Earlier this month I introduced my great, great great grandmother, Margaret Bryan. She kept for a few years an album with entries by her friends and today it’s time to take a look at some of them.
As I don’t have the album, it is at Barmeath, I must rely on my step great grandmother’s description published in The Connoisseur in 1908.
There is a poem, obviously in Thomas Moore’s handwriting, endorsed, “This song was written by Mr Moore for a fête in honour of the Prince of Wales’s birthday, given by his friend, Major Bryan, at his seat in the County Kilkenny, 1810”. It is the well-known poem, published under the title of the “Prince’s Day”.
As I don’t agree that it is well-known today, although it’s not very good, here it is:
Though dark are our sorrows, today we’ll forget them,
And smile through our tears, like a sunbeam in showers:
There never were hearts, if our rulers would let them,
More form’d to be grateful and blest than ours.
But just when the chain,
Has ceased to pain,
And hope has enwreathed it round with flowers,
There comes a new link,
Our spirits to sink —
Oh! the joy that we taste, like the light of the poles,
Is a flash amid darkness, too brilliant to stay;
But, though ’twere the last little spark in our souls,
We must light it up now, on our Prince’s Day.
Contempt on the minion who calls you disloyal!
Though fierce to your foe, to your friends you are true;
And the tribute most high to a head that is royal,
Is love from a heart that loves liberty too.
While cowards, who blight
Your fame, your right,
Would shrink from the blaze of the battle array,
The Standard of Green
In front would be seen —
Oh, my life on your faith! were you summon’d this minute,
You’d cast every bitter remembrance away,
And show what the arm of old Erin has in it,
When roused by the foe, on her Prince’s Day.
He loves the Green Isle, and his love is recorded
In hearts which have suffer’d too much to forget;
And hope shall be crown’d, and attachment rewarded,
And Erin’s gay jubileee shine out yet.
The gem may be broke
By many a stroke,
But nothing can cloud its native ray;
Each fragment will cast
A light to the last —
And thus, Erin, my country, though broken thou art,
There’s lustre within thee, that ne’er will decay;
A spirit which beams through each suffering part,
And now smiles at all pain on the Prince’s Day.
Gwendoline Bellew’s article continues:
The first sketch in the Album is a wreath of flowers with the inscription, “Copied from the Album of Hortense, Ex-Queen of Holland”, followed by a print of that lady “donné par elle-même”, and a poem on “Espérance”, covering many pages. This is the beginning of a long series of souvenirs of the Roman Bonapartes.
Hortense was the wife of Louis Napoleon, the Emperor Napoleon’s brother whom he made King of Holland. Confusingly her mother was Josephine by her marriage to Alexandre de Beauharnais before she married the Emperor.
Rome was in those days the home of lost causes, the refuge of every exiled Prince and Claimant. Old Letitia Bonaparte, Madame Mère, half-blind, ill and helpless, still held her little Court in the Palazzo Rusticucci dall’Asti, afterwards known as the Palazzo Bonaparte, and there received all those who held in reverence the name of her great son, and who saw with eyes of hope a golden future for her descendants.
The Irish Diamond must have tried her witcheries on the old lady, and successfully, as, amongst her most cherished souvenirs, we find a lock of Napoleon’s hair, and a silver embroidered scarf of his, both bestowed by his mother, and also a miniature of him supposed to be by Menier.
To be continued.