Tag Archives: Glasnevin Cemetery

On This Day – 10 November 1861 The funeral of Terence Bellew McManus

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Say what you like about the Irish republican movement since the 1860s but you’d have to concede, they do great funerals. There would have been no … ‘The fools, the fools, they have left us our Fenian dead’, from Patrick Pearse in 1915, had the IRB not transported the body of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa from New York, to have him buried in Glasnevin. That was one of the reasons why the British authorities were quick to dispose of the bodies of the executed 1916 leaders ‘in house’. The last thing they wanted was fourteen Dublin funerals.

But the obsequies of Rossa were merely an expert copy, convincing but unoriginal. The first great Fenian funeral was that of a relatively obscure Young Irelander, Terence Bellew McManus. He was no Thomas Davis, no John Mitchel, not even a Thomas Francis Meagher. But he had occupied a prominent position in the mid-1850s generational conflict between the romantic nationalists of the Young Ireland movement, and the waning Daniel O’Connell. And he died, in San Francisco, at just the right time.

McManus was a friend of one of the founders of the Nation newspaper, Charles Gavan Duffy. He had made a fortune exporting wool, and then lost most of it in the mid-1840s investing in railroad stock. An enthusiastic British-based Young Irelander he travelled back to this country in 1848, after the authorities declared martial law in anticipation of a rebellion. He was one of the few members of the movement who actually took up arms. He participated in the only military action of the 1848 rising, the infamous skirmish at the Widow McCormack’s cottage in Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary. He eluded capture in Ireland, and returned to Britain. There he was declared bankrupt and just managed to get on board a ship bound for the USA before he was arrested.

The trouble was that the ship on which he was travelling was called back to port, he was hauled off, and tried for treason. His famous statement, that he had acted as he did, ‘not because I loved England less, but because I loved Ireland more’ cut no ice. He was sentenced, like most of his fellow leaders, to be hanged, drawn and quartered—an appalling penalty that remained on the statute books for the crime of high treason. A petition seeking clemency for the convicted Young Ireland leaders, with one hundred and fifty thousand signatures appended, was presented by the Lord Mayor of Dublin to the Lord Lieutenant. The barbaric capital penalties were diluted to transportation. By October 1849 he was settling into life in the penal colony of Tasmania, or van Diemen’s Land

Like a number of his colleagues, McManus managed to escape from captivity—in his case with Thomas Francis Meagher—and made his way, in 1851, to San Francisco. After which McManus disappeared from sight, abjured most political activity, and tried to build up a respectable business, though without much success.  He suffered a fatal accident in January 1861, died and was buried in San Francisco. And that should have been the last we ever heard of Terence Bellew McManus.

However, a campaign began to raise money to put a monument over his grave in Lone Mountain cemetery. But the IRB had a better idea. Instead of a monument, McManus got a two-month one-way trip back to Ireland, via Panama, New York and Cobh. This was followed by a huge funeral in Dublin, skillfully organised and exploited by the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The organisation had not existed when McManus was in his pomp, but included some of his former Young Ireland chums, like James Stephens.

The Cardinal-Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, was allergic to Fenians, and refused to allow McManus’s coffin to lie in the Pro-Cathedral. So, instead, he lay in state in the Mechanic’s Institute, from where his remains were taken, in solemn procession, to Glasnevin cemetery, watched by thousands of Dubliners.

Whether or not this indicated growing support for the nascent Fenian movement, or just confirmed the Irish attachment to a good funeral, it emboldened the IRB and greatly vexed their constitutional nationalist opponents as well as most of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

McManus eventually got his monument, but not until well into the twentieth century. Funds had been raised to build it by 1895 but the inscription was considered too political and the Glasnevin Cemetery Committee refused to allow it to be erected until 1933. He now shares his grave with, among others, Patrick W. Nally, after whom the Nally Stand in Croke Park was named.

Terence Bellew McManus, emerged from relative obscurity to become the central figure of the biggest funeral in Dublin since Daniel O’Connell’s, one hundred and fifty-six years ago, on this day.

 

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On This Day – Drivetime – 30 January 1846 – Birth of Katharine O’Shea (Parnell)

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To this day she is known as Kitty, though her friends, family and London society in the late 19th century knew her as Katharine, or Kate. Although the name is innocuous today during the Victorian era it was meant to sting – in those times ‘kitty’ was a euphemism for a prostitute.

She is at the heart of one of the great ‘what ifs’ of Irish history, as in ‘what if Katharine O’Shea and Charles Stewart Parnell had never met?’

But they did. She was the wife, probably estranged, of one of the great Irish chancers of Victorian London, Captain William Henry O’Shea, once a dashing Hussar but more familiar today as a talentless political opportunist. Had O’Shea not been a failed banker he might well have found other ways in which to discommode his native country. As it was it was his failure as a politician that was to have more serious ramifications than his inadequacies as a financier.

In 1880 O’Shea was a rookie Irish MP, Parnell was the new leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. O’Shea had an attractive wife and he obliged her to make herself useful in the advancement of his political ambitions. She was instructed to invite Parnell to a number of political soirees she organized on her husband’s behalf, or, more likely to keep the dodgy O’Shea at a disrtance. He pronounced his name O’Shee by the way, presumably to distinguish him from his common or garden countrymen of the same name. Parnell, however, was not one for the banality of opening invitations, or indeed letters in general, so to press her invitations she went in person. That, according to her own account, was when they fell in love. Parnell didn’t leave any account. He was as good at writing letters as he was at opening them.

The relationship blossomed rapidly and soon, they were, in effect, man and wife. She became his ‘Queenie’, he became her ‘King’. O’Shea rarely darkened the door of his wife’s boudoir but found out about their trysts rather quickly. He challenged Parnell to a duel but when, to his surprise, the Irish party leader accepted the challenge, the former Hussar backed down. He contented himself thereafter with squeezing every drop of political nectar he could from his wife’s lover and partner.

He looked away as the couple had three children together. His incentive, in addition to political advancement, was a hefty share in a large sum of money his estranged wife stood to inherit from an aged aunt. When the elderly lady finally passed on, and he was neatly cut out of the inheritance, he stopped looking away. He sued for divorce, no doubt full of the festive spirit, on Christmas Eve 1889.

The resulting court proceedings destroyed Parnell’s career. In the middle of a year of huge controversy in 1891 he only made things worse for himself politically when he married Katharine after the divorce was finalized. Humiliated by a series of futile and debilitating by-election campaigns an exhausted Parnell died in their house in Brighton in October, a month the highly superstitious Parnell always considered ill-starred.

Katharine Parnell, as she now was, then did a great service to a country she had never visited and much of whose population considered her to be a scarlet woman or an English spy who had destroyed their leader. In an act of generosity she waived her right to have Parnell buried in a south of England graveyard where she could join him when her own life ended. Instead she allowed him to be returned to Ireland and interred in Glasnevin cemetery in perhaps the biggest funeral the country had ever seen.

Katharine O’Shea, or Katharine Parnell as she chose to be called, was born five months before her second husband, Charles Stewart Parnell, 169 years ago, on this day.

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