Irish Earls and Irish Castles
Colum, Padraic
IRISH EARLS AND IRISH CASTLES By PADRAIC COLUM JUST at the entrance to the College of Maynooth where the priests of Ireland receive their training, there is the ruin of a great castle-an...
...Kilkenny remains the most distinctive of Irish cities...
...When he woke up in the hotel he asked what sport there was in town...
...the noses are broken off...
...One earl has his feet resting on a strange little beast...
...The next day Lord Edward went to Paris...
...She gave him her two hands...
...Part of what is here is as old as any Norman foundation in Ireland, for the beginning of it was made by Maurice Fitzgerald who was with the first band of Norman adventurers that came into the country...
...His reputation as a learned man, as a wizard came first...
...From being a learned man, a wizard, an enchanter, Earl Gerald passed into being one who was enchanted, taking the place of some older hero of the folk...
...His own uncles were against it...
...A park with fine trees-the sort of a park one expects to see deer moving through-stretches away, and just where I have come in, on the grass, like moving snow-flakes, is a flock of pigeons: they are pure white fan-tails, the daintiest pigeons I have ever seen...
...The fingers are disjointed...
...It was this speech that put heart in the Normans...
...Once, in a cottage, a man told me a story about him-a story that had the simplicity of a folk-tale and some of its charming turns...
...She took me through the gallery and showed me the portraits of the Geraldines of the old days...
...And already the Fitzgeralds-the Gheraldi of Tuscany-had an ancestry that had been brought back to Trojan times...
...She left Ireland, bringing the children with her, ?nd no one had any account of them ever afterward...
...One night the young lady disguised herself and went into the ill street...
...one does not feel that a family would be lost in it...
...Lady Nesta Fitzgerald, I found, is true to the good fame of her line...
...She was so fond of her that she used to take the young woman to sleep on her lap...
...Alone among the nobility of Ireland, the Geraldines produced men who were Irish and who were Europeans...
...Then he was beheaded...
...But one old servant came and brought me within...
...He was told there would be a great ball that night in the royal palace...
...The cathedral is Saint Canice's...
...Here is Van Dyck's portrait of Charles I: there is something about the portrait that makes us feel that this is a monarch-an anointed king, but where we look at the other royalties we know that Charles I was the last of the monarchs...
...Then he snatched her hand...
...And I come to a house bigger than any I have ever seen...
...We have no land, and Ireland does not detest us more than England does...
...Five of his uncles shared his fate...
...The girl ran from him, and let herself into a house...
...They brighten and darken with the changes of light through the window above the altar, as the clouds come and pass every few minutes...
...But while remaining barons in name, the Fitzgeralds became great princes, ruling over these fertile lands of Kildare and taking possession of a royal domain in Desmond...
...She had three children...
...Give me your hand," said he...
...How did Earl Gerald enter into the circle of Fionn and Frederick Barbarossa...
...This is Maynooth Castle, and the College is built on what was the deer park of its grounds...
...What swathed-up individuals these seventeenth-century notables were 1 They did not produce vivid personalities as the Fitzgeralds so often did, but the Butlers have been able to identify a city with their house and their house with a city...
...Maynooth was the first and the greatest of their castles...
...Pardon me for that is past, I will offend no more, In this most vile and sinful cast Which I will still abhor...
...Henry VIII, according to Holinshed, was persuaded "that he should never conquer Ireland as long as any Geraldines breathed in the country...
...Lord Edward was very watchful, being in such a street, and he noticed that the woman kept her hand from him...
...IRISH EARLS AND IRISH CASTLES By PADRAIC COLUM JUST at the entrance to the College of Maynooth where the priests of Ireland receive their training, there is the ruin of a great castle-an ivy-covered tower and keep...
...Here is his portrait with the portrait of his wife, Pamela-Pamela, the daughter of Madame de Genlis and Philippe Egalite...
...They had started, I thought, to tear the whole demesne up...
...When he was a young man Lord Edward heard much of the lewdness of London...
...He had a library that must have been among the best of its time: a catalogue of books that were in it has come down to us-they were in Latin and English, French and Irish...
...Of Earl Gerald, how he rides abroad, His horse's hooves shod with the weighty silver, And how he'll ride all roads till those horse's hooves Are worn thinAs thin as the cat's ears before the fire, Upraised in such content before the fire, And making little lanterns in the firelight...
...The original castle has been dismantled and its stones have been used to build a modern mansion...
...When the small Norman forces were faced with the Irish before Dublin and were affrighted by the possibility of a Norse fleet coming in and joining with the king of Ireland's forces, Maurice Fitzgerald exclaimed, "Can we expect aid from our own land...
...I imagine the house has about one one-hundredth of the staff of the servants and retainers that kept it going in the eighteenth century...
...For a long time he did not credit these stories...
...Carton, near the old castle, is now the seat of this family: its head is the Duke of Leinster...
...Its bad report had brought Lord Edward and herself into the same street...
...Together they went down the street...
...He was wont to apparel himself so gorgeously that the Irish knew him as Silken Thomas...
...For their effigies are in black marble, and the rings on their sculp-tored armor, worn down, make a skeleton-like effect- an effect which is all in blackness...
...an ancient tower has been made part of the modern structure...
...Maybe she was wishful to know what sort was the young man who was in the wicked street at an ill hour...
...Lord Edward went to the ball, and the first one he saw among the dancers was the girl who had disguised herself...
...But the Irish lords were not ready to give him wholehearted support in this move...
...Therefore example take by me, That curse the luckless time That ever dice mine eyes did see, Which bred in me this crime...
...They had taken lodgings...
...though she knew that it would turn out bad work for him...
...And there is the Duke of Ormond who gave Dublin to the English Parliamentarian forces, and who afterward tried to get it back for the Royalists and got beaten: he is in armor, and magnificently bewigged, and holds a commander's baton in his hand...
...It seems to me that they have become the very emblems of mortality...
...He used to be out at night drilling the people with Wolfe Tone...
...I enter the grounds through a gate in a street in Kilkenny...
...And before the house, on the grass, were about a thousand of the most rapacious rooks I ever looked on...
...The barons who won that battle might have ruled Ireland as kings had not their leader Strongbow, weaker than his name implies, stepped down when his Plantaganet king made him...
...Here is Charles II in Sir Peter Leyley's portrait looking as cadaverous as a man who had been dug up after burial, and James II, by the same court painter, looking as if he never had a vivid moment in his life, and there are their successors visibly passing from a decadent nobility into middle-class commonplaceness...
...She had come to London, bringing her aunt...
...I look upon the features of a man who is of the type that was at Francis I's or Henry VIII's court, and I remember that he has come into the telling of many an Irish folk-tale...
...She has favorites...
...Its fall marked the beginning of a new epoch in Irish history-the epoch that was to end with the extirpation of the great lords...
...But more and more the stories oppressed him, and at last he decided to go in person and find out if London was really depraved...
...They built their castle upon the river Nore, and the city of Kilkenny grew and spread under them...
...The pictures in the gallery here are a real revelation of seventeenth-century character...
...To arms, then, Barons...
...The long road back to Dublin was empty, and I could imagine the men who had become figures in folk-lore riding abroad-Lord Edward riding toward the Cur-ragh, wearing that green cravat that aroused the ire of the British officers, Earl Gerald riding his horse with its silver shoes, and that little, strange-looking man whose portrait I had looked on, and who was known as the Fairy Earl...
...This conquistadore was already half Celtic, for his mother was Nesta, the daughter of a Welsh prince...
...Or riding like one whose spirit was changing within him, that Gerald who was Baron of Offaly, and son of the eleventh earl, and who, turning from gambling and swearing, wrote a Song of Repentance of which this is a verse: There is no wight that used it more Than he that wrote this verse...
...It is a European mediaeval town become an Irish market town...
...Now, a lady in Paris had also been oppressed by such tales of wickedness...
...One may not write about the Fitzgeralds without drawing into the story another great Norman-Irish family, the Butlers, Earls of Ormond...
...I pass through a gate and see a demesne before me that seems to be as wide as the Phoenix Park...
...a flock of them there seem to be...
...I thought that a dozen or else no servant at all would appear...
...Who are you...
...Thereafter the Geraldine of Kildare was a great lord, not a semi-independent prince...
...When his horse's shoes are worn out he'll come back and destroy the enemies of our country," said the lady...
...Lord Edward, with this romantic and enthusiastic face, must have been one of the most fascinating men of his time...
...Armored Ormonds, their swords carved across their effigies, are here...
...Tomorrow I'm going to Paris with my aunt," she said...
...The house is compact...
...Lord Edward offered his arm...
...Who crieth Peccavi, now therefore His oaths his heart doth pierce...
...But still she kept her hand away...
...Lord Edward, too, has come into the circle of folklore...
...But after the death of Lord Edward the mother turned altogether against the young wife...
...I cross the stream and come to another gate and enter another demesne...
...He thought they were made up to discredit the people of London...
...He was given the lordships of Maynooth and Naas...
...Twilight filled the great demesne as I left the house...
...said he...
...He would be riding a swifter horse than the others...
...It was the hand of a young girl...
...One cannot go through Kilkenny without remembering the Ormond Earls and Dukes...
...Yes...
...He went over to that city...
...The bite of this beast brought about his death...
...The Fitzgerald of the time was a picturesque, and, probably, a chivalrous and romantic young man...
...Here and there in its streets one comes on fine houses with coats of arms carved outside with their mottoes in French...
...Eighteen years afterward the estates, castles and titles of the earls of Kildare were given back to the eleventh earl...
...The moment she saw him she asked a lady to take her place in the dance, and she came over to him...
...A mhic," she said, "My son, would you help an old woman to such a number...
...Like Lord Edward, she was concerned to discover or deny the depravity...
...In a poem which James Stephens has translated, David O Bruadair, addressing a Geraldine lady, exclaims that it is not possible for one of her princely race "to use a poet less than courteously...
...She did not take it...
...I have never seen so many of these shy creatures together...
...Inside the walls are of bare grey stone...
...Silken Thomas was beheaded at Tyburn...
...She never said, "Edward, where were you last night...
...I come to a stream that has about a score of water-hens upon it...
...The Ormond family intervened conspicuously, but not at all creditably, in Irish and English affairs at the end of the seventeenth century...
...The lady was disguised as an old beggar-woman...
...She was very lonesome then...
...I go there hoping that I may be permitted to look at the portraits that are in the house...
...One night he put on a disguise, and went down a very evil street...
...There is another portrait of him shown me, a smaller one thought to be by Holbein...
...She has a little face and long brown eyes-a lovely creature...
...It was not one hand she gave him this time...
...There is the Enchanted Earl...
...No stipulation had been made about sparing his head...
...The Battle of the Liffey was fought in 1171, and five Norman barons with a few hundred men overthrew King Roderick O'Connor, and prepared the way for Henry II's formidable invasion...
...There was-to skip two centuries-Lord Edward Fitzgerald who was like Earl Gerald in his being Irish and European...
...The energetic and resourceful deputy, Skeffington, appeared before Maynooth: Lord Thomas was in the West raising aid, and the castle was betrayed to the deputy by Fitzgerald's foster-brother...
...He heard that his father had been executed in the Tower of London- the rumor was not true-and forthwith he attempted to set up rule in Ireland in the anti-English interest...
...Perhaps Carton is not really as big as Versailles, but there, in the middle of the grass-lands of Kildare, with nothing to lead up to it-no hill, no woods, no other walls-it seemed to me about Louis XIV's size...
...This is the ninth Earl of Ormond, James Butler...
...Here, for instance, is an ancient round tower, tall and slender, with the squat turret of the cathedral behind it, steps going up to both, and beside the steps a house with an opening that shows the fire of a blacksmith's forge...
...It is a city for an etcher to work in-over and over again I come upon little scenes that are for the art of the etcher...
...Holinshed tells how the traitor received the thanks of the deputy and the great sum of money that he had bargained for...
...His mother used to be very fond of her...
...It is an otter...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 12
