Mary Leadbeater

Mary Leadbeater (/ˈlɛdˌbɛtər/; December 1758 – 27 June 1826) was an Irish author and diarist.

Leadbeater was born in Ballitore, Athy, County Kildare, Ireland. She was the daughter of Richard Shackleton (1726–1792) by his second wife, Elizabeth Carleton, and granddaughter of Abraham Shackleton, schoolmaster of Edmund Burke. Her parents were Quakers. She was thoroughly educated, and her literary studies were aided by Aldborough Wrightson, a man of great ability who had been educated at Ballitore school and had returned to die there. In 1784 she travelled to London with her father and paid several visits to Burke's town house, where she met Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Crabbe. She also went to Beaconsfield, and on her return wrote a poem in praise of the place and its owner, which was acknowledged by Burke, 13 December 1784, in a long and eulogistic letter. On her way home she visited, at Selby, Yorkshire, some primitive Quakers whom she described in her journal. In 1791 she married William Leadbeater, a former pupil of her father, and they resided in Ballitore. Leadbeater, who traced his descent from the Huguenot family of Le Batre, was a small farmer and landowner, and his wife kept the village post office.

On her father's death Mrs. Leadbeater received a tender letter of consolation from Burke.

She had from time to time written poems, and in 1794 published anonymously in Dublin Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth, which begins with "some account of the society of the people call Quakers", contains several poems on secular subjects, and concludes with "divine odes". She was in Carlow on Christmas Day 1796 when the news arrived that the French fleet had been seen off Bantry, and she describes the march out of the troops. On 28 May 1797 Burke wrote one of his last letters to her. Ballitore was occupied in 1798 first by yeomanry, "from whose bosom," wrote Mary Leadbeater, "pity seemed banished." Next came the quartering of soldiers on the town, the Suffolk Fencibles and the Ancient Britons, who commenced torturing and flogging the inhabitants. "The village, once so peaceful, exhibited a scene of tumult and dismay; and the air rang with the shrieks of the sufferers, and the lamentations of those who beheld them suffer," she wrote. A force of about 300 rebels then occupied the town and carried out reprisals, but who fled the following day on the approach of a force of soldiers. These soldiers in turn exacted reprisals on the locals, even killing the local doctor, Johnston. Mary Leadbeater wrote of the killing of her friend: "He was alone and unarmed when seized, and I believe had never raised his hand to injure any one." The soldiers sacked the town, burned many houses and smashed up the rest, and one of them almost killed Mary Leadbeater, who had to flee with a number of other women.

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