Somhairle Mac Domhnail

Somhairle Mac Domhnaill (c. 1580 – c. 1632), called by English speakers Sorley McDonnell, was a renowned soldier for the Gaelic cause in Ireland and Scotland during the Thirty Years War and the patron who commissioned two 17th-century manuscript collections of poems, Duanaire Finn and The Book of O'Connor Donn.

Mac Domhnaill was born in the Glens of County Antrim about the year 1580 to Séamas Mac Domhnaill of Dunluce, son of the renowned Sorley Boy MacDonnell) and Máire Ní Néill of the Clandeboy O'Neills. The English conquest of 1601 ended any hopes of Somhairle's to succeed to his father's lands.

He was party to the Irish rebel conspiracy of 1615. When the rebellion fell through he escaped to Scotland to take part in a MacDonald rising. In the space of a few months he overturned Campbell control of hereditary MacDonald lands in Islay, Jura Colonsay and Kintyre, but fled to Ireland when Archibald Campbell, 7th Earl of Argyll, led an army against them.

In 1616 he captured a ship in Larne and continued the fight in the Inner Hebrides. He then captured a French ship and sailed to Dunkirk in the Spanish Netherlands with a band of Scotsmen to engage in the Spanish army.

As a result of French and English protest to the Spanish government in the Netherlands, Mac Domhnail and his men had to seek asylum in an abbey in Dunkirk. After intervention by Ó Néill and Ó Domhnaill they were allowed their freedom.

As a captain in the Spanish army, Mac Domhnail was commissioned to raise a company of musketeers in Flanders. He took part in the Bohemian campaign in the Thirty Years War and fought at the head of his company in the Verdugo regiment in the Battle of White Mountain, 1620.

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