will bear in mind this important lesson, that you will yourself educate
our children in the true principles of Christianity, which believe me
are not to be acquired by a mere _Sunday show_. No! they are to be
instilled in the life and conversation, and that only by precept and
example.... Continue to teach them a love of _truth_ and _Christianity_,
with an utter abhorrence of falsehood and hypocrisy. There is a maxim of
an ancient heathen author, which my father recommended to me when I was
a boy; it had a great effect on my mind at the time, and is worth your
teaching them; it is thus translated:
“Be this your wall of brass, no _guilt_ to know
Nor let one _crime_ sit blushing on your brow.”
His letters to his children are charming in their simplicity and
tenderness. Here is one of them:
“My dear Children,—I am extremely delighted with your very great
progress in writing, and am only anxious on that subject that
you will not forget what you have been taught. But my great and
increasing care is about your progress in the acquisition of
industrious habits. It should be a first principle with people
that they should actually _earn_ whatever they _enjoy_. Writing
is good and reading is good, but no learning should entitle a
person to live by the fruit of another’s industry. Your mother
will help you to apply this principle. State your objections to
it, if you have any, in your next letter; and show me, if you
can, why one part of the community should live by the labours of
another.”
The longing for his children which had tried to satisfy itself with the
sight of their framed likenesses above his mantelpiece, the record of
their ages and heights on his wall, was stilled at last on the joyful
day which brought him William. The boy’s presence was not procured
without sacrifice on his father’s part. The prisoners were allowed a
certain amount of wine every day at dinner. This, Neilson saved, and
sold privately to some of the prisoners at 3_s._ 6_d._ per bottle which
paid for William’s diet, “having agreed for it at £15 per annum.” “I
don’t feel the slightest inconvenience from this privation,” he assures
his wife, “and though it looks a little awkward to sit at table while
others are taking their glass, yet my fellow-prisoners cannot but esteem
me the more for the motive; indeed I feel a good deal pinched about the
usual expenses of mending, washing, paper, quills, etc., _not having at
present a crown in the world_. But then I do not owe a farthing to
anyone, and I have learned to make a little go a long way.” From a
letter addressed by Neilson to the Governor we learn that he covered the
expense of washing, etc., by going without supper. When we remember that
Neilson had become addicted, during the convivial days of his political
life and the weary days of his imprisonment in Kilmainham and Newgate,
to spirituous drink, we realise the extent of the sacrifice he made to
secure the presence of his little son.
That little lad’s story of the days spent by him with his father in Fort
George can be told by no one so well as himself. We must bear in mind
that the writer of the following letters was only eight years old.
The first letter is to his mother and announces his safe arrival in Fort
George:
“My dear Mother.—I like this place very well. My father is very
well, as are the rest of the prisoners.
“I had the pleasure of seeing a little dog and a hare. Mr.
Wilson had the hare, and Mr. Cormick the dog. We had a very
pleasant voyage, only Monday, which was a little stormy. Mrs.
Cuthbert and Miss Park took great care of me. Mrs. Emmet will be
as kind to me as if I was her own child. My father had a pretty
little bed and arm-chair ready for me.”
The next letter is dated a week later:
“My dear Mother—I am sorry to tell you that Mrs. Cuthbert has
been very ill ever since the day I came here. My arm is almost
stout, and Dr. MacNevin says it will be as well as ever. I bathe
a little every morning, at first I was afraid to dive, but now I
am growing bolder. I am counting with Mr. Dowling in the
morning, reading and grammar with Doctor Dickson, in the middle
of the day, and writing and reading with my father, who is also
beginning to teach me geography, in the afternoon. I play in the
evening with Robert Emmet and his sisters; sometimes I sup at
their mother’s, and sometimes in our own room, on bread and
milk. I go to bed at nine, and rise before eight o’clock. Father
sits an hour later than me. My love to my sisters.”
A letter to his sister Anne who was with Sophia in Dublin (probably at
Mrs. Bond’s), comes next in order of time, and we learn from it that he
knew his father from his picture, and that he bathes every morning at
eight o’clock. He conveys a message from John Sweetman to Sophia who was
evidently an old favourite of the genial brewer.
By the middle of September William is quite settled down in his new
quarters, and extremely happy in them. “Everything here is agreeable,
and my father takes great care of me. The little Emmets are fine
play-fellows, but I am ten hours at my education, and I think it not
long. I sleep very sound all night, and in the morning my father awakes
me to my lessons. He says I am in a fair way of being a good scholar....
I get my copies from Mr. Dowdall, who sends his best respects to you.
Tell John we have got no bag-pipes yet, nor any errand-going dogs.”
We next hear of William’s performance on the flute at a concert given by
the children in Mrs. Emmet’s room, with Mr. and Mrs. Emmet, Neilson,
John Sweetman, Dr. MacNevin and the boy’s self-appointed music-master,
Cormick, as the appreciative audience:—
“My dear Mother. We had a concert on Friday evening, when Robert
Emmet and I played several tunes together, and we had the
approbation of the whole company. I am reading Erasmus in Latin
with Dr. Dickson, and I am in the rule of five of fractions and
tare and tret with Mr. Dowling. My father assists me in
everything.”
Poor William fell ill towards the New Year, but sickness had its
alleviations in Fort George for a little boy whom everybody idolised. It
meant all kinds of petting from Jane Park and Mrs. Cuthbert, and gifts
of jellies and fruit and sweetmeats from Mrs. Emmet. Nor was that all,
as witness the following letter from the convalescent to his sisters:—
“My dear Sisters.—I suppose you have heard that I was sick; but
I am sure you will be happy to hear that I am perfectly
recovered. When I was ill my little pigeon used to play about me
like my little cat; it is very fond of me. Dr. Dickson who was
so kind as to teach me Latin, has left us; but Mr. Dowling is
good enough to supply his place, and to continue my arithmetic
also. I can now play twenty-one tunes on the flute, and Mr.
Cormick gives me those which will be most agreeable to my
mother. I have just begun trigonometry with Mr. Russell. I read
history and biography in English with Mr. Emmet. With my father
geography, and a little of everything except writing, which he
thinks will be best deferred for some time. Robert Emmet is my
schoolfellow in all classes.”
Some of the State prisoners were liberated about this time, including as
we learn from William’s letter above, Dr. Dickson. A subsequent letter
to his mother indicates his regret, even in the midst of the fine
sliding the long-continued frost afforded him, for Mr. Simms (another of
those liberated) with whom he used to play “tig.” His father tries to
supply the loss of Mr. Simms by playing “shinney” with his little son,
and the latter makes himself useful to the prisoners by keeping a weekly
account of the washing sent out, and checking it when it comes back. And
so the days pass.
Anxious days they are for the father whose future is so uncertain. It is
clear that with the coming of the long-expected peace the remainder of
the prisoners will be sent away from Fort George. But whither? And what
is best to be done with William?
Finally, on the last day of May, 1802, word comes that the prisoners are
to be sent to Hamburg. Thence it is Neilson’s intention to depart for
America. But will he bring William with him, or send him home to his
mother? The boy himself cannot bear the idea of parting with his father:
“he has been in tears this hour past because I won’t promise to take him
with me.”
The final decision is to send back William to his mother, and the son of
one of the prisoners, Mr. Chambers, returning, one of these days, to
Belfast, poor William was torn from his father and sent back to his
mother and sisters.
He was to see his father once more. Braving all dangers, Samuel Neilson
stole back to Ireland, for one last glimpse of its dear shores, and
accompanied by faithful Jamie Hope, rode from Dublin to Belfast, to see
his beloved wife and children, ere he bade them farewell for ever.
Less than nine months after his arrival in America, poor Neilson died,
his giant frame worn out by all he had endured during his long
imprisonment, as truly a martyr for Ireland as if he had perished, with
so many others of his comrades, on the scaffold of ’98 or ’03.
Mrs. Neilson, soon after the break up of the _Star_, embarked in a small
line of business, and God prospered her little enterprise. “She was
enabled,” says Madden, “by the fruit of her industry, to bring up her
children respectably, to give them education, and to leave them—such as
it would have been her husband’s pride to have found them, had he lived
to have seen them in their ripe years—trained to virtue and matured in
useful knowledge.
“Miss McCracken, speaking of her, says: ‘Mrs. Neilson was a very
superior woman, a most exemplary wife and mother, for whom I had the
highest esteem, and continued on terms of intimacy and friendship, from
1795, when I first became acquainted with her, until her death. I never
saw a family so well regulated, such order and neatness, on such a
limited income; and such well-trained children, most amiable and
affectionate to each other, and so respectful to their mother, and all
so happy together—it was quite a treat to spend an evening with them.’
This excellent woman, esteemed and respected by all who knew her, even
by those to whom her husband’s political principles were most obnoxious,
struggled for her family during her husband’s imprisonment and exile and
subsequently to his death, and died in November, 1811, in her
forty-eighth year. Her remains were interred at Newtownbreda. The
inscription on her tomb truly describes her to have been, ‘A woman who
was an ornament to her sex; who fulfilled in the most exemplary manner,
the duties of a daughter, wife and mother.’”
There remains only to tell, as briefly as may be, the story of her
children, for of this woman, in a special degree it is true to say, that
she has no history but the history of her husband and family. Poor
William, whom we have learned to love as dearly as any of his masters in
Fort George, lived long enough to show the fruits of the remarkable
education he had received there—but alas! not long enough to confer on
his country the benefits which all those who knew him expected from him.
After a brilliant course at the Academical Institution, Belfast, he
embraced a commercial career, where his splendid talents ensured for him
a speedy success. His employers described him as “a young man of the
most splendid talents we have ever known; there was no subject in
mercantile affairs that he could not make himself master of. In public
affairs he soon became conspicuous, and had he lived he would have been
an ornament to his country.”
Alas! his career was cut by his death from yellow fever in Jamaica on
February 7th, 1817.
Of the four daughters of Samuel and Anne Neilson, Anne (who lived much
with Mrs. Oliver Bond) married a Mr. Magennis, in New York, and died
there at an advanced age. Sophia and Jane married gentlemen of the name
of McAdam, and one lived in Belfast, the other in New York. Mary, the
youngest, married William Hancock of Lurgan, and was the mother of the
distinguished statistician, William Neilson Hancock, LL.D.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Wife of Lord Edward Fitzgerald
PAMELA (1776?-1831)[79]
“Would God thou wert among the Gael!
Thou wouldst not then from day to day
Weep thus alone.”—MANGAN.
Footnote 79:
_Authorities_: Madden’s “United Irishmen” (Second Series, Second
Edition;) Moore’s “Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald”; Gerald Campbell’s
“Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald”; Harmand’s “Madame de Genlis”; various
works of Madame de Genlis, including “Mèmoires,” “Adèle et Théodore,”
“Leçons d’une Gouvernante à ses Élèves,” etc.
IT is not Romney, ravishing as his portrait of her is, nor Giroust, who
in his _Leçon de Harpe_ has painted her for us in all the virginal
charm, and sweet, and fresh, and innocent loveliness of her early
girlhood, nor Mieris, whose miniature of her shows an exquisite Diana,
with little white buskined feet, as light and swift as the wind on which
they seem to be borne—it is none of these that has given us the picture
of Pamela we Irish people love best. It is as Lord Edward, himself,
pictured her in a letter to his mother that we think of her most
willingly—with her baby in her arms, the little son, the first-born, of
whom the young husband and father was so proud: “I wish I could show the
baby to you all—dear mother, how you would love it! Nothing is so
delightful as to see it in its dear mother’s arms, with her sweet, pale,
delicate face, and the pretty looks she gives it.” For the sake of the
five years of perfect happiness she gave Lord Edward we, the Irish
nation, to whom he has given so much, have taken “the dear little, pale,
pretty wife” into our hearts for all time.
Poor Pamela! We have need to keep her place in our hearts very safe and
warm; for the rest of the world has dealt pitilessly with her fame
during life, and her memory after death—and fate has spared her no
unkindness, no humiliation, from the shadows that surrounded her cradle
to the sordid and _macabres_ details of her incoffining.
As we read the sad story of Pamela, and contrast “what might have been”
(“if the dear little, pale, pretty wife” had been suffered by destiny to
ripen, in the sweet, and simple and wholesome atmosphere of Irish family
life, to her gracious maturity, and lovely old age) with the sordid
actuality, our love for Pamela becomes doubled with a great pity, and an
infinite regret. We feel how right Madden was in ascribing what was
unlovely in her to the education she received at the hands of Madame de
Genlis, and the blame which some of her critics have lavished on her
levity, her errors and her frailties we join with him in apportioning to
those who failed in their duty towards her in the most critical and
trying moment of her life.
* * * * *
Into the disputed question of the parentage of Pamela it is not our
business to enter. Suffice it to say that in the common belief she was
regarded as the daughter of the Duke of Orleans, the notorious
_Egalité_, and Madame de Genlis, the Governess of the Orleans children.
On the other hand, Madame de Genlis asserted that Pamela was the
daughter of a poor English woman named Mary Simms, who had married a
gentleman of good family called Seymour,[80] and fled with him, from the
displeasure of his family, to Fogo in Newfoundland. Here their little
daughter Nancy was born, and here shortly after the young husband died.
His widow returned to England, and settled down in Christ Church, where
the extraordinary beauty and fascination of her little girl attracted
the attention of a Mr. Forth. Mr. Forth was accustomed to buy horses in
England for his Grace of Orleans, but recently he had received another
commission: to look out for a little English girl, to be educated with
the Orleans children, and to speak English with them. Mary Simms was
very poor, and her desire to keep her child with her was not strong
enough to stand in the way of the brilliant provision thus promised her.
Accordingly, Mr. Forth was soon able to announce to his royal patron
that he was sending him “the handsomest mare and the prettiest little
girl in all England.”
Footnote 80:
It has been pointed out by Madden that in the civil marriage contract
of Pamela and Lord Edward, the bride’s father is stated to have been a
William Berkley, while in the religious contract of the same date
(Tournai, December 17th, 1792) Pamela is entered as the daughter of
William de Brixey.
All we know with certainty of Pamela’s[81] “origin” is that at a very
early age she made her appearance in the Convent of Bellechasse, whither
Madame de Genlis had retired to devote herself to the education of the
children of the Duke and Duchess of Orleans, and that until her marriage
with Lord Edward in December, 1792, she was the constant companion of
the young princes and their sister, and shared that remarkable and
original system of education, which Madame de Genlis—one of the most
gifted educationists of France, the country of educationists—had devised
for her pupils.
Footnote 81:
The name Pamela was borrowed by Madame de Genlis, who was an
enthusiastic admirer of the novels of Samuel Richardson, from the
heroine of the most famous of them.
M. Emile Faguet has discovered in the pedagogy of Madame de Genlis the
origin of all modern education—in its theories, its practices, its
tendencies. “With some of its defects,” he admits, but “wanting most of
these defects,” as he also claims: “an education, directed towards the
true, as well as to the beautiful, paying much attention to history,
modern languages, _Realien_, the study of the most important new
discoveries, as well as the literary masterpieces of ancient and modern
times.”
It seems to us, as we study this education in its results—that is to say
in the character of the pupils who were formed by it—that some of the
defects of our modern education were more inherent in Madame de Genlis’s
system than M. Faguet is willing to admit. Lady Sarah Napier, with her
shrewd woman’s wit, has perhaps formed a truer estimate of it. In a
letter written to her friend, Lady Susan O’Brien, shortly after Lord
Edward’s marriage to Pamela, she says: “Your account of M. Sillery
(_i.e._ Madame de Genlis) and her _élèves_ answers my idea of her, all
pleasing to appearance, and nothing _sound_ within _her_ heart, whatever
may be so in the young minds whom she _can_ and does of course easily
deceive. I hope we have got our lovely little niece time enough out of
her care to have acquired all the _perfections_ of her education, which
are certainly great, as she has a _very uncommon_, clever, active mind
and turns it to the most useful purposes, and I trust our pretty little
_Sylph_ (for she is not like other mortals) has not a tincture of all
the double-dealing, cunning, false reasoning, and lies with which M. S.
is forced to gloss over a very common ill-conduct, because she _will_
set herself _above_ others in virtue, and she happens to be no better
than her neighbours.”
The great fault we seem to find in Madame de Genlis as an educationist
is that she failed to make true religion the foundation of it. Though
she insisted on devoting a large portion of her pupils’ time-table to
the study of the Catechism, and reserved for herself, as the most
important of her duties, their preparation for First Communion, and
their religious instruction, she failed signally to make them realise
that they were created and placed in this world for one end and aim
only: “to know God, to love Him, and serve Him, and by that means to
gain everlasting life.” The system of morality which she taught them was
founded less on the knowledge and love and service of God than on that
curious code of external ethics called _Les Convenances_. The strange
thing about this was that she, herself, was an ardent, not to say a
noisy, protagonist of religion, and enjoyed nothing more than a tilt
with the _Philosophes_. But, somehow, one thinks of religion as an
element a little fortuitous in the heterogeneous collection of
ingredients which went to the making of her character—and when she
failed to make it the foundation of her own conception of life, it is
not to be wondered at that she failed equally in respect of her pupils.
Louis Philippe and Madame Adélaïde were worse than indifferent in the
matter of religion. And it is sufficient to say of Pamela that though
she was reconciled to the Church before her death, and died, as one has
reason to believe, truly penitent, she seems to have given up the
practice of her religion immediately after her marriage with Lord
Edward, without the slightest qualm of conscience.
“_Les Convenances_,” external appearances, it was these Madame de Genlis
kept steadily in view in educating her pupils. The consequence was that
she made them think of life as an act played on a stage for the benefit
of spectators, whose applause determined the success of the actor,
rather than a solemn business between God and each lonely human soul. To
have their bodies trained to the highest degree of strength, and grace,
agility and efficiency; to have their minds adorned with all useful and
agreeable knowledge, to be adepts and connoisseurs of the fine arts:
painting, and music, poetry and literature—this was the educational
ideal she set before herself. If the hearts of her pupils withered a
little under the neglect which they necessarily suffered—if the lessons
of “love, and pain and death” were missing from this positive and
modernist education, who can wonder that the results in poor Pamela’s
case at least were disastrous?
* * * * *
Nevertheless, there were in Madame de Genlis’s system, as Lady Sarah
Napier admits, sufficient “perfections” to make it worth our while to
study it in a certain detail, in the hope of finding something in it to
suit our own educational needs. The books in which she expounds her
system (_Adèle et Théodore_, _Leçons d’une Gouvernante_, etc.) exercised
a tremendous influence on a generation of parents much more interested
in the education of their children than their present-day successors. We
learn from Lady Sophia Fitzgerald that her mother, the Duchess of
Leinster, admired “all the writings of Madame de Genlis to the greatest
degree,” and was often bantered by Lord Edward (who little suspected in
what a relation he was one day to stand to the educationist) over her
_engouement_. (He, for his part, pronounced her _Plans d’Education_ all
perfect nonsense). Lady Sophia, herself, began to re-read _Adèle et
Théodore_ (which she had first read about eight or nine years
previously) after her brother, Lord Edward, brought home Pamela as his
bride. She pays a pretty compliment to Pamela while she makes a record
of this intention of hers in her diary: “Knowing what a charming,
engaging little creature Lady Edward is, I think I shall be more
interested than ever, and give more attention to all she [_i.e._ Madame
de Genlis] says upon Education.”
In 1777 Madame de Genlis, who had been attached since 1770 to the Court
of the Duchess of Chartres, at the _Palais Royal_, as Lady in Waiting,
was appointed Governess of the little twin Princesses, who had recently
been born to the Duke and Duchess. She insisted on taking charge of them
practically from their birth—contrary to the usual custom which left the
care of baby princesses to a _Sous-Gouvernante_, and in order that she
might develop unhampered the system of education which she had devised
for them she stipulated that they should be removed from the _Palais
Royal_, and a special pavilion built for them in the garden of the
Convent of Bellechasse, on plans drawn up by herself.