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WOMEN OF ’NINETY-EIGHT

PAMELA
The Wife of Lord Edward Fitzgerald

WOMEN OF

’NINETY-EIGHT

By MRS. THOMAS CONCANNON, M.A.

Author of “The Life of St. Columba,” “A Garden of Girls,” “The Sorrow of Lycadoon,” Etc.

M. H. GILL AND SON :: LTD.

50 UPPER O’CONNELL STREET, DUBLIN

1919

PRINTED AND BOUND

BY

M. H. GILL & SON, LTD.

DUBLIN

In Memory

OF

All the Dead Women

AND

In Homage

TO

All the Living Women

WHO HAVE GIVEN

Their Dear Ones

TO

Ireland

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Alas! how sad by Shannon’s flood,

The blush of morning sun appears!

To men who gave for us their blood,

Ah! what can women give but tears!

—Drennan: Lament of the Women after the Battle.

“THEY tell a beautiful and poetical story about the croppies’ graves in Wexford. Many of them carried in their coat pockets wheat seed gathered in the fields to satisfy their hunger. When they were buried in their shallow graves the seed sprouted and pushed its way up to the light, and the peasants, seeing the patches of waving grain here and there by field or wayside, knew that there a poor croppy slumbered. Was not the waving grain an emblem that the blood they shed for Ireland would yet nurture the harvest of Freedom?”

Twenty years ago, when in the pages of the Shan Van Vocht, that moving and lovely tale was told to the faithful few whom the centenary of ’Ninety-Eight had rallied around the croppies’ graves, it needed a poet’s vision, a patriot’s heart, to see in

“The grain that was fed on the dust of the dead”

a promise of the mighty harvest of freedom. To-day, we look around us, and, lo!—even to the blindest and coldest of us—the fields are white.

Ere we go forth to the reaping, shall we not consider with ourselves what culture the buried seeds of freedom received to ensure a yield so rich? It is not alone the blood of the men who died for Ireland that has nurtured the harvest of her freedom. The seed has been abundantly watered by the tears of heartbroken women: mothers and wives, sweethearts and sisters, daughters and comrades. Some of these grieving women I have tried, in the following pages, to make better known to their country-women of to-day, whose joy has been purchased, in such large part, by their sorrow.

And not with their tears alone did our sisters of ’Ninety-Eight sprinkle the red furrows of that tragic seed-time. In many a forgotten grave, from Antrim to Wexford, lies the dust of the women who died victims of the brutality of the yeomanry and military, let loose on the country to goad its manhood into a rising. Beneath the unmarked site of many a vanished cabin lie the charred bones of countless women who were burnt to death when the drunken soldiery fired their homes. Among the outrages tabulated by Cloney as having been perpetrated by the military in the county of Wexford alone, we find record of seven young women violated and murdered near Ballaghkeene by the Homperg Dragoons, after the retreat from Vinegar Hill; of four women shot after the flight from Wexford; and of three women bayonetted in Enniscorthy; of nine women and six children slain by the yeomanry between Vinegar Hill and Gorey, on the high road; of three women shot by the yeomanry in the village of Aughrim; of four women murdered by “the supplementary yeomen” between Gorey and Arklow.

Anne Devlin was not the only woman of those times who bore to the day of her death on her tender skin the cicatrized marks of the wounds inflicted by the bayonets of the soldiers in the design of extorting from her information. Some of the atrocities suffered by women had not even the excuse of any purpose—save that of satisfying a monstrous lust of cruelty. A dreadful case is that of Mrs. O’Neill, whose son, a clerical student, had been taken up and confined in New Geneva barracks, preparatory to being shipped off to work in the salt-mines of the King of Prussia. The poor woman had come all the way from Antrim, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, to take a last farewell of him. When she reached her destination she was refused access to him, and only succeeded in seeing him after she had bribed his guards. Unfortunately, she yielded to the violence of her grief when the time to leave him came, and the anguished cries of the poor mother betrayed her forbidden presence in her boy’s cell. She was torn from his arms, hurried into the presence of the colonel, and by him delivered to the tender mercies of the soldiers, who dragged her into the courtyard, and proceeded to toss her in a blanket. When the savage pastime of the soldiers ceased, a few rags were thrown to the unfortunate woman; she crawled to a neighbouring cabin, and there she died.

Those who are best entitled to speak of the causes of the Rising of ’Ninety-Eight are singularly unanimous in their exposition of them. During Thomas Addis Emmet’s examination before the Secret Committee of the House of Lords (August 10th, 1798) he stated in reply to Lord Clare’s query as to what caused the late insurrection: “the free quarters, the house-burnings, the tortures, the military executions in the counties of Kildare, Carlow and Wicklow.” Mary McCracken used to quote her brother, Henry Joy’s opinion that “if it had not been for the free quarters and the flogging, there would have been no rebellion after all, for it is not easy to get the people to turn out of their comfortable homes, if they have any comfort in them.” It was the sight of his burning chapel and the blazing homesteads of his flock which turned Father John Murphy from a man of peace into the intrepid leader of fighting men. When his people fled to him in the woods from the flames of their farmhouses and the outrages of the yeomanry, he told them that “they had better die courageously in the field than be butchered in their houses; that, for his own part, if he had any brave men to join him, he was resolved to sell his life dearly and prove to these cruel monsters that they should not continue their murders and devastations with impunity.”

The same motives which urged the priest to become the soldier animated many of the women. Better, it seemed to them, to die fighting side by side with their men in the field than to be violated and butchered in their houses. And so we find among the Women of ’Ninety-Eight more than one Irish Joan of Arc. There was Molly Weston who fought at Tara, Betsy Grey at Ballynahinch, Mary Doyle at New Ross and many a brave woman who died fighting on Vinegar Hill.

Another rôle filled by the Women of ’Ninety-Eight was that of inspiring their men to patriotic action, aiding them by their counsels, putting their women’s wit at the service of the patriots as messengers and intelligence officers. Charles H. Teeling informs us that “the enthusiasm of the females exceeded the ardour of the men; in many of the higher circles, and in all the rustic festivities, that youth met a cold and forbidding reception from the partner of his choice, who, either from apathy or timidity, had not yet subscribed to the test of union.” “A green velvet stock, or a silk robe with a shamrock device, were the emblems of national feeling; and the former was not unfrequently presented to the youthful patriot by the fair daughter of Erin, as the pledge of a more tender regard.” We see Pamela and Lady Lucy Fitzgerald shedding the bright influence of their beauty over the circle of patriotic and romantic young Irishmen whom Lord Edward gathered around him in Kildare Lodge. Numerous women were so deep in the secrets of the United Irishmen that it was considered necessary for them to take the oath. Of these, the most notable, Miss Moore, will receive more extended notice in subsequent pages of this book. Among others we find mention of Mrs. Risk, whose husband having fallen a victim to his patriotic principles in ’Ninety-Eight, devoted herself and all she had in the world to the Cause for which he died. It was to her house in Sandymount that Lord Edward was to have been removed the night of the day on which he was arrested. We subsequently find her visiting the prisoners at Fort George and carrying back messages from them to their friends in Ireland. Rose McGladdery, wife of William McCracken, was “a sworn United man,” and did good service to the cause for which her husband was imprisoned and for which her brother-in-law, Harry, died, as she passed out and in of Kilmainham jail to visit her captive husband. It is very probable that Mrs. Oliver Bond was also “a sworn United man.” Her name lives in their records for a clever device by which she enabled the State prisoners of 1796 to keep in touch with the outside world. The story is told by Charles Teeling, who was one of them:

“On that great festival, which is respected in every quarter of the Christian world, this excellent lady, having addressed a polite message to the first authority of the prison, requested through him to furnish a dish for the table of the prisoners of State.... This dish was accompanied by one of smaller dimensions, but of similar appearance, which was presented to the good lady, the governor’s spouse. Never did the governor or his gentle rib partake of a dish more agreeable to their palates. It was a pasty of exquisite flavour, and seasoned by no parsimonious hand. Dainties of this kind were novel to the captives, but still more novel the design; choice, indeed, were the materials of which our dish was composed, and most acceptable to those for whose entertainment it was prepared. With the full permission of the governor, the pie was placed on our table, the turnkey received his Christmas-box, smiled as he turned the money in his hand, and retired. Under cover of the encrustment, which was artfully, but with apparent simplicity, arranged, the dish was filled with writing materials, foreign and domestic newspapers, communications with friends.” Writing his recollections thirty years later, Charles Teeling recalls, in all their vivid freshness, the sensations to which this discovery gave birth, and the happiness which the poor prisoners felt when they were thus made acquainted with the true sentiments of their fellow-countrymen in their regard.

One more pious duty the Women of ’Ninety-Eight took upon themselves, and that was to guard the memory of the fallen, and to keep bright their names. Again and again, Dr. Madden has found occasion to pay tribute to the faithful women to whom his researches owe so much. “With few exceptions,” he writes, “the materials collected for the memoirs of the United Irishmen would in all probability have perished, had they not fallen into the hands of women, who clung to the memories of their departed friends with feelings of attachment commensurate with the calamities which had overtaken the objects of their affection or regard. It would seem that in man’s adversity, when his fellow-men fall away from his sinking fortunes, or detach their thoughts from his maltreated memory, there is a steadfastness in the nature of woman’s love, a fidelity in her friendship, which gives to the misfortunes of her kindred a new claim to her solicitude for everything that concerns their interests or their fame.” Very touching instances are those of Mary McCracken, the daughters of Samuel Neilson, the daughter of Dr. MacNevin.

Finally, it is not to be forgotten that to a woman of ’Ninety-Eight we are indebted for the first and, when all is said, perhaps, the best—the most authentic, and vivid and enlightening—story of the Rising which takes its name from that year. Charles Hamilton Teeling’s “Personal Narrative,” published in 1828, three years before Moore’s “Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald,” was dedicated by the author in words, as touching as they are noble, to “My wife and my children at whose request solely, it has been undertaken.... Respected and beloved, they are entitled to this mark of my remembrance, the only inheritance which the enemies of my country have left me to bequeathe.” We are allowed to catch, in the final page of the “Narrative,” a fleeting whisper of the romance of Charles H. Teeling and Catherine Carolan. We know that when the Insurrection was suppressed, young Charles Teeling, for true love’s sake, preferred to take anew the outlaw’s track on the mountain rather than to seek safety beyond the seas. We would fain know a little more of the girl who won her place side by side with “the Little Black Rose” in that most knightly and constant heart. We sense in her story one of the most tender, and sweet, and pure of the romances of ’Ninety-Eight.

I cannot but feel proud of the fact that, in writing this book, I have received the constant help of two of the grandsons of Charles Teeling, and Catherine Carolan: Charles T. Waters, Esq., B.L., and Charles H. Teeling, Esq., K.C. I wish I could acknowledge adequately, the obligations under which I have been put by their kindness in lending me the precious Teeling letters in their possession, and allowing me to use them as I desired. I have been privileged also to consult Mr. Waters constantly in many doubts and difficulties, to draw on his knowledge of the period, to use his library, and to call on his help in a thousand ways which it would be impossible to enumerate.

I am also under an obligation to F. J. Bigger, Esq., Belfast, and Denis Carolan Rushe, Monaghan (another kinsman of Catherine Carolan) for their patient answering of my many questions concerning a period on which they are among the greatest of living authorities.

To Mrs. Patrick Semple, LL.D., and her sister, Mrs. MacCarthy, I owe most warm thanks for their help in making extracts from books otherwise inaccessible to me, and to Professor Mrs. Macken for the trouble she took to procure certain books for me. I am also indebted to George Taaffe, Esq., of Smarmore Castle, Ardee, for information furnished me from the Taaffe family papers.

HELENA CONCANNON.

Lios na Mara,

Salthill, Galway,

September, 1918.

THE MOTHERS OF ’NINETY-EIGHT

THE
MOTHERS OF ’NINETY-EIGHT

“Hush, O Mother, and be not sorrowful,

The women of My keening are yet unborn, little Mother.”

—The Keening of Mary.

TRULY it was of the Mothers of Ireland that Mary’s Son was thinking, when from the Tree of His Passion He comforted His own Mother with prophecy of the “keeners” yet unborn who, through the centuries, were to bear her company in her anguish, and weep with her for her sorrow and His most bitter death.

That knowledge—with so much else—we owe to the teaching of Padraic Mac Piarais. He gave us the first part of the lesson when he gathered us with him into the cottage of Mary Clancy, in Iar Chonnacht,[^[1]] and bade us listen to her “keening” with Mary for her dying, crucified Son, and shuddering at the instruments of His Passion, and shedding floods of tears at the thought of His gaping wounds. He made us realise what “a precious thing it is for the world that in the homes of Ireland there are still men and women who can shed tears for the sorrows of Mary and her Son.” But did the teacher, himself, know then at what a price had been won for the mothers of the Gael their “terrible and splendid trust”? Or was it only revealed to him in the blinding flash of the illumination which showed him that his own mother’s soul must be pierced by the same sword which transfixed Mary’s? Certain it is that we had to wait for the completion of the lesson, begun in Mary Clancy’s cottage, till that most holy and solemn night when, as he waited, like King Cellach in his prison cell, for “his love, the morning fair”—and the flame-like gift it was to bring him—he wrote for his mother the exquisite prayer, with which he would have her, on the morrow, lay his own broken body in Mary’s outstretched arms. Then was it made plain to us that the mothers of Ireland have won the right to stand thus close to Mary, beneath the Cross, and to claim as their hereditary office, the task to minister to her in her desolation, because they, above all the other women of the world, have so often “seen their first-born sons go forth,” even like Mary’s, “to die amid the scorn of men—For whom they died.”

[1]. “Caoineadh Mhuire” (The Keening of Mary) was taken down by P. H. Pearse from the singing of Mary Clancy in Moycullen, and first published by him in the Claidheamh Soluis, October 24th, 1904.

Thus the Desolate Mother, even in a world which has so largely forgotten the sorrows of her and of her Son, has always found, and will find, in the homes of Ireland, her faithful company of keeners. And who shall say that their ministering is less grateful to her, because while they weep for her Son, they are weeping for their own, and the voice they raise in woe is that of Rachel, who will not be comforted?

These poor mothers of our Irish martyrs! These poor Rachels! There is something in their grief which makes it a thing apart. Wives, and sisters, and sweethearts, who have given their dear ones to Ireland have felt, even in their most anguished hour, something of that exaltation which makes “the hard service they take, who help the Poor Old Woman,” a yoke more sweet and precious than any liberty. Like the men, of whose sufferings it was their splendid privilege to partake, the women who have shared their husband’s prison cell, like Jane Emmet, or who have walked with their brothers, even to the foot of the scaffold, like Mary Anne McCracken, or who have found death by their lover’s side on the battlefield, like Betsy Gray, “think themselves well paid.” But not even Ireland could pay the mother of the Emmets, or the mother of the Shearses, or heal the hidden wound that bled until her death-night in the heart of Bartholomew Teeling’s mother, or comfort Lord Edward’s poor mother when the roses of each recurring June were redly tragic with the memory of his blood-stained prison deathbed, and its sunshine was darkened by the memory of her boy’s agony. For the greatness of their sorrow, then, shall we not place them first, these broken-hearted mothers, in our tale of the “Women of ’Ninety-Eight”?

The Mother of the Emmets

Elizabeth Mason Emmet—(1740-1803)[^[2]]

“My life was he,

My death his taking.”

—Lament of Mothers of Bethlehem.

[2]. Authorities: Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Third Series, Second Ed. (London and Dublin, 1860); Dr. Thos. Addis Emmet’s “The Emmet Family” (New York, 1898); J. J. Reynolds’s “Footprints of Emmet” (Dublin, 1903); Smith’s “County and City of Cork,” edited by Day and Copinger (Cork, 1893).

“ON Tuesday, September 20th (1803), the day of the execution of Robert Emmet, he was visited at ten o’clock in the morning, by Mr. Leonard McNally, the barrister, who, on entering the room where Emmet had the indulgence of remaining all that morning in the company of the Rev. Dr. Gamble, the ordinary of Newgate, found him reading the litany of the service of the Church of England. Permission was given to him to retire with McNally into an adjoining room, and on entering it, his first enquiry was after his mother, whose health had been in a declining state, and had wholly broken down under the recent afflictions which had fallen on her. McNally, hesitating to answer the enquiry, Robert Emmet repeated the question, ‘How is my mother?’ McNally, without replying directly, said, ‘I know, Robert, you would like to see your mother.’ The answer was, ‘Oh! what would I not give to see her?’ McNally, pointing upwards, said, ‘Then, Robert, you will see her this day!’ and then gave him an account of his mother’s death, which had taken place some days previously. Emmet made no reply; he stood motionless and silent for some moments, and said, ‘It is better so.’ He was evidently struggling hard with his feelings, and endeavouring to suppress them. He made no further allusion to the subject but by expressing ‘a confident hope that he and his mother would meet in heaven.’”[^[3]]

[3]. Madden, op. cit. p. 461. Madden’s account of this touching incident was furnished him by John Patten, brother of Mrs. Thos. Addis Emmet, and the devoted friend of the whole Emmet family, who was a prisoner in Kilmainham at the time of Robert Emmet’s trial and execution.

I have known one woman who, having been able to read, with dry eyes, the melting tale of Sarah Curran’s “Broken Heart,” and to listen, without a sob, to the voice of Sarah’s young lover, so soon to be stilled for ever, pleading from the brink of “the cold and silent grave,” for the last charity of the world’s silence, broke into a passion of weeping as the tragedy, which was Robert Emmet’s life-story, swept through every stage of gathering pathos to the almost intolerable poignancy of its climax—the picture, conjured up by Madden, of the mother who lay dead, of a broken heart, in her widowed home in Donnybrook, while her last-born son, her Benjamin, stood in the dock in Green Street on trial for his life.

And yet is there not comfort to be found in the thought that the mother’s loving spirit was liberated in time from the prison of the suffering flesh, to be made free of all the places out of which her boy’s anguish called to her? If, as was Robert Emmet’s fond hope, “the dear shade of his venerated father” looked down upon him, where he stood in the dock, ready to die for the principles which that father had first taught him, surely the soul of the mother was not far away. Surely it bore him company during the long nerve-wrecking, exhausting hours of the trial,[^[4]] giving him the refreshment which the brutality of his captors and judges denied; surely it was close at hand when his poor body, on which the fetters of death were so soon to be laid, had to submit for the last time to the more galling fetters of the abominable gaoler of Newgate. Could we bear to think of what Robert Emmet was made to suffer during his last night on earth, if the conviction that his mother’s spirit hovered near him, did not bring us comfort? Brought to Newgate from Green Street about eleven o’clock at night, he was heavily ironed by Gregg, the gaoler, and placed in one of the condemned cells. About an hour after midnight an order came from the Secretary at the Castle that the prisoner must be at once conveyed to Kilmainham. What a journey was that through the darkness of the autumn night! What a journey back from Kilmainham to Thomas Street the next day, when through the seething crowds, the carriage which bore the young martyr to the place of his execution moved in the midst of its strong guard of horse and foot! Even his enemies, looking upon him, were fain to confess that never had they seen a man go forth “to die like this”—with such “unostentatious fortitude,” such marvellous absence of all signs of fear, such a conviction of the glory of dying “for Ireland.” Did the dear Lord make it easy for him “to die like this,” by permitting his mother to leave her place in heaven for a time to be with her boy in the supreme hours?

[4]. The trial of Robert Emmet lasted from 9.30 a.m. until 10.30 p.m. During “these thirteen hours of mortal anxiety, of exertion, of attention, constantly engaged, he had no interval of repose, no refreshment.”

Set side by side two pictures. One is that drawn, in such tragic intensity of black and white, by Madden, of a woman of sixty-three, who having drained to the dregs the cup of life’s sorrows, lay down in the home of her widowhood, from which all her children save one were absent, to die of the malady, for which science has found no cure: a broken heart. Nine months earlier her husband had been taken from her and now she, “like the mother of the Shearses, was hurried to her grave by the calamity which had fallen on her youngest son; who, it was vainly hoped, was to have occupied one of the vacant places in the house, and in the heart of his afflicted parents. Vainly had they looked up to Thomas Addis Emmet to supply that place which had been left a void by the death of their eldest and most gifted son, Christopher Temple Emmet. And when Thomas Addis was taken away from them and banished, to whom had they to look but to the younger son; and of that last life-hope of theirs they might have spoken with the feelings which animated the Lacedemonian mother, when one of her sons had fallen fighting for his country, and looking on the last of them then living she said ‘Ejus locum expleat frater.’ And that son was taken from them, incarcerated for four years, and doomed to civil death. Thomas Addis Emmet was then a proscribed man in exile. The father had sunk under the trial, although he was a man of courage and equanimity of mind; but the mother’s last hope in her youngest son sustained in some degree her broken strength and spirit; and that one hope was dashed down never to rise again, when her favourite child, the prop of her old age, was taken from her, and the terrible idea of his frightful fate became her one fixed thought—from the instant the dreadful tidings of his apprehension reached her till the approaching term of the crowning catastrophe, when, in mercy to her, she was taken away from her great misery.”

“Orangemen of Ireland ... these are your triumphs; the desolation of the home of an aged, virtuous couple—the ruin in which all belonging to them were involved, the ignominious death of their youngest and gifted child.”[^[5]]

[5]. Madden, op. cit. pp. 463-464.

The other picture is one we paint for ourselves of a fair young girl, very slim and graceful in her riding habit, with a charming face, usually a little too serious for its twenty summers, showing now a dainty flush of excitement under the piquant riding hood, and clear eyes, usually somewhat too grave for their youth, shining now with an unwonted light. For background a stately eighteenth-century country seat, set in a landscape of exquisite beauty—(What need to describe the entrancing loveliness of woodland, lake and mountain, when it is sufficiently summed up by the magic word, Killarney?) Over it all a sky aflush with the colours of the summer dawn! The haze of summer over the bird-filled, fragrant woods, that sway lightly to the breezes of the virginal new day!

So we picture for ourselves Elizabeth Mason on that summer morning of the year 1760 when she set forth, a charming and accomplished girl of twenty, from the home of her father, James Mason, Esq., of Ballydowney, Killarney, for the memorable visit to Cork, which was to prove an event of such transcendent importance in her life.

We guess something of the hopes and dreams, which lay in James and Catherine Mason’s mind when they yielded to the desires of their son, James (who was a successful business man in Cork), and allowed their only daughter, Elizabeth, to accompany him, on his return to Cork from one of his visits home, for “a season” in the gay, little Southern Capital. Among the country gentlemen of the neighbourhood there was small likelihood of finding a suitable parti for their beautiful girl. Arthur O’Neill’s description of Lord Kenmare’s “Milesian Assembly,” which took place in this identical year,[^[6]] seems to point to a society around Killarney of hard-riding, hard-drinking, jolly squires with few of whom Elizabeth’s cultured and thoughtful mind would have enough in common for the prospects of a very happy marriage. Amid the young professional and business men in Cork, with their more intellectual interests, the wider knowledge of life which their close and frequent intercourse with the Continent fostered, their greater accessibility to new ideas, she was, as her prudent, loving parents probably realised, much more likely to find a husband calculated to make her happy. Extraordinarily gifted by nature, her education had been such as to foster her birthgifts. Her great-grandson, Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, of New York, who in his book, “The Emmet Family,” has done us the great service of making us acquainted with the choses intimes of his illustrious stock, has published many of her letters, and they bear out Dr. Madden’s verdict on her “as an amiable, exemplary, high-minded lady, whose understanding was as vigorous as her maternal feelings were strong and ardent.” In another place Madden speaks of her “noble disposition and vigorous understanding,” and in conversation with Dr. Thos. Addis Emmet in 1880 he stated that he considered that she, her husband, her three sons, Christopher Temple, Thomas Addis, Robert, and her daughter, Mary Anne (wife of Robert Holmes) “were the most talented family in every respect he had ever known of.” It was felt, indeed, and not alone by those who hold that “all distinguished men inherit their characteristics rather from the mother than from the father,” that the extraordinary brilliancy of the three sons of Dr. and Mrs. Emmet was largely an inheritance from their mother. And it is impossible to read her letters, with their exquisite precision and felicity of phrase, their ease, and candour and absence of all straining after effect, their expression of a philosophy of life, the noblest, and soundest (because founded on the truest Christian principles) without feeling that they have been penned by a woman rarely gifted in heart and mind.

[6]. Mrs. Milligan Fox’s “Annals of the Irish Harpers,” p. 147. It was on this occasion that Arthur O’Neill, in reply to an apologetic remark of Lord Kenmare’s concerning the place that the blind harper had found near the foot of the table, made the famous assertion: “Where an O’Neill sits, there is the head of the table.”

With these rare gifts of heart and mind, and in all the freshness, and charm, and beauty of her twenty summers, Miss Elizabeth Mason made something of a sensation when she appeared in Cork society. She had numerous relatives in the pleasant little city by the Lee, and each and every one of them was determined that their beautiful visitor should have “a good time.” So once or twice a week some kindly matron would call at James Mason’s house, and carry off his sister to the concerts and “assemblies” which were regular bi-weekly events in the Assembly House near Hamond’s Marsh. Or a party of young people would beg her to join them for a boating excursion on the river, or “a promenade” on the Mall where the beau monde loved to display its gay silk and satins, its feathers and furbelows; or on the Bowling Green, where it took the air under the quaintly cut trees, and listened to the band discoursing sweet music for its delectation; or in Mr. Edward Webber’s gardens near the Mardyke where it ate strawberries and cream, and all the other delectable fruits of the earth, each in its proper season. In the evenings there were theatre-parties, or “drums” at the Assembly House, or in the hospitable and elegant homes of some of Cork’s merchant princes, whose culture was not surpassed by their wealth. Here while the young folk danced their minuets and country-dances, their elders played cards; but both young and old were ready to leave dancing floor, and card table, to take part in the delightful concerts of “Italic airs,” which made one visitor to Cork imagine “the god of music had taken a large stride from the Continent, over England to this island,” and attribute “the humane and gentle disposition of the inhabitants, in some measure, to the refinement of this divine art.” At supper one heard supremely good conversation, for the men of Cork were, according to the same witness, “well versed in public affairs,” fond of news and politics, and diligent readers of the newest French and English books, and the periodicals of the day—and their pretty partners made a charmingly appreciative audience while the men talked over the foreign and domestic news they had found in the Dublin and London newspapers, which the two coffee-houses near the Exchange supplied for their customers.[^[7]]

[7]. Smith’s “County and City of Cork,” I., 388.

It began to be noticed by the observant matrons, who chaperoned these delightful gatherings, that one brilliant talker seemed particularly anxious to observe the effect his conversation made on clever Elizabeth Mason, and how persistently he sought her out as a partner in ball and supper rooms, or at pic-nic or promenade, whenever his professional occupations allowed him to take part in these functions. They noticed, with approval, that Elizabeth was not indifferent to the attentions of the rising young physician, Dr. Robert Emmet,[^[8]] who having studied medicine and taken his degree with great éclat at one of the most famous medical schools in Europe, that of the University of Montpelier,[^[9]] had taken up practice in Cork some years previously.

[8]. Born in Tipperary in 1729, he was just thirty-one years old at the date of his marriage.

[9]. His great-grandson, Dr. Thos. Addis Emmet of New York, himself a distinguished specialist, records the publication of a book by Dr. Robert Emmet, in 1753, on some of the diseases of women. It was originally published in Latin and was afterwards translated into French, with two editions printed in Paris (op. cit. p. 47).

In due course the good-natured gossips of Cork learned that Dr. Emmet had sent proposals, through James Mason, jun., to Mr. and Mrs. James Mason of Ballydowney, for the hand of their daughter, Elizabeth, and that the parents, having satisfied themselves, after due enquiry, that the connection was a suitable one, had given their consent to the marriage. Dr. Emmet was the son of a physician, Dr. Christopher Emmet, in Tipperary, and in addition to his professional earnings had inherited a considerable fortune from his father. Through his mother, Rebecca Temple, he was connected with one of the most aristocratic families in England. Satisfactory marriage settlements were speedily arranged, and preparations were pushed on for the wedding, which took place in Cork on November 16th, 1760.

Dr. Madden informs us, on the authority of Elizabeth Mason’s nephew, Mr. J. St. John Mason, that the doctor built a large house for his bride in George’s Street. It seems probable that the ménage included from the beginning the doctor’s widowed mother, Mrs. Rebecca Temple Emmet, and his widowed and childless sister-in-law, Mrs. Grace Russell Emmet, relict of his brother Thomas, who died in 1754. At all events these two ladies died under the doctor’s roof, after the family had moved to Dublin; the elder in 1774, the younger in 1788. A bequest of the latter to her “dear sister-in-law” of a gold watch, and ample legacies to the children seem to betoken that Elizabeth Emmet had the secret of gaining the hearts of her husband’s kin, and that as mistress of a large and wealthy household she knew how to make all who sat by her hearth, or gathered round her table, happy.

She was soon busy in her nursery. In 1761, her first-born son, Christopher Temple Emmet, made his entry into it. The boy was destined, like Cuchullin, to “a great name and a short life.” He was only twenty-eight when he died, but he had already impressed his contemporaries as one of the most brilliant men of his time. Grattan, who disliked the Emmets intensely (because they had the courage of their convictions, and he, in spite of his fiery rhetoric, was all for compromise and security), has left on record his opinion of Temple Emmet, and it is worth quoting at length:—

“Temple Emmet, before he came to the Bar, knew more law than any of the judges on the bench; and if he had been placed on one side, and the whole bench opposed to him, he could have been examined against them, and would have surpassed them all; he would have answered better both in law and divinity than any judge or any bishop in the land. He had a wonderful memory—he recollected everything—it stuck to him with singular tenacity. He showed this in his early youth, and on one occasion he gave a strong instance of it. There existed at that time in Dublin College, an institution called the Historical Society; there were subjects selected for discussion, and prior to the debate there was an examination in history. On one occasion the books happened to be mislaid, and it was thought no examination could have taken place; but Emmet, whose turn it was to be in the chair, and who had read the course, recollected the entire, and examined in every part of it, and with surprising ability.”[^[10]]

[10]. Grattan’s “Life and Times.” By Henry Grattan, the younger. IV. 356.

In reading the records of eighteenth-century families, we are equally astonished at the size of them, and the small proportion of their members to survive infancy. Dr. and Mrs. Emmet had seventeen children in seventeen years, and of these there only grew to manhood and womanhood three sons, Christopher Temple, Thomas Addis (born 1764), Robert (born 1778), and one daughter, Mary Anne (born 1773). Of the other thirteen, there remained only their names in Aunt Grace’s family bible, followed by the pitiable record, “died young.”

One circumstance moves us strangely: four little Robert Emmets (the first born in 1771, the others in 1774, 1776, 1777) came, and finding the burden of life too heavy, laid it quickly down, until he came, the fifth, the destined one, who was to take it up and carry it, until his hero-fate bade him lay it down—for Ireland.

Perhaps the little graves that multiplied so fast in the Cork cemetery made that city a depressing place for Elizabeth Emmet; or perhaps her husband was attracted to Dublin, by the promises of professional advancement offered by the appointment to the Viceroyalty of his kinsman, the Marquis of Buckingham. At all events it is a matter of history that Dr. and Mrs. Emmet came to Dublin in 1771 and took up their residence in Molesworth Street.[^[11]] Here a number of their children were born, including Mary Anne (1773) and Robert (1778).

[11]. The identification of the house is of much interest, as it was that in which Robert Emmet was born. A writer in Georgian Society Record (IV. 94) states that it is now numbered 22, and forms portion of Kilworth House.

In this same year, 1771, Dr. Emmet was appointed State Physician, and owing to his character and capacity, was soon in possession also, of a large private practice. He was a charming, genial man, and a great favourite with his patients. His wife’s nephew, St. John Mason, described him to Dr. Madden as “a man of easy and gentlemanly manners, remarkable for vivacity and pleasantry, but free from coarseness or that exaggeration of expression in moments of hilarity called grimace. He possessed humour but not of a caustic nature. In discourse he was fluent and happy in the choice of words, and in the use of classical quotations. He was remarkably punctual and precise in business and professional affairs.” By his professional skill and business prudence Dr. Emmet amassed a considerable fortune, and lived in a manner commensurate with it, entertaining much good company, and taking a leading part in the brilliant society of the day.

After the birth of their youngest child, Robert, in 1778, the Emmets moved from their house in Molesworth Street, to a splendid new mansion in Stephen’s Green. Those were the days of the Volunteers, and Ireland, stirred to the depths by the example of America’s struggle for freedom, was gathering her forces to make the same demand, which America had already secured—and to back it by the same arguments. Less fortunate than America—or less wisely and nobly led—Ireland did not force the question to the decision of the field of battle, but accepted in full settlement of her claim a something which only Grattan and his friends, blinded by their own verbal fire-works, could have mistaken for liberty. Dr. Robert Emmet was one of those who saw, from the beginning, the inadequacy of the Settlement of 1782; and there is no doubt but that it was from him that his sons learned that political creed—the doctrine of “Absolute Independence”—for which one of them was to suffer the “white martyrdom” of exile, and the other the “red martyrdom” of blood. Grattan and Curran and others of their ilk who could never forgive those who had the pluck and honesty to draw their logical conclusion from the premises which they themselves had instituted, have tried to discredit Dr. Emmet by throwing ridicule on him. Grattan’s son quotes his father as saying that “Dr. Emmet had his pill and his plan, and he mixed so much politics with his prescription, that he would kill the patient who took the one, and ruin the country that listened to the other.” And Curran loved to raise a laugh among his friends—Sir Jonah Barrington and other high-minded gentlemen—by “taking off” the Doctor administering “their morning draught” to his sons. “Well, Temple, what would you do for your country? Addis, would you kill your brother for your country? Would you kill your sister for your country? Would you kill me?” We can listen with equanimity to the bitter epigrams of Grattan, or the monkey-like buffoonery of Curran when we remember what his own sons thought of Dr. Emmet: “Dear shade of my venerated father,” cried Robert as he stood in the dock facing his iniquitous judges and accusers, “look down on your suffering son, and see has he for one moment deviated from those moral and patriotic principles which you so early instilled into his youthful mind, and for which he has now to offer up his life.” And Thomas Addis Emmet, writing to his mother from Brussels, on the receipt of the news of his father’s death (December, 1802), has drawn for his own, and his mother’s consolation, a noble portrait of him whom they had lost: “The first comfort you can know must spring up from within yourself, from your reflection and religion, from your recalling to memory that my father’s active and vigorous mind was always occupied in doing good to others. That his seventy-five years were unostentatiously but inestimably filled with perpetual services to his fellow-creatures. That although he was tried, and that severely, with some of those calamities from which we cannot be exempt, yet he enjoyed an uncommon portion of tranquillity and happiness, for, by his firmness and understanding, he was enabled to bear like a man the visitations of external misfortunes, and from within no troubled conscience or compunction of self-reproach ever disturbed his peace.”

The years from 1778 to 1789 were, doubtless, the happiest years in Elizabeth Emmet’s life. The elder boys, Christopher Temple and Thomas Addis, were at the University, and a mother even less tender than she, could not but be filled with pride and happiness at the brilliant records they were making for themselves. In one of these years there arrived from America kinsfolk of her husband’s, Sir John and Robert Temple, and the latter’s family, and in the hospitable eighteenth-century manner which its big houses and generous style of living fostered, they became inmates of Dr. and Mrs. Emmet’s house. The tie which bound the Emmets to the Temples was strengthened, when in 1784 Christopher Temple Emmet married his cousin, Miss Anne Western Temple, daughter of Robert. He had been called to the Bar a short time previously and was in extensive practice. I have already quoted Grattan’s opinion of his gifts. Even more significant was the testimony—spoken of all places in the world—in the very Court wherein Christopher’s youngest brother was awaiting the death-sentence—and by the lips that were so soon to pronounce it, the cruel lips of “Hanging Judge” Norbury. “You had an eldest brother whom death snatched away, and who when living was one of the greatest ornaments of the Bar. The laws of his country were the study of his youth, and the study of his maturer years was to cultivate and support them.” With Christopher marked out, by the judgment of all the competent men of his time for high advancement; with a charming and amiable new daughter added to her household in the shape of Christopher’s wife; with her second son, Thomas Addis, winning all sorts of distinctions for himself in the University of Edinburgh, whither he had gone to study medicine; with Mary Anne, growing into lovely womanhood, and showing a strength of character and a breadth of intellect, which stamped her as a true Emmet; with young Robert, earning praise from his masters and regard from his comrades; with the spectacle of her husband’s delight in all this to double her own—Elizabeth Emmet might well count herself, for one golden moment at least, that rare thing: a perfectly happy woman.

Alas! Alas! how short the moment to which we may cry with Faust, “tarry awhile, thou art so fair.” Very speedily, Elizabeth Emmet’s “fair moment” passed. In February, 1789, her son, Christopher Temple, went “circuit” in Munster—and one day to those who waited his return in the pleasant home in Stephen’s Green there came the tragic news of his death from smallpox. The blow was too severe for Christopher’s young wife. She died a few months after her husband, leaving their little daughter, Kitty, to the care of her grandparents. Elizabeth Emmet had to live on—to face the sorrows that yet awaited her.

At the desire of Dr. Emmet, the second son, Thomas Addis, anxious “to fill” as far as in him lay, “the place of his brother,” turned aside from the profession of medicine, in which he had already graduated, and took up that of law. He was called to the Bar in 1790. In 1791, he married Miss Jane Patten, daughter of Rev. John Patten of Clonmel, his choice of a bride giving the greatest satisfaction to his father and mother.

At first the young couple lived with the old Doctor and his wife, as part of the one household; but as the little grandchildren began to fill the nursery, it was found desirable to provide separate establishments. The Doctor, with this end in view, divided his house in Stephen’s Green, West, into two portions. It stood (and still stands, divided as the Doctor left it into two residences) at the corner of Lamb’s Lane and Stephen’s Green, West,[^[12]] and the Doctor kept the corner portion for himself and assigned the inner to his son’s family. Thomas Addis Emmet had, also, as we know from Tone’s “Autobiography,” “a charming villa” at Rathfarnham, and doubtless the whole family were made welcome in it, whenever the call of the countryside overbid the attractions of the town, in the years previous to Dr. Emmet’s purchase of Casino—the country residence where he spent his last years.

[12]. Mr. Reynolds identifies them as 124 and 125 Stephen’s Green, West. In Dr. Emmet’s time the house was numbered 109.

The mention of Tone fitly introduces the years of Thomas Addis Emmet’s public life—his efforts for Catholic Emancipation, his connection with the United Irishmen. But, as we shall speak more fully of these years when we come to tell the story of Thomas Addis Emmet’s wife, we shall content ourselves here with a thought of the anxieties, which must have been the constant companions of a woman so clever and far-sighted as his mother. Where was all this leading to? Her son, himself with his clear grave eyes and resolute heart, knew perfectly well—like the majority of the leaders of the United Irishmen—that the course in which he was embarked was one which would, most probably, call for the sacrifice of all that men hold dear. Brilliant professional prospects; the elegance and comfort of a home adorned by a charming wife and a band of lovely children; property and position and the interest in a settled order of things which they bring with them; life itself—all these Thomas Addis Emmet saw himself called upon at any moment to renounce for the loyal service of Ireland. “It is a hard service they take,” indeed, “who serve the Poor Old Woman”! “But, for all that, they think themselves well paid.”

On March the 12th, 1798, when the Government, acting on the information of Thomas Reynolds, swooped down on the Leinster Directory of United Irishmen, assembled in Oliver Bond’s house, Emmet was arrested in his home in Stephen’s Green and committed to Newgate, from whence he was afterwards conveyed to Kilmainham. Of his wife’s heroic conduct on that occasion we shall have an inspiring tale to tell. While her daughter-in-law shared her husband’s imprisonment, Elizabeth Emmet found merciful occupation in the care of the five little grandchildren whom they had confided to her: Robert, Margaret, Elizabeth, John Patten, Thomas Addis.

In April, the authorities, alarmed by the spirit of patriotism which was manifesting itself among the students of Trinity College, ordered the “Visitation,” of which Moore gives an account in his “Memoirs.”

In anticipation of the verdict of Lord Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Robert Emmet, who was looked on as the leader of the patriot youths, requested the Board of Fellows to take his name off the books of the college. During the wild excitement of the next few months: the bloody weeks of “the Rising” in May and June; the executions and court-martials of July; the French landing in August; the new executions which followed it, in September; the capture of Tone in October; his court-martial and death in November, all through the tragic calendar of the year 1798, Dr. Emmet and his wife Elizabeth had, at least, the comfort of their younger son’s constant presence with them.

In this year Dr. Emmet set the houses in Stephen’s Green, and took up his residence with his family (which now included his grandchildren) in a country house he had recently purchased for himself, Casino, Milltown. This historic house still stands, and Mr. Reynolds’s indications make it easy to locate: “at the corner of Bird Avenue on the eastern side of the Dundrum Road, midway between Milltown and Windy Arbour.”

Two events of much importance mark the following year (1799) in Elizabeth Emmet’s maternal calendar. The first was the removal of Thomas Addis and the other State prisoners to Fort George in the North of Scotland; the second was the marriage of her daughter, Mary Anne, to the distinguished barrister, Robert Holmes.

Early in 1800, Robert Emmet visited his brother in Fort George, passing from thence to the Continent where he remained until after the signing of the Peace of Amiens in 1802.

Later in the year, Jane Emmet made good the design which her conjugal affection had long inspired, and which no governmental rebuff could weaken—that of joining her husband in Fort George. She went there in July, escorted by her brother, John Patten, and accompanied by her three elder children, Robert, Margaret, and Elizabeth. With the grandparents at Casino were left John Patten, Thomas Addis, and a sturdy little chap called Christopher Emmet, who had joined the goodly company since we last made the enumeration of them.

During the years Thomas Addis and his wife spent in Fort George there was a constant interchange of letters between Casino and the grim northern keep in which the Irish State prisoners were so long interned. Sometimes the Casino news is conveyed by Dr. Emmet—whose letters remind us of St. John Mason’s description of his conversation; sometimes it is Mary Anne Holmes who holds the pen; sometimes it is Kitty, the orphan daughter of Christopher Temple and Anne Western Temple. But most frequently it is the mother and in these letters we get our best picture of the sort of woman Elizabeth Emmet was.[^[13]] There are pleasant glimpses, too, of the home-life in Casino. We see the father, seeking solace for his anxieties in his labours in beautifying the house he fondly hoped was to be the home of his children, and his children’s children. The thirteen acres around Casino serve the purpose of Penelope’s web, and the loving wife finds comfort in watching the amusement he gets from his tree-planting and landscape gardening, his industry in gravelling the walks and raking them when they have been gravelled. Convinced that “the promises of hope are better than the gifts of fortune,” he has built a fine nursery ’gainst the happy day when all his grandchildren (and their parents) shall be gathered together under his patriarchal roof; and a certain cherry tree in full blossom makes him and his wife long to see Jane and her charming children gathered under it. The Doctor’s craze for transplanting trees which, to the rest of the family, seem to be perfectly well placed where they are, has grown into a family joke; but his wife is too well pleased to see the good effect the interest and occupation have on his health to protest now, as she was wont to do, even “tho’ from the earliness of the season and the age of the trees she despairs of ever seeing a leaf upon any of them.” “As we have a great demand for pea-rods,” she remarks jestingly, “they will not be useless.” She gathers up all the news she can about their friends, knowing how welcome such items are to exiles. Dr. Drennan, who has attended Mary Anne at the birth of her first-born baby, is happily “married to a very amiable, pretty young woman”; “he has waited to some good purpose.” We have a pretty etching of the author of the “Wake of William Orr,” and the famous “Orellana Letters,” “leaning over the cradle of his little heir, so anxious about it lest it should die.” Other friends, like Lady Anne Fitzgerald, Ally Spring, the Temples—and, above all, the Pattens and the Colvilles—find frequent mention. She does not hesitate to inculcate certain “musty precepts” as to health, which her knowledge of her son’s and her daughter-in-law’s dispositions seems to her to call for. Jane must refrain from “the great efforts of which she is so fond,” for “system is better than swiftness,” and though “we may admire the speed and power of a racehorse, a steady draft horse will in general be found as useful and much more durable.” Both Thomas Addis and Jane are fond, she knows, of heated rooms and late hours, and their prudent mother reminds them of the necessity of fresh air in their bed-chamber and living room, and preaches the doctrine of “early to bed and early to rise.”

[13]. They are published at length by Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet in his “Emmet Family” (pp. 71-101). They are models of grace and style, and one wishes they were in the hands of our women who have so largely lost the old-world accomplishment of letter-writing.

But what most people will think the most delightful thing in the letters are the pictures they give of the children. As has been already mentioned, the three elder were with their parents in Fort George, and almost all the State prisoners were lending a hand, each in his own speciality, to their education. The accounts of their progress interests their grandmother keenly, and she helps with comments on their dispositions as she had studied them. She is proud of Elizabeth’s beauty and goodness of disposition, of Margaret’s shrewdness of observation, and liberality and directness in dealing; but “the tenderness of Robert’s tones and the brightness of his countenance give him the advantage over all the other children whatever.” It is easy to see that Robert is his grandmother’s favourite, dear as all the children are to her. A letter from him gives her “great pleasure, for it is a true picture of his heart, overflowing with innocence, honesty, and good nature.” She begs for “minute accounts of the three children ...,” she and her husband “being glad to feed upon crumbs that fall from her son’s table.” In return she is almost as minute as her son and daughter-in-law could wish about the three from whom they are separated. She draws a funny little sketch of the “little fellow,” two-year-old Christopher Temple, “fighting hard in dumb show for his share in his grandfather’s claret,” and a little later on “engaging in his elder brother’s plays, and forcing himself into notice more than the others.” John is the other grandmother’s favourite, and Tom is pronounced by Ally Spring “the finest child you have,” but “the little fellow,” as Elizabeth always calls the baby namesake of her dead first-born, is of all the three confided to her care the nearest to her heart. We must, however, reserve further quotations from the letters, as far as they regard her grandchildren, until we come to discuss their education, at some length, in our memoir of their mother.

The letters paint the writer as a grave and somewhat reserved nature. She feels that she has not her husband’s “gracious manner,” which perhaps prevents her daughter-in-law judging of the strength of her love for her. She is inclined by nature to melancholy. “Solitude has through life stuck to me like an inner garment, and I find that it exceeds even those of the children of Israel; it is a habit that instead of wearing by time, grows stronger by constant use.” But she has the great anchors of Faith and Charity. She feels her blessings with a grateful heart, and wishes to discern and adore the healing hand which has been held out to her in the midst of trials and distresses, and without which her natural infirmities must have sunk under the scenes she has gone through. The most persistent note in this correspondence is that of deep and true religious feeling and, as we catch it, we seem to understand how it came about that in the midst of the corrupt society which was that of eighteenth century Dublin, this woman’s sons were kept chaste and undefiled—Moore’s tribute to the unspotted youth of Robert comes back to us, bringing with it unconscious tribute to the pure and exalting influence of Robert’s mother.

The letters end in 1802, when Thomas Addis Emmet was released from Fort George and awaited in Brussels certain developments which were to determine his future movements. Here the news of his father’s death reached him, and his own letter on that occasion to his mother, which I have already quoted, brought forth one from her which, apart from its intrinsic interest, must have ever borne in the eyes of her son a priceless value, for when he received it, the hand that had penned it was long mouldering into dust. It was addressed to the Poste Restante, New York, and only reached its addressee on his arrival in that city in November 11th, 1804.

In the interval the race of Emmet had been practically exterminated in the land for which they had given so much. The death of Elizabeth Emmet on September 9th, 1803, was followed by her youngest son’s execution a few weeks later. In 1804 Mary Anne Holmes died most tragically in the arms of her husband, newly liberated from prison. One guesses that the little children, John, and Tom, and Temple, were then taken care of by their Grandmother Patten, until an opportunity could be found of sending them across the Atlantic to their parents. They had gone with Grandmother Emmet, when she left Casino, after her husband’s death, to take up her residence in Blomfield, Donnybrook. And, no doubt, Mary Anne Holmes and poor cousin Kitty did what they could to care for them and comfort them. But if the pathos of the scene drawn by Madden of the death chamber of Elizabeth Emmet could have borne any heightening, doubtless he would have introduced in it the tiny figures of three little frightened, sable-clad boys, standing hand in hand for comfort, and weeping—though they knew it not—for the tragedy of the passing of their house from Irish soil.

The Mother of Lord Edward Fitzgerald

Emilia Mary, Duchess of Leinster (1731-1814)[^[14]]

“And the flower I held brightest of all that grew in soil or shall ever grow

Is rotting in the ground, and will spring no more to lift up my heart.”

—A Father’s Keen, by Patrick O’Hegarty.

[14]. Authorities: Moore’s “Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald”; Campbell’s “Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald,” “Letters of Horace Walpole,” works of Mrs. Delaney, etc.

“GREATER love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”—(John xv. 13). Ever since that June dawn, when its first sweet rays, stealing through the bars of the prison window in Newgate, fell on the form that lay rigid and still on the prison bed, we know what was “the greatest love” in Lord Edward’s life. For on that sad bed, still disordered from the tossings of his fever-racked limbs, still stained with his life-blood, there lay one who had died for Ireland.

By the supreme test, therefore, vouched for by the Supreme Lover, we know that the love of Ireland was Lord Edward’s “greatest love,” and that all other loves of his had to yield to its supremacy. But we can only measure the magnitude of his love for Ireland, if we have the measure of his other loves to set beside it. And so it falls out, that we have a particular need, if we would estimate Lord Edward aright, and would understand what he had to offer to Ireland, to know something of his other loves, and of those who inspired them. Above all we must know something of his extraordinary love for his mother.

His letters are full of it: “I am never so happy as when with you, dearest mother, you seem to make every distress lighter, and I bear everything better, and enjoy everything more when with you.” And again: “You cannot think how I feel to want you here. I dined and slept at Frescati the other day, Ogilvie and I, tête-à-tête. We talked a great deal of you. Though the place makes me melancholy, yet it gives one pleasant feelings. To be sure, the going to bed without wishing you a good night; the coming down in a morning, and not seeing you; the sauntering about in the fine sunshine, looking at your flowers and shrubs without you to lean upon one, was all very bad indeed. In settling my journey that evening, I determined to see you in my way, supposing you were even a thousand miles out of it.”

There is one letter to the “dearest of mothers,” in which he places his love for her above all else: “I assure you I miss you very, very much. I am not half so merry as I should be if you were here. I get tired of everything, and want to have you to go and talk to. You are, after all, what I love best in the world. I love you more than I think I do; but I will not give way to such thoughts, for it always makes me grave. I really made myself miserable for two days since I left you, by this sort of reflections; and in thinking over with myself what misfortunes I could bear, I found there was one I could not; but God bless you.”

Was it Lord Edward’s surpassing love for his mother, that made her, on her side, single him out among all her children to lavish her tenderness on; or did she recognise in his great capacity for love a heritage from her own nature which drew this son closer to her than any other child she had ever borne? It is certain that of her numerous children—they counted twenty-one in all—Lord Edward was his mother’s favourite, and was accepted as such by the rest of the family. Mr. Gerald Campbell thinks her very frankness in avowing her preference for him prevented any jealousy among the others. Among the seventy or eighty letters of the Duchess to her daughters and others which Mr. Campbell examined before writing his charming book, “Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald,” there is hardly one, he tells us, “in which she does not express her exceeding love for him above all the rest.” He quotes: “Dear, dear Eddy! How constantly he is in my thoughts!” “In Edward nothing surprises me, dear angel; he has always loved me in an uncommon degree from childhood.” “I do not pretend to say that Dearest Angel Edward is not the first object: you have all been used to allow me that indulgence of partiality to him, and none of you, I believe, blame me for it, or see my excessive attachment to that Dear Angel with a jealous eye.” The truth is that Lord Edward had to an extraordinary degree, the gift, so often accorded as a birthright to persons with a great work to do in the world, of winning hearts. And probably his own brothers and sisters were as ready to succumb to his magnetism as the rest of the world.

It would not be surprising if Lord Edward inherited his power of winning hearts, as well as his capacity for love, from his fascinating mother, and she, in her turn, wielded it in virtue of her Stuart blood. For she was the great-granddaughter of Charles II and the beautiful Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth. Of the numerous daughters of her father and mother, the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, four grew to womanhood, and of these Lady Emilia Mary was the second. All four were famous for their great beauty and charm; and all four have played a notable part in history. Lady Caroline, who married Stephen Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, was the mother of the brilliant statesman, Charles James Fox. Lady Louisa married Mr. Connolly, of Castletown. Lady Sarah, some years after the unfortunate termination of her first marriage with Sir Charles Bunbury, married Colonel Napier and became the mother of many distinguished soldier sons, including Sir William Napier, the historian of the Peninsular Wars, and Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Scinde.

I do not know why the novelists who have found in the life romance of the four beautiful Lennox girls such a wealth of material should have passed over the love-story of their parents. It is, if possible, more romantic than any of them. The story is told by their grandson, Mr. Henry Napier, and published in the introduction to the “Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox” (pp. 85-87), his mother:

“My grandfather, the second Duke of Richmond, was one of the Lords of the Bedchamber to King George the Second, who then resided at Kensington Palace. He had been, as was the custom in those days, married while yet a boy to Lady Sarah Cadogan.... This marriage was made to cancel a gambling debt, the young people’s consent having been the last thing thought of; the Earl of March[^[15]] was sent for from school, and the young lady from her nursery, a clergyman was in attendance, and they were told they were immediately to become man and wife! The young lady is not reported to have uttered a word; the gentleman exclaimed, ‘They surely are not going to marry me to that dowdy!’ The ceremony, however, took place; a postchaise was ready at the door, and Lord March was instantly packed off with his tutor to make the ‘grand tour,’ while his young wife was returned to the care of her mother, a Dutch woman, daughter of William Munster, Counsellor of Holland. After some years spent abroad Lord March returned, a well-educated handsome young man, but with no very agreeable recollections of his wife. Wherefore, instead of at once seeking his own home, he went directly to the Opera or Theatre, where he amused himself between the acts in examining the company. He had not long been occupied in this manner when a very young and beautiful woman more especially struck his fancy, and turning to a gentleman beside him he asked who she was. ‘You must be a stranger in London,’ replied the gentleman, ‘not to know the toast of the town, the beautiful Lady March.’ Agreeably surprised at this intelligence, Lord March proceeded to the box, announced himself, and claimed his bride—the very dowdy whom he had so scornfully rejected some years before, but with whom he afterwards lived so happily that she died of a broken heart within the year of his decease, which took place in Godalming, in Surrey, in August, 1750, when my mother was only five years and a few months old.”

[15]. The title borne by the hero of the story while his father, the first Duke of Richmond, was still alive.

EMILY, COUNTESS OF KILDARE
The Mother of Lord Edward Fitzgerald

The conjugal affection which ever afterwards united the hero and heroine of this pretty romance receives emphatic testimony from Horace Walpole. In the gossip he gathers up for his correspondents their names figure frequently; and while he jests maliciously about the Duke’s “pride and Stuartism,” and the Duchess’s “grandeur,” he is an enthusiastic admirer of her Grace’s beauty, and his cynicism is not proof against the spectacle of her love for her husband, and her devotion to her children. Like her daughter, the Duchess of Leinster, she had an extraordinarily large family—twenty-six, as we learn from Horace Walpole[^[16]]—but as was so often the case in these enormous eighteenth-century families—but a small proportion of them survived their infancy. We have a pretty picture of the Duchess and her husband (“who sat by his wife all night kissing her hand”) at the ball given by “long Sir Thomas Robinson” for “the Duke’s little girl,” Lady Caroline Lennox, in October, 1741. “The beauties,” he informs his Florentine correspondent, Sir Horace Mann, “were the Duke of Richmond’s two daughters,[^[17]] and their mother, still handsomer than they.” At the Duchess of Norfolk’s great “masquerade” of February 17th, 1742, to which Royalty went, ablaze with diamonds, and where “quantities of pretty Vandykes, and all kinds of old pictures walked out of their frames,” the “two finest and most charming masks,” in Mr. Walpole’s opinion, “were their Graces of Richmond, like Henry the Eighth and Jane Seymour, excessively rich, and both so handsome!”[^[18]]

[16]. “Letters,” II., 221.

[17]. “Letters,” I., 85. The editor of the Walpole “Letters,” identifies the second of these girls as Lady Emily, our heroine, but it seems very unlikely, as she was only ten years old at the date of this ball.

[18]. Ibid., p. 146.

Owing to their father’s position at Court, the little Lennox girls were well known to the old king, George II, and prime favourites with him. He was Lady Emily’s godfather, and the christening cup he gave her is still preserved at Carton. He was delighted, beyond measure, when one day, taking his constitutional on the broad walk at Kensington, he saw a charming little maid rush from her French bonne and come bounding up to him with a saucy “Comment vous portez vous Monsieur le Roi, vous avez une grande et belle maison ici, n’est ce pas?” It was little Lady Sarah Lennox, and the king, having discovered her identity, invited her bonne to carry her often to see his “grande et belle maison.” The children learned to speak French before they spoke English, and Lady Emily, in particular, showed herself all through life an enthusiastic admirer of French literature, and very accessible to the new ideas of which that literature made itself the vehicle. Horace Walpole tells us of the delight he experienced, on one occasion when he had invited her and her sister, Lady Caroline, with their husbands, Lord Kildare and Mr. Fox, to Strawberry Hill, and the weather turned out too wet to show his company the wonders of his castle and grounds, to find that Lady Kildare was “a true Sévignist.” “You know,” he remarks to his correspondent, Richard Bentley, “what pleasure I have in any increase in our sect” (i.e. the cult of Madame de Sévigné). “I thought she looked handsomer than ever, as she talked of Notre Dame des Rochers.”[^[19]] Later on, we hear from Mrs. Delany of her admiration for Rousseau, and his theories of education; and we know from one of her daughters that her great interest in education made her a diligent reader of Madame de Genlis. She seems to have spent much time in her girlhood with her mother’s relations in Holland, and this fact, together with the French influences which presided over her education, gave her a European point of view, which was in striking contrast with the insularity of the majority of English-women of her class and generation. Doubtless, this cosmopolitanism of his mother’s was, also, not without its effect on Lord Edward.

[19]. A name given by Horace Walpole to Madame de Sévigné, of whose “Letters” he was a devoted enthusiast. He sometimes calls her “Notre Dame de Livry”—Les Rochers and Livry were the names of her country seats.

In 1744, her elder sister, Lady Caroline, eloped with Mr. Henry Fox, to the great displeasure of the Richmonds. “The town,” writes Horace Walpole to his namesake in Florence (May 27th, 1744) “has been in a great bustle about a private match; but which by the ingenuity of the ministry, has been made politics. Mr. Fox fell in love with Lady Caroline Lennox, asked her, was refused, and stole her. His father was a footman;[^[20]] her great grandfather, a king: hinc illae lacrymae.”

[20]. Sir Stephen Fox was said originally to have been a choir-boy in Salisbury Cathedral. He died, after a romantic career, and having held office under four sovereigns—Charles II, James II, King William, and Queen Anne—one of the wealthiest men in England.

It was only after some years, and when the birth of Lady Caroline’s eldest little boy made the struggle between tenderness and pride in her parents’ hearts incline overwhelmingly towards the former, that they consented to a reconciliation. The touching letter which the Duke addresses to his daughter on this occasion has been published by the Princess Liechtenstein in her book on “Holland House” (pp. 68-72), and will be read with interest by all who have learned to like Lord Edward’s maternal grandfather and grandmother, from Horace Walpole’s account of them.

One consequence of Lady Caroline’s runaway marriage was to make the Duke and Duchess of Richmond extra careful about the chaperonage of their second daughter, Lady Emily. Horace Walpole has an amusing story to tell in this connection of a little “set-to” between the Duchess of Richmond and the witty but eccentric Duchess of Queensberry. “There is a very good quarrel on foot between two duchesses: she of Queensberry sent to invite Lady Emily Lennox to a ball: her Grace of Richmond, who is wonderfully cautious since Lady Caroline’s elopement, sent word ‘she could not determine.’ The other sent again the same night: the same answer. The Queensberry then sent word, that she had made up her company, and desired to be excused from having Lady Emily’s; but at the bottom of the card wrote, ‘Too great a trust.’”[^[21]]

[21]. Letter to Sir Horace Mann, March 29, 1745.

Carefully guarded as Lady Emily might be, the town was soon busy with her name. When Prince Lobkowitz arrived in England in the beginning of 1745 and was observed to pay great attention to the Duke of Richmond’s charming daughter, it was immediately reported that they would make a match of it. The gossip even reached Mrs. Dewes, deep in the provinces, and in reply to a question she puts her sister, Mrs. Delany, about it, the latter gives the accepted version of the story:[^[22]] “You were not quite misinformed about Lady Emily Lennox and Prince Lobkowitz; he was in love with her and made proposals of marriage, but the Emperor would not consent on some foolish reason of State. I never heard that Lady Emily was in any way engaged to him, and everything is agreed on between her and Lord Kildare, and my Lady Kildare is come over for the wedding. Prince Lob. was in England last year.”

[22]. Letter to Mrs. Dewes, November 7, 1746.

Well informed as Mrs. Delany prided herself on being, it is not to be expected that she would know as much about the matter as Lady Emily herself; and fortunately we have in a letter of the latter’s addressed to her friend, Hon. Anne Hamilton,[^[23]] her version of the incident. As the letter gives a vivid idea of our heroine as a lively girl, of fourteen or fifteen, and of the sort of society in which she moved, it is worth reproducing.

[23]. Afterwards Countess of Roden. The letters of Lady Emily to Miss Hamilton are in the possession of the Earl of Roden and have been published by the Marquis of Kildare in his “Earls of Kildare,” Second Addenda, 1866, p. 76 et seq.

“Prince Lobkowitz, who I believe you remember a giddy, good-natured wild young man, as any in the world, was coming to Goodwood, and has had a fall off his horse, so that I fancy he won’t be here this good while; a propos to him I must make you laugh and tell you what the Town says, he is in love with me, I very much so with him, but his relatives don’t care he should marry a Protestant, though as he is his own master that would be no objection, but that Papa and Mamma, great as he is, won’t part with me, and besides have other views for me; is not this a pretty story. I assure you ’tis told for certain all over the Town, and several of my friends have told me of it. The truth of the matter is, he is vastly fashionable, and as I happen to speak French and to know most of his acquaintances in Holland, he takes it into his head to talk a good deal to me, and you know in London two people can never talk together a quarter of an hour but they must immediately either be in love or to be married. They say also that the Venetian ambassadrice is in love with him and with rather more truth, for she really behaves very ridiculously about him.[^[24]] As you love these sort of things I must tell you a ridiculous thing enough. Prince Lobkowitz was one night at supper at the Venetian ambassadrice’s and the Prince of Wales sent for him, upon which he went and she was excessively angry with him for leaving her to go; in joking she said since he would go she would keep his hat. Accordingly the next morning she cut the hat into a million of little pieces and sent it to him with her compliments. About a week after he told her a pye which he had promised her had come from Germany, upon which she invited a vast deal of company to dinner, and when she came to open the pye, behold it was the bits of hat which she had sent him. I think it gives one a very good notion of them both.”

[24]. Some of the pranks of this lady, which created a sensation, even in the irresponsible society of the period, are related with great verve by Horace Walpole.

Very soon after, “the Town” had given her a new suitor—and this time with more reason. As early as April 15th, 1746, Mr. Horace Walpole was able to report to Sir Horace Mann that the Duke of Richmond “has refused his beautiful Lady Emily to Lord Kildare, the richest and first peer of Ireland, on a ridiculous notion of the King’s evil being in the family.” The Earl persisted in his suit, and the Duke’s objections were finally overcome so that by the end of the year we find Lady Emily writing to her friend “Nancy” Hamilton to announce her betrothal. “In short, in order that the whole town of London should not tell a lye, Lord Kildare desires to make them speak truth, and as Papa and Mamma have no objection to it. I am willing to save them from this and heartily wish they would tell no more.” A little after the announcement of the engagement, Mrs. Delany met the beautiful bride-elect at the Prince of Wales’s “Birthday” in Leicester House, and waxes enthusiastic in a letter to her sister, Mrs. Dewes (January 21, 1747), over her loveliness. Even the hideous dress of the moment (“hoops of enormous size and most people wear vast winkers to their heads”), which make other women look like “blown bladders,” could not destroy Lady Emily’s exquisite beauty. “The reigning beauty I think among the young things is Miss Carpenter, Lord Carpenter’s daughter, and since Lady Dysart was fifteen I have never seen anything so handsome; but the prize of beauty is disputed with her by Lady Emily Lennox. She is indeed ‘like some tall stately tower’; the other is ‘some Virgin Queen’s delicious bower!’”

The marriage took place on February 7th, 1747, when the bride was a little over sixteen. Horace Walpole has the record of the event in the chronicle he sends his friend in Florence on February 23rd, 1747. “Lord Kildare is married to the charming Lady Emily Lennox, who went the very next day to see her sister, Lady Caroline Fox, to the great mortification of the haughty Duchess-mother. They have not given her a shilling, but the King endows her by making Lord Kildare a Viscount-Sterling[^[25]] and they talk of giving him a pinchbeck dukedom, too, to keep him always first peer of Ireland.”

[25]. That is an English viscount, in contrast to the “pinchbeck” of an Irish title.

It was quite true that Lady Kildare (who, in common with the rest of the family, had been forbidden all intercourse with Lady Caroline since the latter had married Mr. Fox in opposition to their parents’ wishes) made immediate use of the liberty conferred by her new position to visit her sister. Lord Kildare and she urged a reconciliation, with more zeal perhaps than discretion. In the letter of the Duke to Lady Caroline to which I have already referred, he complains very bitterly of the tone adopted by the Kildares, “who instead of makeing entreatys, were pleas’d to tell your mother that wee ought to forgive you, and were blamed by the world, and by themselves for not doing it, which is a language I would hear from nobody, and indeed when they saw how it was received, they did not think fit to repeat it. And I assure you my reconcilement to you has been defer’d upon this account, for I will have both them and yourselves know that it proceeds from the tenderness arising in our own breasts for you, and not from their misjudg’d aplication.”

The first few months after the marriage were spent by Lord and Lady Kildare in England and the young wife’s letters to her girl friend are full of bridal happiness. But her “dearest Nanny” is not to think that when she says she is happy, “it is from being her own mistress, doing just what she please, and all the fuss and racket.” “No, believe me, that my happiness, thank God, is upon a better foundation. It is from being marry’d to the person I love best in the world, and who is the best and kindest of husbands.”

James, twentieth Earl of Kildare, was just twenty-five at the time of his marriage, and had succeeded his father, Robert, nineteenth Earl, three years previously. His young Countess might well find him “the best and kindest of husbands,” for he was one of the best and kindest of men, much concerned for the welfare of his people and his country, and taking a serious view of the duties and responsibilities of his great position. He was the leader of the popular party in the Irish House of Lords, and when the corrupt administration under the Duke of Dorset and Primate Stone had become intolerable to the people he took the bold step of presenting a memorial against them to King George II. His brave fight with tyranny and corruption made him the idol of the populace, and on one occasion “he was an entire hour passing through the crowd from Parliament House to Kildare House, and a medal was struck to commemorate the memorial, representing the Earl, sword in hand, guarding a heap of money on a table from a hand which attempted to take it, with the motto, ‘Touch not, says Kildare.’”

By July, 1747, the young Earl and Countess were back in Ireland settled for the moment at Dollardstown. The Dowager Countess and Lady Margot, the Earl’s sister, came on a visit to them, and these with Miss Brudenell, the young Countess’s companion, and a couple of men friends of the Earl’s, make up a party very much to the bride’s taste. “We read, work, write and walk,” she informs her confidante Miss “Nanny.” They are presently to take up residence in Carton, which the Dowager Lady Kildare has given over to her son and his bride, having completed it after her husband’s death and furnished it for the young people from top to bottom—even to “the table linen.” It would be ungrateful of the new Countess—after this generosity on the part of her mother-in-law—to seem indifferent about Carton, but in truth she leaves the simplicity of Dollardstown for the grandeur of Carton with much regret.

A few weeks later we find our young people in residence at Carton, with the elder Lady Kildare and her daughter, Lady Margot, as their guests. The young wife, one gathers, stands a little in awe of her grave, reserved mother-in-law, whose manner “until ye are well acquainted with it, is not very taking.” But she is quite in love with Lady Margot, “whom she [i.e. the Dowager] is very strict with.” She is “really charming, and I find I shall grow vastly fond of her. She is vastly lively, very sensible and a very open heart, for she always speaks her mind, and has a very open heart.” In a later letter she makes merry over the compassion she received from those friends who thought it “a very dismal thing for her” to have to leave London—the new London house the Earl had bought for her in Whitehall—“to come with the person in the world I love best, who studies how to please me and make me happy more and more every day, to a very pretty country where I meet with nothing but civilities from everybody, to a whole family who are agreeable and cheerful and vastly fond of me, and to a country where I have a charming house building [Leinster House], a sweet place [Leinster Lodge] which you know I always delight in, and another pretty place [Carton]. Certainly I deserve great compassion for all this.”

While “her charming great house” was a-building, the Earl took a town house for his bride’s first winter in Dublin in Stephen’s Green, and she did the honours of her great position by giving some large parties in it. She enters with great zest into her Lord’s building and improvement schemes. Beautiful Leinster House, perhaps the most perfect creation of Richard Castle’s architectural genius, was nearing its completion, and although her health does not permit her to share her Lord’s weekly visit to Carton, she keeps au courant with all that is being done there. “Lord Kildare has cut down the avenue, which I am sure makes it charming, and has made a very fine lawn before the House, which I think is the greatest beauty a place can have.”

A few weeks after the date of this letter, her first child George, Lord Offaly, was born (January 15th, 1748) and the young mother’s cup of happiness seemed full to overflowing. She was one of those women who have the genius and the passion of maternity, and much of her sweetness was due to this characteristic. During the following years her letters to her friend are full of the pretty children who have followed George into her nursery at quick intervals. William, her second son, afterwards Duke of Leinster, was born in March, 1749, and the Countess’s first little girl arrived in August of the following year. Her friend receives an entertaining account of the small bundle of femininity: “in the first place her name is Caroline Elizabeth Mabel. Caroline after my sister, Elizabeth after the old Lady Kildare in London, and Mabel to please Mr. Fox, who had entertained himself while he was here in reading over old manuscripts and letters belonging to the Kildare family, in which he found there had been a great many Mabels, and therefore begged we would tack it on to the other two, which was done accordingly. And now ye have the history of her name. I will tell you she is in the first place fat and plump, has very fine dark long eyes which I think a great beauty, don’t you? and her nose and mouth like my mother’s, with a peaked chin like me. As for her complexion she is so full of red gum that there is no judging of it, but what is best of all is that she is in perfect health and has been so ever since she was born. But it’s not fair to her brothers to entertain you only about her without mentioning them.” And so we get a charming picture of the two little boys, and incidentally a glimpse of their pretty young nineteen year-old mother in the midst of them: “To begin with George. He is in the first place much improved as to his beauty, but the most entertaining, comical arch little rogue that ever was, chatters incessantly, is immensely fond of me, and coaxes me not a little, for he is cunning enough, very sweet tempered and easily governed by gentle means, in short if I was to sit down and wish for a child it would be just such a sort of boy as he is now. William is a sweet child, too, in a different way, he is not so lively or active as George is by a good deal, but is forward enough both as to his walking and talking, for he says several words and walks quite alone. As for his little person it is fat, round and white as he was when you saw him, and does not improve as to that; he is the best-natured creature that can be, and excessively passionate already, but puts up his mouth to kiss and be friends the very next moment. He is vastly fond of his nurse and does not care twopence for me, so you may imagine I cannot for my life be as fond of him (though in reality I love him as well) as of George, who is always coaxing and kissing me, and does not care for anybody else.”

The poor young mother was to have the great grief of seeing two of these pretty children die young. Lord Offaly died in 1765 at the age of seventeen, and was succeeded as heir, by William. Little Caroline died in 1754 at the age of four. The fatality which, as has been already observed, pursued the large eighteenth-century families, did not spare our beautiful Countess’s. Of the nineteen children (nine sons and ten daughters) she bore her lord during the twenty-six years of their married life there only survived the years of childhood six sons: William, Charles, Henry, Edward, Robert, Gerald; and four daughters: Emily (afterwards Countess of Bellamont), Charlotte (afterwards Baroness Rayleigh), Sophia, and Lucy.

In the meantime, knowing nothing of what the future has in store for her, the Countess is a very happy woman. The improvements at Carton, in which she is so interested, have been a great success, and no wonder she longs to go there and see how “her spotted cows” look on the new lawn from which the Earl has cleared some hedges since she was there last. Did she ever tell her friend of her passion for spotted cows? She believes not: “You have no notion what a delightful beautiful collection of them I have got in a very short time, which indeed is owing to my dear Lord Kildare, who ever since I took this fancy into my head has bought me every pretty cow he saw. It’s really charming to see them grazing on the lawn.”

So, with her children, the part she took in her husband’s plans for the improvement of his estate, and his tenantry, her social duties, her frequent visits to England, the years of the Countess’s married life passed swiftly and happily. Mrs. Delany meets her occasionally in Dublin society, but one gets the impression that Lady Kildare keeps the Dean of Down’s lady at some little distance, and that may account for the rather bitter tone in which the latter speaks of the Countess. The Dowager Countess was a great friend of Mrs. Delany’s, by whom she was frequently visited in London, and whom she visited at Delville. But it is significant enough that the mistress of Delville, having invited to breakfast Mrs. Vesey and Lady Kildare, “Lord Kildare would not let his lady venture so far.” On another occasion Mrs. Delany went with Mrs. Vesey and their friend Letitia Basle to visit Carton, and call on Lady Kildare and Lady Caroline Fox. But they found nobody but the Dowager “at home,” and were not even invited to dinner. These experiences are probably at the bottom of Mrs. Delany’s evident acrimony against the Countess. Writing to her sister, Mrs. Dewes about Rousseau, who, during a sojourn of his in England, was the guest of their brother, Bernard Grenville, Mrs. Delany warns her of the danger he may be “to young and unstable minds ... as under the guise of pomp and virtue he does advance very erroneous and unorthodox sentiments. It is not the bon ton who say this, but I am too near the day of trial to disturb my mind with fashionable whims. Lady Kildare said she would ‘offer Rousseau an elegant retreat, if he would educate her children.’ I own I differ widely with her ladyship, and would rather commit that charge to a downright honest person. I mean as far as religious principles; but perhaps that was a part that did not enter into her schemes at all.” When the Duchess, as she then was, startled her friends by her second marriage to Mr. Ogilvie, Mrs. Delany’s observations on the event were in the worst possible taste. After a little tilt at her as “one of the proudest and most expensive women in the world,” this typical Mrs. John Bull, with all the unctuous priggishness and fondness for innuendo of her class, quotes a horrid jest of Lady Brown’s, and proceeds to bestow her quite uncalled-for pity on the Duchess’s “poor children.” It is easy to suppose that our charming and clever Lady Kildare found herself bored to death with Mrs. Delany, and her hideous shell-work, and the other atrocities on which she lavished her time (with the profound conviction that she was setting an example for all womanhood), and that she committed the unforgivable offence of avoiding her as much as she could.

At the Coronation of King George III, in September, 1761, our Countess, then the mother of ten children, walked in the procession of the peeresses and, according to Horace Walpole’s account of the proceedings to Hon. H. S. Conway, was with her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Richmond, and Lady Pembroke, “the chief beauties.” To the Countess of Ailesbury he compares this trio to “the Graces.” To George Montagu he speaks of “Lady Kildare, still beauty itself, if not a little too large.” It is clear that her Ladyship’s beauty was not the transient thing which passed with the passing of youth. She was forty-eight when Sir Joshua Reynolds painted the portrait of her, which is still in Kilkee Castle. “What a beautiful head!” cried Edmund Burke in a rapture of admiration, when he saw the portrait in his friend’s studio. “Sir Joshua with much feeling replied: ‘It does not please me yet; there is a sweetness of expression in the original which I have not been able to give to the portrait, and therefore cannot think it finished.’”

In 1766 the Earl, who had been made to suffer as much as the administration dared for the bold stand he had taken in Irish politics, received at last the “pinchbeck dukedom” which had been promised him nearly twenty years ago. Government was as kind to him now, as it had been averse to him before; and lucrative offices were offered him in quick succession. But death took him from the midst of his splendour, and one November day in the year 1773 he was carried from the beautiful home he had built for himself in Leinster House to the family vault in Christ Church, where his ashes await the resurrection.

The Duchess, after a short widowhood, married, to the consternation of most of her friends, and the scandal of the Mrs. Delanys, her sons’ Scotch tutor, Mr. Ogilvie. The marriage, contrary to expectation, turned out extremely well. Under a rather dry and unattractive exterior Mr. Ogilvie had a kind heart, and was most devoted to his step-children, who, on their side (and this is true of Lord Edward in a special degree), were very fond of him. Lady Sarah Bunbury,[^[26]] writing from her brother-in-law, Mr. Connolly’s place at Castletown, to her friend, Lady Susan O’Brien, shortly after the marriage took place, hints that the Duchess had been forced to the step she had taken, by “the impertinence” of her daughter, Lady Emily, who had recently married the dissipated Earl of Bellamont, to her mother’s intense displeasure. It further appears, she told her son (William, Duke of Leinster), her mother-in-law, and her sister (Lady Louise Connolly) that she thought it very possible she should marry Mr. Ogilvie. They all agreed in the same thing for answer, that they could not wish it, but if she was happy it was all they wished; and that she could not choose a person she had a better opinion of and had more regard for. With such a sanction, you would perhaps think there was nothing for her to do, but to inform her brother (the Duke of Richmond) of her marriage tout simplement, but I wish you had seen the affectionate, the reasonable manner in which she wrote to my brother, and indeed to all her friends. One of her expressions to him is, ‘I am content that you should call me a fool, and an old fool, that you should blame me, and say you did not think me capable of such a folly; talk me over, say what you please, but remember that all I ask of you is your affection and tenderness.’ My brother says there is no resisting her owning herself in the wrong, and begging so hard to be loved, so you see the good effect of meekness; I assure you my sister gains friends instead of losing any by her manner.

[26]. Letter of July 29th, 1775, “Letters,” I., pp. 240-241.

After her second marriage the Duchess and her husband, Mr. Ogilvie, taking the younger children with them, went to live in France, where her grace’s brother, the Duke of Richmond, had put his house at Aubigny at their service. Here the two little Ogilvie girls were born, Cecilia and Emily, and were made heartily welcome to the family circle by their kind-hearted half-brothers and sisters, the Fitzgeralds. In the meantime these boys and girls were going on with their studies under Mr. Ogilvie’s direction, and the successful careers of Lord Charles and Lord Gerald in the navy, Lord Edward in the army, Lord Henry in politics, and Lord Robert in diplomacy were largely due to the skill and prudence with which Mr. Ogilvie directed their preparatory studies.

In 1780 the family returned to Ireland, and the Duchess saw her brood of boys scatter for their first flight. For the next six or seven years she, with her girls, divided her time between Ireland and England. But from 1785 to 1787 she was settled in Dublin with Lord Edward, back for a portion of the time, under her wing, and her girls going out a good deal under the chaperonage of the young Duchess of Leinster, and their aunt, Lady Louisa Connolly. In the summer of 1787 we learn from Lady Sarah Napier that the Duchess was in Barège for the sake of Lady Lucy’s health, and she was looking forward to the pleasure of being joined by three of her sons, when news of Lord Gerald’s death at sea reached her. From 1788 the Duchess took up her permanent abode in London, probably with the idea of getting her daughters suitably settled. As regards Lady Charlotte these expectations were fulfilled the following year when she married Mr. Strutt.

In 1788 and 1789 Lord Edward was in Canada and his letters to his mother describing his adventures, “deep in Canadian woods” and on the banks of Canadian lakes and rivers, were looked forward to with great eagerness by the Duchess, and passed from hand to hand among the family circle, even finding their way from London to Castletown, for Lady Louisa Connolly’s and Lady Sarah Napier’s delectation. “He writes,” the latter informs her friend, “the most natural and pretty account of his journey you ever read, comments on the spirit of the chase, the melancholy end of it, the inferior passions of hunger driving away pity, his low spirits when he thinks of all his friends, and ends: ‘My dear mother, I fear we are all beasts and love ourselves best.’” Lord Edward was a special favourite of his aunt, Lady Sarah, and nothing that befel “this dear spirited boy” left her cold. One of the most delightful spectacles in the world was to see how he brought his love-troubles to her and to “his dearest mother” with the full certainty of their sympathy and help, and understanding.

He had been for some time deeply in love with his cousin, Georgina, daughter of Lord George Lennox, but the young lady’s father would not consent to the match and married the girl to Henry Bathurst, Lord Apsley. By an unfortunate chance Lord Edward, arriving in England, unexpectedly from Canada, drove up to his mother’s house in Harley Street at the very moment she was giving a dinner-party in honour of the bridal pair.

Disappointed in love, Lord Edward threw himself eagerly into politics, and devoted his time to his duties in the Irish Parliament. On the outbreak of the French Revolution he hurried to Paris, and in the enthusiasm with which he adopted revolutionary principles, he took the extreme step of “renouncing” his title, and in consequence of this he was dismissed from the English army.

In December, 1792, Lord Edward married Pamela, who was generally believed to be the daughter of the Duke of Orleans and Madame de Genlis. The marriage cannot have been much to the liking of the Duchess. But, like the wise woman she was, she offered no opposition to her son’s choice, once she saw his heart was set on it, and when he came to her a few weeks later to present his bride to her, she opened wide her heart and arms to “the dear, little, pale, pretty wife.”

During the five years that followed, Lord Edward and Pamela kept in the closest possible touch with the Duchess through a constant correspondence and frequent visits. But it was only one portion of his existence which her son revealed to his loving mother. There is no hint of politics, of the stern business which was to be wound up in the bloody liquidation of “’Ninety-Eight,” in the letters which “Eddy” writes in the open bay window of the little book-room in Frescati, with the birds pouring out their song and the perfumed garden its fragrance all around him. It is of her flowers and shrubs he tells the Duchess, “I believe there never was a person who understood planting and making a place as you do. The more one sees of Carton and this place [Frescati] the more one admires them; the mixture of plants and the succession of them are so well arranged.” He gladdens her heart with a description of Frescati and the shrubs she had planted, in all their June loveliness. “All the shrubs are out, lilac, laburnum, syringa, spring roses, and lily of the valley”—in short the whole is heavenly. He seeks her approval for his own gardening plans and labours: he has had the little green full mowed and rolled, the little mound of earth that is round the bays and myrtle before the house planted with tufts of gentianellas and primroses, and lily of the valley, and they look beautiful, peeping out of the dark evergreen; close to the root of the great elm he has put a patch of lily of the valley. A fine February morning finds him “digging round roots of trees, raking ground and planting laurels,” and planning to have hyacinths, jonquils, pinks, cloves, narcissi in little beds before the house and in the rosery. If his mother will trust him to prune the trees, in the long round, he thinks he can do it prudently.

Later on he tries very hard to make his mother see the home he has made for his wife in Kildare—the little white house with bay windows, all covered with climbing roses and honeysuckle—the “dear wife” herself in her little American jacket planting sweet peas and mignonette—her work-box with the little one’s caps on the table in the open window.

The expected “little one,” “the little young plant that was coming,” filling its young father with proud joy, arrived in October, 1794, in the shape of another little Eddy, and the Duchess was very glad to accede to her big Eddy’s request, and to be its godmother. The little Eddy was subsequently left with his grandmother for good, after his parents’ visit to Hamburg in 1796, which was to have such momentous political consequences. Little did the poor Duchess know for what his father was preparing when “the precious Babe” was left with her! She is full of gratitude for the gift, and full of appreciation of the sacrifice the “dear Edwards” have made in parting with it—they “who adore it and delight in its pretty ways.” We get charming glimpses of the Duchess and the pretty boy in some letters to Lady Lucy. Now he is at play among the sheep on the green hill beneath her window; now at her elbow while she is writing, and full of messages for her to give to Papa and Mamma. “Eddy, dood boy, Eddy, happy boy. Papa ride horseback, Mama dance.” which shows, the Duchess remarks, “that he remembers them.” Again, the Duchess is showing him a lock of Papa’s hair which Lady Lucy has sent her mother, and Eddy is kissing it a thousand times: “Papa’s hair, Eddy’s own Papa’s hair!” She loves to gather up his comical remarks. “I told him something he was eating was enough and that more was too much. ‘But Eddy don’t like enough, Eddy like too much.’”

In October, 1797, Lord Edward saw his mother for the last time. After that, events moved with tragical swiftness to the catastrophe of May 19th, 1798.

It was ten days after Lord Edward had got his fatal wound in the altercation with Major Ryan that his mother was told of his condition. As soon as the news was broken to her, she declared that she must go to her boy at once. They kept her in London, persuading her that it was there she might serve his cause, seeing great people, using all the influence she could command to have his trial put off. Only poor Lucy, more closely in sympathy with Lord Edward than any of the others, feels how useless all this is. “All that human foresight could point out they are doing, but alas! Edward is dying and alone!”

It was only on June 6—when Lord Edward had been two days dead—that the Duchess, Mr. Ogilvie, Lady Sophia, Lady Lucy, and “Mimi” Ogilvie set out at length for Ireland. They were met on the road by the messenger bearing the fatal news.

Lord Edward’s daughter, Pamela, shall tell us the end of the story: “The Fourth of June, when the guns fired for the King’s birthday, was always a dark day in the house; poor Grandmamma appeared in deeper mourning, and somehow there was a sort of stillness; we spoke with bated breath, and went softly ... it was the anniversary of my father’s death. Grandmamma wore his coloured handkerchief next her heart, and it was put into the coffin with her.”

The Mother of the Sheareses

Jane Anne Sheares, née Bettesworth (-1803)[^[27]]

“Come to me, O Christ,

Take swiftly my soul

Alike with my sons.”

—Lament of Mothers of Bethlehem.

[27]. Authorities: Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Fourth Series, Second Edition.

ON Saturday, May 19th, 1798, Lord Edward, desperately wounded in the gallant fight he had put up—one man against the multitude of his assailants—was taken prisoner and lodged in Newgate. Wounded and alone he lay in his gloomy cell, and on his hard prison bed through the long hours of the hot May Sunday that followed, and none of those who loved him was near at hand to bring healing to his fevered body, or comfort to his tortured heart.

On that same May Sabbath, when, from every open space that the retreating country had left behind her, in her flight before the city’s advance, there came the smell of the lilac and hawthorn, the honeyed fragrance of lime trees and chestnut blossoms—“all the sweetness of the May”—a different scene was taking place in another part of the city. In a handsome house at the corner of Baggot Street and Pembroke Street, a dinner-party was in progress. The cuisine was irreproachable, the wine excellent, the conversation of a high order. The master of the house, a tall finely-built man of about forty-five, with something of the soldier in his bearing, sat at one end of the table. His countenance, usually somewhat stern and forbidding, owing to the haughty glance of his dark eyes, and the curious blood-red birth-mark which stained the lower part of his face, was softened now into geniality as his eyes swept the little circle of relatives and guests gathered around his hospitable board. His brother, a man of about thirty-two, of a singularly open and pleasing countenance, blue-eyed, clear-complexioned, with well-formed features and a clever mobile mouth, that showed, as the frequent smile parted it, a row of perfect teeth—sat opposite. An old lady—their mother—very stately and handsome in her rich dark dress and priceless lace, sat near her eldest son. Beside her was that son’s beautiful wife. On the opposite side of the table was the host’s sister, and beside her his daughter by an earlier marriage. By the side of the younger brother sat a tall man in the uniform of a Captain in the King’s County Militia.

Presently, dinner being ended, the ladies left the men of the party to their wine, and retired to the drawing-room. A knock at the front door, followed by the frou-frou of silks and the murmur of feminine voices in the hall, announced the advent of after-dinner visitors. At the proposal of the younger brother of the host, the political discussion which the three men had inaugurated over their port was postponed, and a dish of tea with the ladies in the drawing-room was suggested. The dark eyes of the master of the house were full of merriment, while he explained to the guest what the magnet was that drew John from his politics. As the voices floated past them in the hall there had been clearly discernible the silvery tones of their beautiful neighbour, Miss Maria Steele. “You should hear some of the poetry he addresses to his Stella, Captain Armstrong!” said the host in laughing tones.

Captain Armstrong! Captain Warneford Armstrong! We know now, with that name ringing in our ears, that darker than the tragedy of Lord Edward, lying wounded to death in his prison cell at Newgate, is the tragedy that is being enacted before our eyes in this pleasant hospitable house. In this handsome dining-room, around the gleaming mahogany with its genial burden of fruit and wine, there sit—the informer, Captain John Warneford Armstrong, and his victims, Henry and John Sheares! And presently, if we have the courage to face it, and will follow the three men in their passage to the ladies in the drawing-room, we shall see an even more harrowing spectacle. For in that charming eighteenth-century room, all full of May sweetness from the tall open windows, all full of lovely ladies and beautiful children in their picturesque eighteenth-century costume, we shall presently see the traitor gather the two little children of Henry Sheares upon his knee, while their mother tunes her harp, and sings in her glorious voice, some exquisite, moving strain for his delectation.[^[28]] It is the picture which the genius of Curran has made immortal: “I am disposed to believe, shocking as it is,” he cried, while he turned to the Jury, in the dim light of the ghastly midnight court where the Sheareses stood, two months later, on trial for their lives, “that this witness had the heart, when he was surrounded by the little progeny of my client—when he was sitting in the mansion in which he was hospitably entertained—when he saw the old mother, supported by the piety of her son, and the children basking in the parental fondness of the father—that he saw the scene, and smiled at it—contemplated the havoc he was to make, consigning them to the storms of a miserable world, without having an anchorage in the kindness of a father. Can such horror exist, and not waken the rooted vengeance of an eternal God?”

[28]. The incident of Mrs. Henry Sheares singing to her harp for the entertainment of Armstrong was related to Madden by Miss Maria Steele, the friend of John Sheares. In Curran’s “Life,” written by his son, it is stated on the authority of a gentleman who had dined with the Sheareses, on the day in question that “he observed Armstrong, who was one of the guests, taking his entertainer’s little children upon his knee, and as it was then thought, affectionately caressing them.” Armstrong denied to Madden the truth of these statements, but his denials were not considered convincing.

The poor old lady, on whom the diabolical treachery of the guest of that Sunday dinner-party was to bring such suffering that the whole annals of “’Ninety-Eight” have nothing to surpass it, had already tasted in a fuller measure, than is the lot of common women, the joys and the sorrows of life. The near kinswoman of the distinguished lawyer, Sergeant Bettesworth, and a relation of the Earl of Shannon, she had been married, while still very young, to a wealthy Cork banker, Mr. Henry Sheares, son of Henry Sheares, Esq., M.P., of Goldenbush. At Goldenbush, by the pleasant Bandon river, the young couple resided for some time, and here a number of their children were born. But at a later date the family lived at Glasheen, about a mile and a half from Cork, and their abundant means allowed them to keep up another establishment in the city—a house which has been identified by Dr. Madden as situated at the corner of Moore Street and Nile Street.

The young wife was highly accomplished, and it is rare to find a couple so perfectly matched, as were she and her husband, in every noble quality of heart and mind. She entered into his philanthropic schemes with the greatest zeal. Out of the abundance with which God had blessed them it was their joy to help all those in need. One of the spectacles which moved their compassion most keenly was that of decent poor people who, having fallen into debt, were by the barbarous law of the time, liable to be hauled off to prison for it, and to be herded with criminals, by whom they were too frequently contaminated. To help these unfortunates, whose only crime was poverty, Mr. Sheares instituted “the Society for the Relief of Persons Confined for Small Debts,” and in about nine months the secretary, Rev. Dr. Pigott, was able to report that “more than seventy poor wretches have been relieved by this institution from the depths of misery, and all the horrors of loathsome confinement—by which, at the same time, above 240 children (besides wives and other poor dependent relations) have had those restored to them from whose labour they derive their bread, and the community has been enriched by the replacing of many useful and industrious members.”

We have already spoken of the culture which marked the merchant princes of Cork in the eighteenth century. Even in their cultured ranks Mr. Henry Sheares stood prominently forth. He was a clever writer, and his contributions over the pen-name “Agricola,” to the Cork periodicals of his day were keenly appreciated by their readers. It was held by some of them that “no moralist—not even Mr. Addison—excelled him in the composition” of the little moral essay, which was his favourite vehicle of instruction. Two of his essays, one “On Forgiveness,” the other “On Man in Society, and at His Final Separation from it,” are reproduced by Madden; and they show, beneath the somewhat stilted and formal style which was so much to the taste of their day—and so little to that of ours—a depth of religion, feeling, a noble philosophy of life which can never be out of date. He was the founder of a Club, somewhat in “the Spectator” style, “where popular and literary subjects were debated, and his speeches at this Club were long remembered by his friends as pleasing memorials of great historical knowledge, a fine taste and graceful elocution.” He sat as member of Parliament for the borough of Clonakilty—which was in the patronage of his wife’s kinsman, the Earl of Shannon—in the Irish House of Commons from 1761 to 1767; and the Parliamentary Debates for these years show that he took an active part in the proceedings of the House.

Mr. Sheares died in 1776, leaving his widow and family in very comfortable circumstances. Nine children are mentioned in his will: Henry, Robert Bettesworth, Richard, John, and Christopher Humphrey; Letitia, Mary, Jane Anne Bettesworth, and Julia. Of these it was their mother’s tragic fate to survive all but the youngest, Julia.

The greatest pains had been taken with their education, and for their settlement. Of the four daughters, all were married except Julia: one to Mr. Gubbins, of Limerick, another to Mr. Henry Westropp, another to Dr. Payne of Upton. “The sons,” writes one who knew the family, “had the best masters to attend them in their father’s house, under their father’s eye; he narrowly inspected what company they kept, and at a proper age they were sent to the University, where, being young men of good natural parts, they acquired a considerable degree of reputation.”

The high hopes that had been built on these boys were overturned, in the case of three of them, by very early deaths. One day Robert and John were out bathing together, when John got into difficulties, in saving him poor Robert was drowned. A little later, Christopher, who had chosen the army for his profession, went out to the West Indies, on John’s advice. A few months later there came to his loving mother in Ireland the news of his death by yellow fever. Richard, who had entered the navy, perished on the Thunderer, which went down, with all hands, off the West Indies, in the great hurricane of October, 1779.

The eldest son, Henry, who inherited his father’s real and personal property, estimated at about £1,200 a year, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and first chose the army for his profession. In 1782, when he was scarcely twenty years of age, he eloped with Miss Swete, of Cork, whose father, Alderman Swete, was considered one of the wealthiest men in the City. Young Councillor Fitzgibbon (afterwards Lord Clare) had been among Miss Swete’s suitors, and it is said that he never forgave the man whom she preferred to him—and that thoughts of this early rivalry in love were at the bottom of the implacable hostility which drove Henry Sheares to his doom. Shortly after the marriage, Alderman Swete became bankrupt, and his daughter’s fortune having vanished with the rest of his assets, Henry Sheares was obliged to give up the army and take up the study of law. He was called to the Bar in 1790, his brother John, thirteen years younger than he (born 1766) having been called the preceding year. The brothers began practice together, taking up their residence in Dublin—at first in a house on Ormond Quay, and from 1796 in Baggot Street (now 128).

A little after the move to Dublin the young wife of Henry Sheares died (December 11th, 1791) leaving her husband four little children. Three of the children were taken by the grandparents, the Swetes, and educated by them in France. The youngest child, Jane, appears to have been put in charge of Grandmother Sheares and Aunt Julia.

In 1792 Henry Sheares, accompanied by his brother, John, went to France to visit his children. The stirring events which were taking place in Paris drew the brothers to the capital, and here they made the acquaintance of some of the most prominent men of the Revolution; notably Roland and Brissot. The influences under which they found themselves in this atmosphere were to give the most decisive direction to their political philosophy, and ultimately to seal their fate. The ardent spirit of John was irresistibly attracted to the new doctrines, and where John led, Henry, who loved him with a love surpassing the love of ordinary brothers, was fain to follow. Left to himself, poor Henry would have felt little call to republicanism; he liked dignified splendour; a fine house, a good table, a choice library. He loved society in which from his conversational powers, and his charming deferential way with women, he was a great favourite. He was a devoted family man—a loving son, and husband and father—and his happiest hours were spent in his own beautiful home in Baggot Street in the years which followed his second marriage with Miss Sarah Neville, a lady of good family in the County Kilkenny. In this home, with its rich furniture and fine library, he was soon joined by his mother and Julia and little Jane; and Sarah Sheares, who was a woman of character, as well as of accomplishments and charm, lived on the happiest footing with her people-in-law. John was also a permanent member of the household.

Shortly after their return from France the brothers became members of the newly instituted Society of United Irishmen, which at that time, had perfectly “constitutional” objects: Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform. But in the eyes of the Lord Clares and others of the Ascendancy the advocating of the most moderate measures of reform was “treason.” During all the brothers’ professional career, the enmity of Lord Clare, which was first that of an unsuccessful rival in love of Henry’s, pursued them, and as they, in their turn, put no restraint on the language they used with regard to the Lord Chancellor, every day that passed fanned the flame.

It was only after the arrest of the chief leaders of the United Irishmen on March 12th, 1798, that the Sheareses became prominent in the organisation. John Sheares was appointed to the Directory, and given special charge of operations in Cork. In April the brothers went circuit in the South-West, and were present at a memorable dinner-party in the house of Bagnal Harvey, Bargey Castle. Another guest was (unfortunately for the majority of those present) Sir Jonah Barrington. By some curious presentiment—which he took good care should be verified by immediately communicating with Mr. Secretary Cooke—he knew that a tragic fate was reserved for most of the guests. An excellent prophet was Sir Jonah—of the same “authentic class” as Major Sirr[^[29]]—every member of that jovial dinner-party (with the exception of himself, a certain barrister and Mr. Hatton) was executed within three months!

[29]. “There are two sorts of prophets—one that derives its source from real or fancied inspiration, yet are sometimes mistaken; the other class composed of persons who prophesy what they are determined to bring about themselves; of this second, and by far the most authentic class was Major Sirr.”—Curran’s “Speech in Hevey’s Trial.”

With Sir Jonah Barrington and other “honourable” gentlemen of his class drawing up “for their own amusement,” lists of those among their fellow guests at friendly dinner parties “whom they considered likely to fall victims” to the coming disaster, and these lists finding themselves wafted by some marvellous agency from Wexford Bridge to the office of Mr. Secretary Cooke in Dublin Castle—it is not to be supposed that Government was in ignorance of the movements and designs of the Sheareses. They were carefully watched and “set,” but they were left at large for some time, according to Madden, “to allow the premature explosion of the rebellion to take place, for the same reason that Lord Edward was left at large after the arrests at Bond’s for several weeks, during which time Messrs. Hughes and Reynolds (the informers) visited him in his places of concealment, at Cormick’s in Thomas Street, and at Dr. Kennedy’s in Aungier Street.”

At length the time was ripe for their destruction. Government had found the proper tool.

On Thursday, May 10th, Captain John Warneford Armstrong took a little jaunt to town from his camp at Lehaunstown and called—as he was in the habit of doing—at Byrne’s, the bookseller’s, in Grafton Street. Though Captain Armstrong wore the king’s uniform, he was, if his conversation was any indication, by no means a fanatical adherent of a militarist and royalist government. He talked republicanism; and was a diligent reader of republican and deistical books, like Paine’s “Age of Reason” and “Common Sense.”

During one of his many conversations with Byrne the names of the Sheareses cropped up, and Byrne, completely deceived by the Captain’s specious professions, proposed to make them known to each other. In the afternoon of May the 10th, Captain Armstrong was seated in Byrne’s shop when Henry Sheares came in, and Byrne immediately made the introduction. Henry, however, was unwilling to enter into any conversation with the Captain and shortly afterwards made an excuse to leave him.

Presently entered John, with his head full of plans for the Rising, which was fixed for the 23rd of the month. One of his greatest objects was to gain over the soldiers, and when Captain Armstrong was made known to him by the unsuspecting Byrne “as a true brother on whom he might depend,” it is not to be wondered at, if John looked on this meeting as the direct answer to his ardent prayers. The Captain professed to be as eager as John to secure the soldiers for the good cause, and after some preliminary discussion it was arranged to meet at the brother’s house in Baggot Street the following Sunday.

At eleven o’clock on Sunday, May 13th, Captain Armstrong saw the brothers as arranged; at this interview he got from them the names of some soldiers in his regiment who were known to be United Irishmen.

On Wednesday, May 16th, Captain Armstrong called once more at the house of his victims but found neither of them at home. A second call about six o’clock in the evening was more fruitful. He was shown in to John in the library, and learned from him that he was on the eve of his departure for Cork to organise the Rising there, and that his friend, Surgeon Lawless, would take his place in Dublin and consult and advise with Armstrong as to the matters they had in hand. It would appear that poor Henry Sheares was on his guard against Armstrong for at this interview he did not appear.

On the morning of the following day Armstrong was again in Baggot Street, and made the acquaintance of Surgeon Lawless, who according to the Captain, “informed him that he had lately attended a meeting of deputies from almost all the militia regiments in Ireland, at which meeting there were two of his (the Captain’s men).” At this interview Captain Armstrong found, what he had hitherto sought in vain, evidence to implicate Henry Sheares “in the knowledge of the military organisation” of the United men.

After each interview with his victims Armstrong, according to his own evidence, “returned to the camp and communicated the business that passed to Colonel L’Estrange and Captain Clibborn.” Sometimes he communicated it to Lord Castlereagh and Mr. Cooke. It was Lord Castlereagh who persuaded him to go to the house of the Sheareses. “He would not,” he told Dr. Madden himself, “have gone there if he had not been thus urged to do so. It was wrong, he believed—indeed, he felt it was wrong to have gone there and to have dined with them. It was the only part of the business he had any reason to regret.”

Early in the morning of Monday, May 21st, the day following the pleasant dinner-party at which Armstrong had been so hospitably entertained, the inhabitants of Baggot and Pembroke Streets, and the neighbouring Squares, were startled by seeing a party of military take possession of the front and rear entries to the house of Mr. Henry Sheares. A loud rapping at the door roused the inmates, and procured for the police magistrate in charge of the party, Alderman Alexander, and the Chief Constable, Mr. Atkinson, the entrance they demanded “in the king’s name.” Alexander made his way to the library, where he was presently joined by Mr. Henry Sheares. The master of the house was immediately made cognisant of the object of this early visit, and informed that his papers must be searched. Henry Sheares, who was perfectly easy in mind as to this, in the consciousness of having no treasonable papers in his possession, acquiesced without protest. The search was nearly ended, without anything incriminating having been found, when Henry Sheares directed the Alderman’s attention to a small writing box, belonging to his brother, which lay unlocked on the study table.

In this box was found a scrawled production, all blots and erasures, which John Sheares, who had the dramatic temperament developed in the highest possible degree, had passed the time in writing, after the rest of the household had gone to bed the previous night. It was written in the character of one addressing the Irish people after a successful rising, and on its evidence, supported by the perjured “parole” of Armstrong, not only John Sheares who wrote it, but Henry, who was asleep when it was written, and as innocent of its contents as his little child, whom Armstrong had fondled the evening before, were launched into eternity.

“Can such things be, and not awaken the vengeance of an eternal God?”

What were the feelings of the poor ladies, old Mrs. Sheares and her daughters when all this was going on? Was their privacy respected while the house was being searched for John and more “incriminating” documents? Was Henry allowed to bid them farewell before he was marched off to the Castle, and to whisper to them that there was no need for anxiety? Did any dim foreboding warn them as they saw him leave the home he loved so well, and where they had all been so happy that never, never more should he enter it again?

Later in the same day John Sheares was arrested by Major Sirr at the home of Surgeon Lawless. Lawless, himself, having received timely warning from Surgeon General Stuart, had made his escape on the previous Saturday.

The two brothers, after examination at the Castle, were committed to Kilmainham and here they lay in close confinement until they came up for trial on July the 4th. A postponement was secured until July the 12th. Then the trial was hurried on with the most indecent haste.

The truth was that Lord Clare was in terror of his enemies escaping from his hands—for the most powerful influences were at work for their rescue, and the evidence against Henry Sheares was not sufficient, as the common phrase goes, “to hang a dog on.” Miss Maria Steele used her influence with her devoted admirer, Captain Horatio Cornwallis, nephew of the Lord Lieutenant, to secure the brothers’ pardon; and to his nephew’s pleading, supported by that of Julia Sheares, Lord Cornwallis, “anxious that his first act in Ireland should not be a sanguinary one,” was about to yield, when Lord Clare, who was present, intervened. All day long on July 13th, while the trial dragged its weary length through the hot and crowded court, Sarah Sheares, poor Henry’s wife, sat in a sedan-chair at Lord Clare’s hall door; when at length she saw him, she fell at his feet on the steps of his door, clasping his knees and begging her husband’s life from his hands. It was all in vain.

And what of the mother all these dreadful weeks? They had not dared to tell her that Henry was in any danger. They told her that he had been advised to keep away, and would return when all was safe again. For John’s fate she was in some measure prepared, but she hoped, with all her mother’s heart, that it might be averted. A heart-breaking incident was related to Dr. Madden by a relation of the Sheareses:

“The Earl of Shannon was a relation and intimate friend of old Mrs. Sheares, and the day of her sons’ execution, of which she was then ignorant, his lordship went to see her. A most melancholy scene, as may be supposed, occurred between them. She threw herself on her knees to implore his mediation for her younger son, at the time not knowing that her son Harry was implicated, or had been imprisoned, having been told that he had been advised to keep out of the way for some time, and was actually expecting him home that evening. The Earl left the house, not being able to tell her that they had been both executed that morning.”

When poor heart-broken Julia, poor widowed “Sally” could bear no longer to hear her ask, “When will Harry come back,” they burst into a storm of weeping and then the desolate mother knew that no son had been spared to her out of the calamity that had swept them all away. For a time they feared her reason would give way before the shock of that knowledge.

Her two daughters—for Sarah’s devotion was not less ardent than that of Julia—took the poor old mother far away from the scene of her sufferings, and made a new home for her in Clifton, England. Here she passed the short and sad remainder of her days—grieving ever for those she had lost, having no joy but in the thought of death which would give them back to her once more. Some time in 1803, the same year which witnessed the death of her fellow mourner, Elizabeth Emmet, she passed through “the strait and narrow gate”—and stood with her beloved amid the multitude “clothed with white robes, and (having) palms in their hands, before the throne and in the sight of the Lamb.” For she and the sons, who welcomed her, had indeed “come out of great tribulation, and had washed their robes and made them white in the Blood of the Lamb.”

The Mother of the Teelings

Mary Teeling (née Taaffe—1753[?]-1830[?])[^[30]]

“He will not be seen on a swift young horse

Clearing a road over fosse and fence,

His comeliness is forever changed,

On his majesty has fallen a mist.”

—Lament for Oliver Grace.

[30]. Authorities: “Memoir of Bartholomew Teeling,” by (his nephew) Bartholomew Teeling, Jun., B.L. in Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Third Series, Vol. I. (Dublin, 1846); Charles Hamilton Teeling’s “History of the Irish Rebellion of 1798,” “A Personal Narrative,” and Sequel to same; Unpublished Correspondence of the Teeling Family; “The Teelings,” by Albi Norman (article in Gentleman’s Magazine for October, 1905).

“I MUST now say a word or two of the excellent mother of Bartholomew Teeling—not so much because of the well-formed opinion that almost all distinguished men inherit their characteristics rather from the mother than from the father, as because I myself have the liveliest recollection of the amiable and endearing qualities of this venerated being; of her ardent piety; of her active benevolence; of her cheerful spirit; and her most graceful presence.

“Whilst she was still a child, she had been seen by him who was to be her husband, and who, struck with her girlish beauty, had resolved ‘to wait for her.’ She, consequently, at the very earliest age, united her fate to his; and at the end of fifty years, during which they journeyed together through all the vicissitudes of life—

“‘In all their wanderings round this world of care,

In all their griefs, and they had had their share.’

The romance of this early attachment continued fresh and unabated. The contrast, perhaps, of her bright and buoyant spirit with the stern and unbending one of the haughty politician ... was more calculated to give endurance to their love than the most perfect similarity could have done; and to the last hour of her existence, she was the pride and idol of her family.

“It was matter of astonishment how she contrived, after the severe trials she had met with, to push the badge of grief away from her, in the society of those she loved, and to enter into the sports of her grandchildren, as mirthful as the youngest of them. She was proud of her high birth, and used to recount to her grandchildren the bright deeds of her ancestors—the loyal efforts of the noble commander of the Irish forces; of the unhappy Charles; and the heroic defence of her castle, by the Lady Cathleen, against the ruthless Cromwell and his adventurers.

“But she scarcely ever touched upon the untimely fate of her own sons, slaughtered or scattered over the world. Once only did I hear her mention her gallant son, or allude to his dark fate, and then came a gush of anguish, which showed, indeed, the sources of her grief were far from being dried up, and, under a bright exterior, how much of heart-rending suffering she had put up within her bosom; but, as I have already said, she turned from her own woes to alleviate those of others, and to spread joy around.

“By rich and poor, she was admired and she was loved. I have been told, by those whom I myself saw adorn the most brilliant circles of the metropolis of the empire, that in childhood they were taught to regard her as a model of grace and excellence; and I speak a fact, which will be testified by thousands, when I say, that in the hearts of all the poor of the neighbourhood, in which she resided, her memory remains enshrined, and that children born since her death have been taught to love it, and in their dear petitions to give her name a place.”[^[31]]

[31]. Extract from “Memoir of Bartholomew Teeling,” by his nephew, and namesake, in Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Third Series, Vol. I. (First Edition, 1846).

Is it true, as men say, that the woman by whose cradle the kind, gift-bearing fairies have laid that most rare and precious gift called “charm,” is immortally dowered? Mary Teeling was an old woman, and one who had drained to its dregs the cup of life’s bitterest sorrows—when (knowing it not) she sat for the portrait which her grandson has left us of her; and she had been many years in her grave, when it was finished and hung in its place in the gallery of portraits collected by Dr. Madden of the men and women who gave their all for Ireland in ’98. But from the canvas there comes forth, stealing into the heart of each of us, the same charm which, in her radiant girlhood, won the devotion of her stately young lover, and in her beautiful old age made captive his little grandson. Neither age had power to wither, nor death to destroy, the gift which was hers to draw all hearts under her sweet sway.

We would fain know something of the training and education which, fostering her innate charm, made the mother of Bartholomew and Charles Teeling such an exquisite type of the Irish Catholic gentlewoman. “A nation is what its women make its men”; and if we want boys in the Ireland of the future like the gallant boy, who on his noble grey charger galloped alone against the cannon of Park’s Hill, and saved the fortunes of the day at Carricknagat, or like that other gallant boy, his younger brother, who rode forth—a lad of seventeen—on a yet more perilous quest: to slay unaided the dragon of Orangeism, we must take care to provide “mothers of men” like her who bore these young heroes. And not alone for the men they will make, will Ireland need such women. She will want them for their own dear selves; and she will want them, whatever be her destiny—whether she is to enter at last on the reward of her long sorrows, or whether she must tread the roadway of thorns yet a little longer. If the future of our land is to be one of peace and prosperity she will need in her homes women to “look well to the paths of their house,” as Mary Teeling did in the days of her prosperity amid the elegance and comforts of the home in Lisburn which her husband’s wealth had enabled him to provide for his family, exercising the sweet and lovely rule of the mistress of a Catholic home, training her children to the noblest ideals of life and conduct, directing her servants with gentle authority, practising a gracious hospitality, “opening her hands to the needy, and stretching out her hands to the poor.” And if, on the other hand, the whole price is not paid yet, and the era of persecution is to open again—ah! then it is that Ireland will need her Mary Teelings to stand by their husbands’ side while “they suffer persecution for justice’ sake,” as she did by Luke Teeling’s during the long years of his martyrdom; keeping in the midst of all misfortunes, loss of home and children, of wealth and ease, the same exquisite sweetness of nature and charm of manner which made her in happier days the delight of her friends, “the pride and idol of her family.”

It has seemed worth while to go to some pains to discover, if possible, the details of an education which “in the dead vast and middle” of the Penal night, produced a type of womanhood, presenting nothing less than the “fine flower” of Catholic culture. “Who shall find a valiant woman?” Have we not found her—with every exquisite trait of her immortal prototype reproduced—in this dear Irish lady, whose radiant personality, and high-bred grace, no less than her sweetness, and saintliness, and charity, survive, through her grandson’s portrait of her, even the destruction of the tomb? “Far and from the uttermost coast would be the price of her,” whatever land produced her. If it were France during the age when the education of girls was considered a subject of sufficient importance for the grave debates of a King’s Council Chamber, or a brilliant treatise from a learned and saintly prelate’s pen;[^[32]] or Italy, in the days when wealthy and powerful princes like those of Mantua co-operated with great teachers and scholars like Vittorino da Feltre in the foundation of the schools, where the Cecilia Gonzagas won their culture; or Germany in the years when illustrious humanists like Celtes and Reuchlin were proud of the share they had taken in forming the minds of women like Caritas Pirckheimer—if it were any of these lands or these ages that claimed the “price of her” it would be a matter of small wonder. But let us try to realise that it was Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century, when education was, for Catholics, a thing banned and barred by statute. In other countries little Catholic boys and girls were enticed to their books by every loving and ingenious device. Great statesmen, great churchmen, great scholars gave their best thought to the subject of their education. In the Ireland into which little Mary Taaffe was born about 1753, “statesmen” also had given their thought to the subject of education for Catholic children—but the legislation which was the result amounted simply in Lecky’s famous phrase, to “universal, unqualified and unlimited proscription.”

[32]. Witness the interest of Louis XIV in Madame de Maintenon’s foundation of St. Cyr, and Fénélon’s treatise on “L’Education des Filles.”

Nevertheless Catholic parents managed to get their children educated, and the nation which its lawgivers doomed to ignorance and degradation produced, by some miracle, scholars like Charles O’Connor of Belanagare and high-bred, charming women like her whose life-story we are now studying. How was it accomplished? What a stirring and splendid chapter the full answer to that question would add to the history of human endeavour! How one longs for the coming of the long-delayed historian of the Irish people who shall tell, in all its fullness, the story of how they educated their children during the Penal Days.

For the boys we know in part how it was done. They were smuggled off to the Continent with other forbidden “cargoes,” and at the great colleges in Spain, and France and the Low Countries found “bourses” provided by the pious generosity of their wealthier countrymen, or were supported by remittances from home which no threatened penalty could prevent their devoted parents from sending.[^[33]] Or a tutor was provided for them in some hunted bishop, perhaps, or friar, who found safety in the lowly disguise of a gardener or farm-servant working on their father’s place,[^[34]] or who came there for a time, as one of the Bishops of Clogher is recorded to have made the rounds of his diocese, in the character of a wandering harper. Or they would get a course of lessons from some of the numerous scribes, who perambulated the country, stopping for a season at the houses of the gentry of the old race, and copying out manuscripts for them—Keating’s History of Ireland,[^[35]] tales of the Red Branch and the Fenians, pseudo-historical accounts of the old families—as Sean MaGauran did for Brian Maguire.[^[36]]

[33]. The statute dealing with their case runs thus: “In case any of his Majesty’s subjects of Ireland shall go or send any person to any public or private Popish school, in parts beyond the seas, in order to be educated in the Popish religion, and there be trained in the Popish religion, or shall send money or other thing towards the maintenance of such person gone or sent, and trained as aforesaid, or as a charity for relief of a religious house, every person so going, sending or sent, shall, on conviction, be disabled to sue, in law or in equity, or to be guardian, executor, or administrator, or take a legacy or deed of gift, or bear any office, and shall forfeit goods and chattels for ever, and lands for life.”—7th William III, ch. 4, s.), 1694.

[34]. See “Religious Songs of Connacht,” passim.

[35]. It is instructive to note the dates of the MSS. of Keating in the British Museum. The larger number were written during the Penal Days.

[36]. See “Maguires of Fermanagh,” edited by Fr. Dinneen, p. 140.

The girls in some instances shared the lessons of their brothers. Dr. Costello of Tuam tells me that his great-grandmother was taught Latin by a man working on her father’s farm—a disguised friar. The scribes put aside their copying for a time to form the little maidens’ hands to the delicate Italian script which was the admiration of the time. The wandering harper, who honoured their father’s house with a visit, could sometimes be induced to give the daughters of the family a course of lessons on his sweet instrument. Arthur O’Neill tells us of teaching the harp to two young ladies in Longford, Miss Farrell and Miss Plunkett. “Miss Farrell played handsomely; Miss Plunkett middling.”[^[37]] Most of the old Catholic families had members settled abroad, and intercourse with the Continent was therefore so close and intimate that the outlook of the Irish at home was far less insular than it is at present. Occasionally uncles and cousins, who had won fame as soldiers in foreign services, came home to visit their people, and as they liked to have their nephews and nieces able to converse with them in French, or Spanish, or German, as the case might be, the little ones were stimulated to learn as much as they could in expectation of their kinsmen’s coming. Little Mary Ann McCracken had to learn her French from an old weaver, but little Mary Taaffe and her sisters had all around them priests, who had studied abroad, and were only too anxious to keep up their practice of foreign languages by speaking them with their little parishioners. And so when the Taaffe uncle who had fought at Fontenoy, or his son, who witnessed the dispersal of the Brigade, came home to Ireland, their fastidious ears were not tortured by the halting French or vile accents of their young kinswomen. In many a country house, as in that of the O’Connors of Belanagare, were living ladies, like Madame O’Rorke, Charles O’Connor’s grandmother, widows of distinguished Irish officers in the French, or Spanish or Imperial service, who had spent their youth in the most brilliant circle in Europe, had been the friends and confidantes of Queens, and who now took delight in forming their little grandchildren and nieces to the exquisite manners and gracious bearing which, in their own case, had won the admiration of the most polished society on the Continent. In other houses were other ladies who under the secular garb which the necessities of the time imposed on them, carried out as well as they could, in their kinsmen’s homes, the religious rule of life to which they had bound themselves in their suppressed convents. When the convents were closed, and the nuns scattered, those who, instead of going abroad, found refuge with their relatives and friends, devoted themselves largely to the education of the little girls of the household. They trained them to their own exquisite skill in needlework, they taught them something of the art of healing, and above all they filled their minds with sweet and lovely images through their stories of the girl saints who had been their own unseen but constant companions in cell, and garden, and church; they turned them steadily to the imitation of the virtues by which the Elizabeths, the Cecilias, the Catherines, the Agneses had won their place as hand-maidens of the Heavenly Queen.

[37]. “Annals of Irish Harpers,” p. 179.

There is no story more beautiful in our national annals than the story—yet untold in its completeness—of the Irish nuns during the ages of persecution. We see them avail themselves of the slightest lull in the storm to found their convents, and carry out the Magnum Opus to which they had vowed their life. The days of the Confederation of Kilkenny saw the foundation of the Dominican Convent at Galway,[^[38]] the days of James II saw its restoration, and the establishment of the Benedictines in Dublin. To such institutions the Catholic gentry sent their daughters to be educated, and we have only to turn to the pages of O’Heyne[^[39]] to learn what manner of women these were who had the training of their young compatriots.

[38]. O’Heyne states that the convent was established at the end of the reign of James I. but it was only in 1644 that the church was built and a house arranged in conventural style. The foundation was confirmed by Rinuccini in 1647.

[39]. Admirably edited by Rev. Ambrose Coleman, O.P., who has contributed an Appendix full of the most valuable historical information (Dundalk, 1902).

We see the heroic and saintly Prioress of the Dominican Nuns in Galway, Juliana Nolan, “a woman of heroic fortitude in bearing every kind of adversity, and very firm in observance and the gaining of virtues”; her successor, Mary Lynch, who taught school in Spain before her return to Galway, “a most religious woman and of great capacity for ruling and instructing”; and above all Mary O’Halloran, than whom, O’Heyne declares, he had never known a woman of stronger intellect. “She had a more accurate acquaintance with the Spanish tongue than the Spaniards themselves, and was well versed in sacred and profane history.”

It was not alone the young girls of the “Tribes” or the chieftainly families of the West who were sent to the Convent in Galway to be trained by the women we have described. Even right across the country from Drogheda pupils came to them. One of these, Catherine Plunkett, daughter of Thomas Plunkett, of Drogheda, and a relation of the martyred Archbishop, Oliver Plunkett, passed from the school room, at an early age, to the novitiate and received her religious training under Mary Lynch. “She shared in all the vicissitudes of that Community, who were several times compelled by religious persecution to quit their convent. Some sought shelter in the homes of their relations or friends, whilst not a few experienced the utmost vigours of poverty. Father Hugh O’Callaghan, who was Prior Provincial of the Dominicans from 1709 to 1718, having during the course of his Visitation, found the Sisters in this lamentable condition, and without any hope of their being permitted to return to their Convent, obtained for them from the Archbishop of Dublin, Most Rev. Dr. Edmund Byrne, permission to settle in his diocese; accordingly in March, 1717, eight of them (of whom Catherine Plunkett was one) arrived in the Metropolis and took up their abode first in Fisher’s Lane, from which they soon afterwards removed to the ancient Benedictine Convent, Chancel Row (now North Brunswick Street).”[^[40]]

[40]. Memoir of Mother M. Catherine Plunkett, compiled from the Archives of Sienna Convent, Drogheda, very kindly furnished me by Mother Prioress and Community.

After a little time, Catherine Plunkett obtained the permission of her Superiors to go to Belgium, where she was received into the Convent of the English Dominican Sisters, called the Spillikens, from its proximity to a pin factory. Here she remained about three years until at the urgent request of the Primate Hugh MacMahon, she was recalled in 1721, by the Provincial, Dr. Stephen MacEgan, to found a convent in her native town of Drogheda.

It reads like a chapter of the Fioretti—the record of the early days of Catherine Plunkett’s foundation in Drogheda. The first home of the nuns was a little mud cabin on the Meath side of the Boyne. Long before day broke over the shining sands and thin line of Eastern sea, the Dominican Father who ministered to their spiritual wants, used to row himself over in a little boat to say Mass and give them holy Communion. Dressed in secular garb, with their real character known only to a few discreet friends, the ladies from Brussels obtained, without much difficulty, leave from the Protestant Primate to open a school, and the Drogheda merchants were very glad to send their daughters to them. Later, they moved to a house in Dyer Street, and opened a boarding school, and an establishment for lady boarders. All the noblesse of the Pale, the Plunketts, the Bellews, the Balfes, the Dillons, the O’Reillys, the Drakes, the Fortescues, the Taaffes are represented among the first pupils—and it is not at all unlikely that our heroine, Mary Taaffe, received her education in this Dyer Street Convent, which welcomed so many of her kinswomen. The nuns of Sienna very kindly searched their old account books for her name, but unfortunately the books were missing for the years 1762 to 1765, which are the very years when we might expect to find her there—if we are right in assuming that she was born about 1753.[^[41]]

[41]. The date has only been arrived at by inference. She was married in 1771, and we know from her grandson’s narrative that she was considered to have married early, say about eighteen. Her mother died in 1753, which set a posterior limit to her conjectured birth year.

So while it is not improbable that Catherine Plunkett’s Convent in Drogheda had the credit of the education which produced so charming a result, we cannot attain any certainty in the matter. Nor do we know much about Mary Taaffe’s childhood. Her father, Mr. George Taaffe, representative of that branch of the Taaffes who held the Earldom of Carlingford under the Stuarts, lived in Ardee on the remnant of the ancestral estates which was all the family’s devotion to the “Lost Cause” of the Stuarts had left them, and within sight of the ancestral castle of Smarmore, which his son was to purchase back for the family. His young wife, Elizabeth Keappock, died in 1753 at the early age of thirty, leaving him with one son, John, and four daughters. Of these, one married Terence Kiernan; another, a member of the Scurly family, a third, Alice, James Lynch of Drogheda. John, the only son, was twice married, first to Anne Plunkett of Portmarnock, and after her death in 1786 to Catherine Taaffe.

The ease with which Mr. George Taaffe got his girls married (an ease which anxious parents of the present day might well envy) to young men who in respect of fortune and family were among the most eligible partis in the Pale, suggests that the Taaffe girls were very attractive. Doubtless their father’s house, when his four charming daughters still graced it, was an extremely pleasant place; and it is not to be wondered at that the girls’ clever young kinsman, Mr. Luke Teeling, found himself often taking in Ardee[^[42]] on his journeys between his father’s place near Balbriggan and the establishment of the linen merchant in Lisburn with whom he was serving his apprenticeship.

[42]. It would be quite in his way if we are justified in assuming that the route taken by Thomas Molyneux in 1707 was the ordinary one.

As is so often the case with serious-minded young men, there was a strong, if hidden, vein of romance in Luke Teeling’s nature, and he soon discovered that he had lost his heart irrevocably, to his pretty cousin, Mary. She was young, hardly more than a child at the time, and her father was loth to part with his little maid so soon; but he recognised the sterling qualities of her suitor and gave his consent to an engagement, which terminated in the marriage of the young couple at Ardee on April 6th, 1771.

There had been an old connection between the Taaffes and the Teelings, and we learn from Bartholomew Teeling’s Memoir of his uncle that Luke Teeling’s mother was of the house of Taaffe. After the record of the marriage of Luke and Mary (still kept at Smarmore Castle) the words are inserted, “obtenta dispensatione in consanguinitate.”

Like the Taaffes, the Teelings had suffered much during the long wars which devastated Ireland in the seventeenth century, and of the broad acres which their forefathers had held in Meath for over five hundred years there remained after the “Third Breaking” of Aughrim, in the pathetic phrase of one of the family’s present-day representatives, little more than “the semi-circular arched vault in the churchyard of Rathkenny.” But even before Father Teeling, who came back from his College on the Continent about the beginning of the eighteenth century, to endure the life of suffering, and labour, and peril of a missionary priest in Ireland under the Penal Régime, was gathered to his fathers in that vault, the fortunes of the family were already in the ascent. In truth there was something in the Teelings which forced them to the front in whatever walk of life they might choose for themselves, whether as soldiers, like the old knightly Teelings of the Middle Ages, whose names survive in many an ancient deed of gift to religious houses; or churchmen, like Father Ignatius Teeling, S. J., or scholars like Theobald Teeling, the correspondent of Justus Lipsius, and that other Teeling, who has been described by Archbishop Peter Talbot as “urbis et orbis miraculum.”[^[43]] And this something—call it personality, force of character, or what you will—was peculiarly evident in Bartholomew Teeling whom we find settled in the neighbourhood of Balbriggan about the middle of the eighteenth century.

[43]. These particulars concerning the Teeling family are taken from an excellent article in The Gentleman’s Magazine (October, 1905), by a writer signing himself “Albi Norman.”

It was in the days when Balbriggan, under the fostering care of its landlord, Baron Hamilton, of Hampton Hall,[^[44]] was developing from a miserable little fishing hamlet into a prosperous trading town. With the assistance of a small grant from the Irish Parliament, the Baron built the pier, in the sixties of the eighteenth century, and thus fostered a lively carrying trade with Wales. Ships of two hundred tons could unload in the new harbour, and such craft crowded the quay, unloading cargoes of slates, coal and culm, as well as rock salt and bark, and carrying back corn and cattle. In 1780 the Baron established extensive cotton works here, for the promotion of which parliament granted the sum of £1,250, but this manufacture was subsequently almost abandoned for that of hosiery.[^[45]] When Arthur Young visited Ireland in 1776, he spent a few days with the Baron, and we learn from him[^[46]] much of the latter’s improvements; of the one hundred and fifty acres of mountain land he reclaimed; of the agricultural methods he adopted, and of their financial results; of the local fishing industry and how he worked it. It seems the Baron had boat-building works, and out of these came his fleet of “23 boats each carrying seven men, who were not paid wages, but divided the produce of the fishery. The vessel took one share, and the hands one each, which amounts on an average to 16s. a week. A boat costs from £130 to £200, fitted out ready for the fishery; they make their own nets.”

[44]. He was M.P. for Belfast, Solicitor General and Baron of the Exchequer (D’Alton’s “History of County Dublin,” p. 477).

[45]. D’Alton, op. cit., p. 468.

[46]. “Tour in Ireland,” Vol. I.

With the agricultural experiments of the Baron, and his industrial and trading enterprises, Bartholomew Teeling was closely identified. He held the lands in Walshetown, Gardiner’s Hill, Kilbrickstown, etc., and some family documents, which I have been privileged to examine, have reference to business transactions with Baron Hamilton, which would seem to indicate that Bartholomew Teeling helped to finance the Baron’s schemes.

At all events Bartholomew prospered, and when he died the provisions he was able to make for his sons and the education he gave them, show that he had accumulated a comfortable fortune. He was married twice, it would appear, his first wife being of the Taaffe family, and his second a Miss Grace. By these he had a numerous family of sons. In addition to Luke, the eldest son, we find mention in the family papers of Christopher, a well-known doctor in Dublin; James, who seems to have remained in his father’s place near Balbriggan and combined manufacturing and farming; Joseph, and Robert, afterwards merchants in Dublin; and Bartholomew. There was also a Patrick, but if he was one of these brothers, he must have died soon, as his name early falls out of the family record.

Luke had been early apprenticed to the linen trade—and that fact in itself indicates that his father was a man of means. For in the endeavour to keep the trade “exclusive,” a high fee was charged, and a fairly long apprenticeship insisted on.