Birds of a feather – Frank McNally on an unusual English tribute to the Irish writer Melesina Trench

One of the more unusual tributes to an Irish writer abroad was unveiled earlier this month at England’s Winchester Cathedral.

No, it’s not a plaque, or even a gravestone, although the writer in question is buried inside the church. And when I say “unveiled”, I mean it was reported by the regional BBC channel, for whose dispatch I’m indebted to reader John Dunne.

The tribute is a live, female peregrine falcon, now named “Mel” after Melesina Trench (1768–1827), who was born in Dublin and raised in Waterford before travelling widely in Europe and finally settling in England.

The bird is a recent arrival at the cathedral but has taken up residence with a longer established male falcon, “William”, after she performed the traditional courtship ritual of killing his mate.

General selection – Frank McNally on national stereotypes, Greek (and table quiz) heroes, and a stamp of greatness

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Blood brothers – Frank McNally on the deaths of two young men, one Irish, in the Korean War

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Hard Border – Frank McNally on a visit to the Korean Demilitarised Zone

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Transmigration of Seoul – Frank McNally on a long-awaited trip to South Korea

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I’m paraphrasing a little there. But according to a spokesman for the Hampshire Ornithological Society, Mel’s presumed termination of her predecessor, “Winnie” – who had reared at least 27 chicks – was the “natural course of events”, ensuring the future of the species.

Mel is expected to lay eggs by the end of March, after which they should take 30 days to hatch. All this is happening beneath the cathedral’s rose window, monitored by webcams that are broadcasting the events worldwide.

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By a happy chance, this Friday (March 22nd) is Trench’s birthday. Orphaned at age four, she was brought up by her uncle, the Anglican Bishop of Waterford, and also lived in Cork for a time after she married.

An heiress through two grandfathers, she was wealthy but devoted to the cause of women’s education and, as noted by Bridget Hourican’s entry for her in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, had “that marked and almost neurotic straining for self-improvement discernible in other educated women of the period”.

It was her travels in Germany, starting in 1799 and bringing her into contact with many famous and powerful people, that turned Trench into a writer, partly via a private diary she kept from then until the end of her life.

Posthumously published, her journals reveal (in Hourican’s summary): a mind “alternately lively, satirical, and socially observant” and “interior, philosophical, emotional, and melancholic”.

The DIB entry continues: “The former attributes are seen to best effect in her German diary, which contains excellent and bitingly malicious descriptions of Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton; the latter in her accounts of her lonely childhood and the deaths of a son and her only daughter, which also occasioned her most moving verse.”

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Mention of Trench’s “bitingly malicious” descriptions of Lord Nelson had me reaching for my well-thumbed copy of Diaries of Ireland (1997), edited by her variant-spelling Christian-namesake Melosina Lenox-Conyngham.

Alas, despite the nominative coincidence, Trench does not make that anthology. But I was amused in passing by the earliest writer included, German aristocrat Ludolf von Munchhausen (1570–1640), who left this vivid vignette of Kilkenny in March 1590:

“Just when I was in Kilkenny, a convict had been condemned to death. Because of this, the women ran through all the lanes crying and weeping, clapping their hands and making a lot of noise, so that the whole town was filled with their lamentations. I wondered what all this was about . . . "

He then sees that the women are crying “without tears” and learns that this is standard in all local deaths. Recording the noise they make as “Dil, dil, dil, dil, Ho, Ho, ho!”, his diary concludes by explaining that the impending execution was a routine judicial matter: “Justice is very strict in Ireland because the people are of a natural savageness and malignity.”

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For an online version of Trench’s journals, meanwhile, I had to genuflect yet again at the San Francisco church-headquartered Internet Archive – praised be its name. And whether she would be flattered to have a peregrine falcon named after her I still don’t know. But as a writer, certainly, she had sharp talons.

Of Lady Hamilton’s attempts to befriend her, for example, Trench confesses: “Still she does not gain upon me. I think her bold, daring, vain even to folly, and stamped with the manners of her first situation [as a courtesan]”.

Lord Nelson too she finds has a vanity “so undisguised that it wears the form of frankness”. When she tells him she has heard he is a singer, he agrees without hesitation to having “the most wonderful voice that ever was heard”.

And here she reflects after a dinner with the couple: “It is plain that Lord Nelson thinks of nothing but Lady Hamilton, who is totally occupied by the same object. She is bold, forward, coarse, assuming, and vain. Her figure is colossal, but, excepting her feet, which are hideous, well shaped. Her bones are large and she is exceedingly embonpoint . . .”

Of the great admiral, she concludes witheringly: “Lord Nelson is a little man, without any dignity . . . Lady Hamilton takes possession of him, and he is a willing captive, the most submissive and devoted I have seen.”