Queen spoke language of Irish warlords

WHEN Queen Elizabeth II makes her historic State visit to Ireland today, will she greet President Mary McAleese in Irish? Her namesake, the 16th century Queen Elizabeth I, would have done so.

Elizabeth 1 was a multi-lingual Renaissance monarch with a passion for learning. Her earliest surviving letter is in Italian and she was fluent in French, Latin and Greek, but Irish, the mother tongue of a large minority of her subjects, had never been part of her youthful education.

This queen of Ireland thought it necessary to learn a cúpla focal, perhaps prompted by the visit of Shane O’Neill, the great Gaelic chieftain of Tyrone, to her court. O’Neill and his retinue visited Whitehall in 1562, dressed in Gaelic fashion and speaking Irish, which was said to have caused “as much wonderment as if they had come from China or America”.