Henrietta Battier facts for kids

Henrietta Battier (c.1751 – 1813) was an Irish poet, political satirist, and actress. As a subscriber to the United Irish test and as the squib writer "Pat. Pindar", she embraced the cause of Catholic-Protestant unity, representative government and national independence.

Biography

Battier, Henrietta (Fleming) was the daughter of a John Fleming of Staholmog, Co. Meath. In 1768 she married Capt. John Gaspard Battier, the estranged son of a Dublin banker (of French Huguenot descent). They had at least four children and she began writing in order to subsidise the family's income.

While on a visit to London in 1783–4, she approached Samuel Johnson to request his advice about publishing a manuscript collection of poems. Johnson was encouraging and helped her to build a subscription list. He reportedly said to her, "Don't be disheartened my Child, I have been often glad of a Subscription myself." His death in 1784, serious illness for both herself and her husband and the death their son 1789, delayed Battier's plans and The protected fugitives was not published until 1791. While she was in London, she acted the role of Lady Rachel Russell in Thomas Stratford's tragedy on the death of Lord Russell, at the Drury Lane Theatre.

Back in Dublin, where she enjoyed the patronage of Elizabeth Rawdon, Countess of Moira, she found her "patriot heart, that throbs with honest pride", and wrote verses that pilloried the Attorney-General, John FitzGibbon, Earl of Clare (a "glitt'ring snake"), and others in the London-appointed Dublin Castle Irish executive. Beginning with The Kirwanade, and under the name "Pat. Pindar," these were published as a series of pointed political lampoons : "magnificently controlled vituperation in vigorous, colloquial heroic couplets." Her subsequent satires argued for reform, religious tolerance, and Irish independence.

In "Bitter Orange", which appeared in the United Irishman's paper The Press, and in The Lemon (1797), she denounced the loyalist and sectarian Orange Order as "boys of the ascendancy" formed to support the "bondage of our hundred years". With another of Lady Moira's bluestocking set, Margaret King, she responded to the appeal in The Press for women to "act for the amelioration of your country in the mighty crisis that awaits her": she took the United Irish test.

After the suppression of the 1798 rebellion, and subsequent union with Great Britain, which in An Address (1799) she protested, her political and literary stock fell. In her final years, she was visited in her Fade Street lodgings by Thomas Moore who, while a student at Trinity College in 1796, had begun reciting his own, often satiric, verse at her literary salon. Battier died in poverty in Dublin in 1813.

Selected works

• The Mousiad: an Heroic-Comic Poem. Dublin: P. Byrne, 1787 (attributed).
• The protected fugitives: a collection of miscellaneous poems, the genuine products of a lady, never before published. 1791.
• The Kirwanade, or, Poetical Epistle. Humbly Addressed to the Modern Apostle. Published in two parts, 1791.
• The Gibbonade, or, Political Reviewer. Three issues, 1 May 1793 – 12 September 1794.
• Marriage Ode Royal after the Manner of Dryden. Dublin and London, 1795.
• The Lemon. 1797.
• An Address on … the Projected Union, To the Illustrious Stephen III, King of Dalkey, Emperor of the Mugglins. 1799.