1545–1638
Rebel and wife of Garrett FitzGerald, fifteenth earl of Desmond
The story of Eleanor FitzGerald is the story of an ancient Irish clan and its lonely and desperate stand against its mighty Tudor neighbour. Eleanor was born into conflict: conflict within her own family; conflict between the two greatest families in Munster, the FitzGeralds of Desmond and the Butlers of Ormond; and conflict between Ireland and England.
Eleanor was originally a Kilkenny Butler, a member of the Norman-Irish nobility. She was born into a life of ease and plenty in the family pile at Kiltinan, County Kilkenny. In 1558, when she was thirteen, two things happened that were to have a profound effect on her life: Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne of England, and Garrett FitzGerald, her future husband, became the fifteenth earl of Desmond.
In the mid-sixteenth century, Gaelic Ireland was about to enter its death throes under a superior and ruthless force. The Tudors had impelled nearly all the leading families to submit to their cultural and economic domination. The name of the game was loyalty and assimilation: loyalty to the Crown, assimilation into the Anglo-Saxon way. This meant the Irish language would have to go, Catholicism was on its way to becoming illegal, ancient Brehon laws were replaced by the Latin law system, inheritance rules changed, autonomy was lost and old allegiances were split. For Eleanor and her family it also meant an unceasing, never-ending battle to try and hold it all together – all to no avail, for by the end of Eleanor’s long life, her world, already fractured at her birth, would be smashed to pieces.
In 1565 Eleanor Butler, a tall and beautiful nineteen-year-old, married thirty-two-year-old Garrett FitzGerald, the fifteenth earl of Desmond. The bride was regarded as a great asset: she was intelligent, diplomatic, calm, resourceful and courageous. Their marriage was definitely a love match: Garrett would never have married a Butler otherwise for he passionately hated all Butlers, and one in particular, Eleanor’s kinsman and his own contemporary, Thomas ‘Black Tom’ Butler, the tenth earl of Ormond.
Garrett FitzGerald was one of a dying breed of poet-warriors who had been brought up in the traditional Gaelic manner. He was single-minded about holding onto his land and his heritage, no matter what the cost. His estate, the biggest estate in the whole of Ireland or England, comprised most of the province of Munster and, within it, he ruled as a king. Garrett was undeniably brave, but also proud, highly strung and foolishly impulsive. He resented Tudor efforts to get involved in his estate and this was to lead him – and his family – disastrously to outright rebellion.
The first test of Eleanor’s mettle came two years into her marriage. Just after the birth of her daughter, their first child, Garrett was arrested and taken to England where he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He spent the next six years away from Ireland, imprisoned without trial, first in the Tower, and then under house arrest. The effect on him was traumatic: his pride took on an element of hysteria and his nerves were shattered. He was to spend the rest of his life obsessed with avoiding re-imprisonment.
In Garrett’s absence, Eleanor ran the estate, obtained massive funding for his upkeep and cannily remanded into custody his closest rivals to guard against attempts to seize his property. Eventually she went to England to personally petition the Queen for her husband to be allowed home. Staying by her husband’s side during his house arrest, she gave birth to his son and heir, James, in 1571. Heartbroken, she was then forced to hand the child into custody as a condition of Garrett’s release.
Eleanor and Garrett finally got back to Ireland in 1575. Garrett spent the next eight years availing of his ancient lordly rights, but also making treasonable statements, skirmishing on the estate borders with Black Tom and failing to placate the Queen with her favourite present – money. Eleanor spent her time getting him out of trouble. She wrote conciliatory letters to the Queen, she negotiated with the Dublin authorities on his behalf, she guarded him from his enemies and she gave him sound advice, most of which he ignored.
By 1579 Garrett, who had never recovered from prison, was becoming physically frail, but his ambitious brothers, his ‘unnatural brethren’ as Eleanor called them, instigated what became known as the Second Desmond Rebellion (1579–1583). In the autumn of that year, to Eleanor’s horror, the brothers propped the feeble earl onto a horse and informed him that he was to lead a rebellion against the English.
For the Lord Justice of Ireland, William Pelham, and the ‘loyal’ earl, Black Tom, it was good news: this was what they had been waiting for. As soon as they heard the word ‘rebellion’ they attacked Garrett’s estate, ravaging his territories and laying waste to some of Ireland’s finest farmland. Eleanor rushed to Garrett’s side as the Crown drove the Desmond forces ahead of them, trying to starve them into surrender and killing indiscriminately. Despite the threat of punishment, no one betrayed the whereabouts of the earl and his countess.
Eleanor stayed with her sick husband, sleeping and eating under hedges and in caves. By day the FitzGeralds and their men regrouped and attempted to attack the Crown forces; at night, Eleanor rode out alone to distribute plans and communications for the following day. One night their party was attacked and she alone dragged the limping earl into a freezing river. They spent most of the night submerged as the soldiers hacked at the undergrowth around them. The soldiers stopped just before dawn, inches away from where Eleanor and Garrett were hiding. Eventually, Eleanor began to achieve mythical status among the English soldiers. They sometimes chased fleeting glimpses of the elusive Countess of Desmond on horseback, as she led them away from where her husband slept.
But it had to end. In 1583 Garrett made one final furious assault on Black Tom and the Crown forces, a supreme effort that immortalised him in legend and song. He was defeated and took to his heels for the last time as the freshly equipped Black Tom harried him across Kerry. Facing the cold and hunger of a fourth winter on the run, Garrett ordered Eleanor to leave him and save herself – better she should be in Crown custody than caught by soldiers, he reasoned. Plus there was their son to think of, who was still in custody in England. Sadly, Eleanor agreed to leave Garrett and give herself up to the Crown. She never saw her husband again.
Garrett’s death came in November 1583 when he was run to ground by bounty hunters, who would be handsomely rewarded whether he was captured dead or alive. They decapitated him and sent his head to Black Tom, who sent it to the Queen, who had it spiked on London Bridge. Garrett FitzGerald, earl of Desmond, was fifty-one years old.
Eleanor spent the next four years as a pauper, mainly in Dublin, and another year in England attempting to see the Queen. In October 1588 she finally managed it and the Queen granted her a pension. She found it difficult to access the money in Ireland – the authorities there had no time for the ‘wicked woman’ who had been a ‘chief instrument’ of Garrett’s rebellion – so she and her daughters moved to England full-time, trailing around after Her Majesty and managing as best they could. Eleanor’s son, James, now aged seventeen, remained imprisoned in the Tower.
In 1597 Eleanor remarried. Her husband was Donogh O’Connor from Sligo, another hereditary landowner who was embroiled in legal battles in an effort to retain his birthright. It was a political alliance – the Lady of Desmond was still something of a catch – but the marriage was also a happy one, and Eleanor moved to Sligo full of optimism for the future.
She found she was still surrounded by politics. In the last years of the sixteenth century, the northern earls O’Neill and O’Donnell made nationhood seem tantalisingly possible. Buoyed by the mood of progress, Eleanor quietly tried to get back the FitzGerald earldom for her son. She even managed to get young James out of the Tower and over to Munster. But it was no use. James’s spirit had been broken in captivity, just as his father’s had been, and he had become institutionalised. He stayed a few months in Munster and then voluntarily went back into prison where he died in 1601, aged only thirty. A month later the O’Neill and O’Donnell forces were defeated at the Battle of Kinsale, and the Tudor re-conquest of Ireland was complete.
Eleanor lived out the rest of her life in Sligo Castle. Her husband died in 1609 and his indomitable widow inherited what was left of his land. After her years of glory as the Countess of Desmond, her years on the run as a rebel and her years of desperate poverty as a traitor’s wife, she managed the Sligo estate and lived her final years in relative security and wealth until her death at the ripe old age of ninety-three.