Druim-dá-Mhaighe Hostages1556 CE

Dateline

The evidence for 1556 is uneven, but it is unusually revealing. A change at Dublin Castle, a northern expedition, the seizure and release of midland hostages, a newly finished castle, a Thomond encounter and the killing of a leading poet all appear in the record. Taken together, they show an Ireland in which the Tudor state sought firmer control while Gaelic lordships, Old English magnates, churchmen and learned families still exercised authority on their own ground.

A New Deputy at Dublin

On 27 April Thomas Radcliffe, then Lord Fitzwalter and soon to become third earl of Sussex, was appointed lord deputy of Ireland, replacing Sir Anthony St Leger. The change marked more than a routine transfer of office. St Leger’s approach had generally sought negotiated incorporation: Gaelic lords might acknowledge the crown, receive legal recognition of landholding and status, and participate in a wider political order. Yet the midlands had already exposed the limits of that programme. Crown forces, forts and confiscatory claims had increasingly pressed upon the lands of the Ó Mórdha of Loígis and the Ó Conchobhair Fáilghe of Uí Fhailghe.

Fitzwalter reached Dublin late in May, accompanied by his wife, Frances Sidney, and by her brother Sir Henry Sidney, who had an important financial office. His royal instructions combined religion, justice, finance and war. He was to advance the restored Catholic religion under Queen Mary and King Philip, restrain disorder, administer justice, prepare for a parliament and address the crown’s difficult position in Ireland. Such directions should not be mistaken for proof that policy was smoothly enforced beyond the government’s stronger districts. They demonstrate, rather, the ambitions of a regime whose effective reach varied sharply from Dublin and the Pale to the Gaelic lordships.

The incoming deputy inherited a government short of dependable revenue and dependent upon garrisons, local alliances and supplies drawn from the country. The previous decade had brought repeated military interventions in Leix and Offaly, including the construction or strengthening of forts. Those installations gave the crown footholds, but holding them and feeding their soldiers was expensive. The midlands were therefore central to a practical problem: how to secure the western approaches to the Pale without maintaining an unaffordable permanent army.

The Northern Summer Campaign

Fitzwalter did not begin in the midlands. On 1 July he led an expedition into Ulster directed against Hebridean Scottish settlers and fighting men established along the Antrim coast. Scottish military migration had long been part of regional politics; Gaelic Irish rulers could employ Scottish gallóglaigh, while the MacDonnells built influence in the Route and the Glens. For the Dublin administration, however, their growing strength near the northern sea routes appeared both a military and an international danger.

The deputy’s force moved through Coleraine and the northern districts before returning by way of Newry in early August. English accounts present the operation as a successful show of force against Scots and their associates, and report a submission from Shane Ó Néill. Its immediate importance lies less in any permanent settlement of Ulster—which 1556 plainly did not achieve—than in the resources it consumed and the breadth of the government’s concerns. Ireland’s politics were never confined to a single frontier: conflict in Antrim and north-east Ulster, the security of the Pale, and the contest for the midlands all competed for troops, money and attention.

Hostages at Druim-dá-Mhaighe

The most revealing events securely assigned to 1556 occurred in the contested country west of the Pale. The Annals of the Four Masters record that Conall Óg Ó Mórdha was taken by the lord justice, the annalists’ usual description for the chief governor. They also record the capture of Donnchadh, son of Brian Ó Conchobhair Fáilghe, at Druim-dá-Mhaighe. Crucially, Donnchadh was seized while under the protection and guarantee of Gerald FitzGerald, eleventh earl of Kildare.

This was not merely a clash between a central government and supposedly isolated opponents. It exposed overlapping systems of authority. A guarantee by Kildare was a serious political bond, binding a major Old English magnate to the safety of a Gaelic lord’s son. James Butler, ninth earl of Ormond, also stood surety in the ensuing dispute. The annals say that both the deputy and Kildare sent messengers separately to the queen in England to ask how the prisoners and other hostages should be handled. Ó Mórdha and Donnchadh Ó Conchobhair were then released because of the guarantees given for them—an outcome the annalist treats as unexpected.

The episode illuminates everyday high politics in the frontier zone. Hostages were not simply captives awaiting punishment. They were collateral for agreements, instruments of coercion and people whose treatment tested relationships between families and lordships. Their seizure could produce immediate military advantage, but it could also offend powerful allies and undermine the credibility of official safe-conducts. The release in 1556 shows that the Dublin government still had to reckon with Kildare and Ormond, even as it increasingly contemplated a harder settlement of the lands from which the hostages came.

Brian Ó Conchobhair Fáilghe, Donnchadh’s father, had himself endured imprisonment and political reverses. His lordship of Uí Fhailghe had been subjected to campaigns, crown claims and internal competition. The hostage affair was thus part of a longer pressure upon the Ó Conchobhair and Ó Mórdha, not evidence that either polity had suddenly disappeared in 1556.

Plans Before the Shiring

This distinction matters because 1556 is often labelled the year in which King’s County and Queen’s County were created. The familiar statutory citation, 3 and 4 Philip and Mary, can mislead because regnal-year citations do not always correspond neatly to a modern calendar year. Fitzwalter’s 1556 instructions did include the projected settlement of Leix and Offaly, and the government was already considering how to dispose of land and plant loyal occupants. But the parliament that enacted the measures to vest Leix, Slewmarge, Irry, Glimnaliry and Offaly in the crown and make them shire ground assembled on 1 June 1557. Maryborough and Philipstown belong to that subsequent legal and administrative stage.

What can responsibly be said of 1556 is that it was a year of preparation, coercion and political testing. The replacement of St Leger, the appointment of officials around the new deputy, and the treatment of midland hostages formed the immediate setting for the more systematic shiring and settlement policy of 1557. It was not a clean beginning. Fortification, confiscation proposals and attempted colonisation had antecedents in the later 1540s and early 1550s. Nor did a parliamentary statute automatically transform fields, woods, bogs or local loyalties. The future King’s and Queen’s Counties would remain zones of resistance, military expenditure and contested possession.

Castles, Lordships and Local Violence

The annals also preserve events beyond the principal theatre of government policy. At Liscluain in Delvin, Máel Sechlainn Ó Dálaigh completed a castle on the feast of St Matthew. This precise notice is a small but valuable reminder that fortified residences were still being built by local elites. A castle represented defence, storekeeping, lordly display and the ability to organise labour as much as it represented warfare. In a landscape of competing jurisdictions, such structures helped families secure their position.

In Thomond, Donnchadh Ó Briain defeated Tadhg, son of Murrough Ó Briain, at the castle of Disert; the annals put the dead at thirty or more. The brief entry should not be inflated into a national conflict. It does, however, show the persistence of dynastic rivalry within major Gaelic kindreds, even while the Dublin government was preoccupied with the north and midlands. Political power in Ireland was dispersed, and local successions and territorial claims could be as consequential to those involved as the deputy’s proclamations.

Faith, Learning and Loss

Mary’s restoration of Catholicism provided the formal religious setting of the year. Fitzwalter had been instructed to uphold the Catholic faith, but religious life in Ireland cannot be reduced to orders issued from Dublin. The personnel and property of the church had been repeatedly unsettled since Henry VIII’s break with Rome, while local patronage and older devotional practice retained considerable weight. George Browne, the former reforming archbishop of Dublin, died about 1556 after his deprivation and reconciliation to the Catholic church. The date is approximate, but his death neatly symbolises the reversibility and personal complexity of the previous two decades’ ecclesiastical upheavals.

The killing of Uaithne Ó Cobhthaigh offers another perspective. The annals describe him as Ireland’s foremost poet and record that he was murdered by night at Baile an Luicc in Magh Bacha, without naming his killer. Such praise follows the conventions of annalistic commemoration, yet it also attests to the continuing prestige of hereditary learned families. Poets composed praise, elegy, political verse and religious writing; their work sustained memory, genealogy and reputation across lordly networks. Uaithne’s death was therefore not simply a private crime. It was a loss registered in a national chronicle during a year when military and administrative change were increasingly reshaping the conditions under which such networks operated.

In 1556, then, Ireland was neither a country newly remade by statute nor one beyond the crown’s concern. It was a polity of armed expeditions, hostages and guarantees; of forts and newly completed castles; of restored Catholic authority and resilient learned culture. The year’s surviving notices make its central lesson clear: Tudor expansion advanced through negotiation as well as force, and every advance encountered durable local powers.