The Nine Years' War

1594-1603: The last stand of Gaelic Ulster, and the war that ended the old order in Ireland.

By the 1590s the Tudor state had brought most of Ireland under its administration, and only Ulster remained substantially outside it. The pressure to bring the northern lordships into line produced the longest and costliest war England fought in Ireland.

Its leader was Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, a man raised partly in the English interest who turned on it, allied with Red Hugh O'Donnell of Tír Chonaill, and proved a far better soldier than Dublin expected. He drilled his men in modern firearms and fought on ground of his own choosing. At the Yellow Ford in Armagh in 1598 he destroyed an English army sent to relieve a besieged fort, killed its commander Henry Bagenal, and left over two thousand dead. It was the worst defeat an English force had suffered in Ireland.

What undid him was going south. In 1601 a Spanish expedition landed at Kinsale in Co. Cork, at the far end of the island from O'Neill's strength. He marched the length of the country in winter to reach it, and in the battle outside the town the Irish and Spanish forces were beaten. The Spanish sailed home. The war in Ulster ground on for another year and a half against a scorched earth campaign that starved the province.

O'Neill submitted at Mellifont at the end of March 1603. Elizabeth had died a few days before and nobody had told him. The terms he got were better than he feared, but the world he had fought for was finished, and four years later he and the other northern lords left Ireland for good.