Appendix

The ‘Old’ Countess of Desmond

While the life of Eleanor Butler, Countess of Desmond, has received little acknowledgement, that of another Countess of Desmond has been recorded by both contemporary and latter-day historians and writers. The countess in question was Katherine FitzGerald, daughter of John FitzGerald, second Lord of Decies in Waterford, and wife of her second cousin, Thomas FitzGerald, twelfth Earl of Desmond. Her main claim to fame was her great longevity, which resulted in her appellation as the ‘Old’ Countess of Desmond.

One of the earliest references to this paragon of longevity is contained in Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, in which he records that, while married in the reign of Edward IV, the countess was still alive in 1589. Presuming, as was the custom, that she was married at the age of fifteen, and that the marriage took place in the last year of the king’s reign, that would leave her at the remarkable age of 121 years in 1589. But evidence of her continued existence, well into the seventeenth century, is recorded by many contemporary historians, among them the famous Elizabethan writer and traveller Fynes Moryson, who died in 1614. In his Itinerary, published in 1617, he stated:

In our time the Irish Countesse of Desmonde lived to the age of about one hundred and forty yrs, being able to go on foot four or five miles to the market towne, and used weekly so to do in her last yeares and not many yeares before she died.1

A few decades later, Lord Bacon in his History of Life and Death claimed that she lived to be 140 years old and that during the course of her long life she grew two sets of teeth!

On the death of her husband in 1534, the Old Countess of Desmond settled at Inchiquin castle, a few miles south-west of Youghal, which her husband had assigned to her as part of her jointure for the duration of her life. On her death the castle and lands would automatically revert to the earldom of Desmond. There, it was not unnaturally expected, she would live out her few remaining years. But successive earls of Desmond came and went and Inchiquin remained in the possession of its elderly chatelaine.

It is likely that she and Eleanor met several times during their long lives, especially during 1575, when the controversial enfeoffment of his lands by Eleanor’s husband, Garrett, was effected. By a deed dated 5 April 1575 the Old Countess enfeoffed the castle and lands of Inchiquin to the Earl of Desmond. He, in turn, enfeoffed them in trust to his servants, Morris Sheehan and David Roche, for thirty-one years. Whether she supported Garrett’s rebellion is unknown, but she was witness to the devastation of Munster and his subsequent death and attainder. In the plantation that followed, Inchiquin castle and lands were part of the Crown grant to Sir Walter Raleigh, who, whether obliged by law or in deference to the age of its antique resident, allowed the Old Countess to remain undisturbed at Inchiquin. Raleigh too expected that her demise would be imminent, but she lived to see Raleigh depart and Inchiquin pass into the grasping hands of Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork. Boyle was less inclined to tolerate the now seemingly unending occupancy of his new property by an aged tenant who simply refused to die. But the Countess resisted his attempts to dislodge her from her perch and, when Boyle persisted, she took matters into her own hands.

In 1604, at the phenomenal age of some 136 years, this female Methuselah set out from County Cork, with her daughter, who was over ninety years of age, for the court of King James I. It was recorded that ‘landing in Bristol she came on foot to London’, while her daughter ‘being decrepid was brought in a little carte, their poverty not allowing better means’.2 While there is no conclusive evidence as to the outcome of her petition to the king, it does seem likely that the touching and incredible apparition of this ancient woman, who had lived through the reigns of seven monarchs and overlapped with two others, was suitably rewarded. For the Old Countess returned to Inchiquin, where her long life was only brought to an end in 1604 by a bizarre accident. Sir Robert Sidney recorded the circumstances of her death:

She might have lived much longer hade she not mette with a kind of violent death, for she must needs climb a nutt tree to gather nuts, soe falling down, she hurt her thighe, which brought a fever, and that brought death.3

So ended the incredible life of the Old Countess of Desmond, although another account places her death ten years later, in 1614. A portrait of a woman which once hung in Muckross abbey, County Kerry, purports to be a likeness of her, painted during her visit to the court of King James in 1604.

Whether she met her death in 1604 or in 1614, the Old Countess of Desmond has entered both legend and history, where she has continued to be considered an inspiration in the records of human longevity.

Older far than my grand-dam, indeed, aye, as old

As that Countess of Desmond of whom we are told

That she lived to much more than a hundred and ten,

And was killed by a fall from a cherry tree, then

What a frisky old girl.⁴