What do you think?
The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh: A Remarkable Irishwoman and Soldier
Christian – ‘Kit’ – Cavenaugh, born in 1667 in Dublin, grew up on a Leixlip farm. A dragoon in the Marlborough Wars, Kit led an adventurous life, courting women, fighting duels and arguing a paternity suit before the truth became known: Kit was a woman. After her husband and father of her three children, Richard Welsh, was press-ganged into the English army to fight in the European wars of the early eighteenth century, Kit disguised herself as a man and enlisted to find him. When she finally came face to face with Richard in 1704 she was enraged to find him in the arms of a Dutch woman. Kit’s adventures did not end there ...
253 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 28, 2013
About the author
Anne Holland
39 books1 followerLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
Anne Holland was a successful amateur rider who once rode at Aintree on Grand National day. She has written many books on horse-racing including Steeplechasing: A Celebration, The Grand National: The Irish At Aintree and All in the Blood.
Anne Holland was a successful amateur rider who once rode at Aintree on Grand National day. She has written many books on horse-racing including Steeplechasing: A Celebration, The Grand National: The Irish At Aintree and All in the Blood.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 27, 2021
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3748417.html
I am hugely grateful to Wim Uyttebroeck, expert on the 1693 Battle of Landen aka Neerwinden, for flagging this up to me. Christian Cavenaugh, born in Dublin in 1667, ran an inn there and married her barman; but then he was unexpectedly conscripted into the Duke of Marlborough's army and disappeared from Ireland completely. Christian Welsh, as she now was, decided to go looking for him by dressing as a man and enlisting at the Golden Last (which incidentally has just been refurbished); it took her several years to track him down, and then several more years before an army doctor treating her after the Battle of Ramillies discovered that she had breasts (her secret had survived earlier treatment for a hip injury). In the meantime she had courted many women in male guise, while forbidding her husband to go near anyone else once she had found him.
Once the secret was out, she became a camp follower, ensuring logistics and provisions for her husband in particular and his comrades, and also unapologetically and frequently engaging in the looting of civilian property. Her long-lost first husband was eventually killed in action. She married twice more, ending her life as Christian Davies. When peace finally came she got a pension from Queen Anne and on 19 November 1717 was admitted to Chelsea Hospital as a Pensioner; she is recorded there as a "fatt, jolly-breasted woman [who] received several wounds in the Service in ye habitt of a man".
Her account really is an extraordinary document. Since the late nineteenth century, it has been attributed to Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe; but this seems very unlikely as he died eight years before it was published. (And also I think he would have written it more smoothly.) It's a combination of detailed military history of the wars, which has been fairly thoroughly checked out for accuracy and consistency of dates, and Christian's own personal history, which seems a lot more vulnerable to inaccuracy - to give the most blatant example, we are told that between the Battle of Aughrim, where her father was supposedly killed, and the Battle of Landen/Neerwinden, where she herself received her hip injury, she ran the Dublin tavern, got married, had three children, wondered where her husband was for a year, and finally enlisted. But the two battles were only two years apart, so it seems improbable. However, it's clear from the rubric of the book that she was delivering it as oral history, without documentation, to an unnamed scribe, who then quite possibly finessed the military history research.
I really want this to be largely true. It fully caught my attention in the second sentence, where she states that her father's landlord soon after her birth in 1667 was an Arthur White of Leixlip. As it happens, an Arthur White of Leixlip, born in 1611, was the son of my 7x great-grandfather Sir Nicholas White and brother of my 6x great-grandfather Charles White/Whyte (therefore my 7x great-uncle, if you're counting). There is evidence to suggest that my Arthur White died before 1648; but he may well have had a son or a nephew of the same name, or Christian may be wrong about the dates. The coincidence seems a bit too good to ignore. (Especially since, as Cailtin White (no relation as far as I know) points out, a lot of her other Irish details are shaky.)
I was also struck by the local details regarding our part of Belgium. When she finally finds her husband in Breda, she is drinking a pint of "hougarde", ie the Hoegaarden blond beer which we still know and love today. After Ramillies, her secret is discovered while she is being treated for a skull wound at Meldert, which is the next village to Hoegaarden, very close to where B and U live. The bits about Flanders are very definitely written by someone who knew this part of the world. (The bits in Germany seem a bit vaguer - in particular the description of the Battle of Blenheim doesn't actually use the name "Blenheim" for it, which seems odd for the climactic battle of the earlier war.)
I've used she / her pronouns here, because that's clearly what Christian used, but she's equally clearly an early well-documented case of genderqueerness. I bet that she gave a lot of physical joy to the Dutch and Belgian women she courted, though they may have been puzzled that she did not go as far as most male soldiers would have done. (Of course, some of them may have known perfectly well, and been happy enough!) By her own account, supported by the existence of the Chelsea record, she was as effective (and brutal) as any other soldier in the army, and thrived living as a man.
And she was not alone - one of her early anecdotes is that a French officer who died in her parents' house in Ireland turned out to be a woman when she was laid out for burial. An appendix to the original 1740 book alleges that the dead French soldier had a device for easy urination standing up, which Christian then appropriated and used during her own military career. This seems perhaps a little too good to be true; but then so does the entire story.
A few years ago, Anne Holland produced a version of the Life and Adventures, The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh: A Remarkable Irishwoman and Soldier, which somewhat uneasily straddles the genres of novelisation, historical research and simply reprinting chunks of the original. It doesn't add a lot, to be honest, but it may be more readable for people less used to eighteenth-century style.
I am hugely grateful to Wim Uyttebroeck, expert on the 1693 Battle of Landen aka Neerwinden, for flagging this up to me. Christian Cavenaugh, born in Dublin in 1667, ran an inn there and married her barman; but then he was unexpectedly conscripted into the Duke of Marlborough's army and disappeared from Ireland completely. Christian Welsh, as she now was, decided to go looking for him by dressing as a man and enlisting at the Golden Last (which incidentally has just been refurbished); it took her several years to track him down, and then several more years before an army doctor treating her after the Battle of Ramillies discovered that she had breasts (her secret had survived earlier treatment for a hip injury). In the meantime she had courted many women in male guise, while forbidding her husband to go near anyone else once she had found him.
Once the secret was out, she became a camp follower, ensuring logistics and provisions for her husband in particular and his comrades, and also unapologetically and frequently engaging in the looting of civilian property. Her long-lost first husband was eventually killed in action. She married twice more, ending her life as Christian Davies. When peace finally came she got a pension from Queen Anne and on 19 November 1717 was admitted to Chelsea Hospital as a Pensioner; she is recorded there as a "fatt, jolly-breasted woman [who] received several wounds in the Service in ye habitt of a man".
Her account really is an extraordinary document. Since the late nineteenth century, it has been attributed to Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe; but this seems very unlikely as he died eight years before it was published. (And also I think he would have written it more smoothly.) It's a combination of detailed military history of the wars, which has been fairly thoroughly checked out for accuracy and consistency of dates, and Christian's own personal history, which seems a lot more vulnerable to inaccuracy - to give the most blatant example, we are told that between the Battle of Aughrim, where her father was supposedly killed, and the Battle of Landen/Neerwinden, where she herself received her hip injury, she ran the Dublin tavern, got married, had three children, wondered where her husband was for a year, and finally enlisted. But the two battles were only two years apart, so it seems improbable. However, it's clear from the rubric of the book that she was delivering it as oral history, without documentation, to an unnamed scribe, who then quite possibly finessed the military history research.
I really want this to be largely true. It fully caught my attention in the second sentence, where she states that her father's landlord soon after her birth in 1667 was an Arthur White of Leixlip. As it happens, an Arthur White of Leixlip, born in 1611, was the son of my 7x great-grandfather Sir Nicholas White and brother of my 6x great-grandfather Charles White/Whyte (therefore my 7x great-uncle, if you're counting). There is evidence to suggest that my Arthur White died before 1648; but he may well have had a son or a nephew of the same name, or Christian may be wrong about the dates. The coincidence seems a bit too good to ignore. (Especially since, as Cailtin White (no relation as far as I know) points out, a lot of her other Irish details are shaky.)
I was also struck by the local details regarding our part of Belgium. When she finally finds her husband in Breda, she is drinking a pint of "hougarde", ie the Hoegaarden blond beer which we still know and love today. After Ramillies, her secret is discovered while she is being treated for a skull wound at Meldert, which is the next village to Hoegaarden, very close to where B and U live. The bits about Flanders are very definitely written by someone who knew this part of the world. (The bits in Germany seem a bit vaguer - in particular the description of the Battle of Blenheim doesn't actually use the name "Blenheim" for it, which seems odd for the climactic battle of the earlier war.)
I've used she / her pronouns here, because that's clearly what Christian used, but she's equally clearly an early well-documented case of genderqueerness. I bet that she gave a lot of physical joy to the Dutch and Belgian women she courted, though they may have been puzzled that she did not go as far as most male soldiers would have done. (Of course, some of them may have known perfectly well, and been happy enough!) By her own account, supported by the existence of the Chelsea record, she was as effective (and brutal) as any other soldier in the army, and thrived living as a man.
And she was not alone - one of her early anecdotes is that a French officer who died in her parents' house in Ireland turned out to be a woman when she was laid out for burial. An appendix to the original 1740 book alleges that the dead French soldier had a device for easy urination standing up, which Christian then appropriated and used during her own military career. This seems perhaps a little too good to be true; but then so does the entire story.
A few years ago, Anne Holland produced a version of the Life and Adventures, The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh: A Remarkable Irishwoman and Soldier, which somewhat uneasily straddles the genres of novelisation, historical research and simply reprinting chunks of the original. It doesn't add a lot, to be honest, but it may be more readable for people less used to eighteenth-century style.
May 15, 2015
A cross-dressing Irishwoman goes to war to search for her press-ganged husband. I love these little nuggets of history.
June 21, 2022
I bought this during my trip to Ireland (2016) but didn't read it until now.
In the introduction, the author refers to the book as "written in the creative non-fiction style". This means that there are lots of sentences with "may have" and "would have".
Kit Cavenaugh was an Irish woman who became a soldier after her husband was forced into the English army in the War of the Spanish Succession in the early 18th Century. A lot of the book is set in what is now Belgium with the English fighting against the French.
In the introduction, the author refers to the book as "written in the creative non-fiction style". This means that there are lots of sentences with "may have" and "would have".
Kit Cavenaugh was an Irish woman who became a soldier after her husband was forced into the English army in the War of the Spanish Succession in the early 18th Century. A lot of the book is set in what is now Belgium with the English fighting against the French.
November 21, 2013
A review copy was provided by Killeen PR in return for an honest review
The secret of Kit Cavenaugh is told through kits actual accounts, excerpts and little added flare/dramatisation from the author.
Kit is our very own Irish Mulan! She is deeply in love with her husband Richard and is devestated to learn that he has been tricked into enlisting in the army and is now half way across the world on a ship destined for a strange, war torn land. Young men were bribed in whatever way possible if it got them onto a ship and into a uniform. Many did it as a way to escape poverty. The army offered a regular wage and food on a daily basis.
Kit is so determined to find Richard she decides to conceal her sex and enlist in the army in an attempt to find him. Her love for him is heart warming but the way she was so easily able to pawn her children off was a little disturbing. Throughout the story she seems to have very little maternal instinct!
Kit excels as a soldier and is thoroughly involved in life in the camps. She was a fearless fighter who impressed generals of the highest rank. In fact I think that Kit enjoyed life at war so much that she almost forgot about Richard. 12 years pass without much mention of him.
When they do finally meet again she finds that he hasn't been missing her as much as she missed him!
Perhaps the most surprising element of the book, for me was the lack of punishment upon the discovery of her sex. I thought the penalty would be extremely harsh but no. Everyone just seemed fine with it! Maybe I'm just influenced by too many Americanised films?
One thing that I felt ruined the book for me was the pictures in the middle. The captions gave away the entire story so for the remainder of the book I was just waiting for things to happen. I felt these pictures and illustrations would have been better placed at the end of the book.
Despite Kits cold nature the story was enjoyable. History Buff's will really enjoy the thorough descriptions of life at war and within the camps.
April 15, 2016
My second time reading this after a friend got me my own copy. What an absolute cracker of a tale!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews