Margaret Leeson was born Margaret Plunkett in Killough, County Westmeath. There were twenty-two children born to the family, although only three boys and five girls survived to adulthood. Their father was a Catholic man of property and, for the times, Margaret and her sisters received a good education.
When Margaret was still young, her mother contracted a fever and died. Her father was unable to cope and the children were scattered around to various relatives. When they returned to the family home some years later, they found that their eldest brother, Christopher, had taken over as master of the house. Unfortunately, Christopher was a tyrant who regularly beat and starved his siblings. He also prevented the young Margaret from getting married – not once but twice – whereupon Margaret ran away from home to the bright lights of Dublin.
In Dublin, Margaret was quickly seduced by a lawyer friend of her brother’s and became pregnant. In her memoirs, written more than half a century later, she appears philosophical about this fall from grace. She rather delighted in the fact that, because of it, she acquired her own home, which her lover rented for her in Clarendon Street.
After the birth and death of the baby, this relationship ended, and there were many more lovers of ever-decreasing respectability. Margaret had children by nearly all of her ‘protectors’, but none of them survived infancy. In her memoirs, written when she was a repentant old woman, Margaret calls this the ‘hand of Providence … wisely and mercifully’ taking the children away from a life of vice. She admits that her own ‘love of pleasure and want of reflection’ played too major a role in her life. In a classic case of denial, she also claims that her ‘heart was naturally good’, but that this natural good was perverted by ‘evil examples’.
After a long procession of evil examples had made their excuses and left – including one called Leeson – Margaret was financially comfortable and ready to become a full-time madam. In 1784, at the age of fifty-seven, she set up her own brothel in Pitt Street and employed handpicked young women from London’s theatre world to service her high-class clientele. The ‘men of fashion’ who flocked to Pitt Street included none other than Charles Manners, the duke of Rutland and the lord lieutenant of Ireland. This house of ill-repute enjoyed enormous success for a decade and Margaret became notorious throughout the land. Of course, she failed to lay aside any money against the future, and one day found herself with nothing but pocketfuls of IOUs from her unprincipled customers. She closed the brothel and retired to Blackrock with a companion, Miss Collins.
Margaret then reformed and found religion. Ironically, her penitence made her poverty all the more biting since she felt unable to accept handouts from her rich but racy former acquaintances. Eventually, they stopped offering and Margaret got poorer and poorer. She started to write anecdotal and amusing memoirs, hoping they would produce an income – either from their sale or from their blackmail value to some of her more high-profile ex-clients. While waiting for this to happen, she was arrested for a debt of £15 she owed to a grocer in Grafton Street, and held in the Four Courts Marshalsea, a debtors’ prison. She was bailed out by the governor of the prison – a previous client – and went back to living quietly with Miss Collins.
One night she and Miss Collins were out walking in Drumcondra when they were attacked and gang-raped. Shortly afterwards they both discovered they had contracted venereal disease, which, as Margaret sardonically noted, was an ailment she had managed to avoid all her professional life. Though cured of the disease, Margaret died shortly afterwards. She was sadly mourned by her friend, Miss Collins, who called the most famous brothel-keeper in Ireland an ‘exemplary, pious, worthy, charitable woman.’ Margaret is buried in St James’s churchyard, Dublin.