thumb|Map of Ireland c. 1570. The Desmonds ruled the southwest corner of the island.

thumb|Clothing of Irish women and men. c. 1575.

The Desmond Rebellions occurred in 1569–1573 and 1579–1583 in the Irish province of Munster. They were rebellions by the Earl of Desmond, the head of the FitzGerald dynasty in Munster, and his followers, the Geraldines and their allies, against the threat of the extension of the English government over the province. The rebellions were motivated primarily by the desire to maintain the independence of feudal lords from the English monarch but also had an element of religious antagonism between Catholic Geraldines and the Protestant English state. They culminated in the destruction of the Desmond dynasty and the plantation or colonisation of Munster with English Protestant settlers. 'Desmond' is the Anglicisation of the Irish Deasmumhain, meaning 'South Munster'.

In addition to the scorched earth policy, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Warham St Leger, Perrot and later Nicholas Malby and Lord Grey and William Pelham, deliberately targeted civilians, including women and children, the elderly or infirm or even those of diminished mental capacity, regardless of whether they supported the Desmonds or not. It was considered a good policy to terrorise the native population. The American author Richard Berleth covers it in great detail in his book The Twilight Lords.

Causes

The southeast of Ireland (in the provinces of Munster and southern Leinster) was dominated, as it had been for over two centuries, by the Norman Irish Butlers of Ormonde and the Fitzmaurices and FitzGeralds of Desmond and the Southwest of Munster was still under the native Eóganachta dynasty under the O’Sullivans, McCarthys, and O’Keefes who defeated the Normans of the Butlers and Barry’s at the Battle of Callann in 1261. The Butlers, Fitzmaurices and FitzGeralds of Desmond raised their own armed forces and imposed their own law, a mixture of Irish and English customs independent of the English government imposed on Ireland. Beginning in the 1530s, successive English administrations tried to expand English control over Ireland (See Tudor conquest of Ireland). By the 1560s, their attention had turned to the south of Ireland and 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 creation of "lord presidencies", provincial military governors who were to replace the local lords as military powers and keepers of the peace.

The dynasties saw the presidencies as intrusions into their sphere of influence. Their interfamilial competition had seen the Butlers and FitzGeralds fight a pitched battle against each other at Affane in County Waterford in 1565 in defiance of English 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, 10th Earl of Ormonde, "Black Tom" Butler, Queen Elizabeth's cousin and friend, was pardoned, but both Gerald FitzGerald, 14th Earl of Desmond (in 1567) and his brother, John of Desmond, who was widely regarded as the real military leader of the FitzGeralds (in 1568), were arrested and detained in the Tower of London on Ormonde's urging.

That decapitated the natural leadership of the Munster Geraldines and left the Desmond earldom in the hands of a soldier, James FitzMaurice, the captain general of the Desmond military. FitzMaurice had little stake in a new demilitarised order in Munster, with abolition of the Irish lords' armies. 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 claimant to lands granted to an ancestor just after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland that had been lost soon afterwards.

FitzMaurice was thus the support of important Munster clans, notably O'Sullivan Mór, MacCarthy Mór, and O'Keefe, and two prominent Butlers, brothers of the Earl. FitzMaurice himself had lost the land he had held at Kerricurrihy in County Cork, which had been taken and leased to English colonists. He was a devout Catholic who was influenced by the Counter-Reformation and saw the Protestant Elizabethan governors as his enemies.

To discourage Sidney from going ahead with the Lord Presidency for Munster and to re-establish Desmond primacy over the Butlers, FitzMaurice planned rebellion against the English presence in the south and against the Earl of Ormonde. FitzMaurice had wider aims than simply the recovery of FitzGerald supremacy within the context of the English Kingdom of Ireland. Before the rebellion, he had secretly sent Maurice MacGibbon, Catholic Archbishop of Cashel, to seek military aid from Philip II of Spain.

First Desmond Rebellion

FitzMaurice first attacked the English colony at Kerrycurihy south of Cork city in June 1569, before attacking Cork itself and those native lords who refused to join the rebellion. FitzMaurice's force of 4,500 men went on to besiege Kilkenny, seat of the Earls of Ormonde, in July. In response, Sidney mobilised 600 English troops, who marched south from Dublin and another 400 landed by sea in Cork. Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormonde, returned from London, where he had been at court, and mobilised the Butlers and some Gaelic Irish clans antagonistic to the Geraldines. After the failed attempt to take Kilkenny, the rebellion quickly descended into an untidy mopping-up operation.

Together, Ormonde, Sidney, and Humphrey Gilbert, appointed as governor of Munster, devastated the lands of FitzMaurice's allies in a scorched earth policy. FitzMaurice's forces broke up, as individual lords had to retire to defend their own territories. Gilbert, a half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, was the most notorious for terror tactics, killing civilians at random and setting up corridors of severed heads at the entrance to his camps.

Sidney forced FitzMaurice into the mountains of County Kerry, from where he launched guerrilla attacks on the English and their allies. By 1570, most of FitzMaurice's allies had submitted to Sidney. The most important, Donal MacCarthy Mór, surrendered in November 1569. Nevertheless, the guerrilla campaign continued for three more years. In February 1571, John Perrot was made Lord President of Munster. He pursued FitzMaurice with 700 troops for over a year without success. FitzMaurice had some victories, capturing an English ship near Kinsale and burning the town of Kilmallock in 1571, but by early 1573, his force was reduced to less than 100 men. FitzMaurice finally submitted on 23 February 1573, having negotiated a pardon for his life. However, in 1574, he became landless, and in 1575, he sailed to France to seek help from the Catholic powers to start another rebellion.

The wars of the 1570s and the 1580s marked a watershed in Ireland. The southern Geraldine axis of power was annihilated, and Munster was "planted" with English colonists given land confiscated from those who fought for their country. After a survey begun in 1584 by Sir Valentine Browne, Surveyor General of Ireland, the thousands of English soldiers and administrators who had been imported to suppress the rebellion were given land in the Munster Plantation of Desmond's confiscated estates. The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland followed the subsequent Nine Years' War in Ulster and the extension of plantation policy to other parts of the country.

See also

  • History of Ireland (1536–1691)
  • List of Irish uprisings
  • Tudor conquest of Ireland

Notes

References

  • 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.