My mother loved the royal family : she would say, I know every one of them - their seed breed and generation. I don’t love them all. Some of them are really mental. She would delight in telling me about the 7, 8, 9 or 10 mistresses King Edward 7th enjoyed and often simultaneously. A proclivity for adultery and the prerequisite of physical beauty marked Alice Keppel as the King’s favorite and that distinction followed her down the generations. Alice being the great grandmother of the Duchess Of Cornwall - The controversial Camilla who stole Prince Charles away from Princess Diana. Unlike her great granddaughter Alice embarked on a relationship with the King, enjoying the full sanction of her husband who was having a spot of financial difficulty and embarrassing insolvency. He encouraged Alice to go for it with Edward. The arrangement also included her husband’s own infidelities.
He was no cuckold but the beneficiary of the king’s largesse to Alice which allowed him to live in comfort for the rest of his life.
Quite the arrangement , my mother said and would ponder how it all worked with more than a hint of admiration . Alice and her husband were happily married for 57 years according to her daughter and she was at the King’s bedside when he died. She spent a few years moping about in grief stricken misery after the King’s death which probably encouraged her husband to find more adulterous liaisons to buck himself up.
She said - they got away with it because they‘re Protestants and The Royals make up their own rules. She didn’t find the current Queen Elizabeth very interesting, probably because she was very private, not a hint of scandal in her own right before her children started acting out. In my mother’s day and in her eyes she was dutiful and dull, doing nothing more interesting than exerting herself on horseback and playing with her corgis.
My mother in this instance, didn’t make any association between the besieged Irish and their general antipathy towards the English monarchy. Or the historical arch and disdainful view they had of the Irish.
She wasn’t that keen on Queen Victoria or her decorating with aspidistras, fussy ferns and overstuffed tufted furniture. She thought she looked rather like an uncomfortable tufted piece of furniture herself.
She was all together too rigid for my mother’s forgiving, flexible, funny, accessible approach to life. She loved a good story and a royal grieving widow with nine children only became interesting when some of the nine of them went off the rails.. Counterintuitive that she admired the royal rebels, she herself saying multiple rosaries every day and maintaining standards of unimpeachable virtue.
The welcome she gave to the first gay couple in late sixties Ardee Co Louth cemented her reputation as having escaped Victorian straight laced propriety, criminal censure and Catholic probity. She offered encouragement to the couple in question telling them to leave it to her, you’ll have no trouble in this town.
Throw a dinner party, I’ll tell you who to invite.
But she did feel sorry that Victoria lost Albert, the love of her life so young. Also that she had to sit on the throne corseted and constrained for 65 years.
Then my mother didn’t really know that she had a kind of an attenuated claim to royal blood herself. She thought her only connection to somebody famous came through her mother’s side, the Donegan‘s of Monasterboice, whose forebears were to link the family to the English Royals. Albeit many centuries before. The more recent pride of the Donegans, was the colorful Paddy her first cousin , a former Minister for Defense, sailor, farmer, bon vivant and father of Roseanne who today presides over The Monasterboice Inn, a Donegan stronghold and birthplace of my grandmother Julia.
I suppose true blue blood does suffer dilution after a few centuries. No one would have been more delighted than my mother with the ancestral foraging that later produced evidence of her aristocratic forbears.
She didn’t love all the Royals. She had her favorites. She felt very sorry that poor Princess Margaret did not get to marry the man of her dreams, the man she loved, Captain Townsend and on the rebound ended up with a man she didn’t love, the photographer Anthony Armstrong Jones. Because Captain Townsend was divorced Elizabeth the Queen, her sister, refused her permission. My mother didn’t live long enough to see 3 of Queen Elizabeth’s children end up in the divorce Courts.
She wasn’t really impressed with Wallis Simpson either. An American who caused such a brouhaha of abdication and turned the Royal House of Windsor upside down. More to my mother’s point, she was no oil painting, had been divorced twice and by all accounts was a controlling royal pain in the ass. Still The King abdicated the throne for the woman he loved.
He looked sour and disgruntled for the rest of his life. She talked about the Royal family as if they were her family and then we discovered later on she had a bit of a claim.
Neither would she have endorsed the abdication of Harry and Megan. I think her response to it would be largely along the lines of my own- she should have stuck it out and done something for race relations in England she was uniquely poised as a bi racial woman to help in this time of systemic racism ‘s recent and ongoing narrative.Harry is to the manner born and has lost everything he was used to - Queen and country. So one can’t help but wonder why such a drastic decision ? Becoming a vapid Hollywood celebrity as opposed to a popular working prince ? He didn’t seem to be too miserable before Meghan. Just the opposite, productive charming and Grannie’s favorite.
Now by all accounts estranged from his brother, Meghan it would appear is no stranger to family alienation and instead of ignoring the tabloids takes them on with a vengeance and legal fury. All the while recently spilling her guts to Oprah and defying the stiff upper lip ethos necessary to becoming royal and English. The tabloids have always feasted off the Royals who heretofore pretended they didn’t exist. Not Meghan, the lady doth protest too much.
Ignore them and they might go away.
But I digress.
My 12-year-old self said to my mother, I have to write an essay about a famous person who should I write about?
I thought she was going to suggest a member of the royal family. Or actress, Lily Lantry one of the other seven mistresses of King Edward the 7th or Wallis Simpson. Too racy for the nuns, she said. You’re too young to be delving into the private lives of the royals .
You could write about your great great great great uncle, she said.
I don’t actually know how many greats - Uncle Father Nicholas Callan.
Or your other great great great great Uncle Father Dowd from Dunleer. He was the savior of many of the starving famine stricken Irish arriving in Montreal. He was born in the same house in Dunleer as myself. There ‘s a street named after him in Montreal.
Two priests- I wailed?
That’s sounds dull as dishwasher.
The nuns will love it.
Now just because, they’re priests don’t jump to any conclusions. Fr Nicholas Callan was an astonishing scientist and had he lived today he would probably have won the Nobel Prize. He was as fascinating as he was brilliant.
I’ll tell you about Father Callan first.
Learning about him will give you a great deal of family pride and you will have understood what he invented and some basic science that changed technology. And all shut away from the world scientific community in the priesthood seminary of Maynooth Co Kildare.
Father Nicholas Callan , my mother’s great great great great great? uncle was born in Darver , Co Louth.
He had curiosity and a vocation to science but probably prompted by his Irish mother to pursue a priestly vocation.
What Irish mother then didn’t want a priest -her own son, by her deathbed.
Fascinating I said!
What else?
He invented the induction coil!
What’s that?
This device was the first transformer, he made a huge contribution to automation and the early technology that powered the motor car.
He experimented with batteries and built the world’s largest ever seen at that time. Instruments for measuring current or voltages had not yet been invented. He measured the strength of the battery by calculating how much weight his electromagnetic magneto coil could lift and power , using his giant battery Dr. Callan’s electromagnet lifted 2 tons. His battery went into commercial production in London. Of course they thought he was a mad scientist at Maynooth seminary when he fried
a poor unfortunate turkey during a stage demonstration.
My mother said, visiting German scientists seeing the potential for the technology took it to the next stage in the development of automation. He didn’t really get enough credit for his significant contribution to the beginnings of the motor car - my mother’s take which I processed as the truth.
His other major discovery was galvanizing.
Because of the damp Irish climate rust destroyed iron. He patented his discovery. It made a huge difference in the lives of Irish farmers whose barns could be eaten up and collapse with corrosion caused by rust.
Even more fascinating-I said grappling with the science giving my twelve year old eyes a good ol’roll.
There is a museum dedicated to Fr Nicholas Callan at Maynooth and a prize in his name every year for the most outstanding student in physics.
In more recent times he has even been on an Irish stamp in the company of Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur , the other distinguished 19th century scientists whom the Irish post office honored.
Still grabbling with the magneto coil and the galvanizing, Ok I said I’ll give it a try, but electromagnetism is a bit of a mouthful
and what’s a transformer ?
You love words, my mother said. Just keep saying it over and over. electromagnetism- electromagnetism.
I love the story about electrocuting the poor turkey. The nuns will be impressed, I’m writing about science- I think I’ll leave out the turkey.
Tell me the connection to royalty - I said.
Why can’t I write about that ?
It can be your next essay - my mother said.
Your grandmother Julia Donegan came from a family of 13 children , the Donegans of Monasterboice.
She launched into her own favorite topic ,our own seed , breed and generation.
The men in the family all had double barelled names Sarsfield Donegan. Uncle Paddy who raised me with Grannie after my mother died was Patrick Sarsfield Donegan , she said.
Funny, I said that we called him Uncle Paddy and Jennie Donegan his wife, Grannie.
Yes she said, it is odd I suppose. I didn’t question that when I was a child . My mother on a roll of priestly pride said, but the other priest Fr Patrick Dowd is on the Grannie Lynch side
One priest at a time , Father Callan is enough for today, Mum.
Father Nicholas Callan born in 1799, has the same claim to royal lineage as ourselves, but he is closer in time.
Now we have to go back to the 1600s and the original Patrick Sarsfield - The Earl of Lucan - a brilliant soldier, who was of Anglo Norman ancestry, a landowning aristocrat. He distinguished himself at the Siege of Limerick. His military training was in France. His father was also Patrick Sarsfield. His mother was the daughter of the great Gaelic Chieftain Rory O’Moore, who helped organize a rebellion in 1641. You got great cudos in those days for organizing rebellions. You even got your own songs.
All our wars are merry and all our songs are sad, she added.
Rory Óg‘s heroic exploits are forever remembered in a song I’ve been singing for 50
years!
Follow Me Up To Carlow.
From Tassagart to Clonmore
There flows a steam of Saxon gore
Och! Great is Rory Óg O ‘Moore
At sending Loons to Hades
Me own great great great great great great uncle Rory Óg Ó More and I didn’t know when I was singing the song that he was my great great, great great great great Uncle Rory
It’s the brother of the Earl of Lucan, Thomas Sarsfield who is our forebear, my forensic ancestry seeking sleuth Californian cousin Denise Donegan, said.
The descendants, all these centuries later are still taking the name Patrick Sarsfield and ally themselves with the more famous Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan. But his sibling Thomas was actually the one who married into the Spencer family. Yes - directly descended from the, Lady Diana Spencer. The beloved departed people’s Princess.
Denise Donegan the daughter of yet another of those Patrick Sarsfield Donegans has traced every scintilla of 10 generations back to Thomas Sarsfield. We learned all about his brother The Earl of Lucan because of the importance of the Siege of Limerick in Irish History. We all know in our family that he was a relation even if it was centuries ago. Additionally he was on the right side of Irish history as King James 11 the Jacobite Catholic King who was defeated by William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. This is the landmark date which celebrates the defeat of Catholics and the establishment of Protestant domination of Northern Ireland.
The storied historical beginning of The Troubles.
It is celebrated every July 12 when the descendants of the victorious William of Orange - they are the modern Organemen, light bonfires, bang on big Lambeg drums and frighten the bejaysus out of the Catholics, the spiritual descendants of the battered King James.
The connection to Princess Diana is through the less distinguished brother Thomas Sarsfield.
Lady Diana Spencer, her authenticated genealogical connection occurs on down to the present Donegans of whom my grandmother Julia was the eldest.
We have to make do with Thomas the lowliest Donegan brother who married well, for our claim to royalty.
I’m wondering now that Harry has been stripped of his princely title, is an immigrant and Megan is just a duchess would they consider having tea with their Irish 8th cousins once, twice or thrice removed.
My mother would have been in 7th Heaven.
All due to my cousin Denise who knows exactly how many Patrick Sarsfields there are since the first redoubtable Earl of Lucan.