Highlights the remarkable life of ELEANOR COUNTESS OF DESMOND (1545-1638)
'To celebrate Women's International Day Anne highlights the remarkable life of ELEANOR COUNTESS OF DESMOND (1545-1638) the forgotten heroine of the Tudor Wars in Ireland.'
ELEANOR COUNTESS OF DESMOND (1545-1638)
A Forgotten Heroine of the Tudor Wars By ANNE CHAMBERS
‘Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands for their legs could not bear them, they looked like anatomies of death, they spoke like ghosts, crying out of their graves…in a short space there were none almost left and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast.’
So the English poet, Edmund Spenser, described the province of Munster in the year 1583. While the dreadful spectacle of famine, death and decay may have appalled his eyes, Spenser, together with the famous explorer, Sir Walter Raleigh, had actively participated in and personally benefited from Munster’s ruin, as the English Crown wrested the province from the grip of its once powerful overlord – Garret (Gerald) Fitzgerald, 15th Earl of Desmond who, from his headquarters at Askeaton castle in county Limerick, had dominated and controlled the wealth and politics of the province for decades.
By 1579, however, the writing was on the wall for Desmond. Rooted in the feudal tradition of a bygone era the world outside his Munster domain had moved on. Queen Elizabeth I of England viewed him as a threat to her power in Ireland, his intrigues with Spain a threat to England’s security and the vast acres under his control in Munster a potential goldmine. After years of prevarication in 1579 Elizabeth finally let loose the dogs of war. Desmond was proclaimed a traitor, a price on his head and his lands and numerous castles up for grabs.
For three years a savage military campaign was waged against him by Elizabeth’s military generals, aided by her Irish cousin the Earl of Ormond. Abandoned by his Spanish allies, ill from dropsy and dysentery, too weak to even mount his horse, Desmond was hunted like a wild animal across the despoiled acres of his vast Munster lordship. Despite his overwhelming liabilities, however, he had one remaining asset - his countess, Eleanor.
Educated, intelligent, courageous, able and loyal, the daughter of Edmund Butler, Baron of Dunboyne, from Kiltinan Castle, county Tipperary Eleanor’s destiny was as a wife, mother and chatelaine. But her marriage in 1565 to the Earl of Desmond hurled her into a maelstrom of a bitter family feud, international political intrigue, a religious war, the enforced rebellion of her husband and finally social and political melt-down, destitution and ostracism.
With amazing skill, courage and diplomacy, Eleanor at first tried to mediate with the English queen and her Machiavellian administration. Her letters are pragmatic, astute and knowledgeable, as she tried to keep at bay avaricious officials in the Queen’s pay in Ireland, predatory English military generals, disgruntled liege lords of her powerful husband, as well as power-hungry rivals from within his own family – all of whom hoped to profit from his downfall. During Garret’s imprisonment in the Tower of London, she single-handedly and capably administered his vast and far-flung lordship stretching from the Decies in Waterford to Dingle in west Kerry. Making the perilous journey to visit him during his long captivity in London she used her skills and contacts to intercede with Queen Elizabeth and her officials on his behalf. Enduring imprisonment, both in Dublin Castle and in the Tower of London, exile in the slums of Southwark, her only son held hostage in the Tower, her mission, to save the House of Desmond, her husband, her children and herself from annihilation, became Eleanor’s obsession.
And when her efforts as a mediator between her husband and Queen Elizabeth were overtaken by international events, her husband declared a traitor by the English administrators in Ireland, Eleanor joined Garret on the run across the wastelands of his former Munster lordship. Enduring a knife-edge existence in desolate hastily-erected shelters in forests and mountains desperately she tried to keep her husband alive until either the vacillating Queen called off her war dogs or help came from her husband’s fickle ally, King Philip II of Spain.
For three long years there was little respite for the ‘rebel’ Earl of Desmond, his Countess and their few remaining loyal adherents. With Askeaton Castle in enemy hands, they were, as Eleanor wrote, forced ‘like deere to laie upon their keepings and so fearfull they were, that they would not tarrie in anie one place anie long time but where they did dress their meate, then they would remove and eat it in another place to lie.’ With a price on her husband’s head, danger lurked everywhere. Constantly on her guard, Eleanor (an accomplished horsewoman) rode ahead of the little band of fugitives ready to sound the alarm at the first sight of danger. To deter pursuing English scouting parties, like the lapwing, she lead them on many a wild chase away from her husband’s hiding place. ‘We had the Countesse of Desmond in chase two myles’, the captain of the English garrison in Kilmallock reported, ‘and myssinge herselfe took a great prey of three hundred kyne from her.’ From deep within the wilderness of the Glen of Aherlow and the Galtee mountains, to the outposts of the ancient Desmond palatine of Kerry, the once most powerful man in Ireland and his faithful Countess fled for their lives.
When Desmond was finally run to ground and ignobly beheaded in a lonely cave near Tralee in the winter of 1583, his head pickled in a wine cask, sent to London to end up on a spike over the entrance to the Tower of London, Eleanor set out to salvage what she could from the ruins of her husband’s once vast estates. Deserted as the wife of a ‘traitor’ by family and friends, a political and social outcast, pocketing her pride, she was forced to beg her bread with her five young daughters on the streets of Dublin. In one of her letters to the Queen’s Secretary of State, Lord Burghley, she described her extreme circumstances:
‘At the present tyme my miserie is suche that my children and myselfe livethin all wante of met, 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 miserable that I see my poore children in manner starve before me.’
Despite the concerted efforts of English officials in the Dublin administration, determined to protect their avaricious claims to Desmond’s confiscated estates and prevent his widow from presenting her case in person at the English court, pawning everything she possessed, towards the end of 1587 Eleanor managed to escape to London to appeal her case directly to Queen Elizabeth. Experiencing humiliation and isolation, her persistence and courage finally paid dividends when she was accorded an audience with the Queen. Despite her long-held animosity towards her late husband, Elizabeth sympathised with Eleanor’s plight.
‘ Wee having compassion 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 yearlie pension of two
hundredth pounds sterling to be paid to hir yearlie our of our excheqer…’
A timely, but in view of her late husband’s previous wealth and possessions, miniscule compensation.
It was also at the English court that Eleanor later found the love and protection of a new husband, Sir Donagh O’Connor Sligo, chieftain of county Sligo, to where she moved on their marriage in 1597. On O’Connor’s death in 1609 she was once again forced to defend her second husband’s estates this time to rebut the spurious claims made to his property in the Court of Chancery, in both Dublin and London, by the new wave of English carpetbaggers and planters who like vultures descended on the unprotected lands of county Sligo after the fall of Gaelic Ireland in the years following the Battle of Kinsale (1601) and the Flight of the Earls (1607). With extraordinary courage and persistence, well into her nineties, Eleanor met the new challenges head-on travelling to Dublin and to London to defend and mostly win her legal endeavours until her death in 1638.
The life of Eleanor Countess of Desmond is testimony to the struggle of an exceptionally courageous, spirited and enduring woman who refused to abandon hope in the face of immense personal tragedy against the background of a period of unparalleled destruction and upheaval in Ireland which sucked an entire civilisation into its maw. In life she received few bouquets; in death oblivion from Irish written history, even from popular folklore. In the quiet ruins of Sligo Abbey her tomb stands as the only memorial to this unsung heroine of the Tudor Wars in Ireland while her personal correspondence bear testimony to the life and struggles of this exceptional woman on whom fortune seldom smiled but who steadfastly refused to succumb to the dark shadows that relentlessly clouded her long life.
While Eleanor Countess of Desmond may have lived almost 500 years ago, the personal trauma she experienced by the violent and systematic destruction of the fabric of her native society has reverberation and relevance today. Women in Palestine, Iran, Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the mothers, wives, grandmothers, widows, sisters and daughters of the indigenous population, continue to live through political, military and social upheaval, their lives torn apart by forces, both foreign and local, over which they have no control. And yet, despite such insurmountable odds, like Eleanor, these unsung heroines continue to protect, nurture and provide for their families and keep hope alive.
Eleanor’s only son, James, a prisoner for almost all his life, and whom she was occasionally permitted to visit, died in the Tower of London in 1601, presumed by poison, at the age of thirty years.
Her third daughter, Lady Katherine FitzGerald married her first cousin Maurice Roche, Viscount Fermoy. Through the Viscount Fermoy line Eleanor’s descendants include the late Princess Diana and her sons Princes William and Harry.
Eleanor’s birthplace, Kiltinan Castle, Fethard, county Tipperary, is presently owned by the composer, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.
ELEANOR, Countess of Desmond, 1545-1638 by Anne Chambers (Gill Books)
