'A Great Fire in the Midst of the Town': The Burning of Our Lady of Coleraine

The iconoclasm which accompanied the Reformation was one of its most distressing aspects for Catholics in Ireland. In some places the destruction of much-loved statues or historic relics was done quietly and without leaving any record. Yet in others, for example the burning in Dublin of the Bachall Íosa, the Staff of Jesus, a relic, in the words of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux 'deemed of the highest honor and sanctity' in Ireland, it seems that there was a public, performative aspect designed to deliver a message of humiliation to demoralize the Catholic population. The Annals preserved in Trinity College, Dublin recorded that in 1539: 

"The most miraculous image of Mary which was at Baile Atha Trium, and which the Irish people all honoured for a long time before that, which used to heal the blind, the deaf, the lame, and every disease in like manner, was burned by the Saxons. And the Staff of Jesus, which was in Dublin, and which wrought many wonders and miracles in Ireland since the time of Patrick down to that time, and which was in the hand of Christ himself, was burned by the Saxons in like manner. And not only that, but there was not a holy cross, nor an image of Mary, nor other celebrated image in Ireland over which their power had reached, that they did not burn..."

 J. C. Crosthwaite, ed. The Book of Obits and Martyrology of the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, Commonly called Christ Church, Dublin (Dublin, 1844), xvi-xviii. 

Much less well-known than the burning of Our Lady of Trim, yet much better-documented, was the destruction of a similarly wonder-working statue of Our Lady of Coleraine, County Derry, in 1611. Unlike the Dublin burnings, which took place at the beginning of the Reformation in the reign of Henry VIII, the public destruction in Coleraine took place against the backdrop of the Plantation of Ulster by the first Stuart king, James I. It was the English former Augustinian friar, George Browne, appointed as Archbishop of Dublin in 1536 who organized the destruction of the Bachall Íosa; in Coleraine it would be another Englishman, Brutus Babington, appointed Bishop of Derry in 1610, who commissioned the destruction of the wonder-working statue but a Scotsman, Andrew Knox, made Bishop of Raphoe in the same year, who would actually carry it out. 

Coleraine was one of the new towns established as part of the Plantation of Ulster, receiving its charter in 1613, but the founding of a church at Cúil Raithin, 'the corner or nook of the ferns' is described in the medieval Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick.  The Dominican House at Coleraine, established on the River Bann facing the town was founded in 1244 and one writer has suggested that it may have been the original home of the statue known as Our Lady of Coleraine [1]. There was a tradition that the community at Coleraine was martyred en masse during the reign of Elizabeth I but the event went undocumented [2].  The existence of the statue at Agivey, a few miles from Coleraine, was documented in the early seventeenth century by the Anglican Bishop of Derry, George Montgomery in the survey of his new ecclesiastical territories:

Prope Aghdowie sunt Kilrian et Ageive locus canonicorum ubi in capella est imago beate marie ad quam fuit frequens peregrinacio…

Near Aghadowey are Kilrea and Agivey, a place of canons, where in the chapel is an image of the Blessed Mary to which there was frequent pilgrimage…

 A. F. O’D. Alexander, 'Bishop Montgomery's Survey of the Bishoprics of Derry, Raphoe and Clogher' in “The O’Kane Papers.” Analecta Hibernica, no. 12, 1943, pp. 67–127. 

Bishop Babington, who succeeded Montgomery in 1610, was a native of Cheshire, who attempted to recruit native Irish clergy to the Reformation cause and to evangelize using the Irish language. Even more zealous was the Scotsman appointed in 1610 to the neighbouring diocese of Raphoe, Andrew Knox, Bishop of the Isles in Scotland. His experience of promoting the Reformation among the Gaelic Highland Scots may have made him an especially desirable candidate for the position [3]. The part played by both of these men in the destruction of the statue of Our Lady was described in a letter of 1611 by Father Thomas Lawndrie which reported that Bishop Babington had suggested the deed to Knox:

"There came into my hands not long since a letter written by a  friend from Drogheda, certifying it to be credibly reported that Knox, the governor of the redshanks (him the King terms his swaggering Bishop), and this summer, he being in Dublin, did his endeavour to induce the State to a bloody persecution, after  taking view of the Bishopric or lands given him in the North, committed in his way homeward sacrilege not left altogether unpunished. Sic autem post alia habet epistola. Knox in his way took occasion to visit the superintendent Bishop of Derry (Anglus hic erat, et Babbington, ni fallor, illi nomen) who,  after conference, seeking to take his leave, was requested by the said Bishop of Derry, that as he did pass to Coleraine, he should enter into a little church by the way, wherein, a fair  picture or image of the B. Virgin was, which finding, prayed him to pull down the said image and to burn the same, for that the people (as he said) went thither of superstitionty to worship the same, which the said Knox promised to do, and in passing that way, went into the church and found the image there accordingly, whereupon he commanded his men to go and pull down the said image, which his people loathing and refusing to do, he ascended himself, and pulled down the image, and caused one of his men to carry it to Coleraine, where he caused a great fire to be made in the midst of the town, and had the image cast therein, which remaining a long time in the fire, till the fire was near spent, and taking no hurt, it was taken up out of the  fire, and a new fire made, whereunto the said image was cast again, which, notwithstanding, took no great hurt by the said  fire; and being admired of many, the said Knox, fearing farther notice should be taken thereof, sent for a carpenter, and caused him to bore several great holes into several parts of the  image, whereunto he also caused a company of small dry sticks to  be thrust with powder and tar, which being kindled, the image took fire and was burned. The same day the Bishop of Derry suddenly died, being in perfect health an hour before; soon after the aforesaid Knox took shipping to go for Scotland, and  being at sea, was overtaken by a foul storm, and since nothing  heard what became of him, a just judgment for so foul a fact. The day the Bishop of Derry died, was to come before him the clergy of his diocese, and such as would not conform should lose their benefices, who coming (with what resolution I know not) found him dead. The church wherein the image was is but six miles from Coleraine, wherein remains to this day many monuments of the several miracles wrought by visiting thereof, as the lame and blind to receive their limbs and sight: my cousin Gilbert Lambint, with several others of this town, hath seen the monuments, and saith that in their lives they never saw a fairer image.  Hactenus  epistola. And this I write because I  hear it talked of, and partly acknowledged by the Protestants  themselves....  

From my lodging, 4° November. 1611.

"Your always assured,

"THOMAS LAWNDRIE.

"Since the writing hereof, I spoke with one that was in Drogheda  the other day, who says it is held for certain there that Knox is drowned, he for whom the poor inhabitants of the Island durst not almost look upon any that might acquaint them with the means of their salvation. James Sail also telleth me more, that he was in  Coleraine himself, at the burning of the image in the manner aforesaid….

 W. McDonald, 'Irish Ecclesiastical Colleges since the Reformation', Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 10 (1873), 296-7.

 Sadly, this letter does not contain an actual description of the 'image', although it was presumably a later medieval wooden statue.  There are surviving examples in Ireland such as Our Lady of Clonfert, but without further information it is impossible to know if the Coleraine image was in the same style. There are, nevertheless, some interesting incidental details in the priest's report. He describes the reluctance of Knox's men to obey the order to pull down the statue, thus forcing the man himself to undertake his own dirty work and casting him in the role of chief villain. The statue is hauled off to Coleraine, then being established as one of the chief centres of the Plantation, where British civilization and its reformed religion will replace the barbarism of the natives and their Papist idolatry. By causing 'a great fire to be made in the midst of the town', which a recent commentator suggests was probably the market place or Diamond [4] Knox was demonstrating the new town's Protestant credentials. By contrast, in his use of miraculous tropes Father Landrie presents a firmly Catholic response. The statue initially resists burning, confirming the belief of Catholics in its wonder-working abilities and driving Knox to make even more extreme efforts to destroy it. Then the villains of the piece are both called to account, with the Bishop of Derry (Babington) being a victim of sudden death and Knox being reported as lost at sea. Babington's sudden demise is confirmed by other sources. Sir Arthur Chichester, Lord Deputy of Ireland, wrote in a letter of September 17, 1611 of the death of the bishop "on the 10th inst. suddenly, being well at 7 o'clock evening and dead at 8" [5]. In the Catholic mind the timing and manner of his death were directly related to his impious actions. Reports of Knox's death, however, had been greatly exaggerated. He lived on until 1633, but it might be significant that the rumours of his demise originated in Drogheda, for Palesmen from this town were known to have been staunch supporters of the pilgrimage to Our Lady's shrine at Agivey [6].  

It is equally interesting to see how the story of the destruction of the statue of Our Lady of Coleraine survived and developed. The Munster exile, Philip O'Sullivan Beare, in his 1621 Historiae catholicae Iberniae compendium added the detail that Babington, whom he describes as Pseudoepiscopus Anglus, committed a further sacrilege by having a pair of trousers fashioned from a cope, which caught fire when he tried to wear them! [7]. The same incident made its way into the eighteenth-century Dominican history the 1762 Hibernia Dominicana of Bishop Thomas de Burgo and had lost nothing in the telling. A hostile Irish Anglican source published both stories in 1829, ironically the year of Catholic Emancipation:

Bishop Burke in his laboured book, "The Hibernia Dominicana,".. repeats what Fathers Porter, and Con of Colerain, in the 17th century, tell of a Protestant Bishop, who, in order to turn the Catholic religion, its rites, and its priesthood into ridicule, had that part of a Priest's vestments which is called a chesuble, and which he had carried off from some plundered altar, transformed into a lower garment, whose name, in modern days, is inexpressible. But, lo! the moment he attempted to encase himself in the garment, he became enveloped in blazes, and before his friends and attendants could divest him of the integument, he was burned to death. Another story which the Priests industriously circulated, and which is also repeated by Burke; that Brutus Babington, the Protestant Bishop of Derry, had the impious audacity to seize on a miraculous image of the Virgin Mother of God, that was worshipped with intense adoration in the town of Colerain; and the misbeliever ordered two of his apparitors to cast the image on a burning pile of wood, which he had prepared for its destruction. But the moment the satellites of heresy laid their unhallowed hands on the image, they fell down dead. Now this signal exhibition of Divine vengeance, might have deterred common heretics; but it seems that these Derrymen, with an obstinacy of heresy which sticks to their posterity up to this very day, were by no means kept back from their iconoclastic impiety; therefore, at the instigation of Bishop Brutus, they carried the image to the market place, and there, cramming its hollow parts with gunpowder, and daubing it with pitch, they cast it on the blazing pile. But, lo, a miracle! The flames, the moment the sacred wood touched them, drew back in bashfulness; the pitch would not burn, the powder would not explode, and the entire fire went out, just as if the river Bann was floated over it. Whereupon the heretic Bishop was struck with such terror, that after ordering the blessed image to be restored to the altar from whence it was ravished, he took to his bed, and amidst agony and dismay, breathed out his impious soul!

 ‘An Historical Sketch of Popery in Ireland’, The Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Magazine, Vol VIII, 1829, footnote, p.36.

I couldn't help noting here how Bishop Knox, to whom the actual destruction of the statue was attributed at the time, had vanished, leaving Brutus Babington as the sole villain. 

We will let a modern historian, the Rev. Doctor Brian Mac Cuarta S.J., have the last word:

The political background suggests that the broad outline of this report of the shrine's destruction is plausible... the event coincided with the start of a crackdown against Catholicism led by the lord deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester, with whom Bishop Knox consulted earlier that year, hence the bishop's coercive stance was in line with government policy...What allegedly happened at Coleraine was an early and violent encounter between the new state church and native society in north Ulster. It was typical of the destruction of relics and statues, and the profanation of sacred vessels and vestments, widespread in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Devotion to the shrine by Palesmen ensured that contemporary testimony to this event has survived to a perhaps unparalleled degree. By contrast, as the state church was taking over what remained of the parish churches in the north, the destruction of the surviving images there went unrecorded.

Brian Mac Cuarta, S.J., Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland 1601-41 (Dublin, 2007), 40.

 

References

 [1] Henry A. Jefferies, 'Bishop George Montgomery’s Survey of the Parishes of Derry Diocese: A Complete Text from c. 1609.' Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society, vol. 17, no. 1, 1996, footnote 19 p. 59. 

[2] Thomas S. Flynn, O.P., The Irish Dominicans, 1536-1641 (Four Courts Press, 1993), p.74.

[3] Alan Ford, 'Andrew Knox', Online Dictionary of Irish Biography https://www.dib.ie/biography/knox-andrew-a4605

[4] Robert Armstrong, 'Planting Protestantism in Urban Ulster' in B. Scott, (ed.), Ulster's Plantation Towns: Society and Administration (Four Courts Press, 2019), 167.

[5] Daphne Pochin-Mould, The Irish Dominicans (Dublin, 1957), p.98.

[6] Brian Mac Cuarta, S.J., Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland 1601-41 (Four Courts Press, 2007), 39.

 [7] ibid.

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'Ready to Suffer All Kinds of Torments for the Faith of Christ': Margery Barnewall

March 8 is International Women's Day, when a spotlight is shone on great women from history and their achievements. The woman I am honouring today, Margery Barnewall (fl. 1547-1583), would not, perhaps, tick too many contemporary boxes as a feminist heroine, yet like those involved in the struggle for women's suffrage she was prepared to face arrest, interrogation and imprisonment. Her surname is an Old English one and she may have been one of the Barnewalls of Turvey, a leading family of County Dublin. The Barnewalls held the Priory of Grace Dieu near Portrane and built Turvey House close by. It was an important centre for Catholic recusancy and sheltered the English Jesuit martyr Saint Edmund Campion for a few months in 1571. It is possible, suggests Bronagh Anne Mc Shane, that Margery may have been the daughter of the builder of Turvey House, Sir Christopher Barnewall (d.1575) and his wife Marion described by Saint Edmund as 'a very religious and very modest woman' who had treated him most kindly [1]. The experiences of Catholic women during the Reformation era in Ireland are the topic of much research by the current generation of scholars. They have shown that women played a variety of roles, indeed, by their refusal to bring their children up with the new religious practices and by the pressure they put on their husbands by refusing to attend Protestant services, the resistance of married women was crucial to the survival of the faith at this time.  Following the suppression of religious houses nuns were forced to join communities in exile abroad, yet there were other women continuing to live as consecrated virgins in Ireland, but not formally within a religious order. In the 1560s Limerick, for example,  had a group known as the Mena Bocht (Poor Women) who had taken vows of chastity and who ministered to the poor. Similar groups have been documented in Dublin and Drogheda. The Jesuits in particular supported this type of female apostolate and prominent priests such as Limerick's Father David Wolfe and Dublin's Father Henry Fitzsimon provided spiritual direction and leadership to them. It was another Irish Jesuit, Father John Howlin (d.1599) who recorded the story of Marjorie Barnewall in his pioneering catalogue of Irish martyrs, Perbreve compendium, which listed forty-six Irish people who had suffered for the faith in the decade between 1578 and 1588. She was one of two women included, the other being Blessed Margaret Bermingham (Ball), whom Father Howlin knew personally. He described Margery as having 'dedicated her virginity from her earliest years to God' who at the age of thirty 'was conferred with a blessed veil by a certain Catholic bishop according to an ancient tradition of Ireland', after which she 'joined a company of chaste honest women, and devout virgins'. Father Howlin met Margery in Rome in 1583 and received the account of her experiences directly from her own lips. Father Howlin's work in turn was expanded by Bishop David Rothe (Roothe, d.1650) in his 1619 catalogue the De Processu Martyriali which reached a wider audience in Europe. Introducing Father Howlin's two heroines he wrote: 

"As I have thus given a few examples of constancy, taken from every rank of the male sex, both ecclesiastical and secular, primates, archbishops, bishops, abbots, deans, archdeacons, and other priests of different orders, of whom I spoke in my catalogue; and, as I there made mention of illustrious women, if now I give two examples, one of a married woman and the other of a virgin. I shall not seem wholly to have omitted the sex. I shall, therefore, here briefly gives a few particulars, first of a married woman, that is a widow, and then of a virgin." [2]

And so below is Bishop Rothe's account of the virgin, Margery Barnewall,  as translated by Myles O'Reilly in his 1869 collection Memorials of those who Suffered for the Catholic Faith in Ireland in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries. Among the standard martyrological tropes there are many vivid and fascinating details contained within it. Following her arrest in 1580 Margery faced interrogation from the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin Adam Loftus (d.1605), who was less than impressed by her chosen way of life. Her courage at resisting this ordeal is further demonstrated in the account of her flight to Saint Malo where she is forced to fend off both the threat of fierce dogs and of sexual assault. There is a particularly interesting mention of a citizen who is able to act as an interpreter for Margery. Mary O'Dowd, who features Margery Barnewall in her 2014 book on the history of women in Ireland, says of this man:

The citizen of St. Malo who acted as interpreter for Margery Barnewall before the local bishop in about 1580 had by coincidence learned English and Irish in the Barnewall household twenty years previously. He was, according to John Howlin, one of many Frenchmen of that area who had been sent to Ireland for language-learning reasons, exchanging with the sons of Dubliners and Palesmen who came to study French. [3]

 We do not know the date of Margery Barnewall's death but on International Women's Day she can deservedly take a place in the ranks of courageous women who bravely withstood hardship to defend what she believed.

 

DAME MARGERY BARNEWALL.

I GIVE her life from Dr. Roothe :

This virgin was born of noble parents, and when she attained a marriageable age determined to dedicate her virginity to God, and in her thirtieth year received the holy veil from the Catholic bishop. The name of virgin, says St. Ambrose, is a title of modesty, and the one of whom I write did not disappoint the omen of the name; for she ever delighted in purity and the conversation of other devout and modest virgins. She dwelt, for the most part, in the city, or at least diocese, of Dublin; nor could her profession and mode of life be long concealed from the pretended bishop of the place, for information of it was given to him by a spy, not for misliking of the life of the holy virgin, but for hope of lucre from the archbishop. On receiving the information, he sent an apparitor to arrest the lady and bring her before him. She was first thrown into prison, and then brought out for a public examination. Many questions were put to her regarding her name, parentage, age, residence, and profession, to all of which she answered prudently and categorically. Her age was then thirty-three, her condition that of a virgin. 'How,' said the pseudobishop, 'can I believe that one so noble born, so well brought up, and so fair, could remain in this wicked world to that age a virgin?" This he took from the ideas of Luther, who, himself given up to concupiscence, remembered not those classes of eunuchs of whom our Lord speaks, of whom those who voluntarily renounce carnal pleasures for the kingdom of heaven obtain the reward; and though this work is difficult and beyond the ordinary strength of man, yet it is not impossible to Him whom all things obey and whose power is equal to his will. But our Sunamitess, who by the grace of God had observed that which she had promised, modestly blushing, answered that she marvelled her questioner should think it strange that God should give strength to observe the vow he had himself inspired, and which so many men and women in all ages had observed. Thus repulsed with regard to her vow of virginity, the bishop attacked her faith, using many artifices to induce her to swerve from the orthodox faith; but she boldly and plainly answered that she had hitherto lived in the bosom of the mother church Catholic and Roman, and was resolved in the same to die, nor was there aught in life which could shake this her resolution. Irritated by this answer, the bishop at once ordered her to be taken back into prison. After she had been there detained for some time, she escaped by the aid of her noble relatives, who bribed the jailer, and, having found a British ship in the port of Dublin, agreed with the master to take her to St. Malo. This is a city in the lesser Britain, called also Armorica, surrounded with walls and towers, yet for greater safety, when the gates are shut at night, large, fierce dogs are loosed to strengthen the guard. They roam outside the walls and ferociously attack any man or beast whom they may meet. The sailors spoke much among themselves before they arrived at the port; this inspired Dame Margery and her handmaiden with some fear, and she determined not rashly to expose herself to them.

"When the ship reached the port and had dropped her anchor, the captain and his men landed, leaving only two sailors to guard the women till morning, for it was late when they arrived in the bay, and they had to go some distance in a boat to land. The women feared the dogs on land, but the dogs on sea proved even more dangerous; for the two unprincipled sailors, finding themselves left alone with the two women, broke into the place where they were sleeping, and tried, first by offers and promises, and then by violence, to make them consent to their impure desires; but the holy virgins, calling God and our Blessed Lady to their aid, resisted alike their solicitations and their violence, and, strengthened by him who is the strength of those that call upon him, were enabled to defeat their unholy violence. At length, wearied with their obstinate resistance, the sailors left them, and, retiring to their own berths, slept heavily.

"All thought of sleep had fled from the terrified women, and, trembling lest they should again be attacked by these vile men, they thought of flying from that den of wild beasts. Tying their clothes tightly around them, they threw themselves into the sea, and, supported by their clothes, which floated on the water, were borne to the shore. But as they reached the land, having thus escaped two successive dangers, a third awaited them-the dread of the ferocious dogs who roamed round the walls at night and spared neither man nor beast. The maid was particularly terrified, but her mistress encouraged her, reminding her of the divine providence and goodness, and saying that it were better for them that their bodies should be devoured by dogs than their souls destroyed by vicious men. Thus they mutually encouraged each other, arming themselves with the sign of the cross, and imploring the divine assistance and the protection of the Blessed Virgin as they approached the shore. On their landing, the ferocious watch-dogs rushed at them, and the largest and fiercest placed his paws on the shoulders of the virgin, as if about to tear her; her maid, following behind, trembled, but the mistress, repeating the verse of the psalm, 'Many dogs surrounded me,' and speaking some words of her native Irish to the dog, gently stroked his head, and the dog, suddenly becoming gentle, with all his fellows, led them to the gate of the city, and guarded them there safely until the gates were opened, which, according to custom, was not until the sun had arisen.

"When those who had the charge of the keys of the gates, and of the dogs, opened them in the morning, they were astonished to see two women alive and unhurt in the midst of the savage dogs, and, after a few questions, they led them to the bishop of the place, who was then celebrating the divine mysteries in the church. The news of the strange event spread through the city, and a crowd assembled at the church to see the two women who, contrary to all example, had escaped safe from the dogs.

"The bishop, when he had finished Mass, examined them by means of an interpreter, for he did not understand Irish, nor they French or English. But by good fortune there was present a noble of Maclon, who had been brought up in Ireland, and who knew the parents of our Margery, perhaps even herself, having resided in the neighborhood, as there is a constant intercourse between the inhabitants of Maclon and Ireland, the young people of each country being entertained in the other to learn the language and custom of the people, as is still the custom in some parts of Ireland.

" In order more certainly to learn all the affair, the bishop sent for the captain, and asked him what he knew of the women. He frankly told the whole tale, how they had been recommended to him in Dublin, and had come in his ship, and how he had left them in it the preceding evening to await for day in order to land. Finally, the two sailors who had assaulted them were brought up, and, on their confessing their guilt, the two women whom they had sought to injure begged that they might be forgiven.

"All having thus come to light, the bishop, lest the recollection of these events should perish, ordered the whole examination and the result to be enrolled in the public registers of the town, and most hospitably entertained, during their stay, the two women thus preserved by the divine providence; nor when they departed did he allow them to leave empty-handed. They had made a vow to God, who had freed them from such great danger, to visit the shrine of St. James of Compostella. On their arrival there, the servant fell ill, and departed to the Lord. The stronger constitution of the mistress enabled her to continue her pilgrimage to Rome, and to visit the tombs of the apostles. There she related to her confessor the whole of this narrative of her imprisonment in Ireland and her escape, her voyage to Brittany, the assaults of the two sailors and her escape from their power, the unusual gentleness of the watch-dogs, and how the waves and the wild beasts had spared their innocence.

"Afterward, by her counsel and example, many pious women and religious maidens in Ireland dedicated their chastity to God, and, to use the words of St. Jerome, (Epist. 8, Ad Demetr.,) 'by the solemn words of the priest covered their consecrated heads with the virginal veil;' and many more would have done so had those who ruled the country allowed them to lead a cenobitical life. But since, according to the proverb, women require the protection either of a man or a wall, to guard them 'from the attacks of the noonday devil, from the arrow that flieth by day, and the thing that walketh in the night,' prudent men were cautious in exhorting the weaker sex to take on them the veil and vow of celibacy, lest the purity of that virginal garment should become tarnished in the heat of the worldly sun, since it is more easily guarded in the shade of the cloister than in the throng of the world. Yet there still remain in that land scattered shoots of that virginal tree, whose light shines the brighter for the surrounding darkness, and by whom the world, the flesh, and the devil are overcome.

"Our Margery was taken prisoner by the Protestants in Dublin, in the year 1580, and in the third following year, that is, 1583, in the month of October, reached Rome, and there gave an account of all these her wanderings to her confessor, from whom we learned them, and for the edification of our readers have here written them." -De Processu Martyriali.

Dr. Roothe does not mention, nor have I been able to find, the date or place of Dame Margery Barnewall's death. As he says himself, he collected, from time to time, what authentic accounts he could of the sufferings of those persecuted for the faith; and thus probably her confessor, who was his informant, could only tell him the events of her life up to her arrival in Rome and departure thence.
Anno 1584. 

  M. O'Reilly, Memorials of those who Suffered for the Catholic Faith in Ireland in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries, (New York 1869), 75-81.

Father Denis Murphy, the nineteenth-century postulator of the cause of the Irish martyrs, did not include Margery Barnewall in his catalogue Our Martyrs and neither is her name found on the Official List of The Irish Martyrs (1918) submitted to Rome for consideration of her cause.

Notes

 [1] Bronagh Anne McShane, Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530-1700 (Boydell Press, 2022), 72, 80- 84.

[2]  M. O'Reilly, Memorials of those who Suffered for the Catholic Faith in Ireland in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries, (New York 1869), 115, fn2.

[3] Mary O'Dowd, A History of Women in Ireland, 1500-1800 (Routledge, 2014), 157. 

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The Ruined Abbeys in Ireland

An 1889 article syndicated in the Australian press looks at the legacy of the historic Irish abbeys left either in ruins or in Protestant hands following the Reformation. There are a number of points of interest, first the mention of Glenbeigh in the opening paragraph relates to burnings and evictions, not in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, but to the evictions in County Kerry in the 1880s during the Land War. Then, despite enlisting John Wesley as a witness, we have a reminder that we are in a pre-ecumenical age with the description of cold Protestant rituals conducted at historic ecclesiastical sites.  I noted too the same wistful tone used to describe the lonely, windswept ruins in writings of this period about the 'Celtic church' employed here, as well as the same sense of regretful longing for a lost past. Even at Adare, where 'decay is arrested and beauty reigns', the writer still asks 'But who shall say that Mass will ever again be celebrated within its lonesome wind-swept wall?' The only ancient site where Mass was heard again was at Ballintubber Abbey (here spelt as Ballintoher), County Mayo. The article concludes with an evocative description of a type of 'hedge school' being conducted among its ruins:

THE RUINED ABBEYS IN IRELAND.

JOHN WESLEY said several things of us which are remembered. Most of them were very unkind, but some were involuntary tributes to our better nature. One thing he said was that the Irish are "an immeasurably loving people." Again, he declared that "the poor in Ireland, in general, are well-behaved; all the ill-breeding is among well dressed people." And he described certain dearly beloved brethren as "a well behaved, though genteel, congregation." All these remarks tend to prove that history repeats itself. Nor is the truth of that truism in any way depreciated by his expressions of astonishment at the immense quantity of ruins he found in Ireland. Of course, Wesley had not seen (for instance) the charred walls of the recently evacuated homes in Glenbeigh—the valley of fire, the valley of the evicted—but his days were not long after the Cromwellian wars, not a hundred years removed from the Williamite wars; and then, as now, our ruins of church, castle, and cabin, like our poor, were always with us. 

A certain number of our most important ruins have been restored, and retained in Protestant possession; and in such cases a cold ritual is followed in the ancient sanctuary of the faith by a scanty congregation, who fail to see the inconsistency of worshipping at an altar without a sacrifice. Of these are St. Patrick's and Christ Church, in Dublin, St. Canice's in Kilkenny, and the ancient Cathedral of Tuam. Another number have been preserved, in a sense, remaining ruins, beautified with gardens and well-clipped ivy; the entrance to the dark arched cloisters frowning under rose wreaths, as the Abbeys of Mucross and of Cong. In the lonely Franciscan abbey, which stands in Lord Dunraven's demesne, and is one of the famous group of ruins of Adare, near Limerick, decay is arrested and beauty reigns. But who shall say that Mass will ever again be celebrated within its lonesome wind-swept wall? When I saw it a few years ago summer rain was drifting through the delicate carved tracery of its shattered windows, weft of rain on a woff of sunshine, and a rainbow spanned the green and grey distance beyond it, one jewelled shaft lost in the thick, darkling forest trees over against the east, and the other dissolving its rose and saffron in the flying mists to westward that scudded before a light wind like an exodus of fairies from the gleaming and vanishing woodlands. There it stands, beautiful, like our everlasting hills, its open fretted arches, its mosses and lichens, forming part of our national wealth, as do the purples and violets and stern craggy crests of our mountains. The Franciscan Church of Adare was called in olden time Poor Abbey, as belonging to the Mendicant Friars—the friends, through grief and through danger, of the poverty-stricken Irish. Thomas, seventh Earl of Kildare, and his wife, Joanna, daughter of James, Earl of Desmond, were the chief founders of the abbey, and furnished it with glass windows, a bell of great value, and two silver chalices. Michael the Archangel was the patron of the church. Lord Dunraven believed that pictorial decorations were extensively used within it, "from the traces remaining on the tops.of the semi-circular arches surmounting the tombs, and on the surface of the revealed wall, a few of the patterns and patches of pale green and red being still visible." An old book of travels in Ireland says—"In this stately ruin are some remains of ancient painting yet to be seen, particularly a bishop, with his crozier and mitre, giving his benediction. St. Patrick, St. Brigid, and St. Columba are very conspicuous." 

Another and better example of our preserved but not restored ruin is Mucross, famous because of its dreamlike beauty of the scenery hallowed by the presence of its ancient sanctuary. Standing as it does within echo reach of the bugle call that rings around the Eagle's Nest, within a bird's short flight of the magic shores of Inisfallen, the sweet venerableness of Mucross has been recognised by more human eyes and hearts than have ever found their way into most of our ruined cloisters. Of it an old book tells that "the Festival of St. Francis, the patron saint, is celebrated herein the month of July, upon which occasion the peasantry assemble in great numbers to receive the benediction of their pastors and make their confessions among the tombs and ruined walls of this venerable building nothing can inspire a more sincere feeling of reverence and awe than a glimpse of the reverend minister seated on a tomb, within the dark and gloomy recesses of he abbey, attentively listening or fervently praying over the penitent prostrate at his feet,"

A pendant to this picture is the sketch of the ancient abbey of Askeaton, founded by an Earl of Desmond in 1420 for Friars Minor. Holmes, in his travels in Ireland in the end of last century, describes it as a noble ruin entirely of black marble, in many parts richly ornamented, particularly in the cloisters, the waters of the River Deal rising several feet up to its walls; in the centre of the abbey an aged yew tree surrounded by tombs and broken flags. In this place," says Holmes, "the priest celebrates Mass, unprotected from the inclemency of the weather—a circumstance which denotes either extreme poverty, or, what is stronger, ancient prejudice in favour of this venerated spot; for they frequently walk six or seven miles to this abbey to hear Mass, and go home again. Many parts of the cloisters are exquisitely polished by the accidental friction of the clothes of such as pass to and fro." It may be truly said that these old chroniclers present us with pictures of life which could not be made anywhere out of Ireland. 

Our ruins of this order, preserved and unpreserved, are almost innumerable, impressive alike from their own sacred forlornness and from the pathetic beauty of the landscape surrounding them. Yet another grouping may be made, a very small one unfortunately—that of the ruins of ancient shrines which have been restored and are in use for divine worship by the faithful of the present day. One of these is the White Abbey of the Trinitarians, at Adare, which was given by Lord Dunraven to the Catholics of Adare. He had previously converted the remains of the old Augustinian abbey into a parish church for the Protestants of the same place. The old Trinitarian abbey had been used as a ball-court, and there was a project on foot for fitting it up to be a markethouse. One day the Earl walked into the ruin, and standing gazing up at the venerable tower, he was heard to exclaim—" I will never give it to be a den of thieves!" Immediately afterward he sent for the parish priest (Rev. Fr. Lee, 1811), and the old Trinitarian abbey is now the Catholic Church of Adare. he traditions of the ancient abbey are interesting. The Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives was founded in 1198 by St. John of Martha and St. Felix of Valois, and was sanctioned by Pope Innocent III. Its object was the relief and liberation of the Christian captives who had fallen into the hands of the Mohammedans. The habit is a soutane and scapular of white serge, with a red and blue cross on the right breast. The Irish Trinitarians established themselves at Adare, under the shadow of the princely Greraldines. The Franciscan Father, Bonaventure Baron, himself of the noble family of the Geraldines, writing, in 1686, the "Annals of the Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives," mentions the blessed Arthur O'Niell as having been the Provincial of his Order in Ireland and Scotland. This O'Niell was the son of the great Irish chieftain, O'Niell, and died a martyr, preaching the faith in Asia in the year 1282. According to an ancient MS., now lost, he belonged to the house of the Order of Adare. 

It is now proposed to restore for purposes of Catholic worship the ancient Abbey of Ballintoher, county Mayo, the only pre-Reformation church in Ireland which has never at any time been forsaken as a place of worship by the people. Fr. Brennan, who has undertaken this worthy work, says:—

"For nearly seven hundred years it has been the only place of worship for the faithful of Ballintoher. Built in 1216 (according to 'Ware's Antiquities' on the site of a church founded seven centuries before by St. Patrick) for the canons regular of St. Augustine, by Cathal O'Connor, King of Connaught, and brother of the last monarch of Ireland, it flourished until the time of Henry VIII., when it shared the fate of the other confiscated abbeys and monasteries of the country. In the last days of the reign of Elizabeth it was completely dismantled. During the Cromwellian campaign 'of the seventeenth century cannon against mediaeval stone masonry' it escaped the attention of the Puritan soldiery, who, fortunately, did not penetrate the beautiful glen in which it is situated, on the northern corner or Lough Carra. Hence its fine architecture still remains perfect. But for the stone groined roof over the chancel, the worshippers have had for the last three hundred years no other roof but the dome of heaven; and in the frosts, snows, and rains of winter they may here be seen kneeling with bared heads, like their forefathers in centuries past. Through wars and persecutions and through penal days they have clung, as the ivy on its ruined walls, to this roofless but beautiful old sanctuary, on whose ancient altar stone the Holy Sacrifice has been offered for nearly seven consecutive centuries." 

A former effort to restore the church was interrupted by the famine. It is proposed to carry out the ancient Irish style of the architecture in effecting its restoration. It will be remembered that this Ballintoher was the ruined abbey in which Beranger, the French artist, on coming to sketch and ruminate among the solitary tombs, was startled to find a brisk scene of daily life being enacted— a schoolmaster holding school among the gravestones, his desk a monument larger than the rest, and the children sitting on broken stones around him, writing and casting accounts with chalk on the dark slate flags, made smooth by the disappearance of long obliterated names and inscriptions. — Dublin Correspondence Weekly Register.

 The Advocate, Saturday, 5 October 1889, p.10

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'A Powerful Man': Father Daniel Delany

 

The martyrdom of Arklow parish priest, Father Daniel Delany, in 1653 has a number of interesting features. First, we learn that at the time of his capture the priest was armed with a sword and that he gave a good account of himself against his captors. Secondly, that he was attended by a servant who unsuccessfully attempted to secure the sacred vessels before being cut down. Then too there is the fact that it takes place under the provisions of martial law. Father Delany is subject to the abusive rough justice of a group of soldiers and does not receive any kind of official due process. There is the description of the martyr being tied to the tail of a horse and dragged behind it, a recurrent trope in the martyrologies. Finally, there is the fact that the arresting soldiers went back on their promise to preserve the priest's life if he gave up his sword. This act of betrayal particularly incensed the man who recorded Father Delany's martyrdom, Galway native Archdeacon John Lynch, (c.1599-1677). He included an account of it in his 1662 work, Cambrensis Eversus, a three-volume rebuttal of the twelfth-century Cambro-Norman chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis's description of Ireland and its people. Father Lynch, a survivor of the Cromwellian siege of Galway, believed that the cruelty with which the Irish were being treated had its origins in the dismissive colonialist attitudes expressed by Cambrensis at the time of the Norman invasion and which had coloured English thinking ever since. Thus the failure of the soldiers to keep their promise of safe conduct if Father Delany surrendered was entirely in keeping with perfidious Albion's behaviour on both an individual and official level towards Irish armies who had been offered terms of surrender. The account below from Cambrensis Eversus has been taken from the translation published in the mid-nineteenth century by Father Matthew Kelly. The same account was used by the promoter of the cause of the Irish martyrs, Father Denis Murphy S.J. in his 1896 book, Our Martyrs and by Cardinal Moran in his 1884 Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland: under the rule of Cromwell and the Puritans:

 The enemy came by surprise on Daniel Delany, parish priest of Arklow, and savagely massacred before his eyes his servant, named Walsh, who was flying for his life, with a packet of the sacred vessels and ornaments: but the priest himself, being a powerful man, drew his sword and defended himself so well against the attack, that he compelled his assailants to promise him his life if he delivered up his sword. 

But, so far from keeping that solemn promise, they immediately stripped the venerable man naked, and tied him to a horse's tail. The rider goaded the horse to his full speed through a road covered over with brambles and thickets, and rough with frost and frozen snow, and dragged the priest to the town of Gorey. There the savage commander of those hunters condemned him to death, in violation of the solemn promise. He was covered over with blood, his sides torn, and his whole frame exhausted; he was delivered up to a guard of soldiers, who were to watch in turn during the night, while he lay there naked, sleepless, frozen with cold and livid with bruises; his guards amused themselves with twisting and plucking his long beard with a cane, and cruelly beating his sides with a staff; but these excruciating tortures could extort no other answer than "the greater pleasure they appear to give you, the more patiently I will bear them." Next day he was three different times hanged to the bough of a tree and three times let down to the ground, to protract the agony of his torture. But he was hanged at last, and ended his life in torture to reign triumphant in heaven. 

Among all the tortures they inflict, nothing is more cruel than their perfidy, which is so manifest that every one must know it, even themselves have not dared to deny it. These men, in truth, first renounced divine faith, and then violated all faith towards men. The transition is easy from the more heinous to the more pardonable crime. All who are acquainted with the history of the different surrenders know that this treachery was not the crime of individuals merely, but often perpetrated by public authority.
 

Rev. J. Lynch, Cambrensis eversus, ed. and trans. Rev. M. Kelly (3 vols, Dublin, 1848–52), Vol. III, 183-5.

Father Delany is number 165 on the Official List of Irish Martyrs (1918) submitted to Rome for official consideration. There the year of his martyrdom is given as 1653. No further progress has been made with his cause.

 

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'The Glory of Martyrdom': James Eustace, O.Cist.

Cistercian Monk

 

The Cistercian Order, introduced to Ireland as part of the reform of the Irish church in the twelfth century, contributed a number of martyrs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, details of whom have been outlined here. There is some doubt though about the dating of the execution of Irish Cistercian martyr James Eustace and few surviving details of the circumstances in which he met his death.  His case is linked in the sources with that of his confrère Nicholas Fitzgerald, a post on whom can be found here. Like the Fitzgeralds, the Eustaces were a prominent Old English Kildare family, who had occupied some of the highest offices of state for centuries before the King introduced his religious changes in the 1530s. Nineteenth-century promoter of the cause of the Irish Martyrs, Father Denis Murphy S.J, outlined the history of this family in a footnote to his 1895 translation of the work of Cistercian historian Father Malachy Hartry, the Triumphalia Chronologica Monasterii S. Crucis in Hibernia:

Eustace. The founder of this family was a relative of Maurice Fitzgerald, to whom Henry II gave the barony of Naas. A descendant of his, Richard Fitz Eustace, became Baron of Castlemartin in 1200. Others became Barons of Harristown and Portlester and Viscounts Baltinglass. In 1426 Sir Richard was Lord Chancellor. Viscount Baltinglass joined in the war of Gerald, Earl of Desmond, and lost his estates in consequence. 'Of this noble and historic name,'says D'Alton, 'five have been Lords Chancellor, two Lords Deputy, and one Lord High Treasurer of Ireland. Army List, ii.450. 

Father Hartry was writing around the year 1640, but he does not seem to have had any personal acquaintance with Father James Eustace, whom he claims was martyred twenty years earlier. In the Triumphalia Father Hartry treated the case of Father Eustace alongside that of fellow Cistercian martyr Father Nicholas Fitzgerald. He had been executed in September 1581 and Father Hartry had included details of the place and manner of his execution, as well as of the subsequent interment of his remains. His source was a priest who had known both martyrs, although in the case of Father Eustace it is simply reported that he suffered in the same manner as Father Fitzgerald:

CHAPTER XXIV.

Afterwards on the 8th day of the same month [September], the Revd .James Eustace (received) the glory of martyrdom, and by sufferings on earth like those of his fellow-monk already mentioned [i.e.  Father Nicholas Fitzgerald], obtained a reward in heaven in the year of the Virgin 1620. I heard the account of the two preceding from the venerable Mr. Richard Kelly, in the 76th year of his age and the 51st of his priesthood, who knew both martyrs well and had been an eyewitness of their sufferings.

Rev. Denis Murphy S.J., ed. and trans., Triumphalia Chronologica Monasterii S. Crucis in Hibernia, (Dublin, 1895), pp. 255-56.  

In his own catalogue of Irish martyrs published in 1896, Father Murphy raised a doubt about the date of Father Nicholas Fitzgerald's martyrdom based on the dating of a family tombstone.  A modern Irish Cistercian historian feels that the date of Father James Eustace's martyrdom is equally problematic:

There is some doubt as to the date of the martyrdom of James Eustace. The Cistercian Malachy Hartry puts it in the year 1620, while Father Myles Ronan, in his book on the Irish martyrs, says he was slain on the day following the martyrdom of Nicholas Fitzgerald. The context itself would seem to demand an earlier date than 1620: for Nicholas Fitzgerald and James Eustace are bracketed together by Hartry, and the same venerable priest who gave him the details of Nicholas Fitzgerald's martyrdom was also his informant concerning the capture and death of James Eustace. This venerable old priest, Richard Kelly by name, then in the 76th year of his age and the 51st of his priesthood, was himself an eyewitness of their sufferings and had known both martyrs well, from which it may be inferred that they were from the same vicinity and hence probably members of the same community, and had suffered death about the same time. If this be so the express statement of Fr Malachy Hartry that James Eustace suffered death in 1620 can only be explained on the supposition that he put down the wrong date and allowed it to stand uncorrected. His narrative seems to imply that he himself had no personal knowledge of James Eustace, who, if the date 1620 be the correct date of his martyrdom, must have been a contemporary of Hartry in the Cistercian Order. No details have been preserved regarding the manner or the place in which James Eustace suffered, nor have we any record of his family connections, though the name suggests that he may have been the scion of the noble family of which one branch gave rise to the Viscounts of Baltinglass.

 Rev. Colmcille Ó Conbhuidhe OCSO, Studies in Irish Cistercian History (Dublin, 1998), 115.

I find An t-Athair Ó Conbhuidhe's argument here compelling. The fact of the martyrdom of Father James Eustace is not in doubt, merely the date on which it occurred. Given that Father Hartry's source clearly linked Father Eustace's martyrdom with that of Father Fitzgerald, Father Myles Ronan's contention that he died on the day after his confrère also makes sense. In the List of Martyrs for the Faith appended to his 1935 work The Irish Martyrs of the Penal Laws, Father Ronan first records at the year 1581 the death of Father Nicholas Fitzgerald , O.Cist. on September 7 followed by this entry:

1581 (September 8). James Eustace, O.Cist., was slain by the heretics for the faith.

Rev M. Ronan, The Irish Martyrs of the Penal Laws, (London, 1935), 199. 

Father James Eustace is number 109 on the Official List of Irish Martyrs (1918) submitted to Rome for official consideration. No further progress has been made with his cause.

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A Higher Court

 

A HIGHER COURT.

Many times in the course of history, says the Ave Maria, men have been forced to appeal from the injustice of man to the Judge of earth and heaven. When, in the year 1651, Ireton, Cromwell's representative, was besieging the city of Limerick, Terence O'Brien was Lord Bishop of Emly. "Exhort your people to surrender," was the message sent to the prelate by the general, "and I will give you forty thousand pounds sterling, and guarantee your safety besides." "I will do no such dastardly thing!" was the import of the message sent to Ireton in return.

The general then thought it better to change his tactics. He addressed himself to the besieged. "Send me the head of your pompous Bishop," he wrote, "and twenty of the men who voted against surrender, and I will spare Limerick." The citizens held a hurried meeting, and unanimously voted not to accept such humiliating and costly terms. They would stand or fall by their saintly Bishop and their beloved city. But no courage could hold out against the fanatical horde at their gates, and it was not long before Limerick was in the hands of a foe that knew no mercy. The first act of the Puritan commander was to order the immediate execution of Bishop O'Brien. But death had no terrors for that faithful servant of God; he heard his sentence without a shudder, then calmly remarked: "I summon Ireton, the archpersecutor, to appear in eight days to stand before the heavenly tribunal and answer for his cruel deeds." Eight days after that, terrible to relate, Ireton was dead. He had been stricken with the plague.

The Sacred Heart Review, Volume 8, Number 17, 17 September 1892.

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Nicholas Fitzgerald, O.Cist

In September 1581 Cistercian monk Nicholas Fitzgerald was hanged, drawn and quartered in Dublin.  This martyr bears the name of one of the most important Cambro-Norman aristocratic families in Ireland. His own branch, the Fitzgeralds of Lackagh, was descended from Sir Thomas Fitzgerald, second son of Thomas, the Second Earl of Kildare. As we shall see, this high social standing enabled the parents of martyred monk Nicholas to remove his body to the cathedral of Kildare, where the family burial place was in the south transept. The story of the martyrdom of Nicholas Fitzgerald was one of those preserved in the work of Father Malachy Hartry, O.Cist., in the De Cisterciensium Hibernorum Viris Illustribus, appended to his 1640 history of Holy Cross Abbey, County Tipperary Triumphalia Chronologica Monasterii S. Crucis in Hibernia. Both of these sources were edited and translated by Father Denis Murphy, S.J., the late nineteenth-century promoter of the cause of the Irish martyrs. He gives Father Hartry's account of our martyr thus:

Nicholas Fitzgerald, a Cistercian monk, fleeing from the cruel persecution, while concealed in a wood to which he had fled through fear of the persecutors, was seized in his monastic habit, taken in chains to the city of Dublin, and condemned by the Viceroy (who was never sated with the blood of Catholics) to be hanged, and while half-alive to be quartered. He endured this kind of death courageously for the Catholic faith, wearing his religious habit. The faithful, influenced by their pious devotion, preserved the clothes and blood of the courageous martyr, dividing them into small portions as relics, in the year from Christ's birth 1581, in the month of September. His father Maurice FitzGerald and Margaret [FitzRedmond] Butler his mother obtained as a very great favour that they might carry away the quartered body of their beloved son for burial and lay it in the tomb of his ancestors in the church of the nuns of the Order of St. Brigid at Kildare. Our glorious martyr was descended from the noble race of the Geraldines.

Rev. Denis Murphy S.J., ed. and trans., Triumphalia Chronologica Monasterii S. Crucis in Hibernia, (Dublin, 1895), pp. 255-56.

 When Father Murphy came to reproduce this account in his 1896 catalogue Our Martyrs he added:

There is a tombstone close by the vestry door of the cathedral of Kildare which bears the names of the parents of Nicholas Fitzgerald. If the original position of this stone was ascertained, it would determine the place where the martyr was buried.

Rev. Denis Murphy, Our Martyrs (Dublin, 1896), 120-121.

Father Murphy included some further detail in a footnote on this tombstone which throws into doubt the accuracy of the date of Father Fitzgerald's martyrdom, established by Father Hartry as September 1581:

A tombstone recently removed from that part of the church, having a raised figure in armour on it, bears the following inscription in black-letter:

Domina Margareta Butler hoc monumentum fieri fecit ob memoriam Mauricii Fitzgerald de Laccah militis quondam sui mariti, qui obiit 20 die Decembris anno 1575. 

These were no doubt the martyr's parents. The difference of dates arises from an error of Hartry's most probably. 

Rev. Denis Murphy S.J., ed.and trans., Triumphalia Chronologica Monasterii S. Crucis in Hibernia, (Dublin, 1895), footnote 5, pp. 255-56.

A modern Irish Cistercian historian, Father Colmcille Ó Conbhuidhe, agrees:

The martyrdom of this Cistercian monk took place, according to Hartry, in the year 1581, but if Nicholas's father was still alive at the time of his son's death as Hartry states, the date of Nicholas Fitzgerald's death must have been some years earlier, for the inscription of the tomb of Sir Maurice Fitzgerald shows that the latter died on the 20th of December, 1575.

Rev. Colmcille Ó Conbhuidhe OCSO, Studies in Irish Cistercian History (Dublin, 1998), 114-115.

The author also speculates that since our martyr was from the Lackagh branch of the Fitzgerald family which is midway between Kildare and Monasterevan:

It is not improbable, therefore,  that Nicholas Fitzgerald was a monk of the abbey of Rosglas, better known to us as Monasterevan.

 The Cistercian abbey at Monasterevan was founded in 1178 by Dermot O’Dempsy, king of Offaly and suppressed some time between 1539 and 1540. 

The uncertainty around the date of Friar Fitzgerald's martyrdom makes it more difficult to establish the exact context in which it occurred. It is clear though from Father Hartry's account, which he had directly from Father Richard Kelly, a priest then in his seventies who had known the martyr personally and who was an eyewitness to his sufferings, that his contemporaries regarded Nicholas Fitzgerald as a martyr. This they demonstrated by their preservation of his clothes and blood which were divided into small portions for use as relics. Father Ó Conbhuidhe adds some interesting further information on the family of our martyr in a footnote:

The Fitzgeralds of Lackagh were a staunch Catholic family. During the era of persecution which followed on the Reformation they remained true to the faith. They suffered severely under Cromwell, the whole family being transported to the Barbadoes to be sold as slaves. The head of the family at that time was Henry Fitzgerald of Lackagh Castle. He and his wife were over eighty years of age at the time of their transportation. Their children, the widow of their eldest son, and their servants were transported with them. 

Rev. Colmcille Ó Conbhuidhe OCSO, Studies in Irish Cistercian History (Dublin, 1998), footnote 52, p.115.

Friar Nicholas was thus not the only member of the Fitzgeralds of Lackagh to courageously witness for the Catholic faith at a heavy personal cost.

Friar Nicholas Fitzgerald is number 29 on the Official List of Irish Martyrs (1918) submitted to Rome for official consideration. No further progress has been made with his cause.

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