Battle of Kinsale, 1601: the end of Gaelic Ireland

In the winter of 1601, on the hills outside the town of Kinsale in the south of Ireland, the last great hope of Gaelic Ireland was put out in a morning. A Spanish army had landed to help the Irish lords Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell in their long war against English rule, and the Irish had marched the length of the island to join it. They lost their way in the dark, and when daylight came they were caught on open ground. Within an hour or two the army that had beaten the English for years was in flight.³

When was the Battle of Kinsale: 1601 or 1602?

Both dates are correct. The battle was fought on 24 December 1601 by the Julian calendar still used in England, the Old Style, which was 3 January 1602 by the Gregorian calendar, the New Style, used by the Spanish and the Catholic Irish. In 1601 the two counts ran ten days apart.⁴

Background: the Nine Years' War

Hugh O'Neill, second Earl of Tyrone, was the most powerful lord in Ulster. Raised partly in the English Pale and long useful to the crown, he turned against it in the 1590s and became the leader of the last great Gaelic rebellion against the Tudor conquest. His ally was Red Hugh O'Donnell, lord of Tyrconnell in the northwest. Open war broke out in 1595 and lasted until 1603.⁵

O'Neill built an army that could beat the English. Many of his soldiers had been trained in English service, and veterans back from the Spanish regiments taught them to use firearms and to dig in. On 14 August 1598, at the Yellow Ford near the Blackwater, his men destroyed an English army under Marshal Henry Bagenal, who was killed; Britannica calls it the most serious defeat the English suffered in the Irish wars, and Hiram Morgan the greatest victory ever won by Irish arms against the English. The revolt spread across the country.⁶

The war then turned. In 1599 the Earl of Essex came with a great English army and failed; in 1600 Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, took over as lord deputy and made war without a pause, while an English force landed behind O'Neill's lines at Derry. O'Neill and O'Donnell had pinned their hopes on Spain, then at war with England, and on 21 September 1601 a Spanish fleet finally put into Kinsale with about 3,300 men under Don Juan del Águila; Britannica gives 4,000.⁷

Armies and commanders

The Spanish had come to the wrong end of Ireland. They landed at Kinsale, about as far from Ulster as the island allows, in a province where the English had already crushed the revolt, and O'Neill and O'Donnell were dismayed at how few they were. The Irish annals record that Don Juan took over the town and its fortifications, landed his guns and stores and sent his ships home.⁸

Mountjoy moved fast. He brought what forces he could to Kinsale, took the castle of Rincorran on the harbor that the Spaniards had garrisoned, and shut del Águila in. Reinforcements came by sea under the Earl of Thomond. But the siege dragged on into winter, and cold, sickness and desertion wasted the English camps.⁹

The Irish answered with one of the great marches of their history. O'Donnell set out first, from Ballymote in Sligo, at the beginning of winter. Sir George Carew, the English president of Munster, moved to block him near Cashel, and O'Donnell slipped past by a forced march through the Slieve Felim mountains, over a pass the frost had made passable. O'Neill followed more slowly, raiding the Pale on his way, and in December the two armies met on the River Bandon, west of Kinsale. Now it was the English who were besieged, caught between the Spaniards in the town and the Irish in the hills.¹⁰

The battle in phases

A plan made under pressure

The Irish cut the English off from forage, fuel and water. O'Neill wanted to keep them there until hunger and sickness finished them. But the Spaniards in Kinsale were starving too, and del Águila sent word asking the Irish to attack the English camp while he sallied out from the town. The Annals of the Four Masters say that O'Donnell, ashamed to leave the Spaniards in distress, carried the council against O'Neill's advice; the Dictionary of Irish Biography notes that there is no contemporary evidence for that quarrel, and that neither leader wanted to fight. Their reputations were at stake, and they agreed to the plan.¹¹

Lost in the dark

The Irish set out in the night in three great bodies, O'Neill's men of Tyrone, O'Donnell's men of Tyrconnell and Connacht, and the exiles from Munster and Leinster, and the annalists describe them marching shoulder to shoulder, each leader wanting to be first. In the darkness the guides lost the way, and they did not reach their positions until full daylight. The annals add that some said an Irishman had warned the English; the story that the plan was sold to Carew for a bottle of whiskey, John McGurk writes, the historian J. J. Silke showed to be false.¹²

The charge

At dawn the English scouts saw O'Neill's division close to their lines. The Spaniards in Kinsale did not come out. Mountjoy stood his army to arms and sent forward his cavalry with part of his infantry, a force much smaller than the Irish army. O'Neill, seeing no sign of the Spaniards, pulled back across a ford and over marshy ground and drew up his army behind a bog. Hiram Morgan puts it at 5,000 men; the musters McGurk lists for the whole Irish camp were much larger.¹³

There the English cavalry charged. The Irish horse broke and fell back onto its own infantry, and the foot broke in turn. O'Donnell's men, coming up late, saw the rout ahead of them and fled too, while he shouted himself hoarse trying to rally them.¹⁴

Turning point: the cavalry on open ground

Kinsale was decided in under two hours. Hiram Morgan writes that the Tyrone infantry, which had fought the war so well, was destroyed in an hour. McGurk writes that Mountjoy had counted on exactly this, that in a pitched battle on open ground his cavalry would hold the field. Morgan notes that O'Neill's tactics had always had to be defensive, and sees in his retreat from a difficult but winnable position a lack of confidence that had also cost him at the Moyry Pass.¹⁵

The losses are disputed. English accounts give about 1,200 Irish dead and 800 wounded, and Fynes Moryson, Mountjoy's secretary, wrote of 1,200 bodies left on the field. The Annals of the Four Masters say the number of Irish slain was not great, because the pursuers were few, but mourn what was lost that day as beyond counting.¹⁶

Aftermath: the end of the Gaelic order

The defeat broke the rebellion. That night the Irish leaders decided that O'Neill would go back to defend Ulster, and O'Donnell would go to Spain to ask Philip III for a new army. He sailed on 27 December, Old Style, and the king received him at Zamora and promised help, but it never came. He died at Simancas near Valladolid in 1602, on 30 August by the Dictionary of Irish Biography's date, in September by the Irish Times; the Dictionary says of a fever, not poison, though the Irish Times notes that reports still differ.¹⁷

Del Águila, abandoned in Kinsale, offered terms. The English agreed to ship him and his men home to Spain. In the far southwest the O'Sullivan castle of Dunboy held out until the English battered it down later in 1602.¹⁸ › Siege of Dunboy, 1602

In the summer of 1602 Mountjoy broke into Tyrone itself and wasted the country. O'Neill hid in the forests until he could surrender on terms at Mellifont on 30 March 1603, six days after the death of Queen Elizabeth. The new king, James I, let him keep most of his lands.¹⁹

Legacy and memory

The peace did not last. Under pressure from the Dublin government and fearing arrest, O'Neill, Rory O'Donnell, the new Earl of Tyrconnell, and their followers sailed from Rathmullan on Lough Swilly in September 1607. The Flight of the Earls left Ulster without its Gaelic lords and open to the Plantation of Ulster, after which the province was rapidly Anglicized. O'Neill died in Rome on 20 July 1616.²⁰

Historians still argue over who lost Kinsale: the Spanish for sending too little too late and landing in the wrong place, del Águila for staying behind his walls, or the Irish leaders for their quarrels and their decision to fight a set battle. John McGurk adds a factor he thinks historians have neglected: the English navy, without which, some strategists argue, Kinsale might have ended in an Irish and Spanish victory.²¹

Red Hugh is still remembered in Spain. Valladolid, then the Spanish capital, searched for his grave in 2020 without finding it, and since then the city has staged a re-enactment of the royal funeral Philip III gave him, with torches, an Irish piper and a speech by the mayor.²²

Kinsale stands with Clontarf and the Boyne among the battles that decided the history of Ireland; see also the greatest early modern battles.

Could you place Kinsale on a map of Ireland, or among the battles of its century? Try Where Was It Fought? and Put the Battles in Order.