“My name is Patrick Winningoes
Parnell and I was born at Wadebridge, in Cornwall, in the south-west of
England, to a Catholic Irishwoman and a Protestant Englishman. My father, Lord
Isaac Winningoes, whose family was among the noblest and most ancient for
English lineage, was a very close adviser of the British government. My mother
was named Mary Josephine Parnell.
In those times Great Britain
was still a vast empire and Ireland, born earth of my mother, made integrally
part of it.
After a happy infancy, I was
started to the classical studies, but when I was sixteenth it happened
something that changed radically the course of my life.
Without any apparent reason my
father had withdrawn me from the College and the same day of my getting home,
in a night of storm, I was embarked on a ship, “the Ulysses”, that anchored to
Land's End, attended my arrival to set sail.
My father didn't want to give me
any explanation and, despite I implored him crying, that I didn't want to
depart without greeting my mother, he was inflexible. He delivered two letters
to me: one for the reverend Jacob Sevear, who would have become my despotic
guardian; the other for me, and I read it on tears, when my beloved coasts were
already distant from sight.
It contained, this letter, few recommendations
on the principles that a good child has to observe, together to the information
that my destination would have been Boston and that I had to be in charge to
reverend Sevear's.
The life that attended me
beyond the ocean was, my friends, a hard life indeed to be sustained.
Certainly, I had all the comforts of life, but I lived in a gilded isolation,
without almost any contact with the outside world. My guardian was inflexible
on applying those rules that, as he underlined, had been ordered to him by my father:
I could not go out, if not in his company; I didn't have to possess any sum of
money, providing himself to satisfy any my desire; even the newspapers and the
magazines passed for his careful censorship, before I could read them.
After some time,
my captivity slightly decreased, but I still felt as a prisoner and for my
mind, offended and violated, to find an outlet in the studies, in which my
guardian worked out to be a wise and able preceptor, was a matter of surviving.
How many nights
I dreamed to fly, like Icarus, over the Atlantic or to sail, as Ulysses, searching for craving, new lands! How many
nights I cried, thinking about my mother, to my distant born beaches ! How I
felt heavy, then, my father's hand on my head and that of my sad destiny! For
how much I tried on it, however, I didn't succeed on breaking those chains that
tormented me. From time to time I contrived a plan to run away, but I always
postponed it, hoping that the day after a letter from England would come for
me, to bring me the freedom, the end of my nightmare and its mysteries.
After years of
that life of segregation, finally came the very expected day: On my
twenty-first birthday the reverend Sevear handed over a letter to me from my
father on which he accounted to me the circumstances that were the origin of
all my sufferings and that so much had to influence my life in the future. But
the joy for the long, desired truth, was darkened by the sad news, in the same
letter contained, that my mother, my beloved mother, had died, two years
before, in the prison of Primestone.
I learnt through
that letter that my mother, just a little before my departure for Boston, had
been halted with the accusation of plot to overturn the institutions and the
Crown, accusation much more serious, being my father a man at service of the
State. She was recognized guilty, and only the interest that some friends of my
father showed towards, saved her from the inglorious end that struck all the
other heads of the revolt: the hanging in public square.
But she could
not stand up with the imprisonment as she wrote herself in one of the few
letters that she was allowed to write to me, and which the reverend Sevear had
been ordered not to deliver to me before my twenty-first birthday:
“My gasp of
liberty cannot hold up to the imprisonment between four suffocating walls “.
The scandal that
followed the discovery of the plot to free Ireland from the oppressive English
yoke, had also overwhelmed my father, who was forced by his political enemies
to give the resignations. The aspect of the whole circumstance for me more
spine-chilling was constituted by the fact that my father himself had
discovered and denounced the secret activity of my mother, for whose he asked
me to be forgiven and hoped that I would understand the involved, ethics
implications.
How I hated him
from that day! I cursed him, one hundred, thousand times, from that day and for
the days to come! How was he been able to choose his stupid state’s reason against
the love of a fragile and sweet creature as my mother? Why had he not embarked
her with me to subtract her to the jailers? His king, then, was more worth than
his woman on his heart?
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