A poet, a highwayman and a beautiful graveyard #death#graveyard #cemetery

Mary Tighe

Mary Blackford (or Blanchford) was born in Dublin 9 October 1772. Her parents were Theodosia a methodist  leader, and William (d.1773?), a Church of Ireland clergyman and librarian. She had a strict religious upbringing, and when she was twenty-one she married Henry Tighe  (1768–1836), her first cousin and a member of the Parliament of Ireland for Inintioge, Co. Kilkenny.
The marriage is said to have been unhappy, though little is known.
The couple moved to London in the early nineteenth century. She became acquainted with Thomas Moore, an early admirer of her writing, and others interested in literature. Although she had written since girlhood, she published nothing until Psyche (1805), a six-canto allegorical poem in Spenserian stanzas. Psyche was admired by many and praised by Moore in his poem, "To Mrs. Henry Tighe on reading her Psyche".
Having suffered for at least a year, Mary Tighe endured a serious attack of tuberculosis in 1805. In February 1805 Moore states that she had "a very serious struggle for life" and in August of the same year that she was 'ordered to the Madeiras'. Moore also claimed that "another winter will inevitably be her death".Tighe lived for another five years and spent her last few months as an invalid at her brother-in-law's estate in Woodstock, County Kilkenny, Ireland. She was buried in the church at nearby Inistioge. Her diary was destroyed, though a cousin had copied out excerpts.
The year following her death, a new edition of Psyche was released, along with some previously unpublished poems; it was this edition that established her literary reputation. John Keats was one of her admirers and paid tribute to her in his poem, "To Some Ladies".Pam Perkins writes that "[d]espite the bleakness of many of the short poems in the 1811 volume, in much of the nineteenth-century writing on Tighe there is a tendency to make her an exemplar of patiently (and picturesquely) long-suffering femininity, a tendency exemplified most famously in Felicia Hemans's tribute to her, 'The Grave of a Poetess'.

James Freney
Unable to pay the exorbitant fees charged by the town corporation, the couple closed up their pub and moved back to Thomastown. Here, Freney fell in with the Kellymount highway gang, led by fellow Thomastown man John Reddy. Their colleagues would in time number Richard Dooling, John Anderson, Felix Donnelly, James Bolger, Michael Millea, John Reddy, George Roberts, Edmond Kenny, James Larrassy and a man called Hackett.
Proclaimed an outlaw in January 1748 (old calendar), Freney surrendered in April 1749. Joseph Robbins's brother, a lawyer, and Lord Carrick helped Freney work out a deal with the chief justices in which Freney would be allowed to emigrate. It is believed this deal was procured because the authorities feared executing him would make him a folk hero and lead to further disturbances.
The rest of the Kellymount band were not so lucky. Bolger, Kenny, Larrassy, Millea, Reddy, Hackett, Dooling and Roberts all went to the gallows. Reddy was imprisoned while Donnelly escaped to England but was eventually hanged in Kilkenny.