The Irish Princess

by Karen Harper

  Fosterage was one way, Magheen had told me plain, that powerful families kept the loyalty and control over lesser ones, who then owed them money and fighting men. Foster brothers were treated as family members, for the relationship was an honored and almost sacred one. Christopher was nearly thirty, older even than Thomas, and had been with the Fitzgeralds long before I was born. He was the constable of Maynooth Castle, with the duty to keep us supplied and safe. But I knew he had dared protest to Father that the extra firepower on the premises made Maynooth less safe, not more, though I had not the vaguest notion how he could reason thus.

  As both Father and Thomas spoke, I saw Mother’s lower lip quiver. She blinked back tears and kept her head held high, so I did too. All of us, but my dear Margaret, of course, soon swelled the hall with the shouted battle cry that Thomas, soon to be deputy of Ireland in Father’s stead, himself led: A Geraldine! A Geraldine!

  Father summoned each of us children to him separately that evening, in order of our birth. Mother sat beside him in his favorite room, the library, which boasted one hundred and twelve fine volumes or manuscripts in Latin and, of course, mostly Irish or English on all sorts of subjects. With the college he had founded and this library, Father hoped to raise the level of education in our land. We had oft sat at our lessons in this room. The library was a special place, for it housed in a filigreed silver box The Red Book of Kildare, a precious family heirloom kept current regarding our history and lists of land and household possessions and the names and records of those loyal to the cult of Kildare, as Christopher Paris had called it once.

  As I approached the door to the library, I heard Father telling Mother in the sweetest voice, “Bessie, Bessie, my love. This too shall pass, and I will be back home before you know it. I’ve dealt with Henry Tudor before.”

  “But I’ve seen him turn on those he once favored. The years I served the princess Mary—before she was declared bastard and exiled from court and his affections—he had coddled her, favored her, even spoiled her.”

  I knocked and was bidden to enter. The room was lit by a large lantern and several candles; their flames flickered as I passed. I knelt before Father for his blessing, as I had done many a night before bed. Dry-eyed but pale, Mother clasped her hands hard together and bit her lower lip. I bent my head and closed my eyes.

  “My dear, quick, and bright Elizabeth, our Gera,” he said as his big hand rested on my head before he lifted my chin so I looked up at him. “Never forget the proud heritage of the Fitzgeralds, who stand tall for all Ireland. Guard your tongue and your maidenhood over the years, for you will be the beauty of us all, the best of those who have come before. Rise now, child, for you must never give obeisance to anyone but the Kildare earls—and to the Tudor kings, of course. Never forget that if only Ireland could truly be for the Irish, you would be an Irish princess, and worthy of the title.”

  He said all that in a rich, soothing voice but for the mention of the Tudor kings, and then his words were bitter, like nettle juice curdling milk.

  “Obey your mother and help with the others,” he continued. “When you are able, protect those less fortunate and blessed than we. And pray God I will be home soon, before all the rogues in Ireland come knocking on Maynooth’s door to court you.”

  He smiled as he said that, his teeth flashing white against his brown beard and mustache before he got a bit of a coughing fit. I thought he would dismiss me then, but as I curtsied and turned reluctantly to go, he seized my wrist and pulled me to sit on his knees in a hard hug. He smelled of wind and forests and freedom.

  “There,” he said with a kiss on each of my cheeks as he held my face between his huge hands. “Bessie,” he told my mother, “I know you think she favors your family, but she’s a russet-haired, green-eyed Fitzgerald through and through.” As I got to my feet again, his voice broke into what we always called “the brogue.” In a way it was our family’s second, secret language. “Ay, I’ll be telling meself while I’m away, ’tis sure as rain our Gera be doing us proud; there’s no denying it.” The speaker’s voice always lilted through the words and went up at the end as if asking a question, and I had a hundred questions I dared not ask that night.

  My feet felt like stone as I walked away. Father’s voice was hoarse and almost breathless as he gave the old Gaelic farewell, “Go raibh maith agat,” which meant, “May it go well with you.” At the door to the library, I looked back at them, holding hands, but with their eyes still shiny on me. I forced a smile and made a jaunty wave. But I would have screeched like a banshee had I known I’d never see my father again.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  It was but a month later that the next stone fell from the protective wall Father had built around us. It was high summer, and the rain had stopped for once. Magheen and I, with two armed galloglass trailing us as always, were riding back from Maynooth village, where her sister lived, wed to a cobbler. We rode sidesaddle, of course, as was proper, though I’d have liked to mount like a man and ride like the wind. Riding fast and sailing—the loves of my life, and I a mere colleen.

  I recall that it had recently struck me—for I daresay I was a precocious child both in body and brain—that the village of Maynooth was more than just a forest and a field away. By that I mean its merchants, smiths, and shepherds seemed aeons back in time. The village folk still left milk out at night for the little people, scraped hoarfrost from the fields to cure headaches, nailed horseshoes at their thresholds, and fell on their knees before a new moon, however staunch attendees of Mass they were. Holy wells abounded, with pennies and pieces of metal tied with scraps of rag dangling above them, some the little people had supposedly dug, so what was really holy and what old pagan practices? Slowly, I knew, the power of the Fitzgeralds would bring even the poor folk to prosperity and peace.

  “Mother of God,” Magheen cried, crossing herself as she pointed ahead at a wolf that slunk across the road from the beech forest up ahead. Our mounts shied, but we calmed them. “Bad luck, and that’s for certain,” she muttered. Magheen always pronounced mother as if it were mither. She was full of old folktales too, which could entrance me for hours. Cecily had no use for such but was always sneaking chivalric romances, which she had been forbidden to read until she was at least twelve. So Gerald would not tat-tale on her, she bribed him with her share of sweets.

  I was grateful I had not brought my wolfhound, Wynne, today, for he would chase a wolf until he dropped. “Bad luck only if the wolf is hungry,” I said, “though he looked beset too.”

  “Too, aye,” she said, crossing herself again, and, shaking her head, added, “and the leprechauns in the ditch have gone silent.”

  I knew she meant the frogs, but I wondered what had affrighted them, for they oft croaked day and night this time of year. It was as if something dire floated in the morning mists off the rye field. Yet we saw no more wolves in the stretch of forest, and soon the gray stone tower of the castle came into view. As we turned up the lane, Edward came running toward us across the lawn, scattering the sheep cropping grass.

  “He’s in the Tower!” he shouted, gesturing like a windmill with one arm as if we were to hie ourselves inside. “Father’s in the Tower!”

  “Oh,” I said, bursting into tears of relief, “he’s come home! No wonder we didn’t hear from him. He was busy telling the English king to mind his realm and let us alone, and then he had to catch a ship to hurry home.”

  I had dismounted and turned to run into the castle when Edward grabbed my arm and spun me back. I saw his tears were not ones of joy but of terror. “No, sister,” he said. “I mean Father’s in the Tower of London, where the crown criminals go and sometimes get their heads cut off, so I heard Thomas say.”

  I gasped. Thomas was here. And Father locked away like some wretched traitor in a deadly place. Mother had told us about the Tower of London when she’d explained how large and impressive that city was. I tore inside and took the stairs up to the solar two at a time. Mother’s voice,
strident and sure, not broken as I had expected, mingled with our half brother Thomas’s angry tones.

  “I can help by going to the English royal court, I tell you,” Mother argued as I hesitated just outside the solar door. “I have contacts there, the Greys, especially my brother, Lord Leonard.”

  “Father had intimates there too, and what did it get him?”

  “But I’m the king’s second cousin by blood—”

  “Blood—that’s what they’re after,” he interrupted, but she went on.

  “Thomas, I’m pure English too, so mayhap they will listen to me. How dare they say Garrett Og, Earl of Kildare, grows too powerful! He needs to be strong if he is to keep the Gaels at bay and control the Pale. He’s helping Ireland, not harming it!”

  “The Tudor will stop at nothing to have his way, mark my words. My lady, by this move King Henry has tried to cut Father off at the knees so—”

  “Don’t talk like that! The Tower’s a hellhole of torture and cutting off more than legs. No, I must go to my brother, leave the children safe at his country house in Leicester; then at court I can—”

  “You must not take your children out of Ireland, away from Maynooth. The king would surely like to get his hands on them too, just to keep Father and me in line. I say you should not even go, and I’m the one in command now. Action needs to be taken here, though, to show them that they can’t cow us. I’ve ordered Christopher Paris to double-provision the castle and set up more guard posts, lest the English send an army looking for me or even little Gerald. I trust them not—any of them.”

  “Thomas, please do nothing rash. Calm negotiation, that’s what’s needed, not some sort of defiance your father would be blamed for, please!”

  I leaned against the wainscoted wall in the corridor, my legs shaking, tears dripping off my chin, my stomach ready to heave up the buttered biscuits and blackberries I’d overeaten in the village. I slid down the wall and huddled there, my arms clasped around my bent knees, pretending Father was hugging me like he did the last night he was here.

  Magheen found me and tugged me away to my room, where we told Cecily and even Margaret about Father, through acting him out being locked in a room and pacing there. I played Father’s part, pretending to stroke my beard and frowning until I was certain Margaret understood. But, by Saint Brigid, I did not understand, except that I was on both Mother’s and Thomas’s sides. To get Father back, we should sail to England, ask the king nicely for his release, then, if he refused, storm the Tower of London to rescue him, all of us together: Thomas, my five strong uncles, and those loyal to the Geraldines.

  It was a wretched winter, waiting, hoping, praying. Mother pleaded with the king by letter through her brother Leonard, while Thomas fumed and cursed and rode about the Pale with a growing band of men, stopping at Maynooth now and then to confer privily with Christopher Paris.

  We were desperate for word from London, though we did hear that King Henry’s wife, Anne Boleyn, had not fulfilled her queenly duties any better than her predecessor, Queen Catherine of Aragon. For the Boleyn had been delivered not of the desired son, but of a girl, Elizabeth. So I shared with that princess of England a first name, and had Father been crowned king here as he should, I’d have shared her title of princess too. I was fiercely glad the English king was disappointed in her birth, for, like me, she was not one to hold the promise of future power.

  Then too, word came once that Father was dead, but—thank the Lord—it was but rumor. Still we heard he was gravely ill in the dank, dark Tower, coughing up blood, while we all felt guilty for enjoying the splendid tower house he had made for us. Father’s declining health convinced Mother she should go to England in the spring of 1534 to visit and intercede for her beloved husband, no matter what Thomas said. She was defiant and nothing could convince her else. She planned to take her children with her and leave us at her brother’s estate, called Beaumanoir, but the week before her departure both Gerald and I fell gravely ill.

  ’Twas feared we had the dreaded smallpox. Mother called to me from out the door of my chamber, lest she catch the pestilence, which would keep her home. Gerald was in another room, both of us tended by villagers who had survived that oft-fatal scourge. Physicians were summoned, and we were dosed. I knew naught of all this until later, for my fever was so high I was out of my mind. When it was certain we had some sort of spring sweat and not the pox, Magheen tended me, and Collum stayed with Gerald. I was barely strong enough to hug Mother farewell when she left for England with Margaret, Edward, and Cecily, with promises that Gerald and I would join her soon. I was grief-stricken to see them go. Yet if she could free Father, it would be worth anything.

  But two months after Mother left, about the time when Gerald and I thought Thomas would send us and the McArdles to England, our world shifted again. Thomas, unbidden and unbridled, stomped into the Irish Parliament in Dublin and sealed all our fates. June 11, 1534, it was, a dread day, though we foolishly cheered, “A Geraldine! A Geraldine!” at first when we heard what our bold brother had dared. Our uncles came to tell us that Thomas had ridden into Dublin with a force of nearly eight hundred foot soldiers and a hundred and twenty horsemen who sported green silk fringe upon their helmets, a favorite flourish on our half brother’s garb. And for that, Thomas was forever after called by the nickname Silken Thomas.

  Word of the next events came to us from various messengers or from one of our uncles riding in to confer with Christopher. Striding into Parliament, Uncle James said, Thomas had thrown down the Sword of State and, because of King Henry’s attacks on the Catholic Church in England and his divorce of Queen Catherine, declared the English king a heretic who did not deserve Ireland’s allegiance. And he had defiantly proclaimed, “I am none of King Henry’s deputy. I am his foe. I will render Ireland ungovernable unless the Earl of Kildare is sent back to us forthwith!”

  Instead, God help us, the king of England sent an army of twenty-three hundred men under the command of Sir William Skeffington, a hated former lord lieutenant of Ireland. Because he had been lately in charge of King Henry’s armaments, he was known as “the Gunner.” Though I was yet still young, I could reckon one thing in this tightening noose of events over which I had no say or control: If someone called Silken Thomas had to fight someone called the Gunner, who would be the victor then?

  14 December 1534

  My dearly beloved children Gerald and Gera. I deeply regret to share dreadful news that your father has passed on to a better life two days ago. It was of natural causes, my brother assures me, and my lord has been buried within the walls of the Tower in a small church called St. Peter in Chains. I shall think of Saint Peter and Saint Patrick greeting my beloved at the gates of heaven, though nothing comforts me. At least I was allowed to visit and tend him in his last days. At court, I desperately tried to plead his cause. And, of course, he took all of our love with him and knew we would carry on and support Thomas, now 10th Earl of Kildare.

  Children, I fear your sire, my dear lord, lost heart from his imprisonment and from fretting over the current rebellion in the Pale. I have asked again, in letters both to the new earl and to your uncles, that you two be smuggled out of Ireland, if it comes to that, and sent to me and safety at your uncle Leonard’s estate here in Leicestershire. Edward, Margaret, and Cecily send their love and miss you sorely too. Uncle Leonard says we all are welcome here. He sends his regards and deepest regrets to you.

  This letter must be sent by secret means, so I pray it reaches you before word of your sire’s passing. I am devastated by my loss but will go on for all of you.

  Your mother, Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kildare

  I burst into tears when Christopher Paris read the letter to us. He too looked grieved. “I feared such,” he muttered, almost to himself. “I’d be sending you both to your mother today, that I would, but the new lord won’t allow a bit of it.”

  Gerald and I, both crying, held hands. “Thomas—I mean, the earl—won’t let us leave?�
�� Gerald asked.

  “Too dangerous, he says. Then, too,” Christopher added, his voice taking on a sort of mocking tone, “says he, ‘Now that I am Ireland’s uncrowned king, we can’t have the Irish prince and princess fall into the English king’s hands, now, can we?’ After all, anything happens to Thomas, the new Earl of Kildare, till he has a son of his own, you are next in line, Gerald—the heir. A clever one, Thomas is, though a bit of a headlong hotspur, eh?”

  I could not believe Christopher would dare to criticize Thomas, though now I see through more mature eyes that our foster brother did resent our half brother’s high-handed ways. And I had heard Christopher say once that but for a mere accident of birth, he too could have been a powerful man’s heir. But then I was also shocked when I heard that two of our five uncles refused to raise men for or join the uprising of Silken Thomas and just stayed home.

  At St. Mary’s Church next to the castle, we held a quickly called memorial service for Father, yet it was packed with retainers and local gentry as well as most of Maynooth village. After the priest’s closing benediction, Thomas stood up and added, “My father, Garrett Og Fitzgerald, the ninth earl, was the second coming of Brian Boru, Ireland’s brave eleventh-century warrior who won kingship of Ireland. Boru died at the Battle of Clontarf after shattering the Viking hold on our beloved land. Though my father died in a foul English prison and left his task undone, I shall shatter the English hold on our beloved land.”

  Everyone cheered and applauded him, but I was angry with Thomas that day. New earl or not, leader of the rebellion or not, granted, firstborn son of my father’s first family, why did it sound as if only he claimed our father, when Gerald and I mourned for him too?