As The Everyman’s major revival of Brian Friel’s materpiece Making History opens this April, we have invited Dr Hiram Morgan to discuss Hugh O’Neill.
‘Hugh O’Neill’ by Dr Hiram Morgan
Hugh O’Neill (1550–1616), Earl of Tyrone from 1585 and the O’Neill last inaugurated chief of his name from 1595, was one of the greatest political figures in Irish history. The contemporary English historian William Camden described him aptly: “He had a strong body, able to endure labour, watching and hunger: his industry was great, his soul large and fit for the weightiest business: much knowledge he had in military affairs, and a profound dissembling heart: in so much as some did prognosticate of him, that he was born either to the very great good or the great hurt of Ireland.”
Hugh survived a dangerous childhood in Ulster. His father Matthew, created Baron of Dungannon by the English, was killed fighting Shane O’Neill for supremacy. Hugh and his elder brother Brian were moved to Balgriffin north of Dublin to be raised by the Hovenden family. When Brian was murdered in 1562 by Turlough Luineach O’Neill, Shane’s eventual successor, Hugh became the English-supported heir to Tyrone. Returned north by Lord Deputy Sidney in 1568, it took Hugh another twenty years to gain control. Marriage alliances with the O’Donnells in Donegal, hitherto the O’Neills’ main dynastic rivals, were crucial to success. The crown’s growing fears of the new earl’s power by the mid-1580s led to its imprisoning his prospective son-in-law Red Hugh O’Donnell in Dublin Castle and switching support to the aging Turlough.
To stop encroachment, O’Neill eloped with Mabel Bagenal to entangle her ambitious English family based at Newry in another alliance; that strategy misfired but his springing of Red Hugh from gaol aided the neutralising of Turlough in Strabane. When the English entered Fermanagh in 1593, O’Neill began military action secretively using his cousins and brothers as proxies whilst himself ostensibly aiding royal forces led by his brother-in-law, Henry Bagenal. The earl built a formidable army practised in the use of firearms before being proclaimed a traitor in 1595. He proved an able general masterminding an increasingly nationwide struggle. He won at Clontibret (1595); then defeated and killed Bagenal at the Yellow Ford (1598) in the greatest Irish victory ever achieved over an English army. Revolt swept across the Midlands and overthrew the English plantation of Munster.
With her rule teetering, Queen Elizabeth sent the Earl of Essex with the largest English army yet brought to Ireland. The campaign was disastrous, and Essex compromised himself by foolishly meeting the ‘Archtraitor’ alone at the ford of Bellaclinthe. O’Neill, assisted by O’Donnell, was leading the most successful revolt against the Tudor conquest but their forces lacked the capacity to take walled or fortified positions of any strength. O’Neill launched a faith and fatherland appeal to gain support of the townsmen as fellow Irish Catholics in a common fight. When this political approach floundered, outright victory, and indeed the revolt’s very continuance, depended on foreign assistance from Spain. That arrived too little, too late at Kinsale on the south coast. Attempting to combine with the Spanish expedition, the Irish forces were decisively defeated. Thereafter O’Neill’s career became, according to his earliest biographer, “a tennis-ball of fortune”. With Ulster devastated and political and religious pressure mounting on its elite, O’Neill and his allies abandoned the country in the 1607 Flight of the Earls. Though feted as Catholic hero on his journey across Europe, O’Neill ended his days an impoverished exile in Rome.
Brian Friel’s great Making History play uses O’Neill’s career to explore multiple themes: masculine and feminine, love and power, public and private, religion and politics, civility and barbarism, Irish and English. He based his drama on The Great O’Neill, Seán Ó Faoláin’s popular but magnificently flawed 1942 biography. It portrayed an Irish leader caught between traditional Irish culture and a modernising English one – in fact O’Neill represented a new type: an Irish person with significant agency through facility in both. In that sense we are all now Hugh O’Neills!
Dr Hiram Morgan is Head of the History Department in UCC.
His research interests include the Nine Years War and Hugh O’Neill.
Making History by Brian Friel
The Everyman is proud to present a major revival of Brian Friel’s masterpiece about resistance, revolution and the remaking of heroes, directed by The Everyman’s new Artistic Director Des Kennedy in his inaugural season.
First performed by Field Day in 1988, the play follows Gaelic leader Hugh O’Neill in the events before and after the Battle of Kinsale and examines who gets to decide how history is recorded, told and retold.
