Maguire’s Erne Ford1593 CE

Dateline

In 1593, the political map of northern Ireland did not suddenly become a battlefield divided into two neat sides. Yet the year unmistakably altered the balance of power. A dispute over the imposition of an English sheriff in Fermanagh expanded into raiding, regional alliance and a major crown expedition to the River Erne. At the same time Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, tightened his command within Tír Eoghain, while Hugh Roe O’Donnell strengthened the position of Tyrconnell. The connected disturbances of 1593 are therefore reasonably treated as the opening phase of the Nine Years’ War, though the fully developed conflict still lay ahead.

Authority Remade in Tyrone

The year began with a decisive shift inside the O’Neill lordship. Hugh Roe O’Donnell, lord of Tyrconnell, had reasons of both family interest and strategy to oppose Turlough Luineach O’Neill, the ageing Gaelic lord who still possessed the traditional title of The O’Neill. O’Donnell acted against him from the Donegal–Tyrone frontier in January. Pressure from O’Donnell in the west and from Hugh O’Neill, the English-created earl of Tyrone, narrowed Turlough Luineach’s room for manoeuvre.

In May, Turlough Luineach surrendered the effective government of Tír Eoghain to Hugh O’Neill. The settlement did not erase all ambiguity: Turlough retained his personal estate, a pension, and the style of O’Neill for life. Nevertheless, Hugh now controlled the practical resources that mattered: subordinate lords, pledges and hostages, military followings, and access through the heart of Ulster. The later Annals of the Four Masters portrayed the province as being under the shared, peaceable direction of O’Neill and O’Donnell. That language reflects a Gaelic political ideal as much as a simple fact, but it captures an important development. Two young, forceful neighbouring lords had aligned their interests and contained a previous centre of authority.

This was not merely a dynastic rearrangement. Hugh O’Neill remained outwardly a royal subject, an earl who had long cultivated channels to Dublin and London. His position was doubly useful: he could speak the political language of the crown while drawing legitimacy from Gaelic lordship. In 1593 he did not openly declare war on Elizabeth I. Instead, events in Fermanagh enabled him to test the limits of crown power without immediately abandoning the appearance of loyalty.

The Sheriff in Fermanagh

The immediate flashpoint was Hugh Maguire’s lordship of Fermanagh. Its lakes, islands, rivers and wooded country gave the Maguires both a strong local base and command over routes between Ulster, Connacht and the north-west. English government policy sought to make such lordships more governable through county institutions, rents, sheriffs and garrisons. To Maguire and his followers, the arrival in April of Captain Humphrey Willis as government-appointed sheriff represented an intrusion into their jurisdiction.

Contemporary government material and later accounts agree that Willis entered Fermanagh with an armed company and that his presence quickly became violent and provocative. Maguire expelled him. The central point is secure even where the detail is partisan: an office intended to extend the crown’s law was introduced by soldiers and resisted as an armed occupation. The dispute was therefore never a narrow administrative quarrel. It concerned who could command men, levy food and cattle, punish offences, and move safely through Fermanagh.

Maguire’s resistance soon attracted wider help. Cormac MacBaron O’Neill, Hugh O’Neill’s brother, was among those connected with support for Fermanagh, while O’Donnell and Brian Óg O’Rourke of west Breifne had their own reasons to oppose the expansion of crown-backed power. In July the government required Maguire to disperse his forces; he indicated compliance by mid-September. Yet this was negotiation under pressure, not a durable peace. His subsequent actions showed that the crisis had spread beyond Fermanagh.

Rent, Cattle and Connacht

The violence of 1593 also reveals how closely political authority was tied to the ordinary economy of cattle, pasture, dues and labour. In May Brian Óg O’Rourke quarrelled with Sir George Bingham at Ballymote over rent claimed on lands described as waste. O’Rourke maintained that rent should not be exacted until abandoned ground was inhabited; Bingham’s soldiers seized cattle instead. The seizure of milch cows was no incidental insult. Cattle sustained households, supplied food, provided wealth and enabled a lord to reward dependants. A dispute expressed in the language of arrears could consequently become a question of survival and honour.

O’Rourke called in hired troops from Tyrone, Tyrconnell and Fermanagh, raided around Ballymote and, according to the annalistic account, burned thirteen villages. Hugh Maguire followed with an expedition across Breifne and Sligo into Connacht. Raiding parties took livestock and portable goods; inhabitants faced loss of food, shelter and seed resources as well as immediate danger. These campaigns were not set-piece battles alone. They were a means of feeding armed men, asserting lordship and making opponents pay for contested authority.

Near Tulsk in County Roscommon, Maguire’s force encountered troops linked to Sir Richard Bingham, the president of Connacht. The encounter took place on 23 June in English dating, equivalent to 3 July in the Gregorian calendar used elsewhere in Catholic Europe. Accounts describe early-morning fog, cavalry meeting suddenly, and a confused fight. Edmund MacGauran, Catholic archbishop of Armagh and primate of Ireland, was killed, along with other men from Maguire’s side. The date and death are firmly established, even if later narratives differ in their emphasis on the skirmish.

Religion and Foreign Hope

MacGauran’s death demonstrates that religion was inseparable from, but not identical with, the political conflict. He had travelled in Spain and Rome, where he pursued support for a Catholic recovery in Ireland. In 1592 Philip II had promised him that Spanish troops would be sent in the following summer, and MacGauran returned to Ireland carrying that expectation. He helped connect clergy, exiles and northern lords across the Irish Sea and the Continent.

No Spanish army appeared in Ireland in 1593. It would be wrong, therefore, to present Maguire’s rising as simply the execution of a Spanish plan. The available evidence instead points to overlapping purposes. Local resistance to sheriffs, rents and military intrusion gave the fighting its immediate force; Catholic grievances and hopes of external aid gave it a wider language and horizon. Government officers understandably treated a Spanish connection as a grave danger, while Gaelic leaders could use the possibility of foreign help to enhance their bargaining power. MacGauran’s death removed an experienced intermediary, but did not remove the causes of conflict.

The Crown’s Autumn Campaign

By late summer, the government considered Maguire and associated leaders to be in open rebellion. Maguire’s move into Monaghan helped prompt proclamations branding him and his confederates traitors. The crown ordered a substantial hosting, drawing on forces from the Pale and other regions. A surviving muster is headed for Tara on 24 September, a reminder that the war placed demands on landowners, tenants and communities well beyond Ulster. Men, horses, weapons, carts, food and fodder had to be supplied and assembled before an army could move north.

Sir Henry Bagenal, marshal of the army and chief commissioner for Ulster, led the principal government operation. Hugh O’Neill accompanied it, nominally on the crown’s side. Their cooperation was politically striking. Bagenal was O’Neill’s brother-in-law by O’Neill’s marriage to Mabel Bagenal, but relations between the two men were strained; their joint campaign did not resolve the deeper contest over Ulster. O’Neill’s participation let him demonstrate obedience, gain knowledge of the expedition and preserve his position as an indispensable intermediary.

In October the expedition reached the Erne near Belleek, at the ford known in Irish as Áth Cúlain. Maguire tried to oppose the crossing. The government army forced its way over and defeated his smaller force; the Annals of the Four Masters also report that O’Neill was wounded. Crown sources and later histories differ over numbers and casualties, so these should not be treated as certain. What is clear is that Bagenal’s army achieved a tactical success at the ford and then inflicted serious destruction in Fermanagh. It was not, however, a settlement. Maguire retained local support and mobility, while the crown could not transform a successful expedition into secure control of the lordship before the year ended.

A Region Under Strain

The campaign’s human effects were immediate. Maguire removed cattle and flocks towards Tyrconnell before the army arrived, an expedient that protected wealth but displaced herds, herders and dependants. The crown force burned and plundered in Fermanagh, while government troops were left to support Conor Óg Maguire, a rival claimant. Such interventions turned local succession disputes into instruments of conquest. For farming families, church communities and smaller landholders, the consequences were not abstract constitutional change but requisitioning, broken settlement patterns, lost livestock and the uncertainty of travelling soldiers.

1593 thus deserves attention less as a year of final decisions than as a year in which several pressures converged. Crown administrative expansion met a determined Gaelic response in Fermanagh; alliances tied that response to Tyrone, Tyrconnell, Breifne and Connacht; Catholic diplomacy linked Irish politics to Spain; and Hugh O’Neill emerged more powerful while still publicly serving the crown. The Erne ford showed that royal forces could win a field action. It also showed that victory at a crossing was not the same thing as governing the surrounding country. Ireland entered the winter with its northern political order armed, distrustful and profoundly unsettled.