ABSTRACT
Sean O’Neill was that kind of man. Nobody saw in his coming to London in the winter of 1561–62 a turning point in the history of Ireland, but the excitement he created during his stay endured for a long time and opened the greedy eyes of many, including Stukeley, to a new reality. Land, a scant commodity at home, could be obtained in abundance across the Irish Sea, where it rested in the hands of people who seemed atrophied in history, dressed in hairy mantles and unable to utter one intelligible syllable. To many, that was what O’Neill represented: a being from a land still living in an age of legend, blind to the new realities of European policy, and consequently in need of ‘civilized’ and ‘modern’ masters, capable of taking the country fully into an age dominated by the mentality of expansion of the new entrepreneurs:
They knew, for example, that here was a typical Irish captain, lord, noble, prince – for they hardly knew what to call him, not knowing a word of his language and next to nothing about the ancient society out of which he came; they knew that he was enormously rich – he must have owned more than a hundred thousand cows; that he had murdered his brother, or caused him to be murdered; killed off his rival nephew, or caused him to be killed; believed that he kept his mistree, the Countess of Argyle, in chains in a cellar until of evenings, when the wine was in his brain, he chose to have her up for his pleasure; as they guessed that she had betrayed her husband to become O’Neill’s woman and knew that while she was in O’Neill’s arms her husband Calvach O’Donnell was being shown, to the people outside, in chains like a baboon. They believed that he had had swarms of bastards. They had heard of his gigantic potations, of the vast cellars at Dundrum where two hundred tuns of wine were commonly stored at a time, and of his strange habit of burying himself to the neck in sand to cool his mad blood. They knew that he was dangerous and would have to be placated. 1
It was the clash of two very different worlds. William Camden’s fortunate comparison of O’Neill and his guard of gallowglasses with the Chinese or American Indians is the best contemporary analogy to understand the gap between cultures. 2 And yet Sean O’Neill was a vital piece in the labyrinth of early Elizabethan politics. Master of Ulster, his rule lay too close to the storm centre of Scotland, from which the French had been expelled after the treaty of Edinburgh. But the persistence of the young Queen of Scots in her claim to the English throne, and the support that Ulster could lend to a Catholic rising in her favour, 60suggested temporizing with the main Gaelic chief and obtaining his submission, which would undoubtedly mean ‘a considerable saving of men and money at a time when both were badly needed elsewhere’. 3 Besides, O’Neill represented an obstacle in the efforts, carried out since the times of Henry VIII, to anglicize the neighbouring island. His rule sprang not from the observance of primogeniture, which the English had enforced, but from the designation of the clan. Bacagh O’Neill, his father, who had resigned his chieftancy of the O’Neills in exchange for the title of Earl of Tyrone, had designated, following English law, his eldest son Matthew as his legitimate heir. However, Sean, who knew Matthew to be illegitimate 4 and who had the support of the clan, had Matthew, Lord Dungannon, murdered and himself proclaimed the O’Neill. To English eyes, it was a ‘barbarous’ election that made him a traitor and thus subject to persecution by English arms.