‘I have fought and won’ is the proud motto of the Byrnes and their namesakes the O’Byrnes, although other versions are, ‘ We strive and we win’ and ‘I have fought and conquered.’
All versions of the motto, however, aptly sum up the turbulent early lives and times of this ancient Irish warrior clan whose original territory lay in what is now modern day Co. Kildare.
Driven from this territory in the twelfth century, they found a new homeland in the south of Wicklow – where they flourished to such an extent that a common expression was ‘you will find a Byrne under every bush in Wicklow.’
Their lineage is illustrious, tracing a descent from the Celtic warrior chieftain Bran Mac Maolmorrdh, a power-ful ruler of Leinster who died in 1052 A.D.
‘Byrne’, meaning ‘raven’, indicates descent from this ‘Bran’, who in turn traced his own descent back to the early third century king of Leinster, Cathair Mor, who also became Ard Rí, or High King, of Ireland.
As such, this would have made him one of the earliest High Kings whose seat was the Royal Hill of Tara, in the valley of the Boyne river in Co. Meath.
Tara had been established as the inauguration site and seat of the High Kings by the mysterious tribe known as Tuatha De Danann in 200 A.D.
The original Irish version of the name is ‘Ó Brion’, and it was these Ó’Brions who were among the many other clans of native Irish origin who suffered grievously in the aftermath of the Norman invasion of the island in 1169.
Ireland in the twelfth century was far from being a unified nation, split up as it was into several territories ruled over by competing chieftains who even the Ard Rí, could not fully control.
Fatally for the island, this disunity worked to the advantage of the Cambro-Norman invaders who descend-ed in force on the island in 1169.
But even these powerful barons had to be eventually brought to heel by their own monarch, England’s Henry II.
He landed on the island, near Waterford, at the head of a large army in October of 1171 with the aim of curbing the power they had established for themselves in the wake of their invasion.
Protracted war was averted, however, when the barons submitted to the royal will, promising homage and allegiance in return for holding the territories they had conquered in the king’s name.
Many Irish chieftains had no option but submit to the royal will, and English dominion over Ireland was ratified through the Treaty of Windsor of 1175.
Three separate ‘nations’ of Ireland were created under the English domination.
There were the territories of the privileged and powerful Norman barons and their retainers, the Ireland of the disaffected Gaelic-Irish such as the Byrnes, and the Pale – comprised of Dublin itself and a substantial area of its environs ruled over by an English elite.
It was this dominance of an English ruling elite, encroaching over the succeeding centuries on not only what little power remained of the Irish clans but also on the landholders of Norman extraction, that would lead to the formation of strange alliances between both parties and the emergence of strong leaders.
One of the most celebrated of these leaders was Fiach Mac Aodh Ó Broin, or Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne, born in 1544 and leader of the Byrne clan during one of the many tumultuous periods of Ireland’s history.
It was in the aftermath of the Norman invasion that the Byrnes had lost their original homeland in what is now Co. Kildare, and been pushed into southern Wicklow.
Here they ruled supreme, with a fortress at Ballincor, in Glenmalure.
During one of the many rebellions against the Crown known as the Butler Wars, the bold Fiach (also known as Feagh) helped Edmund Butler to escape from the near impregnable and forbidding fortress of Dublin Castle.
Charged in 1572 with involvement in the murder of a close relation of the government official in charge of Co. Wexford, Fiach became a hunted man as detachments of troops were sent to bring him to account.
He managed to evade their clutches, but villages in his territory were burned to the ground and hundreds of his innocent kinsfolk massacred.
His response, however, was to launch a savage raid into Wexford before retiring to the safety of Glenmalure.
Fiach’s life was marked in the following years by a series of complex and shifting alliances, further daring escapades, and bloody battles.
In 1579 he joined with the Viscount Baltinglas in the rebellion against the Crown known as the Second Desmond Rebellion, ambushing and slaughtering Crown forces a year later in a carefully prepared ambush in County Carlow.
A 6,000-strong force under the command of Arthur Grey, Lord Deputy of Ireland, was sent against him a year later, culminating in the battle of Glenmalure.
Grey and his troops proved no match against Fiach and his seasoned band of guerrilla fighters, who had them at their mercy after luring them into the rocky fastnesses of Glenmalure.
Hundreds of Grey’s troops were caught in vicious cross-fire from their carefully concealed foes, while hundreds of others died in the equally vicious hand-to-hand combat.
Grey and his few surviving troops managed to make it back to the safety of Dublin – but they were pursued and harried all the way, suffering even more losses.
Despite the humiliating defeat inflicted on the Crown forces, it was not long before the complex shifting sands of alliances and counter-alliances led to Fiach being granted a pardon.
By 1592, however, he was again at the forefront of rebellion, helping in yet another escape of a Crown prisoner from Dublin Castle.
This time it was ‘Red Hugh’ O’Donnell, who later became the Earl of Tirconnel, and who Fiach sheltered for a time in Glenmalure.
An indication of how much a thorn in the flesh Fiach had become to the Crown is that in 1594 a reward of £150 was offered for his capture, while £100 was offered for his head.
His second wife, Rose O’Toole, was also later declared a traitor and sentenced to be burned after being captured – and only the intervention of the English monarch Queen Elizabeth prevented the brutal sentence being carried out.
This may have been because the queen felt scruples over the execution of a woman – but she certainly hadn’t let such scruples stand in her way when she had agreed to the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots, her own cousin, only a few years earlier.
Rose and her husband, meanwhile, appear to have been perfectly matched.
Detailing the heroic exploits of the sixteenth century Byrnes is the Leabhar Branach, or Book of the O’Byrnes, compiled by no less than 35 different poets – one of whom describes Rose as ‘a blazing meteor, wine of grape, flower of women… she glows with the fire of youth. She is the life and death of heroes.’
The sands of time finally ran out for her husband in May of 1597 after leading what appears with the benefit of historical hindsight to have been something of a charmed life.
Run to ground and captured in a cave by a Captain Thomas Lee, he was hacked to pieces and decapitated. His mutiliated corpse was cut into quarters and hung on pike staffs on the walls of Dublin Castle.
His head was pickled and later sent in great ceremony to London – much to the fury of Queen Elizabeth, who is said to have asked ‘why the head of such a base Robin Hood was brought solemnly into England.’
A ‘Robin Hood’, perhaps, but certainly not ‘base’.
Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne became the very stuff of legend and a folk hero, remembered to this day in the stirring Irish folk song Follow Me Up To Carlow.
One memorable and particularly blood-thirsty line is ‘…now for Black Fitzwilliams head, we’ll send it over dripping red, to Queen Liza and her ladies.’
The fortunes of the Byrnes spiralled into further decline under the policy of ‘plantation’ that had first begun during the reign of Henry VIII, continued under Elizabeth I and her successor James I (James VI of Scotland), and reached new heights under the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in 1649.
In a bid to cheat Fiach Hugh O’Byrne’s son and heir, Phelim, out of his rightful property to make way for land grabbers, false charges were brought against him.
Although he was acquitted, he still lost his lands, and it is said he was left no more than a pauper.
The policy of ‘plantation’ involved the settlement of ‘loyal’ Protestants on land previously held by Catholic landowners such as the Byrnes – Henry VIII having effectively outlawed the practice of the Roman Catholic faith through his religious Reformation.
A seething cauldron of discontent was created and, in an insurrection that exploded in 1641, at least 2,000 Protestant settlers were massacred at the hands of Catholic landowners and their native Irish peasantry.
Thousands were stripped of their belongings and driven naked from their lands to seek refuge where they could.
Terrible as the atrocities against the Protestant settlers had been, subsequent accounts became greatly exaggerated, serving to fuel a burning desire on the part of Protestants for revenge against the rebels.
Tragically for Ireland, this revenge became directed not only against the rebels, but Irish Catholics such as the Byrnes in general.
The English Civil War intervened to prevent immediate action against the rebels, but following the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the consolidation of the power of England’s Oliver Cromwell, the time was ripe for revenge.
The Lord Protector, as he was named, descended on Ireland at the head of a 20,000-strong army that landed at Ringford, near Dublin, in August of 1649.
He had three main aims: to quash all forms of rebellion, to ‘remove’ all Catholic landowners who had taken part in the rebellion, and to convert the native Irish to the Protestant faith.
An early warning of the terrors that were in store for the native Catholic Irish came when Drogheda was stormed and taken in September and between 2,000 and 4,000 of its in-habitants killed, including priests who were summarily put to the sword.
It was not long before Cromwell held Ireland in a grip of iron, allowing him to implement what amounted to a policy of ethnic cleansing.
His troopers were given free rein to hunt down and kill priests, while Catholic estates were confiscated.
The island groaned under oppression, with the implementation of a series of harsh penal laws against Catholics that included, in 1695, legislation that restricted their rights to bear arms, in education, and even in the ownership of horses.
By 1704 Catholics had to submit to a series of humiliating loyalty ‘tests’, before even being considered for any form of public office, while in 1728 an Act was passed that withdrew their right to vote.
This only served to stoke the fires of a series of rebellions, one of the most memorable of which was the Rising of 1798.
The roots of this Rising are tangled in the thick undergrowth of Irish history, but in essence it was sparked off by a fusion of sectarian and agrarian unrest and a burning desire for political reform that had been shaped by the French revolutionary slogan of ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity.’
A movement had come into existence that embraced middle-class intellectuals and the oppressed peasantry, and if this loosely bound movement could be said to have had a leader, it was Wolfe Tone, a Protestant from Kildare and leading light of a radical republican movement known as the United Irishmen.
Despite attempts by the British government to concede a degree of agrarian and political reform, it was a case of far too little and much too late, and by 1795 the United Irishmen, through Wolfe Tone, were receiving help from France – Britain’s enemy.
A French invasion fleet was despatched to Ireland in December of 1796, but it was scattered by storms off Bantry Bay.
Two years later, in the summer of 1798, rebellion broke out on the island.
The first flames of revolt were fanned in Ulster, but soon died out, only to be replaced by a much more serious conflagration centred mainly in Co. Wexford, and it was here that three Byrnes left an indelible mark on their nation’s struggle for independence.
Born in Ballylusk, near Monaseed, in 1780, Myles Byrne joined the United Irishmen in 1797 and became one of the main leaders, along with Father John Murphy and others, of the Rising in Wexford.
The rebellion in Wexford was sparked off by an incident in May of 1798 when two yeomen were killed by an angry mob, and Father Murphy, along with a group of other leaders that included Myles Byrne, took to the hills and engaged in guerrilla warfare against the heavily armed forces of authority.
Victory was achieved at the battle of Oulart Hill, followed by another victory at the battle of Three Rocks, but the peasant army was no match for the 20,000 troops or so that descended on Wexford.
Defeat followed at the battle of Vinegar Hill on 21 June 1798, followed by another decisive defeat at Kilcumney Hill five days later.
Father Murphy was hunted down and captured on 2 July and, brought before a military tribunal, sentenced to death for treason against the British Crown.
Taken to Tullow town, he was stripped naked, flogged, hanged and decapitated and his corpse thrown into a barrel of tar and burned.
His head was then impaled on a spike.
Miles Byrne had accompanied Father Murphy on the campaign throughout Wexford, but was fortunate to escape by only the skin of his teeth northwards to Dublin.
The brothers Garret O’Byrne and William O’Byrne had also played a prominent role in the Rising in Wexford. William was later captured and hanged, but his brother survived.
The Rising of 1798 fizzled out to an exhausted conclusion, with the United Irishmen leader Wolfe Tone committing suicide in prison in November of 1798 after being captured aboard a French ship in Lough Swilly.
But the flames of revolt were not completely extinguished.
Myles Byrne managed to evade capture by assuming the role of a builder in Dublin, and it was here that he met the celebrated nationalist Robert Emmet.
Nationalist passions had been further inflamed in 1800 when the Irish Parliament was abolished under the Act of Union with Britain – a move that did not entail any significant alleviation of the discrimination against Catholics.
Myles Byrne joined with Emmet and other nationalists in the abortive Dublin Rising of 1803, managing to escape later to France.
This was no quiet exile, however.
Byrne enlisted in the ranks of France’s famed and elite Irish Legion – composed of men like him who had fled their native land and offered their swords to any country that was an enemy of England.
Commissioned as an infantry officer he fought with distinction in the Napoleonic Wars and was awarded the Legion of Honour before his death in Paris in 1862.
Distinguished as they had been for centuries on the battlefield, Byrnes also gained distinction through more peaceful activities.
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