Flight Of The Earls
Name
The event was first named as a "flight" in a book by the Reverend C. P. Meehan that was published in 1868.
Historians disagree to what extent the earls wanted to start a war with Spanish help to re-establish their positions, or whether they accepted exile as the best way of coping with their recent loss of status since the Treaty of Mellifont in 1603. Meehan argued that the earls' tenants wanted a new war: "Withal, the people of Ulster were full of hope that O'Neill would return with forces to evict the evictors, but the farther they advanced into this agreeable perspective, the more rapidly did its charms disappear."
Background to the exile
After the defeat at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, Hugh Roe O'Donnell of Tyrconnell traveled to Spain to seek support from Philip III. Unsuccessful, he soon died in Spain from a sudden illness and was succeeded by his younger brother Rory O'Donnell.
The O'Neills and O'Donnells retained their lands and titles, although with much-diminished extent and authority. However, the countryside was laid bare in a campaign of destruction in 1602, which induced famine in 1603. Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, was pardoned under the terms of the Treaty of Mellifont in March 1603 and submitted to the crown.
When King James VI and I took the English throne in 1603, he quickly proceeded to issue pardons for the Irish lords and their rebel forces. Already reigning as king of Scotland, he had a better understanding of the advantages from working with local chiefs in the Scottish Highlands. However, as in other Irish lordships, the 1603 peace involved O'Neill losing substantial areas of land to his cousins and neighbors, who would be granted freeholds under the English system, instead of the looser arrangements under the former Brehon law system. This was not a new policy but was a well-understood and longstanding practice in the Tudor conquest of Ireland.
On 10 September 1602, the Prince of Tyrconnell had already died, allegedly assassinated, in Spain, and his brother succeeded him as 25th Chieftain of the O'Donnell clan. He was later granted the Earldom of Tyrconnell by King James I on 4 September 1603 and restored to a somewhat diminished scale of territories in Tyrconnell on 10 February 1604.
In 1605, the new Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir Arthur Chichester, began to encroach on the former freedoms of the two Earls and The Maguire, enforcing the new freeholds, especially that granted in North Ulster to the O'Cahan chief. The O'Cahan had formerly been important subjects of the O'Neills and required protection; in turn, Chichester wanted to reduce O'Neill's authority. O'Cahan had also wanted to remove himself from O'Neill's overlordship. An option was to charge O'Neill with treason if he did not comply with the new arrangements. The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in the same year made it harder for Catholics to appear loyal to both the crown and the papacy. A lengthy legal battle however found in O'Neill's favor.
By 1607, O'Neill's allies the Maguires and the Earl of Tyrconnell were finding it hard to maintain their prestige on lower incomes. They planned to seek Spanish support before news of the Battle of Gibraltar arrived. When their ship dropped anchor, O'Neill seems to have joined them on impulse. He had three options:
- Flee with his friends and hope for a reinvasion by Spain
- Go to London and stay at court until his grievances were redressed
- Do nothing and live on a reduced income as a large landowner in Ulster.
Fearing arrest, they chose to flee to Continental Europe, where they hoped to recruit an army for the invasion of Ireland with Spanish help. However, earlier in 1607 the main Spanish fleet in Europe had been defeated by the Dutch in the Battle of Gibraltar. But the oft-repeated theory that they were all about to be arrested contradicts writer Tadhg Ó Cianáin, the main historical source on the Flight, who said at the start of his account that O'Neill heard news of the ship anchored at Rathmullen on Thursday 6 September, and "took his leave of the Lord Justice (Chichester) the following Saturday". They had been meeting at Slane for several days, and there is no proof that warrants for his arrest had been drawn up, nor was it a hurried departure.
Also, as the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) had been ended by the Treaty of London in 1604, King Philip III of Spain wanted to remain at peace with England under its new Stuart dynasty. As a part of the peace proposals, a Spanish princess was to marry James' son, Henry, though this never happened. Spain had also gone bankrupt in 1598. Tyrone ignored all these realities, remained in Italy, and persisted with his invasion plan until his death in exile in 1616.
End of the old Gaelic order
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The earls left from the town of Rathmullan with some of the leading Gaelic families in Ulster; they traveled down Lough Swilly on a French ship. Their departure was the end of the old Gaelic order, in that the earls were descended from Gaelic clan dynasties that had ruled their parts of Ulster for centuries. The Flight of the Earls was a watershed event in Irish history, as the ancient Gaelic aristocracy of Ulster went into permanent exile. Despite their attachment to and importance in the Gaelic system, the Earls' ancestors had accepted their Earldoms from the English-run Kingdom of Ireland in the 1540s, under the policy of surrender and regrant (under this policy, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Irish rulers were to surrender themselves and their lands to Henry VIII, and he would grant their land back to them along with an English title). Some historians argue that their flight was forced upon them by the fallout from the Tudor conquest of Ireland, while others that it was an enormous strategic mistake that cleared the way for the Plantation of Ulster.
From 1616, a number of bards outside Ulster had a poetic debate in the "Contention of the bards" and one of the arguments celebrated King James's Gaelic-Irish Milesian ancestry through Malcolm III of Scotland. So it is debatable whether the Gaelic order had ended or was evolving.
Journey
The Earls set sail from Rathmullan, a village on the shore of Lough Swilly in County Donegal, accompanied by ninety followers, many of them Ulster noblemen, and some members of their families. Several left their wives behind, hoping either to return or retrieve them later. The late Tomás Ó Fiaich, Archbishop of Armagh, gave a lecture at Rathmullan in September 1988 and recounted that the Earl of Tyrone allegedly “had a gold cross which contained a relic of the True Cross, and this he trailed in the water behind the ship, and according to O’Ciainain, it gave some relief from the storm” during the crossing to Quillebeuf-sur-Seine in Normandy, France. They finally reached the Continent on 4 October 1607. This supposed relic of the True Cross was probably a minor relic taken from that kept at Holy Cross Abbey, which they had previously visited en route to Kinsale in 1601.
Their destination was Spain, but they disembarked in France. The party proceeded overland to Spanish Flanders, some remaining in Leuven, while the main party continued to Italy. Tadhg Ó Cianáin (sometimes quoted by historians as O'Keenan) subsequently described the journey in great detail. While the party was welcomed by many important officials in the Spanish Netherlands, he makes no mention of any negotiations or planning between the earls and the Spanish to start a new war to regain the earls' properties.
Ó Cianáin's diary is important as the only continuous and contemporaneous account of the Flight. Its original title, Turas na dTaoiseach nUltach as Éirinn – the departure of the Chiefs of Ulster from Ireland – has been changed since the creation of the more dramatic phrase "Flight of the Earls" to the latter's modern literal translation, Imeacht na nIarlaí; and, according to Professor Ó Muraíle, turas can also mean a religious pilgrimage.
