Irish rebel Felim (or Phelim) O’Neill of Kinard was executed on this date in 1653.

“A well-bred gentleman, three years at court, as free and generous as could be desired, and very complaisant; stout in his person, but, not being bred anything of a soldier, wanted the main art, that is, policy in war and good conduct” by a contemporary assessment, O’Neill numbered among the leaders of the 1641 Irish Rebellion against English governance. He issued a noteworthy manifesto of the affair known as the Proclamation of Dungannon.

The attempted coup helped to launch the English Civil War,* whose local-to-Ireland theater was known as the Irish Confederate Wars — Irish Catholics versus Protestant English and Scottish colonists. Felim O’Neill passed these years as a parliamentarian of the rebel (to English eyes) Confederate Ireland whose destruction required the bloody intervention of Oliver Cromwell.

O’Neill officered troops in this conflict, to no stirring victories. Although far from Confederate Ireland’s most important player, he was significant enough to merit an exception to the 1652 Act for the Settlement of Ireland — which made him an outlaw with a price on his head. He was captured in February 1653 and tried for treason in Dublin, refusing the court’s blandishments to abate the horrible drawing-and-quartering sentence by shifting any blame for the rising to the lately beheaded King Charles I.

* Or for a somewhat broader periodization, the rebellion fit into the Britain-wide breakdown that delivered the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

On this day..

• 1431: Thomas Bagley, Lollard martyr
• 1931: Alfred Arthur Rouse, Blazing Car Murderer
• 1714: A Tyburn dozen
• 1992: Robyn Leroy Parks, botched lethal injection
• 1899: Cordelia Poirier and Samuel Parslow
• 1865: Amy Spain, liberation anticipation
• 1777: James Aitken, aka John the Painter, terrorist of the American Revolution
• 1762: Jean Calas, intolerably
• 2010: Jihan Mohammed Ali and Atef Rohyum Abd El Al Rohyum, lovers
• Themed Set: The Contemporary Middle East
• 1799: The defenders of Jaffa, at Napoleon's command
• 1615: St. John Ogilvie
• 1302: Dante Alighieri condemned