Florence Mac Carthy - Early Life

Early Life

MacCarthy was born in 1560 at Kilbrittain Castle near Kinsale in the province of Munster in Ireland, into the MacCarthy Reagh dynasty, rulers of Carbery, the son of Donogh MacCarthy Reagh, 11th Prince of Carbery. His grandfather was Donal MacCarthy Reagh, 9th Prince of Carbery.

The significance of MacCarthy's career lies in his command of territories in west Munster, at a time when the Tudor conquest of Ireland was underway. Southwest Munster was the area most open to Spanish intervention, which had been mooted from the late 1570s to aid Catholic rebellions in Ireland. The overlord of much of this area, but excluding Carbery, was the MacCarthy Mór of Desmond, whose lands were located in modern west Cork and Kerry. There were, in addition, three more princely branches of the MacCarthy dynasty, the MacCarthys of Muskerry, the MacCarthys of Duhallow, and finally the most wealthy: the MacCarthys Reagh of independent Carbery, of whom Florence's father had been a (semi-)sovereign prince. It was into a complex interplay between the crown government and these opposing branches that Florence found himself pitched.

The MacCarthy Reagh branch established itself as loyal to the crown during the Desmond Rebellions (1569–73 and 1579–83), in order to assert their independence from their nominal overlords, the Earl of Desmond and the MacCarthy Mor, both of whom had gone into rebellion. Florence's father, Donagh MacCarthy Reagh, served the crown faithfully and reported that he had mobilised his men to drive the rebel Gerald Fitzgerald, 15th Earl of Desmond out of his territory during the Second Desmond Rebellion. When his father died in 1581, Florence, by then in his late teens or early twenties, led around 300 men in the English service with the assistance of an English captain, William Stanley, and his lieutenant, Jacques de Franceschi, under the overall command of the Earl of Ormonde. They drove Desmond’s remaining followers out of MacCarthy territory, ‘into his own waste country’, where the rebel earls' troops could find no provisions and deserted. Florence also claimed credit for the killing of Gorey MacSweeney and Morrice Roe, two of Desmond’s gallowglass captains.

Upon his father's death in 1581, MacCarthy inherited substantial property but was not the prince's tanist (second in command and usually successor to the head), and therefore did not assume his father's title, which went to Florence's uncle, Owen MacCarthy Reagh, 12th Prince of Carbery. The position of tanist went to Florence's cousin, Donal na Pipi (Donal of the Pipes). But in 1583 Florence did go to court, where he was received by the queen, who granted him 1000 marks and an annuity of 100 marks. In 1585 he served as a member of the Irish Parliament at Dublin.