Honora, or, as her friends and beneficiaries loved to call her, Nano Nagle, was the daughter of a gentleman named Garret Nagle, of Ballygriffin, near Mallow, in the county of Cork, where she was born A.D. 1728. Through both parents she was related, not only to many of the old Catholic houses, but to several of the most influential Protestant families in the South; which is only worthy of remark as furnishing a clew to the fact of her parents' wealth and social standing in times when those of the proscribed religion were not only disqualified from accumulating or holding property in their own right, but were personally objects of contempt and contumely to the dominant class. It may also, perhaps, account for the impunity with which Mr. Nagle, despite the numerous statutory enactments, was enabled to send his favorite child to the Continent to complete an education the rudiments only of which could be obtained in the privacy of her family.
Accordingly, at an early age, Nano quitted her pleasant and cheerful home by the Blackwater for the retirement and austerity of a convent on the banks of the Seine, in which institution she acquired all the accomplishments and graces then considered befitting a young lady of position.
Having entered school a mere girl from a remote part of a semi-civilized country, untutored, undeveloped, and, it is even said, a little petulant and self-willed, she now, at her twenty-first year, emerged from the shadow of the convent walls into the sunshine of Parisian life, an educated, beautiful, and self-sustained woman. Her family had many friends in the French capital, particularly in the households of the Irish Brigade officers and other Catholic exiles, and her entrance into the best society was unimpeded, and was even signalized by rare scenes of festivity and mutual gratification. Her native naïveté and buoyancy of spirits, tempered with all the well-bred courtesy and dignity of a French education under the old régime, made her a general favorite; and though it does not appear that she was in the least spoiled by the admiration and adulation that everywhere awaited her, there is little doubt that she participated in the fashionable dissipations of the gay capital with all the ardor and impetuosity latent in her disposition. Admitted to such scenes, it is little wonder that for a time she forgot the land of her birth, its persecutions and tribulations, its degraded peasantry and timid and degenerate aristocracy. One so young and so capable of appreciating the refinements and elegancies of the most cultured city in Europe, might well have been excused if she found it difficult to exchange them for the obscurity and monotony of a remote provincial town.
But the spell which at this time bound her was soon to be broken. The still, small voice of duty and conscience was soon to find a tongue and speak to her soul with the force almost of inspiration. The circumstances of this radical change in her life are thus graphically described in a very valuable book recently published:
"In the small, early hours of a spring morning of the year 1750, a heavy, lumbering carriage rolled over the uneven pavement of the quartier Saint Germain of the French capital, awakening the echoes of the still sleeping city. The beams of the rising sun had not yet struggled over the horizon to light up the spires and towers and lofty housetops, but the cold, gray dawn was far advanced. The occupants of the carriage were an Irish young lady of two-and twenty, and her chaperon, a French lady, both fatigued and listlessly reclining in their respective corners. They had lately formed part of a gay and glittering crowd in one of the most fashionable Parisian salons. As they moved onward, each communing with her own thoughts, in all probability reverting to the brilliant scene they had just left, and anticipating the recurrence of many more such, the young lady's attention was suddenly attracted by a crowd of poor people standing at the yet unopened door of a parish church. They were work-people, waiting for admission by the porter, in order to hear Mass before they entered on their day's work.
"The young lady was forcibly struck. She reflected on the hard lot of those children of toil, their meagre fare, their wretched dwellings, their scanty clothing, their constant struggle to preserve themselves and their families even in this humble position—a struggle in many a case unavailing; for sickness, or interruption of employment, or one of the many other casualties incidental to their state, might any day sink them still deeper in penury. She reflected seriously on all this; and then she dwelt on their simple faith, their humble piety, their thus 'preventing the day to worship God.' She contrasted their lives with those of the gay votaries of fashion and pleasure, of whom she was one. She felt dissatisfied with herself, and asked her own heart, Might she not be more profitably employed? Her thoughts next naturally reverted to her native land, then groaning under the weight of persecution for conscience' sake—its religion proscribed, its altars overturned, its sanctuaries desolate, its children denied, under grievous penalties, the blessings of free education.
"She felt at once that there was a great mission to be fulfilled, and that, with God's blessing, she might do something towards its fulfilment. For a long time she dwelt earnestly on what we may now regard as an inspiration from heaven. She frequently commended the matter to God, and took the advice of pious and learned ecclesiastics; and the result was that great work which has ever been since, and is in our day, a source of benediction and happiness to countless thousands of poor families in her native land, and has made the name of Nano Nagle worthy of a high place on the roll of the heroines of charity."[199]
Miss Nagle then set out for Ireland, firmly determined to commence the noble work so suddenly contemplated and so maturely considered; but on her arrival in Cork, she found her friends exceedingly lukewarm, and the amount of ignorance and destitution in that city so appalling that she shrank from the very magnitude of the difficulties to be overcome, and began to fear that she had, in a moment of enthusiasm, overrated her ability and mistaken her vocation. This was natural. What could a young lady, scarcely entered on womanhood, delicately nurtured, and hitherto accustomed only to the society of the most fastidious—what could such a frail scion of aristocracy do to remove even an infinitesimal part of the incubus of poverty, ignorance, and crime, the result of centuries of misgovernment, which then weighed so heavily on the people?
She therefore resolved to visit the French capital again to consult eminent clerical friends, and to lay before them all her doubts and difficulties. They heard her explanations and arguments with attention, weighed her objections with proper gravity, and finally, having dispelled her doubts and strengthened her self-confidence, assured her that in their opinion—and it was a unanimous one—God had evidently called her to be the succor and comfort of her afflicted countrywomen—a decision which subsequent events proved to have been little short of prophetic. Thus reassured, and casting aside once for all the allurements of life, the rational pleasures which youth, beauty, and wealth might reasonably command, Miss Nagle resolved to eschew the things of the world for ever, and devote herself heart and soul to the self-imposed duties from the performance of which she had lately shrunk, more from a consciousness of the weakness of her position than from any lack of intention to perform them faithfully. The resolve she so solemnly made then she kept till the day of her death, thirty years afterwards, with unflinching fortitude and fidelity.
In 1754 we find her back in Cork, steadily but quietly, almost secretly, as the spirit of the times demanded, initiating her crusade against squalor and ignorance. With what precocious circumspection she commenced her labors is best shown in a letter to a friend, Miss Fitzsimmons, then in the Ursuline Convent at Paris. The extract is long, but it will repay perusal, as it may be considered an exact reflex of the working of her strong, simple, but thoroughly earnest mind. She writes under date July 17, 1769: