Jenny Verner realised now what many might have spoken behind their hands about her when she was a child. For she knew she was illegitimate, one way or another.

Common people used a crasser, harsher word for it. She understood later the conversations people had under their breath when she hid in corridors to overhear them. Further, there was a story about her father, who had married her – by all accounts beautiful – mother when she was carrying a child from another man, and people thought that very good of him, but their mouths took on tucks that proclaimed him unworldly.

And now the topic was: who would marry the eldest of their children, the girl Jenny? Strangely, since they would say she was a beautiful little thing just like her mother, and it would be false modesty on her part, she realised, to say she was not. Her parents were both considered handsome, and apparently respectable in every regard. It was only later in life that members of the wider family of the Verners let her know that her parents, in fact, had not so much as married, and that Burke’s Peerage told the world that anyhow, or at least told anyone interested enough to look her father up.

James Verner had been a captain in the British army and resided in the Churchill mansion, where he had fallen for the coachman’s daughter, Mary. Mary was now James Verner’s companion there at 52 Queen Street, Newry, and had been for decades upon decades. And not wed! Who indeed, consulting Burke’s Peerage, as reputable people did, would marry her, Jenny Verner? Once she had even heard her own mother ask the question in lamentation. The problem itself asking about the problem.

It seems her father would have been Baron Churchill of Armagh if – as the eldest of the Verners – he had married properly. A younger, capable brother of his had instead been given the title now, and all the Armagh estates attached. Except for Jenny’s father’s determined love of her mother, he could not only have been a peer, but also elected to the Commons in Westminster. Again, except for love of her mother …

They were noble parents. Her father had commanded a company of troops at Waterloo, and her mother was intriguing. Yet the ordinary way the two lived in Newry seemed smaller than such absolutes as Love vs. Power. This Shakespearian tale seemed comprised of characters writ pleasant and small and domestic, and even timid.

The Verners were a family that had involved itself in the founding of the Orange Order at their townhouse in Dawson Street, Dublin. And the Orange Order was the very essence of loyalism to the British Crown and to Britishness as it sat and disported itself in Ireland.

‘Well,’ Jenny had been told to say by her parents, ‘if it is hatred of other Irishmen, that is not what the Orange Order was founded for.’

‘Really?’ people replied, thinking of fisticuffs between the Protestant Orange and the Catholic Green at St Patrick’s Days from Sydney to Toronto, Belfast to New Orleans.

‘It is possible to celebrate one’s origins,’ Jenny would as a young woman maintain, ‘and indeed uphold one’s freedom from the undue claims of Papism upon the soul, as the Orange Order does, without hating one’s fellow Irish!’

It was lesser minds, she believed, who in upholding Protestant ascendency decided that that meant hating and attacking the masses of Catholic Ireland. She had asserted these nuances in front of her genial father and he seemed to enjoy her view as wonderfully daring. It was her argument even before she met her Johnny Mitchel. There were a number of people of Protestant Ireland, not simply her, nodding towards their fellow countrymen then, seeing a unity of interests with the Irish mass, oppressed as they were on the one hand by Catholic dogma, on the other by Britain, both of whose rules were absolute.

The Penal Laws – which served severely to oppress Catholics, denying them an education, land ownership and public posts – were finally revoked by the Irish Party and the Whigs in Westminster in 1829. Still, the Established Church, called the Church of Ireland, actually the Anglican Church in Ireland, raised tithes from Catholics and Presbyterians. Even Presbyterians got into trouble for resisting to pay the tithe proctors, the agents who exacted the payments. As a member of the Church of Ireland, Jenny Verner, Who-Will-Marry-Her Verner, felt embarrassment that her church was sustained by tithes exacted from Presbyterians and Catholics.

But she knew that was not a very common sensibility amongst her parents’ contemporaries. Sometimes Catholic peasants would kill a tithe proctor, or at least burn his house, and those who did were either hanged or sentenced for life to Australia. As people seemed to think appropriate.

Now John Mitchel, straight from Trinity College in Dublin, had become a bank clerk in Derry, and of course he did not like it, the mean and frivolous arithmetic of it all, and the lack of scale. The way numbers would be the absolution for all sorts of tragedies, for hunger, want, disinheritance. At that stage, prior to his meeting with Jenny, and numb from a hated job, he fell in love with a Belfast girl he met who was six years older than his nineteen years.

John did not fall in love by measures. And this woman, who had relatives in Newry and knew of his much-respected father, the non-subscribing Presbyterian Reverend Dr Mitchel, possessed young John’s soul. The ‘non-subscribing’ sector was a church which refused to sign on to any creed and attracted liberals and improvers.

John, stricken for the woman, rode to Belfast from Newry, where he was being interviewed to become a possible law clerk in the practice of a Mr Neill, to lay his soul before her, plead with her. He was not, though, admitted to her and went into a decline. Ultimately, it was when, after less than a year, John had been somehow cured of this first thwarted and unhappy love, that Jenny would inherit him. She would come to pity that Belfast woman who would never travel with him amongst the volcanoes and wild torrents of the earth!

For she had never heard anyone proclaim like John Mitchel.

Jenny Verner herself was said to be talkative. ‘Men don’t like girls who make their opinions known,’ said her mother with her look of bruised prettiness. Yet she came from an opinionated clan. Not so much her father; he was the quietest clansman. Her uncle, her father’s younger brother, Sir William Verner, Grand Master of the Orange Order, was vocal in Parliament. Abomination and the defence of the British Protestant inheritance made men vocal, in part because there was great applause in it from their own type; because the humblest Protestant, even the poorest Presbyterian, saw himself as at least above the mass of the disinherited Irish.

She was hungry for talk, this girl whose father could have renounced and exiled her, as members of the gentry did renounce their children of dubious origin. ‘Your father gave up everything for you,’ her mother told her, as a caution, and her mother was right. Jenny’s was the birth he would not cover up, nor would he send her mother away to live in some cottage on an endowment.

But it meant her mother did not want to permit the small rebellions, or to let her daughter hanker for talk of lightnings and revelations, which was the daily talk of John Mitchel, law clerk, when she first met him. Mitchel had a view that to set everything spinning and falling was as much an act of creation as actual systematic building – indeed more so. When a structure fell, he said even then – and as he would later write – the germ of the new building was in the ruin. And Jenny Verner had been from fifteen onwards anxious to be his acolyte in ruin and his abettor.

She had first seen John on his way to work. The girls of Miss Bryden’s School for Young Ladies were on one side of the river named Clanrye, proceeding downstream, and he was on a tow path on the far side. He was a God, Jenny thought. He was also a young Wordsworth, a Romantic figure – nearly six feet, with dark floppy locks and penetrating eyes. Mitchel knew a friend of hers in the same class, Mary Thompson, and Jenny treacherously had her contact him in the hope he would go for Sunday walks with her, accompanied by Jenny as a supposed guarantor of propriety.

Jenny’s infatuation was apparent to her mother, who was nervous that Mitchel was Presbyterian, son of a minister of that church and of what were called ‘the auld lights’, who did not subscribe to the general Protestant creed as settled on in 1725 – and did not see it as their duty to preach loyalty to the state, but loyalty to conscience. Additionally, they could be vocal in their condemnation of injustices in a way respectable people rarely heard in the Established Church of Ireland, which let Caesar do very much whatever Caesar chose. The auld lights believed there was a social covenant between the state and the ordinary folk, and that if the state neglected it, it must be challenged for it.

Now, being of the Establishment, the Verners were Britons by...