![]() That year O’Neill launched attacks at Blackwater Fort, an English garrison in the heart of Tyrone, and then against Sir Henry Bagenal, the marshal of the queen’s army in Ireland, at Clontibret in southern Ulster. ![]() Abandoning pretences of aiding the English, he joined with O’Donnell in leading Ireland’s Gaelic lords in a campaign that later become known as the Nine Years’ War. In June 1595 O’Neill was declared a traitor for conspiring with Spain – and he was forced to swap subterfuge for open conflict. Such smoke and mirrors could work for only so long. Meanwhile, Hugh was in the process of converting the traditional axe-wielding gallowglasses (a class of elite mercenary warriors) into musketeers, and sending Catholic clerics to ask Spain for aid. Yet he was reported as arriving soon afterwards to divide up the spoils. When his brother Cormac defeated an English attempt to resupply its garrison at Enniskillen, Hugh absolved himself of responsibility by claiming he was unable to control his followers. He fought a proxy war, pretending to be a supporter of the crown while directing a military campaign against it. When an English sheriff was imposed there in 1593, O’Neill was determined to resist – but by stealth. Hugh O’Neill was a supremely canny operator – a master at wrong-footing his opponents with sleight of hand – reflected in his initially low-key campaign for the territory of Fermanagh in Ulster. Back in Ulster with his father-in-law, together they subdued local opponents and began secretly swearing in confederates to thwart English control. Red Hugh languished in the castle for over four years till 1592 when, using a silk rope supplied by accomplices outside, he slipped out through a privy. Hugh O’Neill described his intended son-in-law’s detention in Dublin Castle as “most prejudice that might happen unto me”. And so, in an attempt to block the marriage, the Dublin authorities abducted Red Hugh (having lured him aboard a ship with the promise of wine) and held him hostage in Dublin. However, it signalled a potential threat to English plans to establish control of Ulster. Then, in 1587 – the same year he was confirmed as Earl of Tyrone – he betrothed his daughter Rose to Sir Hugh O’Donnell’s heir, ‘Red Hugh’.Īs a strategy for extending O’Neill’s power in Ulster, the double alliance was a masterstroke. In 1574 O’Neill divorced his first wife and married Siobhan, daughter of Sir Hugh O’Donnell. To remedy this situation, he decided to build an alliance with historic rivals, the O’Donnells of Tirconnell. His grandfather Conn O’Neill had been made Earl of Tyrone by Henry VIII, though internecine fighting between Conn’s heirs had temporarily robbed Hugh of power. Hugh’s political ambitions stemmed from the O’Neill family heritage as Ulster overlords. But his attempts to increase his power in Ulster soon brought him into conflict with the authorities. Hugh, taken into crown wardship near Dublin, was at first happy to work with the English occupiers, accepting the role of maintaining a troop of soldiers to protect the borders of the Pale. His father Matthew, Baron of Dungannon, was assassinated by his own half-brother Shane in 1558, and Hugh’s elder brother Brian was killed by another dynastic competitor in 1562. This unrest was to heavily influence Hugh O’Neill’s early years. Suspicious of English attempts to exert control over them, the Gaelic Irish became ever-more restive in the late 16th century. As Elizabeth I ascended the throne in 1558, there were effectively two Irelands: the ‘English Pale’ around Dublin and the south, containing English-style towns and the predominately Gaelic west and north, dominated by powerful clans such as the O’Neills and O’Donnells.
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