Great O'Neill - Softcover

Sean O'Faolain

3.98

41 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0853427690 ISBN 13: 9780853427698

Publisher: Dufour Editions, 1970

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Originally published in 1942, this is the story of Hugh O'Neill. Born in 1550, Hugh O'Neill lived in England from the age of nine as a protege of Queen Elizabeth I. He returned to Ireland as Baron Dungannon and was proclaimed Earl of tyrone in 1585, but when he went through the ancient ritual of becoming "The O'Neill", the chief of Tir Eoghain, in 1595, he had bthrown down the gauntlet to Tudor power. Elizabeth sent a succession of commanders to suppress the traitorous earl; the ensuing conflict, for which O'Neill combined forces with Red Hugh O'Donnell and other Gaelic chieftains, was the Nine Years War. The Battle of Kinsale, in which the Irish forces were defeated in 1601, marked the end of the possibility of a permanent victory for Gaelic Ireland. O'Neill subsequently travelled to Rome, where he lived in exile by the grace of the Pope and the King of Spain until his death in 1616.

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Review:

Sixteenth Century Ireland, still in the Middle Ages, forms the background for the biography of the wild Irish chieftain who kept Elizabeth's Irish army at bay for nine years. From the time when his grandfather, Conn, was made the first earl of Tyrone, there was disunity among the bewildered people. Some thought he had betrayed his race for immediate good to himself. His grandson was sent to be brought up in the household of ?? the elder; he returned to face years of struggle for his own ancestral rights in the North of Ireland. He was an opportunist - he played his cards well for his own ends; he stayed virtually clear of the bitter Desmond Wars of Southern Ireland, he shut his eyes to the massacres and butchering, until his loyalty was taxed by the kidnapping of his sily's son, Red Hugh. From that moment, his roots struck deeper into Irish ??soil, and though he played for time, and pretended friendship for the dread English, he was veering towards his fate as leader of Ireland's fight for independence, a fight which almost brought success. Spain was yapping at England's ?? and promising aid to Catholic Ireland. The wars were wars of frontier and forest, and for nine years, The O'Neill used strategy, deceit, and the allies of time, famine and penury, to keep successive English leaders at bay. But his own success caught him by the heels, and at Kinsale he met defeat and rout. O'Faolain shows him as he was, ?? not an Irish patriot hero, but as a man who "had designed with what he found...A European figure intelligently aware of the large nature of the conflict..as intelligent a man as any of his time..lost to European history and made part of merely local plety." There is much that is fascinating reading --Kirkus Reviews

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