Stanihurst, Richard (1547-1618)

Irish historian, classical scholar, alchemist, and Counter-Reformation activist. Born into a long-established Dublin family, he became tutor to the children of the 11th Earl of Kildare (1525-1585). Commissioned to write the early Irish section of Holinshed's Chronicles in 1577, his work was subjected to extensive editorial censorship for its version of the 1534-35 rebellion of Thomas Fitzgerald, 8th Earl of Kildare. In 1581 he was driven into exile in the Spanish Netherlands through suspicions of his Catholic sympathies. Celebrated there for his, possibly whiskey-based, medicinal elixirs, he was invited to El Escorial, Philip II's palace and monastery near Madrid, where he was given a laboratory and became involved in a number of intrigues concerning Ireland.

Stanihurst was the son of James Stanihurst, speaker of the Irish parliament 1569-71. He was educated at Oxford University, where he met the English Jesuit and later Catholic martyr Edmund Campion. Stanihurst's De rebus in Hibernia gestis (1584), a historical and topographical account from an Old-English viewpoint, was later criticized by more radical Counter-Reformation historians for its sympathetic attitude towards the English in Ireland and reported to the Inquisition. His translation of the first four books of Virgil's Aeneid was derisorily received by several English critics, notably Edmund Spenser. Towards the end of his life Stanihurst became a Jesuit.