Born: 1757 or 1758, Ireland (assumed)
Died: 3 September 1793
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Henrietta Boyle
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Bridget Hourican. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
O’Neill, Henrietta (1757/8–1793), poet, hostess, and patron of the arts, was the only child of Charles Boyle (1728–59), Viscount Dungarvan (son of John Boyle, 5th earl of Cork and Orrery), and his wife, Susannah (1732–83), daughter of Henry Hoare of Stourhead, Wiltshire, England. Her father died when she was young and her mother, whom Horace Walpole in 1776 described as mad, married Thomas Brudenell (1729–1814), 1st earl of Ailesbury, and had four more children. Henrietta married (18 October 1777) John O’Neill of Shane’s Castle, Antrim, MP for Randalstown (1761–83) and descendant of the O’Neills, former high kings of Ireland. After the birth of her two sons (1779, 1780) and a daughter, Henrietta became a leader in the social and artistic circles of Antrim. A dedicated amateur actress, she had a theatre installed in Shane’s Castle and wrote an epilogue for a performance of ‘Cymbeline’ in which she acted with Lord Edward Fitzgerald in the early 1780s. In 1785 she took the role of a sylph in a play in Shane’s Castle and wrote and delivered a Popeian epilogue. That year she also arranged for the visit to Belfast of the great tragic actress, Mrs Siddons, who duly reported that Shane’s Castle inspired recollections of an ‘Arabian nights’ entertainment. O’Neill was accounted an excellent amateur actress in her obituaries, but William Drennan noted that ‘it is really singular that she should like playing when she is so totally devoid of all theatrical talent’ (Drennan–McTier letters, i, 256). During her visits to her house in London in Cavendish Square she befriended the novelist Charlotte Smith (1759–1806), for whom she wrote her celebrated ‘Ode to the poppy’, first published in Smith’s novel Desmond (1792). The Anthologia Hibernica (1793) termed it ‘perhaps the most beautiful lyric production of the age’ (319–20). It is a fine paean to the opiate qualities of the ‘soul-soothing plant! that can such blessings give’ and caused the essayist, Leigh Hunt, to speculate that Smith and O’Neill regularly took opium together. From about 1791 O’Neill’s health deteriorated, necessitating visits to Portugal, where she died at the Caldas de Rainha near Lisbon on 3 September 1793. She was buried in the English cemetery in Lisbon, near the grave of Henry Fielding. Gossip rumoured that she had died of an opium overdose, but there is little proof of this. Smith described her death as a ‘deprivation which has rendered my life a living death’ (Lonsdale, 458) and reproduced ‘Ode to a poppy’ and another poem, ‘Written on seeing her two sons at play’, in her Elegiac sonnets (1797). These are among the few surviving instances of O’Neill’s poetry. Her obituaries commended her elegance and social brilliance, but Drennan wrote in 1786, with considerable asperity, that ‘her manners are those of a finished courtesan, and I suppose the manners to be a pretty close transcript of the morals. If she be honest she’s a devilish cheat’ (Drennan–McTier letters, i, 252).