Stones of Aran (38 page)

In this same year of 1584, the O'Flaherty feud spilled over into Aran, and there was a battle that ended for some in graves at Log na Marbh, the hollow of the dead, near Cill Rónáin, where I shall tell the complicated tale, the history of Aircín, like that of England in Ireland, being unaffected by it. Aircín was now a Queen's Manor, and when the comprehensive settlement called
The
Composition
of Connaught
was drawn up in 1585, under which the Gaelic lords were confirmed in their estates with feudal rights of succession instead of the old Brehon law of elective leadership and clan ownership of its territory, Murchadh na dTua, now Sir Murrough O'Flaherty, and the other chieftains of West Connacht, received their lands from the Queen “by knights' service as of her castle or mannor of Ardkine in the greater iland of Arren, with suit and service to the Courte barron and lete of the said mannor.”

Lestrange in this year replaced Bingham as governor of
Connacht
for a while, and probably re-fortified and garrisoned Aircín during that period. In March 1588 the Corporation of Galway
belatedly
petitioned the Queen on behalf of the Clann Thaidhg, and were ignored. But Lestrange too had failed to pay the rent, and the islands were granted to a Sir John Rawson of Athlone, who is described in a State document of the times as “an industrious
discoverer
of lands for the Queen”—that is, an expert in detecting flaws in titles leading to expropriation in the name of the Crown. He only lasted three months and then the islands were acquired by the Earl of Ormonde, one of the most powerful Anglo-Irish lords. Lestrange was still in Aran and stayed on as Ormonde's tenant.

The background to these property-wrangles was the tragic
procession
of Spanish galleons beating their way around the coast like gorgeous moths helpless against the windowpane, after the defeat of the Armada by the English fleet and the storms of the English Channel. Two galleons were wrecked on the Connemara coast, and although at first the O'Flahertys sheltered the survivors, later they found it politic to hand them over to the ferocious Bingham, who hanged nearly three hundred of them. Another ship was blown onto the Clare coast, and the chief of that territory, Boetius MacClancy, who had accepted the post of Sheriff of the County, outdid his new masters in the bloodthirstiness of his treatment of the wretches that struggled ashore. He also wrote to the
authorities
that two more galleons could be seen around Aran and others
farther out to the west, but all these ships struggled on southwards, and although Aran folklore is rich in pots of Spanish gold
awaiting
discovery, it seems no landings were made on the islands.

The Mayo branches of the Burkes rose in rebellion against the much-hated Bingham late in 1588, and Murchadh na dTua came out with them, largely from discontent over his loss of the islands. Allied with Murchadh on this occasion was Gráinne Ní Mháille or Grace O'Malley, the sea-queen of the Mayo coast, whom the English administrators described as “a most famous feminine sea captain … a notorious woman in all the coast of Ireland,” and as “a woman that hath impudently passed the part of womanhood and been a spoiler, and chief commander and director of thieves and murderers at sea.” Gráinne's son-in-law Richard Burke, known to the English as the Devil's Hook, was among the rebels too. By the beginning of 1589 Bingham had crushed the rebellion on land and forced the Burkes to sue for peace. Richard Burke gave
guarantees
for his mother-in-law's good behaviour, but whether or no she knew of the treaty, Gráinne continued to harry the coast with her galleys. In April Bingham had to inform the Queen's secretary, Sir Thomas Walsingham, that:

This characteristically hawkish intervention seems to be Gráinne's only entrance in Aran's history, but in the folklore she has a larger role. In fact her first husband, an O'Flaherty known as Dónal an Chogaidh, Dónal of the war, is often said to have died in the O'Flahertys' battle against the O'Briens and to be buried in the
old church at Mainistir; however, this tale seems to be based on a misreading of a novel called
Grania
Waile,
which was read in Aran two or three generations ago. (Nowadays there exists a hybrid of folklore and literary culture, circulating in both oral and written channels, and having its own character, so far unexplored.)

Sir Thomas Lestrange had died shortly before Gráinne's raid, and in the succeeding brief years of local peace after the scattering of the Armada and settlement of the Burkes' rebellion, the records only give one tantalizing glimpse of the history of Aircín: a Captain Fildew was murdered there by his own soldiers in 1595 and his galley stolen; why, we do not know. While Connacht was again devastated by rebellion, and a Spanish invasion in support of O'Neill was daily expected in Galway, ownership of the islands passed from hand to hand in obscure and involved transactions, and little or nothing was done about refortifying Aircín. In 1599 the industrious John Rawson had been given a second lease; later in the same year a Robert Rothe of Kilkenny appears as the lessee; in 1598 a Sir John Peyton, Knight of the Tower of London, was complaining that his tenants in Aran had been plundered by the captain of the English garrison at Galway, and in 1607 there was a legal action in progress involving one Smyth, the tenant of Aran, the Earl of Ormonde and Rothe as agent of the latter.

With the suppression of the rebellion, the initiation of a
peaceful
settlement with Spain and the death of the Queen in 1603, the defences of Galway became a less pressing matter, but within a few years Spain was an enemy once again. In 1614 Sir Oliver St. John, Master of the Ordnance in Ireland, noted the fact that an enemy possessing Gregory's Sound between the islands would be master of both Aran and Galway Bay:

During the rather more peaceful times of James I, the Lynches of Galway began to predominate in Aran's history. Henry Lynch had inherited his claim from the James Lynch to whom the Clann Thaidhg had mortgaged the islands long before, and he now held half the estate, while the rest belonged to a William Anderson, the heir of Lestrange. In 1618 Lynch assigned his moiety to Anderson, “excepting great trees, mines, minerals and great hawks.” By the time of the Ulster Rising in 1641, the islands were in the hands of the Lynches again. The Clann Thaidhg of the O'Briens was reasserting its claim too and plotting with Boetius Clancy (the son of the notorious sheriff of Clare who hanged the Armada men) to seize the islands. The Earl of Clanricarde, who was governor of Galway and concerned for its security, heard of it and wrote to the Earl of Thomond to have the scheme stopped:

The Earl of Thomond must have exerted his authority as the
senior
O'Brien, for that is the last one hears of the Clann Thaidhg and their “antiquated claim.” But Sir Roebuck Lynch's tenure was disturbed again the next year, by the captain of the English fort outside Galway city, as the mayor of Galway reported:

This episode was a premonitory flash from the coming storm which would leave the whole country in ruination. For as the
echoes of the struggle between King and Parliament in England reached the west, Galway itself fell into a state of civil war, with the English garrison in their fort becoming more and more openly Parliamentarian, the townsfolk increasingly committed to the cause of the “Confederate Government” then campaigning in Ulster, and the governor, Clanricarde, less and less able to impose his will in the name of a State divided against itself. The town had besieged the fort, and the governor had besieged the town and would have impressed peace upon both parties had not the wild young Willoughby persisted in his murderous plundering
expeditions
into the surrounding countryside. By this time King and Parliament were at open war in England, and when the captain of an English ship supplying the fort appeared on its ramparts and shouted across to the townsfolk on their walls, “A new king, you rogues and traitors; your king is run away; you shall have a new king shortly, you rogues,” then (in the dry words of Hardiman's
History
of
Galway
) “It was at length concluded that the fort was no longer in his majesty's obedience, but entirely at the disposal of the parliament.” The Confederates appointed a Colonel Burke as lieutenant-general of Connacht, and on his arrival in Galway he set about the extirpation of this wasps'-nest of
parliamentarianism
. In April of the next year Sir Roebuck Lynch had the
satisfaction
of being among the gentry led by Colonel Burke against the fort. Willoughby surrendered after a month or so of siege and was allowed to take himself off by boat, leaving the fort to be
demolished
by the Confederate Catholics.

During these internal convulsions Galway had imprudently called to its aid thirteen or fourteen hundred “wild Irish” from
Iar-Chonnacht
under various O'Flahertys, including another
Murchadh
na dTua, great-grandson of his namesake who had briefly held the Aran Islands, and Colonel Edmund O'Flaherty of
Bunowen
Castle in the west of Connemara. After terrorizing the English inhabitants of the town for a while, Edmund and a hundred of his men went to Aran, but after a fortnight the inhabitants began to complain of the burden of these guests, so he sailed for Tromra in
Clare and besieged a castle there (he claimed afterwards he had no idea who lived in it, but it was held by an Englishman at the time). After a few days the castle fell, its inhabitants were
slaughtered
, and the raiders retired to Straw Island off Cill Éinne to divide their spoil, the wind preventing them from sailing home to
Connemara
. One of the party was a drummer from Inis Oírr called John Browne; he had not wanted to accompany them, or so he claimed when the matter came to trial years later, but Edmund had had him carried into the boat. Browne asked for a silver cup from the looted castle, which Edmund refused him. And in later years after the total defeat of the Confederate cause by the
Cromwellians
it was Browne who laid information against Edmund, so that a party of soldiers was sent into Connemara to arrest him. They were led by the croaking of ravens to his hiding-place under a rock where they found him and his wife “pyned awaye for want of foode, and altogether ghastly with fear.” Edmund was brought to Galway, tried and hanged.

After the ejection of the Parliamentarians from Galway and while the Civil War raged in England, the Confederate Catholics prospered, but they were always divided among themselves
between
the extreme clerical party, led by the Papal Nuncio
Rinuccini
, and more cautious heads who cared less for the cause of Catholicism in Europe and more for the fate of Ireland. When the lay Confederates at length united with the King's other
supporters
in Ireland, Galway offered the Nuncio a refuge although many of its notables (including Sir Roebuck) were opposed to him, and in 1648 the town was once again besieged by its governor Clanricarde in the name of the King. The Nuncio's most vigorous supporter in Connacht was a German convertite known as John Vangyrish, a cavalry officer who had come to Ireland to serve the Confederate cause. Having captured a castle of Clanricarde's near Galway, he led a force to Aran and occupied it, to the annoyance of Sir Roebuck Lynch and his son Sir Robert. But Vangyrish soon left in search of aid, first from Prince Rupert, who would have sent ships to Aran had the Parliamentarians not prevented him,
and then to the Vatican, which promised nothing. Meanwhile Clanricarde forced the expulsion of the Nuncio from Galway in February of 1649.

By then the King's English army and the Confederate army had been united under the Marquis of Ormonde by the Treaty of Kilkenny, but the King himself was dead, beheaded by the
Parliamentarians
, and his successor, Charles II, was in exile in Jersey. The government of the new “Commonwealth” now concentrated its attention on Ireland, and this most horrific period in the
history
of the country began with the landing at Dublin of Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan army. Ormonde and other Royalist
notables
took ship in little ports of Galway Bay and slipped away to France in December of 1650, leaving Clanricarde, now a Marquis, as the new Lord Deputy. Clanricarde, struggling to hold
demoralized
forces together, tried to negotiate support from the Duke of Lorraine and eventually arranged an advance of £20,000 on the security of the cities of Galway and Limerick. The fortification of Aran, as a base for receiving the promised aid, was part of the agreement: