Ireland in 1500 was shaped by the Norman conquest, initiated by Cambro-Norman barons in the 12th century. Many of the native Gaelic Irish had been expelled from various parts of the country (mainly the east and southeast) and replaced with English peasants and labourers. A large area on the east coast, extending from the Wicklow Mountains in the south to Dundalk in the north (covering parts of modern counties of Dublin, Louth, Meath, Westmeath, Kildare, Offaly, and Laois), became known as the Pale. Protected along much of its length by a ditch and rampart, the Pale was a defended area in which English language and culture predominated and where English law was enforced by a government in Dublin.
Ireland at the beginning of the Tudor period.
The Gaelic Irish were largely outside English jurisdiction, maintaining their own language, social system, customs, and laws. The English referred to them as "His Majesty's Irish enemies". In legal terms, they had never been admitted as subjects of the Crown. Ireland was not formally a realm, but rather a lordship; the title 'Lord of Ireland' was assumed by the English monarch upon coronation. The rise of Gaelic influence resulted in the passing in 1366 of the Statutes of Kilkenny, which outlawed many social practices that had been developing apace (e.g. intermarriage, use of the Irish language and Irish dress). In the 15th century, the Dublin government remained weak, owing principally to the Wars of the Roses.
Beyond the Pale, the authority of the Dublin government was tenuous. The Hiberno-Norman lords had been able to carve out fiefdoms for themselves but not to settle them with English tenants. As a result, in the 14th and 15th centuries, in the wake of Irish rebellion, Scottish invasion, the Black Death, and a lack of interest on the part of the London government, the territories controlled by those lords achieved a high degree of independence. The Butlers, Fitzgeralds, and Burkes raised their own armed forces, enforced their own law, and adopted Gaelic language and culture.
Beyond those territories large areas of land previously held by authority of the English crown were taken by the resurgent Gaelic Irish, particularly in the north and midlands. Among the most important septs were the O'Neills (Uí Néill) in central Ulster (Tír Eóghain), flanked to their west by the O'Donnells (Uí Dhomnaill); the O'Byrnes (Uí Bhroin) and O'Tooles (Uí Thuathail) in County Wicklow; the Kavanaghs (Uí Chaomhánach) in County Wexford; the MacCarthys ((Uí) Mhic Chárthaigh) and O'Sullivans (Uí Shúilleabháin) in County Cork and County Kerry; and the O'Brien (Uí Bhriain) lordship of Thomond in County Clare.
Henry VIII
By 1500, English monarchs had delegated government of Ireland to the most powerful of the Hiberno-Norman dynasties – the FitzGeralds of Kildare – to keep the costs of running Ireland down and to protect the Pale. The King's Lord Deputy of Ireland was chief of the administration, based in Dublin Castle, but maintained no formal court and had a limited privy purse. In 1495, laws were passed during Poynings's Parliament that imposed English statutory law wholesale upon the lordship and compromised the independence of the Parliament of Ireland.
Silken Thomas; his family the FitzGeralds had strong Yorkist leanings and he led a rising in Kildare against the Tudor monarchy of Henry VIII.
The head of the Kildare FitzGeralds held the position of lord deputy until 1534. The problem was that the House of Kildare had become unreliable for the English monarch, scheming with Yorkist pretenders to the English throne, signing private treaties with foreign powers, and finally rebelling after the head of its hereditary rivals, the Butlers of Ormonde, was awarded the position of lord deputy. The Reformation also led to growing tension between England and Ireland as Protestantism gained sway within England. Thomas, Earl of Kildare, a Catholic, offered control of Ireland to both the pope and Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. Henry put down the rebellion by executing the leader ("Silken Thomas" FitzGerald), along with several of his uncles, and imprisoned Gearóid Óg, the head of the family. But now the king had to find a replacement for the FitzGeralds to keep Ireland quiet. What was needed was a cost-effective new policy that protected the Pale and guaranteed the safety of England's vulnerable west flank from foreign invasion.
With the assistance of Thomas Cromwell, the King implemented the policy of surrender and regrant. This extended royal protection to all of Ireland's elite without regard to ethnicity; in return the whole country was expected to obey the law of the central government; and all Irish lords were to officially surrender their lands to the Crown, and to receive them back in return by Royal Charter. The keystone to the reform was in a statute passed by the Irish Parliament in 1542, whereby the lordship was converted to the Kingdom of Ireland. Overall, the intention was to assimilate the Gaelic and Gaelicised upper classes and to develop a loyalty on their part to the new crown. To this end, they were granted English titles and for the first time admitted to the Irish Parliament. One of the more important was the earldom of Tyrone, which was created for the Uí Néill dynasty in 1542. In a felicitous phrase, the king summed up his efforts at reform as "politic drifts and amiable persuasions".
In practice, lords around Ireland accepted their new privileges but carried on as they had before. For the Irish Lordships, the English monarch was but another overlord similar to that found in the Gaelic system. It was, however, the Tudors' increasing encroachment upon the Irish local autonomy by the development of a centralised state that was to bring the English system into direct conflict with the Gaelic one. Henry's religious Reformation – although not as thorough as in England – caused disquiet; his lord deputy, Anthony St Leger, was largely able to buy off opposition by granting lands confiscated from the monasteries to Irish nobles.
Difficulties
Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland under Elizabeth I, sets out from Dublin Castle. Detail from a plate in The Image of Irelande, by John Derrick (London, 1581).
After the king's death, successive lords deputy of Ireland found that actually establishing the rule of the central government was far more difficult than merely securing the Irish lords' pledges of allegiance. Successive rebellions broke out, the first in Leinster in the 1550s, when the O'Moore and O'Connor clans were displaced to make way for the Plantation of Queen's County and King's County (named for Mary I of England and Philip II of Spain; modern counties Laois and Offaly). In the 1560s, English attempts to interfere in a succession dispute within the O'Neill sept, or clan, sparked a long war between Thomas Radcliffe (Lord Deputy of Sussex) and Seán Mac Cuinn Ó Néill. Irish lordships continued to fight private wars against each other, ignoring the government in Dublin and its laws. Two examples of this were the Battle of Affane in 1565, fought between the Ormonde and Desmond dynasties, and the Battle of Farsetmore in 1567, fought between the O'Donnells and O'Neills. Elsewhere, clans such as the O'Byrnes and O'Tooles continued raiding the Pale as they had always done. The most serious violence of all occurred in Munster in the 1560s to 1580s, when the Fitzgeralds of Desmond launched the Desmond Rebellions to prevent direct English influence into their territory. After a particularly brutal campaign in which up to a third of the population of the province was reported to have died, the rebellion was finally ended when the Earl of Desmond was killed in 1583.
There were two main reasons for the chronic violence that dogged the central government in Ireland. The first was some of the aggressive acts of the English administrators and soldiers. In many instances, garrisons or "seneschals" disregarded the law and killed local chiefs and lords, and sometimes seized native-owned land.[citation needed] The second cause of violence was the incompatibility of Gaelic Irish society with English law and central government. In Irish law, the chief of a sept or clan was elected from a small noble lineage group called a derbfine. This often caused violence between rival candidates. However, under Henry VIII's settlement, succession was, as was the English custom, by inheritance of the first-born son, or primogeniture, which was intended to result in fewer disputes over inheritance but also in an increasing reduction in the distribution of landed wealth. Imposing this law forced the English to take sides in violent disputes within Irish lordships. Finally, important sections of Irish society had a vested interest in opposing the English presence. These included the mercenary class or gallowglass, and Irish poets or file – both of whom faced having their source of income and status abolished in an English-ruled Ireland.
Under Mary I and Elizabeth I, the English in Ireland tried a number of solutions to pacify the country. The first such initiative used martial government, whereby violent areas such as the Wicklow Mountains were garrisoned by small numbers of English troops under commanders called seneschalls. The seneschal was given powers of martial law, which allowed execution without trial by jury. Every person within the seneschal's area of authority had to be vouched for by the local lord—"masterless men" were liable to be killed. In this way, it was hoped that the Irish lords would prevent raiding by their own followers. However, in practice, this simply antagonised the native chieftains.
The failure of this policy prompted the English to come up with more long-term solutions to pacify and Anglicise Ireland. One was composition, where private armed forces were abolished, and provinces were occupied by English troops under the command of governors, titled lords president. In return, the pre-eminent septs and lords were exempted from taxation and had their entitlements to rents from subordinate families and their tenants put on a statutory basis. The imposition of this settlement was marked by bitter violence, particularly in Connacht, where the MacWilliam Burkes fought a local war against the English Provincial President, Sir Richard Bingham, and his subordinate, Nicholas Malby. In Munster the interference of the lord president was one of the major causes of the Desmond Rebellions. However, this method was successful in some areas, notably in Thomond, where it was supported by the ruling O'Brien dynasty. Composition merged into the policy of surrender and regrant.
The second long-term solution was Plantations, in which areas of the country were to be settled with people from England, who would bring in English language and culture while remaining loyal to the crown. Plantation had been started in the 1550s in Laois and Offaly, the former being shired by Queen Mary as "Queen's County",[5] and again in the 1570s in Antrim, both times with limited success. In the 1590s, after the Desmond Rebellions, parts of Munster were populated with English in the plantation of that province, but the project was half-hearted and ran into legal difficulties when Irish landowners chose to sue; the largest grant of lands was made to Sir Walter Raleigh, but he never really made a success of it and sold out to Sir Richard Boyle, who later became Earl of Cork and the wealthiest subject of the early Stuart monarchs.
After a neutral period from 1558 to 1570, Pope Pius V declared Elizabeth a heretic in his 1570 papal bullRegnans in Excelsis. This complicated the conquest further, as her authority to rule was denied and her officials were considered by observant Roman Catholics to be acting unlawfully. Most Irish people of all ranks remained Catholic and the bull gave Protestant administrators a new reason to expedite the conquest. The Second Desmond Rebellion, from 1579 to 1583, was assisted by hundreds of papal troops. Religion had become a new marker of loyalty to the administration.
The prospect of land confiscation further alienated the Irish. But the alienation wasn't confined to the Gaelic Irish: those who claimed descent from the original Anglo-Norman conquerors under Henry II were increasingly referred to as the "Old English", to distinguish them from the many administrators, captains, and planters (the New English) who were arriving in Ireland. And it was mostly amongst this Old English community that fervent commitment to Catholicism was gaining ground.
The crisis point of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland came when the English authorities tried to extend their authority over Ulster and Hugh O'Neill (Irish: Aodh Mór Ó Néill), the most powerful Irish lord in Ireland. Though initially appearing to support the crown, O'Neill engaged in a proxy war in Fermanagh and northern Connacht, by sending troops to aid Hugh Maguire (Irish: Aodh Mag Uidhir), Lord of Fermanagh. This distracted the crown with military campaigns in the west while O'Neill consolidated his power in Ulster. O'Neill openly broke with the crown in February 1595 when his forces took and destroyed the Blackwater Fort on the Armagh-Tyrone border. In what was later named the Nine Years' War, O'Neill focused his action in Ulster and along its borders, until Spanish promises of aid in 1596 led him to spread the conflict to the rest of Ireland. What had started as a war for regional autonomy became a war for the control of Ireland. With the Irish victory at the Battle of the Yellow Ford, the collapse of the Munster Plantation, followed by the dismal vice-royalty of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, the power of the Crown in Ireland came close to collapse.
In wider European terms, it was a part of the Anglo-Spanish war (1585—1604). While O'Neill enlisted the help of lords throughout Ireland, his most significant support came from the Spanish king. Philip III of Spain sent an invasion force, only to see it surrender after a winter siege at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. Outside Kinsale, O'Neill's own army was defeated. The war ended in early 1603; thereafter the authority of the Crown was gradually reestablished throughout country. O'Neill and his allies were treated relatively generously, considering the cost of the rebellion, and were regranted their titles and most of their lands. Unable to live with more restrictive conditions, they left Ireland in 1607 in the Flight of the Earls. As a result, their lands in Ulster were confiscated. In the ensuing Plantation of Ulster, great numbers of people from all over Britain were encouraged to move to Ulster.
As plantation policy expanded to outlying districts including Sligo, Fermanagh and Monaghan, the English occupation of Ireland grew increasingly militaristic. The Counter-Reformation created an environment of anti-Protestantism within the native population which hindered English influence and led to a massive uprising ending in 1603. It became increasingly clear that the only profitable gain from its recent subjugation of Ireland was the land it yielded. Tens of thousands of Protestants, mainly Scots, emigrated to Antrim and Ulster, supplanting the Irish residents.
In 1601, in an effort to fund wartime expenses in Ireland and deprive Irish rebels of foreign exchange, Elizabeth I proclaimed a debasement of the Irish currency. The proclamation authorized the new, debased coin as legal tender.[6]
Results
The first and most important result of the conquest was the disarmament of the native Irish lordships and the establishment of central government control for the first time over the whole island; Irish culture, law, and language were replaced; and many Irish lords lost their lands and hereditary authority. Thousands of English, Scottish, and Welsh settlers were introduced into the country and the administration of justice was enforced according to English common law and statutes of the Parliament of Ireland.
As the 16th century progressed, the religious question grew in significance. Rebels such as James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald and Aodh Mór Ó Néill sought and received help from Catholic powers in Europe, justifying their actions on religious grounds. However, the Pale community and many Irish lords did not consider them to be genuinely religiously motivated. In the new century, the country would become polarised between Catholics and Protestants, especially after the planting of a large English population into Ireland and Scots Presbyterians in Ulster (See Plantation of Ulster).
Under James I, Catholics were barred from all public office after the gunpowder plot was discovered in 1605; the Gaelic Irish and Old English increasingly defined themselves as Catholic in opposition to the Protestant New English. However the native Irish (both Gaelic and Old English) remained the majority landowners in the country until after the Irish Rebellion of 1641. By the end of the resulting Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the 1650s, the "New English" Protestants dominated the country, and after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 their descendants went on to form the Protestant Ascendancy.
The 1601 debasement of the Irish currency led to multiple lawsuits, most notably Gilbert v. Brett, commonly known as the Case of Mixt Monies, which was referred to the Privy Council of England in 1604. The Case "confirmed the principle of monetary nominalism in the common law."[7]
The Pale or the English Pale was the part of Ireland directly under the control of the English government in the Late Middle Ages. It had been reduced by the late 15th century to an area along the east coast stretching north from Dalkey, south of Dublin, to the garrison town of Dundalk. The inland boundary went to Naas and Leixlip around the Earldom of Kildare, towards Trim and north towards Kells. In this district, many townlands have English or Norman-French names, the latter associated with Anglo-Norman influence in England.
The Kingdom of Ireland was a dependent territory of England and then of Great Britain from 1542 to the end of 1800. It was ruled by the monarchs of England and then of Great Britain, and was administered from Dublin Castle by a viceroy appointed by the English king: the Lord Deputy of Ireland. Aside from brief periods, the state was dominated by the Protestant English minority. The Protestant Church of Ireland was the state church. The Parliament of Ireland was composed of Anglo-Irish nobles. From 1661, the administration controlled an Irish army. Although styled a kingdom, for most of its history it was, de facto, an English dependency. This status was enshrined in Poynings' Law and in the Declaratory Act of 1719.
Shane O'Neill was an Irish chieftain of the O'Neill dynasty of Ulster in the mid-16th century. Shane O'Neill's career was marked by his ambition to be the O'Neill—sovereign of the dominant O'Neill family of Tír Eoghain. This brought him into conflict with competing branches of the O'Neill family and with the English government in Ireland, who recognised a rival claim. Shane's support was considered worth gaining by the English even during the lifetime of his father Conn O'Neill, 1st Earl of Tyrone. But rejecting overtures from the 3rd Earl of Sussex, the lord deputy from 1556, Shane refused to help the English against the Scottish settlers on the coast of Antrim, allying himself for a short time instead with the MacDonnells, the most powerful of these settlers. Shane viewed the Scottish settlers as invaders, but decided to stay his hand against them with hopes of using them to strengthen his position with the English. However, tensions quickly boiled over and he declared war on the Scottish MacDonnell's defeating them at the Battle of Glentaisie despite the MacDonnells calling for reinforcements from Scotland. The Scottish MacDonnells would later assassinate Shane O'Neill and collect the bounty on his head.
Conn Bacagh O'Neill, 1st Earl of Tyrone was an Irish lord who ruled over Tyrone from 1519 to 1558. In 1541 O'Neill travelled to England to submit to Henry VIII as part of the surrender and regrant policy that coincided with the creation of the Kingdom of Ireland. He was made Earl of Tyrone, but his plans to pass the title and lands on to a chosen successor Matthew were thwarted by a violent succession dispute that led to another son, Shane O'Neill, emerging triumphant.
The Flight of the Earls took place in September 1607, when Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O'Donnell, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, and about ninety followers, left Ulster in Ireland for mainland Europe. Their permanent exile was a watershed event in Irish history, symbolizing the end of the old Gaelic order.
The Parliament of Ireland was the legislature of the Lordship of Ireland, and later the Kingdom of Ireland, from 1297 until the end of 1800. It was modelled on the Parliament of England and from 1537 comprised two chambers: the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The Lords were members of the Irish peerage and bishops. The Commons was directly elected, albeit on a very restricted franchise. Parliaments met at various places in Leinster and Munster, but latterly always in Dublin: in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin Castle, Chichester House (1661–1727), the Blue Coat School (1729–31), and finally a purpose-built Parliament House on College Green.
The Irish Rebellion of 1641 was an uprising in Ireland, initiated on 23 October 1641 by Catholic gentry and military officers. Their demands included an end to anti-Catholic discrimination, greater Irish self-governance, and return of confiscated Catholic lands. Planned as a swift coup d'état to gain control of the Protestant-dominated central government, instead it led to the 1641–1653 Irish Confederate Wars, part of the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
The Desmond Rebellions occurred in 1569–1573 and 1579–1583 in the Irish province of Munster. They were rebellions by the Earl of Desmond, the head of the FitzGerald dynasty in Munster, and his followers, the Geraldines and their allies, against the threat of the extension of the English government over the province. The rebellions were motivated primarily by the desire to maintain the independence of feudal lords from their monarch but also had an element of religious antagonism between Catholic Geraldines and the Protestant English state. They culminated in the destruction of the Desmond dynasty and the plantation or colonisation of Munster with English Protestant settlers. 'Desmond' is the Anglicisation of the Irish Deasmumhain, meaning 'South Munster'.
The Nine Years' War, sometimes called Tyrone's Rebellion, took place in Ireland from 1593 to 1603. It was fought between an Irish confederacy—led mainly by Hugh O'Neill of Tyrone and Hugh Roe O'Donnell of Tyrconnell—against English rule in Ireland, and was a response to the ongoing Tudor conquest of Ireland. The war began in Ulster and northern Connacht, but eventually engulfed the entire island. The Irish alliance won numerous victories against the English forces in Ireland, such as the Battle of Clontibret (1595) and the Battle of the Yellow Ford (1598), but the English won a pivotal victory against the alliance and their Spanish allies in the siege of Kinsale (1601–02). The war ended with the Treaty of Mellifont (1603). Many of the defeated northern lords left Ireland to seek support for a new uprising in the Flight of the Earls (1607), never to return. This marked the end of Gaelic Ireland and created the groundwork for the foundation of the Plantation of Ulster.
Plantations in 16th- and 17th-century Ireland involved the confiscation of Irish-owned land by the English Crown and the colonisation of this land with settlers from Great Britain. The Crown saw the plantations as a means of controlling, anglicising and 'civilising' Gaelic Ireland. The main plantations took place from the 1550s to the 1620s, the biggest of which was the plantation of Ulster. The plantations led to the founding of many towns, massive demographic, cultural and economic changes, changes in land ownership and the landscape, and also to centuries of ethnic and sectarian conflict. They took place before and during the earliest British colonization of the Americas, and a group known as the West Country Men were involved in both Irish and American colonization.
Hiberno-Normans, or Norman Irish, refer to Irish families descended from Norman settlers who arrived during the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century, mainly from England and Wales. During the High Middle Ages and Late Middle Ages, the Hiberno-Normans constituted a feudal aristocracy and merchant oligarchy, known as the Lordship of Ireland. The Hiberno-Normans were also closely associated with the Gregorian Reform of the Catholic Church in Ireland and were responsible for the emergence of Hiberno-English.
The history of Ireland from 1169–1536 covers the period from the arrival of the Cambro-Normans to the reign of Henry VIII of England, who made himself King of Ireland. After the Norman invasion of 1169–1171, Ireland was under an alternating level of control from Norman lords and the King of England. Previously, Ireland had seen intermittent warfare between provincial kingdoms over the position of High King. This situation was transformed by intervention in these conflicts by Norman mercenaries and later the English crown. After their successful conquest of England, the Normans turned their attention to Ireland. Ireland was made a lordship of the King of England and much of its land was seized by Norman barons. With time, Hiberno-Norman rule shrank to a territory known as the Pale, stretching from Dublin to Dundalk. The Hiberno-Norman lords elsewhere in the country became Gaelicised and integrated in Gaelic society.
Ireland during the period of 1536–1691 saw the first full conquest of the island by England and its colonisation with mostly Protestant settlers from Great Britain. This would eventually establish two central themes in future Irish history: subordination of the country to London-based governments and sectarian animosity between Catholics and Protestants. The period saw Irish society outside of the Pale transform from a locally driven, intertribal, clan-based Gaelic structure to a centralised, monarchical, state-governed society, similar to those found elsewhere in Europe. The period is bounded by the dates 1536, when King Henry VIII deposed the FitzGerald dynasty as Lords Deputies of Ireland, and 1691, when the Catholic Jacobites surrendered at Limerick, thus confirming Protestant dominance in Ireland. This is sometimes called the early modern period.
During the Tudor conquest of Ireland (c.1540–1603), "surrender and regrant" was the legal mechanism by which Irish clans were to be converted from a power structure rooted in clan and kin loyalties, to a late-feudal system under the English legal system. The policy was an attempt to incorporate the clan chiefs into the English-controlled Kingdom of Ireland, and to guarantee their property under English common law, as distinct from the traditional Irish Brehon law system. This strategy was the primary non-violent method for Crown officials in the Dublin Castle administration to subjugate Irish clan leaders during the conquest. It was an unanticipated consequence to be required to pay fealty in currency instead of trade labor or commodities. The process of "surrender and regrant" thus created new, unfamiliar debt structures among the Irish, and these debts had social and political consequences.
The Ó h-Anluain family was an agnatic extended family comprising one of a string of dynasts along the Ulster-Leinster border. Depending on the advantage to the clan, the Chief of the Name—The O'Hanlon—supported either the Earl of Tyrone or authorities within the English Pale. During the 15th century, ties were close with the famed Earls of Kildare. Frequently, members of the clan would fight on both sides during a rebellion. Some would be outlawed; others pardoned; some ending up on the winning side.
Clandeboye or Clannaboy was a kingdom of Gaelic Ireland, comprising what is now south County Antrim, north County Down, and the barony of Loughinsholin. The entity was relatively late in appearance and is associated partly with the Gaelic resurgence of the High Middle Ages. The O'Neill Clandeboy who reigned in the territory descended from Hugh Boy O'Neill, a king of Tyrone. His descendants took advantage of the demise of the Earldom of Ulster during the latter 14th century and seized vast portions of territory. Clandeboye's main seats of power were Shane's Castle and Castle Reagh.
The Second Desmond Rebellion (1579–1583) was the more widespread and bloody of the two Desmond Rebellions in Ireland launched by the FitzGerald Dynasty of Desmond in Munster against English rule. The second rebellion began in July 1579 when James FitzMaurice FitzGerald landed in Ireland with a force of Papal troops, triggering an insurrection across the south of Ireland on the part of the Desmond dynasty, their allies, and others who were dissatisfied for various reasons with English government of the country. The rebellion ended with the 1583 death of Gerald FitzGerald, 14th Earl of Desmond, and the defeat of the rebels.
Tír Eoghain, also known as Tyrone, was a kingdom and later earldom of Gaelic Ireland, comprising parts of present-day County Tyrone, County Armagh, County Londonderry and County Donegal (Raphoe). The kingdom represented the core homeland of the Cenél nEógain people of the Northern Uí Néill and although they ruled, there were smaller groups of other Gaels in the area. One part of the realm to the north-east broke away and expanded, becoming Clandeboye, ruled by a scion branch of the O'Neill dynasty. In one form or another, Tyrone existed for over a millennium. Its main capital was Dungannon, though kings were inaugurated at Tullyhogue Fort.
The Treaty of Mellifont, also known as the Articles of Mellifont, was signed in 1603, ending the Nine Years' War which took place in the Kingdom of Ireland from 1594 to 1603.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
Gaelic Ireland 
Spain 
