Felim O'Neill of Kinard - Execution

Execution

However, this was not enough to stop Ireland being re-conquered by the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell in 1649-53. The well trained and supplied Parliamentarians crushed all Confederate and Royalist resistance and imposed a harsh settlement on Irish Catholics.

The Ulster Army was routed at the Battle of Scarrifholis in 1650. Felim O'Neill escaped the battle but spent the remaining years of his life as fugitive. He successfully held off a Parliamentarian assault on Charlemont Fort shortly after the disaster at Scarrifholis, inflicting heavy casualties on the English troops before surrendering on terms and marching way with his remaining troops.

Anyone implicated in the Rebellion of 1641 was held responsible for the massacres of Protestant civilians and executed. O'Neill was specifically named as a ringleader in the Cromwellian Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 and could therefore have expected little mercy when he was captured on 4 February 1653 at Roughan Castle where he had taken refuge, near Newmills, County Tyrone. He was taken to Dublin, where he was hanged, drawn and quartered for treason.

O'Neill may have been able to avoid execution if he had testified that he had Charles I's commission for the uprising of 1641, as the Parliamentarians had claimed at the time. However, O'Neill refused to do this. In August 1653, O'Neill was executed, in accordance with the verdict of a High Court set up in Dublin by the Cromwellian government.

O'Neill is depicted as an historical character in Annraoi Ó Liatháin's Irish language novel Dún na Cinniúna centring around the 1651 siege of Charlemont Fort in Tyrone.

O'Neill's defeat at the battle of Glanmaquin in 1642 is described in Darach Ó Scolaí's novel An Cléireach.

He was survived by at least one child, Górdún Ó Neill.