[75]. Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet informs us that “nothing is now known of this portrait.” The two portraits reproduced in his own book were by her daughter Elizabeth, Mrs. Le Roy.
The Wife of Samuel Neilson
Anne Neilson née Bryson (1763-1811)[[76]]
“I love you the more, Love, because of their hate.”
—Ethna Carbery.
[76]. Authorities: Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Fourth Series, Second Edition.
NO woman, of all those whose stories we are recalling to the memory of a people in danger of forgetting them, has suffered so much as Mrs. Neilson. Not alone had she to see her happy home broken up, the ease and comfort to which she had been accustomed both in her father’s and her husband’s house, taken from her, her children deprived of their father and herself of a helpmate, the turning away from her necessities of former friends—but worse than all this she had to endure the intolerable pain of knowing that the reward her husband had won even from his own countrymen, even from those for whose sake he had sacrificed his all—was to be branded as a traitor, and to have his name whispered from mouth to mouth as that of one who had betrayed Lord Edward, and sold the secrets of his associates to Government to purchase his own safety.
It is with hearts very full, then, that we turn to the appealing and lonely figure of this “dear dead woman,” and standing in spirit by her grave in Newtownbreda Cemetery we frame passionate prayers that she may know her sufferings have not been in vain.
Anne Bryson was born in Belfast in 1763. Her father, William Bryson, was a wealthy and highly esteemed merchant of that town, and his daughter had all the educational and social advantages which an assured position, a refined home and considerable means could give her. In 1785, when she had reached her twenty-second year, she married Samuel Neilson, the son of a dissenting minister, of Ballyroney in Co. Down. Neilson had been resident in Belfast for some time, having been at an early age apprenticed to his brother John, a woollen-draper—and doubtless the young people had often met at the social functions which enlivened Belfast at this period, and of which Mrs. McTier’s letters to her brother, Dr. Drennan, give us the most delightful glimpses.[[77]]