XV. Why Aguila Landed at Kinsale

Extract

One of the grounds on which standard histories of Ireland find fault with the Spanish expedition which Don Juan del Aguila led into Kinsale in 1601 is that it came to the wrong place. If, our authorities say, the expedition had come to Munster a year or two earlier, before the insurrection had been crushed there, it might have stood some chance; but now it ought to have come to some northern or western port where O’Neill and O’Donnell could readily have joined forces with it, and not to a port ‘in a province already subdued and all the length of Ireland from the northern chiefs’ (Curtis). The Spaniards in 1601 ‘had come at the wrong time and in the wrong place’ (Hayden and Moonan).

This judgement, in the form stated by D’Alton, is canonised by Hayden and Moonan and by Curtis, who both merely summarise D’Alton. Underlying this view, it will be noted, is the assumption that Aguila, had he so desired, might have landed elsewhere on the Irish coast. While accepting without challenge this assumption, some writers not unnaturally have wondered whether there might not be some hidden explanation for what at first sight appears to have been a ‘dreadful mistake’. Perhaps the Spaniards chose a southern port because their ulterior design was to launch an attack on England (O’Faolain’s suggestion); perhaps the journey to Ulster was considered too far, Ulster’s coasts too inhospitable (Falls). Father Jones, whose conclusions are otherwise tentative, has shown that the expedition (finally at least) did intend to go to Kinsale.