The history of Bandon
Inside St Multose Church in Kinsale, Ireland, Prince Rupert of the Rhine proclaimed the executed Charles I's exiled son as Charles II, weeks after the January 1649 beheading in London reached the town. The same church, built around 1190 on ground with a Christian settlement tradition reaching back to the sixth century, later took in the dead of the 1915 Lusitania sinking off the Old Head of Kinsale.
A Norman church watched a small trading port for centuries
The bell tower rising over the graveyard a few streets away is Norman work, put up around 1190. It stands on ground already old by then. Local tradition places a Christian settlement here from the sixth century. The church itself may sit on that same early foundation. For centuries Church of St Multose was simply the parish church of a small trading port. It watched ships come and go from the harbor below.
That changed in 1601. A Spanish fleet landed at Kinsale to back an Irish rebellion against English rule. The town found itself at the center of a war far bigger than itself. English forces crushed the Irish and Spanish armies outside the walls that winter. This ended any real hope of an independent Gaelic Ireland. The church had already seen soldiers pass through its doors. It was about to see something stranger.
A prince proclaimed a king inside the nave
In London, on 30 January 1649, Charles I was beheaded outside his own palace. England had no king. Word of it took weeks to cross the sea. When it reached Kinsale, it landed inside this church.
Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the dead king's nephew, was in the town with a fleet loyal to the Stuart cause. Standing inside St Multose, he heard the news. He did not wait for London to decide what came next. He declared the executed king's exiled son the new monarch, Charles II, right there in the nave.
It was a proclamation with no crown, no parliament, and no kingdom behind it. Charles II would not sit on an English throne for another eleven years. But in this small church on a Munster hillside, he was already king. One prince in one room said so.
A Spanish siege broke Gaelic Ireland's last resistance
The proclamation in the nave was not the first time a distant war decided this town's fate. Half a century earlier, a Spanish fleet sailed into Kinsale harbor. It came to back an Irish rebellion against English rule. The Spanish commander, Don Juan del Águila, held the town for three months. An English army under Lord Mountjoy dug in outside the walls. Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell marched their forces the length of Ireland to relieve the siege. On the night of the final battle, the Irish army was routed before it could join the Spanish garrison inside. Del Águila surrendered soon after. The defeat broke the last serious Gaelic resistance to English rule in Ireland. Within a few years, its leading lords fled the country for good.
A castle stored gunpowder then burned with prisoners inside
A stone tower a few streets from the church absorbed that war directly. Desmond Castle (Kinsale), a Fitzgerald family town house built around 1500, became a magazine during the siege. Spanish gunpowder and weapons were stored inside its thick walls while the town held out. Once the fighting ended, the castle kept its military use. It became a prison for foreign captives, so many held there that people started calling it the French Prison. In 1747, fire tore through the building. Many of the prisoners locked inside died in it. The tower went on to serve as the borough jail into the 1840s before it was finally emptied of that purpose.
A five-sided fort was built to guard the harbor
The near-catastrophe of 1601 left the English in no mood to be caught again. Within a few years they built James Fort at the harbor mouth. It was a five-sided stone stronghold ringed by earthworks. It was designed to stop any second landing before it reached the town. It stood watch over the same channel the Spanish fleet had sailed up. Kinsale had been a war's battlefield once. Its answer was to make sure it never would be again so easily.
A torpedoed liner brought its dead into the town
That same channel carried a different kind of wreckage into the town three centuries later. A German U-boat torpedoed the ocean liner Kinsale off the Old Head of Kinsale in May 1915, killing nearly 1,200 people. Bodies and survivors were brought ashore into Kinsale itself. The inquest into the deaths was held in the town's own courthouse. Some of the dead were buried in the churchyard around St Multose, in the same ground that already held centuries of the parish's own dead.
The tower still stands over that graveyard, holding both the town's dead and the memory of the one afternoon it crowned somebody else's king.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.