Who won the Battle of the Yellow Ford?
The Ulster confederates won. On 14 August 1598 Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, with Red Hugh O'Donnell and Hugh Maguire, broke an English army of about 4,000 foot under Sir Henry Bagenal north of Armagh. Bagenal was shot dead, hundreds or thousands of his men fell, and the Blackwater fort they had come to relieve was surrendered.1
Few Irish battles carry a name as plain as this one. The Yellow Ford, Béal an Átha Buí in Irish, was a crossing of a small river north of Armagh, and on 14 August 1598 an English army marching to save a starving fort was destroyed around it. Hiram Morgan, O'Neill's biographer in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, calls it the greatest victory ever achieved by Irish arms against the English; History Ireland calls it the heaviest defeat the English ever suffered in Ireland. Three years later the same war would be lost at Kinsale. This article follows both armies through the day, sets out what each source says about the dead, and asks why O'Neill did not march on Dublin. For the wider story, see our guide to the military history of Ireland.2
Why was the Battle of the Yellow Ford fought?
The battle grew out of the Nine Years' War, the long struggle between the English crown and the lords of Ulster led by Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone. O'Neill had risen through the crown's own patronage, but by the 1590s the crown's advance into Ulster threatened his power, and he came to present himself as the champion of Catholic Ireland, seeking help from Spain.3
The war was also personal. Sir Henry Bagenal, marshal of the queen's army in Ireland since 1590, hoped to rule a reformed Ulster himself. In 1591 his sister Mabel eloped with O'Neill and married him against Bagenal's will; Bagenal refused to pay her dowry. They first fought each other at Clontibret in County Monaghan in June 1595, where O'Neill harried a column Bagenal was leading to the besieged garrison of Monaghan.4
The prize in 1598 was a fort on the River Blackwater, the border of O'Neill's own country of Tyrone. An earlier English fort there had been taken by O'Neill's half-brother Art MacBaron in 1595. In July 1597 the Lord Deputy, Lord Burgh, forced the crossing and built a new one, and the Irish called it Portmore, the great fort. Burgh died of fever that October. His fort was left as an isolated outpost deep in O'Neill's territory, and in 1598 O'Neill besieged it.5
O'Neill's side: why the confederates stood and fought
To the confederates the Blackwater fort was an English outpost planted on the main road into Tyrone. Fynes Moryson, later secretary to Lord Deputy Mountjoy, wrote that it was “a great eye sore” to O'Neill. When a cease-fire broke down in June 1598 O'Neill swore not to leave it untaken. An assault with scaling ladders failed, and O'Sullivan Beare, the Catholic historian of the war, admits that 120 of the attackers died. O'Neill went back to starving the garrison out.6
He was also preparing for the relief army he knew would come. O'Neill had built what Morgan calls a highly effective army. Many of his men had been trained in the crown's own paid bands, and veterans back from the Spanish regiments taught them to use firearms and dig in. Even Moryson admitted that the Irish had grown ready in handling their guns and bold to skirmish in bogs and wooded passes. O'Sullivan Beare, writing from the Irish side, says they were still lightly armed beside the English, with few heavy muskets.7
Morgan argues that O'Neill's tactics always had to be defensive, because he lacked the resources for open, offensive or siege warfare. At the Blackwater he made the ground fight for him. In July his men spent weeks blocking the passes with felled and interwoven trees and digging holes in the fords. Across the road from Armagh they cut deep trenches, and Morgan describes a series of ditches built as obstacles along the line of march.8
He did not fight alone. Red Hugh O'Donnell of Tyrconnell came with his own men and Connacht troops, and Hugh Maguire of Fermanagh held a command under O'Neill. The Four Masters record that the chiefs told their men the battle would decide whether they kept their land or were killed, imprisoned or driven into exile, as the Irish had been before.9
The English decision: why Bagenal marched to the Blackwater
In Dublin the fort divided the government. The Earl of Ormond, lieutenant-general of the army, wrote in June that the “scurvy fort of Blackwater” was always falling and had been victualled only once without an army. In June the Council, Ormond included, signed letters telling the commander, Captain Thomas Williams, to make the best terms he could. They never reached him. The editor of the state papers says Bagenal kept them back, calling the plan dishonorable; Meredith Hanmer, who wrote an account that same year, says the Lords Justices recalled them.10
The garrison deserved the argument. Williams had beaten off the assault and vowed to blow the fort up rather than surrender it, and his men lived on captured horses and the grass and herbs that grew on the ramparts. The fort had been built for about a hundred men; Bagwell says Burgh left 300 there, and History Ireland counts 150 by August 1598.11
In the end Ormond and Bagenal carried the point that the queen's honor required a relief. The Lords Justices urged Ormond to lead it himself, but he chose to deal with the war in Leinster and gave the command to Bagenal, whose own estates around Newry lay close to O'Neill's country and had been laid waste by him.12
Bagenal's army was large and partly experienced: close to 4,000 foot and over 300 horse, with field guns, many of them veterans of the wars in Brittany and the Netherlands but some of them new recruits from England. It was also, like most of the queen's forces in Ireland, partly Irish. O'Sullivan Beare even claims a slight majority were Irishmen in English pay. The army mustered at the start of August, reached Armagh on 13 August, and camped just beyond the town.13
The march from Armagh: what happened on 14 August 1598
A council of war decided to avoid the direct road, which the Irish held strongly, and march a mile or so to the right, on harder ground. Bagenal divided his army into six regiments, marching in pairs, with gaps between them. Irish skirmishers began to fire on the column within half a mile of Armagh, from woods and bog on either side.14
The vanguard under Colonel Percy crossed the little River Callan at the ford that gave the battle its name. Bagwell thought the name came from its yellow bed and banks; O'Sullivan Beare says the water ran discolored out of the bogs. Beyond it the column struggled through bog and broken ground until it reached O'Neill's main trench, which the English reports describe as a mile long, five feet deep and four feet wide, topped by a thorny hedge.15
Percy's men carried the trench with a rush. But the regiments behind them were too far back to help, and when the confederates closed in from the woods with horse and foot, the vanguard broke. The new recruits threw away their arms and ran. Lieutenant William Taaffe, an Irish officer in the queen's service, wrote two days later that the loss came only from the great distance between the divisions: the vanguard was within sight of the main body, yet no one rescued it until it was overthrown.16
How Bagenal died and the English army broke
Bagenal rode forward with his own regiment to rescue the vanguard and retook the trench. There he raised the visor of his helmet and was shot in the head. English and Irish writers agree on this: Hanmer wrote that a bullet pierced his skull, and O'Sullivan Beare that he lifted his visor to breathe and see the field. With their general dead and no support coming up, his regiment was cut to pieces too.17
Behind them two accidents finished the advance. The army's largest gun sank in the bog, and the Irish shot the oxen that drew it, so the center halted to save it. Then, the Four Masters and O'Sullivan Beare say, a soldier refilling his powder flask from an open barrel set it off with his lit match, and the barrels nearest it went up too; the officers' reports describe two such explosions, one in the rearguard and one in the center. The Four Masters say a dense black smoke hung over the hills for much of the day.18
Colonel Cosby, commanding the third regiment, charged to save the fugitives and was captured. Among the captains killed was Maelmore O'Reilly, called the Fair, a son of the O'Reilly lord, who died trying to rally his men. He was one of many Irishmen who fought and died for the queen that day. About 300 Irish soldiers in the army went over to O'Neill during the fight.19
The rearguard, hard pressed by O'Donnell, Maguire and James MacSorley, kept its order. Covered by Captain Montague's horse, it made an orderly retreat to Armagh. That night the horse broke out through the Irish to carry the news to Dublin. About 1,500 foot were left behind in the church at Armagh with little powder and food for only about ten days.20
How many died at the Yellow Ford?
Nobody counted the dead with any precision. The first English reports, written two days later, disagree with each other. Captain Montague put the crown's loss at no fewer than 1,800 killed or gone over to the enemy, and the confederates' at 700 or 800. On 24 August Ormond sent a reduced list: 855 men killed and 363 wounded, besides the officers. The state papers add that about 300 Irish soldiers had deserted during the battle. Bagwell reckoned that killed, wounded and missing together came close to 2,000.21
Other contemporaries gave higher figures. Moryson wrote that thirteen captains and 1,500 soldiers were killed. The Four Masters say that O'Neill had the dead counted and buried, and that they numbered 2,500, among them the general and eighteen captains; O'Sullivan Beare also gives more than 2,500. History Ireland follows the high count, with English losses of up to 2,500 men. Morgan writes that up to half of Bagenal's 4,000 died.22
The confederate losses are even less certain. O'Sullivan Beare claims fewer than 200 killed and over 600 wounded; English witnesses reported that O'Neill's camp admitted 120 dead; History Ireland puts the figure at about 300. The Four Masters, who celebrate the victory, still note that the Ulster chiefs went home having lost many men. Morgan's verdict is simply that we do not know.23
What happened after the battle?
The Four Masters say that for three days the survivors in Armagh exchanged fire with the confederates. Then, the state papers record, terms were agreed: Williams would give up the Blackwater fort, leaving its colors, drums and munitions, while the captains kept their rapiers and horses, and the whole force would march out with its wounded. They went to Newry, and from there into the Pale. O'Neill had his fort at last.24
Why O'Neill let them go has been argued over ever since. He told the English that his army was costing him 500 pounds a day; he believed the troops shut up in Armagh had more food than they did; and he feared that an English force would land at Lough Foyle, behind him, while Armagh was still held. His allies O'Donnell and Maguire were short of food and ready to go home. Morgan adds that his army was poor at siege warfare and had already lost many men attacking the small fort.25
In Dublin the Lords Justices panicked. On 16 August they wrote to O'Neill asking him to spare the men in Armagh, reminding him that his “ancient adversary”, the marshal, was now dead. They later claimed the letter had never been sent. Elizabeth called it a letter whose like “never was read” for baseness. The 2,000 men meant for Lough Foyle under Sir Samuel Bagenal were diverted to defend the Pale.26
Who won the Battle of the Yellow Ford, and why did it matter?
The confederates won a complete victory. In October 1598 O'Neill sent Owny O'More and Captain Richard Tyrrell into Munster, and the province rose against the plantation there; Leinster and Connacht were also in arms. Moryson, no friend to O'Neill, wrote that the English had never suffered so great an overthrow in Ireland, and that the Irish now celebrated O'Neill as the deliverer of his country.27
The crown answered with the largest English army ever sent to Ireland, under the Earl of Essex in 1599. Essex failed, but his successor, Lord Mountjoy, changed the war, and when a Spanish force finally landed at Kinsale in 1601, O'Neill and O'Donnell marched the length of Ireland to join it and were beaten outside the town. O'Neill submitted in 1603. Moryson recorded the English verdict on O'Neill after the Yellow Ford, the one once passed on Hannibal after Cannae: he knew how to win a victory, but not how to use one.28
How was the Yellow Ford remembered?
Even the name of the battle depends on who is telling it. English officials spoke of the defeat at the Blackwater or at Armagh, and the editor of the 1598 state papers noted that the official letters almost always tied the disaster to Armagh. The Four Masters call it the battle of Athbuidhe (and date it to 10 August); O'Sullivan Beare gives the Irish name, Beal atha bui, and says others called it the ford of Saint Buianus.29
Catholic Ireland told it as a deliverance. O'Sullivan Beare, whose Latin history of the war was printed in Lisbon in 1621, put a speech in O'Neill's mouth about defending faith, fatherland, wives and children, and said an old prophecy had promised victory on that spot. He also wrote generously of Bagenal as a skilled and courageous general. Bagwell, the Victorian historian, trusted him for detail but warned that he was not present.30
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the battle was taken up into the story of O'Neill himself. The Young Irelander John Mitchel wrote a life of him in 1845, and Sean O'Faolain's The Great O'Neill (1942) became, in Morgan's words, the most influential modern account. Brian Friel drew on O'Faolain for his play Making History in the late 1980s. Morgan himself calls O'Faolain's book faulty, and its O'Neill an enigma wavering between English and Irish loyalties.31
Where was the Battle of the Yellow Ford fought?
The battle was fought in County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland, on the ground between the city of Armagh and the River Blackwater. The Yellow Ford crossed the River Callan a short way north of the city, and the Blackwater fort stood a few miles further on, on the road to O'Neill's seat at Dungannon. Bagwell, who inspected the ground before 1890, found a bridge and a mill where the ford had been.32
