The war of two Christmases – An Irishman’s Diary about the Battle of Kinsale

The Battle of Kinsale probably didn’t hinge on a new year’s gift of whiskey, contrary to popular myth. But the excesses of the season, 1601-style, may well have been one factor in the outcome.

As Des Ekin writes in his book The Last Armada, the famous conflict at Kinsale was a "war of two Christmases".  The English still used the old Julian calendar. The Irish and Spanish had adopted the new Gregorian, introduced by the Vatican only 19 years earlier.

So when it was Christmas Day for them, it was still only December 15th – an ordinary Tuesday – for the soldiers of Lord Mountjoy, besieging the Spanish invaders in the port, and in turn being circled by the advancing forces of O'Neill and O'Donnell, who had marched 300 miles south to help their allies.

The Spanish commander, Don Juan del Águila, was by then desperate for the Irish army’s arrival, having been pinned down for months already, his men depleted by hunger and disease.

But in the meantime, the natives had to celebrate Gregorian Christmas. And they did so in style, over a number of days, according to the 17th-century writer Lughaidh O’Cleary (quoted by Ekin): “[…] the chief men in turn feasting and rejoicing together in delight and gladness of mind and soul, as if they were in their own great royal castles”.

Mountjoy’s forces, in the meantime, dug deeper trenches and constructed gun platforms. They also continued their bombardment of the port.

Mind you, they were in wretched shape too. In an impatient letter to O’Neill, written on December 28th (Gregorian), del Águila assured him that “the enemies are tired, and very few, and cannot guard the third part of their trenches”.  For once the weather was not on England’s side, either.  The wind had been blowing from the west for weeks, thwarting plans to send relief supplies by sea. As their Christmas approached, a colleague of Mountjoy noted afterwards, the best banquet they could look forward to was one involving dogs, cats, and horses.

But if the wind wasn’t with them, the English may have had the support of another unpredictable element.  Because while both sides believed they had God on their side, providence decreed the battle would happen, auspiciously for Protestants, on old-style Christmas Eve.

It was 10 days later in the Catholic calendar. And if the Spanish and Irish weren’t suffering from the January blues before the battle, they were afterwards.

The story about the whiskey dates from the Irish new year celebrations, when one of the lesser chieftains, Brian McHugh Óg McMahon of Monaghan, is said to have contacted an English general he knew, asking for a bottle.  The general obliged, and in return (goes the claim), McMahon told him to expect an attack at daybreak on January 3rd. Historians don’t believe it, as a rule. One has called it an outright “fabrication”.

As for Ekin, he thinks the whiskey probably did change hands but that if any information leaked the other way, it couldn’t have made much difference, because the English knew an attack was imminent and were on maximum alert already.

In any case, Ekin writes, when O’Neill marched his forces onto a hill that del Águila had urged him to seize, he was “daunted by the sight of the formidable defensive ring the English had erected while the Irish were celebrating Christmas”. Then he quickly retreated, but not quickly enough, as Mountjoy’s cavalry charged after him in open countryside and routed his army in an hour.

Thus occurred what, in the words of O'Neill's biographer Sean O'Faolain, was "one of the decisive moments in the history of Ireland, incomparably more important than the Battle of the Boyne, or any other battle in the course of her history".

But even 414 years later, nobody can explain with certainty why it happened as it did. O’Faolain argued that, far from delaying fatally, O’Neill was untypically reckless in attacking then, even allowing that the impatient del Águila and the impetuous O’Donnell were both urging him on. His instinct always was to play the waiting game. He could have waited again here.

But nothing in the dénouement was clear-cut. And among the things we can now endlessly speculate about is whether the extra time the English were allowed to erect their defences was an influence on the outcome.

“Or to put it another way,” as Ekin asks, “would the course of our history have been different if O’Neill’s Irish insurgents had not enjoyed such a very merry Christmas?”