William Monsell of Tervoe, 1812–1894, by Matthew Potter

Abstract

Matthew Potter’s biography of William Monsell is one of a number of recent studies of nineteenth-century Irish people whose political views initially seem at odds with their religious beliefs, in a society in which religious confession was a reliable predictor of attitudes to that overwhelming question of Irish life: the utility and desirability of the Union with Great Britain. Most of these have been studies of Irish Protestant nationalists: for example, Colin Reid’s biography of Stephen Gwynn, Marnie Hay’s study of Bulmer Hobson, Paul Bew’s recent reappraisal of Charles Stewart Parnell, and this reviewer’s own monograph framed around Alfred Webb. A study of a Catholic Unionist such as Monsell is a welcome addition. William Monsell was a wealthy landowner in south-west Ireland who married into the gentry. Educated in England at Winchester and Oriel College, Oxford, he was ‘much more English than any of his immediate ancestors’, but ‘paradoxically’, Potter explains, it was his exposure to the Tractarian Movement in Oxford, and in particular his friendship with John Henry Newman, which led him to convert from the Church of Ireland to the Roman Catholic Church (p. 14). The fact of an Irish Protestant converting to Catholicism was unusual in itself, but Monsell’s trajectory was particulary unexpected because it did not have a political catalyst. Whereas other contemporaries may have converted as a final step into their embrace of Irish nationalism (for example, Joseph Biggar or Roger Casement), ironically, Monsell’s conversion to Catholicism had an English ideological context, not an Irish one.