The Irish Princess (5 page)

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Authors: Karen Harper

Tags: #Ireland, #Clinton, #Historical, #Henry, #Edward Fiennes De, #General, #Literary, #Great Britain - History - Henry VIII, #Great Britain, #Elizabeth Fiennes De, #Historical Fiction, #Princesses, #Fiction, #1509-1547, #Princesses - Ireland, #Elizabeth

BOOK: The Irish Princess
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“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?
If the so-called Fitzgerald rebellion and Father’s loss were not enough to grieve us, it soon became clear that the arrival of the English army showed who was truly for the Irish cause and who was not. Despite Thomas’s army numbering seven thousand, his siege of Dublin Castle, where many loyal to England were holed up, failed, mostly because many of the so-called Anglo-Norman families of the Pale took one look at the English might and were only too happy to stay neutral or even loyal to England.
Thomas’s main force was made up of family members, retainers, and tenants of our lands and those kin loyal to them. In short, it was most of those listed in
The Red Book of Kildare
, which had been moved for safety’s sake out of its silver box in the library and hidden with several sacks of silver coins in an empty vat in the wine cellar below the great hall. At least the inland Gaels, whom Father had managed to keep in line, delayed “the Gunner” Skeffington’s army with their raids. Thomas’s forces fought the king’s invaders too, but the Irish loyal to him kept falling back in a hard-fought campaign through the bitter winter and into the spring of the next year.
As I was approaching my eleventh year, Magheen said I seemed much older. I tried to take on the mistress’s duties in the castle, copying things I’d seen Mother say and do. But then, in mid-March it was, from the top tower rooms we saw the English army swarming toward Maynooth like a plague of black ants.
 
It was just skirmishes and light arms fire around Maynooth at first. Sometimes Thomas, who knew the area far better than the invaders, still sneaked in and out at night by a tunnel that connected the wine cellar to the river near where we had hidden our boat. He had recently ordered the tunnel redug, for it led to the river water supply that had helped the castle survive a siege in the fourteenth century, before the inner courtyard well was dug.
But when the English army encircled the castle, Christopher told us he had blocked and obscured the river entrance and Thomas came no more, though we knew he had gone to raise reinforcements to defend Maynooth. Christopher was fully in charge now, even of the garrison here that owed allegiance to Thomas. I could see Christopher reveled in his power, despite the dangers. He ordered Gerald and me about much more than Thomas ever had. But at least we had some firepower to fight back, guns and ammunition Father had seen fit to bring here from Dublin Castle.

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