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Endnotes
My research has taken me to some wonderful placesâwhether it was the hamlet of Meenacladdy on the savagely beautiful Donegal coast; the medieval Round Tower at Windsor Castle, where the Royal Archives are kept; or the Cape Town records office, backed by Table Mountain, which was the site of the old prison where Patrick OâDonnell was briefly held. Several libraries have been iconic destinations in themselves: the Gothic masterpiece of Oxfordâs Bodleian Library; the breathtaking Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin, through which its manuscript department is reached; the British Library, with its glass and bronze six-story tower housing King Georgeâs leather and vellum tomes. I experienced many goose-bump momentsâmost memorably in the National Archives at Kew, where among the OâDonnell trial documents I found the two actual torn scraps of paper that the jury foreman had given to the judge. But frustrations are just as memorable. Several dozen of TNAâs OâDonnell papers were destroyedâprobably in 1985, when the folder was declassifiedâand my excitement at finding his Port Elizabeth studio portraits cataloged was dashed when the folders turned out to be empty. In Dublinâs National Archives of Ireland, my request slips with search codes provided by seemingly reliable bibliographies were often returned with the penciled additions âno resultâ or ânot found.â But now, as I write during Britainâs latest draconian lockdown, with every archive and library closed, I realize how blessed I was to have had free access to such extraordinary material during the five years it has taken to complete this book.
In the long list of citations that follows each chapter heading in the Notes below, I credit quotations from other works and provide sources for facts in the text that I myself might have queried were I to start the book afresh. If a book or journal is mentioned only once in the Notes, I give the authorâs full name and publication details, but with frequently cited works, I provide only a surname and abbreviated title, reserving full information for the Bibliography. I have incorporated editorial footnotes that digress slightly from the main narrative but that strike me as interesting or illuminating. Below, I list my most important sources for each of the key characters, in alphabetical order. Call numbers for archival material are included either in the list of abbreviations or in the Notes.
JAMES CAREY
Archive
I drew mostly on a fourteen-page printed statement made to magistrate John Curran on February 21, 1883. It is held in Britainâs National Archives and abbreviated in my Notes as âTNA, JC.â In it, Carey describes his initiation into the Fenian organization of the 1860s and recounts the formation of the Invincibles and the gangâs abortive attempts to assassinate William Forster. Details are often highly graphicââMy arm touched Mr. Forsterâsââand Careyâs narrative of the actual murders in Phoenix Park unfolds with the tension and urgent dialogue of a thriller.
Secondary
A leaner, less colorful account is given in the London Timesâ coverage of the Invinciblesâ trial (see especially the issues of February 19, 20, 23, and 24, 1883). An important find was Careyâs letter to Joe Bradyâs mother (Irish Times, September 15, 1883), in which he attempts to exculpate himself by naming other informers in the gang. I could not have written my account of Careyâs funeral without the recollections of the humane South African doctor Frederick Ensor in Gleanings (see Ensor in the abbreviations list), nor could I have discovered what became of Careyâs family after his assassination without the memoir by the familyâs minder, the Scotland Yard detective Patrick McIntyre (Reynoldsâs Newspaper, March 31, l895).
LUCY CAVENDISH
Archive
Of particular value among the trove of the Papers of Lady Frederick Cavendish included in the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth are an unpublished diary (vol. 14); the typescript of a biographical essay, âWho Was Lucy Cavendish?â by Jane M. Renfrew; and a long letter from Lord Spencer minutely detailing the last two days of Frederick Cavendishâs life. Further correspondence between Spencer and Lucy is among the Althorp Papers in the Archives and Manuscripts Department of the British Library. The Gladstone Papers, also held in its Western Manuscripts collection, contain several letters to and from Lucy; and there were gems to be found in the papers of Ch...
