that the Statute 7 George II, ch. 5, portion of the Penal Code was passed, which enacted that: age of If any person or persons now or hereafter to be admitted a Barrister, Six Clerk, Attorney, or Solicitor (such Solicitors as were comprehended within the Articles of Limerick excepted) shall marry within this kingdom, or out of the same, any woman of the popish religion, or do or shall educate or permit to be educated any of his children, who are now under the fourteen years, or shall be hereafter born, in the popish religion, such person so marrying or educating any of his children or permitting any of his children to be educated in the popish religion, shall be henceforth deemed a Papist and disabled from being a Barrister, Six Clerk, Attorney or Solicitor, unless such person so marrying shall within one year after such marriage procure such wife to be converted to the Protestant Religion. The act was not retrospective in its effects so far as marriage was concerned; accordingly Burke's father was not disabled from carrying on his practice and the penalties for having married a papist did not affect him. There were, as already stated, several children of the marriage, but all died in infancy except three sons, Garret, Edmund, and Richard, and one daughter, Juliana. The sons were all brought up as members of the Established Church of Ireland; the daughter, Juliana, as we have seen, was baptised in the parish church of Castletown-Roche in the Diocese of Cloyne, and probably this ceremony in the Established Church would have been held sufficient to qualify her as a "legal Protestant" and to arrest any inquisition into the matter of her upbringing, and enable her father to escape the tentacles of the code1. Richard, however, ran but little risk. Except in the case of families of property trouble was rarely taken to enforce rigorously the Penal Statutes. Juliana received her education at her mother's knee, and, though her baptism and marriage were according to the rites of the Established Church, there is no doubt that she was of her mother's creed. Garret Burke, Edmund's eldest brother, followed his father's profession in Dublin, he too was an Attorney of the Exchequer in Ireland. He died unmarried in 1765. Richard Burke, the younger brother, went to the English Bar, became Recorder of Bristol, and died in London, 1794, also unmarried. 1 Richard Burke appears in the "List of Attorneys of the Court of Exchequer in Ireland who took the oath directed by the Act of Parliament made for the Amendment of the Law relating to Popish Solicitors and Remedying other mischiefs relating to Practitioners in the Several Courts of Law and Equity" (7 G. II, ch. 5, Ir.), Dublin. Printed by George Grierson, 1735. King's Inns Library. Pamphlets, 614. Juliana Burke married Patrick French of Loughrea, county Galway, in 1766. He was a member of an old Roman Catholic family, but the licence for the marriage was for a marriage by the Church of Ireland Rector or Curate of St Catherine's parish church, Dublin. They had one child, Mary, who was married to Lieut.-Colonel Haviland. From this marriage descend the Haviland-Burkes. The following is a copy from the Dublin Diocesan Records in the Public Record Office, Dublin1: A Licence was granted the eighth day of January in the year of our Lord 1766 by the Rt Worshipful Alex. McAulay, Esqre, Doctor of Laws, Vicar General of the Diocese of Dublin and Official Principal and Chancellor of the Consistorial and Metropolitan Court of Dublin lawfully constituted, to solemnize marriage between Patk. French of Loughrea in the Co. of Galway Gentleman and Juliana Burke of the Parish of St Catherine, Dublin, Spinster. Directed to the Rev. Samuel Pullein Clerk, Master of Arts, Vicar of the sd. Parish, or to his licensed Curate assst. Sealed with the Seal of the afsd Court. There is no entry in the parish register of the marriage being celebrated in St Catherine's Church. The ceremony probably took place privately. The Act 19 Geo. II, c. 13 (Ir.), s. I provided that any marriage celebrated after 1st May, 1746, between a Papist and any person who hath been...a Protestant or between two Protestants if celebrated by a Popish priest should be absolutely null and void. As Juliana had been baptised in the Established Church it was necessary, to prevent any question of the validity of the marriage, that the ceremony should be performed by a clergyman of that church. 1 Now destroyed. ED CHAPTER II SCHOOLDAYS DMUND BURKE, when a child, was delicate, and showed symptoms of lung trouble. To escape from the unfavourable atmosphere of his home on Arran Quay, which was liable to flooding by the Liffey, he was sent, at an early age, to the residence of his mother's family at Ballyduff, near Castletown-Roche, in the north of Co. Cork, where he spent most of his boyhood. He had learnt his letters at his mother's knee. What was his first schooling, we ascertain from Mrs Leadbeater. She tells us that the three brothers, Garret, Richard and Edmund, had been when very young, at school with an old woman, who was very cross, and they resented her crossness so much, that one holyday the three little fellows set out for her cabin, with intent to kill her. As her good genius would have it, she happened to be from home, and their fit of fury evaporated before the next opportunity1. His next school was in the ruined castle of Monanimy, an old stronghold of the Nagles, in which a kind of hedge school was held2. The school-master's name was O'Halloran, who (as Prior states), lived to a great age, and was known to one or two of the oldest inhabitants living there many years ago, who remembered him, in his youth, as boasting upon all occasions that he was the first to put a Latin Grammar into the hands of Edmund Burke. Prior, in his second edition, tells an interesting story how Burke, when on a visit to the Nagles in 1766, was shaving one morning and saw O'Halloran coming up the avenue to see him. He rushed down half shaved, grasped him by both hands, and gossiped with him about the old times, and then-" didn't he put five golden guineas into my hand as I was coming away," said the old man. O'Halloran was evidently one of the old race of Philomaths, who kept alive in rural Ireland under circumstances of difficulty, and often of danger, in the troublous times of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the traditions of classical learning. Poor hedge school-masters were, down to time of living memories, to be found in Ireland, well versed in the masterpieces of Greek and Roman literature, and they 1 Leadbeater Papers, 1, p. 46. • Historical and Topographical Notes, North Co. Cork, p. 161. were often, too, mathematicians of no mean attainments. Oliver Goldsmith also received his earliest teaching from such a village pedagogue-Thomas Byrne, an old soldier, "who, besides being something of a bookman, dabbled in rhyme, and was even capable of extemporizing a respectable Irish version of Virgil's Eclogues1." Close by Ballyduff was the site of Kilcolman Castle, where Edmund Spenser had lived and written the early books of the Faerie Queene. Thence on the 27th December, 1591, he dated the dedication of Colin Clout's Come Home Again to "the Right Worthy and Noble Knight, Sir Walter Raleigh," and there were the woods he bid to “answer" and "eccho ring" to his exquisite Epithalamium2. Burke felt Spenser's inspiration, and delighted in the same "mountains and rivers and fair forests"; he, too, wandered by "Mulla, faire and bright"; and in after times he looked back to those days of his boyhood, and wrote of them in terms of most affectionate recollection3. He composed, when in Trinity College, a poem on the river Blackwater-Spenser's "swift Awenduff, which of the Englishman is called Blackwater"--and invoked Ye beauteous nymphs that haunt the dusky wood The Blackwater runs through Castletown-Roche, and is there fed 1 Goldsmith, by Austin Dobson, p. 14. 2 Sylvanus Spenser, son of Edmund Spenser, married Ellen, daughter of David Nagle of Monanimy. She was great-aunt of Edmund Burke's mother. Topographical Notes, North Co. Cork, p. 225. 3 See Colin Clout's Come Home Again: “One day, quoth he, I sat as was my trade Under the foot of Mole, that mountain hore, There a strange shepheard chaunst to find me out Whose pleasing sound enshrilled far about, Or thither led by chaunce, I know not right." In the Faerie Queene, Book VII, Spenser makes the neighbourhood of Kilcol man the haunt of Faunus and Cynthia and her Nymphs. Cp. Faerie Queene, Book IV, Canto XI. See also Mutabilitie, Cantos VI, XXXV, XLII, and Epithalamium: "Ye nymphs of Mulla, which with careful heed The silver scaly trouts do tend full well." by the tributary Awebeg (termed Mulla by Spenser) that courses down from Kilcolman and glides close to Ballyduff, Strong Allo tombling from Slewlogher steep And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep. With the exception of a few stanzas, which are contained in a letter to Richard Shackleton of 3rd February, 1746-71, this poem of Burke's is lost. Dennis, one of his college friends, wrote in November, 1747, to Richard Shackleton, "Ned (Burke) has finished the first canto of the Blackwater," but "the poem on the Blackwater, once in possession of Shackleton, was, with some of his earlier letters from London, borrowed by Burke's father, and never returned?." The boy had gained strength by five years' residence in the genial climate of Southern Ireland. He returned to Dublin, and went for a year to a school, kept by a Mr James Fitzgerald, in Smithfield, close to his father's house3. On the 26th May, 1741, he was sent, together with his brothers Richard and Garret, to Ballitore School. Some fifteen years previously this famous school had been founded by Abraham Shackleton, a Yorkshire Quaker, who, early in the eighteenth century, came over to Ireland as tutor to the children of John Duckett, of Duckett's Grove, and of William Cooper, of Cooper's Hill, in the county Carlow. With their encouragement he opened the school on 1st March, 1726, at Ballitore, a small town in the south of the county Kildare, and continued as its headmaster till 1756, when he was succeeded by his son Richard, Burke's friend, who was one of the seven original members of the "Club." Abraham Shackleton died on 4th June, 1771. The simple, yet fascinating, Annals of Ballitore bring before the reader a picture of the later portion of the eighteenth century in Ireland far different from that of most of the memoirs of the time. They contain the traditions of the cultivated Quaker circles of the county Kildare, and of the school kept by the Shackletons. The hamlet and school surroundings with its fields and orchards, where Edmund Burke played and studied as a boy, whither he loved to return, and through which he would wander again in his visits in after life, are presented as the scene of secluded prosperity and tranquillity, during a period when too often in Ireland "the grim form 1 Post p. III. 2 Prior, Life of Burke, 5th edition (London, 1856), pp. 25, 26; Leadbeater Papers, I, p. 169. 3 Beauties of Burke (London, 1798). • The first volume of the Leadbeater Papers is so termed by the authoress. |