An Irish Diary

By royal disappointment - Frank McNally on an Irish clergyman who picked the wrong sermon for a change of English monarch

The seeds of Thomas Sheridan’s downfall

Thomas Sheridan, by Edmund Scott, after Robert Stewart (1789). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

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Frank McNally
Fri Sep 9 2022 - 19:01

With uncanny timing, I see in the Chambers Book of Days that this weekend’s anniversaries include the death of one Thomas Sheridan, an 18th-century clergyman whose career hinged on his choice of sermon to mark the death of an English queen and her succession by a king.

Sheridan (1684-1738) is now best remembered as the grandfather of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright. But he was himself a noted writer and, as a close friend of Jonathan Swift until they fell out, is suspected of having contributed to Gulliver’s Travels and other works.

His ambitions as an Anglican clergyman peaked in 1728 when, aged 44, he was appointed royal chaplain, with a comfortable posting in Cork and the expectation of further promotion if he kept his nose clean and well-tuned.

But 14 years previously, he had marked the death of Queen Anne, on August 1st, 1714, with a reading from the Gospel of St Matthew, including the famous line (from the King James Bible): “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

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That was a suitably sombre choice for the demise of a monarch and proved such a success with the congregation that it became one of his favourite fallbacks, regularly reprised. Thus were sown the seeds of his downfall.

When on August 1st, 1728, he had to preach a sermon marking the anniversary of George I’s accession to the throne (in keeping with tradition, it had followed immediately upon the queen’s death), he must have checked his archive for the date and reached again the old reliable.

Alas, what had been thought a wise choice of scripture for the death of a queen was considered a very unwise one to celebrate the rise of her living successor.

Sheridan was now suspected of being a secret Jacobite, hoping for a return to the throne of the Catholic Stuarts. The royal appointment vanished and so did he from Dublin Castle guest-lists. As Swift summarised: “He had killed his own fortunes by a chance shot from an unlucky text.”

Fellow feeling may have cemented the two men’s friendship while it lasted. Swift himself had hoped for an illustrious career in England until 1714, when his hopes died with the queen. His favoured Conservatives then fell from power and the dreaded Whigs returned, forcing him back to Dublin, “to die like a poisoned rat in a hole”.

Sheridan also lost the Cork job for his carelessness and had to make do instead with a parish in his native Cavan. He seems to have taken the setback cheerfully. But speaking of rat-holes, Swift visited him there often and was so appalled by the conditions Sheridan lived in that he wrote a poem satirising the state of the house.

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The quotation that doomed Sheridan’s prospects is from The Sermon of the Mount and reads in full: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day...”

Put less poetically, it’s an admonition not to concern ourselves unduly with the future, because we always have our hands full with the present.

But this was not advice taken by the late journalist Des Fisher when, almost half a century before it finally happened, he raised with Queen Elizabeth the issue of when she might pay a state visit to Ireland.

So doing, he also spurned the orders of a Buckingham Palace courtier who had warned him and other journalists, before a royal visit to London’s Fleet Street, that they should “on no account” ask the queen questions.

It was 1961, during the IRA’s Border Campaign. And Fisher, then London editor of the Irish Press, did not mean to breach royal protocol.

His question just popped out when, after shaking hands with a succession of British journalists, the monarch was introduced to him and said “Oh, an Irishman”. Whereupon he heard himself reply: “Yes, Ma’am. And when are you going to come over to Ireland?”

As he recalled decades later in An Irishman’s Diary (thanks to his journalist son Michael for the reminder), this was the cue for a lively discussion of the prospect, in which she asked how he thought she would be received, and he gave a balanced assessment before repeating his invitation.

The queen might have been tempted to plead the Gospel of St Matthew at that point, citing the sufficiency of 1961′s problems. Instead, she explained that such visits were out of her hands: “But I would like to come to Ireland some day.”

Polite as it was, the exchange is not recorded in the scriptures of Fisher’s own newspaper. This was in keeping with the strict republican protocols of 1961. As his diary concluded, the editor would not have wanted Irish Press readers to know “that one of his staff was consorting with such representatives of the British establishment”.

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