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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:35]
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- [02:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. On the western edge of Ireland, where the Atlantic breaks into the inlets of Clew Bay, power in the 16th century was measured as much in ships as in land. Coastal lordships rose and fell on their ability to command the sea, to trade, to tax passing vessels, and to defend their harbors with armed galleys. This was a world organized around kinship and clan authority, governed by Gaelic law and custom, and increasingly pressured by the expanding ambitions of the Tudor state. Into this charged maritime landscape was born one of the most striking figures of early modern Ireland, the woman later remembered as the pirate queen, Grace o', Malley. Or perhaps more properly, Gron o'. Malley. She's the source of fascination for a number of you who have written in, including Kendra Paulson from Ogden, Utah, who is keen to find out more. Hi, Susanna. I would love to listen to an episode about Grace o'. Malley. My first exposure to Grace was the song by violinist Maire Nisbett. I later saw a documentary that briefly went through Grace's life and history, and I became very intrigued. Grace is the most badass woman. She was not only a woman, but an Irish woman who gained Elizabeth the first respect. You'd have to be a major badass to accomplish that. She was a woman succeeding in a man's world, and I wonder if Elizabeth saw a kindred spirit. I would be thrilled if you would devote an episode to her story.
- [04:07]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Thank you.
- [04:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks, Kendra. Well, let's find out more about this badass. O' Malley grew up in a seafaring dynasty whose fortunes were tied to Atlantic networks stretching to Scotland, Spain and France. Over a lifetime that spanned the height of the Tudor conquest of Ireland, she commanded ships, led fighting men, forged strategic marriages, and built an independent power base. English officials alternately dismissed and feared her, describing her as a pirate and a rebel. While later folklore transformed her into a larger than life heroine, the documentary traces she left behind. Petitions, state papers and legal disputes reveal a leader constantly negotiating violence, family loyalty and political survival in a rapidly changing world. In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Gillian Kenney, Adjunct Associate professor in the History Department at University College Dublin and visiting research fellow at the Centre for Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. Together, we'll explore how maritime Gaelic lordships are operated, how groin exercised authority in a society that formally barred women from rule, and how her career intersected with the tightening grip of Tudor power. Her story is one of navigation in every sense, across seas, between cultures, and through the dangerous politics of 16th century Ireland. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors From History hit. Dr. Kenny, welcome to the podcast.
- [05:42]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Thanks very much, Susanna. Delighted to be here and chat about her badass. Always good.
- [05:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We're obsessed with that now, aren't we? So let's start by talking about the badass's correct name. What is her name? Because we have these various versions of her name floating around. Granuel. Grace Granuel. What should we call her?
- [05:58]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
So Grace is in. In kind of like an English translation, the nearest they could find to us, which people tend to know her as. But her name is Grogna. Grog was her Irish name. That means Grogny, daughter of o', Malley, but in. In the English way, you'd say just Gronley. That's generally the way the Gronual name. Many Irish people will know her as that. And that comes from a story, a legend about her, that when she was a wee girl, she said to her father, I want to go on the ships with you, because he was a maritime lord. And he said, no, you can't, because your long hair will catch in the rigging. And then she walked off the ship, took a knife and. And cut all of her hair off. And once she did that, her father's men gave her a nickname, a whale. M H A O L A Granya Whale. And that was another story of how she got that name. So Granya the Bald was a kind of a play on her name as well, but generally she's just Granya. She's Groania to the English in the 16th century as well. They tend to call her that in the documents.
- [07:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Recently on the podcast, we've actually been spending quite a bit of time in Ireland in the 16th century thinking about the fate of the ships that were part of the Spanish Armada and then wrecked off the Irish coast, for example, or thinking about the Tudor conquest of Ireland. But for those who haven't caught up on those recently, can you remind us about the political landscape of Ireland at this time?
- [07:25]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Yeah, surely. So Grogna's lifespan is really quite interesting because it covers the arc of Tudor involvement in Ireland. So she's born, we think around 1530, as you say, on the far west coast of Ireland. And at that stage the Tudors were interested in Ireland. We know Henry VII had reports commissioned on what was happening there. We know they kept a close eye. Henry VIII did too. But like many English monarchs before, they lacked both the Commitment and the money, they were far too tight to spend the money properly on basically finishing the conquest of Ireland, because Ireland had been kind of colonized by Anglo normans in the 12th century and that kind of ground to a halt in around the 13th, 14th centuries. So what you had by about 1530 was an island where there were different centres of power, it was highly localized, there were lots of different lordships. Some were culturally English on paper, some were culturally Gaelic, like Onyes. But what it is is it's a land of exchange. It's a land where boundaries blurred. The representative of the king in Ireland by that stage was usually a leading Anglo Irish magnate, so a descendant of those Anglo Normans, and they run the plays basically like an Irish chieftain did. So they would have, you know, they would sometimes use Irish law, they would all speak Irish. So, for example, when the Tudor started arriving here later in the century, they were absolutely bamboozled and disgusted by the fact that there was all this cultural mixing that was going on. So it's quite a complex setup. And then that's what you have when. When she lands in the 1530s. And then we start to see in the. In 1530s as. As kind of Henry VIII starts the break with Rome and as he becomes more paranoid, Ireland becomes really a source of worry to the Tudor state as a backdoor. And there's a big rebellion here in 1534, the Kildare Rebellion, and the Kildares had actually made contact with agents of the emperor which displeased the king. So that was massively flattened down, a show of extreme force. Then after that, you see kind of the great eye of the Tudors turning more and more towards Ireland to kind of put an end to this kind of high, highly dispersed lordship. What also interested them, of course, was as well, lots of land which could be taken, which could entertain younger sons. Then you have, of course, as the century goes on, Ireland stays generally Catholic. You have the Reformation that brings another element into the whole Irish English discourse from about the 1550s, when you have the plantations, it all starts to get, I guess you could say, quite a bit more vicious. And there is more of a. A drive amongst English reformers to reform Ireland, to bring it under the English kind of polity. And in 1541, Henry VIII was made King of Ireland, which really focused their minds as well. So you have a drive towards that for the rest of the century. And then you see in her life, she's born into basically a Gaelic lordship of a bit as Gaelic as you could get back then, and towards the End of her life, she has to make accommodations with the English queen because that is the, now the new paramount power in the land. So I like the fact her life basically maps onto all these changes in how the Tudor state viewed Ireland.
- [10:44]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And can you explain what brehon law was and how that has an implication here? What were its major differences from English law?
- [10:54]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Brehon law is the Gaelic Irish legal system. It's called brehon because it's a kind of an anglicization of brehave, which is a george. And in the Irish tradition it's called fenachis, which is the whole legal system. Now to put into context for your listeners, Irish law first begins to be written down in like the 7th and 8th centuries. And over the succeeding centuries there are many glosses and many changes to it. But it's a very ancient system. It's incredibly hierarchical and status driven and it's managed by part of the learned elite in Irish society. So Gaelic Irish society had quite an unusual component. They had what people know as the Asthana, who were the people of learning. So they are like lawyers, judges, poets, historians. Nice. We would have done well there, Susanna. And they have a very elevated status and they are the kind of cultural gatekeepers and custodians and the brehons are the people who look after the law. And it is unusually and from the earliest of times it is a law that goes right across Ireland. So it is homogeneous from early medieval Ireland onwards, which is when we can first begin to kind of trace it. And it's very different to English law. For example, when someone offends you say if they steal something for you, there's no kind of criminal law. It's a law based on penalties. So if anyone offends you, they will pay a penalty. And it's locally driven. So you go to your local king and his brehon sits and he hands down the judgment and then it's enforced. And quite a lot of the enforcement is done locally through the disapproval of others. But it's, it's massive. It's really complex. It has whole books of Gaelic law on, on, for example, things like bees on dogs. There's loads of stuff on dogs, on, you know, loads of stuff on animals from, from the most ornate and, and obscure legal problems down to what kind of food you can eat depending on what status you are. So that's really still alive and kicking in Ireland in the 16th century. That's, that's still on the go and that's the system Granja would have Been
- [13:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
brought up in another sort of scene setting. Question, if you don't mind. How should we think about the west coast of Ireland at this time? How isolated was it?
- [13:19]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
I mean, I don't know if many of your listeners have ever been there. We go to Mayo every year and it's beautiful, it's very quiet and it's very picturesque. And it was very beautiful and very picturesque in the 16th century, but it wasn't quiet, it was very busy. So the lordship of Grogna's father, the omalley lordship is called Ool in Irish. And that's translated to the owls and the elves, is one of a whole series of maritime lordships along the west and south coast of Ireland. And under Brehon law, they are entitled to the same kind of duties on the areas of sea that belongs to them as were on land. They used to have French boats coming in. They'd English boats, they'd Spanish boats. These people would pay tolls for fishing. They would pay tolls for processing. They would be trading. Just not far from Mayo is the great town of Galway. And that would have been a focal point. I mean, the Galwegians hated the omalis because they were. They were always. The Malays were, as they saw, stepping on their toes by putting tolls on. But what the omalis were doing, like every Gaelic maritime lord, was what was entitled to them under Brehon law. And this is where you get one of those instances where two cultural systems come up against each other. Because of course, when English observers saw this, they saw piracy, but they weren't pirates. What they were doing was managing their sea lands as they would have done their land lands, if you know what I mean. So making a living on the west coast of Ireland is difficult. The land is. Is difficult. So the farming that was done was probably mainly pastoral with cattle. But we know they did grow some oats. But it's hard going, so you have to go to sea. Either you fish or you rent out your fishing grounds. So you know what? She would have grown up in a world where people were paying to offload their herring and salt them. People would have been there from Bristol, from south of France, from Spain. So she would have grown up here in different languages. It's a very cosmopolitan world. And as you mentioned before, Ireland is also part of that greater Irish world, which incorporates the west coast of Scotland as well. So they imported from. For. For other families, gallow glass, which are mercenaries. So you would have had Scottish accents, you would add British accents. Everyone was there incredibly Sophisticated and really quite cosmopolitan. And we know when they were trading, the Irish chiefs loved. Loved a bit of French wine, so they'd be bringing that in and they'd be trading out stuff like hides and stuff like that, because. And Irish textiles. So, yeah, it's really busy. It's not like it is now. It's hard to imagine, but it was actually really busy in the 16th century.
- [16:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So immediately we've hit on a problem, which is that her fame is as a pirate queen. But you're suggesting that this idea of designating the Omanis as pirates is problematic and basically colonial. It's an English perspective on what they're up to.
- [16:24]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Yep. She wasn't a pirate and she wasn't a queen. So that's it. There's nothing else?
- [16:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, we've dealt with that, then. I mean, does this tell us where we're getting the information about her life? Is it the fact that much of what we have as sources for her life are produced by the English?
- [16:42]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Yeah, you know, that's part of it. I mean, she does appear in the state papers, and they are more often than not complaining about her activities. But a lot of that is from later centuries as well. She's romanticized a fair extent from, like, the 18th century on. And she's often seen as kind of, well, depending on your perspective, the kind of noble kind of rebel, which she wasn't either. She was incredibly practical, 16th century politician. But, yeah, the use of the term pirate is colonial to me. It's about a society coming up against another society, and it just doesn't want to understand what's going on, because why should it? It just wants to kind of take everything it can from it. She wasn't a queen. There were no kind of queens. I mean, the whole image of Ireland a lot of people have is, you know, 150 different kingdoms. It wasn't like that by the 16th century, a lot of the older kingdoms. By the 1400s, the Gaelic lords were calling themselves lords. I mean, there are very powerful lords. Like to the north of the o', Malleys, there are the o'. Donnells. And they are increasingly a problem for them. They're increasingly pushing in on them from the north, and they're quite large regional lords. But no, she's a. She becomes. The reason she's so fascinating. Reason I'm writing a book about her is because she's really the first woman in Irish history to have essentially acted as a chieftain. She couldn't call herself one, but she spoke for her family, and she appears which is what I'm looking into. She appears to have essentially run a lordship, or certainly part of it. She certainly had galleys, she had fighting men, she got involved in the politics of the time. So that's incredible because under Gaelic law, women were not allowed to become chiefs. That simply did not happen. So she's remarkable in that she did it. But then, as you know, Susanna, in times of difficulty and trouble, women can often find a route to power because the normal rules are kind of abandoned or suspended when it all gets a bit pear shaped.
- [18:44]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, and I absolutely want to ask you a bit more about that, but what you were saying made me think of the fact that she's also such an important figure in terms of folklore. You know, you've told us the possibly apocryphal story of cutting off her hair so that it doesn't get caught in the rigging. And then there's the famous one year marriage that she's supposed to have ended by ejecting her second husband from a castle. I mean, how many of these sort of stories have kind of accrued around her as part of a romantic legend, do you think?
- [19:19]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Oh, there's loads of them. I mean, I'm going to examine them in the book as well because there's so many of them. I mean, there's stuff about her.
- [19:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
She.
- [19:27]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
She's supposed to have given birth to her son Theobald, and then her ship was attacked by like proper pirates. And then she jumped up out of the bed and took a couple of pistols and went out all guns blazing. There's another one where she had like a young man as a lover and her enemies killed him, so she turned up and flattened them. There's a, there's another one, a hilarious one, where on the east coast of Ireland, there's a big castle at Howth and she apparently called in and the Lord wasn't home, but she didn't get any kind of food and she was so incensed. Hospitality is a massive part of Gaelic culture. She was so incensed, she kidnapped his grandson and took him back over to Mayo. And the, the Earl had to get over there and get his grandson back. And now apparently they'll tell you in the castle to this day, they always set an extra place setting for her. Although she turns up now, be a bit of a surprise. There's loads of, there's loads of that stuff. There's loads of that stuff. Right. But the interesting thing is, right, I like folklore because I like it. I like it as a reflection of, of, of what kind of impact these women made on the Irish psyche? Because there's loads of women like that in Irish history. There's millions of them. There's a woman called Margaret Butler who's around the same time as Grogny, who's quite a forceful character and she's supposed to have hung seven men from one one particular like tree. And then there's other women. There's a woman called Rose Du For Dunn who built the first woman castle builder in Ireland. She's supposed to have thrown her architect out of a window. So I think it's about women when you get particular women who don't always behave as maybe people think they enter the kind of cultural lexicon as a kind of a. Well there. So it's often quite monstrous. You know, it's often something that's really just out there. But within Gaelic culture, this is a common misconception people have. They go, oh, women were so free in Gaelic culture. No they weren't. I get that a lot. You know, when you talk about Gaelic Irish culture it's patriarchal, it's warrior led. Women do have rights, there's no doubt about that. But a woman couldn't be a chief. And when Granja was a little girl when she would listen to the stories in the sagas about women. So when you talk about the great women in the Irish sagas, you know, they all end up bad. They all have a bad end. They're like mothers in Disney films. So they, when they exert their power it always goes pear shape. And so that's what's going into these girls for centuries. I have to toe the line, I have to do this. So it's kind of remarkable when they do get a chance, they go, actually I'm going to do this way, I'm going to exert power this way. And, and they don't. They kind of go against the cultural assumptions and then I think up as almost monstrous, certainly larger than life in the imagination of people, you know.
- [22:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, so let's talk about the historical Rania then. As I understand it, after she got married at 16, she did take on quite quickly a lot of traditionally masculine roles. Is that true? And if so, are you suggesting that that was an unusual thing to do at the time?
- [22:36]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Yeah, so we don't have the dates that. But she probably did get married quite young. So again, it's more of legend than in the, in the documents. But the, the idea is that she married this man called Domhnall on Cogger o' Flaherty who was Domhnal the battler, who was apparently quite good at war, but not the brightest. So the story is, is that she married him and they had three kids and eventually she kind of took over his men because she was just much better at it. That's unprecedented. You do get, in Irish history, you do get many women who get involved politically and sometimes on a physical level. And, and the reason is right. When you got married in, under the Irish tradition, your dairy was movables, so your dairy could be cattle, but you could also bring a whole load of soldiers with you. And there are instances definitely where women did use their own soldiers off their own bat to solve their own problems. The Irish tradition as well, you kept in contact with your own family after your natal family still had a hold over you. So that meant if you had powerful uncles or brothers, they could get involved. So, so there's those linkages still. So she had that going on. And the Omalleys are like a incredibly well respected ancient family on the west coast, so she had that going on. So it's entirely possible that she could have muscled in on the o' flaherties and when he died, certainly she brought back boats with her. So she was active. We do know there was something going on there. So there is a tradition of women getting involved, but not to the extent where they would command, as she appears to have done. That's why she's unusual. You get women who will parley with the English, you get women who will defend a castle. But to command men in the field, as on the water, as she seems to have, is very unusual in our ship industry.
- [24:36]
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- [25:12]
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- [26:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Because this is very much on the water, isn't it? I mean, the story goes that she commands her own flotilla, Is that correct? Can you give us a sort of picture of what that would have looked like? I mean, what, where they were going, what they were carrying. You know, how they decide when to trade, when to tax.
- [26:44]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Yeah, so they were kind of small galleys. They're not massive boats at all. She probably would have had four or five of them at that stage. I guess to understand what they would have done is so they would have viewed the section around Clew Bay in Ireland as theirs. So if you wandered in there in your boat, then you had to pay her a toll or, you know, give her a portion of whatever, or you had to pay her to fish. So they would have patrolled up and down there. They would have been out there looking to see who's coming in, who's coming. They could sometimes stray a little bit into certainly what was illegal, because they certainly sometimes did seem to have stolen stuff from people who are supposed to be going to Galway, which is why Galway didn't like them a lot. But basically, basically, if you can imagine how a landlord would manage his land so his tenants would pay him certain taxes and dues and people coming in, it's that. But on the water. And they had a whole network. I mean, we know as well they were traveling down around the south coast, possibly into France and Spain, so there was trade going on. But what probably would have happened was bigger ships from Europe would have come in and laid anchor off the coast. Smaller boats come in with their trade, the big trade, the big fishing element on the west coast of Ireland was herring. For about the 15th century, that. That kind of exploded. It became a massive European fishing ground. And the Omalis, like the other maritime lords, taxed the light life out of anyone who wanted to do it. And they made loads of money, it seems. So what they did was put up all these little tower houses along the coast which you can visit today, and they would watch out as well to see which both anyone who's not been there. So when you go to Clew Bay, it's like they're little drumlins in the water which you can see out, like, for miles and miles, if you know what I mean. So you have to imagine all these submerged, tiny little submerged islands, dozens of them, which you can see for miles and miles and miles. And the great thing is, as well, if you go to a tower house on Clare island, it's very cunningly built, because when you approach, you can't really see it. You have to get really close and then you can see it. But when you're there, you can see everywhere. You know, they're very well done. So they're traders with a bit of muscle, really. They're out for money, really, more than anything else.
- [29:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Granja's later life is dominated by conflict with Sir Richard Bingham, who's a pretty awful English governor appointed in 1584. How does he become her major? And who was he?
- [29:20]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Yeah, so Richard Bingham is a very accomplished soldier, very good at what he does. And in Ireland at that time, in the 1580s, this is after the plantations. This is after the great Desmond Rebellion in the south of the country. The country is tending towards chaos. And part of the reason is, is that Elizabeth, like many, like many previous English monarchs, having been advised to kind of finish the deal with Ireland, kept backing away because it was costing too much. So what begins to happen is very bad men on the ground, some of them began to act almost independently. They were imposing martial law, they were taking lands, hanging people. Some of it was appalling. Now, there's reports going back from the crown administration in Dublin about Bingham, because he isn't liked and people don't like so much what he's doing. But he comes into Mayo, he comes up against the Burkes, which is the family Granja had married into as her second marriage, who are the. The most powerful family in Mayo. And it's part of a system of basically. So the. They come in in the 1580s and they want to impose uniformity over Connacht, the West of Ireland uniformity and taxation and uniformity in how the Lordships are held. He's held under English law. So this begins to be imposed and of course not everyone's pleased about it and particularly the Burkes aren't. Bingham did things like insert himself into who was getting elected as the next Burke and stuff like that. So he just annoyed everyone. But he seems to have taken a particular dislike to Grogne. Now that can be because he simply had no understanding of how Gaelic women behaved. Certainly in. In how they behaved, they may have been freer. There's lots of accounts. Some of them are, you know, very critical of kind of Irish women dressed in certain ways and drunk and stuff and things like that. But what again, they don't seem to understand is it's part of a. A much more complex kind of cultural system and they aren't all going around with no clothes on. Sometimes people do kick off at feasts, but they don't seem to understand as well. Within the Irish system, for example, there are different types of marriage. So to, to Tudor eyes, to an English man, it may look like it's just someone's kind of casual kind of person they go and have relations with. But actually under the Irish system, it's a particular type of wife who's entitled to particular things. So for example, some of the nobles, the Irish nobles would have six or seven wives. Like Richard Burke died in 1585 of Clanrickard, and he had like six wives and five of them are still alive life. Now, some of them were probably concubines, but under the Irish system you could divorce. I mean, under breh and law, a woman could divorce her husband if he was too fat to have sex with her and give her a baby. So we need to bring it back. It doesn't go the other way. The man wasn't allowed to do that. I'm just going to put that out there because the lawyers were clever, but they weren't, you know, they weren't dumb.
- [32:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Wait a second. Can we just go back to these different types of marriage? I mean, hopefully my husband's not listening to this point, but just. Can you explain, Just talk me through these possibilities.
- [32:41]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Everyone loves this. Yeah. So look, by the 16th century, right, it's only the kind of rich, you'd have several wives because who else could afford it? But under the laws, according to the laws, it's a whole tract on marriage. So there's about roughly 10 types of relationship we'll call it, because people might not recognize it as marriage. So the first type is a marriage of equal contribution. So the man and the woman are equal status and they bring equal things to the marriage. And when the marriage breaks up, they take away what they brought in. That's the crucial thing. You know, Irish women get to take out what they put in. Sometimes it's penalized a bit. Maybe if she had the affair, they broke it up. But it's generally the same. And then it goes right down until you have, like, what is essentially a booty call. But that has status and that. That is meaningful. So the thing is, though, if you were here and you went, but he's just. He's just going to her house and they don't appear to ever see each other. And. But she had a claim. She had. She's a type of wife under the gate. And again, this is where you see this culture clash, because you've got Tudor administrators going, but this is disgusting. Who are these people? But it's a system that's been going for a thousand years and it's worked. But some of the lords, I mean, some of the lords were ridiculous. I mean, there's one man, I think he's a Maguire, and when he died, he had 58 grandsons. Get a grip of yourself. What is this? So, I mean. And, you know, then it's like Game of Thrones. It's crazy because by the 16th century, there's a lot of Irish lords using primogeniture, but not all of them. And the Irish system calls for kind of an election of a leader. So it could get very nasty very quickly. There's lots of eye gougings and castrations and all kinds of stuff to try and make people ineligible to be the lord. Yeah, I mean, I get it. It could look. It could look chaotic. You'd be like, what the hell's going on here? Why is everyone killing each other? And all the Irish people are like, no, it's fine. It'll be over in a week and then we'll have a new chief. Don't worry about it. Here, have an oat cake. It's all good. Don't worry yourself about it there, Richard. It's all fine. Sway it is.
- [34:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So Granja's letting on the side here just with her two marriages. But at which point do you think we could say that she's operating as a chieftain?
- [35:01]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Oh, well, I mean, I think definitely after Richard Burke goes. So she's definitely really from the late 1580s. So she appears to have established herself in Rockfleet Castle, which. So Rockfleet is in the, um, Alley territory, it was really kind of owned by the Burkes. And she appears to have established herself there with hundreds of heads of cattle and she. And ships, and she's going up and down the coast. So she appears to have her own little center of gravity there, which she's answerable to no one. And she appears to have had her own men. And that's probably part of the reason that Bingham is so pissed off with her. But she's certainly exerting power before that though as well, because earlier that decade, she stops Richard Burke from joining in an insurrection. And she's certainly exerting an amount of power within the region, within Connacht. You know, she. She sends over a petition to Elizabeth as well in 1593, and she's acting on behalf of the O', Malleys, it seems. So she's. It's unusual. I mean, it's unprecedented. So it's really difficult to kind of quantify it. You know, she starts her power base with kind of the o' Flaherty marriage. She then marries again. So she's just gradually over the years, just building a power base. I mean, she's up to her own business when she's with Richard Burke because English commentators comment on it. It they're like, how can you let your wife behave like that, sir? They can't believe it. She is off and about with her own men. Yeah, this marrying Richard Burke as well is a brilliant idea because he's super powerful. So no one's ever going to kind of kick sand in her face as a woman leader. And then when he dies, she just grabs a load of stuff and heads off and establishes herself in her own tower house and seems to have her own sphere of power.
- [36:58]
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- [38:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So I guess the question is how unique is she in this? I mean, is she sort of an outlier or is she really just perhaps an extreme but basically example of the possibilities permitted under Gaelic under Brown law?
- [38:35]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
She is an outlier, but really she's the culmination of how kind of women have been tending in later medieval societies. So I mentioned earlier, there's lots of women with records of Gaelic women who will send their soldiers out to do stuff and will do lots of different political things as well. It's not allowed for a woman, it's specifically not allowed for a woman to act like a chieftain. So she is exceptional like that. Women weren't allowed to inherit land, not large amounts of land like under the common law system system they could inherit some of it, but then they had to kind of marry back into the family. So it stayed in. So they don't have that kind of that free, that freedom to do stuff that's locked in to say a large English heiress or a widow. They don't get dowers, for example, when they divorce in Gaelic Ireland they just get, if they can, they get back what they brought in. So she is exceptional because women did get involved but they didn't tend to create a separate power base and that's why she's unusual. So yeah, I mean my feeling is she's able to do it because of the circumstances that were in Ireland at the time. It begins to be so chaotic and kind of war torn that in that kind of space that there was a way through in which a woman could do this. I mean, the custodians of the rules and regulations in Ireland are the learned elite. And by the mid 16th century and particularly the later decades, they're under concerted attack because the Tudor administration saw them as subversive. So the poets and the bards and the brehons, they are under attack. And so what once held really firm is beginning to fray. And that's where you can find, I mean there's other women in the 16th century who behave like there's women in the Nine Years War in Ulster coming in from Scotland like Inian do and stuff. And they are behaving almost as war leaders. But it's because it's so chaotic that they can come and do that and they're bringing in soldiers from their own families. So there is that opportunity there. I think it happens in the 16th century but then the great irony of course is there's no more Gaelic island after that. That's the century in which kind of it gets stamped out and slowly dies then throughout the 17th. So that culture was never going to happen again.
- [41:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now one of the most famous instance of her life, I'm hoping you're going to tell me it actually happened is from 1593, a meeting between Grogne and Queen Elizabeth I. Did this actually happen?
- [41:18]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
No bad news. We've no evidence it happened. So Kieran Brady, an Irish historian has found a reference to it, I think in an 18th century document as the first example. So no, it probably didn't happen, to be honest. But look it, I think she would have met Seth most likely. She filled out a load of answers to questions they'd asked her. She was floating around like many Irish lords were. She went to England because Bingham had attacked her and kidnapped her son and Tibbett and him and his brother had killed a previous son, a Flaherty son. And she absolutely panicked and went to England to plead. So she wrote and she kind of said, you know, can you help? And while that was being sent, she got on the boat and went. So she was an England. But that's not unusual. You know, you used to get Gaelic lords going to England quite a bit. I mean it's hilarious. If you ever want to read anything really funny. I think Elizabeth first had a massive crush on Shane o' Neill when he went, apparently he was very handsome, I think he was in the 1560s and they were all like, oh, look at Shane, look at his cloak, isn't he lovely? So you do get them going over. She went over, they gave her a, they gave her a series of questions to answer, which is brilliant. It's in the state papers and she answers them all. She tells her name and her dad and why she was there. Whether she met Elizabeth, I don't know. I think, I don't think she did. But Elizabeth was curious about Ireland, there's no doubt about it. You have to remember Elizabeth of course ordered the first Irish language Bible to be translated. So she, she has, she hasn't, she has an interest. She's just too tight like all the monarchs were to actually commit. So you know what, to me the story is about if it's 18th century, if it comes from Irish sources, to me it's about identity. It's about saying, look, look, we Were as good as they were once. Look at us going over there and a queen meeting another queen. Granj wasn't a queen. But then there's a. There's the story. I don't know whether you know the story about the handkerchief.
- [43:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
No, tell me.
- [43:16]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Yeah, so one of the legends about this is that Bronya was waiting to see the queen, and there was all courtiers standing about and rob. And she asked if anyone had a hanky. So some fop gave her a hanky, and she blew her nose and threw it into the fire. And they were like, what are you doing? Why are you turning the handkerchief away? You could have handed it back and we'd have it cleaned. And she was like, what a disgusting group of people you are. We don't keep our. Our effluvia. We throw it all away. So again, it's about, you know, aren't they. It's just disgraceful. Imagine. Imagine behaving like that. Such barbarians. So it's kind of. I think it's. I think it's more about the time the story was told, you know, at. In that later period. But in. In the later 16th century especially, there's a whole amount of propaganda about the Irish as, you know, as kind of barbaric and slovenly and dirty. And so you've. All that going on and that went on for centuries, and it started way back in the 12th century. So it. It does ramp up in the 16th century when you get that whole. I guess it's kind of a propaganda about the Gaelic Irish. And I guess things. Stories like that are a kind of a counter to it, if you know what I mean. That's how I view it. Anyway, maybe she did meet her. I believe if they're making a film of it, though, I imagine it'll be in it because you're not gonna. You're not gonna. You're not gonna give that up, are you? Of course you're gonna have them meet. Yeah, 100%.
- [44:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Of course. Mary Queen of Scots always meets Elizabeth in the films, but in reality, what was the outcome of her trip to England?
- [44:43]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Really good, actually. Elizabeth does seem to have been interested in her because. So she asked for lots of things like, you know, freedom to pursue. I mean, it's hilarious. She's like, well, some people accuse me of, you know, stealing, but I've given that all over now, and I'm just a poor old lady. So, I mean, she's in her probably 60s, so Elizabeth kind of just goes, yeah, fine, give it to her with.
- [45:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
No, they're the same age, aren't they?
- [45:08]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Elizabeth's like, give it to her. So she ends up back in Ireland with, like, everything she asked for and absolutely no breaks in her behavior. So. So that sets Bingham off again, you know, and. And he starts attacking her and she appeals again back to Dublin. But Elizabeth, I find it interesting because Elizabeth just appeared to read it and go, yeah, look it. You can romanticize it as much you like. I wonder on a human level if she just kind of didn't go, it must be hard. You know what I mean? I mean, Elizabeth at times found it pretty hard. This woman's come over, she's massively under attack. One son's been killed. Another son may have been killed, or is about to be. She looks like she can't maintain herself. It could have just been let it go by that stage. English power is rising. She's gonna have to come through accommodation, which Granja did with the English crown, so it could be part of that kind of building work. So, yeah, she sailed back with everything she wanted. Brilliant. Thanks a million. And all she had to do was go over and go, I'm just a poor old lady, which I very much doubt that she was, but there we are. I don't think you get to be who she was by being some kind of poor little old lady shuffling around Whitehall.
- [46:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So it feels like one of the things that's really come out in this conversation is that trying to pick one's way between the stories that have historical veracity, Groge the historical actor, and Gronje, the folk heroine. All of these. These sort of variations and iterations of on the Truth, it is very difficult indeed. So given that you're writing about her, how are you finding your way through?
- [46:53]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
So I've written an Irish women before, and they don't figure largely sometimes in the sources. The thing about it is, right, you find her in all different places. Like I found a poem commissioned by her son in which she's mentioned he's descended from her, tells you something about the veneration she's held in. You just have to pick through it. And the folklore is useful to me because of what it says about the times in which it emerged from and what it says about the folk memory of a strong woman. You just have to pick through it. You literally have to question everything. You have to question everything that's said about her. If someone says she set fire something, did she though? Or if someone says, you know, if there's a story about that you have to question everything. All I get to go on as a historian is what's in the source material. Ready, really. There is stuff there, but the book is about her, but it's also about the world that she's the last kind of gasp of. So it's about introducing people to that Gaelic world and that very complex and interesting 16th century Ireland that they might not normally. It's very, very different to say what you think of when you think of the 16th century. You think of England and you think of Shakespeare and you think of Sydney. It's very, very different. It looks different, it feels different. They eat differently, they look different. So it's about that as well. It's sort of telling that story as well about her. So that's why I like the arc of her life so much. Cause it nicely reflects that Gala Garland was doing fine here and then. Oh no, it's not doing fine at all. By the time the last mention of her is in about 1601. So that's the last we hear of her.
- [48:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So to conclude then, do you think that her story is obviously, as you just said, a symbol of the decline of Gaelic power, but the alienness, the difference of that world, but also, I suppose about how women could and did wield power at the margins of. Despite the Tudor world?
- [48:47]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Yeah, very much so, I think. Cause I'll be touching on some other women, especially in the later 16th century. But it's very much means. So sometimes the upset and the violence is a route for women to. To make something permanent. Like for example, Gronja came up in a Gaelic world. She died having made peace with an English world. And it meant that her son inherited everything. And they're still. They still live in. In kind of of the big house on the west coast of Ireland. So what she did is remarkable and is what every aristocrat wants to do. You solidify what's yours for the next generation. And to be honest, who cares who you make the peace with? When you look at it within the Gaelic world, she wasn't really allowed to do anything. She took it towards the end of the 16th century. The O' Donnell is bearing down on her and he's not going to let her do anything she wants. And this new English power will give her this, this and this, which she's agreed to. Why wouldn't you, if you're practical and you know what's. You know what the horizon looks, coming over the horizon and your son is there and you're like, yeah, I'll shut this down. For him. And it worked because they're still around. It actually worked when so many Gaelic families disappeared. She managed to hold on to the lands and the power for a very long time. And so did her family. To me, I don't know, I'm a mother, mother. I think that's quite a testament to her to the how she pushed that through. And the other women who were active at that time as well. They also act in a way on behalf of their sons. It is all about, is all about for all aristocrats, as it always is. It's all about locking in and holding on to it in the face of this kind of terror. So yeah, to me that's one of the major themes.
- [50:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And so not a pirate, not a, not a queen. How should we remember her?
- [50:43]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
A remarkable woman, a Sea Lord. The first and last time there ever was one.
- [50:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Dr. Jo and Kenny, thank you so much for coming on to talk about Gronnure. It's been an absolute delight.
- [50:55]
Dr. Gillian Kenney
Thank you, Susanna. It was brilliant. Thank you.
- [50:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Thanks also to my researcher Max Wintle and my producer Rob Weinberg. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode next time on Not Just the Tutors from History Hit.
- [51:33]
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- [52:09]
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