The Irish Wild Geese were Irish émigrés who left Ireland in waves between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, generally heading to Roman Catholic countries on the continent such as Spain, France, Austria and the Papal State in Italy. Early on the Wild Geese were individuals who had resisted the encroachments of English crown rule into the quasi-independent Gaelic lordships of Ireland during the Tudor era, while later they were people who had engaged in rebellions such as the Confederate War (1641–1653) and the Williamite War (1689–1691) against England. Many were solders and subsequently found employment in the armies of Spain, France and Austria on the continent. Others carved out prominent positions as merchants. Irish merchants from Galway, for instance, obtained a prominent position within the Bordeaux wine industry in the eighteenth century. Many people in disparate parts of the world today will be able to trace their roots back to Ireland, from whence an ancestor migrated as one of the Wild Geese between 1550 and 1800.[1]
Irish Wild Geese chronology of eventsIrish Wild Geese chronology of events
By the middle of the sixteenth century Ireland was an island that was only partially controlled by the English crown. However, from late in the reign of King Henry VIII of England and Ireland (1509–1547) a more aggressive program of conquest was adopted in Ireland. Over the next half century the three dozen or so Gaelic Irish lordships were gradually conquered by the English state. This was resisted, while the imposition of the English Protestant Reformation on a resoundingly Roman Catholic country also alienated older English settlers whose roots in Ireland went back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As early as the 1570s, some Irish lords and their followers were travelling to the continent to try and obtain military aid from the Papacy in Rome or the monarchs of Roman Catholic France and Spain against the English government. Over time, as the Tudor conquest of Ireland was cemented, many of these Irishmen abroad became permanent exiles, becoming the first Wild Geese in the process.[2]
This pattern accelerated in the seventeenth century. The Tudor conquest of Ireland was largely completed in 1603. Two major wars to try and overthrow the English settlement of the island and the colonial plantations which had accompanied it were fought in the middle and end of the seventeenth century. These are known as the Confederate War (1641–1653) and the Williamite War (1689–1691). In both instances, Irish defeat saw a wave of migration from Ireland to France, Spain, Austria and Italy. The level of emigration attendant on the end of the Williamite War was particularly large, as the Treaty of Limerick that was agreed at the end of it in 1691 specifically allowed for nearly 20,000 Irish men, women and children to leave Ireland for the continent.[3]
The flight from Ireland continued into the eighteenth century. At this latter time it was not driven by any wars against crown rule. Instead the Irish were now departing in response to a series of punitive Papal Laws imposed in order to politically, socially and economically disenfranchise the Roman Catholics of Ireland. These ranged from prohibiting the Irish from owning horses to barring them from inheriting large amounts of land or holding political office. As a consequence, many Irish people continued to join the other Wild Geese on the continent.[4] The flight of the Wild Geese only really ended at the close of the eighteenth century as the Papal Laws were lifted and the overt political and religious discrimination against the Irish eased. Fresh massive waves of Irish emigration began in the 1830s and 1840s, but this involved migration to the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries further afield rather than the European continent. This latter migration was also driven more by the over-population of Ireland, the Great Famine of the 1840s and 1850s and general poverty, rather than political and religious issues.[5]
Extent of migration of the Irish Wild GeeseExtent of migration of the Irish Wild Geese
The migration of the Wild Geese came in waves. One of the first such waves occurred at the end of the Nine Years’ War (c. 1593–1603) which completed the Tudor Conquest of Ireland. Spain was allied with the Irish lordships during the war as part of the wider Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1603). When a Spanish expeditionary force was defeated by the English crown at the Battle of Kinsale in southern Ireland very late in 1601 many thousands of Irish lords, soldiers and clerics began leaving Ireland for Spain and other parts of Europe. In 1607 a group of nearly a hundred political leaders of the rebellion such as Hugh O’Neill, second earl of Tyrone, left Ireland as well, eventually travelling to Rome and obtaining Papal patronage in the Eternal City.[6]
Other early waves were less voluntary. As part of their plans to initiate a state-run plantation of the northern province of Ulster, the crown forcibly transported thousands of Irish swordsmen from Ireland to the Baltic Sea, where they were recruited into the armies of both the Kingdom of Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Polish-Swedish War that was underway between 1600 and 1611.[7]
A fresh wave of more voluntary emigration occurred towards the end of the Confederate War, particularly so in 1649 and 1650 after the English Parliament executed King Charles I and Oliver Cromwell arrived to Ireland with an expeditionary force to overthrow the Irish Confederacy. One of the greatest single waves of migration of all came with the signing of the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. An estimated 15,000 Irish soldiers and an additional 4,000 relatives and family members left the country as a result of this. Most headed for France in this latter instance, which had been allied with the Irish during the Williamite War.[8] Finally, the migration continued through the eighteenth century, taking place to France, Spain, Austria and Italy, while some Irish also began heading to the lands of the Spanish Empire in South America. Amongst the latter was Ambrose O’Higgins, a native of Sligo who moved to South America in the mid-1750s. His son, Bernardo O’Higgins, played a prominent role in the Chilean War of Independence (c. 1812–1827) and was the first leader of a fully independent Chile.[9]
Demographic impact of the Wild GeeseDemographic impact of the Wild Geese
The demographic impact of the migration of the Wild Geese was quite considerable over time. A precise figure is hard to establish, but across a period of two and a half centuries there were well over 100,000 people who left Ireland to resettle in places like France, Spain, Austria, Italy and parts of South America. Many of these slightly Hispanicized or Gallicized their names, but were still easily identifiable as Irish men and women. They also obtained some senior positions in the foreign armies of their adopted homelands. Alejandro O’Reilly, for instance, born in Meath north of the city of Dublin in Ireland, became inspector general of the infantry forces of the Spanish Empire in the middle of the eighteenth century.[10]
Other Wild Geese came to prominence as part of the French wine industry. The merchants of the city of Galway in western Ireland had longstanding ties to the city of Bordeaux in France, with the Irish selling salmon and other prized fish to the French in return for Bordeaux wine. Drawing on their ties to the Bordeaux viticulturists, when Galway families like the Lynches, D’Arcys and Kirwans started leaving Ireland in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many headed for Bordeaux and eventually acquired a stake in the wine trade there. Some of Bordeaux’s most esteemed winemakers today are companies established by Irish Wild Geese in the eighteenth century, notably Chateau Lynch-Bages. Thus, the legacy of the Irish Wild Geese is substantial and many people in France, Spain, Austria, Italy and parts of South America today will be able to trace their ancestry to people who left Ireland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.[11]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the Irish Wild GeeseExplore more about the Irish Wild Geese
- Index of Irish Wills, 1484-1858 records collection on MyHeritage
- Prerogative Wills of Ireland, 1536-1810 records collection on MyHeritage
- Ireland Marriages, 1619-1898 records collection on MyHeritage
- Tracing Your Immigrant Ancestor to Ireland at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities in Early Modern Europe (Dublin, 2006).
- ↑ Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (Dublin, 1994).
- ↑ Harman Murtagh, ‘The Williamite War, 1689–91’, in History Ireland, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1993).
- ↑ Liam Chambers, ‘The Irish in Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1691–1815’, in James Kelly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, Volume III (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 569–592.
- ↑ Arthur Gribben (ed.), The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America (Amherst, Massachusetts, 1999).
- ↑ John McCavitt, The Flight of the Earls (Dublin, 2002).
- ↑ Chester S. L. Dunning and David R. C. Hudson, ‘The Transportation of Irish Swordsmen to Sweden and Russia and plantation in Ulster (1609-1613)’, in Archivium Hibernicum, Vol. 66 (2013), pp. 422–453.
- ↑ Mark McLaughlin and Chris Warner, The Wild Geese: The Irish Brigades of France and Spain (London, 1980).
- ↑ Tim Fanning, Paisanos: The Forgotten Irish who Changed the Face of Latin America (Dublin, 2016), chapter 9.
- ↑ https://www.dib.ie/biography/oreilly-count-alexander-a6980
- ↑ https://thisdayinwinehistory.com/the-wine-geese/