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Death of Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire, Archbishop of Tuam

Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire, Irish Franciscan and theologian, founder of St. Anthony’s College, Leuven, and Archbishop of Tuam, dies in Madrid, Spain on November 18, 1629.

Ó Maolchonaire is born in the townland of Figh, civil parish of Tibohine, barony of Frenchpark, County Roscommon. His father and mother are Fíthil and Onóra Ó Maolchonaire. Two other sons survive to adulthood, Maoilechlainn and Firbisigh. They belong to a well-known family of historians and poets. He is brought up in the family profession.

Ó Maolchonaire studies for the priesthood at Salamanca, entering the Irish college founded in 1592. He first studies the liberal arts and philosophy. In 1593 he translates into Irish a short Castilian catechism by Jerónimo de Ripalda SJ. The original is a simple catechetical work written in Aristotelian master-pupil dialogue. According to Mícheál Mac Craith, Ó Maolchonaire’s translation pointedly refers to the Irish as Eirinnach rather than Gaedheal.

After five years at the Salamanca Irish college, Ó Maolchonaire leaves to join the Franciscan province of Santiago. Aodh Mac Cathmhaoil is among his classmates in the Salamanca Franciscan friary. They and nine of their peers in the Santiago province are later raised to the episcopacy, an unprecedented development in the history of the order.

At the height of the Nine Years’ War, Ó Maolchonaire sails to Ireland where he serves as a confessor and preacher to troops under the command of Hugh O’Neill and Hugh Roe O’Donnell. In 1601, they request a bishopric for Ó Maolchonaire “in recognition of his diligence, commending his sound judgment on Irish affairs.” After the disaster of Kinsale in 1601, he accompanies O’Donnell to Spain as his confessor and adviser, hoping to see a renewal of Spanish military intervention in Ireland.

In 1602, Ó Maolchonaire attempts to get approval for O’Donnell to meet Philip III in person but they are kept at arm’s length by the Spanish court. During this time, they also drafted an official complaint against the Jesuit superiors of the Irish college at Salamanca over presumed discrimination in favour of Old English students at the expense of students from Connacht and Ulster.

While waiting for a response to his repeated calls for military support in Ireland, O’Donnell becomes seriously ill and dies at Simancas, being assisted on his deathbed by Ó Maolconaire. In keeping with his patronage of the order of friars minor in Donegal, O’Donnell is buried in the Franciscan habit. Ó Maolchonaire accompanies the remains to their last resting place in the Franciscan church at Valladolid. He continues to press for military support after O’Donnell’s death. He participates in an abandoned maritime expedition which reaches Achill Sound in 1603 but never lands in Ireland. He subsequently assists the Spanish councils of state and war to stem the flow of Irish military migrants and their dependents in Spain.

As adviser to Puñonrostro, the king’s appointee as protector of Irish exiles in Spain, Ó Maolchonaire helps to secure funds for widows, orphans and clerics. Trained as a chronicler and genealogist, he sponsors the entry of Irish soldiers into Spanish military orders and successfully calls for the promotion of Henry O’Neill, second eldest son of the earl of Tyrone, as colonel of Irish infantry units in Flanders, the O’Neill tercio in 1604.

In 1606, the Franciscan general chapter is held in Toledo where Ó Maolchonaire is selected as minister-provincial of the Irish friars minor. The most notable act of his tenure as provincial is the founding of a new Irish Franciscan college at Leuven in the Habsburg Netherlands. A year before his appointment, he begins his efforts in earnest with an appeal to the Spanish king. The loss of five Franciscan houses during the Nine Years’ War makes a new foundation essential. In response, Philip III instructs Albert VII, Archduke of Austria, to provide a perpetual grant for a new college in the university town of Leuven. Ó Maolchonaire’s part in founding the college clearly influences the Catholic pastoral mission to Ireland during the seventeenth century. The first and most active Irish printing press on the continent is long in operation at Leuven.

After Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell leave Ireland in 1607, Ó Maolconaire accompanies them from Douai to Rome as interpreter and advisor. Christopher St. Laurence, baron of Howth, implicates him in a plot to seize Dublin Castle and raises a new rebellion just before the Flight of the Earls. In recognition of his losses, Philip III and Paul V offer O’Neill the concession of Ó Maolchonaire’s promotion to the archbishopric of Tuam. On Sunday, May 3, 1609, he is consecrated archbishop by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini in the centre of Rome at the Chiesa Santo Spirito in Sassia. He remains in Rome until his appointment as archbishop of Tuam before returning to Madrid on behalf of Hugh O’Neill.

In response to the 1613–15 Parliament of Ireland, Ó Maolchonaire writes from Valladolid a remonstrance to the Catholic members of the parliament, rebuking them for assenting to the bill of attainder that confiscated the estates of O’Neill, O’Donnell and their adherents. As Archbishop of Tuam, he never takes possession of his episcopal see, governing through vicars general. He continues to live in Madrid and Leuven, as is the case with many Irish clergy at the time. Like his fellow-Franciscan, Luke Wadding, and Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh, he serves as a key intermediary and his influence in Irish matters is considerable. In 1626, a year after Charles I declared war on Spain, he makes the case for an invasion of Ireland under the joint leadership of the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell.

Ó Maolconaire dies at the Franciscan friary of San Francisco el Grande in Madrid on November 18, 1629. In 1654, two Irish friars bring his remains back to St. Anthony’s College in Leuven where he is buried near the high altar in the collegiate chapel.


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The Battle of Dungan’s Hill

battle-of-dungans-hillThe Battle of Dungan’s Hill takes place in County Meath on August 8, 1647. It is fought between the armies of Confederate Ireland and the Parliament of England during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The battle takes place near the modern village of Summerhill and along the present main road between Trim and Kilcock.

By 1647, The Irish Catholic Confederation controls all of Ireland except for Parliamentarian enclaves around Dublin and Cork and a Scottish outpost in Ulster. The previous year they had rejected a treaty with the English Royalists in favour of eliminating the remaining British forces in Ireland.

In August 1647, the Confederate Leinster army under Thomas Preston is attempting to take Dublin from the English Parliamentarian garrison under Michael Jones, when it is intercepted by the Roundheads and forced to give battle. Jones had marched to Trim to relieve the Parliamentarian outpost there at Trim Castle. Preston, who had been shadowing Jones’ movements, attempts to march on Dublin before Jones’ army returns there, but covers only 12 of the 40 miles before being caught at Dungan’s Hill, where the Confederate forces have to form up for battle.

From a Parliamentarian point of view, victory in this battle is presented to them by the incompetence of the Irish commander. Preston is a veteran of the Thirty Years’ War, where he had been a commander of the Spanish garrison at Leuven, but has no experience in open warfare or handling cavalry. Jones, by contrast, had been a cavalry officer in the English Civil War. As a result, Preston tries to move his cavalry along a narrow covered lane where they are trapped and subjected to enemy fire without being able to respond. Even worse, Preston has placed a large number of his troops in wheat fields over seven feet tall. As a result these troops are unable to see the Parliamentarians until it is too late. With the Confederate army spread out and in confusion, Jones’ troops fall in amongst them causing the demoralised Irish cavalry to flee the field, leaving the remainder of Preston’s infantry unsupported.

The Confederate army’s infantry are primarily equipped with pikes and heavy muskets and trained to stand in tercios in the Spanish manner. This means they are difficult to break, but also highly immobile, without cavalry to cover their cumbersome formation when it moves. What is worse, Preston has positioned them in a large walled field, so that when their cavalry has run away, the Parliamentarians can surround and trap them. Some of the Irish infantry, Scottish Highlanders brought to Ireland by Alasdair Mac Colla, manage to charge and break through Jones’ men and escape into a nearby bog, where the English cavalry could not follow. Preston and 2,000 to 3,000 of his regular infantry manage to follow the Highlanders to safety, but the remainder are trapped.

What happens next is disputed. The Irish infantry manages to hold off several assaults on their position, before trying to follow their comrades into the safety of the bog. This makes them lose their formation and the Parliamentarians get in amongst them and then surround them in the bogland. Parliamentarian accounts simply say that the Irish force is then destroyed. Irish accounts, however, claim that the Confederate troops surrender and are then massacred. One account, by a Catholic friar named O Meallain, says that the corpses of the Irish foot soldiers are found with their hands tied. A recent study suggests that the Irishmen probably tried to surrender, but that, according to the conventions of 17th century warfare, this had to be accepted before it entitled them to safety. In this case, it was not accepted and the infantrymen were butchered.

Around 3,000 Confederate troops and a small number of Parliamentarians die at Dungan’s Hill. One of the English regimental commanders, Colonel Anthony Hungerford, is shot in the mouth, a wound that invalids him out of the English Army. Most of the dead are Irish infantrymen killed in the last stage of the battle. Those prisoners who are taken are mainly officers, whom the Parliamentarians can either ransom or exchange for prisoners of their own. Richard Talbot, a junior cavalry officer but later Earl of Tyrconnell and Lord Deputy of Ireland, is among the Confederate prisoners.

In the immediate aftermath of the battle, Owen Roe O’Neill‘s Ulster Army marches through the pass of Portlester Mill to mount an effective rearguard action, routing Jones’ advanced brigade and enabling the survivors of the Leinster army to escape. Jones, fearing O’Neills army, does not continue the pursuit and returns to Dublin. O’Neill and his Ulstermen return four months later to bury the dead Confederates.