Maeve Binchy Read Online Free PDF Page A

Borough, and with the king’s blessing made it the seat of his court as Lord President of Munster, building in it a church, an endowed school and, on an 800-acre plot, a grandiose mansion with landscaped gardens, fish ponds and pleasure grounds, giving it a reputation for ‘much revelling and wine-drinking’, but alsoattracting manufacturers in linen and woollens, and tradesmen to the town. In 1670, Charleville petitioned successfully for a Royal Charter, which gave it the privilege of appointing two Members of Parliament.
    But Boyle’s uncompromising stance on Catholicism was eventually his family’s undoing. In 1690, when no member of the family was present, the Catholic Duke of Berwick, illegitimate son of James II, happened by on his way back from the Siege of Limerick, where his forces had resisted the Protestant William of Orange. He feasted at the family’s expense and then razed their mansion to the ground.
    It was into this turbulent scene of bigotry and sectarianism that the Binchys sowed their seed. The two brothers, one a grocer, the other a lawyer, at first found no Catholic place of worship in the town. The Constitution of 1782, however, which gave Ireland legislative independence of Britain, began to ease the situation for Catholics generally, and when the Acts of Union were passed in 1800, promising Catholic representation in Parliament (delivered in 1829), the yoke was finally lifted.
    For the Binchys, the first outward sign of change in Charleville had been the building of a Mass-house, a sort of hut, with two side walls, a gable and a thatched roof under which the faithful gathered. Then, in 1812, the foundation of a Catholic church was laid in Chapel Street; its construction began the following year. And by the time we find useful records of the family in the first decade of the twentieth century they are living in a completely integrated Irish Catholic township, with names such as Holy Cross Place, The Presbytery and the Convent ofMercy, and with one of their number, Margaret Binchy, a Sister of Mercy.
    Maeve’s paternal grandfather, William Patrick Binchy, was born in 1858 and became a successful retail merchant in the town, the family store servicing a large local farming community , many of whom descended on the town on market day.
    His immediate family consisted of his wife Annie, a woman seven years his junior (they married in 1896) and five children (a sixth died). In 1911 they lived with Mary, William Patrick’s mother, born in 1831, at No. 42 Main Street along with two female servants and a male apprentice.
    Charleville is built on a crossroads. Main Street, with Chapel Street and Smith’s Street running across it, is as wide and straight a street now as it was then, with substantial three-storey buildings, many of them two-storey residential quarters over a street-level store.
    One can easily imagine the noise on market day of the wagons, cattle and horses piling through, and the farmers with their lists, ‘busy men who hated having to take any time at all away from their deals and discussions on beasts’, clearly drawn upon by Maeve in her wonderful depiction of Sean O’Connor’s store near the beginning of
Light a Penny Candle
.
    Another branch of the family lived at nearby Gortskagh, still within the official vicinity of Charleville. Head of the family was James Binchy, a solicitor also based on Main Street, born four years before William Patrick. The family firm of James Binchy & Son is today in its fourth generation. In the 1920s, James’s son Owen became the first Binchy to own an estate, Knight’s Lodge,one of the choice houses of the area, now known as Binchy Park and still owned by the family.
    Over the years the Binchy family’s commercial interests were quartered in various stores in the town. In 1914 they had a china and glass dealership, a hardware store in Smith’s Lane, and at some stage also a timber yard. Then, in or around 1920, they acquired Synan’s bread shop