Following her daughters' departure for Paris, Maria retreated to her estates in Ireland, where rumour soon started to fly about her relationship with her Master of Horse, the nineteen-year-old Sir Barnaby Fitzpatrick. The eldest son and heir of the last titular King of Osraige, Barnaby Fitzpatrick had been raised in the household of the Earl of Pembroke and Ormonde, where he had found a talent for riding and caring for horses before leaving for the Marquisate of Clarence at the age of fifteen. Historians have suspected for centuries that Sir Barnaby found it too painful to watch as his ancestral lands were governed by others, particularly when those others were an Anglo-Irish Lord and the daughter of the King who had pressured his father into giving his lands up in the first place.
Whatever the truth, by the beginning of 1552, Barnaby was firmly ensconced in Maria's household, riding and laughing with her by day, dancing and making merry with her by night.
If King Henry had still been alive, he would most likely have violently disapproved of his eldest daughter's relationship with her 'Irish Hare', as Maria fondly christened her young favourite, but Lionel, no stranger to displeasing their father himself, given his rebellious marriage to Queen Christina, was far more blasé about the scandalous rumours coming from the Clarence estates. Indeed, he even created Barnaby Lord Carrickfergus in 1554, saying 'even a former Queen must have her lords about her'.
When Edmund Bonner, the Bishop of London, protested this elevation – and, no doubt, the reasons behind it – Lionel is reputed to have said, 'My sister has served her penance since she was seventeen, my Lord of London," before dismissing him and refusing to see him at Court again for more than a year. It is in moments like these, that we, looking back over the gap of four and a half centuries, can truly glimpse the depths of Lionel's devotion to his older sister.
Even Lionel's protection of the couple wasn't enough to stem the tide of talk, however, particularly not with Maria being almost twice Barnaby's age. Things came to a head in 1556, when Maria retreated into the ramshackle Ferns Castle in County Wexford, with only her closest circle around her – Barnaby, Lady Siobhan Fitzgerald and two of her young Upper Ossory cousins chief among them. Her extended seclusion – which many historians have put down to the onset of the lupus and subsequent kidney damage that ultimately killed her - gave rise to talk that Maria was pregnant with Lord Carrickfergus's child, talk that turned out to be so persistent that, upon her recovery, Maria was forced to swear before the Archbishop of Dublin himself that 'though she loved him dearly…nothing unseemly had ever passed between them' or risk Barnaby being forced to leave her household.
Despite her solemn oath before such a high-ranking churchman, which, we must remember, a pious Catholic like Maria would have taken only with the utmost gravity, however, Maria managed to do no more than to quell the rumours for a year or so. Her sudden gain in weight in the early months of 1558, followed by her sudden death at Barnaby's stronghold of Carrickfergus Castle that September, reignited the belief that she and Lord Carrickfergus were lovers and that she had died of the complications of a geriatric pregnancy. It is my solemn hope that the final chapter of this book, which I have dedicated specifically to Maria's health throughout her adulthood, will quash those rumours once and for all.
_ Eoin Peniston, '"The Fruitless Pomegranate": Maria Tudor 1516-1558'