Autobiography - Christopher E. Brennen

FLIGHT OF THE EARLS

``We have rights drawn from the soil and the sky;
the use, the pace, the patient years of labour,
the rain against the lips, the changing light,
the heavy, clay-sucked stride, have altered us;
we would be strangers in the Capitol;
this is our country also, no-where else;
and we shall not be outcast on the world.''

From ``The Colony'' by John Hewitt (1950)

The ``Flight of the Earls'' represents a watershed moment in the history of Ireland, and more specifically of the northernmost of the four provinces, the ancient kingdom of Ulster. Today, that part of Ireland is mostly occupied by the political division known as Northern Ireland. It is where I was born and where I grew up, a member of that peripatetic tribe that Americans call the "Scotch-Irish". It is appropriate to begin with a little history, a parchment for my being.

It is one of the ironies of the recent tribal and political problems of that province that Ulster was the last part of Ireland to be subjugated by the English. The English conquest of Ireland began about 1100AD when a Norman soldier of fortune by the name of Strongbow was invited over by a minor Irish chieftain who sought a special advantage over his local rival. Gradually the English established dominance over the entire southern three-quarters of the island, the provinces of Leinster, Munster and Connaught. However, the proud and fierce Northerners presented a serious impediment to the English. Up until the reign of the powerful Queen Elizabeth I, the English had tried fitfully and unsuccessfully to complete their conquest of the island. They had tried both frontal assault and the back door approach of seeking to appease and bribe the powerful lords of the North. Preeminent among these were the O'Neills, the kings of Ulster and descendents of the ancient High Kings of Ireland. In the preceding centuries, great O'Neill leaders like Owen Roe O'Neill and Turloch O'Neill successfully resisted English encroachment. The O`Neills held most of the interior of Ulster. The northern coastal strip was quite isolated and more readily reached by boat from the western islands of Scotland. These coastal parts were the dominion of the O'Donnells, closely related to the MacDonalds, rulers of the western islands of Scotland. To this day the MacDonald is known as the Lord of the Isles (my mother-in-law was a very proud Macdonald). When they were led by leaders of vision, the O'Neills and O'Donnells could occasionally cooperate to their mutual advantage. More frequently they squabbled to no-one's advantage save that of the English.

Nevertheless, until the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the O'Neills and the O'Donnells ran Ulster as in ancient times, only slightly influenced by the nearby English. But Elizabeth had other ideas. First she tried to win over the boy who was heir to the O'Neill title, by raising him for ten years in England. That boy, whose name was Hugh O'Neill, grew up to become ``the O'Neill''. Queen Elizabeth gave him the English title of the ``Earl of Tyrone'' but, to the Irish, this meant little compared with being ``the O'Neill''. His seat was the ancient town of Dungannon where my first wife's family lived for generations. Hugh was a shrewd politician in both the courts of England and the fields of Ireland. So effective, in fact, that Elizabeth began to fear his power. Unable to curtail his independence and influence in any other way, she ultimately found it neccessary to demand that her English army in Ireland march north to subdue O'Neill by force of arms. In defence, O'Neill gathered his own forces and persuaded his sometime allies, the O'Donnells, and other clans to join him. The armies clashed on the banks of the Blackwater river just ten miles south of Dungannon near the village of Benburb. A violent battle ensued, a battle that has gone down in history as the Battle of the Yellow Ford. The English army was massacred in one of the few victories in Irish history, ironically a victory by a Northern army. And for a couple of years it meant that O'Neill held sway over almost all of Ireland. Eventually, however, the greater resources of the English had to prevail and O'Neill was defeated near Kinsale on the southern coast of Ireland. He, his ally Red Hugh O'Donnell (the Earl of Tyrconnell), and a host of minor northern chiefs were forced to submit and swear fealty to the British throne. In yet another irony, they little knew at the time they submitted to the English generals that Elizabeth had already died and that, if they had held out just a little longer, they could have negotiated much better terms with Elizabeth's Scottish successor, James the First, who needed Irish support.

For a while O'Neill, O'Donnell and the final remnants of the ancient Irish aristocracy returned to their Northern homes. But they soon chafed under English dominance and were tempted into hatching a scheme to go and raise an army in Spain (England's enemy at the time). The plan was to return to Ireland with Spanish support and to retake their old land and dominion. And so, on September 14, 1607, Hugh O'Neill, Red Hugh O'Donnell and a host of their supporters including the leadership of all the Ulster clans embarked in Rathmullen, County Donegal on a ship bound for Spain. The embarcation point was a small castle whose ruins on the banks of Lough Swilly lie in a beautiful, wooded setting and still evoke a sense of Celtic sadness. The Earls failed in their quest for it never quite suited the plans of the Spanish monarch. They never returned and their loss marked the end of the ancient Celtic leadership in Ireland. Their departure is poignantly remembered as the ``Flight of the Earls''.

Always a political opportunist, King James knew an opportunity when he saw one and embarked on a vigorous plan to finally and completely subdue the stubborn northern province. He began the ``Plantation of Ulster'', a bucolic phrase for a vicious and relentless pogram to destroy the native population of the northern province. The English armies savagely drove the natives from their lands, handing out free gifts of the rich farmland to English soldiers and lowland Scottish adventurers alike. Only ``acceptable'' settlers (in other words Protestants) were so endowed; and their descendants now form the bulk of the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland. Unlike the grand landlords who dominated southern Ireland these settlers were mostly small farmers very like those who carved out their homes in the interior of the United States.

The native, Catholic population who survived the English armies fled to the mountains and the bogs where they manage barely to survive. Thus the Plantation laid the foundation of the present troubles in Northern Ireland for the the anger and resentment of the dispossessed native population persists to this day. Capitalism provided some relief as it has done for many minorities in other parts of the world. When Belfast began to develop thriving shipbuilding and linen industries, a supply of cheap labor was needed and poor Catholics were permitted to settle in Belfast and in Londonderry, the only other city of any size. But they were mostly confined to mean and barren slums. In fairness, one should point out that there developed similar Protestant slums for the appetite of 19th century capitalism was no discriminator.

Meanwhile the newcomers (mostly Protestant lowland Scots), though they were in the majority in Northern Ireland, developed a seige mentality that their descendants retain to this day. The Ulster Protestant poet John Hewitt may have best captured this mood when he wrote :

And as time progressed other ammunition added to the polarisation of these populations of Ulster. When the rest of Ireland gained its independence in the 1920s, it was an almost completely Catholic country, for the English overlords in the rest of Ireland consisted of a small number of aristocrats who held vast estates farmed by the natives. Most of these aristocrats evaporated with English dominance. The newly independent nation of Ireland formed itself as it should, in accordance with the will and beliefs of the native population who had somehow survived all those centuries of Norman rule. And this included a significant obescience to the Catholic church and to its headquarters in Rome. Such influences further fueled the suspicions of the Protestant northerners and their fears as to what would happen to them in a united Ireland. John Hewitt was also eloquent on this trepidation when he wrote:

``I fear their creed as we have always feared
the lifted hand against unfettered thought
I know their savage history of wrong
and would at moments lend and eager voice
if voice avail, to set that tally straight.''

It is no exaggeration to see a direct connection between this fear and the determination of the founding fathers in the United States to place a clear separation between church and state.

My family and I are descended from Protestant settlers, proud and stubborn pioneers, whose most famous sons and daughters went on to become explorers and soldiers in every corner of the globe. A century after their arrival in Ulster, many moved on to settle the interior of the United States and play major roles in the foundation of that country. For these Protestant northerners, it is a source of great pride that the declaration of independence of the United States was written down by an Ulsterman, Charles Thompson, that it was first printed by an Ulsterman, John Dunlap, that it was first read in public by an Ulsterman, Colonel John Nixon and that for a month its only signature was that of John Hancock, whose ancestors came from County Down. Many other famous sons and grandsons were soldiers, from Stonewall Jackson to Jeb Stuart to George McClellan to Ulysses S. Grant. This military tradition continues through the 20th century for the two greatest British generals of the Second World War, Alexander and Montgomery, were both Ulstermen. And I enjoy teasing my more macho Texas friends by reminding them that more Ulstermen than Texans died defending the Alamo. But I stray too far.

I grew up in the heartland of Ulster, in a fertile region to the west of the large lake, Lough Neagh, that dominates the center of the province. To the west the poor, predominantly mountainous land is mostly Catholic. To the east lie the rich farmlands occupied those several centuries ago by the protestant settlers and retained by their descendants to this day. Consequently this heartland was a crucible for the recent struggles. My first wife, Doreen, was born in Coalisland and grew up in Dungannon where our eldest daughter was born. Nearby, in the ancient village of Donaghmore, my great-grandfather, Bernard Brennen, was the local schoolteacher (more about him later). I grew up in a village about 20 miles north in a place called Magherafelt, where my second wife, Barbara, was born. No family could escape the fragments of tragedy that are the consequence of extremism whether in Belfast, Beirut, or Sarajevo. Early one morning in 1992, IRA gunmen intercepted Doreen's cousin Gordon Hamill while he was delivering milk in Dungannon and assassinated him.

The countryside is a rolling landscape of small farms enriched by persistent light rain. Despite its reputation it is a gentle place. Even when one includes the victims of terrorism the rate of violent crime is substantially lower than in any other comparable region of the United Kingdom. And it is orders of magnitude lower than that of New York City or any other urban area in the United States. It is also a cultured and gentle place with secondary schools and universities which are among the best in the world. I was born in Belfast just several hundred yards from the birthplaces of the great physicists, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Osborne Reynolds and only a mile or so from where James Galway first picked up the flute. When I was about four years old we moved to the village of Magherafelt where I grew up a few miles from where Seamus Heaney was dreaming of the beauty and power of words that ultimately led to his Nobel Prize. Sometimes I think I was very lucky to grow up in such a enabling community and yet also know how fragile that gentleness can be.

OF LOVE AND EXPLORATION - AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

FLIGHT OF THE EARLS