The Preacher and the Prelate - Patricia Byrne

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as she became embroiled in a power struggle between Edward and her husband on the one hand, and the Achill Catholic clergy on the other. While rearing her large family, she stoically tried to follow her conscience, attending Catholic services and appearing bewildered by the fractious sectarian tensions around her. She listened at Sunday mass as the parish priest, Father Connolly, harangued the public about the Achill Mission and their attitude to the devotion of Catholics to the Virgin Mary. When she reported back to her husband, he, in turn, challenged the priest to a public debate on the doctrinal issues involved. Margaret was caught in an impossible situation which would, in time, turn out to be tragic.

      ***

      Before leaving Achill, Jane Franklin set out to experience what she could of the island, used as she was to hiking, exploring, observing and note-taking. She took to the mountains, crossing the width of Slievemore behind the Achill Mission settlement on horseback, and also traversing the magnificent Minaun on the island’s other coast. While disappointed not to find any Achill amethyst stone worth taking away, she appreciated the superior quality of Achill mutton grazed on Atlantic-splashed heather. While playing down her knowledge of the island plants, she noted ‘the miniature fern, the abundant thrift and London pride, and the pretty little tormentilla, of which the peasants made a yellow dye for their shoe-skins’. She spied an eagle and some foxes, saw rabbits swarm the Dugort sand dunes, and witnessed the abundance of snipe, woodcock, grouse and plover, a delight for the sportsman’s gun. Most delightful were the seals basking on exposed rocks in Achill Sound until they slid into the water, ‘like the crocodile of the Nile’.

      What, then, was her overall assessment of the Achill Mission? On this, she was in two minds. There was so much that was positive about Edward Nangle’s project: ‘If my good wishes are with this experiment, it is in the absence of any more effectual means of rescuing Ireland from her present state of moral and spiritual debasement.’

      However, there was a hesitancy that prevented her from fully endorsing the proselytising institution. It was a reluctance that resulted from the manner in which she observed Edward Nangle deploring and castigating sincerely held Catholic doctrines such as that of the Eucharist: ‘I cannot but deplore that Mr Nangle should think it right to speak as he does of a doctrine [the Eucharist] which however erroneous and, to us, incredible, is held in pious awe by many an honest Catholic.’11

      While generally approving of the Achill Mission’s programme of conversion, she was apprehensive about some of the tactics used: ‘we may still regret that any weapon sharper than the voice of persuasive reasoning, any language less tender than the daily prayer which Mr Nangle fervently offers up for his deluded and deluding brethren’ should have been used in achieving those conversions. While accepting the viciousness of the Catholic backlash against the mission, she feared that Edward Nangle’s fierce, over zealous approach could prove detrimental in the long run. Jane Franklin’s reservations would be shared by others.

      On the final day of Jane’s visit, Eliza Nangle and Grace Warner laid the foundation stone for a building which was to become the home of Neason Adams, the Nangles’ friend who had helped nurture Edward back to health after his Cavan collapse. The Dublin physician was about to devote his resources and medical talents to the colony with his wife. Neason and Isabella Adams would bring a compassion and humanness to the work at the Achill Mission over the coming two decades.

      The following year, Jane and John Franklin boarded the ship Fairlie with a party of twenty-three en route to Tasmania, Van Dieman’s Land, where Sir John took up the post of lieutenant general while Jane swept energetically through the colony. In the coming years she would become one of the best known Victorian women of her day through her single-minded efforts in support of her husband’s reputation when he disappeared in the Arctic in the 1845 North-West Passage expedition.

      Jane Franklin would explore and travel to the end of her life, driven by a desire to see all parts of the habitable globe. She would be the first woman to travel overland from Melbourne to Sydney, would climb into the crater of a volcano in Hawaii, and visit Alaska when almost eighty years old. Intolerant of injustice, she had a passion for improvement, education and civilisation. Achill Island was as glorious in its natural beauty as any of the places she would journey to, the plight of its people in their poverty and ignorance as wretched as any she would witness. The opportunity and the challenge for the Achill Mission appeared great to her, but there was an ugly sting in its methods which had left her troubled and sceptical.

      Fractured

      In following this story it has been difficult to uncover narratives of individual experiences among the Achill people through the years of the colony. It is as if the personal narratives are merged into the collective of a community struggling with day-to-day, season-to-season survival, leaving few records of individual lives. But we do have the chronicle of Bridget Lavelle, a young woman who reached out to grasp a better life and, in the process, ended up wounded and isolated.

      It is not surprising that Bridget Lavelle would have longed for an existence superior to her peasant life. The Achill Mission beckoned, offering literacy, clothing, cleanliness and intellectual improvement – in short, refinement. She had the opportunity to move to a better place but wrestled with her conscience and with the conflicting dogmas presented by the priests and the proselytisers. Bridget sought out the truth but ended up a pawn in a patriarchal sectarian power play that broke her spirit and her health.

      In late 1835, as the hours of winter darkness stretched, the Nangle family was seated around the fire in the parlour of their home in Dugort. They were pleased with the work of Bridget Lavelle, the children’s maid who had joined them earlier in the year. Aged twenty-one, she had shown an interest in the Bible, had taken religious instruction, ‘openly declared herself a Protestant’ and moved to the colony, causing much unhappiness to her parents and the island’s Catholic clergy.1

      There was a knock at the parlour door and Bridget entered, clearly upset. Her mother, she reported, was in the kitchen and had brought bad news: Bridget’s eldest sister had been seized with a sudden illness, was close to death and wished to see Bridget before she died. Edward was immediately suspicious since the new rabble-rouser parish priest, Father Connolly, had been in the village during the day hearing confessions and he suspected the priest’s hand in the Lavelle story. Bridget was adamant that her mother would not put on such a show of grief if the story were untrue and left to accompany her mother to their home.

      Afterwards, Bridget described what had happened. On reaching her parents’ cabin, she found her sister by the fire in perfect health and then the tall figure of Father Connolly appeared: ‘So, my lady, we have you at last.’ The priest had come down heavy on the family, refusing to hear their confessions until they removed their daughter from the Achill Mission and brought her back to her own religion.

      In a deposition before a magistrate some weeks later Bridget gave her story. She testified that:

      she was living peaceably and happily as a servant in the house of Rev Edward Nangle, Protestant Minister in Achill, where she enjoyed the fullest liberty of conscience, being permitted to go to whatever place of worship she pleased. That she became truly convinced that the Roman Catholic religion is false, and that the Protestant religion is the true, ancient faith. That in consequence of becoming a Protestant she was exposed to much persecution.

      Bridget was caught between two worlds: two sets of competing dogmas on the one hand, the attractions of life at the colony versus the pull of her own family and community on the other. Her distress is palpable in the words of the deposition:

      that she could no longer use the prayers which she had learned in the Church of Rome, as she believed it wrong to pray to the Virgin … she never could [return to mass] with peace of conscience being persuaded that the worship of a consecrated wafer is the great sin of idolatry against which the wrath of Almighty God is threatened in Holy Scripture.

      She described how she was forcibly restrained in her parents’ house and prevented from returning to service in the colony until, one day, she found an opportunity to communicate with Edward Nangle and expressed her desire to get the protection of the law to worship God in accordance with the dictates of her conscience. Edward

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