Jenet Sarsfield

She was born in County Meath, possibly at Sarsfieldstown near Laytown, in about 1528, daughter of the merchant John Sarsfield; very little appears to be known about her mother.

From Cusack's point of view, her wealth was undoubtedly a consideration in the decision to marry, as he was heavily in debt to the Crown.

A widow in sixteenth century Ireland was by custom entitled to one-third of her husband's estate but Jenet, who was clearly a shrewd businesswoman, inherited much more than that: Cusack left her most of his personal property, and the Abbey of Lismullen, which he had acquired on the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

[6] Jenet sued Edward for ransacking Lismullen and trying to destroy his father's will; he counterclaimed that she had unlawfully retained his mother's jewels.

The litigation dragged on into the 1580s, when Edward appealed to the English elder statesman Lord Burghley for his assistance in the matter.

He claimed that the parties to the lawsuit were not evenly matched, despite the apparent disadvantage to Jenet of being a woman, since his stepmother through her numerous marriages was now connected with most of the great families of the Pale.

His picture of himself as her helpless victim was wildly inaccurate: he was in fact one of the wealthiest landowners in the Pale, and had enough political influence to obtain a royal pardon when he was convicted of trumped-up charges of treason in 1582, along with the senior judge Nicholas Nugent ( who was hanged).

[7] Like many of the Anglo-Irish gentry of the time, (women as well as men), Jenet was litigious by nature, and her lawsuits were by no means confined to members of her own family.

She died in 1598, when she was aged about seventy: she chose not to be buried with any of her husbands but in a tomb of her own, which still exists, at Moorchurch, near modern-day Julianstown in County Meath.