FAITHFUL HARPERS AND PHANTOM PIPERS:

THE FATE AND MEMORY OF THE LAST EARLS OF

DESMOND, 1583 AND 1601

SEÁN DONNELLY
 FAITHFUL HARPERS AND PHANTOM PIPERS:

THE FATE AND MEMORY OF THE LAST EARLS OF DESMOND,

1583 AND 1601 1

SEÁN DONNELLY

HARPERS IN DESMOND, 1584

Of the great Anglo-Norman lineages in Ireland who adopted a Gaelic Irish lifestyle,
the most important was the Fitzgeralds, earls of Desmond, rulers of a vast lordship
in south-west Ireland, the core of which was the Munster counties of Cork and
Kerry. The 3rd earl, Gerald Fitzgerald (1338–98), Gearóid Iarla, was a famous
Irish poet, and in one poem apologized to his Gaelic-Irish friends for attacking
them on the king’s orders – an early instance of the ‘nothing personal – just
business’ defence!2 The last earl to possess the vast Desmond lordship, also called
Gerald, was the 15th, leader of the Desmond Rebellion of 1579–83. After an
English campaign that devastated Munster, he was killed on 11 November 1583 at
Glaunageenty, near Tralee, co. Kerry. His estates were forfeit to the crown and
were granted to English settlers in the Plantation of Munster (1586). A preliminary
surveys of the earl’s lands listed a harper living in the townland of Crean, parish of
Glenogra, co. Limerick, whose surname or patronymic, ‘Mac Somhairle’, suggests
he was a Scot: ‘The vill and land Droomebegg in the parish of Kreans, ... ½
carucate great measure now or lately in the tenure or occupation of John
mcSawerley, harper:— ½ quarter.’ 3 An inquisition taken at Cork on 8 November
1584 listing the ‘bards, chroniclers and rymers’ in Desmond, named six harpers,
three belonging to one family and three others of the same surname, almost
certainly a second family:

Meolmyrry mc shane of Castletowne harper seruantes to

Owohny mc meolmvry his son de eadem harper the
ffar gan anym his brother de eadem harper

Dermod odwedy harper

Rwshell oge odwedy mayterless
william Roe odwedy harper4

‘Castletown’ is the name of several places in co. Cork; de eadem means ‘of the
same place.’ In whose service the first family was is impossible to say, as the
manuscript is damaged at this point; ‘mayterless’ should obviously be
‘maysterless.’ The first names are Maolmhuire mac Seáin, Uaithne mac
Mhaolmhuire, and Feargainm, the last meaning, strangely, ‘anonymous’,
‘nameless’, and often equated with ‘Nehemiah’ in English. The surname of the
second three was O’Doody, and while the first man’s forename is obviously
‘Dermot’, the second’s is corrupt apart from ‘oge’, Irish óg ‘young’; in the third
name ‘roe’ is Irish ruadh ‘red-haired’.

In another Desmond inquisition of 1584, Ballymacadoyle, Dingle, co. Kerry, has

the alternative name ‘Harperstown’, which was last recorded in 1628.
Ballymacadoyle is the Irish Baile Mhic an Daill ‘The Home of the Son of the Blind
One’, and tradition had it that the eponymous An Dall or Mac an Daill was a harper
of ‘unrivalled sweetness and sophisticated artistry’. Though no Mac an Daill
harper appears in the 16th and 17th centuries, the persistence of ‘Harperstown’ as
an alias for Ballymacadoyle suggests that An Dall founded a line of professional
players.5 The family had one solid connection with 17th-century harping,
however, in the person of Piaras Feiritéar (c.1610–53), the celebrated poet and
harper who lived at Sybil Head, also near Dingle. In an elaborate poem, Mochean
d’altrom an oirbhirt ‘Hail to the fosterling of the gift’, Feiritéar thanked Éamonn,
son of Domhnall Mac an Daill, for the gift of a beautiful harp.6

TWO EARLS OF DESMOND, 1600–1

Before the earl of Desmond was slain in November 1583, his wife Eleanor had left
him, apparently at his own instigation, taking their children. At the date of his
death, the countess and her children were living in semi-captivity, while her son,
the heir to the earldom, James (1571–1601), was a prisoner in Dublin Castle,
waiting to be transferred to the Tower of London. The countess and her family
endured great poverty and harsh treatment, before she was finally granted a crown
pension, 7 one of several favours she received from Sir Robert Cecil (1566–1612),
secretary of state, to whom in September 1597 she presented an Irish harp in
gratitude. 8 Her son James was to remain in the Tower of London until late 1600,
and was then released only as part of a cynical exercise. The Munster Plantation
had been overthrown in 1598, when the rebellion fomented by Hugh O’Neill, earl
of Tyrone, spread from Ulster through Connacht into the province. With O’Neill’s
support, James fitz Thomas Fitzgerald, a son of an older brother of the last earl’s
made illegitimate by the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, assumed the title ‘earl
of Desmond.’ Nicknamed the Súgán or ‘straw rope’ earl, James fitz Thomas
proved so effective that the crown released the last earl’s son from the Tower,
created him earl of Desmond (but with no claim on his father’s lands), and sent him
over to Munster in the hope that his presence would undermine support for his
cousin. Though the ‘Queen’s’ or ‘Tower’ earl was welcomed in Desmond, he was
weak and colourless, his health ruined by long imprisonment, and had been raised a
Protestant. He was seen as a sad English puppet, and was returned to London early
in 1601, his mission a failure. He died there in October, having, through no fault of
his own, spent twenty-two of his thirty years in prison. 9

A few months later, the Súgán earl followed his cousin to London. Having suffered
a heavy defeat in Aherlow, co. Tipperary, early in 1601, he dismissed his
mercenaries, and went on the run with a few close companions. The story of his
capture, and of the help an Irish harper gave him beforehand, was published in
1633:

The Lord Barry ... about the fourteenth of May, knowing that one Dermond
Odogan, a harper dwelling at garryduffe, vsed to harbour this Archrebell, or
else up occasion of some stealth that had beene made in his Countrey, the
thieues making towards this Fastnesse, his Souldiers pursued them into this
wood, where by good fortune, this supposed Earle, with two of the Baldones,
and this Dermond were gathered together, being almost ready to goe to
supper; but having discovered these Souldiers, they left their meate, and
made haste to shift for themselues; they were no sooner gone out of the
Cabbin, but the Souldiers were come in, and finding this provision and a
mantle (which they knew belonged to James fitz Thomas) they followed the
chase of the Stag now roused: by this time the Harper had convaied the
Sugane Earle into the thickest part of the Fastnesse, and himself with his
other companions, of purpose discovered themselues to the Souldiers, and
left the Wood with the Lapwings policie; that they being busied in pursuite of
them, the other might remain secure within that Fastnesse, and so indeed it
fell out; for the Souldiers supposing that Iames fitz Thomas had been of that
Company, made after them till Evening, by what time they had recovered
the White Knights Countrey ... .10

The lapwing, a bird that nests on the ground, will seek to draw a predator away
from its nest by making noise and dragging its wing along the ground, as though it
were injured. ‘The Lord Barry’, David fitz James Barry, lord of Barrymore in
central co. Cork, complained to the lord president of Munster, Sir George Carew,
that the White Knight, Edmund Fitzgibbon, had not assisted in the pursuit of the
earl. On 29 May 1601 ‘Edmund Fitzgibbon, the ‘White Knight of Munster’,
defended himself in a letter from his castle of Kilmeheny, co. Kerry:

I came in conference with the harper Dermott O Doan, John Shannyghane

the priest, and the Baldons, whom your Lordship knoweth to be their last
 relievers and company, privately offering every one of them particularly to
have Her Majesty’s mercy and favour extended to them, their wives and
children, with other great rewards, about which matte I spent a long time.
Yet every one of them did put me off, taking their oaths they knew not
where the said James at all. Yet I found them perjured therein, because I
know that the priest and [O’] Doan was that very day with him.11

Later, tipped off in private that the earl was hiding in a cave at Slievegrott, near
Mitchelstown, co. Cork, the White Knight captured him and his foster-brother,
imprisoning them in his own castle before sending them to Carew in Cork city. In
August Carew despatched the earl to London, where he was incarcerated in the
Tower; soon after, his mind gave way, and until he died in 1607 he required a
‘keeper in his madness’. The harper who had protected him was the ‘Darby O
Dowane of Garryduffe, harper’ pardoned on 3 March 1603. His surname, also
anglicised as ‘O’Dwane’, or ‘O’Duane’, and ‘translated’ as ‘Kidney’, was Ó
Dubháin in Irish. A Limerick harper with this surname was pardoned on 7 August
1601: ‘Melaghlin O Dowane of Clogh Ically, harper’. 12

LONG MEMORIES
Traditions of the earls of Desmond lived on, especially around Lough Gur, co.
Limerick, where the two earls named Gerald were conflated into a folklore figure.
One story, for example, has it that the earl sleeps under the waters of Lough Gur.
rising every seven years on Midsummer Night to gallop around the lake on a steed
shod with silver shoes. 13 This story was also attached to a namesake, Gerald
Fitzgerald (1525–86), 11th earl of Kildare, long remembered in Kildare folklore as
the ‘Wizard Earl’.14 On celebratory occasions, the people of Lough Gur raised ‘the
Desmond Cry’ – ‘Shanid Aboo’ – the war-cry and motto of the Fitzgeralds of
Desmond, from the castle of Shanid, co. Limerick. 15 (‘Crom Aboo’, the war-cry
and motto of the Fitzgeralds of Kildare, later dukes of Leinster, also derived from a
Limerick castle, that of Croom.) 16 Men named Moriarty were involved in killing
the 14th earl in 1583 – their leader was nicknamed Droch-Bhéarla ‘Broken
English’ – and an English visitor to Tralee in 1760 remarked that their descendants
were still execrated. 17

Not the least to bear a grudge against the Moriarties were the Knights of Glin, of
Glin Castle, co. Limerick, descendants, like the White Knights, of one of the first
earls of Desmond. Down to the 19th century, a Knight of Glin entering any public
assembly would send his footman in before him to order any Moriarty present to
leave immediately, or else face him in a duel. The Moriarties were said to have
sent the earl’s head to London in a little leather bag, and the taunt of being cineál
an mháilín ‘the folk of the little bag’ has followed the family into the 20th century.
In the 1830s, the then Knight of Glin came to blows in the drawing room at Glin
Castle with a Church of Ireland minister surnamed Moriarty, an Irish speaker from
co. Kerry, who had called seeking permission to proselytise in the area, after
taunting him with being cineál an mháilín. 18

Besides the long memories in Glin Castle and around Lough Gur, the elements
were seen to reflect the fall of the earldom of Desmond. When the historian
Richard Bagwell visited west Kerry in 1883, the tercentenary of the 15th earl’s
death, he was shown the spot in Glaunageenty where the earl had been slain,
Bóthar an Iarla ‘The Earl’s Road’. Moreover, he later wrote, ‘when the west wind
comes fitfully up from the sea ... , the Kerry people still call upon travellers to
listen to the Desmond howl …’, presumably the war-cry ‘Shanid Aboo’. 19 But a
visitor shooting wildfowl at Abbey Island, Derrynane, co. Kerry, early in 1832,
recorded a different interpretation of the sound of the wind there, when he wrote of
the south-west wind’s ‘rising in that shrilly note which the southern Irish
denominate the music of “Desmond’s Piper.”’ 20 This eerie musician also haunted
the childhood of the Kerry historian, Mary Agnes Hickson, in Fermoyle,
Ballinskelligs, as she recalled in 1872:

THE EARL OF DESMOND’S PIPER – A reference to this official was an

infallible recipe for producing quiet in Kerry nurseries on winter evenings
some forty years ago. When the wind whistled round the house the old
nurses used to say “Whisht! Listen to the Earl of Desmond’s Piper!” and the
most refractory subject became as still as a mouse or as an undertaker in the
days when Gerrot na Sceaidhe was yet on earth.21

An ‘undertaker’ was an English planter. The earl’s Irish nickname, which Hickson
correctly translated ‘Gerald of the Forays’ elsewhere, has been misprinted: it is
recorded in the annals as Geróid na secaidhe. 22 Imagining the screech of winter-
gale was the sound of a bagpipe was not confined to co. Kerry. Some prehistoric
stone circles in Ireland are called The Piper’s Stones, and the occasional monolith
The Piper’s Stone. An explanation in folklore for these names is that stones were
the haunt of fairy pipers, whose music was probably the sound of the wind
whistling around them. Personifying the wind as a musician was also an
international motif. Along the east coast of England during the 19th century, for
example, ‘The Danish Boy’s Whistle’ was the howl of the winter wind off the
North Sea.23 And in France, along certain parts of the coast an intriguing parallel
with the co. Kerry tradition was once found: to cod fishermen in these areas, the
south wind was le cornemuseux ‘the bagpiper’. 24
1This is a revised version of a note originally published in Bulletin of the Historical Harp Society, xviii, 3 (July
2008), 4–7. I have corrected a number of errors and slips and supplied the references which disappeared during
electronic transmission.
2 Gearóid Mac Niocaill (eag.), ‘Duanaire Ghearóid Iarla’, Studia Hibernica iii (1963), lgh. 17–19.
3John A. Murphy (ed.), The Desmond Survey (2009), p. 42.CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts @http://www.ucc.ie/
celt [Accessed 10 February 2010].
4 Réamonn Ó Muireadhaigh (eag.), ‘Aos Dána na Mumhan 1584’, Irisleabhar Muighe Nuadhat 1960, lch. 82.
5 An Seabhac [Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha], Tríocha Chéad Chorca Dhuibhne (Baile Átha Cliath, 1938), lch. 37.
6 Pádraig Ó Duinnín (eag.), Dánta Phiarais Feirtéir (Baile Átha Cliath, 1934), lgh. 92–5.
7For the countess and her children during the earl’s rebellion, see Anne Chambers, Eleanor Countess of Desmond
(Dublin, 1986; pbk., 2000), chapters 6, 7 and 8.
8 HMC Salisbury Manuscripts VII (London, 1899), p. 372.
9 Thomas Stafford (ed.), Pacata Hibernia (London, 1633: rep. Dublin, 1820), pp 164–5.
10 ibid., pp 239–40.
11 Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1600–1, p. 361.
12‘Fiants of Elizabeth’, 11th–21th Reports of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records in Ireland (Dublin and
London, 1880–5), nos. 6566, 6765.
13Daithí Ó hÓgáin (ed.), Myth, legend and romance: an encyclopaedia of the Irish folk tradition (Dublin, 1990), pp
227–30.
14Vincent P. Carey, Surviving the Tudors: the ‘Wizard’ earl of Kildare and English rule in Ireland, 1537–1586
(Dublin, 2002), pp 11–12.
15 Mary Carbery, The farm by Lough Gur (London, 1937), pp 144, 249, 254, 274.
16 David Greene, ‘The Irish war-cry’, Ériú xxii (1971), 167–73.
17James Kelly (ed.), The letters of Lord Chief Baron Edward Willes to the Earl of Warwick: an account of Ireland in
the mid-eighteenth century (Aberystwyth and Kilkenny, 1990), p. 60.
18 J. Anthony Gaughan, The knights of Glin: a Geraldine family ((Dublin, 1978), pp 72, 112.
19 Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors (3 vols., London, 1885–90), III, pp 114–15.
20[Anon.], ‘Scenes and sketches no. v’, Irish Monthly Magazine of Politics and Literature i (May 1832–April 1833),
382.
21 Selections from old Kerry records (London, 1872), p. 187.
22
W.M. Hennessy (ed.) The Annals of Loch Cé. A Chronicle of Irish Affairs from A.D. 1014 to A.D. 1590 … (2 vols.,
Dublin, 1871), II, p. 454.
23 The Munster Journal and Cork Military District Directory i, 12 (December 1888), [126].
24 Albert Barrere (ed.), Slang & argot ... (London, 1889), p. 95.