A Compendium of Irish Biography/Ambrose, Miss

by Alfred Webb

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Ambrose, Miss, a celebrated beauty of the Viceregal court during the administration of the Earl of Chesterfield (1745-'7). She was a Catholic heiress, of very ancient descent, allied to the best families in Ireland, gifted with exquisite beauty, and possessed of considerable mental acquirements. At one of the Castle balls, given on the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne, she appeared with an orange lily in her breast, upon which Chesterfield improvised the following lines:

Say, lovely tory, where's the jest
Of wearing orange on thy breast,
When that same breast uncovered shows
The whiteness of the rebel rose?

His lordship used to say that she was "the most dangerous rebel in Ireland." In 1753 she married Roger Palmer, M.P. for Mayo (ancestor of the present Sir Roger Palmer of Mayo); and by his elevation to a baronetcy in 1777, became Lady Palmer. She is said to have lived to the age of one hundred years, retaining to the last a vehement hatred of the wrongs under which her Catholic fellow-countrymen laboured. Although rich, she spent the latter years of her life in seclusion in a small lodging in Henry-street, Dublin. ^{[1] [2]}

Authorities

1. Burke, Sir Bernard: Peerage and Baronetage.
2. Burke, Sir Bernard: Romance of the Aristocracy. 3 vols. London, 1855.