Stanihurst, Richard

Stanihurst, Richard (1547–1618), Ireland's closest approximation to a Renaissance ‘Magus’. Born into a prominent Dublin family, Stanihurst studied at Oxford, where he met Edmund Campion and became interested in Neoplatonism. In Ireland he tutored the children of Gerald, the 11th earl of Kildare. In 1577 Stanihurst contributed a large part of the Irish section of Holinshed's Chronicles, his version of the Kildare rebellion landing him in trouble with the English authorities.

In 1581 he went into exile in the Spanish Netherlands amid political suspicions over his connections with Kildare and Campion. His De rebus in Hibernia gestis (Antwerp, 1584)—basically Ireland from an Old English viewpoint—was later banned in Portugal after Philip O'Sullivan Beare complained to the Inquisition. Famed in the Netherlands for his curative elixirs (possibly whiskey based), he was invited to Spain by Philip II in the early 1590s and given a laboratory in the Escorial. Despite casting aspersions on the 1593 Irish mission to the Spanish court, Stanihurst became increasingly involved in the intrigues of English and Irish exiles to secure a Spanish succession to the English throne. He spent his final years as a Jesuit.

Hiram Morgan