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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies

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Although she had an older half brother, it was clear that Grace was her father’s pride and joy. Owen groomed her to take over the clan’s fleet and fortune, making sure that she had a first-class education from the local monks. Her mother would have preferred that Grace be a proper lady but, like all the O’Malleys, Grace was born with salt water in her veins. Dressed like a boy, with her hair short, Grace would accompany her father on his trading trips. Legend has it that on a return trip from Spain their ship was attacked by the English. When her father ordered her to safety, Grace refused, instead climbing up the rigging. While watching the fighting, she leaped on the back of a man attacking her father, saving his life. She was barely a teenager when she took the wheel as captain of her first vessel.
Although Irish women had more freedom than their English counterparts, there were a few things forbidden to them. Grace’s role as a ship’s captain was unusual. Sailors were a superstitious lot, and women were considered to be bad luck on a ship. In fact, the only women generally allowed were the figureheads that graced the bow. The fact that Grace, for over forty years, was able to lead her men successfully despite being a woman says much about her personality and leadership skills.
Despite her abilities as a sea captain, like most girls of the period Grace couldn’t escape marriage. At the age of sixteen, she married Donal O’Flaherty. Nicknamed “Donal of the Battles” because of his tendency to fight first and ask questions later, her husband was the heir to the O’Flaherty, the leader who ruled all of Iar-Connacht, a huge chunk of Ireland that the English were dying to get their hands on. Marriage and three children didn’t stop Grace from continuing to captain ships, make raids on vessels, and basically lead an active, seafaring life. There is no mention of what Donal thought of her continuing to work after marriage. Apparently he had his hands full, what with being accused of murdering his stepnephew and trying to keep the peace among the unruly clans in Connacht.
Grace eventually commanded two hundred fighting men and three raiding ships. It was a hard life for a man, let alone a woman, but Grace loved being out on the sea. When she wasn’t raiding English ships or ferrying mercenaries from Scotland, Grace did have legitimate business interests. The O’Malleys had long traded with other European countries such as France and Spain, bringing spices, wines, and other goods back home to sell. It was, however, as a pirate that Grace ruled the seas. It was rumored that she had buried more than nine tons of treasure, taken from her raids of castles and clans along the Irish coast. She was even tougher than the men she commanded; she loved gambling and could curse a blue streak when provoked. Grace earned the respect of her men because she wasn’t afraid to fight alongside them with her cutlass and pistols.
Grace’s husband, Donal, was killed at the hands of his old enemies, the Joyces, in revenge for an attack on their island fortress on Lough Corrib. Not content with killing Donal, the Joyces launched an attack on “Cock’s Castle,” one of the O’Flaherty strongholds. They reckoned without Grace, who with her husband’s clansmen defended the castle with such skill that the name was permanently changed to “Hen’s Castle.”
She soon had to fend off a strong force of English soldiers who besieged her and her followers at the castle. Conditions soon grew desperate but Grace was not going down without a fight. Thinking quickly, she and her men melted down the lead roof of the castle and poured the molten liquid onto the soldiers, who beat a hasty retreat to the mainland. She sent one of her men under cover of darkness to light a beacon on the Hill of Doon as a signal. Soon the rest of her followers arrived to assist her in routing the English.
By Gaelic law, Grace was entitled to a widow’s portion, one-third of her husband’s estate. But this rarely happened, and Grace had three children to support. With her men, she established herself on Clare Island at the mouth of the mainland’s Clew Bay. She had a splendid view of the ships coming in the harbor, the better to plunder. Sometimes, depending on her mood, she offered pilot services or charged protection money for safe passage.
On St. Brigid’s Day, Grace’s crew rescued a half-drowned man named Hugh de Lacy. Grace decided that he was a better prize than a casket of gold, took him home, and nursed him back to health and into her bed. The lovers’ idyll was short-lived when Hugh, out deer hunting, was killed by the MacMahons of Ballyroy. Grace tracked them down while they were on pilgrimage, killing the ones she held personally responsible for Hugh’s death. Not content with just that, she sailed to their castle in Blackhood Bay and tossed out or killed everyone who couldn’t run fast enough, taking the castle for herself and adding to her list of nicknames “the Dark Lady of Doona.”
In 1566, when she was thirty-six and still a fine figure of a woman, Grace married another chieftain, named Iron Richard Burke, whose family owned Rockfleet Castle, a key fortress in Clew Bay. Tradition has it that Grace only married him for his castle, the only piece of land in the area not owned by the O’Malleys. Once she had established herself and her followers, she locked him out and, taking advantage of the Gaelic custom that allowed divorce after a one-year trial period, divorced him by shouting down the words, “Richard Burke, I dismiss you.”
Despite the divorce, Grace and Burke continued to live together as man and wife. She soon gave birth to their son, who was nicknamed “Tibbot of the Ships” because legend has it that he was born while Grace was at sea. The ship was soon attacked by Turkish pirates. As the battle raged on deck, her captain came down below, where Grace lay with her baby, and begged her to come on deck to rally her men. With the words, “May you be seven times worse off this day twelve months, who cannot do without me for one day,” Grace wrapped herself up in a blanket, grabbed a cutlass, and joined her men to defeat the Turks.
For the next twenty years, the battles between England and Ireland continued. The English were growing increasingly frustrated at the unwillingness of the Irish to become English. A policy began of surrender and regrant. The deal was that after submitting to the authority of the king, a chieftain would be “regranted” his lands. He would also receive an English title suited to his rank. While many of the clan chieftains, seeing which way the wind was blowing, submitted to English domination, Grace was not willing. Some battles she won, and there were many that she did not. Her good luck eventually ran out and she was captured by an old enemy, the Earl of Desmond, and spent two years in prison in Limerick and Dublin before she was released, promising to behave herself. Amazingly no one at the time seemed surprised that one of Ireland’s greatest pirates was a woman. To the English, it just seemed confirmation that the Irish were barbarians.
Her greatest foe arrived in Ireland in 1579. Richard Bingham was sent to aid in the suppression of the Second Desmond Rebellion. For his efforts, he was appointed Lord President of Connacht in 1584. He hated Grace with a passion, calling her the “nurse to all rebellions in Connacht.” He murdered her eldest son, Owen Flaherty, and convinced her second son, Murrough, to switch sides. In retaliation for Murrough’s betrayal, Grace sailed to his town while he was away and burned it, stole all the cattle she could grab, and had several of his men killed for resisting.
By 1593, Grace was tired of fighting a losing battle. The Ireland that she had known in her childhood was disappearing. She was widowed a second time, Iron Dick having gone to that great pirate ship in the sky. The last straw was when her son Tibbot Burke and her half brother, Donal-na-Piopa, were taken captive by Bingham. Bingham also impounded Grace’s ships, endangering her livelihood. Not one to accept defeat, Grace wrote a wily and flattering letter to Queen Elizabeth, requesting a meeting and explaining that she was only protecting her people against her neighbors, “which in like manner constrained your highness’s bond subject to take arms and by force to maintain herself by land and sea.” She also asked for a pardon for her sons, and requested that in spite of her age she be allowed “to roam the seas freely and to invade with sword and fire all your highness’s enemies.”
In September 1593 at Greenwich Palace, surrounded by guards and members of Elizabeth’s court, these two legends finally came face-to-face. No one knows exactly what the two talked about; the only thing historians agree on is that their conversation was probably in Latin, the only language they had in common. On the surface the two women couldn’t have been more different. Elizabeth I bedazzled with jewels and gorgeous fabrics to distract from her fading looks. Grace, weather-beaten by her years at sea, didn’t even try to compete in the glamour stakes. She wore her finest dress, which was probably no longer in fashion, in the clan colors of yellow and green, and with her only jewel a silver clip in her gray hair, she was no match for Gloriana.
Both women were charismatic leaders, politically shrewd, and neither was used to taking orders from anyone. More important, both were survivors. Despite the legends that have sprung up around the meeting—that Grace refused to curtsy, that she tossed the queen’s handkerchief into the fire after blowing her nose—it’s hard to believe that Grace would insult or antagonize the queen with so much at stake. Grace was too canny for that.
She must have done a good snow job because Elizabeth agreed to some of her demands, one of which was the removal of Richard Bingham from power in Ireland as well as pardons for her son and her half brother. Grace in turn agreed to stop supporting the Irish lords’ rebellions in Ulster and to make sea raids only for the English. Feeling victorious, Grace sailed back to Ireland, but, contrary to their agreement, the queen gave Bingham just a slap on the wrist. Several of Grace’s other demands (the return of the cattle and land that Bingham had stolen from her, for instance) remained unmet, and within a rather short period of time, Elizabeth sent Bingham back to Ireland. Upon Bingham’s return, Grace realized that the meeting with Elizabeth had been useless and went back to supporting Irish rebellions.
The Irish kept on battling the English until their defeat at the battle of Kinsale in 1601. Heartsick over the loss, Grace retreated to Clare Castle. She lived long enough to learn of Elizabeth’s death in 1603 before dying several months later. It is said that after her death, no Irish chieftain was able to preserve the Gaelic way of life as Grace and her family had done. While Grace’s place in Irish history was given short shrift in the chronicles of Ireland, her fame and exploits were kept alive by the bards who created poems and songs about her, including “Oró Sé do Bheatha ’Bhaile.”
In 2007, Grace sailed on to the Great White Way, docking at the Ford Center as the heroine of a new musical entitled—what else—
The Pirate Queen
, bringing her story to a new generation.
TWO
 
Wayward Wives
 
 
Émilie du Châtelet
 
1706-1749
 
When I add the sum total of my graces, I confess I am inferior to no one.
—ÉMILIE DU CHÂTELET TO VOLTAIRE
 
 
Émilie du Châtelet was regarded as one of the most beautiful and brilliant women of the Enlightenment, even by her enemies; but for more than two centuries she was better known for being Voltaire’s mistress. “Judge me for my own merits,” she once protested. “Do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this general or that renowned scholar.” Few women of the period could write, much less conduct experiments in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, compose poetry, and translate Greek and Roman authors into French with ease as she did. Her work contributed to energizing the school of theoretical physics in France. She would have been extraordinary in any era, let alone the one she was born in. In her lifetime, she fought for the education and publication that she craved, but struggled under the burdens of society’s expectations for women of her class.
Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil grew up in the lap of luxury surrounded by servants in a three-story town house near the Tuileries gardens. She was doted on by her father, who encouraged her in her studies, refusing to let her mother send her to a convent. He made sure that she had the same education as her brothers, including fencing and riding lessons along with Latin, Italian, Greek, and German. She was so precocious that her father enjoyed showing her off to his intellectual friends. Her mother despaired at having such an unnatural daughter who refused to appreciate proper etiquette. But Émilie had a hunger for learning that just couldn’t be quenched with talk of fashion and gossip. When her father’s income shrank, and there was no money for new books, Émilie used her mathematical skills at the gaming tables to get her fix.
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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