Epilogue

Is that Penelope, Elinor, that second chaste Judith,

Indeed buried beneath marble stones?

I, mother Ierne, who with moistened cheeks stretch forth

My arms in redoubled lamentation,

Will ever be mindful of your death.

INSCRIPTION ON ELEANOR’S TOMB, SLIGO ABBEY

Eleanor resided at Sligo castle for the rest of her life. Her days of petitions and appearances at the English court were over. No further correspondence from her prolific quill appears among the state papers of the day. There are no more allusions to the presence of the ‘Lady of Desmond’ at the royal court. References to payment of her prized pension, which she had fought so diligently to obtain from the Crown, appear sporadically in the state despatches in the early decades of the seventeenth century. She doggedly fought her case in the law-courts and hung tenaciously on to every acre bequeathed to her by Sir Donogh O’Connor Sligo. She stood her ground despite the powerful and resourceful new breed of fortune-seekers, entrepreneurs and wealthy merchants who, in the years after Kinsale, flooded into Sligo to take advantage, by way of defective title, bribery and sharp practice, of the remnants of the old Gaelic aristocracy and, whenever possible, to replace them as the new masters of the land. It took courage and gumption for an aged widow, on her own, to defend her interests with such success against such able opposition. But her days of penury were at last behind her, and her remaining years were spent in the relative comfort and dignity which had eluded her throughout her early and middle life.

Her ability as a matchmaker for her daughters had paid dividends. Her daughter Joan, for whom she had plotted a marriage with Red Hugh O’Donnell, married Dermot O’Sullivan Beare of Cork. Her third daughter, Katherine, after the death of her first husband, Lord Roche, married Donal O’Brien, afterwards Viscount Clare. On the death of her second husband, Sir Robert Cressey of Cong, her daughter Ellen married her cousin Edmund Butler, who in 1629 had succeeded his grandfather as Baron of Dunboyne; by this marriage Eleanor’s unhappy feud with her brother over the disputed estate was laid to rest. Her youngest daughter, Ellis, married Sir Valentine Browne of Ross castle, Killarney, and ‘thus as the wife of an undertaker’s son enjoyed some portion of the vast estates which had been forfeited by her father’s rebellion’.1

Eleanor’s only son, James, the ‘Tower Earl’, left no heir. Soon after his death the title was claimed by her first husband’s old protagonist, Black Tom, Earl of Ormond, in right of his mother, Joan, as the daughter and heiress of James, the eleventh Earl of Desmond. When the only daughter and heiress of Black Tom was subsequently bestowed in marriage on a Scotsman, Sir Richard Preston, by King James I, the claim to the Desmond earldom was revived. Preston, in right of his wife, was created Earl of Desmond by patent dated 1619. The patent stipulated that if Preston died without male heirs, the earldom should descend to George, the younger son of William Fielding, Earl of Denbeigh, with whom a marriage was then contemplated with Preston’s only daughter and heiress. While the marriage did not in effect take place, the provision of the patent was allowed, and the ancient Irish title passed into the Fielding family, who became the Earls of Denbeigh and Desmond. The spirit of Garrett FitzGerald would surely have rested uneasily had his prized title come to rest on the descendants of his bitter rival, the Earl of Ormond.

In 1624 Eleanor erected an impressive tomb for her second husband in Sligo abbey. It is an interesting monument built in renaissance style, and is in an excellent state of preservation to this day. Situated in the south wall of the abbey, adjacent to the high altar, it consists of two arched recesses in which are carved two kneeling figures in profile, representing Eleanor and Sir Donogh. ‘Sir Donogh is clad in plate armour, his helmet being placed on the ground behind him. His wife is dressed in a loose flowing overmantle, with a close-fitting cap on which a coronet is placed. Round her neck is a large ruff and a string of beads which supports a cross of the Greek pattern with expanded ends.’² The monument is decorated with heraldic emblems of the O’Connor, Butler and FitzGerald families. In 1989 a headstone from the monument was found in Sligo during excavations for a new office block. With Eleanor and her husband is buried her daughter Ellis, who died in 1623. The date of Eleanor’s own death is less certain.

Her will, however, is dated 26 November 1638. By it she appointed her sons-in-law, Sir Donal O’Brien and Sir Robert Cressey, her executors ‘and willed them to pay all her debts, called her stated accounts, and her funeral expenses out of her moveable goods and chattels’.3 She bequeathed to her daughter Joan a silver ewer and basin, and to her daughter Ellen all the remainder of her goods, including her plate and jewels. She left various legacies to her grandchildren, friends and servants. ‘She bequeathed towards the building of a hospital in Sligo £100, and £200 more (both out of her arrears in England) to be laid out in an annuity mortgage, or land, so as to yield £20 a year towards the support of the poor residing in said hospital.’⁴ Despite her traumatic life, Eleanor lived to the remarkable age of well over ninety years, over double the average life expectancy of the time.

That she lived so long is a tribute to her courage, her indomitable will and her superhuman capacity to withstand suffering, loss and deprivation. Her mental ability enabled her to overcome the Machiavellian political practices of her time which brought about the downfall of many greater and more powerful. She endured much personal hardship and tragedy, but with extraordinary resilience returned, time after time, to meet and contend with each successive challenge. She was both a witness to and a participant in a period of almost unparalleled upheaval and destruction which had sucked an entire civilisation into its maw. She had seen a fertile province scorched to a blackened and wasted heathland, its population starve to death, their pitiful cries mingling with the sound of war and the clamour of the victors. She herself suffered the pangs of hunger and the deprivation of a fugitive’s life as she stoically stood by her outlawed husband. She knew the pain of being forced to part with her children as, on countless occasions, political necessity tore them from her side. She experienced humiliation, insult, isolation and friendlessness as she pursued her mission for survival alone and without means. But her innate will to survive and her ability to adapt to the new order was the spur that impelled her to overcome her adversity and gave her the strength to outlive her opponents. Elizabeth, FitzMaurice, Sidney, Perrot, Drury, Sir John of Desmond, Pelham, Malby, Dr Sanders, Burghley, Raleigh, Black Tom, Essex, Red Hugh O’Donnell, Cecil, O’Neill, the list of great and colourful characters with whom she shared the stage, had all passed on. Eleanor alone remained, the last surviving participant in as great a tragedy that ever befell a family and a nation.

In the quiet ruins of Sligo abbey today the tomb she had erected stands as the only reminder of this extraordinary but unsung heroine. In life Eleanor received few bouquets, and her lot in death was total oblivion from written history and even from popular folklore, which preserved the memory of many of her contemporaries. Yet, in musty archives, her prolific correspondence, the script almost indecipherable on the age-darkened, brittle parchment, bears testimony to the life, aims and ambitions of this extraordinary woman, on whom fortune seldom smiled but who steadfastly refused to succumb to the dark shadows that relentlessly clouded her life.