Digging

up the Wild Geese:

from Red Hugh to Count O’Rourke

St Petersburg Virtual Bloomsday conference, 2020


There has been great stir recently around the attempt by
Spanish archaeologists in Valladolid to dig up the remains of
Red Hugh O’Donnell. Red Hugh died in September 1602 in
the nearby royal castle of Simancas and was buried with full
honours in the Franciscan monastery of Valladolid, in its so-
called ‘capilla de maravillas’. The Gaelic chiefs had a
particular grá for the Franciscans – they patronized their
foundations in Ireland and were usually buried in their
precincts, so that it is no surprise that the lord of Tirconnell
should have asked in his will to follow this tradition. The
large monastery disappeared in the early nineteenth century
due to wars, fires and confiscations of religious property.

Why the town of Valladolid decided to embark on this search
for Red Hugh is a good question. Red Hugh is famous in
Ireland for his escape from Dublin Castle and the war of
resistance he fought with his father in law Hugh O’Neill
against the Tudor conquest. But he hardly figures in the
history of Spain where he went after the battle of Kinsale to
seek further help. There was already a commemorative
plaque in the town and the town council last year received
an enquiry from an Irish visitor. A pedestrianisation scheme
seems to have provided the opportunity but the real
objective would seem to be publicity. Five years ago the dig
for celebrity remains had seen Cervantes’ bones allegedly
identified in Madrid and ten years before that Valladolid had
renewed its dispute with Seville over Christopher Columbus
whose bones had originally been placed in the same chapel.

The idea of attempting Red Hugh was presumably an effort
to obtain publicity in the anglophone world for Valladolid, a

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superb Spanish city with amazing medieval and early
modern heritage. The idea of digging up a romantic hero was
a good one. Red Hugh had been the subject of a Hollywood
Disney film – The Fighting Prince of Donegal - and the
Spanish themselves dubbed him El Cid Irlandés or
alternatively El William Wallace Irlandés. The strategy
succeeded - obtaining 10 days publicity in newspapers,
radio and TV not only in Ireland but also in the UK and the
US. If the remains of Red Hugh are actually identified as a
result of the exacavations, it can expect further publicity.
Such an identification will prove difficult, the dig has
recovered only 15 skeletons out of at least fifty known
burials in the chapel. Famously Red Hugh lost his big toes
from frostbite but only one of skeletons has its feet! If
progress were to be made, DNA tests for genetic materials
and Strontium tests for the environmental conditions in
which the person grew up will be needed. And this process
could be complicated by the fact that another Irishman
Tibbot Burke an ally of Red Hugh’s was buried there two
days later. His DNA should be Anglo-Norman but Mayo and
Donegal would be hardly distinguishable in the
environmental record.

Of course the dig has also provided a great publicity
opportunity for historians like myself who study his period
and the period itself which gets relatively little media time in
contrast to the Nineteenth and especially Twentieth century
periods of Irish history. This has highlighted Red Hugh’s
short and dramatic career, the dynamics of the struggle at
the end of the 16th century the so-called Nine Years War and
in particular the allegation about Red Hugh being poisoned
in Spain by an English agent James Blake though all the
available evidence points to a natural death of a fever.

Of course it has also brought out others – people and
politicians from Donegal who would like to see Red Hugh
repatriated and memorialized and some O’Donnells are

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jumping on the bandwagon claiming to be the same lineage
as the chief. Fortunately we have heard nothing yet from the
Catholic guild formed in 1977 for his beatification!

This issue of Red Hugh is one that leads me to consider two
associated issues – Gaelic chiefs and Wild Geese - and how
they might be approached today.

It would foolish to have a romantic view of Gaelic chiefs.
Gaelic Ireland was not a benevolent mix of paternal
leadership and clan equalitarianism as it is often portrayed.
The clan chiefs were local tyrants and mafiosi. Only those
close to chief in the clan had property rights, the rest of the
clan and the other clans in the area were little better than
share-croppers. The chiefs were patrons of the arts – of
poetry, music and history – but it was to promote
themselves, their lineage and their own violent aristocratic
life-style. They did lead resistance to English invasion in the
later middle ages but the divisions between themselves and
indeed within their own families meant that the country was
never sufficiently united. As a result the only way to have
any possiblility for success against England was to obtain
foreign help but that meant making Ireland and the Irish
being subservient to the interests of other countries.
Furthermore having served these foreign potentates, when
they lost, they invariably fled the country leaving it bereft of
secular leadership.

It was in the late 19th century that Gaelic chiefs after 300
years came into view again – that was because of the
translation work of the likes of John O’Donovan and Denis
Murphy who translated The Annals of the Four Masters and
The Life of Hugh Roe O’Donnell and the popularizing efforts
of Standish O’Grady.

One of the interesting things is the use that Joyce made of
this literature when he sets Ulysses in Dublin in 1904. In it he

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adopts a mock heroic style which ridicules Gaelic Ireland
and the pretensions it involved. As a result we have inter alia
these parody examples:

‘Return, return, Clan Milly: forget me not, O Milesian.’

‘O’Bloom, the son of Rory: it is he. Impervious to fear is Rory’s
son: he of the prudent soul.’

‘The young chief of the O’Bergan’s’, who ‘could ill brook to be
outdone in generous deeds’

‘one of the clan of the O’Molloy’s, a comely hero of white face
yet withal somewhat ruddy, his majesty’s counsel learned in
the law’.

‘O’Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was his foot on the
bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow. Wail, Banba, with your
wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind.’

Then there is the fantasically-described giant figure, a cross
between a tramp and a warrior, seated on a boulder beside a
round tower with a large and savage canine at his feet. His
roughly-made Gaelic dress and its ornamentation enables
Joyce to ridicule both the wilder fringes of the nativist
movement and Irish cult of heroes in one of his famous lists

‘From his girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at
every movement of his portentous frame and on these were
graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many
Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of
hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the
ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O’Neill, Father John
Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O’Donnell, Red
Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan O’Growney, Michael
Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry Joy M’Cracken, Goliath, Horace
Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg Woffington, the Village

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Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott, Dante
Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan, Marshal
MacMahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of
the Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castile,
the Man for Galway, The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte
Carlo, The Man in the Gap, The Woman Who Didn’t, Benjamin
Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L. Sullivan, Cleopatra,
Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir Thomas
Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo Hayes, Muhammad, the
Bride of Lammermoor, Peter the Hermit, Peter the Packer,
Dark Rosaleen, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius,
Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez, Captain Nemo,
Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas Cook and
Son, the Bold Soldier Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin,
Ludwig Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn, Waddler Healy, Angus
the Culdee, Dolly Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben Howth, Valentine
Greatrakes, Adam and Eve, Arthur Wellesley, Boss Croker,
Herodotus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama Buddha, Lady
Godiva, The Lily of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye, the Queen
of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah
O’Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O’Sullivan Beare.’

Joyce could mock Gaelic Ireland. I don’t think we could do
that today – few are aware of the literary tradition even in
translation and besides the revived Gaelic Ireland conceived
in the early 20th century never emerged. A hundred years
later we live in a multinational Republic. And as a
professional historian working on Gaelic Ireland, my job is to
take the period seriously. It deserves to be seen in its own
historical context. We can’t afford to fantasize about or
glamorize Gaelic Ireland as if it is some Irish Game of
Thrones. Indeed it may even be dangerous concept – all the
current interest in genealogy and DNA, whilst often good fun
regarding one’s recent family history, smacks awfully like
racial purity. So even though Gaelic chiefs like O’Donnell
played an important part in past battles for Irish freedom
and embedded in our consciousness a spirit of resistance, it

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is probably better that they should stay in the history books
and in the ground.

Red Hugh’s death in Spain also ties us into the Wild Geese
story aboard. The defeated Irish retreated to the continent –
to the countries that had helped them. They inevitably ended
up developing careers in their armies and even
governments. That was significant not just for the
continuation of the Irish Catholic aristocracy outré-mer but
also for those states themselves as they needed the
manpower. The Irish became mercenaries. As I wrote at the
time of the Battle of Kinsale commemorations - Ireland was
lost to the Irish at the time of the battle but the Irish were
not lost to Spain.

Up to the French Revolution at least 30,000 Irish served in
Spanish armies and a similar number in the service of
France. These were relatively small numbers but they made
a big impact. By the eighteenth century many of the
successful officers came from modest backgrounds with
little connection to the old chiefly families but success in the
foreign armies enabled them, assisted by Gaelic genealogists
back home, to invent noble pedigrees and hence be awarded
in turn with aristocratic titles by their new masters. These
Catholic soldiers invariably ended up defending and
developing the power of the ancien regime in Europe and
the nineteenth century politicians they spawned – Leopoldo
O’Donnell in Spain and Patrice MacMahon in France – were
notable representatives of right-wing views and policies.
There were fewer Irish in Austrian and even less in Russian
service but they made an even greater impact. The Brownes
of Limerick became prominent in Austrian service and the
O’Rourkes of Leitrim made it big in Russia. Most famously
Peter Lacy, who served under Peter the Great, Empress Anna
and Empress Catherine, fought 31 campaigns, 18 battles, and
18 sieges dying an imperial count at Riga in 1751. Right
through to the defense of the Pope against Garibaldi, most of

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these Wild Geese were servants of absolutist and
reactionary governments. Of course it should be noted that
Irish Catholic soldiers, often led Protestant Planter younger
sons, were fighting in even greater numbers for Britain to
subject and colonise other peoples across the globe. Perhaps
only the San Patricios in Mexico and the other Irish who
fought for the freedom of Latin America are worth
remembering with any delight.

Of course Joyce, having lived in Trieste in Austro-Hungry,
had a line on the Wild Geese. Ulysses has memorable
passages on Lost Causes and Betrayal. It brings up the case
of the Irishman who saved the life of the young Emperor
Franz Joseph from a Hungarian nationalist assassin on the
rampants of Vienna:

‘Don’t you forget! Maximilian Karl O’Donnell, graf von
Tirconnell in Ireland. Sent his heir over to make the king an
Austrian fieldmarshal now. Going to be trouble there one day.
Wild geese. O yes, every time. Don’t you forget that!
—The moot point is did he forget it, J. J. O’Molloy said quietly,
turning a horseshoe paperweight. Saving princes is a thank
you job.’

This develops immediately into a discussion of Lost Causes:

‘We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said.
Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the
imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve
them.’

The Irish had put their faith the policies of Foreign Powers
who had failed. The Habsburgs, the Bourbons and even
Hohenzollerns. Furthermore these foreign powers if they
were interested in Ireland at all – entertaining as they did
various lost causes there - was for diversionary action
against England where the Irish were proxies and, dare I say,

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patsies. The Irish who made it in their armies ended up
caring little about the cause of Ireland itself and indeed
spent more time making up to British aristocracy and
monarchy the brand leaders by the time of Victoria. The
sense of betrayal is palpable in Joyce:

‘Ay, says John Wyse. We fought for the royal Stuarts that
reneged us against the Williamites and they betrayed us.
Remember Limerick and the broken treatystone. We gave our
best blood to France and Spain, the wild geese. Fontenoy, eh?
And Sarsfield and O’Donnell, duke of Tetuan in Spain, and
Ulysses Browne of Camus that was fieldmarshal to Maria
Teresa. But what did we ever get for it?
—The French! says the citizen. Set of dancing masters! Do you
know what it is? They were never worth a roasted fart to
Ireland. Aren’t they trying to make an Entente cordiale now at
Tay Pay’s dinnerparty with perfidious Albion? Firebrands of
Europe and they always were.
—Conspuez les Français, says Lenehan, nobbling his beer.’

I remember at my end of primary school days in Belfast
about 1970 re-enacting – like a goal in football - the charge
at Fontenoy with one of my friends. It was the sort of thing
one heard at home from my grandfather with much talk also
of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Bonaparte and what they might
have done for Ireland. Successful for a time but lost causes
all in the end. However, as with Joyce’s Ulysses, the majority
of references were however to the Boers, with their victories
over the British being rehearsed and the names of their
leaders being gloriously mispronounced. It too was a Lost
Cause and now a very unfashionable one but it was the
exemplary fight of ordinary farmers fighting a guerilla war
on their own against the might of the British empire. In the
end it was ourselves alone in this manner which won Irish
independence and not in alliance with some reactionary
European power opposed to Britain but rather with the
public opinion and the Irish lobby of the United States which

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had recently helped England win the European War against
those powers. As Seán O’Faolain, the first Irish revisionist
wrote in The Story of Ireland (1943), 46 - ‘The outstanding
thing that emerges in this record is the rise, in Ireland, of a
growing democratic intelligence’.

Notwithstanding their representation in Joyce’s Ulysses,
Ireland’s Wild Geese still provide us with important
connections to countries abroad. Whatever their at times
dubious records home and away in the past, they stand as
markers of friendship which are still useful today. Some of
these are indeed more important than we have hitherto
recognized. For instance Admiral William Brown who fought
for the independence of Argentina and established its navy.
In recent months Laura Bernal, the Argentine Ambassador
to Ireland, who sadly died of Covid-19, decided to be buried
in his birthplace of Foxford, Co Mayo.