Henrietta (Crean) Bennett (1817-1873)

She was a maternal grand-daughter of Nathaniel Warren M.P., Lord Mayor of Dublin, who was a first cousin of Sir William Johnson, 1st Bt. of New York. She came with her widowed mother to New York in 1834 and in 1840 married James Gordon Bennett, owner and editor of the New York Herald. Having witnessed her husband being horsewhipped in the street by an unelected hopeful for the role of District Attorney (John Graham) and heard the news of a bomb that was sent to the Herald's offices, plus all the slander thrown about by rival editors, she deemed New York as unfit to bring up her children and took them instead to Paris. Ironically, it would be her son, Gordon Bennett, who would later scandalize New York society from which he was eventually ostracized.