Portumna Castle will host a talk on the woman who erected Ireland's greatest manor house of the early seventeenth century, on Sunday, May 24, at 4pm.
Frances Walsingham was the daughter of Elizabeth I’s secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham, and was married in succession to two famous men: at 16 to Sir Philip Sidney, a soldier and poet who died young, and then to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, the charming and ambitious military leader who overstepped his role with his queen, and paid with his life.
When she married for a third time, in 1603, Walsingham’s choice of an Irishman, Richard Burke, fourth earl of Clanricard, surprised seasoned royal court observers.
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, Dr Bernadette Cunningham has interrogated her life story in her new book English Countess, Irish Earl on which this month’s talk is based.
Cunningham’s study offers new perspectives on the social and political networks that Frances and her Galwegian nobleman cultivated, and English–Irish relationships in the early modern era.
This included building 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 in a Protestant state, the blended family they reared, and their own enduring relationship over three decades in the early Stuart era.
The talk is free, and Cunningham’s book is available from www.FourCourtsPress.ie priced €40
