any of the Anglo-Norman, recalling the
capture of the city of Galway and the surrounding country: "From the
ferocious O'Flaherties,--Good Lord, deliver us." The same words, as a
talisman, were inscribed over the gate of the city. We know little of
the representative of this family who became the husband of Grainne
O'Malley. Her second husband was Sir Richard Bourke, of the Mayo
division of a great Norman-Irish clan. It was after contracting this
alliance that Grainne O'Malley put herself under the protection of the
English rule in Connaught. Sidney, the lord-deputy, referring to his
visit to Galway in 1576, says: "There came to me a most famous female
sea-captain, called Granny-I-Mallye, and offered her services to me,
wheresoever I would command her, with three galleys and two hundred
fighting men, either in Ireland or Scotland. She brought with her her
husband, for she was, as well by sea as by land, more than master's
mate with him. He was of the nether Bourkes, and now, as I hear,
MacWilliam Euter, and called by the nickname 'Richard in Iron.' This
was a notorious woman in all the coasts of Ireland. This woman did Sir
Philip see and speak with: he can more at large inform you of her."

The personal character of this female buccaneer was never called into
question; saving only her piratical proclivities, she seems to have
been exemplary. The circumstances of her life at the death of her
first husband forced her, a daughter of a pirate, to the seas as
a "thrade of maintenance," as she apologetically put it to Queen
Elizabeth. She founded and endowed religious houses, and the
attitude she maintained toward the powers higher than she was in the
furtherance of the peace of her country. Yet her good deeds have not
been borne in the same remembrance as her piratical performances. With
this account of the adventurous Irish woman, we may turn to a very
different picture, taken from Scotland.

The annals of the Scottish border are replete with stories of cruel
warfare and of savage vengeance. The wars of England with the valorous
Scots present hardly more instances of heroism and of brutality than
do the accounts of the feuds which arose between the clans themselves.
Of the first sort was the expedition which Bluff King Hal sent out to
punish the Scots for becoming incensed at the insolent tone and the
humiliating conditions he imposed on the negotiations looking to the
marriage of his young son, afterward Edward VI., and th