Chapter 5

A Troubled Homecoming

There went he and the Countess towards

Loughgure, where a nombre of the freeholders of

the Countie of Lymerick met hym. He and his

wiefe put on Irishe rayment and made

proclamation that no deputie nor constable nor

sheriff should practise their office in his countrey.

JUSTICE NICHOLAS WALSHE TO LORD DEPUTY FITZWILLIAM, 24 NOVEMBER 1573

The joy of liberty was short-lived, and the nightmare of captivity looked set to continue. No sooner had Garrett, Eleanor and Sir John disembarked at the walls of Dublin than they were promptly taken to Dublin Castle where they were held in ‘easy restraint’1 at the behest of Sir John Perrot. Perrot had long resisted the Earl of Desmond’s restoration and, as he doused the embers of rebellion in Munster, saw even less reason for the earl’s return. Eleanor, while not personally held in custody, chose to remain with Garrett in Dublin. They were permitted daily access to the city and once again incurred much expense as they strove to maintain themselves in some state conducive to their rank and position. But Eleanor’s main preoccupation was to pacify and control her husband. Garrett was incensed at his further detention. He accused the crown officials in Dublin and in London of a breach of faith. What right had they to restrain him, the Earl of Desmond, set at liberty by the Queen? His lack of political cunning was once more exposed as he made wild threats and treasonable outbursts against the Crown.

Eleanor realised that her husband was close to breaking-point. Despite her pleas for caution, he could not control his sense of anger and outrage before the sneering faces of the petty Castle officials, who reported his every word and goaded him into even more damning utterances. He could not be restrained even in the presence of Perrot, who contemptuously reported ‘that Desmond was devoid of reason and that nothing could be done with him’.2 Perrot urged the Queen to have him speedily returned to England, as he considered him ‘more fit to keep Bedlam than to rule a newly reformed country’.³

Garrett’s brother, Sir John, played his cards more cautiously and, promising to uphold English law in his territory, was allowed to depart for Munster. Eleanor became suspicious at the ease with which her brother-in-law obtained his release from Perrot, who had previously indicated to the Queen his readiness to accept Sir John in preference to Garrett as leader of the Geraldines in Munster. To thwart Sir John’s ambitions, Eleanor decided to accompany him back to Munster. Lack of money and the collection of the overdue rents of his estates were used as the excuse to explain Eleanor’s sudden departure. ‘Such rentes and duties as were owing in my country’, Garrett complained to the Irish Privy Council, ‘were taken up by suche as tooke little cause to heere in what beggered estate I lyde there in Dublin.’⁴

Eleanor found Munster in relative peace, slowly recovering from the ravages wrought by the rebellion and Perrot’s subsequent reprisal. As Askeaton loomed into view, despite her undoubted fatigue, she felt a warming sense of homecoming after her long and bitter exile. Her daughters awaited to be reunited with her. As news of her arrival spread, Garrett’s tributary lords and dependent clansmen came to seek news of their overlord and to give an account of themselves during his absence. She listened to their complaints about the encroachment of Perrot’s administration into their domain. The return of their overlord they hoped might restore their traditional rights.

In July the news of Perrot’s sudden departure from Ireland, due, it was said, to ill-health, spurred the Munster lords into action to bring about Garrett’s release. Glin castle was seized and the surrounding countryside plundered. James FitzMaurice intensified negotiations with Spain and Rome to revitalise interest in his religious crusade. At the same time he divorced his wife on the grounds that she had conducted an amorous correspondence with his erstwhile ally, Edward Butler. He promptly remarried O’Connor Kerry’s widow and thereby gained access to the strategic O’Connor castle of Carraigafoyle on the Shannon. Munster was in a restless state once more.

In Dublin the Council began an investigation into the legality of Garrett’s privilege of palatine rights in Kerry and adjudged it to be void. There was henceforth to be but one legal palatinate in Ireland—that of the Earl of Ormond in Tipperary. The Crown’s preference for one earl over the other was once more blatantly exposed. While Garrett fumed in captivity in Dublin Eleanor kept him in touch with developments in Munster and redoubled her efforts to secure his release. But Garrett also received intelligence from England to the effect that the dreaded nightmare, his return to captivity to the Tower, was being actively propounded by Perrot at Court. As the Crown had failed to honour the terms of his release, Garrett considered himself free from whatever promises he had made to the Queen. He waited while Eleanor co-ordinated plans to effect his escape from Dublin.

On a chilly morning in early November 1573 the Earl of Desmond informed the Mayor of Dublin, in whose custody he had been placed, of his intention to join a stag hunting party to the city environs. This was customary, according to the terms of Garrett’s detention, which stipulated that he must return to the mayor’s custody each evening. But at Grangegorman Garrett gave the hunting party the slip and, accompanied by the faithful Morris Sheehan, rode south through the territory of his kinsman the Earl of Kildare without hindrance. There they were met by Rory Oge O’More and Piers Grace, two prominent rebel leaders, who, with a guard of ‘some hundred kerne and shot of the Moores’,5 escorted the earl safely through the midlands to Béal an Droichid where Eleanor waited. Together they hurried on towards Limerick.

News of the Earl of Desmond’s dramatic escape spread rapidly. As if awaiting the return of a messiah, his followers flocked to see him at the Geraldine lake fortress of Lough Gur. The crowds had already assembled as the earl and countess rode down towards the lake shore. With a great cheer of welcome, which reverberated over the still waters, they surged forward to greet their overlord. For many of the wildly cheering clansmen the reappearance of their almost forgotten lord was like a resurrection from the dead. As he climbed stiffly down from his horse, the misery of his long years of imprisonment was etched on his haggard features and on his threadbare hose and worn shoes. It was an emotive and highly-charged meeting between the earl and his loyal Desmond retainers and clansmen. Later, as was subsequently reported to the Lord Deputy, the earl ‘and his wiefe put on Irishe rayment and made proclamation that no deputie nor constable nor sheriff should practise their office in his countrey’.6

Symbolically donning the clothes and speaking the words expected of a Gaelic warrior chieftain, the proud Geraldine thus appeared triumphant before his people. All the pent-up anger, frustration and humiliation which he had endured at the hands of the Crown spilled forth. This was his hour of glory, the destiny of which he had dreamed and from which he had drawn solace and comfort in the long, dark nights in his Tower cell and in his destitute lodgings in Southwark. The traditional retainers, dependants, galloglass and kern of his house pressed excitedly around him, their roars of welcome acting as a stimulus to his long-suppressed ego. Vain and dangerous threats against the Crown and rash promises of a return to Gaelic ways gushed forth incautiously as he basked in the adulation of his supporters, ‘knowing no God, no prince but the earl, no law but his behests’.⁷ With exultant cheers, the Earl of Desmond and his countess were escorted home to Askeaton.

Eleanor listened, with some misgivings, to the indiscreet outbursts of her husband and perhaps wished that he had spoken with more restraint. It was an emotional reunion for him and it was natural that he should vent his spleen on the Crown which had broken faith with him so often. His health had suffered considerably from his enforced detention, and the doubts of his Gaelic followers as to his fitness to receive and command their allegiance had to be assuaged. There were many competitors waiting in the wings should he appear incapable. On the other hand, as Eleanor realised, partly as a result of the events that had occurred in Munster during his exile, and partly because of the recent developments on the international front and their possible effects on Ireland, a return to the old ways would be strongly resisted by the Crown, which had established a foothold in Garrett’s lordship which it intended to retain.

To survive, Eleanor knew, they must adapt to the changing political parameters. She had personally experienced English power, its commitment, philosophy to progress and change, its unity of purpose, its lust for exploration and exploitation. The Earl of Desmond, as leader and protector of the cause of Gaelic Ireland, was doomed; but if he adapted to the changing circumstances relentlessly being promoted by the Tudor political machine in Ireland, he would not only survive but, perhaps, retain his power like his neighbour Ormond. Perhaps it was Eleanor who influenced Garrett to write to the irate Queen regarding his flight from custody in Dublin. It may have been Eleanor’s idea too that she should take the blame for her husband’s unlawful escape, to mask the real reason. For Garrett excused his unauthorised departure to Munster as having resulted from his concern for Eleanor, ‘in whose care in myne absence, having no thing els to lyve upon . . . did pricke so deeply that I camme away without your lycence with intent faithfully to serve her matie as becommeth a true subject’.8 With tongue in cheek, Garrett assured the Queen, ‘if I thought my staye there [in Dublin] had ben ane way a further cause to your highness service, I would [be] well contented to end my lyfe there in captyvitie’.⁹ For the moment there was little Elizabeth could do but grit her teeth at the insolence and audacity of the Irish earl.

Garrett’s fiery speeches to his supporters brought immediate and predictable results. Castlemaine and Castlemartyr, which had taken Sir John Perrot so long to capture, were seized. Garrett ordered the English strongholds in Glin and Castletown to be razed to the ground, and he granted Glin, Carraigafoyle and Tarbert to his cousin James FitzMaurice. Rumours of foreign-based conspiracies circulated, and a servant in the Earl of Desmond’s livery was reported to have been sighted at the Spanish court. The earl revelled in his freedom and power. His dramatic escape from Dublin had enhanced his prestige among the Gaelic and gaelicised grandees. O’Neill and Clanrickard sought an alliance. To those on friendly terms Garrett loudly declared that ‘he would rather have an old mantle in Munster than a torn silk gown in England’.¹⁰ With less likely allies, such as the redoubtable Butler brothers, he was more circumspect: he stoutly professed his loyalty to Elizabeth but his independence of her administration in Dublin—for fear, he claimed, of being subjected again to the extremities he had suffered in the past. To emphasise his argument, ‘he exhibited the patched and pieced hose and shoes which he had been forced to wear continually in England’.¹¹ The Butlers were unimpressed and refused to be drawn into another Geraldine-led conspiracy. Defence of their lands was one thing, but intrigue with alien powers against the Crown was another matter entirely. Like bees to a honey-pot, however, the idle swordsmen of Munster swarmed to Garrett’s gates. Soon his army numbered over a thousand, all of whom had to be fed and maintained at his people’s expense.

The Lord Deputy, Sir William Fitzwilliam, could do little to curb the earl’s increasing power in Munster. Lack of money and poor coordination of resources and manpower in his administration resulted in turmoil in every province. In Connaught the restless sons of the Earl of Clanrickard, Elizabeth’s ‘impudent imps’, plundered unchecked throughout Galway. Turlough Luineach, chief of the O’Neills in Ulster, was known to be plotting with the Scots and the Spanish. In Leinster the O’Mores raided at will through King’s County and Queen’s County, and even the Pale was subjected to attack. In Ormond the palatinate of Black Tom was said to be as disturbed and wasted as Desmond. The Lord Deputy and his vice-treasurer, Sir Edward Fitton, were at each other’s throats and could not agree on tactics to quell the maelstrom. Finally, at the end of his tether, Fitzwilliam begged the Queen to relieve him of his post in Ireland. With her administration and military commitments in Ireland stretched beyond their limits, Elizabeth was compelled to pursue a policy of reconciliation towards the Earl of Desmond. She despatched warrants to Dublin which formally, if belatedly, granted the self-liberated earl his freedom. She urged him to make peace with her Lord Deputy and to disperse his private army, which she realised well outnumbered her own in Munster. But the earl reckoned that he negotiated from a position of strength and, flushed by his reception and success in Munster, boldly replied that if the Queen would remove her garrison from nearby Kilmallock, he would find little need to maintain so large an army.

In an attempt to breach the dangerous gulf developing between the Earl of Desmond and her administration in Ireland, Elizabeth consented that Edward FitzGerald, the brother of the Earl of Kildare, should negotiate with his imperious kinsman. But Garrett proved reluctant to negotiate with anybody. Fearful that the ever-widening gap between the Queen and her husband should become an unbridgeable chasm, Eleanor urged him to at least hear what FitzGerald had to offer. While he awaited Garrett’s decision FitzGerald stayed at Eleanor’s old home, Kiltinan castle. As floods on the Shannon prevented Garrett from a planned rendezvous with the Earl of Clanrickard, reluctantly he acceded to Eleanor’s advice to meet the Queen’s emissary instead.

Eleanor was pregnant again and unable to accompany her husband to the meeting. The earl set out with Sir John of Desmond, James FitzMaurice and Andrew Skiddy, the judge of the palatinate of Kerry, to meet FitzGerald at Clonmel. FitzGerald assured the earl that the Queen did not seek to dispossess him but merely wished to be assured of his loyalty and his compliance with the promises he had made in England. Garrett flatly refused to go to Dublin, but indicated his willingness to meet with the Lord Deputy on the borders of his own territory instead. He refused to hand over Castlemaine and Castlemartyr to captain Bouchier, the English constable at Kilmallock, but offered them to FitzGerald, who, he knew, had no commission to accept them and no means of holding them. Beyond this, as FitzGerald reported to the Queen, Desmond would not be moved. Elizabeth had little option but to pardon the earl, which she did reluctantly in the hope that ‘he would restore such castles as either we were possessed of before the time of his escape or any other that we should like to be delivered into our hands’.12 Once back in the safety of Askeaton, however, Garrett flatly refused to forfeit any of his fortresses. Elizabeth thundered against her luckless Lord Deputy as Garrett claimed a moral victory over the Crown, a thing abhorrent to Elizabeth’s Tudor sense of sovereignty. ‘We think ourselves touched in honour’, she raged, ‘that the earl may have cause to think that we should now seek upon him a thing very unfitting for the place and quality we hold.’¹³

Garrett’s moral victory over the Crown further enhanced his standing among his peers. With rumours of alliances and intrigues, domestic and foreign, Eleanor realised that her husband was now becoming the lynch pin for a wider conspiracy of opposition to English rule in Ireland. She knew her husband’s unsuitability to adopt the mantle of leadership of a Gaelic alliance against England. Garrett was not endowed with the strength, charisma or commitment necessary to mould the highly individualistic tendencies of the Gaelic and gaelicised lords into an effective, organised and patriotic alliance, where personal ambition must become secondary to a common cause. But Gaelic society was, as ever, divided and unable to either spawn or succour such a national alliance. Every lord sought independence of his neighbour as much as of the Crown. It would require the services of a ruthless, powerful leader, driven by a vision of nationhood, to lead and unite such an assortment of independently-minded egotists. Garrett FitzGerald, 14th Earl Desmond, was no such visionary.

Eleanor’s objective was to make her husband secure in his title and estates. But to attain that seemingly realistic and understandable ambition, she realised Garret must first come to terms with the changing political scene. Elizabeth was adamant that Ireland’s autocratic lords, whose independent tendencies she viewed just as much an affront to her sovereignty as a threat to England’s security, must be brought into line. They must either accept the new political parameters, affirm their loyalty to the Crown, and thus retain the power and privilege allowed them by law, or rebel and risk losing everything. Garrett’s temperament and character would, in any event, make a painful transition inevitable. But there were other forces, more sinister in their motivation and more clandestine in their operation, from within the Desmond family itself, that sought to make that transition even more difficult. To Eleanor these powerful interests were as devious and dangerous as the most ruthless agents of the Crown. Both groups cast envious eyes on her husband’s estates and plotted his alienation from the Crown. For Garrett to make the transition from a sovereign lord in his own right to a loyal earl of the realm she knew would take time.

Eleanor sought to gain that time. She wrote to the Lord Deputy to reassure him of her husband’s loyalty. Initially her letter would seem to have had the desired effect, and Fitzwilliam and his army remained in Dublin. As Garrett ruminated over his position in Munster his liegemen ran riot throughout the province. James FitzMaurice captured captain Bouchier and kept him prisoner, while Garrett’s galloglass, the MacSheehys, seized the Mayor of Limerick. Hundreds of kern and clansmen flocked to Askeaton and looked to their indecisive overlord to provide them with work for their weapons and food for their bellies. Reports reached Dublin and London that Desmond had now at his disposal an army of 3,000 men-at-arms, that he had captured Kilmallock and Cork, and that he intended to deliver Valentia Island to the King of Spain, with whom he was said to be in constant communication. It was also said that he intended ‘to purge the country of the name of England’14 and that he would listen to no counsel but that of the rebel leader James FitzMaurice.

Under pressure from all sides, Garrett brooded over his position. In the great oak-beamed hall of Askeaton the earl listened as the Desmond bard O’Daly solemnly intoned the valorous deeds of his ancestors. The bard recited a litany of treachery and deceit perpetrated against the House of Desmond by successive English monarchs. Words of exhortation flowed from his lips as he listed the heroic tales of Nesta’s sons and the first Irish Geraldines. Low, deep-throated growls erupted from the bearded chieftains, seated at the trestle tables, as O’Daly bewailed the cruel fate meted out to the earl’s kinsmen, the Geraldine Kildares, at Tyburn. The assembly was brought to its feet as the bardic recitation reached its climax denouncing the late treacherous imprisonment of the earl and the subsequent attempts of the English to usurp his power and patrimony. ‘Shanid abú!’ cried the bard.

In the emotionally charged atmosphere the wooden drinking-cups, overflowing with the heady wine of Spain, were raised, as lord, chieftain, constable and captain saluted their pale, brooding overlord seated impassively at the top of the hall. ‘Shanid abú!’—their answering roar of allegiance seemed to lift the great beams from their stone corbels and fly south over the dark mass of Kylemore to strike terror into the heart of any faint-hearted or doubting inhabitant of Munster. Beside her husband, Eleanor looked on in fear at the upraised faces and frantic eyes of his supporters, who in their wild homage to her husband also demanded their age-old right to his leadership in the defence of their antique Gaelic world.

As reports of the lawlessness in Munster continued to reach her, Elizabeth angrily berated Fitzwilliam for his apparent unwillingness to move against the Earl of Desmond. Fitzwilliam attributed his inaction to Eleanor’s stalling intercession on her husband’s behalf. ‘The Countess with her contynuall impertinancie’, Fitzwilliam complained, ‘and constant assercions of his conformitie made me to hope he wolde in tyme prove so conformiable as she reported him.’15 Eleanor’s action had been successful in staying Fitzwilliam’s hand but, in any event, Fitzwilliam was about to be pushed aside in favour of Elizabeth’s new favourite, the dashing, extrovert, Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex.

Essex came to Ireland in August 1573 in the vain hope of conquering Ulster for his royal mistress. But the Ulster chieftains, as Essex found to his cost, did not part easily with their territories. Their resistance, together with the insubordinate conduct of his demoralised soldiery, whose fear and hatred of Irish warfare and irregular pay made them desert in hundreds, had tarnished the gilded image of Gloriana’s shining knight. Essex now sought to make amends. The seemingly impossible task of reconciling the Earl of Desmond to the Crown seemed an appropriate challenge. Essex wrote to Garrett, seeking a meeting and urging him to free himself from ‘ill counsellors who hiss you on to that which is evil’.16 Echoing Eleanor’s fears, Essex advised Garrett:

My lord, consider well of this and look into the case deeply and give care unto the sound and faithful counsel of your friends and stop the ears from hearkening unto them which seek by their wicked counsel to destroy yourself and to overthrow your house.¹⁷

Essex wrote in similar vein to Eleanor and urged her to use her influence to persuade her husband to meet him. Eleanor’s counsel prevailed, and Garrett finally agreed to hold discussions with Essex at Waterford. He was accompanied by Eleanor, James FitzMaurice and sixty horsemen. On 1 July 1574 they halted at a bridge some three miles outside the city, where they were met by the Earl of Kildare. The Desmond party refused to enter Waterford without a safe protection, which they promptly received—for twenty days’ duration. Garrett, with Eleanor by his side, accompanied by the Earl of Kildare, rode into Waterford and were received by Essex at his rooms in the city. After a series of meetings, on the advice and under the personal protection of both earls, Garrett and Eleanor agreed to go to Dublin, where Garrett’s case was again to be examined before the Council.

Despite Essex’s friendship and protection, the journey to Dublin must have been a difficult and fearful one for the Desmonds. Eleanor might well have wondered whether the faith she had in Essex would be vindicated. Her husband’s dread of further imprisonment had become an obsession. The nightmare of Dublin Castle, the Tower and Southwark was still a vivid, raw reality. Could a sense of honour and good faith exist in their present circumstances? Would Essex keep his word? Eleanor had placed her trust and her husband’s life and liberty in his hands. But unknown to her, or to Essex, the Council in Dublin had received a stinging missive from the Queen, who demanded immediate action against the Earl of Desmond. In her anger she ordered Fitzwilliam ‘to proclaim him traitor and to proceed against him with all celerity’.¹⁸ And now the object of the Queen’s anger rode unsuspectingly into their presence.

The Desmonds were met with an icy reception in Dublin. Stung into action by the Queen, the members of the Council made little attempt to hide their antipathy towards Garrett and their distrust of Essex. The latter was not permitted to accompany Garrett into the council chamber or to plead in favour of his case. Outside Eleanor waited anxiously for the outcome and hoped that her headstrong husband would restrain his temper and not play into the hands of his antagonists. But the councillors were not in a placatory mood and summarily demanded that the earl abide by the articles he had concluded with the Queen in England. Garrett contended that they had been signed under duress, but that he would agree to be bound by them as part of a more general settlement; otherwise the terms of the articles would, in effect, render him the only undefended lord in the country and thus easy prey to his many enemies. Goaded by the overbearing attitude of his inquisitors, he refused to hold his estates at the Crown’s pleasure or to forfeit those of his castles which it had seized before his restoration. He would accept the Queen’s pardon, but would not on any account ‘repair into England to be a spectacle of poverty to all the world’19 in order to receive it. Asked to submit pledges for his future conduct, Garrett pointed out that both his son and his youngest brother, James, still a minor, were in the keeping of the Crown. ‘If neither my son, being my only son, nor my brother, whom I love, nor the possession of mine inheritance, as before granted can suffice,’ he bitterly told his tormentors, ‘then to the justice of God and the Queen I appeal upon you all.’²⁰ But his appeal fell on deaf ears.

In the Council’s opinion, the Earl of Desmond was not in any position to make demands, but should be prepared to accept whatever decision regarding his future they deemed appropriate. Temporarily in the Council’s power but also under Essex’s protection, Garrett reacted quickly when rumours of his impending imprisonment and removal to London reached his ears. Flight from Dublin was now imperative, and he called on Essex and Kildare to honour their pledges of protection. Essex was disgusted at the nature of the Council’s proceedings against the Earl of Desmond. ‘The manner of Desmond’s answer might with honour have suffered a toleration,’ he protested. ‘The mischief is without remedy, for I am bound with the Earl of Kildare, by our words and honours, to safe-conduct Desmond to the confines of Munster.’²¹ Essex was as good as his word, and, despite some resistance, he and the Earl of Kildare conducted Garrett and Eleanor safely away from Dublin and out of the clutches of the Council.

Throughout the long journey towards Munster Garrett’s companions continued to exhort him to comply with the Queen’s demands. At Kilkenny they were joined by the Earl of Ormond, who, carefully making sure that Essex was within earshot, loudly harangued Garrett, urging him to mend his ways and become a loyal subject. Antagonised by the presence of his enemy, and as the safety of his lordship drew near, Garrett grew more reckless and sneered contemptuously at Ormond’s advice. Let the loyal Earl of Ormond dispose of his private army, and he, Desmond, would do likewise, but not before. At the borders of Desmond Eleanor and Garrett parted with their escort and, surrounded by their own clansmen, returned to Askeaton. From Eleanor’s point of view the mission had been an abject failure. The Crown continued to make impossible demands on her husband, demands which not only would leave him undefended but would also be opposed by his dependent lords and clansmen in Munster whose own security was dependent on the strength of their overlord. The Queen persisted in her personal dislike and distrust of him. There were elements in Desmond too who welcomed Garrett’s further alienation from the Crown for their own designs. Eleanor had sought to attain the middle ground for her husband but, so far, without success.

With the Queen’s threat of being proclaimed a rebel hanging over his head, Garrett summoned a meeting of his kinsmen and tributary lords at Askeaton. It was as a result of this conference that the famous ‘combination’ or deed of association was compiled—though the date of this document was to be hotly disputed in later years. According to one version of events, the deed was signed on 18 July 1574, while another version places it exactly four years later, in 1578. Even if (as seems likely) the latter date is correct, the language of the document graphically reflects the unsettled conditions in Munster and the truculent mood of its principal leaders at the time of Garrett’s return from Dublin. The signatories to the deed stated bluntly that they ‘with one accorde doe counsell and advise the Earle not to consent nor yield to any more than in his answer [to the Council in Dublin]’. They further advised him ‘to defend himself from the violens of the Lord Deputy’ and forewarned the Crown that they intended ‘aiding, helping and assisting the Earl to maintain and defend this our advice against the Lord Deputy or any other that will covet the Earl’s inheritance’.22

The document unequivocally states the reasons which compelled Garrett and his adherents to undertake such a course of action. They did not stem from any great desire to remove or replace the English presence in Ireland, nor from any intention to join in an international conspiracy against Elizabeth. They arose from a basic and distinct desire to preserve their hereditary lands, powers and privileges. The deed of association was signed by Sir John of Desmond and by nineteen of Garrett’s liege lords and kinsmen. Noticeably absent was the name of James FitzMaurice FitzGerald. However, the problems of dating the document make it difficult to determine the reason for FitzMaurice’s non-participation; it may have resulted from a decision to distance himself from any movement which did not further his own designs in 1574 or, as is more likely, to his absence on the continent, if the deed was dated in 1578. The intentions of Garrett and his adherents were soon brought to the attention of the irate Queen. The aspirations of the Munster lords and chieftains, however legitimate, were deemed by the Queen a deliberate affront to her sovereignty. She was furious to learn of Garrett’s permitted departure from Dublin Castle and again vented her anger on the unfortunate Fitzwilliam. ‘We gave you no such authority’, she wrote, ‘to give a protection to him to come and go but to come safe and receive his pardon.’23 The earl it seems might be given safe conduct to the Castle but not out of it. The intolerable situation drove the angry sovereign to try to bribe Sir John with a promise of some part of his brother’s lands, even extending her offer to James FitzMaurice ‘or any other of the leaders of his confederates, alluring them from him by such offers as seem reasonable’.²⁴

Eleanor’s distrust of Sir John and FitzMaurice, and her suspicions concerning their designs on her husband’s patrimony, were further heightened by the Queen’s offer. This, combined with the fear of her husband being proclaimed a rebel, prompted Eleanor and her husband to take the unusual and later controversial step of enfeoffing Garrett’s estates to Eleanor’s brother, Lord Dunboyne, Lord Power and John FitzEdmund FitzGerald of Cloyne, in trust for them during their joint lives ‘with provision for his daughters and final remainder to his son’.²⁵ They intended to make Garrett’s property legally secure from both the Crown and family rivals, so that it could eventually be passed on to their son, who, should his father die proclaimed a rebel, would otherwise forfeit his right to inherit. The document was later to be no more than a paper defence, however, against the steely intent of the Crown to gain possession of the vast Desmond estates.

Meanwhile the Earl of Ormond was seeking an explanation for the seizure by Desmond partisans of his castle of Derrinlaur on the Suir. Garrett refused to answer. In August Black Tom, with the backing of Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam, took matters into his own hands. They surrounded the castle and ran a mine beneath the walls. Before they could spring it the garrison attempted to escape but were intercepted, put to the sword and the castle captured. Fearful that similar tactics might be used against his own castles, Garrett surrendered the disputed Castlemaine to the Queen. Eleanor followed her husband’s action with a personal letter to Elizabeth. She assured the Queen that her ‘husband’s departure from Dublin procedid not (God I take to witness) through any evill intencion towards yor Matie or dignitie but rather incencid by ungodly disturbers of the comon tranquillitie to conceave otherwise of your worthy honor than he had cause’.26 She excused her long delay in answering previous letters from the Queen on the grounds that ‘I durst not untyll nowe, that he hath both hastely repentid and duetifully performid suche things as was required by yr Matie Deputie and Councell of him, ones oppen my lyppes nor put penn to paper to intreat for your highnes mercifull clemency for him.’²⁷ In view of her husband’s submission, Eleanor asked the Queen ‘to restore him unto favour’.²⁸

Eleanor’s appeal and Garrett’s submission had the desired effect. Weary of the entire episode, the Queen agreed that the Earl of Desmond ‘was in theory to reign supreme as a feudal prince and be a loyal subject’.²⁹ But independent feudal princes were an anachronism to the Tudor mind and to their concept of royal absolutism. The Earl of Desmond, on the other hand, would not—and indeed could not—abandon the role in Munster which was his fateful inheritance. There could, however, be only one winner in the struggle, and from the beginning the odds appeared to be decidedly in favour of the Tudor queen. Garrett’s fate and fortune depended on how quickly and astutely he could make the transition while retaining as much of his hereditary power as the changed political circumstances allowed.

Eleanor at last breathed a little easier. The threat of proclamation and attainder had receded. Elizabeth had not pushed Garrett beyond his limits. Her relief was further heightened in March 1575 when James FitzMaurice, together with his family and some other members of the Munster Geraldines, sailed from Glin for Saint-Malo in France. FitzMaurice departed ostensibly ‘for the recovery of his health and to make friendship to come to the Queen’s favour’.30 In fact it was common knowledge that he sought international assistance to continue his religious campaign in Ireland. Whether he had Garrett’s consent and blessing for this undertaking is uncertain, but it does not seem likely. For Garrett, at Eleanor’s insistence, had refused to give FitzMaurice additional land in Munster as a reward for his services. Thomas Russell, the Desmond historian and an ardent supporter of FitzMaurice, writing later in 1638, blamed Eleanor for FitzMaurice’s exile:

For Dame Elleynor Butler, Countess of Desmond, and then the mother of one only sonne, opposed herselfe against this James FitzMaurice and with reasons, persuasions, teares and imploreings, persuaded the Earle, her husband, not to dismember his patrimony, but rather for to leave it whole and entire to his only son James FitzGarrett, who was then a young child.³¹

Russell propounded the belief that Garrett was either, as he states, ‘conjured by his wife or rather not well established in his witts’³² to deny FitzMaurice an estate.

Eleanor saw little reason to deprive her son of any part of his inheritance, particularly for FitzMaurice. She wanted her son returned to her care, and her husband’s future conduct must not jeopardise that possibility. Consequently when Garrett’s kinsman and ally, the Earl of Kildare, was suspected of intrigue against the Crown and imprisoned, and when it was expected that ‘Desmond will make extraordinary broils to revenge him’,³³ Garrett, with Eleanor’s restraining hand on his sword and on his lips, did and said nothing. Their son James was now four years old, and her longing to be reunited with him was intense. But still more intense was Eleanor’s determination to protect his inheritance from the grasping ambitions of her husband’s family. With Garrett reinstated in his lordship and with James FitzMaurice in exile, Askeaton seemed at last a safe haven for the young heir of Desmond. Garrett and Eleanor opened negotiations with the English government for the child’s return. Initially it seemed that their request was to be granted, as James was brought from London to Bristol, where he was placed in the care of a Thomas Chester. With some impatience, Garrett asked the Earl of Leicester to intervene and to obtain a licence ‘to have the child brought hither, where’, he assured him, ‘he will not put Her Majesty or me to any charge until he be able to go to school, at which time I will return him thither’.34 But the English Privy Council, pending further ‘trial and proof of his [Garrett’s] obedience and good conformity’,³⁵ ordered that the child continue to be detained in Bristol.

Despite the temporary setback concerning her son’s return, Eleanor’s hopes for a more balanced treatment of her husband by the English administration in Ireland and at the English court were further heightened in the late summer of 1575 by the news of the reappointment of Sir Henry Sidney as Lord Deputy of Ireland. Sidney generally tended to take Garrett’s side at Court and in the Council in Dublin in an attempt to balance the inordinate influence and power of the Earl of Ormond. In Sidney’s opinion, Black Tom had become, by virtue of the Queen’s preference of him at Desmond’s expense, too powerful a subject and a threat to the balance of power in Munster. At last it appeared that Eleanor could look forward in hope of better prospects.