A Clash of Horsemen - Ireland Nine Years War

I came across two accounts of close combat between individual horsemen in the Nine Years War.  I share them here because they improve our understanding of what actually happened on the battlefield. It should be understood that each of these very personal combats was part of a larger action.

As you might expect the protagonists were all prominent men. The doings of ordinary soldiers seldom attracted the attention of our sources.   

Sir Henry Docwra was probably the least socially prestigious of our combatants. His father was a Member of Parliament in England and he himself made a living as a professional soldier.  Aodh Og Dubh O’Domhnaill (Young Dark Hugh O'Donnell) was possessed of righdharma (eligibility for kingship) and had been supported as Tánaiste (second in command and likely successor as the Ó Domhnaill) of Tír Chonaill. 

Sir Warham St Leger had been High Sheriff of Kent, was a member of the Privy Council for Ireland and was Provost Marshall of Munster.  Hugh Maguire was Lord of Fermanagh, Father in Law to Tyrone and one of the best commanders of the Irish Army.  

It is salutary to think that their times required all of them to engage in mortal combat and that they so willingly did so.

 

Our first combat takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Irish having suddenly descended upon the English cavalry mounts grazing outside of Sir Henry Docwra’s newly established fort in Tír Chonnaill.  The aim of the Irish action was to rob the English of the cavalry necessary to ravage the territory and thus economically weaken the Irish war effort.  Docwra pursued with his remaining cavalry to recapture his lost horses. He tells us:

“ When they saw us cominge, they turned heade and made ready to receive us: wee charged them,& at the first encounter I was stricken by a horseman’s staff in the forheade, in so much as I fell for deade, and was a goode while deprived of my senses..”

Bheatha Aodh Ruadh O’Domhnaill gives us the Irish perspective on how the fight went:

“Aodh Og Dubh O’Domhnaill made a well- aimed cast at Sir Henry Docwra striking him directly in the forehead, wounding him severely.  When the General was thus pierced, he turned back and the English turned back and pursued their horses no longer.”

As we can see the English cavalry acted with characteristic boldness.  Yet the Irish cavalry did not hesitate to turn and meet them receiving their charge. The sides clashed and in the multiplicity of combats that characterise a cavalry melee Sir Henry Docwra met his match.

His opponent, like many of the leading men on both sides of the War, was an accomplished poet and one of his surviving poems sheds further light on the nature of the cavalry combat. I precis it here in English.

I too will cast my dart at you, if it fall vainly to earth that would surprise me

I overthrow a hero in every fight

His head would soon be in my hands before anyone could separate us and his heart’s blood on my steel blue spear

Aodh is talking about close fighting here and he had done a great deal of it.  The author of the Bheatha thinks Sir Henry was hit by a cast dart and the Irish cavalry would indeed throw darts before closing and so that sounds plausible.  

We have some English testimony on the subject of Irish darts.

"..darts, which they cast with a wonderful facility and nearness, a weapon more noisome to the enemy, especially horsemen, than it is deadly"  

That is to say Irish darts usually hit but were defeated by armour.  English horses were not armoured and so suffered more than Englishmen who were.

Never the less we must accept Sir Henry's own account here on the grounds that it was his fight and his forehead and he said the weapon was a spear.

 

Sir Henry kept his head because his soldiers closed up around him and took him from the field.  The Irish might have thought the English had simply recovered their commander’s corpse or may not have cared because their job was to capture the horses and they had done so. Either way both of our combatants survived. 

Sir Henry describes his convalescence:

“I kept my bedd from this wound the space of a fortnith, my chamber a week after & then I came abroade.”

We can note that Sir Henry was struck in the forehead one of the few unarmoured vital parts of his body.  Suprisingly, so far as I can tell Aodh was around 60 years of age at the time of the encounter.  The Og in his epithet was to differentiate him from his father Aodh Dubh O’Domhnaill.

Our second combat happened at the other end of the country.  Sir Warham St Leger was leading a troop of the new petronel armed English cavalry.  Although lighter armoured than the demi lancers they were considerably better protected than their Irish equivalents. St Leger’s men ran into a troop of Irish Horse commanded by Hugh Maguire Lord of Fermanagh and both sides clashed.   

St Leger had double loaded his petronel and shot Maguire at very close range.  Maguire thrust his spear into St Leger’s forehead.  

The blow was so forceful that the spear head could not be removed from St Leger’s skull and he died of the wound the next day.  Maguire died of his wound some three days later.

We can note that St Leger correctly reserved his fire to the closest range.  To do otherwise against a fast moving foe would have been poor soldiering indeed. His action was presumably in line with a standing instruction to English Petronels when facing cavalry.  

The two Irish strikes to the forehead are suggestive. I’m minded to conclude that in close combat against their better armoured foes the Irish horseman routinely thrust for the face.  The military imperative for them to do so seems clear enough. If carried out successfully it nullified the protection offered by armour.