The Flight of the Earls and the Wild Geese

Billy Galligan

On the fourteenth of September 1607, a small ship slipped quietly out of Rathmullan on the shores of Lough Swilly in County Donegal. On board were roughly ninety people — men, women and children. Among them were two of the most powerful men in Ireland. Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone. And Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell. They were never coming back. That departure — known ever since as the Flight of the Earls — is one of the most heartbreaking and consequential moments in Irish history. It marked the end of the old Gaelic order. The end of a way of life that had existed for centuries. And it opened the door to the Plantation of Ulster — with consequences that echo to this very day. To understand why those men were on that boat, we need to go back to the Nine Years War. In the 1590s, Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell — father of Rory — led the last great Gaelic resistance against English rule. Now, Hugh O'Neill was a fascinating and complicated man. He had been educated in England, spent years at the English court, and understood the English system from the inside. He spoke the language, he knew the culture, he had played the game of loyalty and politics with extraordinary skill. And then, when it became clear that English power in Ulster would eventually destroy the Gaelic world he came from, he turned. He became the leader of the resistance. They fought brilliantly. In 1598, at the Battle of the Yellow Ford, they inflicted the worst defeat on an English army in Irish history. They fought on for years, seeking help from Spain, keeping the English at bay through sheer determination and military genius. And then came Kinsale. In 1601, a Spanish force finally landed — but at Kinsale in the south, the wrong end of the country entirely. O'Neill and O'Donnell marched the length of Ireland in winter to meet them. The combined Irish and Spanish forces were outmanoeuvred. The battle lasted two hours. It was over. Red Hugh O'Donnell sailed to Spain to appeal for more help. He died there in 1602, some say poisoned by an English agent. He was twenty-eight years old. O'Neill fought on for another year but surrendered in 1603 — and in a bitter irony, he signed the Treaty of Mellifont just days after Queen Elizabeth I had died, without knowing it. The queen who had been his great enemy was already gone. The new king, James I, pardoned O'Neill and confirmed him in his title. But it was an empty gesture. English officials in Dublin — particularly Sir Arthur Chichester, the Lord Deputy — were determined to break the power of the Ulster lords once and for all. Land was confiscated. Legal challenges mounted. The noose tightened slowly but surely. By 1607 O'Neill was facing being summoned to London, where his enemies wanted him tried for treason. Rory O'Donnell — brother of Red Hugh and now Earl of Tyrconnell — had already decided he could not live under the new English order. He was leaving for Europe to seek Spanish support for another rising. O'Neill appears to have made a snap decision. Rather than face London and almost certain imprisonment or worse, he would go too. And so on that September morning, from the quiet shores of Lough Swilly, the last of the great Gaelic earls sailed away. Among those on board was Rory O'Donnell's infant son — eleven months old, leaving the land of his birth never to return. The old Ireland went with them. The English reaction was swift and devastating. The lands of the departed earls — six entire counties of Ulster — were declared forfeit to the Crown. And in 1609, the Plantation of Ulster began. Scottish and English Protestant settlers were brought in to colonise the confiscated land. The Gaelic population was displaced, pushed to the margins of the worst land. It was a transformation so thorough and so deliberate that its effects have never fully healed. Now. The personal fates of the men who sailed from Rathmullan. The earls had hoped that exile would be temporary. That Catholic Europe — Spain, France, Rome — would rally to their cause, provide an army, and send them home in triumph. It never happened. The great powers of Europe had their own wars, their own politics, their own interests. Ireland was a distant concern. Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, did not last long. He died in Rome in July 1608 — just ten months after leaving Ireland. He was thirty years old. Some accounts suggest he died of a fever. Others hint at despair. He never saw his homeland again and left behind an infant son who would grow up speaking Spanish, fighting in European armies, and dreaming of an Ireland he barely remembered. Hugh O'Neill survived longer. But his years in exile were a slow, grinding sadness. He wandered through Flanders, Spain, and eventually settled in Rome, where the Pope provided a small pension. He spent his days petitioning courts and kings for support that never materialised. Writing letters. Meeting ambassadors. Keeping alive the hope of return. He was reportedly seen in his final years as a broken man — old, partially blind, dependent on charity, haunted by the memory of Ulster and the life he had left behind. He died in Rome in 1616. He is buried in the church of San Pietro in Montorio, overlooking the city. A long way from Tyrone. There is a particular kind of grief in that image — one of the greatest Gaelic lords Ireland ever produced, dying in a foreign city, looking out at a view that was not home. But the story did not end with their deaths. Because from the Flight of the Earls grew one of the most remarkable phenomena in Irish history — the Wild Geese. The Wild Geese was the name given to the waves of Irish soldiers who left Ireland over the following centuries to serve in the armies of Catholic Europe. France, Spain, Austria — wherever Catholic powers fought Protestant enemies, Irishmen were there. Fighting not just for their adopted nations, but carrying with them the memory of what had been taken from Ireland and the hope, however fading, that one day it might be recovered. The Irish Brigade in the French army is perhaps the most famous. At the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, it was Irish soldiers in French service — the descendants of the men who had fled after Kinsale and after the Plantation — who broke the British line and helped deliver a famous French victory. As they charged, they reportedly cried out 'Remember Limerick!' — a reference to the Treaty of Limerick of 1691, another broken promise, another betrayal. The Wild Geese gave Ireland a strange, scattered legacy across Europe. Irish names in French aristocracy. Irish regiments in Spanish service. Irish colleges in Louvain, Paris, Salamanca — keeping the language, the faith, and the culture alive in exile when they were being suppressed at home. The phrase itself — Wild Geese — captures something true. Migratory birds, leaving every autumn, carrying something of home with them into the skies over a country that no longer fully belonged to them. The Flight of the Earls is remembered in Irish as Imeacht na nIarlaí. And there is a wonderful monument at Rathmullan today, marking the exact spot where they departed. Every year people gather there to remember what was lost on that September morning in 1607. In Irish memory, it is a moment of profound grief. Not just the loss of two powerful men, but the loss of something older and deeper — a Gaelic civilisation that had survived Vikings and Normans and centuries of pressure, only to finally break under the weight of what came after Kinsale. The invitation that Dermot MacMurrough extended to Strongbow in 1169 set something in motion. The Flight of the Earls in 1607 was one of its darkest consequences. The Plantation that followed wrote the next chapter. And the Wild Geese — scattered across the armies and colleges of Europe — were Ireland's defiant, heartbroken answer to it all. Sure, it's only history. But this particular history never really ended.