The Blarney Stone

Some conquests are refused with the sword and some are refused with the pen. The pen is the slower instrument and, in certain countries, the more durable. A lord who answers a summons with a courteous letter, and answers the next summons with another courteous letter, and the one after that with a third, is not yielding and not rebelling. He is doing a third thing, for which the English of the sixteenth century had no settled word, until they found one at his expense.

THE LORD OF MUSKERRY

Cormac Teige McCarthy held Muskerry from 1560, and Blarney as his principal seat, in a country the Tudor administration had decided to bring inside the law of England. The policy was called surrender and regrant: the Gaelic lord was to come up to Dublin in person, lay down his title under the old Brehon custom of tanistry, by which the chief was chosen from the kindred, and receive his lands back as an English barony, heritable by primogeniture, forfeit at the crown's pleasure. The cattle-fines that walked in the country would become rents on paper. The kindred would become tenants. The Senchas Mór, the old Munster law-book whose fifteenth-century recension sat in a chest at his elbow with his great-grandfather's marginalia in the margins, would become a curiosity. He read Latin, courtly English, serviceable French. He read the policy clearly. So did every other Gaelic lord between Kerry and the Pale. Some had fought it. Shane O'Neill had fought it and was dead. The Desmonds were even now fighting it and would shortly be dead. Cormac Teige had been writing letters about it for nine years.

THE WET MORNING

On a wet morning in October 1581 the latest summons lay on the desk in the upper solar at Blarney, brought up from Cork the day before by a tired messenger. The light was grey through the high windows. The fire in the iron basket had burned down to embers and no one had been called to feed it. The letter was from the Lord Deputy at Dublin Castle and it required Cormac Teige McCarthy, lord of Muskerry, to submit personally at Dublin within forty days, to surrender his title, to receive it back as an English peerage, to accept English law of inheritance for his lands. Forty days. He was in his late forties himself. Twenty-one years he had been lord here. He laid the letter flat and weighted one corner with a small piece of bog-oak the carpenter's boy had given him as a child.

THE THIRD ANSWER

To go up to Dublin in forty days and submit was to lose tanistry at a stroke, to hand the chiefship not to the man the kindred would have chosen but to his eldest son, to become an English baron in a country in which English barons held their lands at the king's pleasure and fell when the wind shifted in Whitehall. To refuse outright was to bring an army through the gap of Macroom in March, when the ground hardened. Between the two stood a third answer, the one he had used for nine years, the one that had no name yet in either language. A courteous letter. An expression of unfeigned and dutiful intention to come up to Dublin at the first opportunity that the season, and the security of the realm, and the health of his person allowed. Three subordinate clauses on the floods on the Bandon, two on the lawless men of north Cork, one regretful reference to a slight indisposition suffered in recent weeks, the deepest loyalty to her gracious Majesty, an assurance he would not delay his submission a moment longer than the necessities of the country required. Twenty-three lines. The Dublin clerks would read it twice. On the second reading they would see he had promised nothing. By then it would be April. By April his mother's brother in Madrid would have written again on the prospects of a Spanish landing, and the country would be a different country, and the letter would have done its work, which was to spend six months of the crown's patience for the price of an hour at a desk. He picked up the bog-oak, set it down again, and turned his chair towards the side-table where his clerk waited.

THE DICTATION

Patrick, he said, take this in Latin. The salutation is the standard one to His Excellency the Lord Deputy. Begin. Patrick Carthach, who had written sixty of these letters in the past nine years, did not look up. He dipped his pen. The dictation took twelve minutes. Floods, lawless men, indisposition, loyalty, the closing assurance. The seal was set in green wax. The letter was on the road for Dublin by the Tuesday. In the upper solar the embers had gone cold by the time the door closed behind the messenger. Cormac Teige sat a long while at the desk, the Senchas Mór open at no particular page, and listened to the rain on the lead.

THE READING IN DUBLIN

In Dublin Castle the letter was read, as he had expected, twice. It was filed. A reply was drafted requiring him to set a definite date. He answered the reply. They answered his answer. The correspondence is preserved in the State Papers Ireland, sheet upon sheet of it, the regret, the floods, the indisposition, the loyalty, the deadline pushed by a season, by a year, by another year. The frustration of the English clerks comes up off the page like damp off a wall. They knew, by the third or fourth letter, what was being done to them. They could not name it. They had no word in their own language for an instrument that was neither submission nor refusal, that consumed their time and gave them nothing to hang a charge upon. Tradition, late but stubborn, has Queen Elizabeth herself, handed yet another McCarthy letter across a council table, say this is all Blarney, what he says he never means. Whether the exact words crossed her lips on a particular afternoon is undocumented. The underlying tradition is solid. The word entered the English language from her court, and from his desk, and from the green wax on the road from Cork.

THE NAME ON THE STONE

Cormac Teige McCarthy died in 1583 holding Muskerry, never having in fact submitted. His son Cormac Mac Diarmada continued the strategy, and his grandson after him. The McCarthys held Blarney through the rest of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, never quite refusing the crown, never quite accepting it. Blarney passed out of the family at last in the Williamite confiscations of 1691, through several hands to the Jefferyes in 1703, and to the Colthursts later in the eighteenth century, who hold it still. The practice of climbing the parapet and leaning back over the machicolation in the south-east battlement to kiss the stone is no older than the 1820s; the first guidebook account is from 1825, and the Victorian American press took it up in the 1870s and never set it down. Four hundred thousand visitors a year go up the steps. Most of them, the staff will tell you quietly, do not in fact kiss the stone but pretend to in front of the camera, which is fitting, because the gift the McCarthys gave the English language was never the kiss. It was the letter. Blarney is in the Oxford English Dictionary: plausible verbal evasion, soft talk that buys the speaker a season. The earliest letter that produced the word sits in a deposit at Kew, sheet of paper, green wax, twenty-three lines, three subordinate clauses on the floods on the Bandon.

THE INSTRUMENT

Some lords are remembered for the battle they won and some for the battle they declined to fight. The instrument Cormac Teige McCarthy chose, on that October morning and on a hundred mornings before and after, was not the sword and not the surrender but the courteous, dilatory, faintly apologetic letter, dictated in twelve minutes from a desk in an upper solar in County Cork, and it held the gap of Macroom for as long as any sword would have held it, and longer. In the chest at Blarney the Senchas Mór still lay open at no particular page. On the desk, the small piece of bog-oak, weighting nothing now, given to a child by a carpenter's boy and kept for forty years.