A week after the Battle of Affane, fought on 1st February, 1565, during which Gerald fitzGerald, 15th earl of Desmond had been wounded and captured, he was brought to Waterford by a triumphant Thomas Butler, 10th earl of Ormond, who handed him over to the authorities. Butler had already coloured the narrative of the events that had taken place by claiming he was handing over a prisoner of the queen, captured in an act of treason. Queen Elizabeth was horrified to hear of such a private battle between two earls and ordered both men to court in London to appear before her. As a favourite of the queen, Thomas Butler received preferential treatment. In order to secure his release, Gerald fitzGerald was forced to pay what was known as a recognizance (to the substantial tune of £20,000), a form of late medieval bond, as a guarantee of his good behaviour. Should he break this guarantee, his bond would be forfeited.

In June 1565, while the earl of Desmond was in London, he was forced to watch, powerless, as Donal McCarthy Mór, Gaelic chief of west Cork and neighbouring south Kerry, was created earl of Clancare at Westminster, as part of the ‘surrender and regrant’ scheme. The objective was to make McCarthy directly answerable to the crown and, therefore, independent of the earls of Desmond, who had acted as overlords of the McCarthys for centuries. This was one of the last acts of the ‘surrender and regrant’ policy initiated by Anthony St Leger many years earlier. Moves were already afoot to try an entirely new and more radical reform of local government in Ireland.

Early in 1566, Gerald fitzGerald, having given reassurances that he would keep the peace, was allowed to return to Ireland, and arrived around the same time as a new lord deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, recently appointed by the queen. Sidney moved quickly to implement a scheme to reform the local government in the south, known as the Presidency of Munster. The scheme was not entirely new. It had been considered by Henry Sidney’s predecessor, and even before his death in 1558, James fitzGerald, 14th earl of Desmond, no doubt realising that reforms were inevitable, had suggested a similar model in the hope that he might control the presidency and thereby future-proof his dominance in the region. These had been proposals rather than concrete plans, but the new lord deputy was someone who acted on ideas, and Henry Sidney wasted no time in implementing the scheme.

The new proposed presidency would be headed by a president, an English man appointed by the crown, to ‘preside’ over the Munster lords (both Gaelic and old English) and have full judicial powers in the region. The president would have a standing army, which would nullify all claims to the contrary that the local lords needed their private armies, and all of this would be paid for by a new taxation. This tax would take the form of a fixed rent paid by landholders directly to the presidency, rather than to the overlords, such as the earls of Desmond or Ormond. The president would also be assisted by a council, comprising the archbishop of Cashel, the bishops of Cork, Limerick and Waterford (the principal cities in the region), as well as the earls of Desmond, Ormond, Thomond and Glencar. The two latter earls were both Gaelic chiefs who had recently been converted through the ‘surrender and regrant’ scheme. Clearly, Sidney realised that it would be better to have the most powerful land holders within the fold than outside it.

The first president was Sir Warham St Leger, whose father, Anthony, had promoted the ‘surrender and regrant’ scheme twenty-five years earlier. The earl of Desmond had spent time at St Leger’s home in Kent a few years earlier and used the recent promotion of his friend to Ireland as an opportunity to curry favour with the new president by leasing him lands at Kerrycurrihy near Cork city. The earl of Ormond soon became suspicious of his archenemy’s relationship with the president and complained to the queen. 

Perhaps surprisingly, the typically loyal earl of Ormond was hostile to the crown’s plans for the presidency of Munster. In this both he and the earl of Desmond shared a similar concern. In Munster, there were two regions that were still held as liberties, namely Tipperary, held by the earls of Ormond, and Kerry, held by the earls of Desmond. These liberties had their origins back to the 14th century when both earldoms were first established. At that time, the original earls of Desmond and Ormond received these estates as lordships that were virtually independent from royal administration and law. Now, in the modernising era of the 16th century, these were seen as archaic forms of landownership and Sidney argued strongly that their continued existence was an obstacle to his proposed presidency of Munster. In order to protect his independence in Tipperary, the earl of Ormond now used his personal influence with the queen to undermine Sidney’s proposals for the region. She ordered Sidney not to interfere in Ormond’s liberty of Tipperary, and by the end of the year Butler had convinced her to dismiss St Leger as president of Munster on the grounds that he was too close to the earl of Desmond. 

Presumably in an act of frustration, the earl of Desmond sent his private army on a rampage throughout Tipperary, raiding much of the earl of Ormond’s lands there. Not surprisingly, this was seen as a breach of the conditions of his release a year earlier, and on 25th March, 1567, he was arrested by Henry Sidney at Kilmallock, Co. Limerick on a charge of plotting treason. The queen ordered a fresh investigation into the disputes between the earls, but Gerald fitzGerald, by now imprisoned in Dublin Castle, refused to cooperate. The investigation found in favour of Thomas Butler, and fitzGerald was ordered to pay him over £20,000 in damages, an enormous amount of money at that time, especially for someone who was already in chronic debt. His brother, John fitzGerald, was put in charge of the earldom during his absence. One of his first tasks was to arrange payment of the compensation to those who had been injured by the earl’s actions. He succeeded in making some of these, but the earl of Ormond continued to provoke the situation and appealed to the queen that John had not done enough. On 12th December 1567, John went to visit his brother Gerald, and was arrested. The next day, both men were dispatched to London. Butler may have won the battle, but the war was about to begin.

Since succeeding his father, Munster had been in a near-constant state of unrest during Gerald fitzGerald’s term as earl of Desmond. This was seen by most contemporary observers as justification for his arrest in 1567. However, for much of that period he had been in England (mostly under house arrest), and his absence had not prevented the unrest in Munster. Therefore, it could be predicted that his present absence was unlikely to make the situation in the region any calmer. And so, it came to pass.

With the earl and his brother out of the country, a large political vacuum was left in Munster. The man the earl chose to fill that vacuum was his cousin, James fitzMaurice fitzGerald, captain of the earl’s private army. That the earl should choose a military man to look after his affairs could only result in one outcome. Initially, he used military aggression to enforce his authority in Munster. By 1569, with his position consolidated in the region, fitzMaurice decided to use military force to provoke the government to release the imprisoned earl. This tactic of intimidation was the same one used 35 years earlier by ‘Silken’ Thomas fitzGerald to provoke the release of his father, and it had failed miserably. However, while ‘Silken’ Thomas had simply appealed to the Pope for assistance, James fitzMaurice went one step further – he sent emissaries to king Philip II of Spain, requesting him to send a representative to act as a new king of Ireland. In so doing, he looked to the Catholic king of Spain to rid Ireland of the Protestant queen of England. FitzMaurice claimed to represent an assembly of Irish lords and bishops from across Ireland. Though this was undoubtedly an exaggeration, the man they sent to Madrid as their emissary in February 1570, was no messenger boy. He was one of the most senior Irish Catholic clerics of the period, Maurice fitzGibbon, the archbishop of Cashel. The timing of his visit was important, as pope Pius V had just issued a papal bull known as Regnans in Excelsis (‘Reigning on High’), which had excommunicated queen Elizabeth and declared her a heretic. In the end, Phillip II politely turned down the offer to interfere in Irish affairs. In the meantime, James fitzMaurice attacked Warham St Leger’s estates at Kerrycurrihy near Cork. Later he attacked the town of Kilmallock in Limerick, where the earl had been arrested in March 1667. However, fitzMaurice failed to secure much support from most of the other major landholders in Munster. Indeed, the regional towns, such as Kilmallock, had embraced the proposed presidency of Munster, realising that this scheme finally provided them with an opportunity to become independent from the earls of Desmond.

The lord deputy, Henry Sidney responded to fitzMaurice’s revolt by appointing Humphrey Gilbert as governor of Munster in September 1569. He had at his command a force of some 700 soldiers, which was significantly less than the private army commanded by fitzMaurice. His job was to suppress the revolt, and despite the apparent numerical disadvantage, by the end of the year he had ruthlessly and systematically taken control of the castles belonging to the fitzGeralds and their sympathisers, slaughtering anyone who resisted, including women and children. In March 1570, Gilbert was replaced by none other than the earl of Ormond as commander of the crown forces in Munster, though he used the opportunity mostly to defend his own interests in Tipperary. By the end of 1570, Henry Sidney had appointed Sir John Perrot from Pembrokeshire as the new President of Munster, who arrived in February 1571 to take up his post. As president, he took command of the crown forces in the region. Though fitzMaurice’s army was now much smaller than it had been when he first revolted, this downsizing meant that he was much more agile in the field, and over the next few years he remained elusive, undermining Perrot’s efforts to implement the presidency. Finally, in February 1573, fitzMaurice submitted to the president at Kilmallock, bringing the revolt to an end.

Around the same time, a decision was made to return the earl of Desmond to Ireland. He arrived in Dublin in March 1573, after a five-year long detention in England. Despite his arrival back on Irish shores, he was not allowed to return to Munster immediately. Instead, he was detained in Dublin for several months, while Perrot used the opportunity of the new peace to embed the presidency of Munster. There followed an intense period of negotiations during which Perrot set down a series of conditions that he knew the earl would not accept, but which he insisted were necessary before he could be released back to Munster. While in Dublin, he remained under house arrest in the custody of the mayor. Frustrated by the deadlock in the negotiations, on 17th November, on the pretext of spending the day hunting in Grangegorman, he walked out the gates of the city never to return. Not far from the city he was met by Ruaidhrí Óg O’More of Laois, who brought horses and escorted him for the initial leg of his journey home. By the time he reached Munster, news of his escape had spread. At Lough Gur near Limerick, he was met by a large crowd of followers anxious to welcome their earl home. Here he discarded his English attire and changed it for the Irish clothing he was accustomed to. The timing of escape from Dublin was hardly coincidental. On the same day, Sir John Perrot left Munster and was en route to England. With Perrot’s departure, the presidency of Munster stalled once again, but only temporarily. However, while Desmond was now safely on home ground, during his prolonged absence, his position in Munster had become severely undermined. Rather than keeping the earldom secure for Gerald fitzGerald while he was absent, his cousin, James fitzMaurice, had weakened the profitability of the estates during his prolonged revolt. The earl was already in debt, and now his financial resources were weakened even further. At home in Munster once again, the reality of the position that he now faced became closer into focus.