Born: Unknown (1800s), Ireland
Died: Unknown
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Patrick Maume. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Anthony, Mary Anne (‘Miss Anthony’) (fl. 1875–90), litigant, was the daughter of Michael Anthony, merchant, brewer and house owner of Tallow, Co. Waterford, and his wife Catherine (née Diver); the Anthonys were an extended family of upper-middle-class catholics living in west Waterford, south Tipperary and east Cork. Mary Anne was probably born at some time in the early 1850s and was educated at the Loreto convent school in Omagh, Co. Tyrone. Partially deaf, she had three sisters, one of whom died in 1873. Another became blind c. 1870, while the third had an intellectual disability.
Early experiences with the law
On Michael Anthony’s death in 1873 his indebted estate (including a large shop and house in Tallow and land in the vicinity) was left in trust to his brother, Dr Henry Anthony of Dungarvan, subject to annuities of £20 each for his daughters. A dispute arose between trustee and beneficiaries over non-payment of the annuities and the sale of properties, with Mary Anne representing her sisters in the landed estates court. In later court proceedings she claimed that this and other disputes over £500, out of an estate worth £5,000, led to the whole estate being consumed by litigation. In 1880–81 Anthony sued her uncle for slander, claiming his statements caused her to be refused admittance to the Dungarvan Convent of Mercy as a novice and dissuaded Thomas Slattery, a Lismore solicitor, from marrying her (Slattery became a regular adversary in local court proceedings). After her uncle’s death, Anthony accused his housekeeper of having violently prevented Anthony from visiting him and using undue influence to dissuade him from making a will providing for her and her sisters.
Anthony’s early legal experiences gave her a view of the legal profession as a cabal with impunity to act as it pleased against members of the public, claiming in court (to laughter) that ‘There was no system of landlordism, terrorism, or Fenianism which did so much to devastate home and hearths as the present system of lawyers’ (Waterford News, 1 Apr. 1881). That view provided the impetus for many of her subsequent lawsuits, which were often directed against solicitors whom she claimed failed to pursue lawsuits she entrusted to them, or magistrates whose rulings against her she regarded as perverse. Anthony believed judges generally shared the corrupt practices of the lawyers from whom they were recruited, and that newspaper reporters distorted coverage of court cases in the interests of the legal profession. (Barristers who had not established a reputation often supported themselves by working as reporters.) In an 1886 lecture, ‘Judges versus justice’, Anthony stated that she opposed Gladstone’s 1886 home rule bill because of its elaborate protections for judges, whom she thought too well protected. She frequently wrote letters to judges expressing unvarnished opinions of legal adversaries, and to nationalist politicians such as Charles Stewart Parnell warning that Gladstone’s 1881 land act and similar measures would become a nullity if administered by lawyers and judges. In 1886 and 1887 she delivered several lectures in Dublin and provincial towns, declaring that achieving ‘honest rule’ by exposing legal and judicial misbehaviour was more important than home rule.
The ‘lady litigant’
Because of her distrust of lawyers, Anthony increasingly represented herself in court and offered to represent others, though she continued to engage counsel at times; she claimed lawyers became even more hostile at a woman trespassing on their preserves. When asked by a judge if it had occurred to her that she ‘might not suffer as much if you had not a lady lawyer?’, she replied ‘I am finding that out by experience, my lord’. On the same occasion she recalled: ‘When I got out at Thurles station to my surprise the whole Leinster Bar got out too, and they all began to say, “There is the lady litigant”.’ (Freeman’s Journal, 25 Apr. 1881). Her presence was certainly unusual; an important part of the life of the legal circuits was the male sociability of judges and barristers, from which she was excluded. The first Irish women barristers were not called until the 1920s, and Anthony’s regular appearances on the barristers’ benches attracted considerable attention. Court proceedings often served as a form of popular entertainment and newspaper reports describe crowded courtrooms when it was known that she would appear. Summaries of her interventions frequently note outbursts of laughter. Newspapers regularly published placards and headings with such titles as ‘A lady lawyer’ and ‘Miss Anthony in court once again’. This ridicule intensified her paranoia.
Edward Carson told his official biographer that the ‘wild-eyed, middle-aged’ Anthony greatly advanced his legal career when she marched into his bedroom at the local inn, attempting to brief him directly in an 1881 case against the Waterford, Dungarvan and Lismore railway company for assault. According to Carson, the case allowed him to showcase his skills in pleading and cross-examination. Carson in fact represented the railway company in the case. He had earlier represented Anthony and obtained £100 damages in an 1879 lawsuit against two local justices of the peace; this is probably the basis for his recollections. Anthony regarded his subsequent appearances against her (the last known one being in 1887) as a personal betrayal and used insulting language in court relating not only to him but to his mother.
By the time her activities began to be covered by the press (c. 1879), Anthony was already well-known in the courts, having brought between twenty and thirty lawsuits in the previous two years. She repeatedly borrowed money from people, gave security and then sued them for taking pledges without registering as pawnbrokers (allowing her to claim a reward as a common informer). She sued the Tallow Christian Brothers for illegally taking pledges after they allowed her sheep to be kept on their land to avoid seizure and lent her a small sum with the sheep as security. Alexander M. Sullivan claimed that she did this to the abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Mount Melleray, Co. Waterford, but failed on a technicality (this may be a confused recollection of her dealings with the Tallow Christian Brothers).
Anthony tried more than once to join religious orders as a novice; it is not clear whether she had ulterior motives. When cross-examined by Richard Adams in 1886, she stated that while she had visited America it was untrue that she had gone there dressed as a nun. During one lawsuit an opponent claimed she was divesting herself of assets by placing them in trust before entering a convent. This trust was never completed as it contradicted canon law, and Anthony subsequently sued James Murphy, a prospective trustee and Waterford merchant, for slander. When she handed him a summons, he threw it at her after a verbal altercation, assuming that as it was served by a woman the document could be of no importance. Anthony obtained a judgment by default and arrived in his office accompanied by bailiffs to make a seizure. Though Murphy managed to get the judgment set aside, he was obliged to pay her costs. (The case was settled out of court and her solicitor later sued to garnish the damages after she failed to pay him.)
In 1877 and 1878 the parish priest of Tallow, Fr Terence Prendergast, refused to admit Anthony to communion after she complained to his bishop that he was neglecting his duties. In 1885 she sued Prendergast for libel, alleging that her excommunication provoked rumours about her personal character and accusing him of writing anonymous letters slandering her to the national superior of the Christian Brothers and a Wicklow convent which she had wished to enter. She was subsequently harassed by a crowd which broke down her garden wall and damaged her fruit trees. On 1 August 1885 Anthony was attacked while returning home from taking steps to prosecute those who damaged her property; by her own account she was stoned by a mob whom she held off for two hours with her umbrella, escaping with torn clothes and hair and incurring defensive wounds on her arms and hands. Her subsequent claim for compensation had the most significant legal impact of her litigation; she obtained rulings upholding her right to go directly to the grand jury without first appearing before a presentment sessions and clarifying that the injuries she had received counted as ‘maiming’ under the relevant legislation, despite not involving loss of bodily parts. The latter decision was reported in the Irish Law Times and cited in subsequent compensation cases.
After receiving an initial award of costs in her suit against Prendergast, Anthony employed bailiffs to attempt a seizure at the parochial house. Another attempted seizure took place in Tallow on a fair day in February 1886, leading to a riot and the intervention of West Waterford MP, Douglas Pyne. The case was subsequently dismissed and newspapers reported popular celebrations in Tallow; Anthony attributed these to a ‘rabble’ seeking financial reward.
Anthony trimmed political statements to suit circumstances. When appearing before magistrates or grand juries, she often presented herself as a victim of Land League supporters and urged resistance to anarchy. When addressing ordinary juries, Anthony compared herself to Joan of Arc and Mary Queen of Scots (regarded as Catholic heroines), claimed to be as much in favour of home rule as anyone else, and spoke of her assailants as non-political ruffians. The legal memoirists who preserved her memory (recalled at second hand or in extreme old age, and often demonstrably inaccurate) present Anthony as a demented genius deploying an extensive knowledge of legal technicalities to undertake a prosperous career as an extortionist. Contemporary newspaper reports suggest this is exaggerated and that Anthony possessed the limitations as well as the abilities of an autodidact. Although she had an extensive acquaintance with legal authorities (on at least one occasion an appeal court judge congratulated her on her presentation of her case) she was often tripped up by technicalities and obliged to request postponements. (In some cases, however, the latter may represent attempts to prolong the entanglement of opponents.) She was inclined to treat suspicions as facts and to disregard regulations when conducting cross-examinations or addressing judges; she was told more than once from the bench that a man who behaved as she did would be prosecuted for contempt of court. An extreme example was her claim that the sudden deaths of lord chancellors Hugh Law and Edward Sullivan had represented divine vengeance for their rulings against her, with the implication that the judge before whom she was currently appearing might expect a similar fate.
Later life
By the late 1880s Anthony was in reduced circumstances. She was evicted from her house in Tallow by the Devonshire estate on 14 October 1885, but subsequently readmitted as a caretaker; several subsequent cases concerned squabbles with the caretaker of the neighbouring house over ownership of the garden. She disappears from the newspapers after 1889; this is probably when she was committed to Cork Lunatic Asylum, where she hung herself (c. 1890). There were no newspaper obituaries, apparently due to fear that she might have circulated a false report in order to sue unwary obituarists.
Anthony repeatedly emphasised in court that she came from a respectable family and was being persecuted by a ‘rabble’, perhaps reflecting a sense of lost or precarious social position. She was clearly paranoid and claims of her extortionate behaviour may not be entirely untrue, though this does not exclude the possibility that she and her sisters were also the victims of small-town predators targeting the vulnerable. While she can be seen to some extent as a pioneer of women’s involvement in the legal profession, it is also possible that Anthony’s emergence as a figure of ridicule may have delayed the acceptance of women legal professionals. When an 1886 meeting of the Solicitors’ Apprentices Debating Society discussed ‘the eccentricity of law and lawyers’, the Irish Times noted that ‘numerous references were made to Miss Anthony, the lady lawyer’ (3 Feb. 1886); when H. E. Redmond was one of two magistrates who jailed the Cork Examiner’s printer in 1888 for publishing National League reports, the Examiner suggested he had been rendered senile by the stress of his legal encounters with Anthony. Reactions to her near incessant litigation reflect the ease with which the Victorian court system could shift from theatre of popular entertainment to theatre of cruelty, and it is unlikely that she would have been consoled by the horse-racing fame during the 1890s of a chestnut mare called ‘Miss Anthony’.