Chapter 8
The Pauper Countess
I and my childrin have tasted of so moche myserie
thattt I protest unto your honnor I knowe no waye
howe to preserve me and them from perishing by
famyne except her Matie do nott relieve us.
ELEANOR, COUNTESS OF DESMOND, TO LORD BURGHLEY, 4 SEPTEMBER 1585
The death of the Earl of Desmond and the end of the rebellion were causes for public celebration in Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Galway and Dublin. Garrett’s death was hailed as a joyful deliverance from years of turmoil and devastation. If a sense of loss and sadness was felt by the adherents of the House of Desmond, it was expressed in secret. The earl’s allies, one by one, submitted and accepted the pardons offered them by the Earl of Ormond. The galloglass and kern hid their weapons and lay low until a new leader might emerge from the ruin and require their services in a new conflict. The terrified tenantry and peasantry crept out of the woods and mountain refuges and returned to the plough to till the despoiled land and to await the arrival of new masters. ‘Munster had suffered a violent upheaval, and time was needed to organise the new departure which, from the viewpoint of the state as beneficiary of the FitzGerald collapse, the occasion demanded.’1 The Earl of Desmond, possessor of a great estate, had been slain in flagrante bello, and this ‘was deemed and constitued an immediate attainder, in which instance the heir was irrevocably bound’.2 Desmond’s rebellion and subsequent death ‘threw into the hands of the Crown the vast tracts forfeited by the earl and his adherents and which were now to be parcelled out to new possessors’.3 But before the spoils of victory could be distributed among the waiting freebooters and adventurers, a commission of survey was first established to determine the precise title and extent of the lands claimed by successive earls of Desmond. The potential prize, over half a million acres of Munster, was worth the brief delay.
While the legal wrangles regarding the appropriation of her late husband’s property got under way, Eleanor attempted to pick up the broken pieces of her life. She was thirty-eight years old, in the prime of life, yet with the vicissitudes and deprivations of a lifetime behind her. But her agony was not over. Her circumstances were difficult and her future uncertain. As the wife of a rebel, she could expect little sympathy for her plight. As an active participant in the rebellion, she knew that her life could yet be in jeopardy should the full force of the law be brought to bear. She rested for a time with her daughters, under the protection of the Earl of Ormond at Clonmel, and waited for the dust to settle. She was accompanied by a few female attendants, some Desmond retainers and her confidant and friend, Morris Sheehan. Her son was still a prisoner in Dublin Castle, but arrangements to have him transferred to the Tower of London were in train—and for reasons other than the furtherance of his education, as Eleanor had initially requested. The rightful heir to the Desmond estates might be more easily forgotten if concealed in the tombs of the Tower, where his sequestered existence might be less likely to trouble the conscience of those about to perpetrate one of the greatest frauds in history. The prospect of salvaging something for her son from the ruins of his inheritance seemed remote, but Eleanor never dismissed a chance, no matter how slim, in the cause for which she had fought and schemed so desperately.
Despite the antagonism of the Butlers towards her husband, Black Tom was content to allow her and her daughters remain in sanctuary in Ormond. He also urged the Crown to adopt a policy of reconciliation and to honour the pardons he had granted the rebels. ‘Deal earnestlye with her highness’, he asked Burghley, ‘that no new devices be wrought to thrust those into a new rebellion, whiche have beehaved them selfes dutifullye and done service sins their submissions.’4 Ormond’s concern, however, arose not merely from a desire for reconciliation but from a deep-rooted sense of self-protection.
Eleanor hoped that the reconciliatory policy preached by Ormond would enable her to recover something from the wreck of her husband’s estate. With this in view, in December 1583 she solicited Ormond’s assistance to secure a formal pardon for herself and her family and to lodge a claim to part of the forfeited estates. Ormond was willing to secure her a pardon and wrote to the Lords Justices in Dublin on her behalf: ‘My very good LLs. the Countess of Desmond hath beene an ernest sutor unto me to writt to your LLs for pardon.’5 However, regarding her intention to secure part of her husband’s estate, Ormond was less enthusiastic. ‘She clameth’, he wrote, ‘to have a great porcion of therle of Desmond’s lands for her joyntor.’6 In an attempt to prohibit her from making a claim to her husband’s estate, the Irish Privy Council curtly signified to Ormond ‘their disapproval of any pardon to the Countess of Desmond’.7 But Eleanor refused to be deterred and persuaded the earl to plead her case for a pardon directly to the Queen. In January 1584 she met with qualified success when the Queen notified the Dublin administration:
We are also content that the lady of Desmond shall have her pardon with some such conditions annexed thereto as shall be thought convenient for her quiet behaviour.8
Elizabeth could well afford to be magnanimous in victory. A pardon was an insignificant exchange for one of the greatest prizes that had ever fallen into her lap.
By now the clamour of claims to the escheated estates had reached a crescendo, and Eleanor’s tentative approaches were pushed aside. The hordes of undertakers, adventurers, Crown administrators and soldiers who queued up for the great pay-off were joined by the remnants of the House of Desmond, seeking their share of the spoils. Garrett’s elder half-brother, Thomas Roe FitzGerald, whose claim to the earldom had been disallowed in 1558 in favour of Garrett, now came forward, together with his son James. They petitioned the Queen to restore them to the Desmond estates, which they claimed were rightfully theirs. They further argued that since neither had supported the Earl of Desmond in the late rebellion, there was no impediment to their case. Their pleas, however, fell on deaf ears. Eleanor again entered the fray with a claim to lands in Limerick. Ormond notified the Crown of her intent. ‘She claymeth’, he wrote, ‘to have had a conveyance from her husband afore his entering into rebellion for the most part of his land in the County of Limerick.’9 Whether the conveyance was actually produced or not is uncertain, but her claim was taken so seriously by the Irish Privy Council that they withheld her pardon until the matter could be satisfactorily resolved in favour of the Crown.
Eleanor and her daughters were still living on charity, and their future position and welfare in Ormond had become precarious. They could not remain there indefinitely. Already Eleanor’s persistent claims to the forfeited estates of her husband had embarrassed her current protector and threatened his own claim to the lands. Consequently, during the early months of 1584, the Council in Dublin brought pressure to bear on Eleanor to forfeit whatever claims she was reported to have to her late husband’s estate. ‘Before I could receive my pardon’, she later testified, ‘I was fayne to enter into recognizences of £10,000 that neither my self nor eny other to my use shall make tytle, challenge or entrye, to any dower, jointor or thirds of eny parte of my husband’s lands.’10 She was further obliged to agree that neither she ‘nor eny of my five comfortles children shall nott departe this realme, neither can I obtayne licens to go in to England to be a petitioner to her Matie’.11 The policy of alienation implemented against her husband was to be continued against his widow and children lest the Crown relent and deprive the waiting hordes of avaricious entrepreneurs of even the smallest part of the great prize. Denied the restitution of her dowry price she was condemned to live on the charity of others. Ormond was ordered to provide ‘a diet of 10d per diem for her self her daughters and weeman’,12 and on this meagre subsistence the Countess of Desmond and her household were expected to exist.
She was abandoned by the Gaelic world whose cause her husband had sought to champion. Few of his Gaelic and gaelicised allies wished to associate with or be seen to assist the traitor’s wife. Her brother, the Baron of Dunboyne, also deserted her in her need. The English-educated James Butler had matured in the mould of his overlord Black Tom. He had little sympathy or tolerance for the Gaelic world that had absorbed his brother-in-law and brought about his downfall. He had become a prominent member of the ‘Old English’ aristocracy, loyal to the Crown and more concerned with matters of land and title than attempt to hold back the tide of time in defence of an outmoded way of life. For Dunboyne the enemy was not the Crown but the new breed of English adventurers whose appetite for land and wealth might not be appeased merely by the acquisition of the attainted lands of his rebel brother-in-law. To succour a rebel’s wife and children, even one’s own sister, might well be used by the enemy to discredit him with the Crown. Moreover, Eleanor had quarrelled with her brother over his refusal to give up lands bequeathed to her by her father as part of her dowry and which she had entrusted to her brother before the rebellion. As ever, Eleanor was left with little option but to rely on her own efforts and wits in the continuing battle to survive.
For almost a year Ireland had been administered by two Lords Justices until, in June 1584, Sir John Perrot eventually assumed the office of Lord Deputy. On his departure from England, the Queen imparted to him her usual impossible requirements for ‘good’ government in Ireland: ‘to increase the revenue without oppressing the subject, to reduce the army without impairing its efficiency, to punish rebels without driving them to desperation, and to reward loyal people without cost to the Crown’.13 The most pressing issue facing Perrot was the settlement of the Desmond estates; and the knowledge of Munster that he had acquired during his term as President there made him a suitable candidate for the job. In June a commission to survey the escheated lands was established under the Vice-Treasurer Sir Henry Wallop, Sir Valentine Browne, Surveyor-General Ashford and two auditors. Wallop was an able property administrator, and the work of the commission progressed steadily. It is significant that, like many of his fellow-administrators in the Irish service at the time of the Desmond collapse, Wallop was richly rewarded from the escheated estates, being later granted the ancient Geraldine seats of Askeaton, Adare and Croom.
Perrot’s attention was initially diverted to Ulster where he took the field against a force of Scots mercenaries whom he suspected of being part of a plot concocted by the king of Scotland against Elizabeth. After a brief but ineffective campaign, which elicited a sharp rebuke from Elizabeth against ‘such rash unadvised journeys’,14 Perrot returned to Dublin and prepared to summon the first parliament to be held since 1569.
Eleanor had alerted the Lord Deputy to her plight, and initially Perrot seemed well-intentioned towards her. He ordered that she and her family should be removed to his custody and that provision be made for them in Dublin. But he was in some doubt as to what to do about her long-term future. ‘We think her estate to be verie bare,’ he informed the Queen, ‘and much she lamenthed and desyreth to be sent over to your Matie. We have no warrant to proceide against hir by lawe, to send her over, to bayle her or relieve her.’15 He requested the Queen ‘to geve some direction concerninge her’.16 While he awaited instructions he had Eleanor and her entourage brought from Clonmel and housed within the precincts of Dublin Castle. Eleanor’s plight was indeed pressing. Without money or means, abandoned by friends and relations, she had been reduced to the status of a beggar.
So as I and my children have lived in such calamitie than if my lo: Deputie had nott taken pittie of me and them in relevinge us owtte of his Lops: kitchin we might have starved with honger: for in my necessitie all my kinsmen and frends have utterly forsaken me.17
In Dublin Castle Eleanor visited her son, then awaiting his imminent transfer to London. Now thirteen, James was old enough to comprehend the enormity of the tragedy that had befallen his house, with such disastrous consequences for his own future. For a fleeting moment Eleanor was reunited with her pitiful son, to whom she could give no tidings of freedom or hope, and whose future she could only expect to be as miserable as his short past, a life of captivity and exploitation. As the day of his departure loomed nearer, Eleanor pleaded with Perrot that her son should be accompanied to London by his nurse and one of his sisters. Little attention was given to the fate of the heir of Desmond. In Ireland men were too busy in a fierce struggle for land to concern themselves about the fortunes of a child whose patrimony had evaporated, whose legitimate place was taken by another, and who would have been—even had he a lordship to succeed to—‘equally set aside as from his youth unfit to command in troubled times so powerful a sept’.18 The dark vaults of the Tower of London closed over the child who was fated to spend sixteen long years in captivity, forgotten and ignored by the powers to whose care he had been entrusted. Eleanor and her daughters continued their life of humiliation and despair in Dublin Castle, defenceless and destitute, fed by the morsels that fell their way from the Lord Deputy’s table.
Perrot convened a parliament in April 1585. Twenty-seven counties were represented, mainly by the ‘Old English’ group. While some Gaelic chieftains were present in both houses, and others were invited to attend as observers, most Gaelic-held areas were not represented. Dublin was en fête for the occasion, and the narrow cobbled streets were thronged with lords, chieftains and their retinues. Eleanor looked on with the rest at the parade of Gaelic chieftains and anglicised lords dressed in their obligatory English apparel. She saw her husband’s old fellow-conspirator, Turlough O’Neill, choking in the doublet and hose of his new-found allegiance, yet prepared to put on the loyal show to preserve his interests. Beside him rode the greatest single threat to his position in Ulster, his second cousin, the English-educated Earl of Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, who had been well rewarded for his contrived loyalty, his help in suppressing the rebel Earl of Desmond, and his participation in the savagery that had subdued and despoiled Munster. Thither came Eleanor’s brother, her brother-in-law the Earl of Clancar, and the former friends, allies and liege lords of her husband, as they trooped into Perrot’s parliament to vote for the formal attainder of their former overlord. But Eleanor could scarcely blame them for their sudden conversion. As she had long counselled her husband, survival was the key, and adaptation was the means to survive. Loyalty to an antique and doomed world was a luxury which could no longer be afforded.
The parliament was an acrimonious one. Perrot was thwarted by antagonistic officials in his own administration and by the lords of the Pale, who continued to oppose the Crown’s intent to replace the old system of cess by a land tax. Perrot was opposed and failed also in his attempt to enact a measure suspending Poynings’ Law which, if successful, would have enabled legislation to be passed by the Irish parliament without recourse to England. Religion, for the first time, began to emerge as a divisive political measure. Until then the Crown had been prepared to tolerate religious divergence in Ireland because it feared that any attempt to impose the reformed religion would lead to even greater civil unrest. ‘It was more important that the Queen should rule Ireland than that Ireland should abandon the Pope.’19 But now, with the ideological struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism encroaching on the political issues of the day, and with the power of Spain threatening her throne, Elizabeth was forced to change her ambivalent attitude. Catholic Ireland was a danger to Protestant England’s security. By their intervention in the Desmond rebellions Philip II and the Pope had already attempted to capitalise on this fact. While the more radical Puritan elements in both the Irish and English administrations sought the implementation of laws against recusants in Ireland, Perrot well realised that, for the moment, sheer strength of numbers alone ensured ‘the impossibility of coercing the majority into conformity’,20 and plans for the introduction of penal legislation were, for the moment, postponed. But Perrot’s temporising attitude and generally pacific policy towards the Gaelic lords and chieftains, combined with his public antagonism to the more radical elements within his own administration, provoked the latter’s enmity and were eventually to lead to his downfall.
In the second session of the new parliament the long-awaited bill of attainder against the late Earl of Desmond and his adherents was introduced. Whether Eleanor was involved in the subsequent attempt to prevent the attainder of her husband and to have the Desmond estates returned to her, in trust for her son, is uncertain. However, given her astute political knowledge and her ability to negotiate and intrigue as well as the next, it is likely that she plotted and was party to this final attempt to secure that for which she had endured and sacrificed so much. To thwart her potential claims to the estates, a measure was first pushed through parliament by the government. It stipulated ‘that all conveyances made, or pretended to be made, by any person attainted within thirteen years before the Act, shall be entered on record in the Exchequer within a year, or be void’.21 Before the bill of attainder could be introduced, however, Sir John FitzEdmund FitzGerald rose in the chamber and submitted the original feoffment ‘by which the late Earl of Desmond had placed all his estates in trust for his wife and son, at a time when he was wholly free from all taint of rebellion’.22
There was uproar in the house. Panic-stricken potential grantees clamoured for an explanation. Sir Henry Wallop was speedily despatched to determine whether the late earl’s deed of association with his adherents, signifying his intention to rebel, had been signed by him before the execution of the enfeoffment of his lands. If it had, then by the terms of the new act, the earl was deemed to have forfeited his estate. If, however, the date of the feoffment preceded that of the document containing the deed of association, then the Crown’s claim to the Desmond estate was invalid. ‘In the entire collection of the State Papers of England, no document exists that was of equal importance as to its absolute correctness of date, as this one, for on none other ever depended the transfer of estates so vast and so valuable.’23
The feoffment, as preserved among the Carew Papers in Lambeth Palace, bears the date of 10 September 1574, while the deed of association is dated 18 July 1578, four years later. Wallop claimed that the deed of association bore the incorrect date and should have read 18 July 1574, thus putting it ‘seven weeks earlier than the execution of the feoffment’.24 He based his conclusion on the contents of the first sentence of the deed of association, which reads: ‘Whereas the earl had assembled his kinsmen and others after his coming out of Dublin . . .’25 This, he contended, referred to the earl’s escape from detention in Dublin in November 1573.
Given the fortune that depended on the issue, as well as the anxiety of the Crown and the avaricious expectations of the waiting undertakers and speculators, it is not beyond the bounds of reason to suspect the authenticity of Wallop’s evidence. It certainly seems strange that the matter was only raised in the first place because Sir John FitzEdmund FitzGerald, who had been a signatory to the deed of feoffment, was convinced that a miscarriage of justice was about to be perpetrated against the Countess of Desmond and her son. Throughout the duration of the Desmond rebellion FitzEdmund had been a model of loyalty to the Crown and had dissociated himself completely from the rebellion of his kinsman. He explained his actions regarding the feoffment to Sir Francis Walsingham as having no ulterior motive other than a sense of justice and fair play: ‘I thought it my parte to tell, onely in discharge of my conscience and honestie before God and the worlde, not as a thinge I wished allowed.’26
FitzEdmund’s efforts were doomed to failure. Parliament accepted Wallop’s theory. The final attempt to prevent the forfeiture of her husband’s estates and title came to nought, leaving Eleanor and her children ostracised. Had she succeeded then ‘the vast estates of the earl must have slipped through the fingers, matchless for their tenacity, of Her Majesty, and a multitude of enterprising English gentlemen must have returned home’27 empty-handed. The act of attainder of the Earl of Desmond and his chief supporters ‘and the vesting of their lands, without inquisition, in the Crown’,28 was passed without a whisper of protest from the Gaelic and gaelicised chieftains and lords present, much to the relief of the potential colonists who lined up for the division of the spoils.
After the attainder of her husband and the confiscation of his estates, the fortunes of Eleanor and her family rapidly deteriorated. Perhaps to punish her for attempting to prevent the forfeiture, Sir John Perrot withdrew his assistance, and Eleanor and her daughters were thrown onto the streets of Dublin and on the charity of anyone touched by their plight. Most of her acquaintances resolutely turned their backs. However, she still retained her astute insight into the political arena and her ability to exploit the many factions and coteries that it comprised. She turned for help to Perrot’s implacable enemy, Adam Loftus, the Archbishop of Dublin, who agreed to alert the Crown to the extremity of her circumstances in Dublin.
I assure you [he wrote to Burghley] hir case (being chargid with childrin) is so miserable that seldom the lyke hath bene sene in a woman of hir calling. All hir frends . . . have quite forsaken hir: so as if yor L, with the rest of that honorable board, be not a mean to hir Matie, to grant unto hir some portion to releive hir and hir childrin, there is no doubt but that shortly they all will goo a beginge.29
But the government was reluctant to come to her aid. As the winter drew near, the cold, unfriendly streets of Dublin held more terror for Eleanor than the wastelands of Munster. She was heavily in debt to merchants and traders in the city and her credit was fast running out. The desperation of her plight as she scrounged food and clothing for her needy children she conveyed in a letter to Burghley:
I and my childrin have tasted of so moche myserie thatt I protest unto your honnor I knowe no waye howe to preserve me and them from perishing by famyne except her Matie do nott relieve us.30
But winter came and went without any assistance from the Crown. With her ragged, frightened children clutched around her, she tramped the streets of Dublin in search of sustenance. In a city that had recently felt the effects of famine, for which her husband was blamed, few doors were opened to her, and the faces of the citizens were as cold as the icy winds that blew through the narrow streets. Once again she wrote to remind Burghley of her wretchedness and poverty:
At the present time my miserie is such that my children and myself liveth in all wante of meat drinke and clothes, having no house or dwellinge wherin I with them may rest, neither the aid of Brother or kinsman to relieve oure necessitie which is so myserable that I see my poore children in manner starve before me.31
The memory of her husband’s rebellion and of her personal involvement in it were, however, still vivid at court. Walsingham had never favoured the Earl of Desmond or his house, and his dislike of Garrett was transferred to his widow. Memories of the effects of the rebellion were constantly recalled, as in December 1585, when the Crown rewarded the Earl of Desmond’s executioner, Daniel Kelly, ‘in consideration of his having slain the traitor Desmond’.32 The Queen incessantly bemoaned the vast amounts expended in the suppression of the rebellion. And as the extent of the damage and devastation of the forfeited Desmond estate became apparent, there were growing doubts as to whether the land would ever recompense the Crown for the outlay it had expended in securing it.
But Elizabeth was also confronted with more urgent and important issues in England which diverted her attention from Ireland and from the pleas of an impoverished Irish countess. Around her the tempo of national and international intrigue had reached a crescendo. Plots against the security of her realm and conspiracies against her life daily ebbed and flowed. A plot among English Catholic gentry, aided and abetted by the Spanish ambassador to England, to assassinate her, had earlier been uncovered. The plot hinted at the involvement of the Queen’s cousin, Mary Stuart, who despite being kept under close confinement in Sheffield, continued to scheme against her cousin with unrelenting enthusiasm, conspiring with the King of Spain, the Pope, the Duke of Guise, and her son James VI of Scotland. Mary attracted the attention of the international conspiracy which sought Elizabeth’s overthrow. Every scheme had hitherto been unsuccessful; nevertheless, Mary, who ‘seemed to thrive on adversity and derived renewed hope from every defeat’,33 persevered. As the prospect of war with Spain grew ever more likely, and the plots against Elizabeth grew more desperate, Protestant feeling in England, both among the people and in the parliament, against Mary Stuart and her foreign Catholic fellow-conspirators, grew. Puritan opinion demanded her head, and Elizabeth’s counsellors cautioned that she was sheltering within her kingdom ‘the daughter of sedition, the mother of rebellion, the handmaid of iniquity and the sister of unshamefastness’.34 But Elizabeth had constantly refused to permit the execution ‘of a divinely ordained sovereign . . . it set a dangerous precedent’.35 During 1586, however, Mary exceeded her previous indiscretions in a reckless new plot against the Queen. This time the wily Walsingham had baited the trap and gathered the necessary evidence. Elizabeth was left with little option but to sanction the trial and execution of her cousin.
Before that event Philip of Spain finally made up his mind ‘that the retribution of heaven upon the heretic and monstrous Queen of England had been too long deferred’.36 He considered Elizabeth’s imminent downfall God’s expressed will, and himself the chosen instrument to put that will into effect. Elizabeth and her subjects, on the other hand, believed that England was the final bastion of hope for the world against the insidious incursions of the Catholic confederacy led by the Pope, the King of Spain and the Catholic faction in France, driven by the lust for power of the Medici and their Valois dynasty. ‘The odds had been taken, the sides drawn, and Europe waited and speculated on which of them, Elizabeth of England or Philip of Spain, was the shining messenger of the Lord.’37 It was not surprising that the welfare of an Irish countess, no matter how destitute and deprived, received little attention at the English Court.
For Eleanor the crisis facing herself and her children, however, was to her as important as Philip’s designs on England. Rebuffed at every level, in May 1586 she again solicited the help of Archbishop Loftus, who agreed to write to the government on her behalf. The archbishop’s appeal was blunt. He could himself vouch for the countess’s extreme necessity, he told Burghley, and
could not resonably denye, being an eye witness of her extreme mysery . . . to make knowne . . . how in truthe she standeth at this prsnt: being not hable to sustaine her selfe or her poore children with necessary foode, but are . . . lyke to famishe if her Matie do not grant bestowe some portion upon her for her relayfe.38
But, as before, the archbishop failed to get a response.
Eleanor was now at her wits’ end. She faced the prospect of prison as her bills mounted and the merchants and money-lenders clamoured for payment. Secretly she prepared to embark for England in a last-ditch attempt to plead her case personally at court. But she was prohibited by law from leaving Ireland without special licence from the Lord Deputy. She had, moreover, signed bonds which had been guaranteed by members of the Munster aristocracy to that effect. Undeterred, however, during the latter months of 1586 she begged and borrowed from every available source to fund her mission. But some of the lords who had guaranteed her bonds, such as Viscount Roche of Fermoy, who was bound for the sum of £100, grew uneasy about her intentions. They urged her to reconsider her proposed flight to England. She refused. Finally Lord Roche alerted Lord Deputy Perrot to Eleanor’s plans. He begged Perrot that, in view of his dutifulness, his own bond of £100 should not be forfeited. Perrot’s cryptic reply did little to relieve his anxiety. ‘Touching the countesse of Desmonds going into England,’ the Lord Deputy wrote, ‘yt is more than I knowe, neither can she goe without licence from me so to doe, which she is not like to have.’39
But before Eleanor could attempt her escape to England in early 1587, her plight was finally brought to the attention of the Queen, who decided that ‘the Countess of Desmond should have a pension of one hundred pounds Irish’40 and ordered Sir John Perrot to pay her. On the strength of the promised pension, Eleanor obtained additional credit from the Dublin merchants to feed and clothe herself and her children, though, as she later divulged, ‘I owe duble for everything I hadde.’41 Her indebtedness to the merchants increased when Perrot declined to pay her the pension out of his administrative costs. Her situation was again desperate. ‘Her creditors (being not paid of their former debt) would no further lett her have meate, drinke nor any other necessaries.’42 Eleanor could take no more. Towards the end of 1587 she managed to obtain a passage to England, leaving her daughters in care in Ireland.
She made her way to London, and for the following twelve months she followed the court in the same state of abject poverty and debt as she had endured in Ireland. Even if she had the means to influence or bribe those in power to gain access to the Queen, political developments made an audience virtually impossible. Throughout the early months of 1588 rumours of an imminent invasion by Spain preoccupied Elizabeth and her Privy Council. After months of speculation the great Spanish Armada lumbered into the English Channel ‘to visit the censure of God upon a middle-aged female’.43 Despite ample warning, England was ill-prepared to meet the challenge. All through the summer, as Elizabeth moved her court from place to place, Eleanor followed patiently in her wake. She had to maintain a low profile. Passions and prejudices had been aroused in England against the new Spanish threat to which her name, in the past, had been linked. The court bustled with activity as messengers brought despatches with reports of the sea battles in the Channel, and the Queen and her counsellors held lengthy meetings on matters of state security. But Eleanor persistently and patiently waited her chance. She had become used to isolation, hostility, humiliation and poverty and the quiet resignation that such conditions induce. She had been somewhat encouraged by Burghley, who had looked on her presence kindly enough, though he could, as yet, spare little time to examine her case in detail.
She meanwhile contrived to visit her son in his cell in the Tower. Memories came flooding back as she traversed the stone passages to be reunited with him as she had with his father some twenty years previously. She found James in distress from an ear ailment which was being treated by the prison physician without success. His general health had, not surprisingly, remained fragile. The damp, stale air of the Tower did little to relieve the general malaise that had afflicted him since birth. He had become both institutionalised and anglicised, a passive prisoner of his unnatural surroundings, nervous and apprehensive lest he incur the displeasure of those in charge of his welfare. His later correspondence is proof that Eleanor’s concern regarding his lack of a formal education had been rectified. A schoolmaster, with a salary of £13-13s per annum, had been appointed to educate him, and he was taught to express himself well and to write in a bold, clear hand. His literary style, taking into account his youth and lack of experience of the world, was frequently ‘very superior to that of the statesmen to whom his letters were mostly addressed’.44 There was little else Eleanor could do for her son who seemed lost to her and to the world.
When the Spanish Armada finally disappeared towards the North Sea, to be battered and broken on the jagged, unfriendly rocks of the Irish coastline, Elizabeth resumed her more mundane duties. She agreed to receive the Countess of Desmond and hear her petition. Eleanor had her audience with the Queen at St James’s Palace in early October 1588. Elizabeth wore her fifty-five years well. After the repulse of the Spanish threat she appeared every bit the
Goddesse Heavenly Bright,
Mirror of grace and Majestie divine,
Great lady of the greatest Isle, whose light
Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine45
of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Elizabeth could still dazzle her subjects into love and loyalty by the very radiance of her attire. It was irrelevant to her adoring subjects that the famous red hair was now a wig; her ruddy complexion was liberally aided by the application of rouge and rice powder. The regal presence that emanated from her slight frame owed much to the sheer opulence and weight of her wardrobe. Good Queen Bess had saved her subjects from a fate worse than the fires of the Inquisition, and now, more than ever, ‘she could still marshal words and command emotions’.46 And there was little competition or threat to her looks, wardrobe or majesty from the gaunt, tattered, dispirited countess who knelt before her to beg for sustenance to provide herself and her family with the bare necessities of life. Sheer pity alone would have moved Elizabeth to loosen her purse-strings. As Eleanor explained the extremity of her situation in Ireland and how the Queen’s previous pension of £100 had been withheld from her, Elizabeth’s sympathies were aroused and she forwarded new instructions to her Lord Deputy:
Wee having compasson of hir unhappie and miserable estate whereunto she is fallen, rather by hir said husband’s disloyaltie, than by anie hir owne offence, are pleased for hir owne reliefe to bestowe on hir a yearely pension of two hundreth pounds sterling to be paid to hir quarterly out of our excheqr of that realme.47
But past experience had made Eleanor suspicious of the Crown’s servants, and she reminded the Queen that her previous order to the Lord Deputy and Council in Ireland for the payment of her pension had gone unheeded. Elizabeth consequently despatched a personally signed and sealed letter to her officials in Dublin, commanding the prompt payment to Eleanor of her pension so that, as she stated, ‘she may have no just cause to complayne for want of payment of the same’.48 But bureaucracy seemed destined to thwart even the orders of the Queen. For an addendum to the Queen’s letter subsequently noted that payment of the pension was, for some months, ‘stay’d upon a doubt moved by Mr Soliciter’.49 Meanwhile, her mission accomplished, Eleanor unsuspectingly returned to Ireland in high expectations of some measure of respite from her state of misery and misfortune.
On her return to Dublin she found Sir John Perrot had been recalled and that Sir William Fitzwilliam had succeeded him as Lord Deputy. But the change in personnel brought little relief, for she found Fitzwilliam’s administration as reluctant as its predecessor to comply with the Queen’s instruction. By December 1588 she had received only part of her pension from the Council in Dublin. She therefore decided on a different course of action. She requested the English Privy Council that she might be paid her pension out of the English rather than the Irish exchequer. The Queen was agreeable, and accordingly in early 1589 Eleanor, accompanied by her daughters, Morris Sheehan and a small retinue, departed once more for England and settled near Westminster. But there were other reasons than the payment of her pension behind her decision to move to England.
The dispersal of her late husband’s estates had begun. The lands to be planted were among the richest in the country. It was originally the intention of the Crown that seignories or chief grants, not exceeding 12,000 acres, were to be created for the principal grantees, or undertakers as they became known. But wily lawyers contrived to extend the grants on behalf of their clients beyond the proposed limits. Many grantees, notably Sir Walter Raleigh, ultimately became owners of estates of over 40,000 acres, much more than had been envisaged by the Crown. The grants were made in socage with a head or quit rent payable to the Crown. The plantation was widely advertised in England as an opportunity to acquire an estate at little cost. The native Irish were prohibited from becoming tenants or undertenants of the new proprietors. However, the initial aims of the Munster plantation were gradually distorted and undermined. The majority of the undertakers became absentees. Their estates were managed by agents who readily employed Irish tenants. Ireland’s reputation for political unrest deterred the more suitable English farmers, who refused to be lured by promises of wealth to such a wild and unstable country. But the hardened veterans of Grey’s expeditionary force showed little such hesitancy and eagerly grasped the spoils of war. In counties Waterford and Cork Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Christopher Hatton received large estates. Sir Edward Denny, Sir Warham St Leger, Sir Thomas Morris, Hugh Cuffe and the poet Edmund Spenser, all received attainted Desmond land and property in County Cork. In County Limerick the main beneficiaries were Francis Berkeley, Sir William Courtney, Richard and Alex Fitton and Sir George Bourchier, while Edmund Fitton received over 11,000 acres in counties Waterford and Tipperary. The long hunt to extinction of the former proprietor had been vindicated as the pursuers reaped the rewards without regard for the widow and heir of the attainted earl.
However faint, Eleanor had not given up hope to salvage some part of the forfeited lands. Residence in London would enable her to petition her case directly rather than have to negotiate with the antagonistic administration in Dublin. She also sought more regular access to her son. While the conditions of his confinement allowed him ‘the libertie of the Tower . . . and accesse of all his friends’,50 his health was again giving cause for concern. As well as a physician, he now required the services of a surgeon, while the list of medicines supplied by the Tower apothecary grew:
i Bottels of serope of iii pints apeace
ii pourgatives
iiii ownces of perfumed lossengis for his nostrells
iiii ownces of serope for his nostrells
iiii ownces of Unguente for his eare
iiii ownces of Implaster for his eare
iiii ownces of pilles of Masticgini
ii drames of pillemics
i drame of Trossecs deterra sigillata.51
The list was just part of the long catalogue of pills and potions prescribed for the various maladies that wracked his unhealthy physique.
In London Eleanor first made the acquaintance of the man who was to be central in her future life. Donogh O’Connor Sligo was also at court to petition for the restoration of his title and estate as the heir of his uncle. Sir Donal O’Connor Sligo had died in January 1588 and his estate had been subsequently seized by the President of Connaught, Sir Richard Bingham. In their past misfortunes and present straitened circumstances, Eleanor and Donogh had much in common.
The family of O’Connor Sligo were a branch of the royal O’Connor house of Connaught. The earliest historical references to the O’Connor sept of Sligo occur at the time of the Norman invasion. In the succeeding centuries, following a series of dynastic feuds, the O’Connor clan split into three divisions: O’Connor Roe, O’Connor Don and O’Connor Sligo. The O’Connor Sligo sept eventually settled in the area roughly equivalent to present-day County Sligo. A member of the sept bore the title King of Connaught between 1318 and 1324. By the sixteenth century the O’Connor Sligo was the acknowledged overlord of the area. But O’Connor dominance in Sligo became dependent on the O’Donnell chiefs of Tyrconnell, who also claimed a suzerainty over Sligo. Through alliances with the O’Donnells’ enemies, the O’Connors constantly sought to cast off the shackles of O’Donnell dominance. To the south-west of Sligo lay the lordship of the former de Burgos—the Lower MacWilliam of Mayo and the Upper MacWilliam of Galway. The latter had been created Earl of Clanrickard by Henry VIII.
Sligo occupied a strategic position between Ulster and Connaught. Donogh’s lordship incorporated the barony of Carbury, with Sligo castle as its central point. He also claimed the castles of Ballymote and Collooney. To protect themselves from the heavy exaction of the O’Donnells, the O’Connors had turned for help to the English. In 1568 Donogh’s uncle, Sir Donal, made an indenture with the Queen which he interpreted as a reaffirmation of his overlordship of Sligo but which the Crown later claimed related only to the overlordship of the barony of Carbury. However, the grant allowed him to maintain his rights to the overlordship of the county, and the Crown tended to support him in his struggle against the O’Donnells. The agreement between O’Connor Sligo and the Crown worked well until jeopardised by a dramatic change in the political climate, marked by the arrival in Connaught of Sir Richard Bingham as President of the province in 1584.
A stern military campaigner, Bingham carried out his orders to the letter to extend English law into all parts of Connaught in the shortest time possible, allowing little scope for the Gaelic chieftains to adapt. Bingham began his campaign in Connaught by seizing the O’Connor Sligo castle of Ballymote, ostensibly as a precaution against an invasion by supporters of Mary Queen of Scots. Bingham recognised the advantage of securing a strong foothold in Sligo to control the pass from Ulster into Mayo and thus into the rest of Connaught. Sir Donal appealed to Sir John Perrot in Dublin. The Lord Deputy issued letters patent officially confirming the original agreement with the Queen, though excluding Ballymote and twelve quarters of land.
In the following year Perrot concluded the famous Composition of Connaught whereby, in lieu of cess, a rent of ten English shillings, or one Irish mark, was to be charged on every quarter of arable land in the province. Certain lands were allowed rent-free to principal lords. Their positions as elected heads of their traditional dependent clans were abolished, and each chieftain was made responsible for his own sept and had to hold his estate under the English law of primogeniture instead of the Gaelic custom of election. In relation to Sligo, the Composition ‘merely put into formal feudal language the terms of the earlier agreement’52 between Sir Donal and the Queen. Sir Donal continued to hold his estate in the manor of Ballymote and was granted all his lands free of the Composition rent. On his death in 1588, despite the seizure of Ballymote and Sligo by Bingham, his heir, Donogh, seemed likely to inherit the entire lordship.
Sir Richard Bingham, however, refused to recognise Donogh as his uncle’s legal heir. ‘The heir is base born and illegitimate,’ he wrote to the Earl of Leicester, ‘and the land, especially Sligo itself, by descent and lawful inheritance is now thrown into the lap of Her Majesty.’53 Although a commission of inquiry subsequently found Donogh to be the legitimate heir, Bingham persisted in his opposition and moved his brother, George Bingham, into Sligo castle. While the dispute raged, ships of the Spanish Armada came crashing onto the Sligo coastline. Rumours reached the English court that the Spaniards who had survived were planning to invade Connaught in support of the Ulster chieftains. Possession of Sligo castle took on an added significance, and the question of Donogh’s right to inherit was once again investigated. In an attempt to persuade the Crown to reinstate him and to repudiate the accusations of Bingham, Donogh took his case directly to the English court. There he became acquainted with the widow of the rebel Earl of Desmond.
The similarity of their situation, coupled with the fact that the success of both their petitions depended on the patronage and influence of Lord Burghley, was perhaps instrumental in establishing a friendship between them. Both were exiles, political outcasts, in poor circumstances and without friends. Of the two, Eleanor’s position was the more extreme, especially in terms of her future financial and political expectations. Donogh, while currently regarded as politically dispensable by the English interest in Connaught, could become a vital factor to the Crown—and this possibility increased as the situation in Ulster deteriorated. But meanwhile both had to endure the tedious court protocol regarding their petitions. With little money to speed or influence the process, they had no option but to assume the patience and humility of the penniless and the powerless.
Both initially made little progress. Eleanor’s pension was not forthcoming from the tight-fisted administration, while Bingham continued to press against the reinstatement of Donogh in Sligo. Unable financially to continue to follow the court, Eleanor settled near Westminster, under the care of a widow, Alice Pynnock, who, it was recorded, was paid the sum of £85 ‘for the diet of the Countess of Desmond’.54 Together with her pension, Eleanor also sought further concessions from the Queen. By her entry without licence into England she had, in effect, transgressed the conditions of her pardon and had ‘therby forfeited certain bonds wherein she is entered for the performance of the clause’.55 The Queen eventually agreed to overlook the transgression and ordered the Lord Deputy to ensure that any future bonds made for her continuing good behaviour ‘should not be hurtful or prejudicial unto her for that which is past’.56 Slowly, Eleanor was beginning to experience some semblance of toleration, if not favour, in court circles. Her old enemy Walsingham was dead, and Sir Robert Cecil had joined his father, Lord Burghley, at the forefront of Elizabeth’s administration. The younger Cecil was willing to extend a little sympathy and understanding to the long-suffering countess from Ireland and this brilliant, delicate, hunchbacked statesman became Eleanor’s main refuge and hope.
While Eleanor’s fortunes at court seemed likely to improve, the expectations of her friend, Donogh O’Connor Sligo, also seemed likely to bear fruit. In 1596, as the political situation worsened in Ireland, the Crown considered it expedient that Donogh should return to Ireland and be restored to part of his inheritance. England’s supposedly loyal earl, Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone, from the fastness of his Ulster kingdom, noted Bingham’s savage chastisement of Connaught, where the Mayo Bourkes, after three unsuccessful attempts to restore their ancient rights, had been ground into submission and their hired Scottish mercenaries butchered and drowned on the banks of the Moy. O’Neill noted too Bingham’s advance into Sligo and his unrelenting campaign against O’Rourke of Breffny, who had sheltered some Spanish castaways from the ill-fated Armada. Alarm-bells sounded in the cunning, pragmatic mind of the Ulster chieftain as Bingham attacked Maguire’s lordship of Fermanagh, the last remaining bastion of O’Neill’s hitherto impregnable kingdom of Tyrone. The ghost of the dead Earl of Desmond might well have returned to remind him of the bitter fate he had helped inflict on Desmond and which now faced him in Ulster. But it was still too soon to show one’s hand. There were too many intangible obstacles to be overcome before O’Neill’s great plan could be put into operation. Despite the suspicions of the English administration in Dublin, he must continue to appear Elizabeth’s loyal Irish earl. Consequently he bawled like a child before the Council in Dublin and tearfully protested his loyalty on old Fitzwilliam’s shoulder to stifle suspicion that he was involved in a conspiracy with Spain and Scotland against the English Crown. But in December 1591 he helped to effect the dramatic escape of his relative and future ally, the young Red Hugh O’Donnell, whom Perrot had imprisoned in Dublin Castle. O’Neill sought to mould the lust for revenge of the young Tyrconnell chieftain, as well as the seething discontent of the Gaelic chieftains, into a calculating patience until the time was ripe for open confederacy and rebellion.
While O’Neill played a waiting game, his young ally attempted to reassert O’Donnell supremacy over Sligo, extend his power and influence into Connaught, and extract support for the forthcoming war with the Crown. Sligo was the key to success in the coming conflict, and both sides realised its strategic importance. The methods employed by Bingham were called into question as officials in the administration in Dublin, jealous of his success in Connaught, attempted to have him removed from office. Taking advantage of Bingham’s misfortune O’Donnell raided unhindered through Sligo into Roscommon. In 1595 he seized Sligo castle, which was garrisoned by Bingham’s brother. It was against this background that the English government, in a bid to stop O’Donnell’s growing power in Connaught, decided that Donogh O’Connor Sligo should be reinstated ‘in the hope that he could be used as a buffer against the commonwealth which O’Donnell appeared to be creating in Connaught’.57
Donogh returned to Ireland in 1596, while Eleanor remained on at her lodgings in Westminster. While Cecil had managed to have her pension restored, with directions that it should be paid at quarterly intervals, £200 per annum would hardly restore her to a lifestyle that befitted her rank and status. Furthermore, despite Cecil’s intervention on her behalf, the pension continued to be paid sporadically at the whim of petty officials. Her petitions to Cecil continued in the same vein as before. ‘My great wants and extremities, the daily dearness of victuals . . . urges me to be more troublesome,’58 she wrote to him in May 1597 in an attempt to secure a more permanent cure for her financial straits. If Cecil could not secure her part of either her jointure or the estate of her late husband, Eleanor made the startling request that he act on her behalf as matchmaker. She explained that she was willing to extend her offer ‘to any in England or Ireland that would be pleased to marry either myself or my daughters’.59
Her request was not as extraordinary as it might appear. She was now over fifty years old and had been a widow for fourteen years. The political stigma attached to her name was gradually receding, although her distinct lack of a fortune or a dowry did not enhance her matrimonial prospects. But fortune took a hand to find her a mate. By the establishment of a network of marriage alliances in Connaught, Cecil was seeking to create an opposition among the local aristocracy to stem the support for the Ulster confederacy. He had successfully concluded a marriage alliance between O’Connor Sligo’s sister, Maeve, and the prominent chieftain of the Mayo Bourkes, Tibbott-ne-Long, the youngest son of the redoubtable sea-captain, Grace O’Malley, who had visited the Court in 1593. The marriage had produced satisfactory political results, and the former rebel chieftain looked set to adhere to the Crown in the coming conflict. It would appear that Cecil considered a marriage between Eleanor and Donogh would serve a similarly useful purpose, while having the additional advantage of removing from Court a persistent petitioner whose humbled means was a constant reminder of the Munster confiscations.
It was arranged that Eleanor would return to Ireland. Cecil secured the restoration of her personal estate in Munster which her brother had withheld from her. The Queen also wrote on her behalf to the Lord Deputy
to signify unto you our good liking of the retourne into the realme of the Countess of Desmond, for the opinion we have conceived of her good and lawful behaviour, towards us and our state, so we have now bin pleased to confirme the same unto you by those our own letters. . . . We require you to yealde unto her your favourable assistance in all her lawfull good causes as she may from time to time stand in need thereof and agreeable to the degree she holdeth.60
Cecil also obtained freedom of movement for her between Ireland and England. His diplomatic wizardry and Eleanor’s persistence had finally achieved a small but, from Eleanor’s point of view, significant victory.
In September 1597 Eleanor and her daughters prepared to leave for Ireland. On her departure she acknowledged Cecil’s kindness and showed her appreciation as best her circumstances would allow. She presented him with a gift of an Irish harp, ‘humbly praying you to accept the same, the rather that the sending comes from a thankful mind’.61 Then, with a lightened burden and the hope of better fortune, Eleanor set sail for Ireland and a new beginning.