After her Connemara tour Maria Edgeworth kept up a correspondence with the Martins. She followed their fortunes and misfortunes with all the attention of an enthralled novel-reader. There was plenty to hold her attention. In the spring of 1835 the Martins travelled to London where Mary was presented at court and moved in fashionable society, attending dinner parties and charity events, of which a cynical Lord Byron remarked that these galas were nothing less than a marriage market.
Of course Thomas Martin and his wife must have hoped that Mary would attract the attentions of a wealthy and eligible young man, who could keep the debtors, now the formidable Law Life Assurance Society, from their door. Debutante season was a rite of passage for sophisticated young ladies of society, but poor Mary, despite her promised inheritance of the vast Martin estate, and her scholarly interests, was ‘excessively proud and shy’, and spoke with such a strong Connemara accent that, initially, it was hard to guess what language she was speaking. She must have hated to whole ordeal.
Probably the highlight for her was dining with Prince Moskowa, son of Marshal Ney, Napoleon’s legendary military commander, who must have featured in the stories she heard from the Bonapartist officer the Martins had sheltered at Ballynahinch, who in exchange for refuge, taught her ‘barrack-room’ French and adulation of the Emperor.*
Yet when the Martins called to the Edgeworths on their way home, Maria found Mary ‘much improved’, in manners and dress; and noted that ‘books had gone out, and men had come into her head - I won’t say into her heart.’
A pistol shot
Mary, however, did attract the attentions of no fewer than two Polish nobles, who were themselves in an impecunious position following the disastrous Napoleonic wars when Russians, Prussians and French marched in and out of their country stripping its aristocracy of home and fortune.
Prince Poniatowski had been charmed by her blushing like a country girl, remarking that ‘C’est une grace de la nature qui est hors de mode ici a ce que je vois’; and the unpredictable Count Werdinski, who, it was said ‘had the reputation for ‘kissing and cuffing his maids’, was so eager to see he again actually arrived at Ballynahinch the day before the family themselves returned. For some reason the servants assumed he was the new dancing teacher and showed him up to his room.
When his suit was indignantly refused both by the young lady and her parents, he stormed out of the room, saying he was going to kill himself. Sure enough they all heard a pistol shot upstairs. The door was forced open to reveal a miserable Werdinski very much alive, and a hole in the ceiling. He was packed off to Roundstone in the care of the Church of Ireland curate Mr Foster.
Poniatowski arrived a few days later. Maria Edgeworth was informed by letter from Mrs Martin what had ensued, but unfortunately, when Maria was apprising her brother of the ups and downs of the Martin household, felt honour bound by her promise of discretion not to reveal what had happened after Poniatowski’s arrival. We will never know, except that Mary clearly turned him down.
Princess of Connemara
There were some attempts made to reach an agreement with the Law Life Assurance Society, but matters were taken out of the Martins’ hands with the onslaught of the Great Famine. Tragically, in the year of Black Forty-Seven, Thomas, while visiting old tenants in the Clifden workhouse, contacted cholera and died.** Now the heavily encumbered estate fell on Mary’s shoulders, who in the old Martin tradition of generosity, continued to spend large sums of money providing food, clothing and work for hundreds of her tenantry. Whether it was due to these efforts, or to her family position as heiress to the Martin estate, she was popularly christened ‘The Princess of Connemara’.
Then as Mary struggled to maintain appearances on what little income was left, she became engaged. Arthur Gonne Bell, the grandson of her mother’s sister, a good deal younger than herself, but a businessman, the son of a Mayo justice of the peace. It is said to have been a love match.
Perhaps she could have married someone superior in name and fortune, but maybe a business man was just what was needed to save Ballynahinch. Maria Edgeworth, when she heard the news, proclaimed to her brother: ‘A prince-consort! Here is an agent-consort! How lucky! How prudent! Nothing romantic! after all the princes, and the Polish Count Scampi shooting himself through the ceiling ..so very sensible. Miss Martin well calculated and achieved….’
Land for pasture
It all started well. Arthur heeded the worry that if Mary was to marry the Martin name would be lost. To put minds to rest, before the marriage, and by royal license, he changed his name to Arthur Bell Martin.
He quickly put his business mind to work, and of course it was plain as the light of day, that having tenants on the land who were not able to pay rent, were an obstacle to creating meadows and fields which could be rented as pasture for cattle and sheep. He set about using the notorious Quarter Acre Clause in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1848, under which anyone occupying more than a quarter of an acre was not eligible for relief. Bell Martin set about clearing the estate of tenants, by issuing certificates of entitlement for relief to any tenant willing to abandon his home and land. He then pulled down the home so the tenant and his dependents were driven to take shelter in the already crammed and fever-ridden workhouse.
It was a totally unMartin thing to do. The Poor Law inspector, John Deane, complained ‘very directly to Bell Martin’ on ‘the inhumanity of putting so many families as an additional charge on the rates of the union.’
Union Place Hotel
Despite even these efforts Mary Martin was unable to meet the repayments on her debts. She was sued by the Law Life Assurance Society in the encumbered estates court which ordered the sale of the entire estate. There was no interest from anyone buying 200,000 acres of Connemara during famine times, and the Law Life Society itself ended up buying it for practically nothing.
Landless and penniless the Bell Martins retreated to Fontaine l’Eveque in Belgium where Mary supported them both writing contributions to the Encyclopaedia des gens du Mode, and other periodicals. Her second novel, Julia Howard, a semi-autographical novel about her life in Connemara, appeared in 1850. But as Maria Edgeworth had remarked some time before ‘can any romance equal the romance of real life?’
In that same year the Bell Martins emigrated to America, but Mary suffered a miscarriage on board, and died, aged 35 years, in the Union Place Hotel, New York, shortly after arrival. Another half dozen of her novels appeared over the following quarter-century, all of which are unread today.
Next week: A surveyor from the Law Life Society views the Martin estate.
NOTES: Michel Ney, Ist Prince of Moskowa, was Napoleon’s most gifted military commander who fought in the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars always with distinction; famously described by Napoleon as ‘The bravest of the brave’. Shamefully executed by royalist forces, he was given the right to call the order to fire:
‘Soldiers, when I give the command to fire, fire straight at my heart. Wait for the order. It will be my last to you. I protest against my condemnation. I have fought a hundred battles for France, and not one against her ... Soldiers, fire! ’
Mary’s first novel, ‘St Etienne, a Romance of the First Revolution’ (published 1845 ) was set on the Vendée region of France.
** Thomas Martin is buried in the Franciscan Abbey in Galway. According to one account his funeral took two hours to pass the gate of Ross House, near Moycullen, the home of the senior branch of the Martin family. However, one of the Martins of Ross who witnessed the event as a child, reported that ‘Scarcely anyone followed him to his grave. The peasantry who had revered him were dying by hundreds upon the mountain-sides….’
Sources this week include Connemara - Listening to the Wind, by Tim Robinson, published by Penguin Ireland 2006; and notes on Mary Martin’s life from Dictionary of Irish Biography by Frances Clarke.
