Exploring the Life of Grace O'Malley

Grace wondered if she was as tall and bony and yellow-clackered as they said she was, if the alum and eggshell face paint she wore cracked grotesquely at the corners of her mouth and eyes, if she'd loathe the woman on sight, her enemy for more than thirty years. She would know soon enough, thought Grace, gripping the rail with her strong sun-browned fingers. Soon enough, indeed. Cade Millefalcher or 100,000 welcomes to the fascinating world of the pirate queen, Grace O'Malley. My name is Dawn Daniels, the Director of Programs at the Noble Maritime Collection. Throughout my years at the museum researching stories that are connected with the sea, and also in my travels as an Irish step dancer, I came across the name Grace O'Malley many times. I learned that she was born in 1530 and died in 1603, and was called the Pirate Queen. I had seen one of her intriguing castles while I was in Ireland, and I heard about a Broadway show about her life, but it wasn't until recent years that something just prompted me to dig deeper into Grace's history. Her father, Owen O'Malley, was a wealthy seafarer and trader who lived with his family in a castle at Clue Bay, County Mayo. As legend goes, when Grace was about 14, she wanted to sail with him when he was going on business to Spain. When Owen laughed and told her that girls were not sailors and that her long hair would get caught in the ropes, she simply cut it all off, thus obtaining for herself a nickname that has stuck down through the centuries to this very day, Gráinne Weal, which in Irish means Bald Grace. She proved that her love of the sea was no passing fancy and went on to be a sea trader and raider, and when her father died many years later, she became the queen or the chieftain of the O'Malley clan. She owned the country's largest fleet of ships and worked as a primary gunrunner and troop transporter during the Irish Rebellion. In looking for someone to speak about Grace, I came across a book called The Wild Irish. and was so enthralled by the way its author, Robin Maxwell, described a face-to-face meeting between Grace and Queen Elizabeth I of England that I just had to invite her to tell the story. Graciously, she accepted, and we are delighted to now present The Pirate Queen, Discovering Grace O'Malley by Robin Maxwell. Thank you so much for having me. My going to Ireland you And finding Grace O'Malley was not the reason that I had planned. My longtime comedy screenwriting partner, Billy Morton, who was born in Ireland and immigrated to Australia when she was five, and I had been sent, now we're talking 1995, on a research trip to Ireland to adapt a romantic comedy screenplay. called Kiss My Usyk that was originally set in the wilds of Alaska about a real-life bachelor society that lured cosmopolitan women from all over the world to participate in their wilderness woman competition and their bachelor auction. And we had been paid to adapt that to rural Ireland. And so, and we renamed the script. Danny Boy. And we were sent by the producers on this research trip to figure out, you know, locations and meet some people. And anyway, Billy was already Irish. I had not much understanding of Ireland. A mutual friend of Billy's and mine, who's classically trained British accent. named Suzanne Crowley. And I mentioned her because 25 years later, like last year, she was hired to record the audio book of The Wild Irish. And so she comes back and forth into this story. Anyway, she had sent us to stay with a friend of hers who lived in Western Ireland, a woman named Ethna, who was a fiddle playing friend. And she lived in Connemara with her husband and two kids. And Billy and I had been writing screenplays and getting Hollywood studio deals since 1981. During a downturn in the business that followed a 1988 writer's strike, I had written my first novel in 1995. And just before traveling to Ireland, I had snagged a New York literary agent. It wasn't a book deal, but it was an agent. So while out walking in the green, rocky hills around. Ethna's Place, I blabbed about my as yet unpublished historical fiction novel, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn. And that's the parallel stories of, you know, the unlucky Queen Anne and Elizabeth Tudor, who was Anne's only child with Henry VIII, and who grew up to be Elizabeth I. Well, that was all it took to set Ethna off. She, like so many Irish people, had a strong sense of both literature and history. And she suddenly began rattling off the history of Ireland's greatest heroine in history, Grace O'Malley, also known as the pirate queen of the 16th century, and also called Gráinne Weill, which means Grace the Bald. And there's another story to all that. But anyway, we were told. who she was, where she lived, when she lived, and it was right where we were in Ireland in the 16th century, and about her lifelong rivalry with the historical figure that I knew a lot about, or I thought I knew a lot about, Elizabeth Tudor, and talked about how they fought on opposite sides of Ireland's rebellion. against England. I'd never heard of it. News to me, never heard a word about this woman in all the years of researching Elizabeth. I thought I knew quite a lot about Elizabeth. So, and we also realized that we had stumbled into Grace O'Malley country. We were smack in the middle of it. But we were fascinated by Grace. Billy and I, but we were here to research our romantic comedy, our rom-com. So we tucked away the information, carried on with our own self-guided tour of Western Ireland. And we just went on a road trip across the country from Dublin to the West Coast. And around every turn in the countryside, there were ancient castles and ruins of ancient castles and thatched. cottages that were like 500 years old. And there were towns that had been established in the ninth century. And there were victuals in tiny shops straight out of another century. And it just felt like another time when you, if you weren't in a car, as you were looking out into the landscape, you just felt like you were in another time. And wherever we went, there were these friendly as people. They wanted to stop and talk to two young women from America and Australia. And everywhere we went, there were dogs and they were all the same breed. It was every single dog you saw was a Springer Spaniel. And that was Billy's favorite. She had a Springer Spaniel at home. Anyway, they were either black and white or brown and white and dogs everywhere. And she was in heaven. So we finally got to the seaside town. on the West Coast called Ballybunion. And we went there on purpose because we had heard that they had a bachelor society like the one in Alaska. And they also had a famous bachelor auction where they auctioned themselves off for money for charity and a bachelor ball. And so we had our day with them. And learned what we could, and then we were off to continue on to find locations for our script, for our movie. And in the ancient city of Limerick, we crossed the Shannon River, and we drove north. And we did actually very little sightseeing, just the famous cliffs of Moher and the rocky landscape of the Burren. But we were kind of on a mission. Um, so we, we just kept going. We, one other sightseeing, um, moment that we had turned out to be important. We headed to Galway City, a place that had been inhabited as long as 8,000 years ago. And over the city wall's gate, we learned, had been carved the motto of the clan that dominated the territory, the O'Flaherty's. And the sign said, from the ferociousness of O'Flaherty's, good Lord, deliver us. And they were apparently an independent warrior clan and cattle raiders and into piracy and petty warfare. And we saw in Galway the keep, which is a kind of a stronghold or a castle called Och-Nanur. And it had been a fortress of the O'Flahertys. And we were surprised to find out. that Donald O'Flaherty of the ferocious O'Flaherty clan was no other than Grace O'Malley's first husband and father to her first three children. And so Grace O'Malley again, she was a household name apparently, and had been for 500 years, but Billy and I, we were on a mission. So we kind of, again, we tucked away, Grace O'Malley was starting to kind of bubble in our heads that now that we'd heard about her from... two different places. But anyway, we were on a mission, so we kept on. And up the coast, we headed into a small town called Renvile, where at the local pub, we met a cute young man called Squire, who said, oh, I'll take you out to the tiny island of Inishturk. This was a place that a according to our research, was as wild and remote as our Alaskan town had been and the place that we envisioned our romantic comedy to take place. So without thinking, we drove to this little inlet on the west coast and very picturesque and beautiful and just a little inlet. with some boats and we put on our life jackets and we got into a zodiac blow-up dinghy with this captain squire and took off across the Irish Sea to a tiny little island with 91 inhabitants in Ishturk and we had booked to stay in one of the only places for tourists to stay, only 91 people. It was not exactly a tourist haven, but we stayed in a 500-year-old cottage overlooking Inishturk Harbor with a fisherman, John and his wife, Mary. And it was like, when you looked at his boat, a kurach, it's called, and it was, except for a motor on the back, this is how fishermen fished. you know, hundreds of years ago. And there they were in their 500-year-old cottage and an island in the middle of the ocean. Anyway, they had peat fires at night, and John and Mary plied us with stories about fishermen who'd been fishing the same for hundreds of years. They talked about the weather in winter. The wind came howling out of Scotland. It was so cold, they said it made the cows cry. And the seas in winter were so dangerous that the children had to go to school on the mainland and just stay there. And anyway, when I talked to John and Mary about my foray into historical fiction with Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I, they revealed that Inishturk was one of the many islands owned by. Grace O'Malley. Here she was again. We couldn't seem to get away from her. And Mary asked if we had visited Grace O'Malley's castle on Clare Island off the mainland's west coast. And no, we hadn't because at that point, we'd only been introduced to her for the first time, didn't know much about her. But we were finding that this woman was everywhere. I was starting to get the feeling that maybe The real purpose of this research junket was not a romantic comedy at all, that this historical figure, Granuel, was leading me somewhere. Though where, I had no idea. Anyway, we had lots of locations to scout for Danny Boy. So we took walks through the town and on the beach with locals who, and we learned about life on the island. And it was so much around ships and fishing and the ocean. And I came to understand how tide. to the sea and sailing and piracy that Ireland really was about. Anyway, we went up to the Inner Turk Community Center on Sunday for a dance. I waltzed in front of the entire population of the island with an old bachelor named Porek, just the two of us, everybody's watching and clapping. A pair of 12-year-old twins girls did an incredible step dance. And then the whole population just got up at once to do some square dancing. It was just a mind-altering experience to be in a place like this. I'd never kind of gone back in history like that. And I'd been researching history. I'd been researching history, but I'd never experienced. being in a place that was living history. Anyway, the next day we hiked up into the center of the island and we saw, again, things that were rural and could have been there 500 years ago. And there we were. And we went to visit. And Porig and his brother, another bachelor, the two of whom lived with and took care of their old mammy in a little cottage. She looked about 105. She was tucked under a blanket in front of a peat fire. And the four of us just sat there having tea and with her doting boys. And anyway, we were advised by Mary, our hostess, not to miss going to another. island also owned by Grace O'Malley. And so Squire came back. And after taking us to see the puffins off the western cliffs of Inishturk, which happens to be the westernmost land in Europe, we set off for another island, a bit bigger island called Inishturk. And this was far scarier, really open water, more than a little chop. We saw on the way there, this most exciting thing, other than just the trip itself, we saw a ship called a Galway hooker, a traditional fishing boat used in Galway Bay racing. And it was racing past us on its way to Inishpuffin. And the term hooker is associated with hook. Hook and line fishing, where long lines of baited hooks were drawn through the water and individual fish were caught when they went for the bait on each hook. Anyway, this method of fishing had been adopted by the Galway fishermen was referred to as long lining, and it influenced the labeling of the fishermen as hookers and their boats. became known as the Galway hookers. And it was developed for the strong seas there in the 17th century. And then when the Irish settlers came to Boston in North America, and they needed fishing craft, they built hookers that they knew from home. And these boats became known as Boston hookers, or Irish cutters, or paddy boats. And Anyway, we were just so excited to be out in open water with this beautiful sailboat racing past us. Anyway, I think they beat us to Inishpuffin. And we got to the island and into the somewhat bigger harbor there. And somehow we snagged an interview with the publisher of the island's newspaper. And there we were. sitting in a sunny apartment overlooking the harbor and having tea. And she walked out, walked into her office and came out with. one sheet and what was it it was the legend of grace o'malley um an overview of the islands or ireland's greatest heroine in history so well we can't could not get away from this woman and at the top of the page was this woodcut of grace o'malley in long fur um fur collar chieftain's cloak Standing before a bewigged and bejeweled Elizabeth I, pointing a defiant finger in her face. This is a very famous image of the two of them. Okay, by this time I'm thinking, okay, what is going on here? We've come out for a romantic comedy and we've been hit over the head in the nicest possible way by tales of some Irish pirate queen who is also... It's sounding like a female Braveheart who fought in an Irish rebellion, something that in all my research about Elizabeth, I'd never heard a thing about. Anyway, the next day, before we were going to go back to the mainland, we decided to do one touristy thing. So we rented a little boat and we went out into Inishbuffin Harbor, where right across the way is... a ruined castle called Cromwell's Barracks. Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century invaded and conquered Ireland and that most people had heard about him. Anyway, the boat handler was giving us the history of it, of this ruin, which we assumed would focus on Cromwell. But when he said the owners of the ruined castle kept intruders out. by stretching a chain boom across the harbor entrance and then attacked and looted the ships, it was sounding a little bit more like pirating. And lo and behold, it turned out that the ruins that we were looking at were none other than Grace O'Malley's stronghold. So by the time we left Ireland for home, this woman's story was firmly embedded in my brain, but it was swept straight out of my head. As my agent began trying to sell Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn to publishers. Long story short, I got 36 rejections. And finally, the agent who kept trying and trying, finally got an offer from a publisher called Arcade. Small, but prestigious small press. And in March of 1997, my debut novel, what would... become the first in my Elizabethan quartet was published and it went on to be translated into 14 languages. It was sold in the Tower of London and Hampton Court gift stores. And as of this year, it's in its 26th printing. But because of its initial success, Arcade kept asking for more. So in 1999, they published The Queen's Bastard. And in 2001, The Virgin Elizabeth, which became a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Then Arcade decided we were done with each other. And HarperCollins decided they wanted my next book. Well, what was it going to be? I had just done three Elizabeth books, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth. I still hadn't written about Elizabeth's life after England's. 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada. So I started researching those years and staring me in the face was the story of Elizabeth's Waterloo, which was the Irish rebellion against England. And guess who? Grace O'Malley. So I dragged out that one sheet. that the Inishbuffin newspaper publisher had handed me that day in her sunny living room, overlooking the harbor that Grace O'Malley's pirate ships had taken refuge in 500 years before. Then I went to work researching her, this lifelong rivalry with Elizabeth and the bloody genocidal Irish rebellion of the 16th century, not the Cromwell rebellion, but this was the one in which the... English queen had overseen the killing of half the population of Ireland. Well, it was time to do research, and I had just completed three historical novels. But they were based on a great deal of historical biographies and nonfiction books. I mean, there were so many about Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. No problem doing research. Well, there was almost nothing about Grace O'Malley. There was one book by Anne Chambers. which was the only, the only biography of her. And it took its factual information from not the Irish historians of the time, who had written a huge volume called The Annals of the Four Masters. The most factual information that we could get from history was the English state papers. And anyway, I poured through the few books that I could find about the Irish Rebellion, about Grace O'Malley, and that period in Elizabeth's life, which it hardly mentioned the Irish Rebellion at all. I just put my nose to the grindstone, and I decided I would take every single fact that I knew. about my main characters and put them into one document that I could get an overview of the whole time and place and events. I was able to see what Elizabeth was doing at the same time that Grace was doing something else and the times that they met. In history, they only met once. But, and I wanted to tell you the story of how they first met because it became the linchpin of being able to write this book. And this is how it goes. It was 1593, and the Irish Rebellion was already in full swing. And Grace O'Malley sailed her pirate ship up the Thames River and with her flags flying and her pirate flags flying, and parked her boat at the quay at Greenwich Castle and marched in and demanded an audience with Elizabeth I, who was already a very feared and respected monarch. She had... won the Spanish Armada in 1588. So in walks Grace O'Malley, in her chieftain's cloak to the floor, bold as the day is long, marches up to Elizabeth, and the two of them begin speaking in Latin, which they both knew, both were highly educated women, and Grace O'Malley makes three demands of the queen. Unheard of. You just didn't talk that way to Elizabeth. So she makes these three demands. I want my son returned to me, my son, Tibbet Burke. He is in one of your prisons in Ireland. And I want him back. Secondly, I want you to remove from Ireland Captain Richard Bingham, who is a brutal man and he's murdered, murdered my son and. another son, and he's killed so many people in Ireland. He's just brutalizing my country. I want him out of Ireland. And third, since you've taken away my ability to make a living, I was a rich woman. Now you've taken away my fleet, part of my fleet, and I want a pension from England. Everybody's kind of wondering. What's going to happen if Elizabeth's just going to have her taken out and hung? And instead, Elizabeth grants all of Grace's demands. She goes back to Ireland. She gets her son back. Richard Bingham is taken out of Ireland. And Elizabeth gives her a pension. And when I heard this story, I thought, okay, this is a great mystery in history. And all of my... books before that, my three books, I had done as a centerpiece of a book. I had had a mystery that I solved and a mystery of history. And I thought, why on earth would Elizabeth, who was already so powerful, give in to the demands of this pirate woman who was who was a thorn in her side and who had you. who had pirated her ships and had become one of the leaders of the Irish Rebellion. Why would she do this? And that was what took me into this need to write a book. You have to have a great motivation to sit down and write a historical novel. That was mine. That was my inspiration. And Grace O'Malley, the more I learned about her, she became my personal inspiration because this was a woman who never gave up. She seemed fearless. I'm sure she had fears, but she wasn't motivated by fear. She was motivated by her need to make Ireland. a free country. And Elizabeth was her nemesis for all these years because Elizabeth had invaded and enslaved and just torched Ireland and killed half its population. So this was the fire that was lit under me. to write the book. Thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure being able to talk about Grace O'Malley again, my greatest inspiration in life. And if you want to know more about her, check out the link at the bottom of your screen. Great to talk to you today. Bye. Oh, the boys of Shinbone Alley are in love with Gracie Melody. All of the women are too. Every time you say her name, they all go quiet and sing. Wishin'they were part of her crew Granuel, here, Granuel, here, here The greatest pirate, pirate Granuel Granuel, here, here, Granuel, here here, for Friday counting pilgrim, well well, her father tried to dock her, and she chopped her ginger locks off, her boldness was revealed that grizzly Irish chieftain quickly learned she was a seaman and off into history she sailed Granuel, hey, hey Granuel, here, here that greatest Irish pirate Granuel, here, here, Friday County, Mather, Granuel. Well, she met with old Queen Lizzie, ten ago, she ate some prisoners. All of the men were freed from jail. Grace wouldn't take a knee, she said, I too am a queen. And off back to Ireland she sailed. Granuel, Granuel. The greatest Irish pirate, Granuel. Granuel. Grandy well, grandy well, the pride of county mail, grandy well. Oh, the boys of Sinpone Alley are in love with Grayson Alley. So are the women, too. Say, what can I do? How can I never hope to fail? How can I stay so close to you, knowing now that one place is And another's embrace is, and another one's care? I should be gone, far from this hell, until not a trace of you survives. Yet I'll stay on, for I know well who left me behind you. One day troubles will find you, and when that day arrives, I'll be there, for to me there's no sorrow worse to bear than a lived upon. I... I'll be there from the mists of dawn. I'll be there by your side and deep within your heart. I'll be there, though I know that it's madness. Heartless. Stripped of pride yet still proud I'll be there From the depths of my sadness I'll be there Enstealed, unyielding, and unbound Go and marry someone you don't love Please, if you throw away for a cause all the joys we have won, I want love more than faith, more than glamour, than anything. Let her kiss keep you warm, I'll be fine on my own. See me.

Throughout my years at the museum researching stories that are connected with the sea, and also in my travels as an Irish step dancer, I came across the name Grace O'Malley many times. I learned that she was born in 1530 and died in 1603, and was called the Pirate Queen. I had seen one of her intriguing castles while I was in Ireland, and I heard about a Broadway show about her life, but it wasn't until recent years that something just prompted me to dig deeper into Grace's history. Her father, Owen O'Malley, was a wealthy seafarer and trader who lived with his family in a castle at Clue Bay, County Mayo.

As legend goes, when Grace was about 14, she wanted to sail with him when he was going on business to Spain. When Owen laughed and told her that girls were not sailors and that her long hair would get caught in the ropes, she simply cut it all off, thus obtaining for herself a nickname that has stuck down through the centuries to this very day, Gráinne Weal, which in Irish means Bald Grace. She proved that her love of the sea was no passing fancy and went on to be a sea trader and raider, and when her father died many years later, she became the queen or the chieftain of the O'Malley clan. She owned the country's largest fleet of ships and worked as a primary gunrunner and troop transporter during the Irish Rebellion. In looking for someone to speak about Grace, I came across a book called The Wild Irish.

and was so enthralled by the way its author, Robin Maxwell, described a face-to-face meeting between Grace and Queen Elizabeth I of England that I just had to invite her to tell the story. Graciously, she accepted, and we are delighted to now present The Pirate Queen, Discovering Grace O'Malley by Robin Maxwell. Thank you so much for having me. My going to Ireland you And finding Grace O'Malley was not the reason that I had planned.

My longtime comedy screenwriting partner, Billy Morton, who was born in Ireland and immigrated to Australia when she was five, and I had been sent, now we're talking 1995, on a research trip to Ireland to adapt a romantic comedy screenplay. called Kiss My Usyk that was originally set in the wilds of Alaska about a real-life bachelor society that lured cosmopolitan women from all over the world to participate in their wilderness woman competition and their bachelor auction. And we had been paid to adapt that to rural Ireland. And so, and we renamed the script. Danny Boy.

And we were sent by the producers on this research trip to figure out, you know, locations and meet some people. And anyway, Billy was already Irish. I had not much understanding of Ireland. A mutual friend of Billy's and mine, who's classically trained British accent.

named Suzanne Crowley. And I mentioned her because 25 years later, like last year, she was hired to record the audio book of The Wild Irish. And so she comes back and forth into this story. Anyway, she had sent us to stay with a friend of hers who lived in Western Ireland, a woman named Ethna, who was a fiddle playing friend. And she lived in Connemara with her husband and two kids.

And Billy and I had been writing screenplays and getting Hollywood studio deals since 1981. During a downturn in the business that followed a 1988 writer's strike, I had written my first novel in 1995. And just before traveling to Ireland, I had snagged a New York literary agent. It wasn't a book deal, but it was an agent. So while out walking in the green, rocky hills around. Ethna's Place, I blabbed about my as yet unpublished historical fiction novel, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn. And that's the parallel stories of, you know, the unlucky Queen Anne and Elizabeth Tudor, who was Anne's only child with Henry VIII, and who grew up to be Elizabeth I. Well, that was all it took to set Ethna off.

She, like so many Irish people, had a strong sense of both literature and history. And she suddenly began rattling off the history of Ireland's greatest heroine in history, Grace O'Malley, also known as the pirate queen of the 16th century, and also called Gráinne Weill, which means Grace the Bald. And there's another story to all that.

But anyway, we were told. who she was, where she lived, when she lived, and it was right where we were in Ireland in the 16th century, and about her lifelong rivalry with the historical figure that I knew a lot about, or I thought I knew a lot about, Elizabeth Tudor, and talked about how they fought on opposite sides of Ireland's rebellion. against England. I'd never heard of it.

News to me, never heard a word about this woman in all the years of researching Elizabeth. I thought I knew quite a lot about Elizabeth. So, and we also realized that we had stumbled into Grace O'Malley country. We were smack in the middle of it.

But we were fascinated by Grace. Billy and I, but we were here to research our romantic comedy, our rom-com. So we tucked away the information, carried on with our own self-guided tour of Western Ireland.

And we just went on a road trip across the country from Dublin to the West Coast. And around every turn in the countryside, there were ancient castles and ruins of ancient castles and thatched. cottages that were like 500 years old.

And there were towns that had been established in the ninth century. And there were victuals in tiny shops straight out of another century. And it just felt like another time when you, if you weren't in a car, as you were looking out into the landscape, you just felt like you were in another time. And wherever we went, there were these friendly as people. They wanted to stop and talk to two young women from America and Australia.

And everywhere we went, there were dogs and they were all the same breed. It was every single dog you saw was a Springer Spaniel. And that was Billy's favorite.

She had a Springer Spaniel at home. Anyway, they were either black and white or brown and white and dogs everywhere. And she was in heaven.

So we finally got to the seaside town. on the West Coast called Ballybunion. And we went there on purpose because we had heard that they had a bachelor society like the one in Alaska. And they also had a famous bachelor auction where they auctioned themselves off for money for charity and a bachelor ball.

And so we had our day with them. And learned what we could, and then we were off to continue on to find locations for our script, for our movie. And in the ancient city of Limerick, we crossed the Shannon River, and we drove north.

And we did actually very little sightseeing, just the famous cliffs of Moher and the rocky landscape of the Burren. But we were kind of on a mission. Um, so we, we just kept going. We, one other sightseeing, um, moment that we had turned out to be important.

We headed to Galway City, a place that had been inhabited as long as 8,000 years ago. And over the city wall's gate, we learned, had been carved the motto of the clan that dominated the territory, the O'Flaherty's. And the sign said, from the ferociousness of O'Flaherty's, good Lord, deliver us.

And they were apparently an independent warrior clan and cattle raiders and into piracy and petty warfare. And we saw in Galway the keep, which is a kind of a stronghold or a castle called Och-Nanur. And it had been a fortress of the O'Flahertys.

And we were surprised to find out. that Donald O'Flaherty of the ferocious O'Flaherty clan was no other than Grace O'Malley's first husband and father to her first three children. And so Grace O'Malley again, she was a household name apparently, and had been for 500 years, but Billy and I, we were on a mission. So we kind of, again, we tucked away, Grace O'Malley was starting to kind of bubble in our heads that now that we'd heard about her from... two different places.

But anyway, we were on a mission, so we kept on. And up the coast, we headed into a small town called Renvile, where at the local pub, we met a cute young man called Squire, who said, oh, I'll take you out to the tiny island of Inishturk. This was a place that a according to our research, was as wild and remote as our Alaskan town had been and the place that we envisioned our romantic comedy to take place.

So without thinking, we drove to this little inlet on the west coast and very picturesque and beautiful and just a little inlet. with some boats and we put on our life jackets and we got into a zodiac blow-up dinghy with this captain squire and took off across the Irish Sea to a tiny little island with 91 inhabitants in Ishturk and we had booked to stay in one of the only places for tourists to stay, only 91 people. It was not exactly a tourist haven, but we stayed in a 500-year-old cottage overlooking Inishturk Harbor with a fisherman, John and his wife, Mary.

And it was like, when you looked at his boat, a kurach, it's called, and it was, except for a motor on the back, this is how fishermen fished. you know, hundreds of years ago. And there they were in their 500-year-old cottage and an island in the middle of the ocean.

Anyway, they had peat fires at night, and John and Mary plied us with stories about fishermen who'd been fishing the same for hundreds of years. They talked about the weather in winter. The wind came howling out of Scotland. It was so cold, they said it made the cows cry.

And the seas in winter were so dangerous that the children had to go to school on the mainland and just stay there. And anyway, when I talked to John and Mary about my foray into historical fiction with Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I, they revealed that Inishturk was one of the many islands owned by. Grace O'Malley. Here she was again.

We couldn't seem to get away from her. And Mary asked if we had visited Grace O'Malley's castle on Clare Island off the mainland's west coast. And no, we hadn't because at that point, we'd only been introduced to her for the first time, didn't know much about her. But we were finding that this woman was everywhere.

I was starting to get the feeling that maybe The real purpose of this research junket was not a romantic comedy at all, that this historical figure, Granuel, was leading me somewhere. Though where, I had no idea. Anyway, we had lots of locations to scout for Danny Boy.

So we took walks through the town and on the beach with locals who, and we learned about life on the island. And it was so much around ships and fishing and the ocean. And I came to understand how tide.

to the sea and sailing and piracy that Ireland really was about. Anyway, we went up to the Inner Turk Community Center on Sunday for a dance. I waltzed in front of the entire population of the island with an old bachelor named Porek, just the two of us, everybody's watching and clapping.

A pair of 12-year-old twins girls did an incredible step dance. And then the whole population just got up at once to do some square dancing. It was just a mind-altering experience to be in a place like this.

I'd never kind of gone back in history like that. And I'd been researching history. I'd been researching history, but I'd never experienced. being in a place that was living history. Anyway, the next day we hiked up into the center of the island and we saw, again, things that were rural and could have been there 500 years ago.

And there we were. And we went to visit. And Porig and his brother, another bachelor, the two of whom lived with and took care of their old mammy in a little cottage. She looked about 105. She was tucked under a blanket in front of a peat fire. And the four of us just sat there having tea and with her doting boys.

And anyway, we were advised by Mary, our hostess, not to miss going to another. island also owned by Grace O'Malley. And so Squire came back. And after taking us to see the puffins off the western cliffs of Inishturk, which happens to be the westernmost land in Europe, we set off for another island, a bit bigger island called Inishturk.

And this was far scarier, really open water, more than a little chop. We saw on the way there, this most exciting thing, other than just the trip itself, we saw a ship called a Galway hooker, a traditional fishing boat used in Galway Bay racing. And it was racing past us on its way to Inishpuffin.

And the term hooker is associated with hook. Hook and line fishing, where long lines of baited hooks were drawn through the water and individual fish were caught when they went for the bait on each hook. Anyway, this method of fishing had been adopted by the Galway fishermen was referred to as long lining, and it influenced the labeling of the fishermen as hookers and their boats.

became known as the Galway hookers. And it was developed for the strong seas there in the 17th century. And then when the Irish settlers came to Boston in North America, and they needed fishing craft, they built hookers that they knew from home.

And these boats became known as Boston hookers, or Irish cutters, or paddy boats. And Anyway, we were just so excited to be out in open water with this beautiful sailboat racing past us. Anyway, I think they beat us to Inishpuffin.

And we got to the island and into the somewhat bigger harbor there. And somehow we snagged an interview with the publisher of the island's newspaper. And there we were.

sitting in a sunny apartment overlooking the harbor and having tea. And she walked out, walked into her office and came out with. one sheet and what was it it was the legend of grace o'malley um an overview of the islands or ireland's greatest heroine in history so well we can't could not get away from this woman and at the top of the page was this woodcut of grace o'malley in long fur um fur collar chieftain's cloak Standing before a bewigged and bejeweled Elizabeth I, pointing a defiant finger in her face.

This is a very famous image of the two of them. Okay, by this time I'm thinking, okay, what is going on here? We've come out for a romantic comedy and we've been hit over the head in the nicest possible way by tales of some Irish pirate queen who is also...

It's sounding like a female Braveheart who fought in an Irish rebellion, something that in all my research about Elizabeth, I'd never heard a thing about. Anyway, the next day, before we were going to go back to the mainland, we decided to do one touristy thing. So we rented a little boat and we went out into Inishbuffin Harbor, where right across the way is... a ruined castle called Cromwell's Barracks.

Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century invaded and conquered Ireland and that most people had heard about him. Anyway, the boat handler was giving us the history of it, of this ruin, which we assumed would focus on Cromwell. But when he said the owners of the ruined castle kept intruders out.

by stretching a chain boom across the harbor entrance and then attacked and looted the ships, it was sounding a little bit more like pirating. And lo and behold, it turned out that the ruins that we were looking at were none other than Grace O'Malley's stronghold. So by the time we left Ireland for home, this woman's story was firmly embedded in my brain, but it was swept straight out of my head.

As my agent began trying to sell Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn to publishers. Long story short, I got 36 rejections. And finally, the agent who kept trying and trying, finally got an offer from a publisher called Arcade. Small, but prestigious small press.

And in March of 1997, my debut novel, what would... become the first in my Elizabethan quartet was published and it went on to be translated into 14 languages. It was sold in the Tower of London and Hampton Court gift stores. And as of this year, it's in its 26th printing.

But because of its initial success, Arcade kept asking for more. So in 1999, they published The Queen's Bastard. And in 2001, The Virgin Elizabeth, which became a Los Angeles Times bestseller.

Then Arcade decided we were done with each other. And HarperCollins decided they wanted my next book. Well, what was it going to be?

I had just done three Elizabeth books, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth. I still hadn't written about Elizabeth's life after England's. 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada. So I started researching those years and staring me in the face was the story of Elizabeth's Waterloo, which was the Irish rebellion against England.

And guess who? Grace O'Malley. So I dragged out that one sheet.

that the Inishbuffin newspaper publisher had handed me that day in her sunny living room, overlooking the harbor that Grace O'Malley's pirate ships had taken refuge in 500 years before. Then I went to work researching her, this lifelong rivalry with Elizabeth and the bloody genocidal Irish rebellion of the 16th century, not the Cromwell rebellion, but this was the one in which the... English queen had overseen the killing of half the population of Ireland.

Well, it was time to do research, and I had just completed three historical novels. But they were based on a great deal of historical biographies and nonfiction books. I mean, there were so many about Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. No problem doing research. Well, there was almost nothing about Grace O'Malley.

There was one book by Anne Chambers. which was the only, the only biography of her. And it took its factual information from not the Irish historians of the time, who had written a huge volume called The Annals of the Four Masters.

The most factual information that we could get from history was the English state papers. And anyway, I poured through the few books that I could find about the Irish Rebellion, about Grace O'Malley, and that period in Elizabeth's life, which it hardly mentioned the Irish Rebellion at all. I just put my nose to the grindstone, and I decided I would take every single fact that I knew. about my main characters and put them into one document that I could get an overview of the whole time and place and events. I was able to see what Elizabeth was doing at the same time that Grace was doing something else and the times that they met.

In history, they only met once. But, and I wanted to tell you the story of how they first met because it became the linchpin of being able to write this book. And this is how it goes.

It was 1593, and the Irish Rebellion was already in full swing. And Grace O'Malley sailed her pirate ship up the Thames River and with her flags flying and her pirate flags flying, and parked her boat at the quay at Greenwich Castle and marched in and demanded an audience with Elizabeth I, who was already a very feared and respected monarch. She had... won the Spanish Armada in 1588. So in walks Grace O'Malley, in her chieftain's cloak to the floor, bold as the day is long, marches up to Elizabeth, and the two of them begin speaking in Latin, which they both knew, both were highly educated women, and Grace O'Malley makes three demands of the queen.

Unheard of. You just didn't talk that way to Elizabeth. So she makes these three demands. I want my son returned to me, my son, Tibbet Burke.

He is in one of your prisons in Ireland. And I want him back. Secondly, I want you to remove from Ireland Captain Richard Bingham, who is a brutal man and he's murdered, murdered my son and. another son, and he's killed so many people in Ireland.

He's just brutalizing my country. I want him out of Ireland. And third, since you've taken away my ability to make a living, I was a rich woman.

Now you've taken away my fleet, part of my fleet, and I want a pension from England. Everybody's kind of wondering. What's going to happen if Elizabeth's just going to have her taken out and hung?

And instead, Elizabeth grants all of Grace's demands. She goes back to Ireland. She gets her son back.

Richard Bingham is taken out of Ireland. And Elizabeth gives her a pension. And when I heard this story, I thought, okay, this is a great mystery in history.

And all of my... books before that, my three books, I had done as a centerpiece of a book. I had had a mystery that I solved and a mystery of history.

And I thought, why on earth would Elizabeth, who was already so powerful, give in to the demands of this pirate woman who was who was a thorn in her side and who had you. who had pirated her ships and had become one of the leaders of the Irish Rebellion. Why would she do this?

And that was what took me into this need to write a book. You have to have a great motivation to sit down and write a historical novel. That was mine.

That was my inspiration. And Grace O'Malley, the more I learned about her, she became my personal inspiration because this was a woman who never gave up. She seemed fearless. I'm sure she had fears, but she wasn't motivated by fear. She was motivated by her need to make Ireland.

a free country. And Elizabeth was her nemesis for all these years because Elizabeth had invaded and enslaved and just torched Ireland and killed half its population. So this was the fire that was lit under me. to write the book.

Thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure being able to talk about Grace O'Malley again, my greatest inspiration in life. And if you want to know more about her, check out the link at the bottom of your screen. Great to talk to you today.

Bye. Oh, the boys of Shinbone Alley are in love with Gracie Melody. All of the women are too. Every time you say her name, they all go quiet and sing.

Wishin'they were part of her crew Granuel, here, Granuel, here, here The greatest pirate, pirate Granuel Granuel, here, here, Granuel, here here, for Friday counting pilgrim, well well, her father tried to dock her, and she chopped her ginger locks off, her boldness was revealed that grizzly Irish chieftain quickly learned she was a seaman and off into history she sailed Granuel, hey, hey Granuel, here, here that greatest Irish pirate Granuel, here, here, Friday County, Mather, Granuel. Well, she met with old Queen Lizzie, ten ago, she ate some prisoners. All of the men were freed from jail.

Grace wouldn't take a knee, she said, I too am a queen. And off back to Ireland she sailed. Granuel, Granuel. The greatest Irish pirate, Granuel.

Granuel. Grandy well, grandy well, the pride of county mail, grandy well. Oh, the boys of Sinpone Alley are in love with Grayson Alley. So are the women, too.

Say, what can I do? How can I never hope to fail? How can I stay so close to you, knowing now that one place is And another's embrace is, and another one's care? I should be gone, far from this hell, until not a trace of you survives. Yet I'll stay on, for I know well who left me behind you.

One day troubles will find you, and when that day arrives, I'll be there, for to me there's no sorrow worse to bear than a lived upon. I... I'll be there from the mists of dawn. I'll be there by your side and deep within your heart. I'll be there, though I know that it's madness.

Heartless. Stripped of pride yet still proud I'll be there From the depths of my sadness I'll be there Enstealed, unyielding, and unbound Go and marry someone you don't love Please, if you throw away for a cause all the joys we have won, I want love more than faith, more than glamour, than anything. Let her kiss keep you warm, I'll be fine on my own. See me.

Transcript for:Exploring the Life of Grace O'Malley

Transcript for:
Exploring the Life of Grace O'Malley