Friday Fun!

Just one today, because I went on at length. I want to hear your answers to this one, too, though.

What moment in time would you have most liked to witness?

I was actually just talking about this with Fertility Goddess not too long ago. In the late 1500s, there was an Irish woman pirate, Grainne Ni Mhaille (sometimes anglicized into “Grace O’Malley” or “Granuaile”). Her life story is pretty amazing, but the part I’m fascinated with is when she sailed her pirate ship up the Thames and demanded—and got—an interview with Queen Elizabeth to gain the release of her sons from an Irish prison. Elizabeth and Grainne spent a little over an hour in a private interview, alone in a salon.

Can you imagine being in that room? The queen and the pirate? Think of the time, 1593, think of what it meant to be a woman then. Think of the Queen, refusing to marry because she would be ruled by no one; think of Grace, leaving her dead husband’s clan with half its warriors now loyal to her. Without a doubt or a question, this hour in London, this short interview, these few minutes in two long lives, would have been the only time either woman would have spent in the company of another remotely her equal.

How lonely was it to be The Virgin Queen? How hard was it to fight a neverending war? I want to think they were friends. I want to think the Grainne put her boots up on the table and that Bess overfilled the wine goblets. Grainne said, “About my boys—" and Bess waved a hand. “’Tis nothing,” the Queen replied. “’Tis done.” And from there they complained about men and politics and got a little silly. Grainne told bawdy jokes that made the Queen blush and laugh and tell even dirtier ones and just as the pirate got up to show the Queen the proper trick to run a man through—there was a knock and a cough. A minister came in to say there was another appointment. It was time to be Queen again, to put back on the armor of royalty and power. With a sad smile and pardon for her sons, she left Grainne and that one room where she was just another girl for just a few minutes. And Grainne went home with what she came for and maybe with something else, as well.

Then again, maybe it didn’t happen that way. Maybe they were stiff and formal. Maybe Bess sneered at the ruffian before her and Grainne seethed at this personification of all the subjugation of Ireland. Maybe their differences were too great and their one, blinding similarity not enough. I don’t know, but I hope not. I'd like to have seen it go the other way.