Pirate Queen

The Life of Grace O'Malley

Judith Cook

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780857903112
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historische Biographien

In a life stranger than any fiction, Grace O’Malley, daughter of a clan chief in the far west of Ireland, went from marriage at fifteen to piracy on the high seas. She soon had a fleet of galleys under her commander, but her three decades of plundering, kidnapping, murder and mayhem came to a close in 1586, when she was captured and sentenced to hang. Saved from the scaffold by none other than Queen Elizabeth herself – another powerful woman in a man’s world – Grace’s life took another extraordinary turn, when it was rumoured she had become intelligencer for the queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Was this the price of her freedom? Judith Cook explores this and other questions about the life and times of this remarkable woman in a fascinating, thrilling and impeccably researched book.

1
Momentous and Dangerous Times

Grace was born about 1530, or possibly a little later, making her almost an exact contemporary of the woman with whom the fortunes of herself and her country were to be inextricably bound up. Elizabeth 1 and Grace were born within a short time of each other and died only weeks apart. Before looking at the state of play between the two countries at the time of their births it is useful to know a little of Ireland’s history up to that point. Magnus Magnusson, in his short history of Ireland, Landlord and Tenant, puts this well: ‘History has been used in Ireland as a story, as a rich and passionate source of rhetoric for the next plunge into bitter violence. Perhaps if we all had a greater understanding of how things happened, and why things happened, we might have more sympathy for one another’s standpoints’.

Ireland has suffered a host of invaders, starting in prehistoric times with an influx of population, possibly from Brittany. These were the people who built the great monuments of New Grange and Knowth, the stone lines at Carnac in Brittany and the chambered tombs and stone circles found along the west coasts of Britain. Next came the Celts from central Europe who brought with them first iron and the knowledge of how to make it, then Christianity. By the fifth century Ireland was a largely pastoral country, divided into a number of small kingdoms, with a considerable number of monasteries and a strongly established Celtic Christian Church. So strong, in fact, that it sent out missionaries to Cornwall, Scotland, Wales and Western Europe. Marvels accrued to them. Several of this standing army of Irish saints arrived in Cornwall, sailing, legend has it, on leaves, in sieves or by other miraculous means. Others, such as St Columba, appear to have reached Scotland using more conventional means.

In the ninth century the Vikings invaded the country, settling first in Dublin then in Wexford and Waterford. Magnus Magnusson points out that it was this invasion that brought Ireland into the mainstream of European trade and commerce, turning the cities in which they settled into major trading ports. Many of these same trading routes were used from then on by Irish seafaring and trading families, one of the most prominent being the O’Malleys.

So, following the Conquest in 1066, to the Normans. But it was to take them another century before they attempted to annexe Ireland. There was then an influx of land-hungry Anglo-Norman knights, one of the most famous being Richard Fitzgilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, known as ‘Strongbow’. They studded the country with their castles and tower houses, some 3000 in all, the tower houses very similar in design to those still to be seen on the Scots/English Border. But it remained a very incomplete conquest, with the bulk of the invaders settling inside what was to become known as ‘the Pale’, the colonial enclave comprising the counties of Meath, Louth, Kildare and Dublin. The arrival of the Anglo-Normans was to remain a very partial ‘conquest’, even though some did settle outside the Pale. But while some barons loosely controlled parts of the country, and developed new patterns of trade, they never succeeded in doing what they had achieved in England: creating a new nation that combined the characteristics of natives and incomers alike.

At least some of those who settled outside the Pale were themselves changed and influenced by those among whom they lived, by joint trading, intermarriage and by a growing acceptance of the country’s laws and learning. The rest, the descendants of the twelth- and thirteenth-century settlers who had remained within it, spoke English, accepted the rule of English law and were fiercely loyal to the Crown to whom they looked for protection. The Crown, in turn, counted on their support for whoever was deputised to represent the Crown. These descendants of the Anglo-Norman lords considered themselves to be a bastion against the terrible barbarians outside, not least those in Ulster and along the west coast. They offered protection to their tenants and followers in return for payment and/or military service. But in some instances this in turn could lead to some ‘old English’ lords getting above themselves, thus becoming part of the problem, rather than its solution. Ireland, by the time Henry VIII came to the throne, was therefore a deeply divided nation. It also had, once one got outside the sphere of English influence, a reputation for being a very dangerous one.

As Francisco Chiericati, a priest and papal nuncio who had toured Ireland, wrote to the Duchess of Mantua: ‘Irish people are very religious but do not regard stealing as sinful, nor is it punished as a crime. They hold that we [foreigners] are uncivilised because we keep the gifts of fortune to ourselves, while they live naturally believing all things should be held in common. This accounts for the numbers of thieves: you are in peril of being robbed or killed here if you travel the country without a strong bodyguard. I have heard that in places further north people are even more uncivilised, going about nude, living in caves and eating raw meat’. While Chiericati’s notions are a bit over the top, there is no doubt that the politics of the country were chaotic. For those who want more detailed knowledge of the Irish clan families, the law and the politics at the time Grace was born, there are plenty of academic histories available on the subject, but a brief summary can be given here.

At the time of her birth about sixty Irish chieftains (or ‘kings’ as some preferred to style themselves) ruled their ‘counties’ or ‘countries’ outside the Pale quite independent of English rule. Political control, such as it was, rested in the personal headship of the clans, most especially the dominant kin group who were the hereditary rulers of their own and lesser clans. This produced a proliferation of ruling dynasties.

The social system was patriarchal. The lands great or small of the clan leader, the chief, were his property, farmed out to his family and to his tenants. Those living immediately outside his ‘country’ could also be his tenants, paying him cattle in exchange for having his soldiers on their land as protection. The wives of such chieftains, unluckily finding themselves widowed by warfare or disease, had no rights whatsoever under Irish law to succeed to any of their husbands’ lands, an injustice later taken up by Grace even as far as the English Court. Nor did the succession automatically come down father to son but was by election within the extended ruling family. Customarily, such an election took place well before the death of the current chief, the preferred successor being known as a tanist. This, theoretically, was designed to prevent quarrels and ensure a smooth takeover of power on the death of the chief (which might well be the case), but all too often by the time the tanist was ready to assume the leadership he found there were powerful rival claimants from within his own family. They could be the sons of the chief – even those who were illegitimate but who had been recognised by their fathers – younger brothers, close cousins or members of a different branch of the family altogether. Unsurprisingly this led, in turn, to internecine warfare and even assassination.

The Irish, the ‘Brehon’, law was also quite different to that of the English. The word means ‘judge’ and the brehons were usually hereditary holders of the office. They were experts in the arcane knowledge of ancient legal texts and were called on to adjudicate in cases involving territorial disputes between clans over land or in a variety of matters between individual clansmen. In such cases both parties, if they agreed to ask the brehons to act as arbitrators, had to agree beforehand to their decision. If it was a question of damages, then out of any financial award about an eleventh went to the brehon along with a fee for whichever ‘lord’ oversaw justice. A successful plaintiff in the case was often forced to seize goods or cattle as a ‘pledge for justice’.

But when it came to criminal behaviour the brehon courts were virtually without fixed penalties or punishments. Nor was there any way of enforcing the decision of the courts although traditionally theft, arson and murder were resolved by payments to the victim’s family. A convicted thief had to pay back several times the value of the stolen property, a proportion of which went to the chieftain of the plaintiff. The basic principle was that the family was responsible for all its members. Therefore the normal penalty for killing someone, say, during an inter-clan raid or following a cattle-rustling expedition (which in England would be counted as murder) was a special fine known as an eiric which was exacted from the culprit and his kinsmen and was usually paid in cattle, the number varying according to the status of the victim. When a member of the MacCoghlan clan murdered a foster-brother of the Earl of Kildare in 1554, that clan, and the associated Devlins, had to pay the huge fine of 340 cows to the Earl.

Rebellions against English rule and internecine clan battles resulted in the Irish clans needing substantial numbers of fighting men, more than they could raise themselves, and it is in the thirteenth century that we first hear mention of the galloglaigh – the galloglas – who came over from Scotland to fight for the Irish chiefs. The Gaelic name means ‘ young fighting man’. The galloglas had their own chiefs and leaders whose loyalty was to a particular Irish clan or a lesser clan associated with it, and one of the first Scots to make a name for himself was a MacDonald from Kintyre. MacDonalds were among the most prominent of the galloglas who fought on behalf of the O’Neills in Ulster. The O’Malleys too had their own ‘hereditary’ galloglas drawn from the Donnell clan. While some of the galloglas finally settled permanently in Ireland, most came over in large numbers from the the Highlands and Islands for the ‘fighting season’ between May and October, returning home for the winter. There was also some intermarriage between Scotland and Ireland. Shane O’Neill was related by marriage to both the Macleans and Campbells, which was useful when it came to his needing fighting men. Cyril Falls gives as an example the marriage of Tirlagh O’Neill to Lady Agnes Macdonald, widow of James MacDonald of the Isles and the daughter of the Campbell Earl of Argyll. ‘This unromantic match between an elderly Irish chieftain who drank like a fish and a middle-aged Scots widow was, from the bridegroom’s point of view, a method of obtaining mercenaries, and from that of the bride’s relations an insurance policy . . .’ The galloglas most closely associated with the O’Malleys were the ClanDonnell, many of whom eventually settled in Ireland.

The galloglas chiefs were accorded great respect both by their own men and the clans for which they fought, and although they are sometimes described as ‘mercenaries’, this is not how they saw themselves. Traditionally the Irish kerns were the musketeers and the galloglas the pikemen, although there were also some galloglas forces of horse, ‘shot’, bowmen and halberdiers. When they fought they wore chain mail and steel bonnets but they could look equally intimidating out of uniform. When Shane O’Nell visited London in 1542 he arrived with an escort of galloglas armed, writes William Camden in his Annals, ‘with battle-axes, bare-headed, with flowing curls, yellow shirts dyed with saffron, short tunics and rough cloaks, whom the English followed with as much wonderment as if they had come from China or the Americas’.

The reward of a galloglas soldier was one bullock per quarter as pay and two for food. The captain of a troop of galloglas was allowed to reckon thirteen ‘dead pays’ in drawing wages for a band of one hundred, that is, if his company numbered only eighty-seven he was allowed to draw pay for a hundred and pocket the difference.

Cyril Falls, in Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, writes of the Ulster lord, Tirlagh Luineach O’Neill, having over two thousand men under his command, made up of two hundred ‘horse’, two hundred galloglas, a thousand kern and four hundred Scots. So who were the four hundred Scots who were not classed as galloglas? They were the redshanks, the true mercenaries, largely drawn from the Western Isles, and hired on what we would call today short-term contracts. They owed no particular allegiance to any Irish clan, did not intermarry with the Irish or settle down in that country, and when they had done what was asked of them and been paid for it, went straight back to Scotland. Legend has it that their name originated from the English who had to fight them and who admired their hardihood in wading through rivers in the winter, which made their legs red . . . However, a more sensible explanation is that it was because they wore leggings made from red deer-skin. It was not, says Falls, a term used in contempt, for the English had a tremendous respect for the Redshanks. As we shall see later, Grace made use both of galloglas and Redshanks, and indeed of galleys manned entirely by Scots.

In the early part of the sixteenth century the English kings had taken a fairly relaxed attitude to Ireland, the last major foray – under Richard II in 1399 – ending in humiliation for the English and disaster for him. Then, for a considerable time during the 1400s, England had been taken up with its own internecine power struggles, the long-running civil war known as ‘The Wars of the Roses’ which finally ended in 1485 with the death of Richard III on Bosworth Field and the triumph of the Tudor Lancasters. To most people, if they thought about it at all, Ireland was a foreign country outside the comparative safety of the Pale.

When Henry VIII succeeded to the English throne he was content, at first, to style himself ‘Lord of Ireland’, and leave it at that, with only a token presence representing him within the Pale. Up to and immediately following his accession in 1509 the English had been far more concerned about the Scots. By the end of the 1520s and into the early 1530s he had other things on his mind: the prolonged battle to obtain a divorce from Queen Catherine to enable him to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn, leading, in turn, to the fall of his closest adviser, Cardinal Wolsey; his finally pushing through the divorce whatever the Pope might do or say; the secret marriage to Anne; his subsequent excommunication in 1533 and the birth in that year not of the longed-for son but of yet another daughter, the Princess Elizabeth. A year later he made himself Head of the Church of England and set about ‘dissolving’ the monasteries, taking their land and wealth either for his own use or to give to his favourites. From outside the country onlookers watched aghast as even churchmen such as the Abbot of Glastonbury or Bishop Fisher were put to death, not to mention Sir Thomas More.

It was shortly after Elizabeth’s birth, when Grace would have been about two years old, that he finally turned his attention to Ireland. On bad terms with Spain, France and the Holy Roman Empire and with continuing trouble from the Scots, he realised that over the water was a country which although allegedly under the rule of the English Crown was in reality no such thing. Not only that, the most substantial part of the population remained solidly true to the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church, with close, very close, links with Scotland. He decided to do something about it. After all, if for no other reason, there were yet more monasteries in Ireland which would give rich pickings. Both Grace and Elizabeth had been born into momentous and dangerous times.

2
The ‘Crop-Haired Girl’

The O’Malley clan traced their ancestry back to Cosgrach, a descendent of a King killed by the Vikings in 811 A.D., and one of the first references to them appears in the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters. They described themselves as ‘true Gaels’, ‘Irish of the Irish’, and have one of the rare ‘O’ clan names from which the prefix has never been dropped. At the time of writing, over eighty per cent of O’Malleys still live in County Mayo.

H.T. Knox, in his History of County Mayo, one of the very few histories of the area, notes that in the twelfth century Book of Rights the O’Malleys had to pay a tribute to the King of Connacht of 100 milch cows, 100 hogs and 100 casks of beer, the King giving them in return ‘five horses, five ships, five swords and five corselets’. The clan motto was, and still is, Terra Marique Potens – Powerful by Land and Sea. At the time of Grace’s birth they held the chieftainship of the baronies of Murrisk and Burrishoole.

Her father was Dubhdara ‘Blackoak’ O’Malley, the elected chief of his clan, his name generally being given in English as Owen. His septal (or clan) lands were in the west at Umhaill Uachatarach Ui Maille, Murrisk, Co. Mayo, which, again roughly translated into English, became known as the Territory of the Owls. The land stretched around Clew Bay, taking in Ireland’s Holy Mountain, Croagh Patrick (still a place of annual pilgrimage), Achill Island and the Corrain peninsula, Clare Island, about four miles out from the mainland, and the islands of Inisturk and Inisboffin. While Clew Bay provides shelter, it is scattered with small uninhabited islets and reefs and can be treacherous. Inland the O’Malley lands were bordered by the Partry Mountains to the east and Maumturk Mountains to the south. Even today, driving from Galway along the ‘back road’ to Louisburgh and Westport through Leenane and the oddly named Delphi, houses and farms and villages are sparse. The scenery is stunning. Mountains with pointed peaks, like a child’s drawing, rise steeply on each side of the valley. Not for nothing has it been described as bandit country.

Writing on Ireland later in the sixteenth century, the poet Edmund Spenser pointed out the difficulties of grappling with a ‘flying enemy’ in such a terrain, an enemy who ‘hides himself in the woods, bogs and mountains from where he will not draw forth but in some strait (sic) passage or perilous ford where he knows the army must pass; there will he lie in wait, and if he find advantage fit will dangerously hazard the troubled soldier. Therefore to seek him out that still flitteth, and follow him that can hardly be, were vain and bootless’. After falling on the unsuspecting English troops or, indeed, members of a hostile clan, the Irish would vanish like smoke into the mountains.

To protect themselves by sea and land the O’Malleys built a chain of castles, not so much out of fear of invasion or to deter the English as protection against other, predatory clans. The principal seat at the time of Grace’s birth was Belclare Castle, usefully situated close to a lake with an island to which the family, retainers and fighting men could retreat if the need arose. There were also four more, one near Westport close to the present-day Westport House, another west of Louisburgh, the other two being Kildawnet on Achill Island and that on Clare Island which was to become notorious as the centre for Grace’s piracy. Only Kildawnet and Clare Castles still exist.

Most people when they think of castles imagine something on the scale of Chepstow, Raglan, or Edinburgh but most of the Irish ‘castles’ of the pe...