Women of 'Ninety-Eight

by Mrs. Thomas Concannon

[77]. Published in Young’s “Historical Notices of Old Belfast,” p. 169, et seq.

After their marriage the young couple set up in business for themselves, and Samuel Neilson’s great ability commanded an immediate success. His establishment, called “The Irish Woollen Warehouse,” became, we are informed, “the most extensive and respectable house in that line in Belfast.” Before he had been seven years in business he had amassed a considerable fortune, being reckoned in 1792 as worth about £8,000—which would be equivalent to nearly £20,000 in our days.

Not with worldly prosperity alone did a kind Providence bless Anne Neilson and her husband. Five fair children, four girls and a boy, came to grace their fireside. The girls were Anne, Sophia, Jane, and Mary. Very dear were they to their father, and very touching the letters he was to address to them from prison when the “hard service” of the Poor Old Woman was to sever him from them during sorrowful years. Anne and Sophia were old enough to bear their heroic part among the “Women of ’Ninety-Eight,” and many of the most thrilling and interesting incidents which Dr. Madden gathered into his precious books were actually witnessed, and related to him by them. They spent much time during the troubled period with the wife of Oliver Bond in Dublin, and were by that means right in the centre of things, so to speak. Dr. Madden was deeply touched by the passionate devotion they showed to their father’s memory, when about half a century after his death, he sought from them the materials for his memoir.

But dear as the girls were, the boy was the light of his life. William Bryson Neilson, the only son of Samuel and Anne Neilson, was born in 1794 and, by all accounts, was an extraordinarily gifted boy. We shall hear much of him in the following pages, and find no little interest in the story of the days he spent with his father in the stern old northern fortress of Fort George, which his presence made for poor Sam Neilson almost a place of delight.

The “good years,” as perhaps Anne Neilson was inclined to call them, from their contrast with the years which followed, came to an end—with so much else—at the outbreak of the French Revolution. Neilson had retained from his old “volunteer” days a strong attachment to Liberty, which he then interpreted in the terms of the English Revolution of 1689. The French Revolution gave the word a new meaning for him, and the other dissenters of Belfast who shared his views. The “Rights of Man” became the Koran of Belfast, as Tone pleasantly observes, and Sam Neilson set himself with that logical sequence, which, with him, made energetic action follow principle, to secure these “Rights” for his own oppressed countrymen.

From 1791, politics absorbed Neilson, and his business was much neglected, and finally had to be abandoned. Many anxious moments must have been poor Anne Neilson’s during those stirring days when her husband, with Tone and Russell and Henry Joy MacCracken, was making history. We Irish Catholics ought to cherish a special reverence for her memory, and pay her at least a posthumous gratitude, for it was at her expense that her husband worked for us. He was the first man in Belfast to put Catholic Emancipation in the forefront of the Republican party’s programme, and to make of it, with Parliamentary Reform, the principal plank in the platform of the United Irishmen—the honour of whose foundation he shares with Tone.

In 1792 there was established in Belfast to preach the doctrines of the new society a memorable paper, The Northern Star. Of this paper, to the finances of which he had liberally contributed, Neilson was appointed the editor. Eventually he became the sole proprietor—with disastrous results to his financial position. The paper was repeatedly the object of legal proceedings, and apparently to escape the consequences of these, the other shareholders got rid of their interest in it. Madden tells us that “the various prosecutions carried on against it had obliged Neilson to dispose of all his property, and to relinquish his business in order to meet the enormous expenses attendant on these proceedings, and the unexpected demands arising from them. The other proprietors, shortly after the prosecutions, disposed of their shares to Neilson, and thus encompassed with peril he became the sole proprietor of the paper. In 1792 the printer and proprietors had been prosecuted and acquitted. In January, 1793, six informations were filed in King’s Bench against them for seditious libels, and in November, 1794, they were prosecuted for publishing the address of the United Irishmen to the Volunteers.”

It was not alone through the medium of the Northern Star that Neilson served the cause of the Catholics. He was active in his efforts to compose the differences between the Catholics and the Presbyterians, and to lay the feuds of the Peep o’ Day Boys and the Defenders. We learn from Tone’s diary that both Neilson and his wife were of the party which accompanied John Keogh and the other Catholic delegates, on their return from Belfast in July, 1732, to Rathfriland in order to meet some gentlemen of the neighbourhood with a view to restoring peace between the rival religious parties. He took part, with Tone and Keogh, in a similar expedition a month later. He was intensely interested in the work of the Catholic Committee and the plans for the Catholic Convention.

It was probably in this connection that he became so intimate with Luke Teeling, of Lisburn, and his family, though their relations dated from a still earlier period when both men were working heart and soul to return to Parliament, as representative of the Co. Down, that ardent Reform candidate, the Hon. Robert Stewart—better known to history as Lord Castlereagh.

In 1795 the terrible condition of affairs in the County Armagh, where the Catholics had been subjected to a barbarous persecution at the hands of the Peep o’ Day Boys without the slightest attempt on the part of the authorities, either to protect them or to restrain their savage aggressors, was rapidly reaching a tragic climax. Young Charles Teeling, then a lad of seventeen, got information that the Catholics, convinced that they could not be worse off than they were, were preparing to take the field openly against their intolerant foes. Relying on the influence which his family, from its standing, enjoyed among the Catholics of Armagh, he set off from Lisburn, without informing any one, in the hope of inducing the Defenders to desist from their disastrous purpose.