The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866. Mary McNeill
sources of local information, as are, from another angle, the volumes of Wolfe Tone’s incomparable Journal. Dr. Madden’s Lives of the United Irishmen, though not actually contemporary, is based on information gathered from those who had been intimately connected with the Rebellion. It is in the Madden Papers, now in Trinity College, Dublin, that most of Mary McCracken’s letters are to be found.
Though it is true that Mary McCracken lived her life in Belfast and was deeply implicated in matters that, at a first glance, appear to be primarily of Irish interest, she was very definitely a product of two great movements, originating, the one in France and the other in Britain, viz. the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution; and there are few records of a single life that responded with such vigour to both these influences. In the first half of her life Mary is a glowing example of the Ulster middle-class liberalism that flourished in the short heyday of Belfast’s Georgian brilliance at the close of the eighteenth century. With the opening of the nineteenth century she sets herself to discover the only valid answer to the challenge about to be presented by the new industrial age. Her life is, therefore, of interest to students of these two distinctive eras.
In quoting from her own and other letters I have as far as possible retained the original spelling, punctuation, etc., adding only an additional comma and full-stop when otherwise the sense is difficult to discover on the first reading.
In the course of my investigations I have sought help and information from many individuals, some already known to me, others, till then, strangers. In all instances I have been struck by the sense of something akin to family pride that has been evoked by my queries, and which has brought an added pleasure to my work. To all who have ransacked their book-cases, their old letters and their memories, I am most grateful. In one instance only have I talked with someone who herself had known Mary Ann McCracken. Just a few weeks before her death in her 101st year Mrs. Adam Duffin, granddaughter of Dr. William Drennan, related to me how as a small child she had, with her grandmother, visited Miss McCracken. It is perhaps a reflection of Mary’s understanding of little children that Mrs. Duffin’s memories of that visit centred round exciting jelly in little glasses, enjoyed while her elders discussed matters that were no concern of hers.
I am much indebted to the Misses Duffin for permission to use their typescript copy of the Drennan Letters and to quote from them, and for much incidental help and encouragement.
To the following I express my thanks for permission to consult original documents and to quote from them: The Board of Trinity College, Dublin; Queen’s University of Belfast; the Keeper, State Paper Office, Dublin; the Deputy Keeper, Northern Ireland Public Record Office; the Governors, Linenhall Library, Belfast; Belfast Public Libraries; Belfast Museum and Art Gallery; Presbyterian Historical Society, Belfast; and the Belfast Charitable Society. I am indebted to members of Staff in these institutions for advice and help. Of these I must mention by name Mr. J.W. Vitty, Librarian of the Linenhall Library, the successor in office of one of the characters of my story. I am grateful to Mrs. R.M. Beath for permission to use letters in her possession, and to Dr. R.W.M. Strain for permission to quote from The History and Associations of the Belfast Charitable Society. Also to Dr. Constantia Maxwell; Messrs. John Murray & Co.; and the Talbot Press. I am indebted to the Belfast Museum, to the Belfast Charitable Society, and to Mr. H.C. Aitchison, of Blomfontein, South Africa.
It remains for me to thank Prof. T.W. Moody, Prof. J.E. Beckett, Dr. R.B. McDowell and Mr. John Hewitt for reading the manuscript and for much valuable help and advice, and Mr. A.H. George for reading the proofs. I alone am responsible for any errors that remain.
Belfast, 1959.
CHAPTER 1
FRANCIS JOY
1697–1790
I hope the present era will produce some women of sufficient talent to inspire the rest with a genuine love of Liberty and a just sense of [its] value … for where it is understood it must be desired … I therefore hope it is reserved for the Irish nation to strike out something new and to show an example of candour, generosity and justice superior to any that have gone before.1
So wrote Mary Ann McCracken to her brother in a Dublin prison. The date was 1797, she was twenty-six years of age and standing on the threshold of a long career of public interest in which she herself would strike out something new.
While there are some who reach fulfilment unaided by family tradition, and some who achieve it in actual antagonism to such influences, Mary Ann was one of those in whom all the various streams of inherited tendencies converge in strength, to produce a personality true to type but of greater vitality and excellence. So, in order to appreciate the ingredients that went to the making of her character, it is necessary to commence with her forebears and with a brief outline of the historical background of the town in which she lived.
After years of political, religious and economic upheaval following the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the Commonwealth, and the Williamite wars, Belfast, in the first half of the eighteenth century, was entering on a period of comparative calm. Though on a smaller scale inevitably than in Britain, prospects of mercantile expansion were taking shape in the minds of her citizens, primarily in the trades and industries connected with an agricultural economy. By 1715 the town had developed from the small fortified ford of James I’s reign to take its place, after Dublin and Cork, as the third port in Ireland. Great quantities of beef, hides, tallow and corn were exported, and imports arrived from the northern ports of Europe as well as from France, Spain and Portugal. Indeed by the beginning of the century Belfast was not only well known on the continent as a place of considerable trade but, in a scale of credit appended by the Exchange at Amsterdam to the names of various commercial towns of Europe, its place was in the first rank.2 The possibilities of this increasing commerce were obvious to the enterprising townsfolk, but it was no less obvious that Irish trade and industry could never be fully expanded so long as the English parliament controlled Irish affairs and continued its policy of strangling any mercantile development that threatened to compete with English interests.
As the century progressed, all the constructive political thought in Ireland centred on freeing, by constitutional methods, the parliament in Dublin from the shackles that bound it to Westminster, viz. Poynings’ Law and the more recent enactment of George I, and in this struggle Ulster gave the lead to the whole country. Not only were the Belfast merchants, by reason of their distance from the capital, more independent of the ruling oligarchy than were the traders of Dublin, but their ideas and convictions had prepared them for just such a situation. Countless were the meetings, declarations and addresses asserting the sole right of the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland to legislate for Ireland, and in all this the family of Francis Joy was to occupy a position of increasing influence.
Francis Joy, the maternal grandfather of Mary Ann McCracken, was born in Killead, Co. Antrim, in 1697, of prosperous farming stock.3 In due course he settled in Belfast as an attorney, and, while still a young man of twenty-four, married Margaret Martin, granddaughter of George Martin, Sovereign [or chief Burgess] of the town in the early days of the Commonwealth. Francis was an able and enterprising person. By his own exertions and by inheritance he was comparatively wealthy, and he and his wife must have occupied a prominent place in the growing professional and mercantile community of the little town. Both of them sprang from strongly Calvinist stock. The Joys had, in all probability, fled to England from religious persecution in France, coming to Ireland with the armies of James I.4 With the same armies came the Martins who settled near Belfast, but in 1649 Margaret’s uncompromising grandfather had had to seek refuge in Britain for refusing to billet Commonwealth troops in Belfast.5 Later he aroused the displeasure of the Lady Donegall [family name Chichester, the wealthy landowners of Belfast and neighbourhood] of the day by retiring on the Sabbath to his Presbyterian place of worship, after fulfilling his duties as Sovereign by attending her to her seat in the Parish Church.6 No doubt Francis and his wife had decided views on the stirring “New Light” controversy centring round subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith, and just then agitating profoundly the Presbyterian community in Ulster. These were also the years of the Test Act when Presbyterians as well as Roman Catholics were debarred from holding public office. But, in spite of controversies and disabilities, the law business prospered, family life was happy, and in due course Henry, Robert