been trained in continental seminaries and returned to Ireland

imbued with the zeal of the Catholic Counter-Reformation,

intent on resisting the advancement of Protestantism within the country.

The Queen does not launch a Protestant crusade in Ireland

for she is no religious zealot.

Above all, Elizabeth demands security

so she dispatches a new breed of soldiers and officials,

the Elizabethan adventurers.

The English adventurers who arrive here, how do they view the Irish?

Well, they leave The Pale and they go out into the Gaelic interior

and in Gaelic Ireland they see people who live

in a fashion which is completely opposite to the way things operate in England.

They don't live a settled lifestyle.

They are a pastoral people who follow the herds.

Ireland is a heavily wooded landscape.

The Irish are seen as being wood people.

They come out of the woods to attack you at night time,

to burn your tent, to steal your livestock,

to steal your women.

They can disappear. They can see you, but you can't see them.

They're seen as a menace.

They're seen as enemies of order.

As the adventurers seized land and curtailed private armies,

the great lords, Gaelic and English, faced a dilemma -

to rebel or work with the English.

Some like the Gaelic Hugh O'Neill went with the Crown,

but in Munster the Anglo-Norman Desmonds rebelled.

Elizabeth I fears the Irish rebel lords and chieftains

linking up with England's foreign enemies. And it isn't a totally unrealistic fear.

The rebels send a petition to Philip II in Spain and to the Pope in Rome.

The rebels are not seriously motivated by religion,

but religion is a bridge to Europe.

It's a bridge to finance, it's a bridge to money and weapons

and an invasion force.

Elizabeth's forces launched a policy of scorched earth.

One of the most notorious English commanders was Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

The record says he killed man, woman and child.

He spoiled, wasted and burned...

so that he might leave nothing of the enemy's in safety

which he might possibly waste or consume.

The age of total war had arrived in Ireland.

Gilbert also ordered the decapitation of entire villages

and decorated the path to his tent with heads.

Relatives of his victims would be made to walk along the path.

He boasted later that the sight of the heads of their dead fathers,

brothers, children, kinsfolk and friends brought great terror.

They're also interested, of course, in head money.

How do you collect the reward on a dead rebel?

You chop off their head, right? So, you have bags of heads being sent

from some part of Ireland to Dublin where they are exhibited,

which adds to the horror of the Elizabethan wars.

Bu this wasn't simply a matter of the Irish fighting the invaders.

Some Irish lords helped the Crown to protect their own power.

Here at the National Archives in London is an Elizabethan document

detailing how one Irish lord behaved.

This is an extraordinary document

because it brings, in a very real sense, that age of atrocity to life.

You can look back at Irish history in this period

and thousands of people seem to vanish into anonymous massacres

and battles. What you get here -

list after list of names.

They're Gaelic names - Ovren, Mac Carthaigh.

A total of over 5,000 names.

And they are killed by the army of another Irishman - the Earl of Ormond.

This butcher's bill he sends to London

to convince an English queen that he is loyal to the Crown.

For Elizabeth, Irish loyalty would become an increasingly urgent question

as the religious crisis in Europe escalated.

In Paris in 1572 came an event that would define for Protestants

the terror of the Counter-Reformation.

Here on the morning of August 24th, the Feast of St Bartholomew,

the bells of this church, Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, rang out.

Not in celebration, but as a signal for killing to begin.

Catholic death squads fanned out across the city targeting Protestants

in the worst religious massacres Europe had ever known.

Thousands were butchered.

Amid such confusion, an eyewitness reported,

everyone was allowed to kill whoever he pleased.

The bodies were hurled into the River Seine,

whose waters ran red with the blood of the murdered.

In Rome, the Pope ordered bonfires lit and the singing of the Te Deum

in celebration for "this glorious triumph over a perfidious race".

In Protestant England, there was alarm.

French refugees from the Catholic violence flooded into the East End of London

bringing with them tales of atrocity.

In the minds of the English Protestant Establishment

there loomed the question - would England be next?

English fears were confirmed when the Desmonds rebelled again

and succeeded in getting papal help.

In 1579, a fleet of papal troops landed in County Kerry

to aid the Munster rebels.

Part of the small force would find itself besieged here

at Carrigafoyle Castle in North Kerry.

An Italian captain, 16 Spaniards and 50 Irish defended this castle.

They were attacked by an Elizabethan force with heavy guns

and after three days, the defences were breached.

It was said that in the fighting that followed,

these walls were slippery with blood.

What happens at Carrigafoyle and in other massacres

foreshadows a new kind of European warfare...

where the tactics of massacre, starvation,

of salutary terror are becoming widespread.

It also helps to convince Elizabeth

of the need for a durable solution to her Irish problem.

Elizabeth's is an age of turbulent energy.

In literature, science...

...in exploration and the hunger for new lands.

Great empires are forming - Spanish and English.

Like the very first invader, Henry II,

Elizabeth imagines Ireland being civilised by Englishmen.

A place where "No dainty flower or herb that grows on ground

"No arboret with painted blossoms drest

"And smelling sweet but there it might be found."

The landscape of Ireland was about to undergo profound change.

The axes of the Elizabethans echoed through the great forests

as they cleared away the hiding places of rebels and made space for plantation.

The idea was to create an English garden in wild Ireland.

Among those given estates were a young adventurer called Sir Walter Raleigh...

and his friend, the poet Edmund Spenser.

In his most famous poem, The Faerie Queene, Spenser wrote,

"Who will not mercy unto others show How can he mercy ever hope to have?"

But mercy was noticeably absent in Spenser's role as apologist

for Elizabethan policy in Ireland.

Spenser had been present at massacres and defended his commander,

the Lord Deputy of Ireland,

against charges that he was a bloody man.

His loyalty was rewarded with a forfeited estate.

Spenser's friend Walter Raleigh was also granted 40,000 acres of land

around the Blackwater Valley.

And from this house in the town of Youghal,

he would set forth on his adventures in the New World.

Raleigh and Spenser epitomised the contradictions

of Elizabeth's adventure in Ireland.

Raleigh was an enthusiastic killer of rebels, yet here in this room

he would sit with Spenser and discuss the finer points of English verse.

Both men were willing to see people subjected to famine

in order to clear the land.

And they rationalised it all with the belief

that they had come to Ireland on a civilising mission.

Spenser sees his role as...

...advocate of hard measures to ensure the victory

of English civilisation in Ireland.

He views the Irish as people who need serious correction.

Some 30,000 Irish lost their lives, many to famine.

By the late 1580s, 25 years after she had come to power,

Elizabeth had subdued the Irish in Munster, Leinster and Connacht.

The leaders were dead or in hiding, the people destitute.

But there was one great obstacle to English domination in Ireland

and it lay far to the north in a province that would become synonymous

with the conflict between the two islands.

This is Tullaghoge, the Hill of the Warriors,

seat of the O'Neills,

lords of the ancient province of Ulster.

Ulster was the most Gaelic of the Irish provinces

and was the stronghold of Hugh O'Neill.

Hugh O'Neill is one of the most fascinating figures

in the story of Ireland.

He embodied the complexities of an age of dramatic change.

O'Neill could be a ruthless killer, a wily charmer

and a master of the art of compromise,

whatever the situation demanded.

The imperative for O'Neill was to protect the power of his family.

Constantly manoeuvring, he rode alongside English adventurers against Irish chiefs

and was rewarded with the Earldom of Tyrone.

He was a man who did his best to fit in with the English system.

For much of his career, the odds were on going with the Elizabethan project

of the extension of English laws, English systems of administration

and English systems of land-holding.

The difficulty is that once you commit to this English deal,

you make enemies.

And those enemies will increasingly come from the ranks of the adventurers,

envious of his position and lands.

O'Neill is caught in a rapidly changing world.

The English, with whom he'd tried to make a deal,

are advancing inexorably.

And so he makes a momentous decision.

No longer will the Earl of Tyrone be an enforcer for the Crown.

He will turn against Elizabeth.

In 1595, O'Neill allied himself with the powerful chieftain Red Hugh O'Donnell

and prepared for war.

Trained in the English ways of warfare and bolstered by Spanish advisers,

O'Neill begins to push back the English forces from Ulster.

At the Battle of the Yellow Ford in August 1598,

viewing the well-armed English, O'Neill told his men

that victory lay "not in senseless armour, but in courageous souls".

900 English are killed

and the same number desert.

As the war ground on, a furious Elizabeth rounded on her commander

for his failure to stop O'Neill.

"It must be the Queen of England's fortune,"she declared,

"to make a base cur to be accounted so famous a rebel.

"Little do you know how he hath blazed in foreign parts the defeats of regiments,

"the death of captains and the loss of men of quality."

O'Neill's victory sparked rebellions elsewhere in Ireland.

Far to the south, lands recently planted and tamed rose again.

Here in Munster, rebels descend from the woods.

Farms are burned, the English planters are taken by surprise and many are butchered.

In Munster, the attempt to make the land civil,

according to English ways, is overthrown.

Among the English refugees fleeing Ireland is the poet Edmund Spenser.

As Ireland moved towards a defining confrontation,

O'Neill sought to rally both the Gaelic chiefs and the Old English to his banner.

Hugh O'Neill sought a unifying cause,

but how was he going to achieve that

in a country where lords squabbled and provinces were disunited?

He turned to the one unifying symbol in all the existing varieties of Irishness -

the Catholic religion.

From now on, Hugh O'Neill's struggle for power against the English

would be characterised as a battle for faith and fatherland.

"I will employ myself to the utmost of my power,"he wrote,

"for the extirpation of heresy...

"...for the delivery of our country from infinite murders,

"wicked and detestable policies."

The English regarded O'Neill's militant piety

as a cynical ploy.

When the Earl of Essex met him during peace negotiations,

he remarked, "Hang thee up. Thou carest as much for religion as my horse."

But O'Neill had made an extraordinary connection,

one that would resonate through Irish history...

...between religion and Irish identity.

Pope Clement VIII declared O'Neill

Captain-General of the Catholic Army in Ireland.

Cast as the Irish David fighting an English Goliath,

O'Neill asked King Philip of Spain for help.

The Spanish could see the value in tying down a large English force in Ireland.

But Philip would prove a cautious ally.

He instructed his secretary to

"see what is the very smallest aid that will be needed.

"If it be so small that we can give it, we will help them."

On the morning of September 21 st 1601,

a Spanish fleet of 33 ships. Carrying 4,500 soldiers,

appeared here off the coast of Cork,

bearing down on the town of Kinsale.

But from the beginning, the expedition was dogged by bad luck.

The army they'd come to meet was waiting far to the north, in Ulster.

The Spanish had landed in the wrong part of Ireland.

As the forces of the English Lord Mountjoy massed at Kinsale,

O'Neill and O'Donnell made an epic march through the Irish winter.

The English had by now massed around 6,000 troops at Kinsale.

They besieged the Spanish and waited months in horrendous conditions

for the Irish to arrive.

The phrase "turning point" is one that swirls promiscuously

through Irish history,

usually summoned up by one side or the other to make a political point.

But Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant, all agree

that what happens here at Kinsale

will alter the balance of power in Ireland for ever.

By dawn on Christmas Eve 1601, the two sides are ready for battle.

The Spanish and Irish have amassed a force of 9,500 men

against an English army weakened by disease to around 6,000.

Hardened by relentless war, the Irish are tough fighters.

When he sees the Irish, the English commander Mountjoy says,

"The kingdom is lost."

The gravity of the situation is very clear to him.

He realises that defeat beckons unless some... almost a miracle can happen.

But O'Donnell, who had marched separately from O'Neill,

became lost and failed to make his rendezvous.

According to the Spanish, there was a catalogue of tactical blunders.

O'Donnell alerted the English with a loud call to arms.

In the confusion, O'Neill left his hill-top position

and went to open ground where his men were more vulnerable.

On seeing the hill unoccupied, a Spanish witness said,

"The enemy closed up on to it. He grasped his opportunity."

The English cavalry now charged downhill at O'Neill's men.

The Irish were fighting in open ground

against English cavalry that had the run of the field.

The Irish had never really been in that situation before.

But what it essentially comes down to, at the end of the day,

is that the English had stirrups.

The fact that the English solders had stirrups

meant they could drive home a charge with a lance

because a stirrup takes the shock,

you don't get knocked off the back of the horse.

Whereas the Irish had shorter horses. They carried their lances over arm.

But although it gave them extra manoeuvrability,

it meant they couldn't charge another body of horse.

- The fate of Ireland hung on a stirrup? - More or less, yes.

According to the Spanish eyewitness, 800 men were killed in the rout.

Most of the Irish survivors made for Ulster while the Spanish sailed home.

The Irish should have won the Battle of Kinsale. There is no question.

But they don't - circumstances go against them -

and the entire course of Irish history is altered as a result.

For the Spanish, Kinsale was a military fiasco

and they would never intervene in Ireland again.

The English saved their colony, but the war was ruinously expensive.

It almost bankrupted the Crown.

But for the Gaelic lords, Kinsale was the moment that broke their power for ever.

Mountjoy laid waste to O'Neill's lands in Ulster.

Mountjoy understood well the power of symbols in Ireland

and when he arrived here at Tullaghoge, the Hill of the Warriors,

he first ordered his troops to lay waste to the surrounding countryside.

They then came here and shattered the stone

upon which generations of the O'Neills had been crowned.

Hugh O'Neill surrendered and was allowed to keep his title and some of his land.

But he knew as well as his enemies did

that his real power had been destroyed.

On the 14th of December 1607,

O'Neill and O'Donnell and their families left Ulster for Europe.

The peasants over whom they'd ruled were left to make their peace with new masters.

Hugh O'Neill died in exile in Rome nine years later,

still dreaming of leading an invasion of his homeland.

For the English, the rebellion had proved

that a Catholic Ireland would always be a threat.

The flight of the earls is one of the most romanticised images in Irish history,

but now that they were gone, the question was, what would replace them?

If Ireland couldn't be made loyal, an entire order would be transplanted here

that was Protestant, loyal to the British Crown and determined to stay.

The death of the old order would give birth to a new age of conflict

whose consequences we live with still.

Ripped By mstoll