Alice Thornton, Elizabeth Freke, and the Remembrances of Ireland

Raymond A. Anselment

Among the writing of early modern English women, recollections of life in Ireland are less common than the English presence might suggest. The numerous formulaic depositions recorded in the months following the 1641 Irish uprising offer a vivid testimony of the atrocities and trauma English settlers suffered; personal narratives of several women who defended their property against besieging forces have also survived. Forms of self-writing from less troubled periods of the seventeenth century are not as extensive or as accessible. Letters women wrote from Ireland are now held often among family papers and in archives. Few diaries and memoirs that include accounts of living among the Irish appear to have survived. The remembrances of Ireland of Alice Thornton (1626–1707) and Elizabeth Freke (1642–1714) are noteworthy exceptions. Near the end of 1634, eight-year-old Alice, along with her mother and younger brothers, joined her father, Christopher Wandesford, in Dublin, where he had been appointed master of rolls and where they would live for eight years. Elizabeth Freke was thirty-three when she and her husband, Percy, left England in 1675 for County Cork to "try our fortuns" in Ireland. Over the next twenty years, Elizabeth would live there on five occasions, the shortest eight months and the longest four years. Thornton recalled briefly in "A booke of remembrances" and at greater length in a second manuscript, "My First Booke of My Life," the sense of place she enjoyed with her family during a happy Dublin life. Freke, on the other hand, describes in both versions of "Some few remembrances" the isolation and alienation during her years in Ireland. For both women the Ireland of memory is inseparable from their self-images and subsequent life experiences.

The meaning of Ireland also alters in the revisions of their recollections. The first of Thornton's two manuscripts, each of which begins with her birth in 1626 and ends with the 1668 death of her husband, William, begins as a spiritual memoir. The years in Ireland briefly recalled are occasions of divine deliverance set down in celebration of God's providential mercy. Though the narrative turns more toward her life and family after the return to England, she does not seem at least initially to have a larger audience in mind. Within a year of her husband's death, however, Thornton circulated a personal defense of her honor and that of her family. The revised "My First Booke of My Life" she bequeathed to her daughter significantly expands and refocuses "A booke of remembrances," remembering Ireland anew from an implicitly defensive point of view. The awareness of a larger audience is not apparent in either version of Freke's years in Ireland. Included in manuscripts that contain, among other entries, lists of properties and inventories of possessions, the narratives that begin with her marriage and end within months of her death in 1714 seem another form of accounting. Begun before her husband's death in 1705 and rewritten in the final years of her life, "Some few remembrances of my misfortunes" associate much of her unhappiness with Ireland. Unlike Thornton, whose family contributed significantly to her feeling of belonging, Freke never found in Ireland a sense of place. A stranger and at first frightened, for her Ireland increasingly came to embody the growing separation and estrangement from her husband and son, as well as a place she came to view in widowhood with suspicion and mistrust.

Each account of young Alice's arrival in Ireland begins in essentially the same way. After "safe passage" across the Irish Sea, she arrived in Dublin, "In which place I inioyed great happienesse and Comfort dureing my honoured fathers life." The city where she lived for most of her stay offered a culture not found in north Yorkshire, where she was born. Noted in Raphael Holinshed's Irish Chronicle as "Irishe or yong London," Dublin in the 1630s had a population of about fifteen thousand. A traveler through Scotland and Ireland within a year of Alice's arrival praised Dublin as "the fairest, richest, best built city" on his journey, a metropolis "far beyond Edenborough" and most resembling London. Besides "fair, stately and complete buildings," it had in his opinion the "divers commodities" Londoners enjoyed. A resident of Dublin less favorably impressed by the city nevertheless earlier called attention to shops "well replenished withall sortes of wares" rivaling any in London; its citizens were also "wonderfully reformed in manners, in ciuility, in curtesy." Dublin, a cathedral city, possessed the hallmarks of a major urban center. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Parliament resided permanently in Dublin and Trinity College had been founded. Courts of law, a royal custom house, and the commerce of a significant port increased the city's prominence in the next decades as an administrative, legal, and financial power. Though the majority of the Dubliners were Catholic, English Protestants gained substantial control of trade and during the administration of Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford, dominated the offices of government and law. When Alice with her mother and brothers joined her father in Dublin, he had an important role in the center of power Wentworth had begun to create, and the family would settle among the prominent residents of Dame Street. They lived in a "very elegant House," according to an eighteenth-century descendant with access to the family papers, "situated conveniently for the Discharge of his high Offices. It was in a very wholsome Air, with a good Orchard and Garden leading down to the Water Side, where might be seen the Ships from the Ring's End."

Almost five years later Alice crossed the Irish Sea again, accompanying her mother to Bath and later sailing back to Ireland through perilous seas. The account in the second manuscript of a life-threatening storm, her safe arrival on the Irish shore, and her response to this deliverance remembers Ireland anew. Though travel across the Irish Sea could take little more than a day if all went well, the tidal streams and winds of the narrow sea, the treacherous shoreline of rocks and sands, and the threat of pirates and privateers were dangerous realities....