Siege of Dunboy, 1602: the last stand of O'Sullivan Beare's castle

The Nine Years' War had turned against the Irish at Kinsale. After the defeat of the Irish armies there, the Spanish commander Don Juan del Águila surrendered and, on 11 January 1602, agreed to hand over the castles held by his troops in west Cork: Baltimore, Castlehaven and Dunboy, the seat of Donal Cam O'Sullivan Beare. O'Sullivan, writing to King Philip III in February, called it a deed against all right and human conscience: Dunboy and its harbor were, he said, the only key of his inheritance.²

Taken back by night

O'Sullivan would not give up his castle. According to the West Cork historian W. O'Halloran, he dug his way at night into a weak spot in the walls that he knew well, with 84 men, and at dawn the surprised Spanish commander was told that the Irish now held Dunboy for King Philip. The Spaniards were disarmed and sent away, though some of their gunners stayed of their own will. O'Sullivan put the castle under Richard MacGeoghegan, with an Englishman, Thomas Taylor, beside him. The garrison numbered 143 men, and they began to prepare for a siege, hoping that help would come from Spain before it fell.³

Carew comes west

Sir George Carew, Lord President of Munster, was told that Dunboy was impregnable and that there were no roads to it, only rough country and narrow passes. He set out from Cork anyway, on 20 April 1602, with 3,000 men, O'Halloran writes, and waited a month near Bantry for the ships bringing his guns. Sir Charles Wilmot marched across the Kerry mountains to join him. The size of the army that reached Dunboy differs in the sources: P. W. Joyce counts 4,000 men, Mary Frances Cusack about 3,000.⁴

Carew tried craft before force. On 7 May he wrote to the Spanish gunners in Dunboy offering them safe passage home, and a reward if they spiked the guns on their way out. The letter had no effect. The engraved plan of the siege published in Pacata Hibernia in 1633, shown above, marks the stages that followed: the army camped opposite Dunboy on 7 June, the ordnance landed on 10 June and the battery planted on 16 June. Cusack dates the start of operations to 6 June, after long delays in the arrival of the shipping.⁵

No terms

Day after day the guns battered the walls. By 17 June the castle was so shattered that MacGeoghegan offered to surrender if his men could march out with their arms. Carew's answer was to hang the messenger and order an assault. The defenders fought from turret to turret. Some of the besiegers found a back way in through a heap of rubble, and 40 of the garrison broke out and ran for the sea, hoping to swim to the island. All but eight were cut down on the shore, and Carew had boats waiting for the rest, who, in his own words, "had the killing of them all".⁶

By sunset the castle was a ruin, and the surviving defenders, 77 by Joyce's count, took refuge in the cellars, where barrels of powder were stored. Carew posted a guard and withdrew for the night. On 18 June, with MacGeoghegan mortally wounded, Taylor took command. Twenty-three men surrendered; Carew turned his cannon on the cellars until the rest forced Taylor to yield. As the English came down the steps, the dying MacGeoghegan seized a lighted candle and staggered toward the powder. An English officer, Captain Power, caught him in his arms and he was killed on the spot.⁷

Executions

Carew hanged 58 of the prisoners the same day. Taylor and others were kept back in the hope that they would give information, and when they refused they too were hanged. Among the prisoners was a religious, Dominic Collins, who was executed later at Youghal, his native town. Carew summed up the siege himself: of the 143 defenders "no one man escaped, but were either slaine, executed, or buried in the ruins; and so obstinate and resolved a defense had not been seene within this kingdom". The powder left in the vaults was then fired, and Dunboy was blown apart, on 22 June according to the Pacata Hibernia plan.⁸

The long march

Joyce and Cusack both draw chiefly on Carew's own account, published in Pacata Hibernia, so the story of the siege is largely the victor's. The fall of Dunboy, Cusack writes, was a fatal blow to the Irish cause in Munster, and the English set about "settling the country" by martial law. Later Donal Cam O'Sullivan Beare set out with about 1,000 people, only 400 of them fighting men, on his famous march to Leitrim in the north. He fought his way the whole distance and arrived, Cusack writes, with only 35 followers. The ruins of Dunboy still stand on the shore of Berehaven.⁹