Page:A Compendium of Irish Biography.djvu/28

  on the second occupation of Paris. He was sent under guard to the frontier to be delivered up. On the last night of the journey, one of his guard, on conducting him to his room, whispered: " Monsieur le Colonel, the room in which you are to be confined is strong, but one of the iron bars of the window is loose: we trust you will not escape." He took the hint, and regained his liberty. Some years afterwards he privately visited Dublin, and removed his aged sisters, with whom he spent the remainder of his life in Normandy. The precise date of his death is not known—he was living in 1846. 

Allen, William Philip, was born near the town of Tipperary, April 1848. When three years old his father, a Protestant, moved to Bandon. Young Allen was educated at a Protestant training school, but his mother being a Catholic, he eventually joined that church. He was apprenticed to a carpenter; but before his apprenticeship expired he left his native town, and worked in Cork, Dublin, and Chester. An enthusiastic Fenian, he incited his countrymen in Manchester to attempt the rescue of his friend, Colonel Kelly. On the 18th September 1867, with a small body of confederates he effected Kelly's release from a prison van strongly guarded by police. In the melee, a police-sergeant named Brett was killed. This attack and rescue provoked a considerable panic in England in the Autumn and Winter of 1867. Allen and twenty-five others were taken and tried; and Allen, O'Brien, Larkin, Condon, and Maguire, were sentenced to death. The trial was pressed on during the height of the Fenian scare; and its conduct may be judged from the fact that Maguire was subsequently pardoned as being innocent (though sworn to by ten witnesses as an active member of the releasing party), and Condon, an American citizen, was respited. Allen and his friends made spirited and manly speeches before sentence. It was on this occasion that the words " God save Ireland," were first uttered by one of the prisoners, after conviction. Their last hours were spent in religious exercises, and in writing letters to their friends, breathing resignation and devotion to their principles. Allen, O'Brien, and Larkin were executed at the old prison, Manchester, on the 23rd November 1867, in the presence of an enormous military force. Their bodies were ultimately interred in the new prison, Manchester. Mr. Allen was of a slight figure, and almost feminine in appearance. 

Alley, Jerome, Rev., a minor poet and author, was born in 1760. He was educated and took his degree in Trinity College. He was Rector of Drumcar in the diocese of Armagh, and was the author of several poems and pamphlets. In 1826, shortly before his death, he published a work upon the various religions of the world. 

Ambrose, Miss, a celebrated beauty of the Viceregal court during the administration of the Earl of Chesterfield (1745-'7). She was a Catholic heiress, of very ancient descent, allied to the best families in Ireland, gifted with exquisite beauty, and possessed of considerable mental acquirements. At one of the Castle balls, given on the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne, she appeared with an orange lily in her breast, upon which Chesterfield improvised the following lines:

His lordship used to say that she was "the most dangerous rebel in Ireland." In 1753 she married Roger Palmer, M.P. for Mayo (ancestor of the present Sir Roger Palmer of Mayo); and by his elevation to a baronetcy in 1777, became Lady Palmer. She is said to have lived to the age of one hundred years, retaining to the last a vehement hatred of the wrongs under which her Catholic fellow-countrymen laboured. Although rich, she spent the latter years of her life in seclusion in a small lodging in Henry-street, Dublin. 

Annesley, Arthur, Earl of Anglesea, was born in Dublin, 10th July 1614. He was educated at Oxford, studied law, and entered Parliament for Radnorshire. When the civil war broke out, he for a time followed the fortunes of Charles, but afterwards went over to the side of the Parliament, and was sent to Ireland in 1645 as a commissioner, in which employment he did good service for the preservation of the Protestant interest. He was one of those who brought about the restoration of Charles II., and was subsequently created Earl of Anglesea, and appointed Vice-Treasurer of Ireland. He held the post of Lord Privy Seal from 1673 to 1682, when he was dismissed in consequence of a misunderstanding with the Duke of Ormond. He died 6th April 1686, aged 71. The Earl was a man of considerable independence of character, "of deep politicks, very subtle and reserved in the management of affairs, of more than ordinary parts, and one who had the command of both a smooth and a keen pen." Ware enumerates nine political tracts written by him. In Notes and 4