The Ballad of Mary Kearney
‘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.
Thank you for inviting me onto your blog to talk about my new book, The Ballad of Mary Kearney, and the challenges and dangers my young heroine faces.
Born in 1750, Mary grows up in rural County Down, the child of a tenant farmer in Moneyscalp Townland. It is beautiful country, dominated by the Mourne Mountains. Years later, timber from the nearby woods of Tollymore went to construct the magnificent staircase on the doomed liner Titanic.
A Mourne gateway, near Moneyscalp Wood, Co Down,
the landscape in which Mary grew up.
Image: Albert Bridge. Wikimedia Commons
Thomas Kearney, Mary’s father, once owned the fields he farms, but they were appropriated a century earlier by an English landed family, following the pattern of the Cromwellite and Williamite settlements across Ireland. The family struggle to survive, but because Thomas once saved the life of the little son of the ‘Big House’, his landlord’s grateful mother sometimes intervenes when he cannot find the rent.
Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. This is a bigger, and cleaner version of the kind of home Mary is born into in the novel. In Thomas Kearney’s cabin the windows were blocked by rags and reeds were used for lighting.
Image: Albert Bridge. Wikimedia Commons
Mary and her brothers and sister are illiterate, for their only real chance of even a meagre education would be the Charter School, and that would turn them into Protestants. The family rely on Quaker charity to clothe the children.
Mary’s elder sister is already in service at their landlord’s home, Goward Hall, and her little brother is their ‘bog-trotter’ (messenger boy). The priest thinks he can find a place at the Hall for Mary too, but the child Thomas rescued is now a grown man, not long returned from his Grand Tour of the continent, and has brought back with him another man’s wife, to universal scandal. But Lady Mitchelstown is already showing signs of the consumption that will kill her. It is Mary, barely sixteen, to whom a sorrowing James Goward turns to lay out the corpse of his mistress, and it is with that event that he starts to notice her.
This country house incorporated an earlier fortified house. The imagined Goward Hall, where Mary goes into service, resembles Templeogue: ‘The estate itself is of fine aspect… yet it is not graced with a house worthy of a gentleman, but more a crazed hotch-potch of castle-barracks and oh-my-lady’s-chamber, no more a noble seat than a chap-book is a mezzotint... merely a tower-house with unsymmetrical masonry thrown against it seemingly without plan or apparent purpose, other than to make it larger. A part of it is an enormous bawn, as they call it here, … the work of one De Courcy, some Norman robber baron.’
Image: historyofcountyd03ball. Wikimedia Commons
From this background, it is clear that a young girl like Mary Kearney would have little agency in her life. I realise that this is a recurring theme in my recent novels, whether the heroine lives in 18c. Ireland, Renaissance Italy or (as with the book I have out on submission currently) Victorian London. Then an inciting incident (as the creative writing courses would call it) catapults each of them into a situation she could never have dreamed of, but which brings with it its own challenges and threats.
In Mary’s case, a relationship with James Goward runs counter to prevailing law as well as barriers to do with class, culture and religion. At this time, a marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant in Ireland was illegal, and the priest who officiated could be hanged. A devout Catholic, Mary will not ‘turn’ and if James were to publicly become a Catholic, he would be vulnerable to any Protestant neighbour taking over his lands and a series of other penalties. He does indeed convert, but maintains a Protestant cover, but the marriage is a clandestine one.
Even though she is married and her new husband loves her ardently, Mary is in some respects isolated. Everyone thinks she is James’s mistress; of her own family and his, only her father knows the truth. She could never be received into ‘respectable’ society. James even pretends to his closest friend that he has gone through a sham marriage in order to seduce Mary. In common with just about every married woman up until the Married Woman’s Property Acts a century later, she is economically, and in many respects socially, entirely dependent on her husband, in addition to having lost her reputation (far more important back then than we might realise, from our viewpoint in the 21st century). Mary does not kick against any of this – how could she, or indeed why, given the limited alternatives in her life? – but instead worries about the harm their relationship could do James. Her fortunes are entirely tied to his, for good or bad.
This is where a pregnant Mary was set upon, accused of immorality
Image: Albert Bridge. Wikimedia Commons
As an apparent mistress, Mary would have looked like fair game to other, unscrupulous men. For instance, there is a story from the 1780s that Lord Malden, whose mistress was the poet and actress Mary Robinson, had bet a thousand guineas that no man in his circle could seduce her away from him; the military officer Sir Banastre Tarleton succeeded. Mary Robinson knew nothing of the bet at the time. Mary Kearney is herself the object of an obsession by James’s former land agent, who wants her punished for her rejection of him, and the method he hits upon (like so many men before and after him) is of course sexual degradation.
I won’t go further, as I’d be giving you spoilers! I hope this piques interest in Mary’s story and that these images of places important in her life support that.
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