O'Neill, Hugh

O'Neill, Hugh (c.1550–1616), 2nd earl of Tyrone and last inaugurated O'Neill. Hugh was raised in the Pale after the assassination of his father Matthew in 1558. The crown re‐established him in Ulster ten years later as a bulwark against the pretensions of Turlough O'Neill. When it tried to curb his growing power after 1587, Hugh resorted to bribing officials and opened up contacts with Spain. Fitzwilliam's partition of Monaghan proved the decisive break. O'Neill tried to entangle the main beneficiary of government reform, Sir Henry Bagenal, in a marriage alliance by eloping with his sister Mabel. In 1592 Red Hugh O'Donnell, his son‐in‐law, assisted him in the encirclement of Turlough and the achievement of supremacy in Ulster.

At the start of the Nine Years War O'Neill managed an outward show of loyalty while using proxies to oppose militarily the implementation of further reform. Victory at the Yellow Ford in 1598 enabled the extension of his authority through the midlands and into Munster. A major stumbling block was the Old English, to whom O'Neill appealed unsuccessfully on the grounds of common nationality and religion. O'Neill and O'Donnell were defeated at Kinsale and he himself surrendered at Mellifont in 1603. The subsequent Flight of the Earls was a gamble by O'Neill which went badly wrong. He died in Rome in 1616.

That Hugh O'Neill enjoys such an enigmatic reputation is largely the result of 19th‐century misinterpretation. Uncritical use of Ó Cléirigh's life of O'Donnell, and the mistaken idea that O'Neill was brought up in England, fashioned a vacillating figure caught between two cultures. In fact O'Neill was an adept politician and gifted soldier who made the most of limited resources in a period of rapid change.

Bibliography

Morgan, Hiram , Tyrone's Rebellion (1993)

Hiram Morgan