Henrietta Battier (née Fleming; c.1751 – 1813) was an Irish poet, political satirist, and sometime actress. She is best known for the squibs she published as "Pat. Pindar" and other pen-names. A subscriber to the United Irish test, she embraced the causes of Catholic-Protestant unity, representative government, and national independence.

Life

Henrietta Fleming was the daughter of John Fleming of Staholmog, Co. Meath. In 1768 she married William Battier (d. c. 1794), the estranged son of a Dublin banker of French Huguenot descent. They had at least four children and she began writing in order to subsidize the family's income.

Writing

While on a visit to London in 1783–4, she approached Samuel Johnson to request his advice about publishing a manuscript collection of poems. Johnson was encouraging and helped her to build a subscription list. He reportedly said to her, "Don't be disheartened my Child, I have been often glad of a Subscription myself." Johnson's death in 1784, as well as serious illnesses for both herself and her husband and the death of their son in 1789, delayed Battier's plans and The protected fugitives was not published until 1791. Some of her work was, however, published in 1789, along with that of William Preston and others, in A Collection of Poems, Mostly Original, by Several Hands (London: M. Graisberry, by subscription for Joshua Edkins). While she was in London, she acted the role of Lady Rachel Russell in Thomas Stratford's tragedy on the death of William Russell, at the Drury Lane Theatre. Back in Dublin, where she enjoyed the patronage of Elizabeth Rawdon, Countess of Moira, she found her "patriot heart, that throbs with honest pride", and wrote verses that pilloried the Attorney-General, John FitzGibbon, Earl of Clare (a "glitt'ring snake"), and others in the London-appointed Dublin Castle Irish executive. Beginning with The Kirwanade, and under the name "Pat. Pindar," these were published as a series of pointed political lampoons: "magnificently controlled vituperation in vigorous, colloquial heroic couplets." Her subsequent satires argued for reform, religious tolerance, and Irish independence. In "Bitter Orange", which appeared in the United Irishman's paper The Press, and in The Lemon (1797), she denounced the loyalist and sectarian Orange Order as "boys of the ascendancy" formed to support the "bondage of our hundred years". With another of Lady Moira's bluestocking set, Margaret King, she responded to an appeal in The Press for women to "act for the amelioration of your country in the mighty crisis that awaits her": she took the United Irish test.

Last years

After the suppression of the 1798 rebellion, and the subsequent union of Ireland with Great Britain, which she protested in An Address (1799), Battier's political and literary stock fell. In her final years, she was visited in her Fade Street lodgings by Thomas Moore who, while a student at Trinity College in 1796, had begun reciting his own, often satiric, verse at her literary salon. Battier died in poverty in Dublin in 1813.

Critical reception

Battier's work has been anthologized in Stephen C. Behrendt's Romantic-Era Irish Women Poets in English (2021). The Kirwanade, or, Poetical Epistle and An Address on … the Projected Union are available through open access, and the rest of her publications are available through EEBO. After years of obscurity, her work has recently become of interest to researchers.

Selected works