Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
The opening years of the seventeenth century heralded a series of changes in politics in Ireland, France and on the international stage that brought to an end the episodic political engagement of the sixteenth century between Irish dissidents and the French for several decades to come. After the Spanish Armada, and throughout the 1590s, disaffected Irish lords consistently directed all their pleas for military aid at the Spanish and papal courts. However, a slight glimmer of hope for a possible French invasion of Ireland still survived so long as Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone, and Hugh Roe O'Donnell of Tyrconnell led their campaign to forestall the Anglicisation of Ulster. Elizabeth I's decisive defeat of the joint Gaelic and Spanish forces led by O'Neill, O'Donnell and Don Juan del Águila at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, in the final challenge to the Tudor regime, and the departure from Ireland in 1607 of O'Neill and Rory O'Donnell (Hugh Roe's brother), the last of the greatest potentates of the Gaelic polity, effectively quashed the possibility of any further collusion between Irish rebels and the French. Henri IV's unwillingness to annoy James I, who concluded the Treaty of London with Spain in 1604, James's search for a Spanish or French bride and his resolution to concentrate on securing his position in England meanwhile proved decisive in ensuring the maintenance of stable amicable relations between the three monarchs in the first decade of the seventeenth century.
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