By the seventeenth century, however, the waning of medieval systems of military lordship across the Lowlands, as in England, began to make the Highland clans look very different indeed. When the sixteenth century produced the triumph of firearms in warfare across Europe, the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland adapted in different ways. The former, led by Hugh O’Neill, took on the new gunpowder-based military technology from the Continent, so that he could engage English soldiers with the same weapons: guns and pikes (long spears), supported by horsemen. The Highlanders, not able to afford these, adopted an opposite response which slowly came into force in the first half of the seventeenth century. This was to throw away their heavy medieval armour and swords, and equip their men as light and mobile infantry, armed with leather shields and two-edged, one-handed broadswords. With the advantage of slope in their favour, they could charge fast enough to get among musketeers before they had time to fire off more than one volley, at long range, and so cut them down. Given the right terrain, in which the Highlands abounded, and a good commander, this ‘Highland charge’ could be devastatingly effective. By the middle of the century, therefore, the attempts by James VI’s regime to suppress traditional Gaelic Scottish culture had backfired; it had evolved into something that was in military terms much more dangerous than before, and even more distinct from the Lowland Scots, let alone the rest of the British. To the ‘Irish Problem’ created under the Tudors, a ‘Highland Problem’ had now been added.