Although the Irish Huguenot writer Melesina Trench has been memorialised on a marble plaque on the south wall of Cathedral’s North Transept for nearly two hundred years, she only recently returned to popular notice when a new female peregrine arrived by the transept’s rose window in early spring this year. The bird was named “Mel” after her and so focus has turned to this largely forgotten writer. Both the peregrine and the author have shown their talons, with Melissa Trench, also known as Melissa Chevenix St George Trench, showing them in a scathing literary form about the great naval hero Horatio Nelson and his lover Emma Hamilton.
She was born in Dublin on 22 March 1768, as the only child of the Rev Philip and Mary Chenevix. Her wealthy parents were both dead by her fourth birthday and she was then raised by her widowed grandfather, the Rev Richard Chenevix, Bishop of Waterford, until his death in 1779, then a kinswoman Lady Lifford and finally her maternal grandfather Archdeacon Henry Gervais. From the age of thirteen onwards, Melissa was an independent heiress and able to live life on her own terms.
Always a bright and good-looking young woman, she was married at eighteen to Colonel Richard St George, an Irish officer, in October 1786. Two children were born to the marriage, but Richard St George died of consumption in 1790 which left Melesina a widow at the age of twenty-one. Although one writer claimed she was “alone in the world”, her striking good looks w.
