History
Originally a fishing town, Kinsale's sheltered harbour has made it a place of strategic importance in Irish, and English, history. The town received its first royal charter from Edward III in 1333, but it was of little importance up until the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, a disastrous defeat for the Irish which signalled the end of the Gaelic aristocracy as a power for the English to reckon with. A Spanish fleet stood in the bay ready to support the Irish cause against Elizabethan forces, but was unable to make useful contact with O'Neill and O'Donnell attacking from the north. So the battle was lost, and although resistance to English rule continued, six years later came "the flight of the Earls" - when the Irish nobility fled to the Continent, giving up the fight for their own lands. It was also at Kinsale that James II landed with French support in an attempt to regain his throne in 1689, and it was later the port of his final departure from Ireland after the Battle of the Boyne. The town was an important naval base for the English Crown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the sixteenth-century tower house in Cork Street - Desmond Castle - became known as "The French Prison" when it was used to hold as many as six hundred French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars. It was off the Old Head of Kinsale that the ocean liner, the Lusitania , en route to Liverpool from New York, was torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915, killing 1198 people. It remains a controversial incident: Germany claimed there was ammunition on board; the US said it contained only civilians. Whatever the truth, it has been seen as a catalyst for America's entry into World War I.
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