Desmond Rebellions
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.
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. However, 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 which 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—Earl of Ormonde—who was the Queen's cousin, was pardoned, while both Gerald Fitzgerald—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 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 law, 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 did not owe loyalty to a heretical English monarchy. The Pope granted Fitzmaurice an "indulgence" and also Papal troops and money. The Catholic King of Spain accepted Ireland into his possessions, pending the expulsion of the English. Fitzmaurice and 700 Spanish and Italian soldiers landed in Dingle, Kerry in July 1579. He was immediately joined by John Fitzgerald, the 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 insurgency.
Gerald, the Earl of Desmond, initially tried to stay out of the rebellion but joined it being declared a traitor by the authorities. 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, 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 on 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 family, however, there would be no pardon, and the rising would go on until the bitter 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 Gerald, the Earl of Desmond, was hunted down and killed in the Slieve Mish mountains in Kerry by a local clan named the O'Moriartys. The O'Moriarty 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 (Warhame St Ledger) 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 second is from the English poet Edmund Spencer who fought in the campaign.
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. Thousands of English soldiers and administrators had been imported to deal with the rebellion, and were allocated land in the subsequent plantation of confiscated Desmond estates. The Munster plantation settled several thousand of these people in the south of Ireland. The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland was completed after the subsequent Nine Years War in Ulster.
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.