Chapter 3
Sing Me a Story

Throughout much of the sixteenth century, the Gaelic clans of the northern territories of Ireland had been a fluctuating threat to the stability of England’s Protestant monarchy. The city of Dublin had risen out of the most fertile lands on the east coast and had been in the control of the Anglo Normans since the twelfth century, but the north was still fervently Irish and Catholic. As such, it was vulnerable to co-option by the Spanish kings as a staging post to invade England. For nine years the English armies skirmished with the Gaelic Lords of Ulster and with their defeat and their eventual flight to the Continent in 1607 they left a power vacuum in the Ulster province; or rather, to the advisors of King James VI and I, a fertile void.