Sixty years old, marrying a woman forty years his junior, and ambushed on the road home by his own son.
On 27 August 1883, a man well into his sixties (so the journalist said) married a woman forty years his junior. Believe it or not, that was not the most interesting part of his day.
I found the King’s County Chronicle for 6 September 1883 while chasing something else entirely. “A King’s Co. Country Wedding. Scene: Clonfanlough.” Local papers in this period ran wedding notices as a paragraph, if they ran them at all. This one runs to five hundred words, written in the voice of a writer who knew exactly how good a story he had!
Although the frosts of well nigh sixty winters have shed a silvery radiance upon the head of Tom Coghlan of Clonfanlough, the indurating influence of that element does not appear to have penetrated so far down as the region of Tom’s heart.
Tom had married once before — “more than a quarter of a century” earlier, to a woman of “the numerous and wide-spread clan, Egan” — and that marriage had produced “a goodly array of young buds”: grown children, by 1883, of an age to have opinions of their own. His first wife had died only shortly before the events of this article. And when it became known that Tom intended to marry again — “a damsel of the house of Condron, his junior by forty years or so” — the reaction from those grown children was obviously not very positive! (Tom himself was the son of James Coughlan and Ann Condron — the Coughlans of plot 5 at Clonfinlough.)
The main event wasn’t the wedding at all
The ceremony witnesses “composed solely of the bride’s immediate relatives”. It makes you wonder if Tom’s family was not happy about this. The trouble started on way home after the service.
The parties on their homeward return met with no interruption till, upon nearing a point known as Molloy’s hill, a hostile band, under the leadership of John Egan, a relative of the deceased Mrs Coughlan, and Tom, her eldest son, opposed their further progress.
His own son literally led an ambush against his father’s wedding party, alongside a relative of the dead first wife. The new Mrs Coughlan, sensibly, urged an immediate retreat. Tom did not agree!
Tom broke from his friendly embraces when he saw that his wife’s people were receiving severe treatment at the hands of the opposite party. Casting himself upon these, he fought like a Paladin till a felon stroke administered by a loaded whip stretched him senseless upon the field of combat, whence the rival forces decamped upon a rumour spreading that the police were approaching.
He was carried to a nearby house, revived with “a little rest and some restoratives,” and recovered “to such an extent as enabled him to reach the festivities of his second wedding day.”
The matter went before the Ferbane petty sessions as a Crown prosecution for waylaying and assault against John Egan and Tom’s own son, Thomas, to be heard again at quarter sessions before Judge Nolligan.
I have not yet chased up what happened from there but it is on the list!
I have explored many marriage records in this research. I have rarely found one with a subplot quite so juicy!