Arrival

They reached Vivero, in Galicia (Northern Spain), on a spring day in 1570, on board a light vessel of 80 tons, the Trinity, which might have known better days in the piratical career of her master in the Bay of Biscay. They numbered up to 70 people, and although they belonged to several different nationalities – English, French, Italian, Scottish, and even Spanish – it was the Irish, the bulk of the group, who undoubtedly most impressed the local authorities. A written account presented shortly afterwards to Philip II gives 36 of their names in hispanicized forms, along with brief descriptions of their profession and appearance. ¹ Thus a ‘Carlos’ and a Thelippe’, both catalogued as ‘Irish knights’, appear alongside a ‘Dona’, a page as we are informed, and a ‘Thomas’, a groom. Regardless of social distinctions, they are all branded as ‘savage’, a word indiscriminately applied to the Irish at that time. A fellow countryman, Maurice Reagh Fitzgibbon, papal appointee to the see of Cashel and a visitor to the Court, would not very long afterwards declare to Philip II that the men had been cheated into coming by an unscrupulous leader who, by means of false promises, had convinced them to join the venture. ² But Fitzgibbon had not always been of the same opinion: four months earlier, on 26 July 1570, he had genuinely rejoiced at one of the first pieces of news connected with the event to reach the Spanish Court, where he then played the role of an unsuccessful seeker of aid for a Catholic island in the ‘heretical’ grip of England. Then, his words had been very different. The man who figured at the head of the group was, in his own terms, ‘daring and very skilful in the art of war’, ³ a quality which, combined with his knowledge of the terrain, made a Spanish invasion of Ireland a plan worth considering. The Archbishop had then deliberately added what he might well have considered a conclusive argument: ‘the men he has brought, as I understand, are the most skilful sailors to be found in Ireland’. ⁴ Richard Simpson would include among the crew ‘some of the very best English seamen – John More, sometime master of the Saker; Rowland Breton, master of Frobisher’s ship; Michael Venety, sometime a master in Hawkins’s ship’. ⁵ And John Izon would go even further by supplying information about the rest of the crew: on the Irish side the group was formed by ‘a troop of horse-boys and grooms’, although he immediately explained that they were not what they seemed, but ‘hostages and sons of the chieftains’ for whom the leader of the venture ‘had cast far and wide, from Ulster to the South’. ⁶