According to folklore, Grace wasn’t married long. Traditionally, Brehon law held that either party could divorce after a year, merely by uttering the words to dissolve the marriage. Trial marriages were frequent and fashionable, and after a year and a day, it’s said that Grace locked herself in the castle when he arrived, and shouted down from the battlements, “Richard Bourke, I dismiss you!”
Carraigahowley (Rockfleet) Castle
Adding, “And I’m keeping the castle!”
But history shows that they continued together, if not as traditional marriage partners, then as allies, and they presented a united front to the English, who treated them as husband and wife. While Grace was generally conceded to be the more politically astute, there are many instances of mutual support. Richard doesn’t seem to have objected to Grace’s continued piracy and ownership of the castle. And after his death, unlike what had happened with Dónal O’Flaherty, when she lost all claims to his property, Grace took a third of Richard’s property and made sure her son from the marriage, Tibbot-ne-Long (“Toby of the Ships” as he was called), received his inheritance.
LIVING GEOGRAPHY, that’s some of what travel is, especially a pilgrimage undertaken with a biography or history book in hand. It was one thing to read that Grace coveted Carraigahowley Castle for its strategic location; another to slide my hands over the stone walls damp with sea wind, to breathe in the iodine tang of kelp, to see how a scatter of islands and shoals stretch out to protect the castle in this backwater inlet from any surprise attacks by sea.
Rain and gusty winds would come in a few hours, but this morning, sun spackled the mortar of the castle stones and buttered the blue waves as I went to join Mary on the dock. She ran a one-woman sea-angling business, but I’d talked her into taking me out into Clew Bay for a few hours so that I could see Grace’s castle from the water and get a sense of the shape and feel of the bay itself.
Mary was trim but sturdy, brawny in the arms and narrow in the hips. Her skin was smooth and tan, her curly dark hair cut short. She wore sunglasses with leopard-patterned frames. They were the only flashy thing about her, and she didn’t take them off until later in the day. It may have been as much a question of initial shyness as of glare. Later I saw her eyes were a soft, bright blue. She had on a navy fleece jacket and tall rubber boots.
We set off, at first with me standing at the back of the thirty-six-foot Aquastar, so I could snap some photographs of the castle. As it receded dramatically behind us, I came forward into the cabin and perched on a seat next to her. The cabin was comfortably dusty and cluttered, like the dashboard of a beloved old Chevy, but Mary was precise and firm in her handling of the Shamrock I. No surprise that she’d grown up around boats, on one of the inner islands, and had learned seafaring and weather reading from her grandfather and father. She’d begun fishing with her grandfather at age three and at age ten had taken up sport angling, eventually winning dozens of championships in Ireland and Europe. Like Grace, Mary knew Clew Bay, down to every shoal, reef, and tricky current. As we threaded our way through the islands, Mary pointed out the shallows and other areas to watch out for. Below the surface were other little islands, submerged. All the islands, down to the rocky clusters, were named.
“That one’s Frenchman’s Rocks,” she said. “There was a French merchant ship coming out of Westport that came to grief there. Sunk entirely.”
The island where she’d grown up, Clynish, was one of five that were inhabited. In the past, more families had made their home out in Clew Bay. But over the last century, in particular, people began to leave, either for the mainland or England or America, more because of isolation than anything else.
“No one went hungry here,” said Mary. “It was a rich life, between the fishing, the animals, and your potatoes and vegetables. We always had fish to eat, and raised cows and sheep, too, which we sold. We used to put halters on the cattle and put them in boats or lead them across to the mainland during low tides. Islanders would also gather seaweed and sell it on shore.”
Mary and her brother were first taken to school on the mainland by their father in a small boat with an outboard motor. Later she and her brother went back and forth by themselves. “There were days when the motor didn’t work. It was a long row.” She learned to navigate the reefs and currents of Clew Bay early on, and to read the weather and waves. “My father would say, ‘Slow down when you see a big wave coming, Mary.’” Her grandfather used to take her out sailing, in a yawl with a brown sail. “I remember his hand on the tiller. The other hand held a pipe.” Her father taught her to be careful going out to sea, to make sure that nothing was wrong with the boat. “I’m famous for having three of everything.” She added, “Many fathers wouldn’t be happy with a girl managing a boat, but mine was.”
Her father used to take tourists out fishing occasionally on the weekends, and Mary had done it for about fifteen years now. She mostly ferried small parties of men, serious deep-sea fishermen, to the lee of Clare Island or around Achill Island. If the weather turned bad, she could head back into the more protected waters of the bay. The sandbanks, along with the combination of deep and shallow waters, mean productive fishing. “We’ve caught seventeen species of fish,” she told me: blue shark and skate, conger, whiting, John Dory, ling, coalfish, and mackerel among them.
The Shamrock I was packed with gear, and idly, I wondered if I should turn my hand to catching fish. But I was more interested in talking to Mary. I told her my interest in Grace O’Malley. I said the taxi driver who’d brought me to Rockfleet wasn’t impressed by the O’Malleys. “Great thieves,” he’d called them, only half-joking, and had gone on, “Of course everything around here is named O’Malley this and O’Malley that. Is anything named for the common people, for a family like mine? We’re the ones who had our land trampled and taken, our fields burnt, our houses knocked down.”
But Mary had named her daughter Grania, and took pride in being a woman of the sea. “Europe’s only lady skipper,” she told me. She betrayed her pride in this with only a slight tightening of the lips, as if holding back a smile. “Some people call me the modern-day Granuaile,” she said. “Men don’t mind sailing with me. They know I’ll take care of them and lead them to a very successful day of fishing.” Her husband wasn’t much for the sea, she added. He was a roofer, and liked to stay on shore.
Most of the islands of Clew Bay were near the mainland, but now we headed out into rougher waters. I hoped for dolphins, but didn’t see any. The boat bucketed, and Mary told stories of storms that had forced her over to Achill Island to tie up for a few days. I’d been supremely happy while we’d been making our way around the small islands—the empty pasture-lands with crumbling stone walls here and there, the white sandy beaches, the colonies of seals basking or swimming, steel gray heads like helmets flashing—but I also liked riding the foaming green waters farther out, bracing myself in a corner of the cabin as Mary, as she had learned, slowed to take the big waves slugging our bow.
I could imagine Grace looking something like Mary at around forty, though probably more weather-beaten, both of them steady at the tiller, energetic and unflappable. Middle age was the time of some of Grace’s most outrageous exploits, undocumented in history books, recalled in traditional stories in Connaught, burned into the memories of some of the unlucky families who lived through them. The O’Boyles, the MacSweeneys, the O’Loughlins all knew her raiding parties firsthand, as did the inhabitants of the islands off the coast: Inishbofin and the Aran Islands, Inishmore, Inishmaan, Inisheer. She stole their ships; she stole their cattle; she attacked castles all along the coast. At Carradh Castle her men fired a cannonball from their ship and knocked down part of a wall. Her gambling was as legendary as her bravery in battle. She was notorious for swearing and sex, too: perhaps another reason she lived on in popular memory but not in Irish history books.
Given the stories of Grace’s physical toughness and courage, it’s not surprising that there’s even an admiring
tale about the birth of her fourth child, Tibbot-ne-Long, the son of Richard Bourke. Legend has it that she was out at sea when she felt the first contractions. Seeing no need to turn toward shore, she simply went below and delivered him. The day after he was born, as Grace lay in her cabin recuperating, Algerian corsairs attacked the galley. The second-in-command came below and asked her to lead the men against the pirates. “May you be seven times worse off this day twelve months, who cannot do without me for one day,” she said. Half-dressed, she climbed on deck, swearing loudly and blasting the Algerians with her musket while she rallied the men. “Take this from unconsecrated hands,” she shouted. Reputedly, the Algerians were so overwhelmed by her fierceness and dishevelment that they abandoned their attempt to board Grace’s galley and fled.
Those years were halcyon for Grace, but they weren’t to last. The English had first noticed Grace O’Malley when she was married to Dónal O’Flaherty and exacting tolls from merchant ships off Galway. They took greater notice when she beat them back at Hen’s Castle. But for a long while she was only one of many Irish irritants to England’s grand plans for the country, a curiosity perhaps because she was a woman.
Although the Anglo-Normans had nominally conquered Ireland in the thirteenth century, they’d intermarried and become as Irish as the Gaelic clans, given over to the pleasures of cattle stealing, jockeying for power, and feasting and drinking. Richard Bourke’s family, for instance, came from Anglo-Norman stock that had turned Irish. The only part of Ireland that England could be said to control fully was the former Viking town of Dublin and its environs, called “the Pale.” The west and north of Ireland, especially, was boggy and thick with trees, difficult to penetrate. That was how the O’Malleys and other clans had held out so long. With the reign of Henry VII came new policies aimed at subduing and colonizing the wild Irish, but it was Henry VIII who decided to call himself King of Ireland. Within a few years of his death, Elizabeth I took up where her father and grandfather had left off.
The insidious system of “surrender and regrant” played on the fragmentation of Ireland and was far less expensive than wholesale warfare. The chieftains were offered a bargain. All they had to do was submit to the authority of the English crown. They’d then be “regranted” their lands, with titles to boot. Many also received favors and financial advantages from the English crown. The catch was that in doing so they agreed to give up traditional Brehon law for English law, and to accept the right of sheriffs and justices to enforce it. Some chieftains surrendered quietly and others tried to work both sides. But for many, the notion of paying rents and taxes on estates that had been in their clans for centuries was intolerable, as was giving over many of their quasi-regal powers and privileges to Elizabeth’s agents.
The conquest of Ireland proceeded erratically, but unstoppably, throughout the sixteenth century. Elizabeth sent provincial governors to offer terms to the chieftains, and began establishing bastions of the English legal system. There were many rebellions, of course, and outright battles, not all of which the Irish lost. But Elizabeth’s deputies played a divide-and-conquer game, inserting themselves into the rivalries between and among the clans. One chieftain after another became either an English peer or a corpse.
Lord Deputy Henry Sidney (the father of poet Sir Philip Sidney) paid his fourth visit to Galway in 1577, intent on “colonization by persuasion.” Along with many others, Grace appeared before him to voluntarily submit to Elizabeth. She impressed Sidney, as was her intention, with an account of her many ships and fighting men. Sidney later wrote:
There came to mee also a most famous femynyne sea capten called Grany Imallye, and offred her service unto me, wheresoever I woulde command her, with three gallyes and two hundred fightinge men, either in Ireland or Scottland, she brought with her her husband, for she was as well by sea as by land well more than Mrs Mate with him. . . . This was a notorious woman in all the costes of Ireland.
Grace had little intention of actually giving up power, and shortly after meeting Sidney, she launched a raid on the estates of the earl of Desmond, one of the Gaelic chieftains who had taken an English title in the south of the country. He captured her, however, and turned her over to the English in an attempt to curry favor with the new rulers. She spent months imprisoned at Limerick before being transferred to the dungeons of Dublin Castle. Lord Justice Drury, who dealt with her then, called her “a woman that hath impudently passed the part of womanhood and been a great spoiler and chief commander and director of thieves and murderers at sea to spoil this province. . . .” But he also described her as “famous for her stoutenes of courage and person, and for some sundry exploits done at sea.”
Grace spent eighteen months altogether in the dungeons of Limerick and Dublin castles, cruel punishment for a woman who’d ranged far and wide across the seas. Soon after she was released, the castle at Rockfleet was attacked, and the next years required much cunning. She and Richard Bourke took titles in 1581, and though Richard died in 1583, “Lady Bourke” continued as the de facto head of the clan, supported by Bourke relatives and her own children, two of whom, Owen and Margaret, had also married Bourkes. She was then fifty-three, already long past the life expectancy for a woman in those times. Her most difficult years lay ahead.
In 1584 Sir Richard Bingham became governor of Connaught. Unlike Sir Henry Sidney, Bingham believed more in “colonization by the sword” than “colonization by persuasion.” Bingham came to take a hard line with the clan leaders who were resisting English power, by laying waste to their estates, putting them in prison, and isolating them from their followers. He pursued Grace O’Malley with single-minded zeal. To his way of thinking, she had no legal entitlement as a widow to the Bourke property, and absolutely no right to rule. Not only had she been attacking and plundering English ships for the last twenty years, but this “nurse to all rebellions,” as he termed her, was still fomenting mischief among the clans. Lady Bourke was no more subject to the queen than she had ever been.
Bingham set out to destroy her, and very nearly succeeded. Several of the Bourke clan, including Grace’s stepsons, were executed by martial law, and her oldest son, Owen O’Flaherty, was murdered underhandedly, even though he had not joined his clan’s rebellion against Bingham’s government. Bingham also kidnapped her youngest son, Tibbot, and sent him to his brother, George Bingham, as a hostage, so that Tibbot could learn the English language and be tutored in the ways of the English. At one point Bingham imprisoned Grace herself:
She was apprehended and tied with a rope, both she and her followers at that instant were spoiled of their said cattle and of all they ever had besides the same, and brought to Sir Richard who caused a new pair of gallows to be made for her where she thought to end her days.
Bingham could have killed her; instead, her daughter Margaret’s husband, whom the English called the Devil’s Hook, offered himself as hostage, and Grace was set free. She fled north with her ships and continued to foment mischief. Bingham killed the cattle on her estates and burned her crops. He found his way into the treacherous waters of Clew Bay, and impounded her fleet, thus destroying her livelihood.
The loss of her cattle and crops was misery, but the loss of her ships was intolerable. With cunning amplified by desperation, Grace, now sixty-three, composed a courteous and politically wily letter to Queen Elizabeth, dated 1593, thus opening a correspondence with the English state. Her petition didn’t challenge Elizabeth’s right to rule Ireland, but was, in effect, a sort of special pleading for herself and some of her relatives. Her aim was to protect herself from Bingham, to procure the release of her son Tibbot, captured and imprisoned by Bingham a second time, and to get back to her business at sea. After establishing contact with the court, Grace set off by sea, evading Bingham and making her way up the Thames.
In London, like multitudes of petitioners, she waited for an audience with the queen, and found herself a friend at court, Lord Burghley. This statesman and close advisor to the queen had been
aware of Grace O’Malley for twenty years and was intrigued enough to send her a sort of questionnaire, the “Eighteen Articles of Interrogatory to Be Answered by Grany Ne Maly.”
I try to picture this Irish chieftain and pirate queen sitting in Shakespeare’s London giving detailed answers (in the third person, and doubtless through a scribe and/or interpreter) to such questions as “Who was her father and mother? Who was her first husband?” and deftly fielding the query “How she hath had maintenance and living since her last husband’s death?” by answering humbly that after returning to Carraigahowley and fleeing Bingham, “she dwelleth in Connaught a farmers life very poor . . . utterly did she give over her former trade of maintenance by sea and land.” The questionnaire and her answers are a historian’s dream come true, and I can only imagine Anne Chambers’s thrill when she discovered the parchment pages in the Public Record Office in London, and began to decipher the difficult English script. For in Grace’s answers, not only do we learn important facts about Grace O’Malley’s life and her relations, but we can also see the construction she has put on them, her way of emphasizing her harmlessness and skating over her part in any rebellions against the English rulers.
The eventual meeting between Grace and Elizabeth at Greenwich Palace is the stuff of legend, the centerpiece of many a ballad and historical novel about the Pirate Queen. Although some chieftains of Ireland had previously gone to England to parley with the queen, most ended up in the Tower of London. Grace was one of the few to find the queen’s favor and to sail back to Ireland with everything she sought: freedom for her son Tibbot, an end to Bingham’s pursuit of her, and, most importantly, a return to what Grace euphemistically called “maintenance by sea and land,” that is, piracy.
The Pirate Queen Page 4