Naas in Flames1577 CE

Dateline

In 1577, the Tudor government’s reach in Ireland was expanding, but its authority was neither settled nor inexpensive. Sir Henry Sidney, lord deputy for Elizabeth I, governed through a small English administration in Dublin, garrisons, compliant lords and negotiated agreements. Beyond the Pale, however, power still depended on local alliances, armed followings and control of land. The year exposed a central contradiction of Tudor policy: the Crown wanted regular obedience and revenue, yet the methods used to obtain them—military exactions, plantation and punitive warfare—created fresh resistance. Nowhere was this clearer than in Leinster, where Rory Óg Ó Mórdha made the borderlands dangerous for settlers, soldiers and townspeople alike.

The Cost of Government

One firmly dated political episode came early in the year. On 11 January, men of the Pale sent representatives to England to complain about the burden of the cess: the enforced provision of food, lodging, transport and other necessities for Crown troops. The dispute was not a narrow quarrel over accounting. Pale landowners accepted the queen’s sovereignty, but objected that an army maintained by irregular local levies of victuals and services exposed them to arbitrary demands. For tenants, servants, carters, brewers, graziers and householders, the presence of soldiers could turn official policy into immediate pressure on grain stores, livestock, horses and beds.

Sidney had sought to replace such unstable exactions with a more regular composition, by which the Pale would make an agreed financial contribution towards defence. His scheme nevertheless aroused constitutional and economic objections. Leading lawyers and gentlemen feared that accepting it would validate a prerogative tax not granted by parliament. Henry Burnell, a leading Pale lawyer, was among those associated with the opposition; some delegates travelled to London in February despite having been denied permission. Correspondence from September shows that cess, troop pay and the rising cost of victuals remained live official concerns. Thus, even in the districts closest to Dublin Castle, the Crown’s campaign for order rested on a contested system of supply.

Leinster’s Burning Frontier

The most serious local challenge came from Rory Óg O’More, lord of Laois, whose family had been dispossessed during the creation of Queen’s County. The plantation was intended to implant loyal settlers and break the territorial power of the O’Mores. Instead, it left a durable frontier conflict in which land, lordship, security and family survival were inseparable. Rory had entered the queen’s peace in 1576, but Francis Cosby, the Crown’s seneschal in Queen’s County, continued to press his followers and territory. On 18 March 1577 Cosby received a commission to pursue Rory and his allies with “fire and sword”, a phrase that conveyed permission for systematic destructive warfare rather than a limited arrest operation.

Rory’s reply brought violence into the settled and commercial fringe of the Pale. In May, he and Cormac MacCormack O’Connor attacked Naas. A near-contemporary account places the raid on the third day of the month and describes a small force using burning material fixed to poles to set alight the town’s low thatched houses. It was a devastatingly effective tactic in windy conditions. The significance lay not only in the number of buildings lost, which later accounts put very high, but in the target itself: Naas was a market town and administrative centre, not a remote garrison. Its inhabitants experienced how quickly a conflict over Laois could reach the heart of English-controlled Leinster.

Burning was military communication as well as destruction. Rory’s force could demonstrate mobility, punish communities associated with the colonial regime, seize food or goods, and challenge the government’s claims to protect loyal subjects. The records should not be turned into a simple national contest between two fixed camps. O’Mores, O’Connors, Old English landowners, recent settlers, Crown officers and Gaelic neighbours all pursued their own interests. Yet the attack made the insecurity produced by plantation unmistakable. In November, Rory captured Sir Henry Harrington and Alexander Cosby, Francis Cosby’s son. A Crown assault then rescued the prisoners. Rory escaped despite being badly wounded, while his wife was killed and two young sons died in the encounter. The episode deepened a struggle already marked by reprisals and personal loss.

Mullaghmast and Evidence

Mullaghmast is often attached to 1577, but responsible chronology requires care. Thady Dowling’s annals enter under that year the killing at Mullaghmast of Muircheartach, son of Laoiseach, described as lord of Slemargy, and about forty followers. They had reportedly come under protection for service and were killed by Cosby and Robert Hartpole. This testimony is important: it indicates that a killing connected with protection and parley was remembered as part of the Leinster crisis. It also helps explain why trust between Gaelic leaders and the plantation authorities was so fragile.

However, the much larger event commonly called the massacre of Mullaghmast is not securely dated to the calendar year 1577. Accounts variously place it late in 1577 or on 1 January 1577/8—the latter meaning 1 January 1578 in modern calendar terms—and estimates of those killed vary widely. Modern scholarship has also questioned both the dating and the development of later traditions. It would therefore be wrong to present a mass killing of several hundred people as an established event of 1577 CE. What is firmly connected to this year is the escalating campaign against the O’More country, the March commission, and the recorded killing at or associated with Mullaghmast. The uncertainty itself is historically revealing: violence, rumour and subsequent memory became entangled on a highly contested colonial frontier.

Munster, Connacht and Overseas Plans

Elsewhere, the Crown combined coercion with bargains. In Munster, Sir William Drury, president of the province, worked to extend the government’s authority after the first Desmond rebellion. His officers made a significant advance in Thomond during 1577, overcoming O’Brien opposition and giving the Crown a firmer footing there than before. Drury also had to confront the practical abuses of soldiery. A surviving record of 1577 concerns his inquiry into disorders committed by soldiers in Munster, while other agreements dealt with victualling troops in Carbery. Such documents show that military government was not merely a matter of castles and proclamations; it relied on supplies bought, compelled or negotiated from local communities.

In Connacht, Sir Nicholas Malby pursued a related strategy. On 25 October Brian O’Rourke of West Bréifne concluded an indenture with Malby, accepting payments to the Crown for his lordship. This was a notable example of Tudor rule translating a Gaelic lordship into an English legal and fiscal relationship. It did not mean that West Bréifne had been absorbed peacefully into a uniform state. Rather, it was a negotiated settlement whose force depended upon political advantage and the continuing presence of Crown power. The contrast with Leinster is useful: one region was being subjected to destructive pursuit, another to an agreement promising revenue and recognised status.

Irish affairs also formed part of a wider Catholic and European struggle. James Fitzmaurice FitzGerald, exiled after the earlier Munster rebellion, obtained a papal brief from Gregory XIII on 25 February. It offered spiritual privileges to those supporting his intended cause in Ireland. Fitzmaurice reached Madrid in May and then Lisbon, seeking ships, money and men. Spanish support proved hesitant, and his attempted departure from Lisbon on 19 November ended in storms and failure on the Galician coast. No foreign landing occurred in Ireland in 1577, but the planning mattered greatly. It linked Irish discontent with papal politics, English Catholic exiles and Habsburg Spain, and it foreshadowed the crisis that would erupt in Munster two years later.

Faith, Learning and a Disturbed Sky

Religion remained a central part of these political tensions. William Walsh, the Catholic bishop of Meath deprived after the Elizabethan religious settlement, died in Cistercian retirement at Alcalá in Spain on 4 January. His death in exile underlined the division between the established Church of Ireland and the continuing Catholic episcopal tradition. In April, Drury reported from Waterford that crowds were leaving churches after Catholic worship, evidence that official reform had not made religious practice uniform even in a walled port city under Crown influence. Such reports must be read as those of a hostile official, but they confirm that confessional allegiance shaped everyday public life.

Late in the year, the Great Comet of 1577 was visible in Irish skies. In an age when unusual celestial appearances could be read as warnings, it offered a striking backdrop to warfare, taxation disputes and religious uncertainty. More tangible than any omen were the letters, agreements and complaints produced during the year: they reveal an Ireland in which authority was being pressed outward, contested locally and negotiated continually. By December Sidney was writing from Dublin that he was setting out against Rory Óg and the O’Mores and O’Connors. The year closed, therefore, not with settlement, but with an administration still drawn back to the unsettled heart of Leinster.