The Irish pirate queen who sailed to England to confront Elizabeth I
In 1593 Gráinne O'Malley, chief of a seafaring Mayo clan, sailed to England to demand the release of her son and half-brother from an English governor's prison. English officials called her a lifelong rebel. Oddly, nobody in her lifetime called her Grace O'Malley, and the Irish annals never mention her at all.
Born around 1530 in Clew Bay, she was the only child of Eoghan Dubhdara Ó Máille, lord of a clan that ruled the coast from a chain of sea-facing castles and charged black rent to anyone fishing their waters, even boats from England. Gaelic custom kept the chieftainship for men, yet she took over the family's lands and fleets at her father's death despite having a half-brother. Local tradition says that as a girl she cropped her hair to prove she could sail to Spain, earning the nickname Gráinne Mhaol, or Granuaile, though the name may instead refer to the district of Umhall.
Her first marriage, in 1546, was to Dónal an Chogaidh Ó Flaithbheartaigh, heir to the lordship of Iar Connacht, roughly modern Connemara. After he was killed in an ambush in 1565, she drove off the rival Joyce clan when they tried to seize his castle, then made Clare Island her main base. By 1566 she had married Iron Richard Bourke, whose title came from his ironworks. Their son Tibbot later became the first Viscount Mayo.
As the Tudor conquest tightened, she resisted. A Galway expedition attacked her Clare Island castle in March 1579 and barely escaped. Sir Richard Bingham, the Crown's man in Connacht, called her the nurse of every rebellion in the province for forty years. When he arrested her son Tibbot for treason and her half-brother for killing English soldiers, she went over his head, reaching Lord Burghley through the Earl of Ormond and answering eighteen written questions on the Queen's behalf.
Tradition, though not the written record, says she met Elizabeth at Greenwich Palace. Storytellers later added colourful touches: a hidden dagger, a refusal to bow, a used handkerchief tossed into the fire. The historian Anne Chambers calls these fanciful tales. Most of what we know comes from English state papers, yet two decades and more after she died, one of the English Lord Deputies was still commenting on how famous she remained in Ireland.
Source: Grace O'Malley
