GRACE O’MALLEY MEETS QUEEN ELIZABETH.
GRACE O’MALLEY MEETS QUEEN ELIZABETH. My father used to tell us at the dinner table that Grace O’Malley had come to England to meet Queen Elizabeth. I am afraid that I always was inclined to think that this was part of Grace O’Malley’s legend. It seems too good to be true—if you made a movie, you would have to invent a climactic scene where the two queens confront each other.
It’s not a legend. Chambers reprints documents from the Elizabethan archives which prove the meeting. As a lawyer, I was particularly impressed by a set of 18 interrogatories propounded by Lord Burghley to Grace O”Malley and her responses. The interrogatories primarily seek facts relating to a claim under English property law. (Grace was seeking the grant of what English law would have awarded a widow.)
Grace’s answer to Interrogatory 11, however, did refer to her years of clashes with English officials. She described how in 1586 she had been “apprehended and tied in a rope” by English soldiers and brought to a English official “who caused a new gallows to be made for her last funeral….” (Grace was freed “upon the hostage and pledge” of her son-in-law, who was known as “the Devil’s Hook”.)