Owen Roe O’Neill
(1590–1649) was a seventeenth-century soldier and one of
the most famous of the O'Neill dynasty of Ulster in
Ireland. O'Neill was the illegitimate son of Art
O'Neill, a younger brother of Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of
Tyrone (the Great O'Neill) and the daughter of Aodh
Conallach O'Raghallaigh, the chief of Breifne O'Reilly
in County Cavan.
As a young man
Owen left Ireland, one of the ninety-nine involved in
the Flight of the Earls escaping the English conquest of
his native Ulster. He grew up in the Spanish Netherlands
and spent 40 years serving in the Irish regiment of the
Spanish army. He saw most of his combat in the Eighty
Years' War against the Dutch Republic in Flanders. He
also distinguished himself in the Franco-Spanish war by
holding out for 48 days with 2,000 men against a French
army of 35,000.
In 1642, O'Neill
returned to Ireland with 300 veterans to aid the Irish
Rebellion. The subsequent war, known as the Irish
Confederate Wars, was part of the Wars of the Three
Kingdoms -civil wars throughout Britain and Ireland.
O'Neill was recognized on his return to Ireland as the
leading representative of the O'Neills and head of the
Ulster Irish. Sir Phelim O'Neill resigned the northern
command of the Irish rebellion in Owen Roe's favor.
Owen Roe
professed to be acting in the interest of Charles I; but
his real aim was the complete Independence of Ireland as
a Roman Catholic country. O'Neill wanted the Plantation
of Ulster overturned and the recovery of the O'Neill
clan's ancestral lands
Following a
reverse at Clones, O'Neill had to abandon central Ulster
and was followed by thousands of refugees, fleeing the
retribution of the Scottish soldiers for some atrocities
against Protestants in the rebellion of 1641. To O'Neill
the devastation of Ulster made it look, "not only like a
desert, but like hell, if hell could exist on earth".
O'Neill did his best to stop the killings of Protestant
civilians, for which he received the gratitude of many
Protestant settlers. From 1642–46 a stalemate existed in
Ulster, which O'Neill used to train and discipline his
Ulster Army. This poorly supplied force nevertheless
gained a very bad reputation for plundering and robbing
friendly civilians around its quarters in northern
Leinster and southern Ulster.
In 1646 O'Neill,
with substantial Gallowglass numbers and additionally
furnished with supplies by the Papal Nuncio, Giovanni
Battista Rinuccini, attacked the Scottish Covenanter
army under Major-General Robert Monro, who had landed in
Ireland in April 1642. On 5 June 1646 O'Neill utterly
routed Monro at the Battle of Benburb, on the Blackwater
killing or capturing up to 3000 Scots. However after
being summoned to the south by Rinuccini, he failed to
take advantage of the victory, and allowed Monro to
remain unmolested at Carrickfergus.
In March 1646 a
treaty was signed between which would have committed the
Catholics to sending troops to aid the Royalist cause in
the English Civil War. The peace terms however, were
rejected by a majority of the Irish Catholic military
leaders and the Catholic clergy. So alienated was
O'Neill by the terms of the peace that he refused to
join the Catholic/Royalist coalition and in 1648 his
Ulster army fought with other Irish Catholic armies.
There is no
clear evidence of how Owen Roe died; one belief was that
he was poisoned by a priest, while others think it is
more likely that he died from an illness resulting from
an old wound. Under cover of night he was reputed to
have been brought to the Franciscan abbey in Cavan town
for burial. However some local tradition still suggests
that it may have been at Trinity abbey located upon an
island in Lough Oughter, which may be more likely given
the logistics of his removal. His death was a major blow
to the Irish of Ulster and was kept secret for some
time.
In the nineteenth
century, O'Neill was celebrated by the Irish nationalist
revolutionaries, the Young Irelanders, who saw O'Neill
as an Irish patriot. Thomas Davis wrote a famous song
about O'Neill, titled "The Lament for Owen Roe". |