In the fourth installment of this five-part series, writer, producer, and actor Keelin McCool, currently in development with the period drama feature "Mama Pirate," traces the world that forged Gráinne Ní Mháille into one of Ireland’s most formidable figures.
What has long fascinated me about Gráinne is her absolute courage and nimbleness. In an era with no electricity, GPS, or even acceptance of a woman's autonomy, she built a reputation as a fearsome seafarer, feeding her clan and holding back the violent incursion of the English in her territory. She commanded sometimes 200 men at a time, inspiring their fierce loyalty—with many of them following her when she left her combative husband's clan after he died in a skirmish.
Her independence and dexterity, pivoting when necessary, made her difficult for the English to keep track of, let alone dominate. She adjusted to circumstances. She brought not only force but strategy borne out of decades of experience on the sea. She learned from the time she first sailed with her father, reading the wind and the waves, navigating through storms. She earned a living trading, collecting tolls, and plundering, while commanding men and earning their respect in the process.
But courage and seamanship alone don't explain how she lasted as long as she did. Resisting England for 50 years during a century of systematic violent incursion and land theft required multiple approaches. While she could fight, then vanish into the sea and reappear somewhere else unexpectedly, she could also negotiate, petition, and argue her case in writing, in their own language, and on their own terms. This audaciousness, and the fluidity with which she maneuvered, were a form of power that no title or system could easily contain. It is what also made Sir Richard Bingham, who eventually became Governor of Connacht, so obsessed with bringing her to heel.
(Keelin McCool)
By the time Bingham was appointed governor in 1584, England’s approach to Ireland had hardened quite a bit. Its earlier policy of surrender and regrant, employed first by King Henry VIII, which persuaded Gaelic chieftains to trade in their ancestral authority for English titles, was giving way to more forceful tactics. The 1500s Plantation era was now gathering speed, and operating on a colder, more avaricious principle: confiscate the land, remove those who had always lived on it, and replace them with Protestant settlers who would be loyal to London. Over half a million acres in Ulster alone was eventually stripped away this way. Ireland’s landscape was changing hands, plot by plot and field by field, and its “ownership” recorded in and defined by a ledger in an office across the sea.
The impact on Gráinne’s way of life was calculated and deliberate, as it aimed to dismantle what she had spent her life building. Her way of life and her authority depended on movement: boats, routes, trade, collecting tolls, the ability to appear and disappear along a coastline she grew up alongside and knew far better than the foreigners sent to subdue her. The significance of this resistance had made her dangerous to the English state, because it represented a different way of organized power. Far outside offices and administrative policy, she was living proof that there was authority that could not be contained.
Bingham was acutely aware of this threat, and it made his campaign against her all the more relentless and personal. He had one of her sons, Owen, killed; conspired to turn her second son, Murrough, against her; and had her youngest thrown in jail and threatened with hanging. She learned that Owen had been bound, strung up and stabbed with daggers, contrary to Bingham’s account that he had been killed while trying to escape. And this difference in accounts was not incidental--it was intentional. It was a battle for who got to erase legacy, and whose account would survive.
He also stripped her of her cattle, ransacked her castles, had her imprisoned, and called her someone who "imprudently passed the part of womanhood." So, according to Bingham—and by extension, the state—a woman with ships, men, and maritime authority (and the nerve to use all three) was not, according to the Crown, a "ruler."
(Keelin McCool)
But even with Tibbot in the Tower, her property gone, and few options left, she didn't disappear into the sea. She wrote a letter to the Queen. She then answered Lord Burghley's eighteen preliminary questions in detail - about her life, her marriages, her operations, her alliances. She presented herself not as an outlaw but as a woman of stature, driven by circumstance. Then she sailed to England and put her case directly to Elizabeth.
That is not simply survival. It is a kind of intelligence that tends to get written out of the histories of people who are regarded as “inconvenient."
The document survives. So does she—and my film, "Mama Pirate," will make sure of it.
*Keelin McCool is a writer/producer/actor. As co-producer of the gender equality in Hollywood documentary "This Changes Everything", she enlisted Meryl Streep, Shonda Rhimes, Cate Blanchett, and others to participate. She is currently in development with the feature "Mama Pirate." For more, stay up-to-date on the project on Instagram @MamaPirateFilm.