M.B. Gibson Books

Today is the Ides of March, in the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Twenty-Six.

   It is also the 260th anniversary of the 1766 execution of Parish Priest Nicholas Sheehy of County Tipperary, Ireland. Father Sheehy’s story forms the backbone of my trilogy, The Duncullen Saga.

   Father Sheehy was lynched, drawn, and quartered on false charges of murder. The victim’s body was never found. Stories flew in the years that followed of the man, John Bridge, being spotted in Canada.

   So, what was the priest’s offense? There is little doubt it was the crime of standing up for the peasants against the abject cruelty of the gentry. Other dubious charges were levied against the man and dropped for lack of evidence. Until this murder charge was manufactured.

   Father Sheehy was tried in the city of Clonmel in a building called The Main Guard. It’s now a museum with a comprehensive display about the martyred priest in the very courtroom where his sentence was handed down.

   I visited the room in 2005. I breathed deep, hoping to feel a sense of the events there. Out one window, I looked down Gladstone Street to the yellow hotel called Fennessey’s. In 1766, it was the gaol. Now, Sheehy’s painting hangs on the side of the building. From there, he was walked among hostile crowds to the second floor of the Main Guard where I was, at that moment, standing.

   Anyone interested in the truth could see through the flimsy evidence produced. When the jury, likely intimidated or themselves enemies of Sheehy, returned their guilty verdict, Sheehy’s lawyer, Mr. Sparrow, cried out, “If there is any justice in heaven, you will die roaring!”

   Local legend lists every man and the “terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad” ways each met his demise.

   So, there you have it. The secret is out. I plan to transport this part of Nicholas Sheehy’s story (which I could not work into Harps Upon the Willows) to my next book set in early 18th-century South Carolina.

   As for the premise of Nicholas Sheehy’s gory end upon the gallows, have times changed?

   What of those standing up for people of color in places like Minneapolis who’ve been dragged, beaten, detained, and even killed?

   When you write historical fiction, you find many things change over the decades and centuries.

But human nature? It remains the same.