1602 — the Nine Years' War
Mountjoy's fort
Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, was the Lord Deputy who finally broke Hugh O'Neill's rebellion. After Kinsale in late 1601, his army moved north into Ulster scorching everything that could feed a resistance. In the summer of 1602 he reached the Blackwater, built a bridge, and on the Armagh bank threw up an earthen star fort with four bastions. He named it for himself — Charles + mont. A garrison of 150 under Sir Toby Caulfeild moved in. The fort was modern by the standards of the day, one of only a handful of artillery forts then standing in Ireland, and that modernity is why it mattered for the next fifty years.
1641
Sir Phelim and the rising
On the night of 22 October 1641 the Ulster Irish rose. Sir Phelim O'Neill — who had been dining at Charlemont with the governor, Lord Caulfeild, the great-nephew of Sir Toby — seized the fort by trick rather than by storm. The garrison was overpowered, Caulfeild taken prisoner. Charlemont became the chief Confederate fortress in mid-Ulster and stayed in Irish hands for the next nine years. Caulfeild was later shot dead in custody, an act for which Sir Phelim was eventually hanged.
5 June 1646
Benburb
Owen Roe O'Neill brought the Ulster Confederate army up from Cavan in May 1646. Robert Munro's Scottish Covenanters marched south to intercept him. O'Neill crossed the Blackwater above Charlemont, camped at Benburb on the Tyrone bank a day before Munro thought he could, and let the Scots wear themselves out marching twenty-four kilometres in summer heat to reach him. The Scots arrived exhausted; O'Neill held his pike-and-musket formation through their cavalry charge, then advanced into the river bend and pushed them into the water. Munro lost between two and three thousand men. O'Neill lost about three hundred. It was the largest Irish field victory of the seventeenth century — and Charlemont was the Confederate base behind it.
Siege of Charlemont, 1650
The last stand
Four years later, after the Confederate cause had been broken at Scariffhollis in Donegal, Sir Phelim O'Neill — the only senior Irish commander to escape that field — fell back on Charlemont with what was left of the Ulster army. Charles Coote arrived with Cromwell's New Model Army in July 1650 and besieged the fort. After a month of close-quarter fighting, with powder almost gone, O'Neill asked for terms on 14 August. He got generous ones: march out with arms, head for a port, take ship for the continent. By the count of soldiers killed, the siege of Charlemont was the second-bloodiest fight the Parliamentarians had in Ireland — beaten only by Clonmel.
30 July 1920
The fire
The fort lasted as a barracks and then a private house for two and a half centuries after Cromwell. On the night of 30 July 1920, in the early months of the War of Independence, around forty armed men of the IRA arrived at the gates, overpowered the lone caretaker, and set the place alight. The main block burned to its foundations. The seventeenth-century gatehouse — set apart from the main building — survived. That gatehouse, the bastion lines underfoot, and the name on the map are what's left of three centuries of garrison.