Walter Ralegh by Alan Gallay

Author:Alan Gallay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

THERE WERE, IN THE 1580S, two women alleged to be the Countess of Desmond. One was Eleanor, née Butler, the widow of Gerald Fitzgerald, 15th Earl of Desmond. Eleanor was an influential woman whom Queen Elizabeth had unsuccessfully tried to lure into convincing her husband to turn himself in during the Second Desmond War. Ralegh (correctly) believed that parlays with her were useless.1 Although Eleanor lost all from the rebellion, Elizabeth ultimately granted her a pension and she lived well into the reign of Charles I. Unfortunately, Eleanor has been confused with another Countess of Desmond, who, if she existed, might have been named Katherine. The latter became known because Ralegh told a story that spread through Europe: that the countess was extraordinarily ancient. After her death, many believed that she had lived to the ripe old age of 140. To this day, stories of the long-lived Countess of Desmond continue to be told in Ireland and around the world.

Many myths were associated with the countess: The ancient dowager loved to climb trees, and died after a fall from a cherry or apple tree. She traveled to England from Ireland at well over a hundred years of age (to see the queen or king) and after crossing into England pulled her daughter in a cart all the way to London—a myth actually told about Eleanor, who did visit the English court, but the story was transposed into one about Katherine. Another story, and a quite popular one, was that the countess danced with Richard III at his wedding in 1472, about 117 years before Ralegh met her. Another: she grew so old that she developed a second set of teeth, a story sometimes embellished to include a third set of teeth. Though Ralegh did not create these stories, it is his relation of the countess’s ancient age that stands at the root of the tales.

Almost all those who generated the mythical stories about the countess were English—and none ever met her except Ralegh. Ralegh’s cousin George Carew, obsessively interested in all things Irish and who built a fantastic archive documenting Ireland, drew a genealogy of the countess after her death, though one that was not at all clear about where she fit into the Desmond family. No one seemed to know which Earl of Desmond the countess had married. Fascination with the countess persisted through the centuries. In the seventeenth century came most of the myths. By the eighteenth century, her stories were standard fare; Horace Walpole used the countess as a source in his book Historic Doubts in the Life and Reign of King Richard (1768) and creatively extended her longevity to 162 years. In the mid-nineteenth century, the countess gained even greater fame as many essays and books were published to prove how old she was when she died. Their stories and her story are important to our story of Ralegh and English colonization in Ireland. The real story is an elaborate and important ruse that tricked Ralegh out of fully benefiting from some of the lands the queen had granted him.

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