The Desmond Rebellions

1569 - 1583: Two wars in Munster that ended the Fitzgeralds, emptied the province, and brought the first great plantation.

The Fitzgeralds of Desmond had run most of Munster for generations as something close to kings, and the Tudor state meant to end that. The result was two rebellions, the first from 1569 to 1573 and the second from 1579 to 1583, and the second was a catastrophe.

It began in July 1579 when James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald landed at Smerwick on the Dingle peninsula with a small force of Spanish and Italian troops sent with papal blessing. Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, held back at first and tried to stay out of it. The authorities declared him a traitor anyway, which left him nothing to lose, and he came in and sacked Youghal and Kinsale.

The English answer, under William Pelham and the Earl of Ormond, was not to chase the rebels but to destroy what fed them. They burned the crops and drove off the cattle across a whole province and then waited. Famine and the diseases that follow it are thought to have killed as much as a third of the population of Munster. Edmund Spenser, who was there and approved of the policy, left a description of the survivors that is still hard to read.

Desmond was hunted down and killed in 1583. His lands, and those of his followers, were declared forfeit and parcelled out to English settlers in the Munster Plantation, the model that Ulster would follow a generation later.