The Ballad of Mary Kearney, Guest Post by Katherine Mezzacappa

‘I am dead, my Mary; the man who loved you body and soul lies in some dishonorable grave.’ In County Down, Ireland, in 1767, a nobleman secretly marries his servant, in defiance of law, class, and religion. Can their love survive tumultuous times?

‘Honest and intriguing, this gripping saga will transport and inspire you, and it just might break your heart. Highly recommended.’ Historical Novel Society

‘Mezzacappa brings nuance and a great depth of historical knowledge to the cross-class romance between a servant and a nobleman.’ Publishers Weekly.

The Ballad of Mary Kearney is a compelling must-read for anyone interested in Irish history, told through the means of an enduring but ultimately tragic love.

The United Irishmen

What is that in your hand? – It is a branch
Of what? – Of the Tree of Liberty
Where did it first grow? – In America
Where does it bloom? – In France
Where did the seeds fall? – In Ireland

From a commemorative stone erected in Maynooth, County Kildare in 1998, on the two hundredth anniversary of the United Irishmen rebellion

In 1795, on Cave Hill overlooking Belfast, a group of United Irishmen took an oath “never to desist in our efforts to until we subvert the authority of England over our country and assert our independence.”

*Old photograph of Cave Hill, Belfast, US Library of Congress*. Wikimedia

Amongst them were the Dublin barrister Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Belfast linen merchant, Henry Joy McCracken, Samuel Neilson and Thomas Russell. Tone and Russell were Anglicans, the other two Presbyterians. The society of the United Irishmen had been founded in a Belfast tavern in 1791 but proscribed in May 1794; the republic the movement sought to establish was inspired by the revolutionary principles which had convulsed France since 1789 and encompassed equal rights for and enfranchisement of all Irishmen regardless of religious persuasion (the emancipation of women was still far off). Indeed, the United Irishmen looked to France for practical as well as ideological support for their aims.

Accordingly the French Directory sent a fleet in 1796, with which Tone sailed, but which due to a series of miscalculations and adverse weather had to turn back in disarray without a single French soldier landing in Ireland. A further French invasion in August 1798 led by General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert met with initial success at Ballina and notably Castlebar and but had to eventually surrender to superior numbers at Ballinamuck. Escorted to Dublin, the French officers were exchanged for British prisoners held by France, but those officers of Irish origin were hanged for treason; Wolfe Tone was captured at Buncrana when the French ship he was on surrendered, and he committed suicide in prison.

That invasion came too late. From May to October 1798 rebellion gripped Ireland. An estimated 30-50,000 lost their lives, of which only a relatively small proportion died in battle, greater numbers being accounted for by atrocities and reprisals committed by both sides, of which the New Ross and Scullabogue barn massacres (to give an example from each) are amongst the most notorious, and characterised not just by killing but by acts of torture apparently peculiar to Ireland at that time, such as pitch-capping and half-hanging. From the beginning the United Irishmen movement was infiltrated by spies in Ireland and where members were active on the continent, notably in Paris and Hamburg. The final battle of the rebellion in Ulster took place at Ballynahinch in County Down in June.

*National Portrait Gallery, London. Wikimedia*

I first heard mention of the United Irishmen aged about ten in a (state) primary school in Belfast in the 1970s. What caught my curiosity then was that here was a rebellion led predominantly by Protestants, in which Irishmen were apparently united. It felt to me then, growing up in a city in the grip of seemingly intractable sectarian violence, as though it had been Ulster’s last chance, an “if only.” What was not mentioned in this glancing school-room look at the rebellion was that dissenters of any kind were then subject to certain penalties. There were penal laws in place against Catholics, designed primarily to legally deprive them of land, including for instance the requirement that a Catholic landowner had to divide his estate equally between all his children (which might sound fair but in fact was aimed at the break-up of major estates) and the right of a Protestant neighbour to “discover,” i.e. appropriate, Catholic owned land. It was illegal to set up a Catholic school (which led to the phenomenon of the “hedge school master”), or to be guardian of a child (so a dying Catholic would not be able to nominate a co-religionist to take care of his children). Catholics could not follow a military or legal career, or hold public office, though they could be doctors. Catholics could be whipped for refusing to work on a holy day, or for making a pilgrimage to a holy well, were not allowed to carry arms or to own a horse costing more than five pounds.

This list is by no means exhaustive and does not include the restrictions placed on Catholic clergy. Until 1793 it was illegal for a Protestant and a Catholic to marry, and the priest who performed such a marriage could be hanged; this law and its implications lie at the heart of the story of Mary Kearney and James Goward. These restrictions, developed to keep or reduce Catholics to a state of poverty and ignorance, were introduced following the Cromwellite and Williamite settlements of the seventeenth century. The English agricultural reformer Arthur Young was shocked at their severity, but was reassured that they were frequently not enforced, though whether they were or not would depend entirely on the zeal or otherwise of local magistrates. The Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys however justified their own outrages against Catholics by saying that they were enforcing the Penal Laws when the magistrates failed to do so. In 1792 an off-shoot of the Peep o’Day Boys developed into what is now known as the Orange Order. What is less well-known is the fact that Protestant dissenters (so in Ulster predominantly Presbyterians) had some common cause with Catholics. Presbyterian marriages, for instance, were not legalized until 1782.

The impact of events initially in America, and latterly in France on this common cause was both positive and negative. Deepening Directory-sponsored violence in France frightened not only London but also those who would otherwise have supported rebellion in Ireland. Napoleon’s increasingly imperialistic tendencies and French hostile reaction to Anglo-American trade agreements alienated numbers of northern Protestants who looked across the Atlantic and admired what they saw, and in increasing numbers emigrated there.

Post 1798 rebellion flickered again, notably in the abortive Dublin uprising of 1803 for which Robert Emmet was hanged, but was considered to have been crushed decisively with the death in ambush of James Corcoran at Enniscorthy in 1804.

Catholic emancipation did not finally come until 1829 thanks primarily to the efforts of Daniel O’Connell and the Dublin-born Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington, but shades of the penal laws persisted much longer. In 1854 a parish priest in County Fermanagh had to flee to America to avoid arrest for having married a Miss Ann Jones to a Mr. Pat Teague; he was able to return in 1859 only due to the intervention of the local landowner, the Earl of Erne. When my mother trained as a school-teacher at Stranmillis College in Belfast in the late 1960s she was obliged to obtain a reference from a Protestant minister before she could teach in the state school system. A fellow student who refused on principle to do this never taught. It would take some time to list the inequalities in employment opportunities, council house allocation and all the rest which lay behind the Civil Rights marches of the late 1960s and their aftermath.

*Lord Edward Fitzgerald, by Hugh Douglas Hamilton*. Wikimedia

Leading figures associated with the Society of United Irishmen appear in my book either by in-the-wings reference or as characters. Thus Wolfe Tone is referred to, as is his successor as the leader of the Society, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The irascible lawyer John Philpot Curran, fighter of five duels, appears in a courtroom scene. Curran disowned his own daughter for her engagement to Robert Emmet. Another daughter left Ireland for Italy where she worked as a portrait painter in the circle of the Shelleys.

Not far from the Tree of Liberty stone in Maynooth stands the magnificent Carton House, now a luxury hotel but once the seat of the Earls of Leinster, and childhood home of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (for an account of his life that is both erudite and readable, I recommend Stella Tillyard’s Citizen Lord). There is a story that when the IRA came to burn Carton, as they did so many of the Ascendancy ‘Big Houses’ in the early 1920s, a manservant appeared carrying a portrait of Lord Edward and asked them if they really did want to burn the home of a United Irishmen. They didn’t.

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Meet Katherine Mezzacappa

Katherine Mezzacappa is Irish but currently lives in Carrara, between the Apuan Alps and the Tyrrhenian Sea. She wrote The Ballad of Mary Kearney (Histria) and The Maiden of Florence (Fairlight) under her own name, as well as four historical novels (2020-2023) with Zaffre, writing as Katie Hutton. She also has three contemporary novels with Romaunce Books, under the pen name Kate Zarrelli.

Katherine’s short fiction has been published in journals worldwide. She has in addition published academically in the field of 19th century ephemeral illustrated fiction, and in management theory. She has been awarded competitive residencies by the Irish Writers Centre, the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators and (to come) the Latvian Writers House.

Katherine also works as a manuscript assessor and as a reader and judge for an international short story competition. She has in the past been a management consultant, translator, museum curator, library assistant, lecturer in History of Art, sewing machinist and geriatric care assistant. In her spare time she volunteers with a second-hand book charity of which she is a founder member. She is a member of the Society of Authors, the Historical Novel Society, the Irish Writers Centre, the Irish Writers Union, Irish PEN / PEN na hÉireann and the Romantic Novelists Association, and reviews for the Historical Novel Review. She has a first degree in History of Art from UEA, an M.Litt. in Eng. Lit. from Durham and a Masters in Creative Writing from Canterbury Christ Church. She is represented by Annette Green Authors’ Agency.