From the Dublin Daily Express, Tuesday 19 June 1906, an account, by Mrs Power O’Donoghue, of a medico-legal elopement effected by barge along the Grand Canal, County Kildare in the early years of the 19th century:
“The marriage of Lord Ninian Crichton Stuart and the Hon Ismay Preston recalls a love match of the ‘long ago’ which occurred in the family of the Bellinghams… A certain young Irish barrister, Mr Brian Arthur Molloy, who lived at Millicent, Kildare… had a bosom friend in one Sir Allen Bellingham… They were school companions in early life, and ‘chums’ later on, and upon a certain occasion a young Allen Bellingham – son of the baronet, probably, called at Millicent and chanced to see the daughter of the house, Miss Matilda Molloy.
He fell deeply in love with her; hopelessly would not at all express the situation, because the wooer had any amount of confidence and certainty at hand, and he pressed his suit so successfully that he persuaded the young lady to elope with him without asking for the consent of her father… who no doubt had pistols and coffee in the house as was the custom in the good old times, and would have thought little about producing the first-named articles for action, and sitting down ten minutes later to enjoy a cup of the beverage, made for one.
Young Bellingham, however, did not wait to tempt… his choler or prove a target for his bullets, because he took quick advantage of the old gentleman’s temporary absence, and, getting out the family barge, he rowed the lady gallantly up to Dublin via the Grand Canal and was married to her in quick haste by the Roman Catholic Archbishop Merry, who had christened her eighteen years previously at Millicent…
A portrait of ‘Matilda Molloy’, afterwards Mrs Bellingham, is extant and represents her as a very beautiful girl playing a harp, and robed ethereally in white. A picture of her husband hangs in one of the principal rooms in St Vincent’s hospital today, and there is a statue of him in the Royal College of Surgeons, just opposite.”
Mrs Power O’Donoghue seems to have got her names slightly mixed up; the Bellingham who eloped with Matilda Molloy was O’Bryen Bellingham, later a distinguished surgeon; their marriage took place in 1827.
The description of Matilda’s portrait sounds very like that of another alluring barrister’s daughter, Sarah Curran, beloved of Robert Emmet. Perhaps Mrs Power O’Donoghue also got her details wrong here? The portrait below, by G. Colvin Smith, dating from around the time of the elopement, seems more likely to be that of Matilda.
Sadly, no image of O’Bryen Bellingham appears online, although there does indeed appear to be a bust of him in the College of Surgeons in Stephen’s Green. His classic Treatise on Diseases of the Heart – an appropriate area of expertise for a man with such a romantic history – remains in print to this day.
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