Lady Joan Fitzgerald

• 1. Introduction

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  Lady Joan Fitzgerald died on the 2nd of January 1565 at Askeaton, County Limerick, a woman who had held southern Ireland's most dangerous peace together through three marriages, two sets of hereditary enemies, and the scrutiny of Queen Elizabeth I herself. She was a Geraldine by birth, a Butler by first marriage, and eventually a Desmond by her third. Each title came with its own wars.

  How does one woman become the hinge between families who had spent generations trying to destroy each other? And what happens when that hinge is finally removed?

• 2. A Geraldine Heiress

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  Joan was probably born in 1514 in Munster, Ireland, the only legitimate child of the Earl of Desmond and his wife Amy O'Brien. That status as the sole lawful heir made her valuable and vulnerable in equal measure.

  Her father's family, the FitzGeralds of Desmond, were a noble cadet branch of the Old English Geraldines, a dynasty that also included the more powerful FitzGeralds of Kildare. Her mother's side traced to Turlough O'Brien, a pre-Reformation bishop of Killaloe who died in 1525 or 1526 and who had not stayed celibate. That maternal line ran through the O'Briens of Ara in County Tipperary, a cadet branch of the O'Briens, kings of Thomond.

  Joan's father spent much of the 1520s at war with his neighbours. In September 1520 or 1521 he was defeated at the Battle of Mourne Abbey, south of Mallow in County Cork, by the allied forces of Cormac Laidir Oge MacCarthy, 10th Lord of Muskerry, and his own uncle Thomas fitz Thomas FitzGerald, called "the Bald." In December of that year, Muskerry, Thomas the Bald, and Piers Butler, 8th Earl of Ormond, besieged him unsuccessfully at Dungarvan.

  Her father, the 10th Earl, died on the 18th of June 1529. The Dictionary of Irish Biography records his death at Rathkeale, County Limerick, most likely in the Castle Matrix. Joan was heir general as the only legitimate child, but her granduncle Thomas the Bald, her father's former enemy, was heir male and succeeded as 11th Earl of Desmond at the age of 75. The title passed sideways, and Joan was left holding her inheritance in land rather than a title.

• 3. The Butler Alliance

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  James Butler, Joan's first husband, carried a complicated political inheritance of his own before he ever met her. His father Piers Butler had been locked in a dispute with Thomas Boleyn over the estate and title of Ormond, after the 7th Earl had died without a son in 1515. Piers had in 1522 proposed James as a bridegroom for Anne Boleyn herself, as a way to settle that dispute. For reasons the sources do not explain, those negotiations collapsed. Anne later married King Henry VIII as his second wife.

  In 1528 Henry VIII forced Piers Butler to renounce the title of Earl of Ormond and become Earl of Ossory instead. So when James finally married Joan in 1530, he was already in his mid-thirties and still without a title of his own. Her dowry was land in County Tipperary along the boundary between Desmond and Ormond territory, including the manors of Clonmel, Kilfeakle, and Kilsheelan. The marriage planted the two feuding dynasties side by side in the same landholding.

  James and Joan had seven sons together. The eldest, Thomas, born around 1532, would become famous as "Black Tom" and eventually succeed as the 10th Earl of Ormond. Another son, John of Kilcash, married Katherine, daughter of Cormac na Haoine MacCarthy Reagh, 10th Prince of Carbery; John and Katherine's son Walter later became the 11th Earl of Ormond.

  After the fall of the Boleyns, the earldom of Ormond reverted to James's father-in-law in February 1538. On the 26th of August 1539, James himself succeeded as 9th Earl of Ormond and 2nd Earl of Ossory, making Joan a double countess. On the 17th of October 1546, Ormond went to dine at Ely House in Holborn, London. He fell victim to a mass poisoning alongside his steward and sixteen of his servants, an act some attributed to the political scheming of Anthony St Leger, Lord Deputy of Ireland. James died on the 28th of October.

• 4. Widowhood and Independence

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  At her husband's death Joan was a young dowager countess in her thirties, and for the first time in her adult life she held legal authority over her own affairs. Her son Thomas, the heir, was only fifteen and became a ward of the king. She travelled to London to ensure the wardship would be handled with care.

  As a widow under the law, she could act independently. She regained control of her dowry, administered her dowry and jointure, and played a major role in the affairs of the house of Ormond. That period of self-direction did not last as long as she might have wished.

  In August 1548 she was persuaded to marry the English courtier and diplomat Francis Bryan. The sources suggest the marriage was a political maneuver, designed to prevent Joan from marrying her cousin Gerald FitzGerald, the heir to the Earldom of Desmond. The union was not a happy one.

  Bryan had a reputation at the English court as a rake and libertine, earning him the nickname "Vicar of Hell." Joan herself left a striking statement about her second marriage. She is quoted as saying: "While I was a widow and not married to an Englishman, I defended and kept my own, or at the least, no man went about to defeat me of my right. Well is the woman unmarried; I am bade to hold my peace, and my husband shall have answer made unto him."

  She still asserted herself during that unhappy marriage. She claimed the customary right to keep a private army of gallowglasses in Kilkenny, which greatly annoyed Edward Bellingham, who had replaced St Leger as lord deputy of Ireland on the 22nd of April 1548. Bryan died suddenly on the 2nd of February 1550 at Clonmel while travelling. He apparently died at table after heavy drinking, and some suspected poisoning. A postmortem was held. While Bryan lay dying, Joan was allegedly out on a hunting expedition with her second cousin Gerald FitzGerald. She was then prevailed upon to wait a year before marrying him.

• 5. The Peace Between Enemies

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  The precise date of Joan's third marriage is not recorded, but she did not wait long. Gerald FitzGerald was her second cousin; their common ancestor was Thomas FitzGerald, 7th Earl of Desmond, great-grandfather to them both. When they married around 1550, Joan was approximately 41 and Gerald approximately 17.

  The match joined the two families whose enmity had defined Munster politics for generations. The Butlers and the FitzGeralds of Desmond were hereditary enemies, and Joan's eldest son Thomas was a Butler earl. Her role now was to keep those two parts of her life from destroying each other.

  On the 14th of October 1558 Gerald succeeded to the earldom, becoming the 14th Earl of Desmond, though the exact numbering depends on which counting system is used. Joan became Countess of Desmond. Queen Elizabeth I, who came to the throne in November of that year, recognized Joan's diplomatic skill and relied on her to keep the fragile peace in southern Ireland.

  When her husband, allegedly tired of Joan's influence over him, broke the truce with Thomas and both sides began raiding one another, Joan spent nearly two weeks riding back and forth between the two enemy camps to arbitrate. A tenuous peace was re-established in 1560. That same year her intervention secured a peaceful outcome to a stand-off near Tipperary that contemporaries called "the battle that never was."

  In 1562 her husband was sent to the Tower of London for allegedly insolent behavior before the Privy Council. Joan worked to persuade the queen to release him. She succeeded, and he returned to Ireland in November 1563, less than two years before her death.

• 6. After Askeaton

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  Joan was buried at the Franciscan Friary of Askeaton, the town where she died. The friary stood inside the same County Limerick landscape that had shaped her family for generations.

  The peace she had maintained did not survive her by even two months. On the 8th of February 1565, her Butler son Thomas and her widower Gerald fought the Battle of Affane, where Thomas took Gerald captive. The conflict that followed consumed the next two decades. The Desmond Rebellions earned Gerald the sobriquet "rebel earl" and ended with his forfeiture and killing in 1583, eighteen years after Joan died trying to prevent exactly that outcome.

  In her own lifetime, Queen Elizabeth had described her as someone whose skill in diplomacy was real and relied upon. The queen's recognition was not ceremonial flattery. Southern Ireland's precarious peace was in practice a one-woman effort, carried out on horseback over miles of disputed territory, through correspondence with a monarch, and through a lifetime of marriages that gave Joan a personal stake in both sides of every quarrel.