In the sixteenth century the Gaelic aristocracy in County Mayo was represented by four clans: the O’Malleys, the O’Flaherties, the Joyces and the Burkes. Grace O’Malley, also known as Granuaile, was a daughter of the house of Uí Máille (O’Malley), the hereditary lords of a region that, at its greatest extent, stretched from Connemara in County Galway to Westport in County Mayo.
Grace’s father, Dubhdarra (Black Oak), was a very powerful chief. He traded and fished with a sizeable fleet of traditional curraghs, fast galleys and spacious caravels. He also sold licences to any foreigners – including the English – who wanted to fish in ‘his’ waters. Grace, his only daughter, took after him: she was bold, she was used to giving orders and she loved the rough sea.
In 1546, at the age of sixteen, Grace’s father arranged her marriage to Dónal O’Flaherty (also called Dónal an Chogaidh or Donal of the Battles). He was the scion and subsequently head of the great clan of O’Flaherty, the pirating southern neighbours of the O’Malleys. The wedding was held in the chapel of one of the O’Malleys’ own imposing abbeys at Murrisk, built nearly a century before and located at the foot of Croagh Patrick in County Mayo. The ruins of the abbey can still be seen today.
After her marriage, Grace lived mainly in the coastal strongholds of Bunowen and Ballinahinch, in the shadow of Benlettery in County Mayo. But as the pirate raids for which the O’Flaherties were famous continued, Dónal proved himself somewhat inept at managing them. The opportunistic Grace, a natural leader, gradually took over his role and captained the ships herself. She was still only in her twenties. She also organised more peaceful trade missions as far north as Scotland and as far south as Spain and Portugal. Consequently, she became the de facto leader of the O’Flaherty clan.
In the 1560s, as part of ongoing tribal warfare between Dónal O’Flaherty and the Joyce clan, Dónal was murdered. Grace was left a widow with three children, Margaret, Owen and Murrough, to raise on her own. She retreated to Clare Island, from where she continued to run the O’Flaherty fleet.
In 1566 Grace stayed on land long enough to make a strategic marriage with Richard Burke (also called Risteard an Iarainn or Richard-in-Iron), whose gaelicised Norman clan held the territory north of Clew Bay. It was a traditional marriage, contracted according to the ancient law of Ireland, the Brehon law, by which Grace and her people had lived for 1,500 years. According to Brehon law, women could fight on the battlefield, keep their own name and property after marriage, drink alcohol, be elected head of their clan – and divorce their husbands with no repercussions.
One of the reasons the acquisitive Grace had married Richard was to own the impressive castle of Rockfleet (Carraig an Chabhlaigh or Carrickahooley), on the north shore of Clew Bay by Westport. Once it was in her possession, she established herself here and bore a son, Tibbot-na-Long. One of the best and most unlikely Granuaile legends maintains that Tibbot, or Theobald, was born at sea as his mother was captaining a ship fighting Turkish pirates.
In due course, after a year and a day, Grace divorced Richard – but made sure she kept possession of Rockfleet. (Since Richard crops up in accounts of her for many years after this separation, it can be assumed that their political alliance remained intact even if their marriage did not.)
Meanwhile, Elizabeth I of England had turned her attention to western Ireland and the resources it could provide for Tudor expansion. Having already gained a foothold in most of the rest of country through the efforts of her father, King Henry VIII, she now sent in administrators to infiltrate the old Gaelic families of the west and usurp their power – by fair means or foul.
One by one the clan leaders were forced to capitulate and soon it was Grace’s turn. The English navy sailed to Mayo and on to Lough Corrib, where they besieged her in one of her late husband’s hard-won forts, known as the Cock’s Castle because of the fierce tenacity that Richard had shown while fighting for it. Tradition has it that Grace avoided capture by melting the lead on the roof of the Cock’s Castle and pouring it onto the intruders below. She then escaped to the mainland and lit beacons to alert her allies. Reinforcements arrived and the English were driven back. Afterwards, in deference to Grace’s own fierce tenacity, the castle was renamed the Hen’s Castle.
After this adventure, a furious Grace sailed to the old O’Malley territory at Clew Bay, County Mayo. There she gathered support from both the O’Malley and the O’Flaherty clans and threw herself into revenge. She carried out a series of daring raids, plundering English and ‘loyal’ Irish ships which refused to pay protection money for safe passage along the coast, and generally flouting Her Majesty’s authority.
In 1574 Galway merchants were so enraged by Grace’s piratical attacks on their trade, they conspired with the English to send a force to lay siege to Rockfleet. But once again the sea queen turned the tables. By unexpectedly attacking the superior force and skilfully outmanoeuvring them, she succeeded in forcing them to flee.
In 1576 Her Majesty’s representative, Sir Henry Sidney, arrived in Connacht to demand submission from the Gaelic chieftains of the region. Grace was among those who appeared before him. For the sake of political expediency, it would appear she came voluntarily and submissively. Grace was a smart operator, and she was more interested in local power structures than in whatever seismic reorganisation the English were up to. She wanted to ensure that Richard Burke, her erstwhile husband and Tibbot-na-Long’s father, became The MacWilliam, that is, the acknowledged head of his clan, so that their son could inherit the title from him.
After the meeting, Sidney wrote: ‘There came to me also a famous feminine sea captain called Grany Imallye, and offered her services unto me, wheresoever I would command her, with three galleys and 200 fighting men, either in Scotland or Ireland…This was a notorious woman in all the coasts of Ireland.’
Grace recognised political reality when she saw it. Keen as she was to save face, English power was beginning to appear unassailable. If she could not save Ireland’s autonomy, she certainly intended to retain her own as far as possible.
This turned out to be not as far as she would have liked. In 1577, while plundering the earl of Desmond’s lands, Grace was caught. The earl, Garrett FitzGerald, was anxious to have Queen Elizabeth believe him loyal, so he showily had Grace imprisoned in Limerick Jail and then in the dungeons at Dublin Castle for eighteen months. Lord Justice Drury, the then president of Munster, to whom she was delivered, called her ‘a woman that hath impudently passed the part of womanhood and been a great spoiler and chief commander and director of thieves and murderers at sea to spoil this province.’ However, he grudgingly conceded that her reputation was widespread and that she was: ‘… famous for her stoutness of courage and person, and for sundry exploits done by her at sea.’
On her release, Grace returned to Connacht and, in 1581, gleefully witnessed her ex-husband and ally, Richard Burke, become The MacWilliam. There was a gathering of the nobility after the investiture at which the president of Connacht, Sir Nicholas Malby, noticed that a delighted Grace ‘[thought] herself to be no small lady’. When Richard died in 1583, Grace ruled his followers as well as her own from Rockfleet. By now, at the height of her powers, aged fifty-three, she was regarded as nothing less than a bean rí – a she-king. In 1584 Sir Richard Bingham was appointed governor of Connacht.
In a life filled with confrontation and conflict, Bingham was to prove Grace’s greatest opponent – with his arrival everything changed for the worse. She had enjoyed what amounted to a working relationship with Bingham’s predecessors, but Bingham himself was on a mission: he wanted to subdue Connacht and everyone in it. To Bingham, Grace, in particular, was an anomaly that had to be stamped out. Over the next ten years he made a special target of the woman he called a ‘nurse to all rebellions’.
She was troublesome to him on many different levels. She had been indulging in insubordinate, piratical behaviour for nearly twenty years. Plus she was a woman and under English law was not entitled to any property (though under Brehon law she was entitled to a third of both her husbands’ properties). Plus she was causing trouble in the province over who was going to succeed to The MacWilliam’s title (in the end, no one did). All of this was too much for Bingham and he instructed his brother, Captain John Bingham, to confiscate Grace’s property, capture her and hang her. Captain Bingham succeeded in confiscating her lands, but her life was saved when she was vouched for by one of her most loyal allies, her son-in-law, the picturesquely nicknamed Devil’s Hook (a mistranslation of Deamhan an Chorrain, meaning Devil of the Hook).
Following the confiscation of her lands and the murder of her eldest son, Owen, by the Joyces in 1586, Grace was shaken and forced to fall back on what she called ‘maintenance by sea’. However, Bingham’s constant surveillance and intervention made this impossible, and Grace and her remaining family became destitute. At this point, aware that a rising was afoot, the ‘nurse of all rebellions’ spent three months in Ulster enjoying the hospitality of The O’Donnell and The O’Neill.
At this low point in her life, Grace was forced to write directly to Elizabeth I, disingenuously expressing regret that it had been necessary ‘to take arms and by force to maintain [herself and her people] by sea and by land’, and asking for ‘reasonable maintenance’ to which she was entitled from both her husbands’ estates. The response from the royal court was the issue, by Lord Burghley, of eighteen articles of interrogatory, which included such questions as: ‘If she [Grace] were to be allowed her dower, or thirds of her husband’s living, of what value the same might be of.’
Grace answered all the questions, but while she was awaiting an answer, Bingham arrested her youngest child, Tibbot-na-Long. Grace had already lost one son and did not want to lose a second. On hearing the news of Tibbot’s incarceration, she ordered a ship, sailed around Ireland, through hostile English and Spanish ships, around the south coast of England, up the Thames estuary and right into London. She was determined to plead for her son’s life face-to-face with Elizabeth. She was granted an audience at Greenwich Castle in September 1593.
Even 400 years later, it is hard not to draw comparisons as these two women faced each other. The weather-beaten Irish chieftain remained standing, grey hair tied back, wearing a simple woollen cloak over a smooth linen dress, her only ornament an Irish silver pin; the English queen remained seated, sumptuously dressed in silks and sporting a jewel-encrusted red wig against a livid-white face and a black-toothed smile. They were contemporaries; both were acquisitive and astute; both were charismatic leaders, unused to taking orders from anyone; both enjoyed unprecedented success in predominantly male occupations. However, the differences between the women were greater than the similarities: their respective customs and beliefs made their values almost incomprehensible to each other. Above all, one woman’s destiny was very much in the hands of the other.
Despite what legend would have us believe, it is unlikely that Granuaile was haughty or arrogant in the presence of Elizabeth I, and unthinkable that she should have treated the vision in front of her as an equal. She was politically shrewd, like the queen herself, and would have been very aware that many an Irish chieftain had had a long-awaited audience with the most powerful monarch in Europe, only to find themselves shortly afterwards cooling their heels in the Tower of London at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
But Grace was wilier than that. Having conversed for some time with the queen in Latin – the only language they had in common – she managed to come away from the meeting with everything she wanted and more – not only her son’s life but also the restitution of her property. To Bingham’s fury, the fickle Elizabeth had granted Grace’s petition: her family members were released, she was pardoned for her past activities and, even better, she was again allowed to ‘support herself’ at sea. Grace jubilantly sailed home to Ireland.
After this unparalleled coup, Grace’s status as a leader was enhanced and she re-launched her trade – and even some piracy – under the guise of being a ‘dutiful subject’ of Her Majesty. But once again the vindictive Bingham stopped her, this time by quartering her troops and breaking her financially one more time. The relationship between them deteriorated to an all-time low. So poisonous were her feelings that Grace attacked her own son, Murrough, for having supported Bingham in the past. Unable to vent her spleen on Bingham, Grace went for Murrough instead, ‘with a navy of galleys … and burned his town [at Bunowen, County Donegal] and spoiled his people of cattle and goods and murdered three of four of his men …’ Grace needed to show somebody who was boss.
Luckily for Grace this unpleasant situation resolved itself when a conspiracy against Bingham emerged. In 1595 he fled to England to defend his reputation there, only to find himself imprisoned in the Fleet, a prison in London. In his absence, Grace’s galleys sailed freely once more.
From 1597 to 1601 rebellion against the English raged in the shape of The O’Donnell and The O’Neill and their supporters. The ‘nurse of all rebellions’ had spent three months with the chiefs as their guest when she had first encountered trouble with Bingham, but after being seriously offended by The O’Donnell on a clan matter, the politically flexible O’Malleys withdrew their support from the rebellious earls. Grace’s two sons, Murrough and Tibbot-na-Long, had no qualms about becoming captains on the English side and fighting against their countrymen and one-time allies under the new governor of Connacht, Sir Conyers Clifford.
At one point it looked very much as if the rebellion would be a success and the Ulster chieftains would finally drive the English from Ireland. As it turned out, the defection of the O’Malleys was an astute if cynical move: the rebellion went awry, the insurgents were brutally suppressed in 1601 – and Grace’s youngest son, Tibbot-na-Long, was made a baronet for services rendered.
Grace lived long enough to see the crushing defeat of the last of the Gaelic aristocracy into which she was born, and the elevation of her line to the new order: Tibbot-na-Long was made first viscount Mayo. Perhaps such status was what she wanted all along. Ironically, Grace has stepped into legend and song as a symbol of freedom in an oppressed time.
It is said that Grace died peacefully at Rockfleet Castle around 1603 – the same year that Elizabeth I died. On Clare Island, off the coast of Galway, in a thirteenth-century abbey built by the O’Malleys, there is a tomb. It is said that Grace O’Malley is buried here. The inscription reads: Terra Marique Potens O’Maille (O’Malley: Strong on Land and Sea).