Silken Thomas

There are houses whose authority is so old that the kingdom around them has come to mistake them for furniture. They have governed so long, and on terms so favourable to the men they govern with, that the work of unseating them is thought to be impossible by polite means and unthinkable by any other. When such a house falls, it is rarely because a stronger one has risen against it. More often the heir, given a rumour in the morning and a chamber full of bishops by noon, decides the falling for himself.

THE HOUSE OF KILDARE

For four generations the FitzGeralds of Kildare had been the working government of Ireland under an English title. Garret Mór and Garret Óg, grandfather and father, had been Lord Deputies in succession; the Pale was administered from Maynooth as much as from Dublin; the king's writ ran where a Geraldine countersigned it and stopped where he did not. The family had risen in the Norman invasion of the twelfth century, taken Irish to the household, married into Ó Néill and Ó Conchobhair, and emerged by the sixteenth century as a hybrid lordship that English officials called overmighty and Irish poets called noble. The cry on their banner was Crom Abú, after the rock of Croom in Limerick where the dynasty had first held ground. In the spring of 1534 the head of the house, the ninth earl, was in London answering charges before the Council. He had left his son Thomas, twenty-one years old, as Vice-Deputy of Ireland in his stead.

THE RUMOUR FROM LONDON

On a Tuesday in early June a courier came up from the south with word that Garret Óg had been beheaded in the Tower. The news was false; the earl was alive, though wounded from an old gunshot and weakening. It was the kind of rumour that arrives when an administration wishes a son to act rashly so it may be done with the house at one blow. Thomas heard it at Maynooth. He had been bred to suspicion of the English Council and to confidence in his own following. He sent for his uncles. He sent for the Kildare horse. He called for the silk-fringed helmets the household troop had worn since his father's time, the fringes that had already in the alehouses of Dublin given him the byname Silken Thomas. By the morning of the eleventh of June he had a hundred and forty riders at his back and the Sword of State in his hand, and he turned the column north along the Liffey towards St Mary's Abbey, where the Council was sitting.

THE COUNCIL CHAMBER

St Mary's stood on the north bank of the river, its eastern range giving onto a precinct wide enough to take horse. The chamber was on the upper floor. Inside sat the assembled English administration of the Pale: John Allen the Lord Chancellor, the Archbishop of Dublin, the treasurer, six earls, seven bishops, the bureaucracy by which a kingdom was held at distance. The Sword of State lay across the cushion before the Chancellor's seat. It was the symbol on which the whole arrangement rested. A boy of twenty-one in a fringed helmet was, by the calendar of the chamber, the deputy-governor of Ireland, sworn to defend that sword and the king it represented. He dismounted at the abbey door. He went up the stair with seven of his closest about him. The Council looked up.

A SECOND AT ST MARY'S

Now the chamber narrowed to the breadth of a man's resolve. The rumour pressed at his ear and would not be put down: his father was dead in the Tower, the indictment for treason would follow within the week, the English wanted the news to reach him before the warrant did. The arithmetic was older than the morning. To make terms now was to be hanged in London by Christmas; to make terms in six months was to be hanged in London the following year; the terms were the same and only the dying differed. He had behind him the Geraldines of Kildare and Carlow and Wexford, the castles of Maynooth and Athy and Leixlip, the largest private muster in the kingdom. He had behind him also four generations of grandfathers who had governed Ireland and had not been governed by it. The country, he thought, was not a thing to be defended; it was a thing to be reckoned with, and at one-and-twenty he had not yet had the chance to do that reckoning in his own name. The good bourgeois virtues of a deputy-governor, patience, caution, the waiting on certified news, would have served a clerk's son well; they were of no use to the heir of a house that had lived by its forwardness for a hundred and forty years. He walked the length of the chamber. He took the Sword of State in both hands and threw it flat upon the council table. It slid three inches across the oak and stopped. John Allen was on his feet. Thomas said, in the voice of his rank, that he would not be the king's deputy in a country where his father lay murdered in a Tower; that he renounced the commission and took up his own. Then he gave the cry of his house, Crom Abú, and turned and went out.

MAYNOOTH AND THE PARDON

The war was on by the next morning. He rode the Sword of State home to Maynooth and the Geraldine country rose behind him. Through the summer of 1534 he laid siege to Dublin Castle, the one place in the kingdom from which an English administration could be supplied by sea. Archbishop Allen, attempting to slip out of the country, was overtaken at Artane and killed by Thomas's men, an act of which the young earl never afterwards spoke without a flinch. In October Sir William Skeffington landed with English reinforcements and artillery; the war turned from a Leinster rising into a kingdom's reduction. In March 1535 Skeffington's gunners drove mines under the curtain wall of Maynooth and brought it down in a quarter of an hour, the first effective use of siege gunpowder in Ireland. The garrison surrendered on terms. The terms were broken at the gate: the men were taken out and hanged, and the act passed into Geraldine memory as the Pardon of Maynooth, a phrase the family would carry, dry as a wound, into the next century.

THE TOWER AND TYBURN

Thomas held out in the Bog of Allen through the summer of 1535. He was betrayed in August by his own kinsmen and surrendered on Lord Leonard Grey's promise of his life. The promise was honoured to the gate of the Tower and no further. He was kept eighteen months in the same stone in which his father had died; for Garret Óg had not in fact been executed in June 1534 at all. The old earl had been dying of his wounds, slowly, in a chamber upstairs, and went to his rest in September of that year without ever being told that his son had risen for him. On the third of February 1537 Thomas was drawn on a hurdle to Tyburn, hanged, cut down living, drawn and quartered. Five of his uncles were hanged beside him; three had taken no part in the revolt. The Kildare earldom was attainted, the lands forfeited, the Geraldines as a Leinster political power put out.

WHAT SURVIVED

The English administration moved into Dublin Castle in earnest for the first time, having held it for a hundred years only by Geraldine sufferance. The infant Gerald FitzGerald, Thomas's half-brother, was carried out of Ireland by household retainers, hidden in Thomond, then France, then Rome, and travelled the courts of Europe for fourteen years before Mary Tudor restored him to a portion of the estates in 1554. The dynasty never again carried the weight it had carried on the tenth of June 1534. What it kept was the surname, which the diaspora carries still from Kerry to Massachusetts; and the war-cry, Crom Abú, which is cut today into the gate-arch of the ruined keep at Maynooth, above the line of the wall where Skeffington's mine went in.

Of the great offered hour, Stefan Zweig wrote that it lifts the bold and grinds the faint. The young earl of Kildare was not ground. He took the hour as it came to him, on bad information and on full confidence, and rode through it at the head of his hundred and forty. That the hour took his life and his earldom in payment is, by the lights of the house that bred him, a separate accounting. What stands, four and a half centuries on, is the gate at Maynooth, the iron letters on the arch, and the three short syllables a child of the name will still recognise: Crom Abú.