A History of Women in Ireland, 1500-1800

Mary O'Dowd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317877240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

The first general survey of the history of women in early modern Ireland. Based on an impressive range of source material, it presents the results of original research into women's lives and experiences in Ireland from 1500 to 1800. This was a time of considerable change in Ireland as English colonisation, religious reform and urbanisation transformed society on the island. Gaelic society based on dynastic lordships and Brehon Law gave way to an anglicised and centralised form of government and an English legal system.

PART 1

Politics

CHAPTER 1

Marriage, Lordship and Politics, c. 1500–1692

Politics and marriage networks in sixteenth-century Ireland

In 1574 Edward Fitzgerald, Lieutenant of the Gentlemen Pensioners, was sent on a royal mission to Ireland. He was instructed by Queen Elizabeth to negotiate with the earl of Desmond and to send reports of his progress to his sister or his wife ‘so that one of them might deliver the same to her’. Fitzgerald preferred, however, to write to the queen’s secretary, Lord Burghley, because ‘in my opinion it is too weighty a matter for women to deal with the queen in’.¹ Fitzgerald’s comments reveal the gender dilemma of Tudor politics. Despite the courtier’s misgivings about women’s ability to be trusted with affairs of state, the reality was that the kingdoms of England and Ireland were ruled by two female monarchs for almost fifty years between 1553 and 1602. In order to accommodate the apparent contradiction between the queen as ruler and the queen as a woman, Queen Elizabeth cultivated the notion of herself as androgynous, acknowledging her sex as a woman but not identifying her gender with that of other women. She ruled as a king even though she had ‘the body of a weak and feeble woman’.² Hence, Fitzgerald could entrust her with ‘weighty’ matters that he could not impart to his sister or wife.

Nor was the queen the only politically influential woman in Fitzgerald’s life. He was in fact surrounded by female relatives who wielded political power and influence. Fitzgerald’s mother was Lady Elizabeth Grey, daughter of the marquis of Dorchester, who married Gerald Fitzgerald, 9^th earl of Kildare, and solicited support for her husband from her cousin, Henry VIII.³ Elizabeth was also reported to have learnt to ‘read, write and perfectly speake’ Irish, a politically useful skill for meeting with and providing hospitality for her husband’s Irish supporters.⁴ Following Gerald’s death and the rebellion of Elizabeth’s stepson Thomas in 1534, Elizabeth returned to England where she lived in the home of her brother, Leonard, who served as lord deputy in Ireland, 1536–40. Two of Elizabeth’s children, Edward and his sister Elizabeth, secured positions at the royal court. As we have seen, Edward held the post of Lieutenant of the Gentlemen Pensioners while Elizabeth was a maid of honour to Queen Mary. Later, as the countess of Lincoln, she was among the small group of influential women who surrounded Queen Elizabeth and, hence, in the queen’s view, if not in Fitzgerald’s, was fit to be trusted with affairs of state. Edward’s wife was Agnes Leghe, a wealthy heiress and confidante of Queen Elizabeth. Their daughter was also a lady-in-waiting for Queen Elizabeth.⁵ Another influential female connection was Edward’s sister-in-law, Mabel Browne, a gentlewoman in Queen Mary’s privy chamber, who married Edward’s half-brother Gerald and who lobbied successfully at court for the political restoration of her husband as the 11^th earl of Kildare, a task in which she was assisted by her sister-in-law, the countess of Lincoln.⁶ Historians of the Tudor court have acknowledged the political power and influence of ladies-in-waiting in the female courts of Mary and Elizabeth.⁷ Hence, the women in Edward’s family were among the most politically prestigious in Tudor England. In Ireland, also, Edward’s paternal aunts Eleanor and Margaret, daughters of Gerald, 8^th earl of Kildare, yielded considerable political power.⁸

The tension between Fitzgerald’s view of women’s role in public life and the reality as demonstrated by the women in his family was not uncommon in early modern Europe. The theoretical distinction between the private and public worlds of elite men and women rarely reflected the reality. In Ireland, as in England, private acts of marriage, childbirth and the rearing of children were imbued with political significance.

From an Irish point of view, Edward Fitzgerald’s mission to Ireland underlined a fundamental characteristic of women’s political influence in the sixteenth century. Family connections were of central importance. Fitzgerald was dispatched back to his native country not just because he was an ‘influential courtier in his own right’⁹ but also quite simply because he was a Fitzgerald. When he was asked to negotiate with the earl of Desmond, Edward Fitzgerald was in fact being asked to talk to his cousin Gerald.¹⁰ Edward was a member of what was left of the great dynastic conglomerate created by his grandfather and father, the 8^th and 9^th earls of Kildare. Marriage had formed an important part in the development of the Geraldine network as it had in the formation of the rival power bloc of early sixteenth-century Ireland, that of the Butler earls of Ormond.¹¹ Consequently, the political potential of noblewomen as prospective marriage partners was crucial for the balance of power in early sixteenth-century Ireland.

The classic demonstration of the use of marriage as a political adjunct was the network established by Edward Fitzgerald’s grandfather Gerald, 8^th earl of Kildare (c. 1456–1513). Gerald had six daughters, each of whom was married to either an ally of her father’s or a lord whose support he wished to acquire. Thus Margaret was married ‘for policy’ to the earl of Ormond in an unsuccessful attempt to bring the two powerful families together.¹² Eleanor Fitzgerald married Donal MacCarthy Reagh, a prominent Gaelic lord in the southern part of Ireland; her sister Eustacia married Ulick Burke, the lord of Clanricarde, whose territory lay in the west, while Alice Fitzgerald was married to Conn Bacagh O’Neill in the north.¹³ Two other daughters married lords from the midlands while the seven sons of the 8^th earl of Kildare, by his second wife, were married into prominent Pale families. Thus, through the marital network of his family the earl of Kildare attempted to break down the political fragmentation of early Tudor Ireland and establish a virtual political unity on the island.¹⁴

Gerald Fitzgerald also extended his links into the Tudor court by his marriage in 1496 to Elizabeth St John, a cousin of Henry VIII. The royal connections established through Elizabeth facilitated the marriage of Gerald’s son, Gerald óg, first to Elizabeth Zouche, in a match arranged by Henry VII and his mother Lady Margaret Beaufort, and secondly, to Edward Fitzgerald’s mother Elizabeth Grey, another royal cousin.¹⁵ As James Ware later commented, this marriage ‘did afterwards very much advance and promote Kildare affairs acquiring thereby great friends at Court’.¹⁶ Expedient marriage alliances, thus, gave the Fitzgeralds not only control in Ireland but also access to the very centre of the English polity.

Tudor centralisation of government in the course of the sixteenth century gradually eroded the importance of dynastic politics. By the time that Edward Fitzgerald arrived in Ireland in 1574, it was a pale imitation of what it had been forty years earlier and Edward was unable to exploit his family connections to persuade his cousin Gerald to follow his advice. Edward’s half-brother, Gerald, had been restored as 11^th earl of Kildare in 1554 but he never commanded the same authority and control in Ireland as his predecessors. Thomas Butler, the 10^th earl of Ormond (1531–1614) and head of the traditional rival faction group to the Geraldines, had more political influence than the earl of Kildare but Ormond’s political strength derived more from his family connections with the queen and members of her court than through his ability to command an extensive factional network in Ireland.¹⁷ By the 1570s, the island of Ireland was no longer held together politically by the marriage networks of the Geraldines or the Butlers.

Marriage alliances remained, however, an important, if no longer a dominating, aspect of political life, particularly at provincial and local level. Within Gaelic Ireland marriage was an important basis for securing political support until the end of the sixteenth century. The O’Neills of Ulster made extensive use of marriage to consolidate their control in Ulster. Shane O’Neill married four times and, as one biographer noted, he changed his marriage partners to suit his political circumstances.¹⁸ His first wife was probably a member of the Maguire family, and she was followed by a woman from the MacDonnell clan. The latter was abandoned when O’Neill made peace with Calvagh O’Donnell, lord of Tyrconnell, in 1560 and married his daughter Mary. The following year Mary was recorded in the annals as having died of shock when her husband imprisoned her father and began a liaison with her stepmother, Calvagh’s wife Catherine Mac Lean, the Scottish widow of the 4^th earl of Argyle.¹⁹ Catherine may not initially have been a willing partner in the liaison with Shane. One report alleged that Shane tied her to a small boy by day and released her only in the evening when he was present. Subsequently, however, Catherine married Shane with her family’s approval and she remained with him until he was killed in 1567.²⁰

Despite Shane O’Neill’s marriage to Catherine, rumours continued to circulate that he intended to take back his first wife or to marry Lady Agnes Campbell, the daughter of the 4^th earl of Argyle and Mac Lean’s stepdaughter. The argument that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Politics
• Part II The Economy
• Part III Religion and Education
• Part IV Ideas
• Bibliography
• Index