Silken Thomas

Thomas FitzGerald, 10th Earl of Kildare — known as Silken Thomas for the silk fringes on his retainers' helmets — was twenty-one years old in June 1534, deputy-governor of Ireland in his father Garret Óg's absence in London. A false rumour reached him that his father had been executed in the Tower; in fact Garret Óg was dying naturally of wounds, and would die in the Tower three months later, but Thomas did not know it.

On 11 June 1534, in front of the Council assembled at St Mary's Abbey in Dublin, Thomas rode in with one hundred and forty horsemen of his Kildare retainers, threw down the Sword of State, and renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII. The Geraldines of Kildare had been the effective government of Ireland for almost a century. Silken Thomas's renunciation was, by the lights of any participant in the room, a more serious thing than a Continental noble's defiance — it was the largest private army in Ireland declaring against the king.

What followed was a year of warfare across Leinster and the Pale. Thomas besieged Dublin Castle through the summer of 1534; English reinforcements under Sir William Skeffington arrived in October. The Geraldine stronghold of Maynooth was taken in March 1535 by gunpowder mines under the curtain wall — the first effective use of siege artillery in Ireland — and the garrison hanged after surrender, an act remembered as 'the Pardon of Maynooth'. Thomas held out in the Bog of Allen through the summer, was betrayed by his own kinsmen in August 1535, and surrendered on the promise of his life.

The promise was not kept. Thomas was held in the Tower for eighteen months and on 3 February 1537 was drawn to Tyburn on a hurdle and hanged, then drawn and quartered. Five of his uncles — three of whom had taken no active part in the revolt — were hanged with him. The Kildare earldom was attainted, the family lands forfeited, and the Geraldines as a Leinster political force were extinguished. The English administration moved to Dublin Castle in fact for the first time, having held it only by Geraldine sufferance for the previous century.

The infant Gerald FitzGerald, Thomas's half-brother, was smuggled out of Ireland by Geraldine retainers and travelled the courts of Europe for fourteen years. He was restored to a portion of the Kildare estates by Mary I in 1554 and his descendants survived as the senior Anglo-Irish branch into the modern era. The Geraldines never again held the political weight they had had in 1533 — but they kept the surname, and the war-cry Crom Abú, into the 21st century.