English Countess, Irish Earl

The Social World of Frances, Countess of Clanricard, 1567–1632

Bernadette Cunningham

Frances Walsingham was the only surviving daughter of an Elizabethan secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham. In modern times Frances has enjoyed numerous cameo appearances in books about prominent individuals in Tudor and early Stuart court society. There have been many studies of the careers of her father as administrator and royal spymaster, and of each of her first two husbands, Sir Philip Sidney, a soldier and renowned poet who died tragically young, and Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, a charming and ambitious military leader who overstepped his role and paid with his life. Although she lived in a succession of patriarchal households, in a world where even elite women were regarded as legally and socially inferior to men, her story can be told. 

When she married for a third time in 1604, her choice of an Irishman, Richard Burke, fourth earl of Clanricard, surprised seasoned court observers. Focussing on this English countess and the Irishman with whom she spent the second half of her life, this book offers new perspectives not just on the social and political networks that they cultivated and on which they relied, but also on wider aspects of English–Irish relationships in the early modern era. Theirs is a multi-faceted story of contrasting backgrounds, interlinked elite social networks, their building of new manor houses at Tonbridge in Kent and at Portumna in east Galway, their management of extensive landed estates in two countries, their position as Catholics (one a convert) in a Protestant state, the blended family they reared, and their own enduring relationship over three decades in the early Stuart era.

Bernadette Cunningham is a retired librarian based in Dublin. She has published widely on early modern Ireland, and is the author of numerous books, including, The annals of the four masters: Irish history, kingship and society in the early seventeenth century (Four Courts Press, 2014). She is a former winner of the Irish Historical Research Prize awarded by the National University of Ireland.