Pirate Queen by Judith Cook
In a life stranger than any fiction, Grace O'Malley, daughter of a clan chief in County Mayo, went from marriage at 15 to piracy on the high seas. She had a fleet of galleys under her command (four of them Scots). In 1559 her husband was killed in an ambush and not long after she took as a lover a survivor of a shipwreck. Clansmen came over from Scotland and murdered him. She tracked them down and had them killed, and from then in there follow episodes of plunder, kidnapping, piracy and general mayhem. In 1586 she was captured by the Earl of Ormond and was actually on the scaffold with a rope around her neck when she was saved on the orders of Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth offered to make her a countess. Grace refused, but was officially allowed to be a "privateer" thereafter. She may also have been an intelligencer for Elizabeth's spymaster, Walsingham, thus able to warn the Queen of the Essex plot. Elizabeth died in 1603, by which time Grace had entered a nunnery.
Well-known for her columns in the Guardian’s women’s page and as an anti-nuclear campaigner (she founded the organisation Voice of Women after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962), Judith Cook was also a prolific biographer and investigative journalist. Her subjects included J.B. Priestley, Daphne du Maurier and Hilda Murrell, the anti-nuclear campaigner who died in mysterious circumstances1985. Born in Manchester, Judith Cook lived for many years in Cornwall, where she died in 2004.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781862322479 |
| ISBN 10 | 1862322473 |
| Title | Pirate Queen |
| Author | Judith Cook |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Birlinn General |
| Year published | 2001-01-01 |
| Number of pages | 195 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |