Ireland -- History -- Rebellion of 1798; Women -- Ireland -- Biography
Less than nine months after his arrival in America, poor Neilson died,
his giant frame worn out by all he had endured during his long
imprisonment, as truly a martyr for Ireland as if he had perished, with
so many others of his comrades, on the scaffold of ’98 or ’03.
Mrs. Neilson, soon after the break up of the _Star_, embarked in a small
line of business, and God prospered her little enterprise. “She was
enabled,” says Madden, “by the fruit of her industry, to bring up her
children respectably, to give them education, and to leave them—such as
it would have been her husband’s pride to have found them, had he lived
to have seen them in their ripe years—trained to virtue and matured in
useful knowledge.
“Miss McCracken, speaking of her, says: ‘Mrs. Neilson was a very
superior woman, a most exemplary wife and mother, for whom I had the
highest esteem, and continued on terms of intimacy and friendship, from
1795, when I first became acquainted with her, until her death. I never
saw a family so well regulated, such order and neatness, on such a
limited income; and such well-trained children, most amiable and
affectionate to each other, and so respectful to their mother, and all
so happy together—it was quite a treat to spend an evening with them.’
This excellent woman, esteemed and respected by all who knew her, even
by those to whom her husband’s political principles were most obnoxious,
struggled for her family during her husband’s imprisonment and exile and
subsequently to his death, and died in November, 1811, in her
forty-eighth year. Her remains were interred at Newtownbreda. The
inscription on her tomb truly describes her to have been, ‘A woman who
was an ornament to her sex; who fulfilled in the most exemplary manner,
the duties of a daughter, wife and mother.’”
There remains only to tell, as briefly as may be, the story of her
children, for of this woman, in a special degree it is true to say, that
she has no history but the history of her husband and family. Poor
William, whom we have learned to love as dearly as any of his masters in
Fort George, lived long enough to show the fruits of the remarkable
education he had received there—but alas! not long enough to confer on
his country the benefits which all those who knew him expected from him.
After a brilliant course at the Academical Institution, Belfast, he
embraced a commercial career, where his splendid talents ensured for him
a speedy success. His employers described him as “a young man of the
most splendid talents we have ever known; there was no subject in
mercantile affairs that he could not make himself master of. In public
affairs he soon became conspicuous, and had he lived he would have been
an ornament to his country.”
Alas! his career was cut by his death from yellow fever in Jamaica on
February 7th, 1817.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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