The Pirate Queen Read online

  What made him remember this hanging above many others he had subsequently seen was that among the hanged there had been a blackamoor, and a red-headed woman.

  ‘The O’Flaherty’s wife was red-haired,’ said Ormond.

  ‘So are many women,’ said Burghley.

  ‘According to report,’ said Ormond, ‘hers was a special red, a torch, a surprise—’

  A red-wigged queen spoke from the window: ‘Are we going to be here all day discussing the hair of trollops?’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Ormond, hurriedly, ‘my settler was intrigued by the way this particular woman died, not pleading nor praying like the others, but spitting and swearing. So intrigued was he that after he had watched her die, he went up to the line of those waiting their turn to be hanged and questioned them about her. He had been in the country long enough to learn something of the Irish language.’

  Considering that the waiting line had other things to think about, the settler had done well in getting what information he had. This was that the red-head had consistently protested that she was innocent of whatever it was they accused her of, that she was nobly born, a princess of Ireland, a friend to England.

  The figure by the window strode into the men’s conversation to confront Burghley. ‘Have our representatives in Ireland grown so bold against our person that they hang innocent women?’ That she might lose control over her own administration was one of her greatest terrors. ‘Why didn’t they listen to her at her trial?’

  ‘She had no English,’ said Ormond, gently. ‘They didn’t know what she was saying.’

  Quite suddenly Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears. In one of her unpredictable flashes of sympathy, the ‘treacherous trollop’ had become a fellow woman trapped in horrific circumstances. ‘God have mercy on her soul,’ she said. ‘The justice who condemned her will be recalled to answer for it. What happened to the child?’

  ‘She procured its escape. Some of her companion prisoners saw her give the child a torque—’

  ‘A talk?’

  ‘Torque. An Irish necklet, Majesty. Gold. Then she dropped the child from the window by a rope. My settler was interested enough to make enquiries and discovered that much later a small boy answering to the description of the one in the tower – red-haired like his mother – had been taken aboard a vessel bound for London, but as the ship had already sailed, there was little more he could find out.’

  ‘He could have reported the matter.’

  Ormond didn’t point out that at the time they were speaking of, famine had spread even to the loyal areas and the Cork settler had been occupied in trying to keep alive in a city where fifty people a day were dying from hunger. But he held his tongue; Elizabeth didn’t want to recall the Desmond Wars, which had cost her money, men and humiliation, nor did he want to remind her of them. Their relationship had been tried to breaking point in that chaotic period; she had sent in administrators and generals who were ignorant of the Irish situation, who had assumed, quite wrongly, that all the many old English lords, the ones whose families had been in Ireland since the time of Henry II and had not changed their religion during the Reformation, were enemies because they were Catholic and Catholic because they were enemies. It had brought an element of religious war into the country which had not previously been there and which was dangerous. It had forced perfectly loyal men into rebellion against the Crown. In trying to mediate between the two sides, he himself, though a Protestant, and though he had fought against the rebellion as hard as any, had been accused of collusion with the enemy.

  So vicious had been the intrigues by some of Elizabeth’s officials against him that she’d stripped him of his commission as general in Munster, though she had resisted attempts to arraign him. They were friendly again, but with Elizabeth one could never be too careful.

  ‘Well, well,’ she said now, tapping him on the arm with her fan, ‘we have come to the bottom of the matter and we shall see that those responsible for the poor lady’s execution are punished. Does this O’Flaherty know that she is hanged?’

  ‘No, Your Majesty. I thought it better merely to tell him that she had been shipwrecked and leave him to think that she drowned.’

  ‘Much better, much better,’ said the queen. ‘We shall send him some token of our sympathy and favour. What do you say, Burghley?’

  The Lord Treasurer was watching the Earl of Ormond. ‘I think the matter is not quite completed, Phoenix,’ he said. ‘I imagine the lord earl is exercising himself over the child.’

  ‘The child? The child? But if we have not heard of him in six years then we must assume that he is perished. Assuming that he landed safely in London, could a friendless small boy, a mere Irish, survive the city?’ Elizabeth fawned on her Londoners as they on her, but she had few illusions about the conditions in which they existed.

  ‘But if he did, Majesty…’ said Ormond.

  ‘If he did, if he did,’ said the queen impatiently. ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. What if he did?’

  ‘He would be of considerable use to us,’ said Burghley. He hauled himself up. He knew where Black Tom was aiming now, and he was ahead of him. ‘If he is alive, he is a contender for the leadership of the O’Flaherties. More than that, he is related to all the great clans of the west, the O’Donnells, the O’Burkes, the O’Connors and such other tribes as might form a bulwark for us in the north and west.’ He turned to Ormond. ‘Do I mistake the situation?’

  ‘No, my lord, you do not.’ The Earl of Ormond eyed the old man with respect. Here was one of the few of Elizabeth’s officials who grasped something of Ireland’s complexities. A pity he wasn’t in charge of it. ‘Then there is the grandmother.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Burghley and clawed his beard again. ‘The grandmother.’

  Elizabeth was becoming angry at this communion between the two men. ‘Grandmother me no grandmothers. Do I understand you wish to find and nourish this urchin because he has a grandmother?’

  ‘No ordinary grandmother, Phoenix. This one is the leader of a great sailing people or, as we might say, a pirate.’

  ‘A woman pirate?’

  ‘A considerable one, Majesty, owing allegiance to no one but herself. She is known to us as Grace O’Malley. If we could gain that allegiance…’

  Elizabeth swore by God’s death. ‘Leave the matter, Burghley. Your spies have greater use than to search for some pirate’s brat better left in the care of God, if indeed it is not there already. There are enough pirates in our navy without adding unnatural Irishwomen to their number.’

  ‘Nevertheless, great Phoenix, better she be of use to us than to Spain.’

  Again the word carried gigantism into the chamber, so that it seemed to lose balance under its tilt.

  The queen planted her legs more firmly on the floor. She always stood straight to her enemies. ‘Somewhat late, little man. We seem to have hanged her daughter.’

  ‘Daughter-in-law, Phoenix. A pardonable error, and one of which she is ignorant and which might yet stand us in good stead if we could befriend the child.’

  This was the latest policy for dealing with the Irish, to try and foster some of the country’s more nobly born children and bring them up as little Englishmen so that when they took over their Irish inheritance they would be sympathetic to England. That was the theory. So far the only one it looked like working on was the young orphaned Hugh O’Neill, whom Sir Henry Sidney had taken under his wing.

  But looking for a child in London would mean paying agents, and if there was one thing the Queen of England disliked more than any other it was spending money. Her Lord Treasurer saw that, as usual, she would put off making a decision. Her rheumatics were bothering her. She walked back to the window. Any moment she would dismiss them both.

  He said: ‘The child is heir to treasure, Majesty.’

  He glimpsed Ormond’s head jerk up. Deary me, did Black Tom think he didn’t know? That was what the man had been after all along, treasure and influence. That w
as why he had instigated a search for the boy in the first place and why he had only come to ask the queen’s help once he had learned the child was in a city where he, Black Tom, could not possibly find him unassisted. The Earl of Ormond wanted that child. He would let Burghley find him and then offer to foster him. Deary, deary me.

  The long shoes paused in the diamonds of sun shining through the great window onto the tiles. Her head went on one side. Her mind scrabbled at locks, threw open chest lids. Her fingers twitched to poke over chalice, pyx, drench themselves in winking carbuncles, mooning pearls, pay her debts and her troops, and cut off with gold the life support of her enemies.

  ‘Treasure?’ came the suddenly sweet voice.

  ‘Madam, it is a peculiarity of the grandmother’s clan that its chieftains are heir to great treasure. This child may well inherit it.’

  ‘My Lord Treasurer,’ said the queen, ‘find this child. The poor boy has suffered much. He needs our protection. Find him. Quickly.’

  ‘Yes, Phoenix.’ He bowed with satisfaction to the Earl of Ormond, who opened his mouth and then closed it again. He bowed to the royal back and began to manoeuvre his way out backwards. It hadn’t been such a tiring morning after all.

  His rear was just approaching the doors, which were opening for him – as usual the Captain of the Guard had been listening to the conversation from the other side – when his name was called by the woman at the window.

  ‘Yes, Majesty?’

  ‘What did you do about Master Walter’s blackamoor?’

  She never forgot a thing. His unwilling eye was caught by that of the grinning Captain of the Guard. The black moustache and beard curling round the man’s mouth always gave the impression that Walter Raleigh was smiling, even when he was not. Burghley held an image of that crisp facial hair in the rictus of a smile as its owner played his part in the greatest massacre ever perpetrated on unarmed men by Englishmen in modern times. Swords had stabbed into the neck and paunch of every member of the Smerwick garrison in Ireland, all of whom had already surrendered, all still pleading for their lives. Admitted, most of them had been Spanish invaders, yet it had not been an episode to bring glory on England’s name.

  The Lord Treasurer stared up into the face of the Captain of the Guard, imagining it sweating in the effort to kill so large an allocation of human beings.

  ‘The blackamoor, Burghley,’ came the voice from the privy chamber.

  The Lord Treasurer bowed towards it and nodded to Raleigh. ‘I found him another one,’ he said.

  Burghley shuffled back down the long gallery where the petitioners and courtiers waited and muttered, some of them intriguing against the very man who now passed between them. He could out-plot them all, Raleigh, Ormond, Leicester, even Walsingham. He held too many threads, knew where too many bodies were buried…

  Back in his office his desk was heaped with letters, commands, complaints, requests for preferment, instructions from his sister on how she was to be buried – and she’d probably outlive the lot of them – reports from his spies, wrangles with the commissariat.

  He called one of his scribes and sent him to search among the Irish State Papers. ‘Look under the correspondence between Sir William Drury and myself. Six years ago.’

  One thing, the queen would be thwarted in her command to recall the justice who had hanged the O’Flaherty wife. The man responsible had been Sir William Drury, and Sir William Drury was dead. His term in Ireland had killed him. Ireland destroyed them all eventually.

  When the papers came, the old man spread them on the table and picked them up one by one, holding them near to his eyes. Eventually he found the reference to the mass trial outside Cork.

  ‘Three hundred and six persons were executed in this sessions,’ Sir William had written, ‘among which some good ones; two for treason, a blackamoor, and two witches by natural law, for we found no law to try them by in this realm.’ The letter went on to the usual commentary on the Irish being dogs, ‘and worse than dogs, for dogs do but after their kind, but they degenerate from all humanity…’

  Lord Burghley stopped reading. His great weariness with all things to do with Ireland was caused not only by the insistence and complexity of the problem it posed, its horrific cost to the Exchequer, nor even by the undoubted savagery of its people, but by the savagery it inspired in every Englishman sent out to deal with it.

  Reasonable men stood in his office here in London and listened to his advice on how to govern that country with a firm, wise, and judicious hand, sailed off to it with firm, wise and judicious intentions, and sent back letters incoherent with hatred for its people.

  He did not condemn such men. They were not provided with sufficient money to make Ireland peaceful by kindness, nor to commit genocide cleanly and replace its dead population with English settlers. The eternal compromise between these alternatives was an attrition that wore men down and forced them into a cruelty that Lord Burghley would have liked to believe foreign to the English character.

  Only the other day he had said to the queen that he believed the Irish suffered no less badly under English rule than did the people of the Low Countries under the Spanish. He had offered it as an observation, a basis for discussion. But the queen had been shocked out of reason and had thrown a pomander at his head. She could still amaze him with her ability to feel guilt. He had passed beyond it long ago. There was no blame in anything men did, merely the cupidity of Adam and the slow churn of history presenting sections of the same wheel.

  Left to itself the Lord Treasurer’s brain would have liked to explore the philosophical sidetrack of whether a country that had no law against witches was too backward to recognise their evil, or too advanced to countenance burning them. But as usual there was too much work to do.

  Even so he did not begin right away. Instead, he clambered up onto the window seat to look on the world outside the court.

  From here he could see over the Somerset House gardens, over the lovely river gate to the river itself where the sea-coal barges rowed up to Whitehall and the watermen went back and forth to the south bank in then-endless crossings.

  On an impulse he pulled down the catch and opened the casement, though his doctor had warned him against damp air. Immediately his nose was assaulted by fresh and foul smells and his ears by noise, birdsong, shouts from rowing boats, church bells ringing in christenings and ringing out the dead, the calls of the street-sellers, all the buzz of a city which had burst its bounds.

  He leaned out to peer over the trees to his left and see the spur where Strand Lane spewed people, litter and sewage down to the river. The nobility continually complained of Strand Lane, the only approach for commoners to the Thames between the seven palaces which blocked out the frontage along this stretch. Strand Lane was so… common. The Earl of Arundel, who owned the neighbouring palace, annually petitioned the queen to have the lane closed off, complaining that harlots used it, that his chestnut trees which hung over it were ravaged of their conkers by small boys. Visiting ambassadors walking in the gardens of Somerset House said that it smelled and that rude persons climbed up its wall and jeered at them. But Elizabeth, mindful of ‘her commons’ and secretly enjoying the discomfiture of the ambassadors, refused to have it closed.

  That urchin down there on the lane’s bank, making grey pies from the mud of the river, was he the lost Irish child? How old would he be now? Fourteen? Fifteen? Or was he the slightly older boy at the end of the spit who was displaying his sores and begging from passing boats? It was a matter no more important in the Lord Treasurer’s scheme of things than a thousand others; the reorganisation of purveying to the royal household, for instance. But it was no less important either.

  It was not optimism that led Burghley to persist in trying to bring peace to Ireland by civilising its people. It was desperation. Ireland was dangerous, a vacuum which Spain, sharing its religion, could easily fill.

  Burghley wished, and not for the first time, that he could have commanded the
past four centuries and avoided the errors with which his predecessors had warped the Irish into an intransigent people. He wished he could have persuaded his queen out of her negative colonialism, more a policy to keep Spain out than to keep the Irish content. But it would have cost money, and as usual she had cheesepared. False economy, false economy, thought the Lord Treasurer. They were already fighting Spain in the Low Countries. Soon they might be fighting a Spanish invasion here in England. If Ireland broke out at the same time…

  ‘Are you all right, my lord?’

  He looked round to see the scribes watching him. He had groaned aloud. He shook his head at his chief secretary. ‘Armageddon, Percy.’

  Percy joined him at the window, interested. ‘Where, my lord?’

  Burghley ordered the man back to his desk, and returned to his view. ‘Am I the only one who can see it?’ he asked himself. Well, all he could do was build England’s protection with such bricks as Elizabeth allowed him. Young O’Neill was one of them. His upbringing among the Sidneys, that most English of families, at that most English of country manors, Penshurst, seemed to have instilled all the right values in the boy. That would be Ulster safeguarded. Now if he could only do the same in the west; Connaught was the least known factor in the whole imbalance that was Ireland.

  He was not sanguine about the story of treasure which had caught the queen’s attention, but if it was possible to find the O’Flaherty boy, then found he must be.

  London, though. One hundred thousand people teeming inside its walls and even more overflowing them. The nunnery orphanages which might have taken in the child had gone with the Reformation, leaving a vacuum sucking homeless youngsters into the criminal sewers which underlay and polluted the city and to which even his meanest agents had little recourse. Nevertheless, the Irish pawn must be found.

  What did he know of the child, apart from the fact that it was red-haired and had at one time or another owned a golden Irish torque? Well, they could only try. He’d set the search in train today.