Rathlin’s Empty Caves1575 CE

Dateline

In 1575, Ireland was not governed as a single settled political space. Elizabeth I’s administration held the fortified towns, the Pale and selected garrisons, but beyond them authority was negotiated, resisted and repeatedly remade. The most consequential events of the year unfolded in Ulster, where Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, tried to salvage an expensive private colonising enterprise. Its final campaign culminated in the killing of hundreds of MacDonnell refugees on Rathlin Island. At the same time, a severe summer drought and subsequent disease placed an altogether different burden on communities in Leinster and around Dublin. The year also saw the return of Sir Henry Sidney as lord deputy and, in Connacht, the quiet continuation of Gaelic learned culture through the copying of an important manuscript.

Essex’s Failing Ulster Enterprise

Essex had come to north-east Ulster in 1573 with a royal grant and an ambition to establish an English settlement in territory that included Clandeboye, the Route, the Glens and Rathlin Island. It was an unusually personal form of conquest. He expected his own resources, recruits and military reputation to yield land, rents and a strategically secure colony. The grant, however, collided with the interests of established powers: the MacDonnells of Antrim, whose kinship and military connections extended across the North Channel to Scotland; the various O’Neill branches; and local English officials, some of whom doubted both the practicality and cost of Essex’s plans.

By 1575, the enterprise had become a demonstration of the limits of private conquest. The Crown authorised one last campaign in the spring, but its support was hesitant and closely constrained. Essex’s soldiers were underpaid, poorly supplied and increasingly hard to retain. English authority in Ulster depended not merely on battlefield success but on provisions, shipping, roads, local intelligence and the willingness of neighbouring lords to bargain. These were all insecure. The fact that a magnate of Essex’s standing could spend heavily and still fail to plant a durable settlement is central to understanding the year.

In June he marched north against Sorley Boy MacDonnell, the leading MacDonnell lord in the Route and the Glens. A fort and bridge were established on the Blackwater, an attempt to hold a crossing and project force towards Tyrone. Yet the campaign did not eliminate its opponents. Turlough Luineach O’Neill, the powerful lord of Tyrone, instead reached an agreement with the English on 27 June. The surviving terms show the character of such submissions: Turlough was to keep peace with named neighbours and royal subjects, relinquish dependent lords, assist against Scottish forces, and accept a relationship framed in the Crown’s language of obedience. It was diplomacy under military pressure, not the disappearance of O’Neill power.

The contrast between Turlough’s negotiated accommodation and the treatment of the MacDonnells was stark. Essex chose to strike at Sorley Boy’s civilian base and connections rather than secure a lasting local settlement. His enterprise was supposed to bring English inhabitants and cultivation to Ulster; in practice, its last great action made vulnerability itself a weapon.

Rathlin in Late July

Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast, had become a place of refuge for MacDonnell families during the fighting. In late July an English sea-and-land expedition attacked the island. Francis Drake commanded vessels supporting the operation, while John Norreys led the troops ashore. The garrison at Rathlin Castle was overwhelmed after artillery and assault. What followed is remembered as the Rathlin Island massacre.

The precise total of those killed cannot responsibly be fixed. Accounts and later histories differ in their figures, while the people on the island included defenders as well as non-combatants. But the broad fact is firm: English troops killed the garrison and then killed MacDonnell refugees, including women, children, elderly people and the sick who had been sent to the island for safety. Historians therefore describe the victims in the hundreds. It was not an accidental excess in the confusion of a battle. The operation was intended to break Sorley Boy’s capacity and resolve by attacking those dependent upon him.

The atrocity had an immediate military logic but a damaging political effect. It did not bring the MacDonnell lordship to an end. Sorley Boy remained capable of action and, on 6 September, struck at Carrickfergus, defeated men sent in pursuit and carried off the townspeople’s cattle. Carrickfergus was one of the principal English footholds in the north-east; the raid revealed how little security Essex’s campaign had purchased. Rathlin also became an enduring example of the brutal methods that could accompany Elizabethan expansion in Ireland, especially where officials regarded local communities as extensions of an enemy lord’s war-making resources.

A Deputy Returns

The political response in Dublin and London was a change in leadership. Queen Elizabeth’s instructions for Sir Henry Sidney to serve again as lord deputy are dated 2 August 1575. Sidney arrived back in Ireland on 12 September, beginning a second deputyship after Sir William Fitzwilliam’s departure. The distinction between commission and arrival matters: Sidney’s appointment was arranged in August, but he was not physically present to direct the earlier Ulster operations.

Sidney inherited an administration short of money, facing unpaid soldiers and burdened by the wreckage of Essex’s venture. His papers from the autumn show a governor immediately concerned with conditions in Ulster. He went north, engaged with the crisis around Carrickfergus and negotiated with Sorley Boy. The arrangement included removal of Essex’s Rathlin garrison and an undertaking by Sorley Boy to pay composition, an annual levy. Sidney also gave indications that MacDonnell claims in the Glens and Route might receive consideration. Such terms did not settle the region permanently, but they acknowledged a reality Essex’s colonising project had failed to alter: MacDonnell power could not simply be expelled by decree or isolated forts.

Sidney’s return was therefore neither a clean change of personnel nor a decisive restoration of royal control. It marked a shift from one earl’s speculative settlement scheme towards the deputy’s more flexible mixture of garrisoning, travel, bargaining and administrative reform. The Crown still aimed to enlarge its authority, but 1575 demonstrated that authority had to be paid for and continually negotiated.

Heat, Disease and Empty Holds

Military crisis was only one part of the year’s experience. The Annals of the Four Masters, compiled in the seventeenth century from earlier materials, place an exceptional drought in the summer of 1575: from Bealtaine, conventionally 1 May, to Lammas, 1 August, the annal says that no rain fell for an hour by day or night. Its wording is emphatic and should not be treated as a modern meteorological measurement. Nevertheless, modern climate research using documentary and tree-ring evidence identifies 1575 as a notably dry year, giving the annal’s report substantial wider support.

The annal directly connects the heat to the onset of a “loathsome disease” described as plague. It names Dublin, Naas, Ardee, Mullingar and Athboy as places where illness raged among both Irish and English inhabitants. This is significant because it moves the year’s history beyond the better-documented campaigns of elite men. Drought affected water supply, pasture, harvest prospects and the movement of people and animals. Disease could then disrupt the labour on which households, farms, herds, castles and garrisons depended.

The same annal offers a vivid, if necessarily generalised, picture of the consequences: castles without guards, flocks without shepherds and bodies left unburied. Such phrases cannot provide a death toll or prove identical conditions across the country. They do, however, convey the scale of social dislocation that contemporaries associated with the outbreak. In a landscape where many people lived from mixed tillage and cattle-keeping, and where military companies drew food and labour from local districts, failed rain and sickness could deepen existing insecurity. The disease was especially recorded in Leinster and the central-eastern towns, while the best-known fighting of the year lay far to the north; Ireland’s crises were connected, but not geographically uniform.

Writing at Ballycumin

Not all of 1575 was defined by violence or emergency. Around this year, and in part explicitly dated within the manuscript itself, Aodh, Dubthach and Torna Ó Maolconaire copied the manuscript now known as Royal Irish Academy MS 23 N 10 at Ballycumin in County Roscommon. Dubthach recorded completing his section on the first Monday after the feast of St John in 1575. The manuscript was made in the household of Seán Ó Maolconaire, a member of a learned hereditary family whose work belonged to the long-established Gaelic world of legal, historical, poetic and literary expertise.

Its contents include wisdom literature, triads, narrative material and legal texts. The book is a material corrective to any impression that sixteenth-century Ireland consisted only of English expansion and Gaelic military resistance. While Essex’s forces attempted to recast north-east Ulster through conquest, scribes in Roscommon were preserving and transmitting texts in Irish on vellum and paper. Their activity was neither isolated from political change nor simply a relic of an earlier age; it was a living learned practice, sustained by patronage, households and specialist training.

An Unsettled Balance

By the close of 1575, Essex’s Ulster enterprise had effectively failed. It had consumed immense private and public resources, produced no stable English plantation, and left behind a massacre that strengthened rather than erased hostility. Sorley Boy MacDonnell and Turlough Luineach O’Neill remained consequential powers. Sidney’s arrival opened a new administrative phase, but not a settled one.

The year’s other record—drought, disease, abandoned duties and manuscript copying—reveals a wider Ireland. Communities faced environmental stress and illness; garrisons and towns struggled with the same conditions; learned families continued to make books. Rathlin was the year’s most terrible episode, but 1575 is best understood as a year in which attempted conquest, negotiated lordship, fragile everyday survival and cultural continuity all existed at once.