Murder, Mutiny & Mayhem by Joe O'Shea

Author:Joe O'Shea [Joe O’Shea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: an_account_of_murder_mutiny_and_mayhem
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

BEAUCHAMP BAGENAL

– THE GENTLEMANLY ART OF LEGALISED MURDER

In an age when Irish duellists were the most feared in Europe, Beauchamp Bagenal earned a special notoriety for his short fuse and deadly skill with a pistol. A rake, a libertine, a ‘true born Irish gentleman’ skilled in the art of ‘legalised murder’, Bagenal could have strode straight from the pages of a bawdy Georgian play or rode out, spurs flashing, from the verses of a popular ballad. He drank, despoiled and whored his way across Europe, fought duels with an English Chief Secretary in the Phoenix Park and represented both Enniscorthy and Carlow in the Irish parliament as a staunch Nationalist and defender of Catholic rights.

In an era of romantic, larger than life figures, he was celebrated as the ‘handsomest man in Ireland’ and the greatest duellist of his age. Sir Jonah Barrington, the Laois-born lawyer and romantic chronicler of colourful Anglo-Irish society said of Bagenal: ‘Amongst the people he was beloved, amongst the gentry he was popular, and amongst the aristocracy he was dreaded.’

The Bagenals first moved into Irish society with the marriage of Mabel Bagenal to Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Mabel was the youngest daughter of Sir Nicholas Bagenal, an English planter and soldier, and sister of Sir Henry Bagenal, Marshal of Queen Elizabeth’s forces in Ireland. In the decades after the Elizabethan conquest, the Bagenals settled in the area of the river Barrow where they founded the town that would bear their name in later years: Bagenalstown, Co. Carlow. Beauchamp was born in 1735, the son of Walter Bagenal and Eleanor Beauchamp, and at the age of eleven inherited what had by this time become a huge estate. A drinker and a gambler from his teens, Beauchamp had already made a start on depleting the family fortune by the time he was due to finish his gentleman’s education with the traditional Grand Tour of Europe. He even found it necessary to sell some land to fund two years of travel through the great cities of Europe, picking up expensive souvenirs and learning the manners of the courts of Europe where the wild and easily provoked Irish were often about as welcome as a dose of the pox.

It was during his Grand Tour that Beauchamp really started to build his reputation as the original Wild Irish Rover, as his biographer and great admirer Sir Jonah Barrington records:

‘During his tour he had performed a variety of feats which were emblazoned in Ireland, and endeared him to his countrymen. He had fought a prince, jilted a princess, intoxicated the Doge of Venice, carried off a Duchess from Madrid, scaled the walls of a convent in Italy, narrowly escaped the inquisition at Lisbon, concluded his exploits by a duel in Paris; and returned to Ireland with a sovereign contempt for all continental men and manners, and an inveterate antipathy to all despotic Kings and arbitrary governments.’

The ‘jilted princess’ in question was Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, afterwards married to Mad King George III of England.

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