Raymond A. Anselment
Among the writing of early modern English women, recollections of life in Ireland are less common than the English presence might suggest. The numerous formulaic depositions recorded in the months following the 1641 Irish uprising offer a vivid testimony of the atrocities and trauma English settlers suffered; personal narratives of several women who defended their property against besieging forces have also survived.1 Forms of self-writing from less troubled periods of the seventeenth century are not as extensive or as accessible. Letters women wrote from Ireland are now held often among family papers and in archives. Few diaries and memoirs that include accounts of living among the Irish appear to have survived. The remembrances of Ireland of Alice Thornton (1626–1707) and Elizabeth Freke (1642–1714) are noteworthy exceptions. Near the end of 1634, eight-year-old Alice, along with her mother and younger brothers, joined her father, Christopher Wandesford, in Dublin, where he had been appointed master of rolls and where they would live for eight years. Elizabeth Freke was thirty-three when she and her husband, Percy, left England in 1675 for County Cork to “try our fortuns” in Ireland. Over the next twenty years, Elizabeth would live there on five occasions, the shortest eight months and the longest four years. Thornton recalled briefly in “A booke of remembrances” and at greater length in a second manuscript, “My First Booke of My Life,” the sense of place she enjoyed with her family during a happy Dublin life. Freke, on the other hand, describes in both versions of “Some few remembrances” the isolation and alienation during her years in Ireland.2 For both women the Ireland of memory is inseparable from their self-images and subsequent life experiences.
The meaning of Ireland also alters in the revisions of their recollections. The first of Thornton’s two manuscripts, each of which begins with her birth in 1626 and ends with the 1668 death of her husband, William, begins as a spiritual memoir. The years in Ireland briefly recalled are occasions of divine deliverance set down in celebration of God’s providential mercy. Though the narrative turns more toward her life and family after the return to England, she does not seem at least initially to have a larger audience in mind. Within a year of her husband’s death, however, Thornton circulated a personal defense of her honor and that of her family. The revised “My First Booke of My Life” she bequeathed to her daughter significantly expands and refocuses “A booke of remembrances,” remembering Ireland anew from an implicitly defensive point of view. The awareness of a larger audience is not apparent in either version of Freke’s years in Ireland. Included in manuscripts that contain, among other entries, lists of properties and inventories of possessions, the narratives that begin with her marriage and end within months of her death in 1714 seem another form of accounting. Begun before her husband’s death in 1705 and rewritten in the final years of her life, “Some few remembrances of my misfortunes” associate much of her unhappiness with Ireland. Unlike Thornton, whose family contributed significantly to her feeling of belonging, Freke never found in Ireland a sense of place. A stranger and at first frightened, for her Ireland increasingly came to embody the growing separation and estrangement from her husband and son, as well as a place she came to view in widowhood with suspicion and mistrust.
Each account of young Alice’s arrival in Ireland begins in essentially the same way. After “safe passage” across the Irish Sea, she arrived in Dublin, “In which place I inioyed great happienesse and Comfort dureing my honoured fathers life.”3 The city where she lived for most of her stay offered a culture not found in north Yorkshire, where she was born. Noted in Raphael Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle as “Irishe or yong London,” Dublin in the 1630s had a population of about fifteen thousand.4 A traveler through Scotland and Ireland within a year of Alice’s arrival praised Dublin as “the fairest, richest, best built city” on his journey, a metropolis “far beyond Edenborough” and most resembling London. Besides “fair, stately and complete buildings,” it had in his opinion the “divers commodities” Londoners enjoyed.5 A resident of Dublin less favorably impressed by the city nevertheless earlier called attention to shops “well replenished withall sortes of wares” rivaling any in London; its citizens were also “wonderfully reformed in manners, in ciuility, in curtesy.”6 Dublin, a cathedral city, possessed the hallmarks of a major urban center. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Parliament resided permanently in Dublin and Trinity College had been founded. Courts of law, a royal custom house, and the commerce of a significant port increased the city’s prominence in the next decades as an administrative, legal, and financial power. Though the majority of the Dubliners were Catholic, English Protestants gained substantial control of trade and during the administration of Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford, dominated the offices of government and law.7 When Alice with her mother and brothers joined her father in Dublin, he had an important role in the center of power Wentworth had begun to create, and the family would settle among the prominent residents of Dame Street. They lived in a “very elegant House,” according to an eighteenth-century descendant with access to the family papers, “situated conveniently for the Discharge of his high Offices. It was in a very wholsome Air, with a good Orchard and Garden leading down to the Water Side, where might be seen the Ships from the Ring’s End.”8
Almost five years later Alice crossed the Irish Sea again, accompanying her mother to Bath and later sailing back to Ireland through perilous seas. The account in the second manuscript of a life-threatening storm, her safe arrival on the Irish shore, and her response to this deliverance remembers Ireland anew. Though travel across the Irish Sea could take little more than a day if all went well,9 the tidal streams and winds of the narrow sea, the treacherous shoreline of rocks and sands, and the threat of pirates and privateers were dangerous realities.10 Sailing from Wexford to Kinsale in January 1650, Frances Cooke and John Cook spent ten days at sea in the turbulent storms described in her Meditations and his True Relation.11 While Alice waited in Cheshire with her mother for the stormy sea to change, they witnessed five ships driven onto the shore, only to be caught themselves in a tempest that turned the calm night on which they sailed into winds and waves that threatened to wreck the ship on the Irish sands. Her revised narrative of the harrowing journey in the second of the two manuscripts describes the threat in graphic detail: deliverance from danger includes Alice’s rescue from the threat of entanglement in a ship’s cable that would have swept her into the sea. Both also end in thanksgiving. Missing from the first version is the family’s safe removal from the anchored ship caught on the sands, their reception once ashore, and an extended outpouring of thanksgiving. The additions in the second manuscript modify the emphasis and intent.
Alice’s father and her praise of God are notably more prominent. The boat that rescues them from the ship is sent by a Mr. Hubert, who together with his family and friends welcomes them joyfully and entertains them “with abundante affection & kindenesse” (15). Coaches from Dublin with her father and his “many noble freinds” the next day take them back to the city and a reception of further joy. Once again, as Alice had in recounting their first arrival in Ireland, the second manuscript describes a welcoming place: “much peace & happinesse” that would last until her father’s death. He, and not Ireland, is the source of this contentment. Mr. Hubert’s kindness is an expression of gratitude for the justice received in her father’s jurisdiction, having spent twenty ruinous years struggling against a powerful opponent to present his suit. The esteem her father brought to the law is also implicit in the coaches of men who accompany her father and are part of a Dublin she believed that his judicious office helped change. The family’s deliverance from the storms of the Irish Sea moves Alice to emulate the thanksgiving of those “that goe downe to the Sea in Ships.” Psalm 107 is appropriately central to her stormy journey in the parallels and grateful praise with which she too would “give thanks unto the Lord” (107:1).12 Her desire to keep the mercy of God in “perpetuall remembrance” is apparent in the long thanksgiving that in the second manuscript complements the greater emphasis on her father (16).
The focus of “My First Booke of My Life” differs from that of the earlier version. Both begin as quite traditional exercises chronicling deliverances covering the span from early childhood to the death of Thornton’s husband. The earlier “booke of remembrances” devotes considerably less attention to the stay in Ireland and recalls the decade of the 1640s and the family’s return to England for the most part in cursory fashion. Important events that follow in Alice’s life are often related in a minimalist fashion. One brief sentence records her 1651 marriage to William Thornton; short paragraphs enter births and deaths of their first children. The narrative and the thanksgiving become more substantial in the last years. Whether this or the revised account was the manuscript Thornton later states that she circulated a year after William died, “My First Booke of My Life” is the manuscript she bequeathed to her daughter.13 The biographical expansion and prayerful gratitude in this revision reflect more fully the troubled period in Thornton’s life in the year preceding her husband’s death.
Though the stages of composition in neither manuscript can be dated with certainty, when Thornton recalled her earlier life in a final revision, she had been deeply hurt by the betrayal of a niece who had withheld knowledge of “very great lies & fallshoods against my selfe” and the “Honour of my Family” (181) that might have been countered before the Thornton reputation had been compromised. The scandalous rumors are never clarified, but they appear related to the betrothal of their fourteen-year-old daughter to a local minister and the mother’s relationship with him. Rumors about the propriety of the proposed marriage apparently insinuated that the parents were using their daughter to help secure the family’s uncertain future. Bruited about was the further suggestion of an improper relationship between Alice and the minister, who had lived with the Thorntons. When the niece’s maid revealed the rumors in an emotional confrontation, taunting Alice with the assertion that she, her family, and “all I came on” were “naught,” and then both the niece and maid jeered and laughed, the scandal maligning the reputation of the family was all the more hurtful because the Thorntons had supported the niece in her difficult marriage. Compelled to defend her reputation and that of her family, when Alice expanded the recollections of the Irish years significantly, the revision reflects the defensive tenor.14 Praise of her honorable father and devotion to a merciful God are an essential part of this vindication.
The initial entry in each manuscript about the years in Ireland begins with the family and not Dublin; the happiness of Alice depends on her parents, especially her father. He “ordered” the traditional education of a young lady in French, dancing, and music; through her father’s close relationship with the future Earl of Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, she had the advantage of being taught these and other “qualities” in the company of his two daughters. The “vertuous prouission” of a mother who raised her daughter with a care befitting “her qualitie & my fathers Childe” (10) reinforced their social class and heritage. Above all, through the guidance of her parents and their example, Alice believes she found greatest happiness in the religious life they both embodied and encouraged.
Her “bounden duty” to celebrate God’s mercy is apparent in recollections of Alice’s Irish life absent from the earlier manuscript. Her fall while swinging with the Wentworth sisters at Robert Meredith’s Dublin house is one of the few memories of Alice’s early years in Ireland. The account of the accident recalled in the revised manuscript recreates the childhood misadventure from the perspective of the young girl whose new confidence in her abilities turns to fear when she loses her grip. Everyone in the house may have been worried, as Thornton remembers, though probably few if any thought “for a good space of time” that the stunned girl was dead (13). The exaggeration, in any case, enhances her gratitude for her mother’s care and her prayerful thankfulness for the mercy of God. Her narrative of another fall, this time when the family coach narrowly avoided sliding into the river on a trip to County Kildare, ends with a similar response. Thornton never describes Kildare, where her father had purchased an estate at Naas and where they would live for at least a while before he sold the property to Thomas Wentworth. The focus on the danger narrowly avoided by the skill of the coachman and the rejoicing of the father, who rode on horseback behind the coach helpless to assist him, occasion prayer as Thornton joins her father in glorifying God for the escape from death (11–12).
Two other additions in the revised manuscript are less immediately related to God’s protection of Alice and her family. The vivid narrative of a fire in Dublin Castle, where the Wentworth family resided, traces its cause to a carelessly stored basket of embers and describes the damage to the chapel. The danger to the castle averted by Providence may not have been as immediate as Thornton believes, and she could only have imagined as “terrible to behold” a scene she never witnessed. The cries in the night, the description of the castle setting, and the rescue of the Wentworth family “brought out of bed in blankets” accentuate, however, the providential mercy. Significantly, the rescue of the family includes the deliverance of “all the Kingdom in them,” her father, and “his family” (14). This inclusiveness reflects Thornton’s belief that on Wentworth’s governance rested the well-being of Ireland.
A much longer addition depicting the governance, trial, and death of Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, develops the nature of this relationship and its connection to her Irish memories. Family loyalty explains in part Thornton’s departure from thanksgiving and prayer to praise the lord deputy’s governance of Ireland and to denounce the malice of his enemies. Alice’s father, Christopher Wandesford, would not have been an entrusted part of the administration in Ireland without his ties to Wentworth. They were both friends and kin. An important supporter of Wandesford’s career in the English Parliament and Yorkshire government and the godfather of his first child, the newly appointed lord deputy brought his kinsman with him to Ireland, where Wentworth continued to promote his role in the administration.15 Wandesford also relied on the lord deputy’s influence in securing and protecting his possession of the twenty thousand acres of Castlecomer he had negotiated in the county of Kilkenny.16 After he succeeded the newly ennobled Earl of Strafford as lord deputy, Alice’s father tried to circumvent a remonstrance against Strafford in Ireland, proroguing the Irish Parliament and futilely attempting to prevent committee members from going to England to present their case.17
The relationship with Ireland—both Strafford’s and Wandesford’s—is the foundation of Thornton’s forceful, uncompromising support of the earl and an implicit defense of her father’s loyalty. Strafford’s seven years of Irish governance disaffected others through the unbending administration of policies that seemed absolutist and threatening. As lord deputy, he was also believed to have used the office for his own benefit.18 Before being brought back to England to face charges of treason, Strafford had few supporters.19 The earl was, in Thornton’s judgment, however, “a wise & prudentiall” leader who preserved the dignity and majesty of the monarchy and secured both the church and state on “the right foundations of truth & peace.” Thornton scorns his detractors as “factious” and “Seditious,” threatening law and peace under the guise of a heretical and popish religion. In her excoriation of the bloodthirsty Irish unworthy of the bountiful peace in the seven years of the “wise & Noble” lord deputy’s rule, Thornton adopts the common seventeenth-century English view of the Irish as a “Barbarous People” incapable of benefiting from the civilizing force of English government and law (18). She also accepts without question, albeit with extreme exaggeration, reports of the uprising that began in the years following the death of Strafford and led in her view to the “destruction” and the “martyredom” of “millions of the Poore protestants.”20 But Thornton’s denunciation is not limited to the Irish. Unwavering in her commitment to the monarchy and the Church of England, which she unequivocally asserts was upheld by Strafford, Thornton attacks his enemies in the English Parliament as “Mastiues, & blood hounds.” The crowds gathering each day in London outside Parliament demanding his death are “Vulger meaner Peopple” easily swayed by lies and “Cruell Malice” (19, 20).
Historians agree that Strafford defended himself well, forcing the parliamentary prosecutors to turn away from impeachment to a bill of attainder, though it is questionable whether “all the world” other than his adversaries shared Thornton’s admiration of the “incomparable Wisdome & Abilities” of his gallant defense. She denounces the tactics used in Parliament to inhibit the earl’s response to new charges, and she dismisses as “Lies & callumnies” (19) accusations that he encouraged the king in the subversion of law and support of popery. And when in her narrative Thornton accepts the king’s decision to sign the bill condemning an innocent Strafford, she recognizes the necessity of this “most Pieous King” (20) to protect his own life. In her interpretation Strafford himself accepts the necessity of his death, absolving the king and hoping his fate will restore a greater peace. Her image of the cheerful, serene, and composed man who went to his death in 1641 forgiving his enemies and praying for the welfare of the nation and its monarch is based on contemporary printings of statements he purportedly made in his last hours.21 Her belief that years of peace engendered sins that brought down the sword of destruction was a commonplace based as well on hindsight.22 “Darkenesse & distruction,” the eulogy of Strafford concludes, occur when “taken away” are the “Iust & wise men” (21).
The revised manuscript complements and counterpoints the tribute to the Earl of Strafford with that of her father. Both men are ideal public servants whose deaths are a measure of their lives. The earl died on the scaffold with grace and dignity, wrongly sentenced to death for his misuse of office; Wandesford succumbed to a fever in bed with Christian magnanimity, the only lord deputy, his daughter contends, who “died vntouched, or peaceably in theire beds” (25). The earlier manuscript simply notes her father’s death in December 1640; the revision relates at length his last days and concludes with a long meditation and prayer. The additions celebrate a public and private life devoted to the good of the Irish people and the happiness of his family that will be blessed in memory for generations. Thornton praises her father as “A true Labourer in Gods Vineyard” (22) and recalls again the reform he brought to courts that had denied justice to the oppressed and unfortunate struggling for years against endless legal delay, corrupt officials, and powerful opponents. His was a “wise, Iust” government, “Legall & right” (21), that won an affection in Ireland unequaled among other English administrators. Extoled for his patronage of the church and support of education, Wandesford embodies in an extended catalog of virtues the “Heroicke Soule”—an “exemplear of Learning, Sobriety, Temporance, chastety, holinesse, patience, humility, Charity, Iustice & clemency” (22). A husband without parallel in the world, a marriage admired by all, and children “infinitly happy, & blessed,” the Wandesfords were a rare family exceedingly happy in his love and care.
In the manuscript’s recounting, the death of Thornton’s father is further affirmation of Wandesford’s incomparable life. The narrative that begins with the onset of a sudden fever and ends with the confession of sins, testimony of faith, and prayers commending the soul to God is that of the good death in the ars moriendi tradition. The reading of the will and instructions to his oldest son are part of the pattern of the good death, also confirming an abiding concern for the well-being of his family. Less typical is Thornton’s further affirmation of her father’s concern as well for the welfare of Ireland. Comments about the law he made while apparently asleep similarly recall his concern for an equitable justice to all, whether rich or poor, determined solely by divine and human law. The burdens and responsibilities of the offices he held in Ireland “it was thought” decayed the heart, which was allegedly evident when the body was embalmed. The cause of death seems more than Thornton’s fanciful suggestion. Richard Cox wrote later in the century that the lord deputy died suddenly, “heart-broken with his own and the Earl of Strafford’s Misfortunes.”23 While Cox may have had in mind Wandesford’s struggles to control the Irish Parliament and its opposition to Strafford, another event that qualifies, if not questions, Thornton’s uncritical view of her father’s years in Ireland involved his disputed ownership of Castlecomer. As master of rolls Wandesford used his office to win a favorable claim to the land and his friendship with the lord deputy to protect the holding from the threat of seizure. Strafford’s intercession became an issue in the articles of his impeachment, and at Wandesford’s death the legal title was again in jeopardy and would remain in dispute until the end of the century.24 But to his daughter he remained her devoted father honored with great dignity and acclaim: “Such was the loue,” the Irish lamented with a hone or outpouring of grief unheard before in Ireland at funerals for the English (26).25
The meditation and prayer reaffirm Thornton’s tribute to “this Diligent labourour of God” (31) who toiled for the betterment of his family and of Ireland; verses from Isaiah 57: 1–2 offer in the meditation consolation and an understanding of the dying father’s premonition, “Ah poore childe, what must thou see & thine Eyes beholde” (24). The righteous and the merciful “taken away” will find restful peace; they are taken from “the euill to come” (26). Thornton often finds solace in the knowledge that death is a liberation from the sorrows of life; in meditating on her father she dwells less on the peace of a “better Place” (29) and more on the “misserable, wrettched world” (27) and the evil he has escaped. Certain that he had “foreseene” and labored in Ireland to prevent a forthcoming evil, Thornton consoles herself with the knowledge that he did not see the destruction of peace and the suffering that she and others believed “was neuer heard of the like” (29).26 The sins of the nation cried out for God’s vengeance, yet “miraculously” divine Providence delivered the family from the Irish turmoil. Without the guiding love of her own father, to whose “Prouidence, caire & wisdome” she unfailingly attributes her former happiness, Thornton welcomes in prayer a greater dependency on God. In her renewed dedication he is “our Father”—in words taken from the Psalm 68:5: “A father to the fatherlesse” (32). God will also be, she prays, her mother’s “Husband & guide” (33). And in a sense her mother becomes her father, for strengthened by the spirit of God she led her family out of Ireland and away from the imminent danger.
Thornton’s narrative in the second manuscript of the October 1641 plot to seize Dublin Castle and the danger to the family adds considerable detail to her first account. Within days of the conspiracy’s discovery, news of the plot to take command of the castle, where ordnances and ammunition were stored, and from this position gain control of the city was widespread. The account is much the same in the numerous reports later printed, the most influential of which were the many editions of John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion (1646).27 When one of the conspirators while drinking disclosed the plan to his Protestant kinsman John Connolly, he escaped from their watch, jumped over a pale, and informed the chief justices. In some versions the justices doubted the seemingly drunken Connolly and sent him back for further confirmation of the plot before they then arrested the conspirators. Thornton omits the return and the second escape in a leaner narrative that recreates the drinking scene in the alehouse, the drama of Connolly’s leap from a window over a wall, and the urgency of his address to the chief justices.28 In her lively version, when Connolly voices concern about his Protestant wife, the conspirators reply, “hang her, for she was but an English dogge” and a better Irish wife can be found (36).29 Where other accounts disagree about whether warnings weeks earlier had been ignored, Thornton places considerable blame on justices Sir John Parsons and Sir John Borlase, “2 old gentlemen” seduced into complacency by years of peace and incapable of fulfilling the vacancy left by the deaths of her father and Strafford.30 Her vivid recollection lends personal immediacy to the October uprising. The plight of the Dubliners mentioned in some publications is that of her family. During “14 daies & nights in great feares, frights, & hidious distractions & disturbances from the Alarums” and sleepless nights, “fastings & paines,” the Thorntons gathered their possessions for the flight to England (37).
With the safe preservation of “my fathers family” from Ireland—curiously described in the manuscript as “a strainge Place” (38)—Alice’s mother assumed in England the role her father had held within the family in Ireland. Thornton praises her at great length as the support of the family in a celebration that purposefully counters the later allegations of ruined reputation. Through the dangers of a nation now at civil war, she led her children safely back to her Yorkshire jointure at Hipswell, where she made “a Sanctuary for vs all” (75), and through her determination withstood the military and legal threats to the family estate. Alice remained with her mother until the age of twenty-five, when she reluctantly followed her mother’s will and married William Thornton. She and her husband resided for eight years at Hipswell until her mother died; they then moved to Thornton’s Yorkshire inheritance at East Newton. Alice Thornton never returned to Ireland, though both manuscripts reveal her efforts to gain the Irish legacy of 1,500 pounds bequeathed by her father. The presence of the family in Ireland would continue, however, in Castlecomer, where Thornton’s father had spent a reported 14,000 pounds establishing a plantation of English tenants to farm the land and mine the ore and coal.31 Along with a manor house east of the Dinin River and a four-thousand-acre deer park, the Castlecomer plantation had a village of some five hundred residents.32 Alice’s brother inherited the property, which stayed in the Wandesford family into the twentieth century, when most of the remaining twenty thousand acres were sold. The house on the bank of the river rebuilt after being destroyed in the Irish uprising of 1798 was lost in a 1966 fire.33 Alice’s remembrance of Ireland memorably endures, however, in manuscript and print.
Elizabeth Freke’s experiences in Ireland were very different. Her “remembrances of my misfortuns” begin with her marriage in 1671 to her second cousin Percy Freke and end with the last months before her death in 1714. She began the first recollections before the death of her husband in 1706 and continued writing entries in a vellum-bound manuscript throughout her years of widowhood. In 1712 she revised her remembrances in a wallpaper-bound manuscript, adding further entries during the next year. Unlike the self-writing of Alice Thornton, neither version has a religious focus nor is a personal defense addressed to a larger audience. Though God’s providence and mercy are an acknowledged part of the life she recalls, hers is an “unhappy life,” and Freke herself remains the focus. The death of her husband and a growing sense of isolation in her later years alter without radically changing the representation of the misfortunes. Freke associates with Ireland separation from her father, her husband, her son, and her money.
Three years after their marriage and an unhappy life in London, where Elizabeth suffered two miscarriages and lost money in a Hampshire property, the Frekes agreed to try their fortunes in Ireland at “his estat.”34 Percy Freke’s father had settled in the Munster plantation in County Cork, and the castle at Rathbarry he defended during the 1641 uprising would eventually become his son’s; however, the nature of the Rathbarry estate remains in the manuscripts initially undefined.35 When the Frekes sailed to Ireland in the first of five voyages from England, after being delayed by stormy weather and then the birth of their son, they stayed for eight months at Rostellan. A dangerous Irish Sea threatened their safe landing in 1677 at Cork during a second eight-month stay at an unnamed location. A third return in 1680 of twenty-two months was spent at Rathbarry, as were two further stays, at the estate Percy Freke had secured with the purchase of a reversion on the lease.36 On the coast of southern County Cork, several miles from the small cathedral town of Rosscarbery, the area around Rathbarry and especially the river valley and town of Bandon to the northeast had been settled by English Protestants.37 Still decidedly in the minority among the Irish Catholics, the English, according to one study of their presence in seventeenth-century Munster, had “social conditions which would have comforted and reassured.”38 The Ireland of County Cork may not have been “radically different from England,” and the city of Cork had become in prominence second only to Dublin, but the Ireland of Rathbarry was not the London Elizabeth Freke had left behind.39 Her husband, Percy, born in County Cork, was more at home in an Anglo-Irish culture that to his wife would probably have appeared quite foreign.
The Ireland Elizabeth describes in both manuscripts is unwelcoming, with “noe place fitt to putt my unfortunat head” (42). The eight months she and her husband spent at the Second Earl of Inchiquin’s Rostellan estate might have eased her transition to Ireland: the O’Briens were related through marriage to the Frekes, with whom they also came to the royalist defense.40 But Elizabeth, who had another miscarriage during the time at Rostellan, was deeply affected by her mother-in-law’s unkindness there. Later a similar treatment, she writes, occurred when she, her husband, and their five-year-old son came to Rathbarry in 1680 after the death of her mother-in-law; her sister-in-law had taken away from “my house” all of any worth—including the seven years of letters between Elizabeth and Percy before they were married—claiming the Frekes’ plate and linens were her mother’s and leaving them with the bill for her burial.41 When, after the difficult winter of their next return in 1683, John Hull demanded the fulfillment of a lease on Rathbarry her husband had signed without her knowledge, she claims “we lost neer halfe our goods, the whole country coming to see this cruellty to us” (51/222). The Frekes regained possession of Rathbarry following the war between James II and William III, and Elizabeth reluctantly returned to Ireland in 1692 after eight years “to know more misery” (61). The house at Rathbarry had been burned during the conflict, and in her retelling she found a “deplorable” and “miserable place” with only two rooms, bare walls, and no chair or bed “fitt for a Christion” (61/229). By her reckoning she spent four and a half years “allmost frightned outt of my witts” (229), always seriously ill, and often unable to go down the stairs without assistance. It was “a miserable hard fate” (61/230) and “a miserable life” (232).
But the Ireland of Freke’s remembrances does not always appear a miserable place. When on her fourth voyage to Ireland she and her husband arrived at Cork with “none to help us” (50) and were brought before the mayor as suspects in English plots, a Mr. Covett offered himself as security, arranged to have their belongings brought ashore, and welcomed them at his house with the civility “due to our quallity” (221). The estate at Rathbarry her husband then leased to John Hull near the end of this stay in Ireland also seems to befit their quality, and the neighbors in the country appear to have been supportive. A farm in the lease and the number of horses and oxen, a large herd of cows, and a flock of sheep suggest the estate was substantial; neighbors and others in the Rathbarry area came to the Frekes’ aid with carts and horses to help them move when forced from their house without adequate notice. However miserable Elizabeth may have been during her last years in Ireland, when their property was restored, they remained a family of some stature, and her life may not have been entirely one of isolation. Percy represented Clonakilty in the Irish Parliament.42 When he also became a sheriff, “doe all I could to the contrary” (230), Elizabeth accompanied him to the assizes in Cork, which were important social occasions.43 Twenty-two liveried men attended him; others ran alongside his horses. And when he went the next year as sheriff to Dublin, the Third Earl of Drogheda, Henry Moore, offered a match between his daughter Alice and their son, Ralph. Ireland seemed to have fulfilled the “fortun” the Frekes sought when they first left England, yet Elizabeth was never happy there.
Her initial response to Ireland during the eight months at Rostellan reveals a basic source of Freke’s unhappiness when she juxtaposes the unkindness of her mother-in-law in Ireland with the kindness of her father at Hannington. Learning that his daughter was pregnant, Elizabeth’s father had sent a coach to Bath for her, where the Frekes were awaiting a ship for their first voyage to Ireland; they stayed with him almost a year, “most kindly treated and used” (40/213), and then left their three-month-old son in his care at Hannington. When Percy Freke later had his wife write to her father for a loan of 1,000 pounds secured on the Norfolk property of West Bilney her father had “settled” on his daughter, he “immediately” sent the money to complete the acquisition of Rathbarry and later waived the loan. And when on a visit from Ireland his daughter seemed to him “a little malloncally,” he gave her 200 pounds, telling her not to inform her husband of the gift intended for her own use (49/220).44 Elizabeth would return from Ireland three times “by the desire of my deer father,” the third visit to receive his blessing before he died. At his urging during her final stay she “redily and gladly” promised to remain with him at Hannington, where he assured his daughter that all her needs would be met. The “greatest kindness imaginable” that Elizabeth says she received was “A greatt allterration” from “whatt I found in Ireland from a husband” (49/220), and she adamantly refused to leave when Percy came to Hannington, honoring the promise to her father and protesting the treatment by her husband. Deleted from her first version and omitted in the second is her memory of Percy’s parting wish as she left Ireland on her last journey to Hannington that he never see her again. Neither manuscript mentions their reconciliation. The grief and heaviness of heart that Freke says she felt when leaving her father and Hannington doubtless conveys as well a reluctance to return to an Ireland and a husband that had made the last farewell so difficult.
Whatever the differences between them, the revisions reveal in subsequent partings from her husband a changing attitude toward their relationship. Much of her unhappiness in London during their first three years of marriage she attributes to missing her husband, the cousin she married after a long engagement and without her father’s consent. Not to have had his company “was no small grife to me” (39/213). Later, alone in the unfamiliar county of Cork and among relatives she thought treated her badly, her loneliness appears to have been great; separation from her husband when she returned to England was a further cause of unhappiness. Percy left his wife in England and journeyed back to Ireland on seven occasions; missing in partings mentioned in the first manuscript is the earlier affection apparent once again in the revisions.
Returning to England after being away three-quarters of a year, Percy in the initial version is angry with his wife, apparently because she chose to remain in England; he leaves in 1686 for two years, angered that she refused to sell the Norfolk property of West Bilney, leaving her “thus thrown off with my son and my deer father dead” (56). When Elizabeth recalls this return and parting in the revision, Percy is no longer an irate husband, and she simply writes, “my deer husband wentt for Ireland” (225). Charged by the Irish proclamation of James II an absentee and prosecuted for refusing to drink to the health of a king’s appointee, Percy left Ireland for England and West Bilney in 1688, a decision Elizabeth initially notes was a choice for him between two evils (56). Omitted as well in revision is the belief that her husband later “cruly disgarded” her in London on his return to Ireland (72); deleted, too, is the characterization of another departure, this one for two years, as barbarous (73). Together the changes, all of which were made after Percy faced his final illness, suggest a renewed appreciation of their love brought about by his death.
When Elizabeth did return with her husband to Ireland in 1692, where they were together during the four years of her last stay, Rathbarry embodies a new awareness of isolation. The two rooms and bare walls in the burned house underscore the deprivation and reinforce the memory of her first miserable arrival at least in part because Freke had found a sense of place in England. Left by her husband to shift for herself and, in her telling, with nowhere in England or Ireland to rest her “unhappy head” (223) after her father had died, Freke had taken possession of the Norfolk manor at West Bilney. Unable to occupy the main house until the terms of the lease were fulfilled, she lived in a thatched house for almost seven years before she returned to Ireland. At first without a chair, table, bed, or utensil, the dwelling was reminiscent of the bare-walled house at Rathbarry, but under its thatched roof was an “ease and comfortt” (55) that would have made all the more difficult the return to Ireland. The Rathbarry she says frightened her when she first saw “whatt a place I weere come to” (64) offers none of the contentment of West Bilney. When Freke left Rathbarry for the last time and returned to West Bilney, “againe to bare walls and every thing elce wantting” (66/233), these walls offered a renewed peace and rest. Often the West Bilney hall she later occupied is described in the remembrances as “my own house,” “my beloved home,” or simply “deerly beloved Bilney.” There once again managing for herself, Freke enjoyed the independence and belonging that had eluded her in Ireland. Financial security proved, however, more elusive.
During the three unhappy years in London after the marriage, when her husband lost a considerable part of her money in the Hampshire venture, Freke remembers that she never had control of her funds. “Fearing all my fortune would be spentt” (39/213), she resolved to seek financial security in Ireland, where Percy continued to invest in property with her fortune. Though Freke wrote to her father for 1,000 pounds to complete the ownership of Rathbarry, using the Bilney estate she received from him as security, she later rejected her angry husband’s attempt to have her sell the estate so that he could invest in further Irish holdings. She would not “trust to his or any ones kindness” (55). But Freke did give him sums of money. She gave him 500 pounds when he came from Ireland for a three-month visit “to gett whatt mony he could from mee” (56). He left her on another visit to West Bilney “all alone” after he had taken 1,000 pounds she had received from her father. “This I thought very hard usage, butt tis true” (71). When her husband transferred another 1,000 pounds into Irish debentures to acquire additional land in Ireland, Freke was “very unwilling to partt with itt,” having saved the money during the many years at West Bilney; “butt I was bound and must obey” (240). She did remove her remaining 360 pounds from the Bank of England without consulting her husband, who refused to see her when he returned for the last time from Ireland, even though by her accounting he had already received the bulk of her 2,000 pounds and interest. And he had taken the money while leaving her with little subsistence. Despite his wife’s misgivings, Percy Freke did fulfill the resolve to try their fortune in Ireland. Among the miscellaneous documents in the second manuscript, “A true accountt of what I lent and brought my deer husband” lists only some of the property this money helped buy. Percy Freke benefited especially from the sale of lands forfeited by Catholics and supporters of James II, gaining from the forfeitures extensive holdings that included the village of Baltimore. Among the foremost buyers at the sales and auctions of 1702 and 1703, he became by the beginning of the seventeenth century a major landholder in County Cork.45
Money would also contribute to the growing distance in Freke’s relationship with her son, Ralph. News from Hannington during Elizabeth’s first stay in Ireland that their son had broken his leg, was crippled, and “given over by all” (43/215) brought his parents back to England. Before returning to Ireland a year later, his mother wrote, his leg mended through “my poore, weak endeavours” (42/215), and he walked without crutches. Ralph remained in England until he accompanied his parents on his mother’s third voyage to Ireland. During the eight years following the death of his grandfather and her return from Ireland, Ralph would often be with his mother, until she left him in 1692 for her final years at Rathbarry. A year later his father would bring their eighteen-year-old son back to Ireland, where he resided for the rest of his life. Together in Ireland during Elizabeth’s last, extended stay, serious conflict with her son arose.
The marriage negotiations between Percy Freke and the Earl of Drogheda occasioned the falling out. Her son was, in Elizabeth’s opinion, “quite smitten” (230) and greatly fancied fifteen-year-old Alice; his mother objected initially to her “quality, which I thought too much for a gentleman” (62). The second remembrance clarifies the objection, “quality proper for my son, clog’d with seven or 8 brothers and sisters” (230). Both versions stress the mother’s reluctance to be separated from her married son a distance of some hundred miles, “which I thought very hard to loose my only child” (63/231). In the second manuscript Freke callously adds, “I cared nott to bee frightnened outt of my mony nor my son too” (231). The terms of the settlement would, she believed, make them servants to the married couple, reducing the parents to the role of “paymasters” and proving “rhuinous” to the family. Prospects for the match ended with Freke’s refusal to consider a counteroffer and a son “bitterly angry with me” (63/231). Learning later of her son’s marriage in Ireland to Elizabeth Meade, Freke states in both recollections that she forgave him for marrying without her consent and blessing, wishing the couple good fortune; but the self-concern implicit in the accounts of the failed earlier match reemerges in the addition in the revision: “perhaps I mightt have opposed this match, I heering my son wish (to cross me)” (237).
Letters are emblematic of the physical and personal distance. Not hearing from him after Freke left Ireland increased the growing discord between mother and son. Ralph’s ingratitude is especially galling. When he wanted 400 pounds for the purchase of land in Ireland, which Freke writes was “imediattly” sent, she further adds, “I never had soe much as a letter of thanks” (241). Several months later she settled on him her rights through marriage to Rathbarry, valued at 300 pounds a year, and again “never had his thanks” (77/241). A similar complaint followed the extended visit of her son and family to West Bilney, compounded by the incivility of not having written once they were back in Ireland. After her son had come to England to see his dying father, and Freke thought he had left following the funeral only to learn four months later that he was still in England, the aggrieved mother appeals in a letter to his shame and guilt, “troubled thatt your unkindness should add to the afflicttions of my unfortunate condittion” (89). She adds in the second manuscript, “I had only as usuall a rude answer for itt” (254). Another letter written in response to one her son had sent to Elizabeth’s attorney and the executor with her of Percy Freke’s will, explaining his delays in meeting rents due his mother, complains forthrightly about an “unduttyfull and ungratefull” son who has “broke my hartt” and has “brought mee to the condition I am in.” Angered and hurt by her son’s “many slights and disrespectts,” she threatens to withhold future support and blames the lawyer for misleading her about her son’s appreciation when she initially signed the lease (132).
The troubled relationship with her son and with Ireland is further apparent in the relationship with the attorney, her means of being present in Ireland. Within a year of Percy Freke’s death, Elizabeth intended to return to Ireland, prove her husband’s will, and establish her rights; sickness, however, prevented the journey, and the lawyer sailed to Ireland on her behalf. Though she had never been content during the years she had lived there, Ireland had initially offered Elizabeth and Percy the possibility of finding their fortunes, and she now had a vested interest in the Irish estate, however much she had been happy to leave Ireland. Increasingly suspicious and concerned about her security, Freke’s Irish concerns become personal as well as financial. The change is quite obvious in the difference between her first remembrance of the “sad accountt” the lawyer brought back from Ireland and that of the “dismall account” in the considerably later revision.
Initial entries dismiss his three months in Ireland as a stay of “little or noe purposs” other than to inform her that the estate steward had cheated her of 4,000 pounds, tenants had left without settling their obligations, and an ungrateful and imprudent son had encumbered his family with debt (94). Entries in the later version are not merely an account measured in monetary terms. Freke blames the lawyer who “ruiened me in my estate” by failing to deal with the steward, letting her rents fall by 200 pounds, and giving away over 1,200 pounds in arrears (255). The mistrust reveals her vulnerability and even fear; Ireland also seems a place of rejection, if not betrayal. Freke is particularly upset that through the lawyer’s bad advice, persistence, and power of attorney, she leased to her son a trust from her husband and only once received the rent due. The 300 pounds paid for this legal service, she adds, cost her a bitter lesson about relying on others (282). The “poor unhappy mother” of an undutiful son, she is now a “wretched self” deceived by those she trusted (257, 255). Illness again prevented her going herself to Ireland in 1709 to undo the “barbarous lease” the lawyer had made with her son (95). In the last years of her life Freke could only rue the folly of heeding the bad advice that misled her into a “fools trap.”
The bond with her son remains implicit, however, in responses to letters from her daughter-in-law in Ireland about his illnesses. Learning from his wife that her son is seriously ill of dropsy, she urges them “to hasten over to me for cure” (78/244). Similar fear overcame her after the family’s final visit to England. The year-long stay did not go well, she complaining of his “cruell usuage” (198) and he objecting to her condescension; but before her son left, Freke paid over 500 pounds for his baronetcy. When her daughter-in-law wrote three months later that her husband was suffering from gout, one of the last entries of the remembrances welcomes the news that he was alive. Misled by earlier reports that he had drowned in the Dublin harbor, “I have never gone to bed or rise outt of itt with dry eyes” (208).
Besides letters, the news from gazettes and information from published histories further reveal an abiding interest in Ireland inseparable from concern for herself and the well-being of the family. Entries transcribed from the London Post-Man in September 1710 report the repairing in Dublin of a defaced monument to the “glorious memory” of William III (155) and in November 1711 a resolution passed at the proroguing of the Irish Parliament, declaring all who speak or write against the principles of the “happy revolution in 1688” enemies of the Crown and church and friends of the pretender (189/277). A long narrative in the first manuscript dated 1710 relates in considerable detail events in Ireland following the revolution that forced James II from the throne and led to the war with William III. Freke drew from contemporary histories for her account of the plight of the Protestants and her extended narrative of the military conflict; she also relied on gazettes for the years following William’s triumph. Though she characterizes the series of chronological entries “convenyentt” remembrances about the time in Ireland when her husband was outlawed and they suffered the loss of all their possessions (139), central to the remembrance is William III and the Irish conflict. Where family loyalties determined Alice Thornton’s defense of Wentworth, self-interest underlies Elizabeth Freke’s support of William. Her history confirms what the entries about Dublin from the gazettes suggest: like Thornton she is committed to the monarchy and Church of England. Freke further sees herself, however, as a “deep sufferer” who claims to have lost through the “mallice of King Jams” and his “black actt” 1,000 pounds a year besides the burning of “our house and castle.” She also claims to have “with much adoe saved my deer husbands life” (142). The victory of William, in any case, saved the estate at Rathbarry, for the Frekes regained possession and greatly extended their control of Irish land when Catholics and Jacobites lost their holdings in the Williamite confiscations.
The Frekes and their descendants would continue to control extensive land in Ireland until the first decades of the twentieth century. The farms and acreage of the West Bilney manor were sold by their grandson John Redmond Freke in the eighteenth century. Rathbarry Castle remained a significant part of the Irish estate, which in a 1787 survey encompassed fifteen thousand acres, until the Sixth Lord Carbery, John Evans-Freke, built a new castle in the eighteenth century on a hill in another part of the Rathbarry lands overlooking the sea. With further additions in the next century, Castle Freke would remain the Irish residence of the Carberys, who by 1883 held nineteen thousand acres in Ireland. After a major fire in 1910 destroyed much of the castle, it was rebuilt, sold in 1919, and, following a series of owners in the second half of the century, fell into ruins.46 Both Castle Freke and Rathbarry Castle are now, however, once again Freke possessions. Stephen Evans-Freke, the son of the Eleventh Lord Carbery, purchased Castle Freke and has begun a major restoration. Renovations he commissioned of Rathbarry Castle are notable especially for the work on the ruins of the castle keep and the integration of new structures on the site of the old.
Reminiscences of life in Castle Freke, the people, and the surrounding Rathbarry area described by Mary Carbery, the wife of the Ninth Lord Carbery, in her memoir, West Cork Journal, 1898–1901, portray a pleasure Elizabeth Freke never found.47 The miserable years she remembers as spent in “noe place fitt to putt my unfortunat head” are also markedly different from the Dublin years of “happienesse and Comfort” that ended for Alice Thornton with the death of her father and the 1641 rising. Neither woman would ever return to the Ireland she left before beginning the first of her remembrances, nor are narrations of daily Irish life their primary intent. Ireland remains, however, very much a part of their self-writing. Though Freke sailed from Cork for the last time a number of years before she appears to have begun writing about this period in her life, she did not leave behind the bitterness of separation from her husband and son that she believes Ireland fostered. The loss of her husband would bring them closer in the remembrances rewritten near the end of her life; the Ireland of her widowhood, however, reflected anew the estrangement from her son, along with a growing feeling of insecurity and victimization. The Ireland recalled in Thornton’s revision of the past, unlike that of Freke’s, is a means of coming to terms with the present. Remembrances of Dublin commemorating her father and depicting a family blessed by God are her attempt to fashion and restore a self-image challenged by rumors that questioned her personal and public integrity. To different ends and in different ways the Irelands they remember, and not simply the years lived in Dublin and County Cork, are uniquely valuable expressions of the interrelation between time and place that govern their memoirs. For both women, location and dislocation are especially significant in the dialogue between the past and the present.
1. Marie-Louise Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 141–79; Naomi McAreavey, “‘Paper bullets’: Gendering the 1641 Rebellion in the Writings of Lady Elizabeth Dowdall and Lettice Fitzgerald, Baroness of Offaly,” in Ireland in the Renaissance, c. 1540–1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), 311–24.
2. Alice Thornton, “A booke of remembrances,” microfilm, Miscellaneous 326, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven; “My First Booke of My Life,” Add. MS 88,897/1, British Library (BL), London. Elizabeth Freke’s remembrances from 1671 to 1714 are included in Add. MS 45,718, BL; her 1671–1713 remembrances are among entries in Add. MS 45719, BL.
3. Alice Thornton, My First Booke of My Life, ed. Raymond A. Anselment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 10; hereafter cited in the text. The similar entry in the earlier “A booke of remembrances” is on 16–17.
4. Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle: The Historie of Irelande from the First Inhabitation Thereof, vnto the Yeare 1509, ed. Liam Miller and Eileen Power (Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities, 1979), 39. Estimates of the population range from five thousand in 1600 to thirty thousand in 1660, according to William J. Smyth, “Ireland a Colony: Settlement Implications of the Revolution in Military-Administrative, Urban and Ecclesiastical Structures, c. 1550 to c. 1730,” in A History of Settlement in Ireland, ed. Terry Barry (London: Routledge, 2000), 168.
5. William Brereton, Travels in Holland the United Provinces England Scotland and Ireland, MDCXXXIV–MDCXXXV, ed. Edward Hawkins (London: Chetham Society, 1844), 137, 144.
6. Barnabe Rich, A New Description of Ireland: Wherein is described the disposition of the Irish whereunto they are inclined (London, 1610), 70, 59–60.
7. Raymond Gillespie, “Dublin, 1600–1700: A City and Its Hinterlands,” in Capital Cities and Their Hinterlands in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Clark and Bernard Lepetit (Aldershot: Scholar, 1996), 84, 85, 86, 90, 93–94; David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City (London: Profile Books, 2014), 50, 55, 59; Dickson, “Capital and Country: 1600–1800,” in Dublin through the Ages, ed. Art Cosgrove (Dublin: College Press, 1988), 63, 67, 70; Smyth, “Ireland a Colony,” 168.
8. Thomas Comber, Memoirs of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable the Lord Deputy Wandesforde, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1778), 75–76. “By the 1630s there was a scatter of aristocratic residences along Dame Gate down to Hoggen Green” (Dickson, Dublin, 56).
9. Toby Barnard notes the “quick, cheap and regular” travel, recognizing it could be “frustrating and hazardous.” “Crises of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685,” Past & Present 127, no. 1 (1990): 43 and n12. See also Barnard, “New Opportunities for British Settlement: Ireland, 1650–1700,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. William Roger Louis et al., 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99), 1:322–23.
10. Ronald H. Buchanan, “The Irish Sea: The Geographical Framework,” in The Irish Sea: Aspects of Maritime History, ed. Michael McCaughan and John Appleby (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1989), 3; and John Appleby, “Merchants and Mariners, Pirates and Privateers,” in McCaughan and Appleby, Irish Sea, 47–58.
11. Frances Cooke, Mris. Cookes Meditations (London, 1650); John Cook, A True Relation of Mr. Iohn Cook’s Passage by Sea from Wexford to Kinsale in that great Storm Ianuary 5 (London, 1650).
12. All biblical citations are from the King James Version.
13. See Raymond A. Anselment, introd. to Thornton, First Booke, xvii, and the discussion of manuscripts and provenance, xlix–lii.
14. This interpretation is developed in Anselment, introd. to Thornton, First Booke, see esp. xxv–xxvi, xxviii–xxix, and xlviii.
15. Anselment, introd. to Thornton, First Booke, xx.
16. David Edwards, The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515–1642: The Rise and Fall of Butler Feudal Power (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003), 299, 307–8.
17. Richard Cox, Hibernia Anglicana: or, the History of Ireland From the Conquest thereof by the English, To this Present Time, 2nd ed. (London, 1692), 60–61, 64; see also Aidan Clarke, “The Breakdown of Authority, 1640–1641,” in A New History of Ireland, vol. 3, Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691, ed. Theodore W. Moody, Francis X. Martin, and Francis J. Byrne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 279–80; and Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 83–86.
18. A. Clarke’s “The Government of Wentworth, 1632–40,” in Moody, Martin, and Byrne, New History of Ireland, is especially relevant; Clarke also recognizes the use of office for personal gain (3:252–53, 260–62).
19. According to A. Clarke, “Government of Wentworth,” Wentworth had “overreached himself in his treatment of powerful individuals” and had little “local support” (256); see also Dickson, Dublin, 60.
20. Thornton is not alone in her assertion about the rebellion’s toll. John Temple claims three hundred thousand were victims of rebellion, although not all “cruelly murthered.” The Irish Rebellion (London, 1646), 6.
21. Thomas Wentworth, A Briefe and Perfect Relation, Of the Answeres and Replies of Thomas Earle of Strafford: To the Articles Exhibited against him, by the House of Commons on the thirteenth of Aprill, An. Dom. 1641 (London, 1647); and Wentworth, The Earle of Straffords Speech on the Scaffold before he was beheaded on Tower-hill, the 12 of May, 1641 (London, 1641).
22. Temple recognizes the years of peace (Irish Rebellion, 16); as does Cox, who relies on Temple, in Hibernia Anglicana, 72.
23. Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, 64.
24. Edwards, Ormond Lordship, 298–99, 304–5; Jack Burtchaell and Daniel Dowling, “Social and Economic Conflict in County Kilkenny, 1600–1800,” in Kilkenny: History and Society; Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County, ed. William Nolan and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Geography, 1990), 253–55. For the dispute, see also Edwards, Ormond Lordship, 301–2, 304, 306–7; and Hardy Bertram McCall, Story of the Family of Wandesforde of Kirklington & Castlecomer (London: Simpkin, 1904), 99–100, 141–45.
25. Clodagh Tait discusses the nature of the keen, “a usually extempore lament, half-sung, half-spoken.” Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–1650 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 35–38 and notes.
26. Temple, Irish Rebellion, 16; Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, 72–73.
27. Raymond Gillespie, “Temple’s Fate: Reading The Irish Rebellion in Late Seventeenth-Century Ireland,” in British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Ciarán Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 315–33.
28. See also Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, 248–49.
29. Thornton seems to have read the account in James Cranford, The Teares of Ireland (London, 1642): “hang her English Kite, we will get thee a better wife” (7). Cranford’s text includes a picture of the escape over the wall (9).
30. Edmund Borlase, The History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion (London, 1680), 19. Temple observes, “I could never hear that any English man received any certain notice of this conspiracy” (Irish Rebellion, 17).
31. William Nolan, “Castlecomer,” in Irish Country Towns, ed. Anngret Simms and John H. Andrews (Cork: Mercier, 1994), 122–23.
32. Comber, Memoirs, 98–105; McCall, Story of the Family, 78, 144–45; Edwards, Ormond Lordship, 27–28, 302; Nolan, Fassadinin: Land, Settlement and Society in Southeast Ireland, 1600–1850 (Dublin: Geography, 1979), 54–56, 66.
33. McCall, Story of the Family, 98–99, 144–48; Nolan, “Castlecomer,” in Simms and Andrews, Irish Country Towns, 129–30. In Fassadinin Nolan traces the Wandesfords’ residence through the nineteenth century.
34. E. Freke, Remembrances, 39; hereafter cited in the text. Citations from the text of the 1671–1714 remembrances are separated by a virgule from similar passages then noted in the 1671–1713 text.
35. Arthur Freke’s report of his defense of Rathbarry has been transcribed and edited by Herbert Webb Gillman. Freke, “Siege of Rathbarry Castle, 1642,” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 2nd ser., 1 (1895): 1–20. Gillman’s description of the nineteenth-century ruins of the castle includes a sketch outlining the area within the walls as well as four 1894 photographs of the keep, curtain wall, and bastion.
36. Richard Barry, Second Earl of Barrymore, held a right that would have reverted to him at the end of the lease.
37. Patrick O’Flanagan, “Three Hundred Years of Urban Life: Villages and Towns in County Cork, c. 1600 to 1901,” in Cork History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County, ed. O’Flanagan and Cornelius G. Buttimer (Dublin: Geography, 1993), 402; Nicholas Canny, “The 1641 Depositions as a Source for the Writing of Social History: County Cork as a Case Study,” in O’Flanagan and Buttimer, Cork History and Society, 256.
38. Michael MacCarthy Morrogh, “The English Presence in Early Seventeenth Century Munster,” in Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641, ed. Ciarán Brady and Raymond Gillespie (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986), 188. He also states that “Easy access from south-west England to Munster might persuade the settler he was hardly venturing abroad” (173).
39. MacCarthy Morrogh, “English Presence,” 189; Smyth, “Society and Settlement in Seventeenth Century Ireland: The Evidence of the ‘1659 Census,’” in Common Ground: Essays on the Historical Geography of Ireland, ed. William J. Smyth and Kevin Whelan (Cork: Cork University Press, 1988), 77.
40. William O’Brien, Second Earl of Inchiquin, and Arthur Freke, Percy’s father, married members of the prominent Boyle family.
41. Mary, the older sister of Percy, was the wife of Francis Bernard.
42. Percy represented Clonakilty from 1692 to 1699; he represented Baltimore in 1703; see E. Freke, Remembrances, 61n77.
43. Toby Barnard, “The Political, Material and Mental Culture of the Cork Settlers, c. 1650–1700,” in O’Flanagan and Buttimer, Cork History and Society, 312.
44. The miscellaneous documents in the wallpaper-bound manuscript include an account of money received from her father; see E. Freke, Remembrances, 316–17.
45. Percy Freke acquired the town of Baltimore as part of the forfeited estate of Edmond Galway he purchased in 1703; see E. Freke, Remembrances, 75n118. For the auctions and his emergence as a landowner, see John G. Simms, The Williamite Confiscation in Ireland, 1690–1703 (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), 148–62; and Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630–1830 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2005), 62–63.
46. E. Freke, Remembrances, 18–19. David Hicks’s survey of the history of Castle Freke includes a number of photographs of the castle’s late twentieth-century state of disrepair, in Irish Country Houses: A Chronicle of Change (Cork: Collins, 2012), 14–25.
47. Mary Carbery, Mary Carbery’s West Cork Journal, 1898–1901, ed. Jeremy Sandford (Dublin: Lilliput, 1998).