a stinging defeat at the Battle of Clontibret, successive English offensives were driven back in the following years. At the Battle of the Yellow Ford in 1598 up to 2,000 English troops were killed after being attacked on the march to Armagh. The rest were surrounded in Armagh itself but negotiated safe passage for themselves in return for evacuating the town. O'Neill's personal enemy, Sir Henry Bagenal, had been in command of the army and was killed during the early engagements. It was the heaviest defeat ever suffered by the English army in Ireland up to that point. The victory prompted uprisings all over the country, with the assistance of mercenaries in O'Neill's pay and contingents from Ulster, and it is at this point that the war developed in its full force. Hugh O'Neill appointed his supporters as chieftains and earls around the country, notably James Fitzthomas Fitzgerald as the Earl of Desmond and Florence MacCarthy as the MacCarthy Mór. In Munster as many as 9,000 men came out in rebellion. The Munster Plantation, the colonisation of the province with English settlers, was dealt a serious blow; the colonists, among them Edmund Spenser, fled for their lives. Only a handful of native lords remained consistently loyal to either side, and loyalties were complicated by splits within clans. However all the fortified cities and towns of the country sided with the English colonial government. Hugh O'Neill, unable to take walled towns, made repeated overtures to inhabitants of the Pale to join his rebellion, appealing to their Catholicism and to their alienation from the Dublin government and the provincial administrations. For the most part, however, the Old English remained hostile to their hereditary Gaelic enemies. The English fortress at Castle Maine surrendered in November 1599 after a thirteen month siege. Earl of Essex's command In 1599, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex arrived in Ireland with over 17,000 English troops. He took the advice of the Irish privy council, to settle the south of the country with garrisons before making an attempt on Ulster, but this dissipated his forces and he ended up suffering numerous setbacks on a desultory progress through south Leinster and Munster. He spent almost all of his time in Ireland awaiting transport that he had been promised before setting out, it being the only effective way of reaching his stated objective of Lough Foyle; however, a lack of