The Wild Irish - Robin Maxwell (52 page)

“Perhaps.”

“What did you do, Bess?”

“I refused to let him back to Court, or to see me.”

“What else?”

Elizabeth looked down at her once slender fingers, now bloated like sausages, and twisted the last ring left on her fingers. “I withheld his only means of regaining his wealth—income from the taxation of sweet wines.”

“I see.” Grace fell silent, considering the impact of Elizabeth’s confession. “So . . . you took the wealthiest, most popular man in England—

your country’s greatest hero—and in one stroke turned a proud nobleman into a pauper. And you wonder why he led an uprising against you.” Grace finally lowered herself into one of the chairs. She sighed, as one does who knows her mission is hopeless, but nevertheless she said,

“Don’t kill the poor man. Exile him. Send him home with me. The Irish love him.” Grace gazed into the fire. “
I
love him.” The admission only inflamed Elizabeth. “He ’ll die in England. He ’ll die under the ax. I want him punished publicly. People must learn that if you rise up against your lawful prince you cannot expect to die with your head on your shoulders. Robert Devereaux is not some naughty little boy, nor even my ‘wild horse.’ He is a traitor and a danger to the world.”

“He ’ll die because you hate him,” Grace insisted.

“Yes, I do hate him, for he forced my hand! I have no choice but to end the life of someone I . . . I . . .” Elizabeth was shaking with rage.

“Today I may be a pitiful hag who’s had to have the ring of state sawed off my bloated finger, but I have given my whole life into the service of England, and I have had a great and glorious reign! A reign that will be remembered long after we are all dead.
My
navy beat back the Spanish Armada.
My
ships sailed to the farthest shores of the New World. In my time Marlowe and Shakespeare wrote words the likes of which no men have ever in their lives heard spoken before. England has flowered under my hand! Elizabeth the Queen is revered by all, feared by all. I ruled like the best of the Tudor princes—brilliantly and absolutely. Now comes the blackest of traitors, a man who, by his unconscionable acts, offended every man of noble blood, and common blood too. He placed in jeop-ardy the very monarchy of England. If I were to treat such bold-faced treachery with mercy, would it not be said I had done so out of womanly love for a man? Would I not be thought weak? There is no doubt I would. I will not”—Elizabeth spluttered with outrage—“I will not be remembered as a weak prince!”

Grace regarded Elizabeth with a cool gaze, sensing the queen had more to say.

“I had long believed I was my mother’s daughter—child of the staunchest, cleverest woman to wear the Tudor crown. But now I know better. ’Tis my
father’s
blood rushing through my veins.” Elizabeth gazed back into the past. “She called him ‘the Beast.’ ”

“Aye. A man who murders those he loves is indeed a beast,” Grace agreed. “So, you’re content to be ‘the Beast’s Daughter,’ are you, Bess?

Prepared to do to your lover what your father did to your poor mother?” Elizabeth flinched visibly, but Grace went on. “Is it that same beast who suffers no qualms about murdering a
whole country?
”

“Quelling the rebellion in Ireland is in no way the same.”

“I’d have to agree. It’s far more heinous.”

“You talk nonsense. ’Tis a monarch’s prerogative to use a firm hand on unruly subjects.”

“You’re so sure Ireland belongs to you.”

“You’re being absurd.”

“Your father and his wretched Cromwell conceived their rights of ownership, their ‘Surrender and Regrant,’ and you blindly followed suit.

You thought you could simply claim the country as your own and rule it as you did England. You had no idea then, nor do you yet realize, that Ireland will not be ruled by the likes of you.” Elizabeth sneered at such a notion.

“How do you dare—a foreigner—send your governors into Ireland, your soldiers, and tell them to pillage and burn and rape and murder, and then expect the people to call you their beloved queen?”

“Tyrone would place the King of Spain on the Irish throne.”

“At least the Spaniards have warm blood in their veins and not ice water like you do. You take such pride in your subjects loving you, but you’ve got it wrong. You’ve become a vindictive old bitch who’s about to behead your people ’s favorite hero. Robert Devereaux is a poet, a passionate gentleman, the only great-hearted man in your miserable Court.” Grace pushed herself to standing. “I didn’t really think by comin’ here I could change your mind, but Jesus knows I had to at least try.” She started for the door but turned back and went to face the queen eye to eye. “You don’t own Ireland, Bess. You can have your occupation and win your battles. Turn the minds of our chieftains, establish all the plantations in the world, and you still won’t own us. We are what we are in Ireland—what we ’ve been for a thousand years. Don’t you know you can force a person’s hand, but you cannot force his soul? I can see in your eyes that you think I’m a daft old woman who knows nothing of the ‘prerogatives of princes.’ And I know England will come again and again to Ireland and do its worst to us. Spill our blood. Corrupt our sacred lands.

And we may be bent by the might of your swords and your guns. You won’t think twice of the carnage you inflict, of the wounds left festering, the ancient memories that still slumber in the glens and the hills and the western isles. But we will not be broken, Bess. And sooner or later the dreamer will awaken and
there will be hell to pay!
” Grace leaned close and whispered fiercely in Elizabeth’s ear. “You . . . mark . . . my . . . words.” She pulled herself tall, and with the rage of angels straightening her spine, Grace O’Malley turned her back on the Queen of England and strode from the room. As she left she leveled the guards with a withering stare and before they could stop her she gave the huge doors a defiant shove, swinging them together with a great, bone-rattling crash.

22

THE COG HAD escaped unmolested from the Thames, sailing out into the Channel at Dover, then headed south for a piece, and finally west. Grace stood at the rail as the vessel coasted the waters off the Isle of Wight where the great Armada had first encountered the English fleet in ’88. A gull screamed overhead and suddenly Grace imagined herself a seabird on that fateful day, watching from high above the magnificent crescent flotilla—five miles long from tip to curved tip. There would come the English vessels, so low and sleek and agile next to Philip’s huge, ponderous, high-castled ships, swooping in one by one for their fierce broadside volleys of the all-but-stationary Armada, and peeling away too quickly to be damaged themselves.

Though the loss of life on both sides had been small, that one sea battle had turned the world on its head. Days later, off the coast of Calais at Gravelines, the swift English fleet, assisted by the breath of God himself, had scattered Philip’s mighty Armada and lifted England to a place of strength and power she would later wield as a cudgel to batter Ireland.

Everything had changed in these waters south of England, thought Grace, just thirteen years ago.

Thirteen years ago the true rebellion had hardly begun. Today Robert Devereaux, poor bastard, was as good as a dead man, and what was left of her own family was lost to her as well. All at once the weight of her years settled hard on her shoulders and a deep sigh escaped her.

The sound was pitiful, she had to admit, tired and defeated.

Well, she
was
tired. She ’d been fighting one battle or another her whole blessed life—for freedom from a girl’s life, the brainless Donal O’Flaherty, and the thick-headed Richard Burke. There ’d been Turkish pirates, the hell of prison, and the cold evil of Richard Bingham. She ’d fought to save her sons and fought against her sons, and nursed the whole of the Irish Rebellion.

’Twas no wonder she was tired down to the marrow of her bones.

Perhaps what she needed was a rest. No one would begrudge her that.

She could sail south to Spain, to Majorca, a land untouched by the cares of the world and the wars. The sun would warm her joints and she ’d drink wine with every meal, sleep in a whitewashed cottage near the shore and let the waves lull her to sleep in the balmy, fragrant evenings.

Aye, a rest would be just the thing. She ’d earned it, after all.

“Grace, to starboard!” A hand in the nest was calling and pointing with all the excitement of a lad on his first voyage. She followed the line of his arm and beheld a great striped whale at the top of his joyful leap, then felt her heart—like the gray beast—leap nearly out of her chest with a similar joy. She shouted as he crashed down again, water exploding round his bulk, then watched him dive beneath the waves and disappear.

Does that whale rest?
she wondered then. Or does he swim and feed, make his families, guard his precious waters till he breathes his last and sinks to the ocean floor? Does he ever weary of flight, of sailing up to the sun for that brief moment of clear light and the breath of salt air? Is that not all the respite he needs to keep him moving, moving in the depths through the long years?

A fresh breeze caught in the sails and now the cog was racing into the west wind. Salt spray wet her face and Grace ’s long silver hair whipped out behind her. She inhaled a slow easy breath and her old body began to sing the song of the waves and the whales and the weather, and she knew then she had no wish to rest. Not just yet. There was time enough to rest when she closed her eyes to die. For now she ’d just sail on.

There was far too much left to do in the world.

A f t e rwo r d

Ill health and the reclusive nature of “the other Bacon brother” may have saved Anthony Bacon from the traitor’s death suffered by others in Essex’s intimate circle. Though the spymaster never left his patron’s home, even while the conspiracy swirled around him, Essex refused to draw Anthony into the rebellion. He was so deeply troubled by the events that led to the catastrophic failed coup, and laid so low by Robert Devereaux’s death, that three months later Anthony Bacon was dead of natural causes.

Francis Bacon was so ridiculed for disloyalty to his friend Essex that after the execution he published an essay entitled “Apology,” a justifica-tion for his actions. While he was paid 1,200 pounds for his part in bringing Essex to justice, he never received the gratitude he craved from the queen, nor did he achieve any real status in her court before she died. His rewards came during the reign of James I when Francis was named Solicitor General and Lord Chancellor, and granted the title Viscount St.

Albans. His writings were highly influential, including 
The Advancement
 
of Learning 
and 
Novum Organum
—the latter a scientific theory using observation and experiment that formed the basis of what we now call the inductive method. However, he fell afoul of the law in 1621, and at the instigation of his old rival Edward Coke was impeached by Parliament for corruption and bribery. He was fined 40,000 pounds, sent to the Tower for a time, and died deeply in debt.

For his part in Essex’s uprising, Christopher Blount was granted the more merciful “nobleman’s execution” for treason—simple beheading.

Henry Cuffe was not so lucky. He was hanged, cut down while still alive, eviscerated and quartered. The four parts of his body were sent to the four corners of London and his head was displayed on the end of a pike on London Bridge.

Perhaps by claiming he was influenced by his excessive devotion to his friend, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who was convicted with Essex for treason, managed to have his death sentence commuted to imprisonment in the Tower of London. He survived there until James’s accession in 1603 and became an admired fixture in the new king’s court. He was, ironically, awarded the valuable Farm of Sweet Wines as reward for his service.

ll e t t i c e D e v e r e a u x , ll a d y B ll o u n t ( n é e K n o ll llly s ) , outlived her third husband, Christopher Blount, and her sole surviving son, Robert. She was apparently unfazed by their ignominious deaths, resumed her queenly lifestyle, and lived on to the extraordinary age of ninety-four.

Robert Cecil, the little hunchback secretary, working secretly behind the scenes before the queen’s death, oversaw the successful transference of power from Elizabeth to the Scots king, James I, whose chief councilor he became. Cecil was highly influential in the new regime, negotiat-ing a previously unimagined peace with Spain in 1604. Attaining the title of Earl of Salisbury, his fortunes grew as well, and his descendants have remained close to the seat of power in England to this day.

Frances, Lady Essex (née Walsingham), Robert Devereaux’s widow, was treated kindly by her old friend the queen who supported her after her husband’s execution, and during an attempted blackmail scheme involving some of Essex’s most incriminating letters. Two years later the quiet, mousy Frances married for the third time, her husband the Irish chieftain and English loyalist the Earl of Clanrickard.

For several years after his return from captivity in the Tower of London, Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, played both sides of the game, rebelling one day, swearing his loyalty to the Crown the next.

Providing Grace O’Malley as a hostage to Drury gave him some breathing space, but after the defeat and massacre of the Pope ’s nine hundred troops at Fort dell Oro, Gerald’s fortunes declined. He was proclaimed a traitor and went on the run with his wife, Eleanor, countess of Desmond, and the Jesuit Father Sanders. Once the richest landholder in Ireland, Gerald was now reduced to sleeping in caves and on flea-ridden straw, and stealing food to stay alive. But his flight through the Munster countryside was not a simple rebellion against the English.

He was also a ruthless murderer of his own countrymen and -women—

any he believed to be English sympathizers. During what came to be known as the “second Desmond rebellion,” famine, plague, and skirmishes took a staggering number of lives. While in hiding, Father Sanders died of dysentery, and with him any remaining notion that the Desmond rebellion was of a religious nature. Lady Eleanor, reduced to rags, tried to beg leniency from the Crown for her husband, but by now everyone—Irish and English alike—wanted Gerald dead. In 1583, near Tralee, the earl, then a crippled old man, was discovered cowering in a corner of a rude hut by his own countrymen. He was dragged outside and, with no fanfare, executed. His head was sent to Elizabeth who, says legend, spent a whole morning gazing thoughtfully at it—all that remained of the Irish earl whom she had prayed so fervently and long to be faithful to her—before consigning it to a pike on London Bridge.

The career of Richard Bingham—despised by Irish and English alike—was checkered at best. “The Flail of Connaught,” while successfully subduing the province, was twice recalled by the Crown, placed on trial for his mismanagement, and even imprisoned at the Fleet. But the queen, either eternally hopeful or made desperate by the dearth of men willing to serve in Ireland, sent him back one more time after the battle of the Yellow Ford to govern Ulster. He died of the “Irish disease” several months later.

Lord Mountjoy (Charles Blount), despite his “bookishness,” his dearth of experience with large bodies of troops, his poor health, and his hypochondria (he ’d wear three pairs of stockings and three waistcoats in winter), became Elizabeth’s great hero in Ireland. Within two years he had taken back cities, towns, and provinces from the rebels, and won a decisive battle at Kinsale that ended O’Neill’s supremacy forever. Mountjoy marched into Ulster, and at Tullahogue—in a highly symbolic gesture—

broke apart the ancient throne where The O’Neills, for hundreds of years, had been created. In 1605 Essex’s sister, Penelope, left her husband, Lord Rich, to marry her longtime lover, and the father of her children—Lord Mountjoy. He died suddenly of pneumonia the next year.

On his march to meet with the long-promised Spanish reinforcements at Kinsale, Red Hugh O’Donnell, the still young and arrogant rebel leader, unaccountably laid waste to the Munster countryside, burning and plundering a land inhabited only by his countrymen and fellow Catholics. After the defeat at Kinsale, Hugh O’Neill sent O’Donnell to Spain to beg a new army from Philip III but was unsuccessful in regaining the king’s support. He never returned to Ireland, dying within the year, some say poisoned by an English agent.

Not surprisingly, the truce Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, negoti-ated with the Earl of Essex held only long enough for the English, under Lord Mountjoy, to gain the strength they needed to pursue Elizabeth’s objectives in Ireland. While O’Neill fought valiantly with his rebels to hold on to his gains, and continued to pray for the queen’s death, which he believed would alleviate his and Ireland’s problems, he began to lose ground. Though he was well aware that Spain’s motives for helping Ireland had more to do with unseating the “Heretic Queen” than assisting Ireland in its bid for sovereignty, O’Neill persisted in suing for their aid.

In 1601 it finally arrived—a four-thousand-man invasion force bound for the eastern port of Cork. Due to high wind and surf, the Spaniards landed a few miles south at the town of Kinsale, which Mountjoy quickly surrounded and besieged.

O’Neill and his army marched south from Ulster to meet the enemy while his ally Red Hugh O’Donnell marched in from the west. But once the Irish armies were in place, O’Neill and O’Donnell began arguing as to which of them should begin the attack. This delay proved fatal as the agreed upon hour of rendezvous with the Spaniards passed, and the window of opportunity for an Irish victory slammed shut. The Battle of Kinsale lasted three months, and in the end O’Neill was unable to defeat Mountjoy’s siege lines. Finally the Spanish troops surrendered to the English and sailed home. Thousands of Irish rebels died in the fighting or, taken prisoner, were hung.

Hugh O’Neill was forced to submit to the English conquerors in a series of humiliating ceremonies, first on his knees to Mountjoy, then to the Lord Deputy and the Irish Privy Council. It was only after he ’d put his submission in writing, renouncing his title of “The O’Neill and his allegiance to Spain, as well as protesting loyalty to the Crown, was he told that Elizabeth had died six days before. Mountjoy had tricked him. It was said that O’Neill wept openly and copiously for both his personal defeat and the ruination of the “Irish cause.” The rebel leader retreated to Ulster, and by the good graces of the new king of England, was pardoned once again, and his lands restored to him. He took up residency in his luxurious home, but spurred by a series of dangerous events and the realization that no hope was left for a free Ireland, O’Neill and a handful of Irish overlords and their families sailed from their homeland in 1607. The tragic “Flight of the Earls” ended the most tumultuous century in Ireland’s history.

Tyrone, after wandering with his family through France, the Netherlands, and Germany, finally took up residence in Italy, subsidized by the Pope. Every night, deep in his cups, he would brag that come Hell or high water he would die in Ireland. In 1616 the great rebel O’Neill passed away, a frustrated exile, in Venice.

Tibbot ne Long Burke, hard-pressed to choose sides in the Irish rebellion, finally made his decision at the battle of Kinsale. On his own volition he mustered a force of three hundred men and marched south.

Under Lord Mountjoy, Tibbot led his men so single-mindedly and courageously that he was lauded by the Crown. Having proven his loyalty beyond any doubt, he returned home to a life of leisure with Maeve and his six children. Miles—for many years a hostage—was released by his English captors and went to live with his family. Like Conyers Clifford before him, Mountjoy befriended Tibbot, took sides with him against a new and unpopular governor of Connaught, and made sure his salary was regularly paid. Tibbot was knighted in the early days of James’s reign and elected to the Irish Parliament as a representative of Mayo in 1613. In 1626, by virtue of his valor and faithful service to King Charles I, he was created Viscount Burke of Mayo. He died, age sixty-two, murdered by an O’Connor brother-in-law while the two were on their way to church.

Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, was taken to the place of execution at Tower Green on February 25, 1601. Standing before the crowd in a scarlet waistcoat, Essex made his last speech—a rather long one—

with eloquence and dignity, claiming his sins “more numerous than the hairs on his head.” He was still speaking when the executioner struck his first blow. It took two more to sever Devereaux’s head. Despite his undisputed treason, Essex was remembered kindly by the English people. Nearly two years after his death, Londoners were still singing a ballad lauding their “great and celebrated noble warrior,” called “Essex’s Last Good Night.” In Ireland he was likewise revered, considered by many rebel chiefs as an ally, and by the common people as the only one of the queen’s commanders who had come over to their side.

Elizabeth I, the queen who many believed waited in vain for Essex to beg a reprieve from his death sentence, suffered agonies after his passing.

Despite the victory at Kinsale and achieving her goal of defeating the Irish rebels, she never regained her seemingly inexhaustible zest for life.

As the end neared, the queen, despite her obvious weakness, refused to be put to bed and instead stood upright in one place for fourteen hours, sucking on her fingers. She died on March 24, 1603, never having named her successor. She had reigned for more than four decades, and with her died the great Tudor dynasty of a hundred years.

The last days of Grace O’Malley’s life are a mystery. There are records of her ships—if not personally captained by her—still patrolling the western Irish coast in mid 1601. She seems to have lived at Rockfleet Castle near the end, and probably died at the age of seventy-three, in 1603—the same year as Elizabeth’s death. Some of her stark, brooding castles and ruined abbeys on the shores and islands of Clew Bay today stand testament to her life, though the whereabouts of her earthly remains are still in dispute. While her ending is shrouded in the mists of time, there ’s nothing to suggest that Grace O’Malley would have gone gently into that good night. One can imagine that, like Elizabeth, she ’d have stood her ground till the Reaper paid his final, insistent call. But thanks to Ireland’s balladeers and bards and a handful of Englishmen awed by so remarkable a woman, her last voyage was not into oblivion, but the pages of history and the rich fabric of Irish legend.