Ellen Courtenay’s ultimatum to O’Connell, declaring that she had received promises of assistance from ‘many persons,’ and that ‘it would make her fortune’ to denounce him publicly, was posted to O’Gorman Mahon, the young Member of Parliament for County Clare, at the end of February, 1831. It was exactly a year later that, in the Fleet Prison in London, she added the date to the last footnote to the pamphlet, which was published and at once broadcast over England, by the Editor of the Satirist. He must have made a very handsome profit on the sale of so small a publication at the price of half a crown per copy. The pamphlet comprises twenty-seven small pages of narrative in large black type, followed by ten pages of footnotes in smaller type, which are mainly concerned with a denunciation of O’Connell’s public activities as an Irish agitator, and are written in the familiar style of all his political critics at the time.

The first footnote, for instance, denounces ‘this man of atrocity’ for having ‘violated the sanctity of the Lord’s day by changing even its title, and styling it “the O’Connell Sunday”’ with the object of ‘wringing from the poor Peasantry their last penny .... to enable him to pursue his insatiable ambition.’ And the concluding footnote, which is quite obviously written to serve as political propaganda for quotation throughout England, fills four pages of close type.