Dublin Folktales (7 page)

The Papal Bulls declaring O'Hurley's consecration as a bishop, his letters of introduction, and all his documentation were produced in evidence against him when he himself appeared as a prisoner, in court in Dublin. Earlier, on arrival
in Ireland, O'Hurley travelled quietly to Waterford. But he was recognised, captured, and placed in prison to be interrogated. He managed to escape and moved up the country to continue his work.

He travelled to Carrick-on-Suir, where he was welcomed by the Earl of Ormond. However, while he was sheltering at Slane Castle he was seized by Thomas Fleming, Baron of Slane, and in chains was brought to Dublin. It was said his sufferings on the road were intense and that every indignity and hardship possible was inflicted upon him by his captors. Lodged securely in chains in Dublin Castle, O'Hurley was brought before Loftus, the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, and Sir Henry Wallop, for examination. He freely told his interrogators that he was a priest of Rome, and an archbishop, to boot. The captured cleric was confined in a dark, dismal, and fetid dungeon in the Birmingham Tower, at the centre of the castle. He was kept in chains there until the following year while interrogations went on. Despite a long series of examinations, no crime was discovered against him, other than having a different faith to that of the established church.

In frustration, Wallop ordered that O'Hurley be subjected to the ‘Boots Torture', in the hope that if he could not extort a confession from him, then he might force him to deny his professed faith and to embrace Protestantism. It is recorded in
Collins Chapters of Old Dublin
that the executioner placed the archbishop's feet and calves in tin boots filled with a mixture of salt, bitumen, oil, tallow, pitch, and boiling water through which ran small streams of boiling oil. They fastened his feet in wooden shackles or stocks, and placed fire under them. The boiling oil penetrated the feet and legs so deeply that morsels of skin and flesh fell off and left the bones bare.

If the officials of the government gathered there in the Castle Yard hoped that this torture would turn O'Hurley's beliefs around, they were mistaken. During all his agony, the archbishop did not cry out beyond praying that Jesus,
Son of David, would have mercy upon him. Even this searing torture could not wring a confession of falsehood from him. Finally, an exhausted O'Hurley lay on the ground, just short of death but in such a way that the executioner feared he had exceeded his orders of torture to confession. He had the victim carefully removed from the apparatus and taken back to his cell where he received medical treatment for his appalling injuries.

In time, the archbishop recovered to face another danger concocted by his tormentors. Both Loftus and Wallop were to be replaced in office by Sir John Perrot. There was to be a formal ceremony of handing over the sword of office as power passed from the pair. Loftus and Wallop thinking that the new regime would release O'Hurley, decided to try him by court martial and have him condemned to death, before they left office.

Loftus told the story two years later in his official report:

The archbishop, who could no longer walk because of the injuries to his feet, was drawn on a hurdle through the castle garden. He was taken away without any noise or fuss, such was the haste of his arch-enemies in getting rid of him. They may have feared that the people would raise a disturbance and rescue their minister from death, if it were known that he was to be executed. Loftus and Wallop ordered that he be brought out of the castle before sunrise, and before the people were up, to be hung on the public gallows, a distance away from the seat of power in the castle.

It was said that only two townsmen met him as he was hauled on his way to the place of execution. This pair and William Fitzsimons, a friend of his, accompanied O'Hurley through his final journey to his public hanging. Archbishop O'Hurley was hanged near St Stephen's Green, which was then outside the city. The Green was then an osiery where rod-like willow was grown for the construction of houses of clay and wattle and for making baskets which were widely used at the time.

To prolong the condemned man's agony, his three executioners hanged him with a sort of noose made of sturdy interlaced willow twigs, the effect of which was to slowly strangle him rather than to hang him. It is said that the site of the public scaffold for executions was where modern Fitzwilliam Street crosses Baggot Street, known as Gallows Road, when O'Hurley and many more were put to death.

The bodies of the condemned were thrown into a trench beneath the scaffold following the execution and O'Hurley's dead body was thrown there to rot with the others. He was dead and could cause no further trouble to the high and the mighty and those with beliefs contrary to his. However, his friend William Fitzsimons had the remains of the martyr recovered and enclosed in a coffin. He saw to it that they were reinterred in a consecrated burial place. He had to wait until darkness had fallen before he had the remains brought to the old burial ground of St Kevin's, in Camden Row near the Meath Hospital where they were prayed over and laid to what was hoped a final rest. Although a Protestant cemetery, St Kevin's had come by custom to be used by Catholics and Quakers for burials. But if his tormentors thought that was the end of it, they were mistaken. No sooner was he dead than the song ‘Slane's Treason' or ‘The Fall of the Baron of Slane', was written and became widely known. It was set to music by Richard Cruise, the distinguished harper.

Followers of the archbishop made pilgrimage to his grave and people reported seeing his defiant ghost celebrating
mass on nights when the elements rode wild over Dublin City. It seemed as if restitution was being sought from the heavens for an injustice. According to
Burke's 1879 History of the Irish Lord Chancellors
, ‘Multitudes of pilgrims for three centuries thronged to his tomb, which the fancy, perhaps the superstition, of the people clothed with many legends.'

His body may have died, but the people of Dublin kept the Limerick man's memory alive in their hearts. He became one of the most celebrated of Irish Catholic martyrs, who chose to die rather than deny his convictions. Even in death, O'Hurley was never far from the heart of Dublin and its goings-on. At the start of the nineteenth century, St Kevin's cemetery became a target of the sack-'em-up body-snatchers. Determined action by the authorities apprehended the thieves and peace returned once more to this corner of Dublin.

Another Pope in Rome was to recognise the work of this singular man. Dermot O'Hurley was beatified by Pope John Paul II in September 1992 as one of seventeen Irish Catholic martyrs who died for their belief. The archbishop is commemorated in his native Limerick by the Archbishop O'Hurley Memorial Church in Caherline County Limerick. St Kevin's church closed in 1912. The old St Kevin's graveyard has been converted into a modern public park now hidden away on Camden Row near the busy Wexford Street. It is a place of peace, at last. There are no longer any reports of a hanged archbishop celebrating a ghostly mass over the grave of a man who gave up his life for his conviction.

One dark night in Chapelizod some years ago, a black dog that no one owned began to howl. He did not stop for many hours. It is still remembered chillingly by those who heard the disturbing dirge as it roiled around the small houses of the town. Some said it was just an unfortunate dog who was lost and was howling for its master to come to rescue it from the empty streets where nothing and nobody stirred. But others said it was a Banshee, in animal form, come to foretell the death of a chosen one.

It is said the Banshee only comes for someone from one of the great families of Ireland, those with names beginning with an ‘O', as in O'Neill, O'Donnell, O'Brien. But many other families whose Anglicised names do not carry the ‘O' nonetheless have an ‘
Ó
' in Irish;
Ó
meaning descended from. So the Banshee could be calling for any Irishman, whose name is known only to the harbinger of death.

Few chose to leave their homes to seek the keener that night. Most pulled the curtains closed and left the night outside. Some prayed the visitation would pass their home by. Some knelt and made a sign of the cross while they prayed; others shrugged and kept their prayer private to themselves. Few slept easily in their bed until dawn came.

The following morning, the dog was nowhere to be seen, not on the streets of Chapelizod, not in Phoenix Park beside
it, not on any of the roads leading to the town, nor in the surrounding parishes. It was as if the phantom had simply vanished. People asked one another what it could have been, but no one could say for certain what they had heard that night. In the natural order of life, some older people passed away in the weeks following that weeping through the streets, so who knew what happened to the soul that was destined to be taken that night. It was the sort of story that Chepelizod takes in its stride.

Sheridan Le Fanu lived in the Phoenix Park in the Royal Hibernian School during the first eleven years of his life. His father, Thomas Le Fanu, a Church of Ireland clergyman, was appointed to the chaplaincy of the school for orphaned and abandoned children of members of the British Army. Interested in the unexplained as he was, Sheridan Le Fanu made sure to feature Phoenix Park and Chapelizod in his stories of Gothic horror. He was called to the bar in 1839, but abandoned law for journalism, newspaper ownership and ghost stories, some of which were told in such detail about Chapelizod that their footsteps may still be followed by late-night wanderers to this day.

In 1851,
Dublin University Magazine
published his
Ghost Stories of Chapelizod
, a collection of three stories: ‘The Village Bully', ‘The Sexton's Adventure', and ‘The Spectre Lovers'.

In ‘The Spectre Lovers', Peter Brien leaves nearby Palmerstown, in the early hours of the morning, with a head full of drink, to return to his grandmother's house where he lives. He pauses on the bridge over the Liffey. Upstream, as he watches, small houses begin to appear on the bank of the river behind the town's Main Street. He wonders why he has never seen them before, and wanders around into the Square.

To his horror, he sees a troop of soldiers, dressed in uniforms of a bygone age, marching towards their barracks with terror on their faces at what might be following behind. Le Fanu describes it as a column of foot-soldiers,
marching with perfect regularity, and headed by an officer on horseback. As they pass by, Peter falls into step with an officer. He leads him to an old ivy-covered house beside the graveyard. The house has a green door with a bright brass knocker on it.

There they meet a young woman in an upstairs room, keening for her lost treasure. She and the officer point to a stone sill and say the treasure is there. When Peter looks to where they point, he sees, to his horror, a small baby smiling back at him with outstretched arms. Instead of accepting the child's embrace he faints at the enormity of it all. He recovers consciousness on the ground outside. He sees that the house has returned to its familiar derelict state.

His grandmother tells him that what he saw was the ghost of the Royal Irish Regiment that was garrisoned in Chapelizod. An old neighbour tells him he saw the ghost of Captain Deveraux at the house. Deveraux was said to be responsible for a young woman's ruin and death. The twist in the tale comes when Peter goes climbing about on the top of the ruined building to see if he can find real treasure. He falls and dies and is buried in the graveyard along with everyone else involved in the story.

The story of ‘The Village Bully' relates the tale of Bully Larkin who challenges Long Ned Moran to a fistfight at the top of Barney's Hill. Larkin sets his sights on a young woman who likes Ned better. When Ned yields to the Bully's taunts, Larkin beats him so badly that Ned later dies from his injuries. However, it is just a little too long afterwards for a charge of murder to be brought against Larkin. Some time later, on a moonlit night, as Larkin returns from his work, across the park and starts down the hill for home, a long, lean figure climbs across the graveyard wall. It runs up the hill and accosts Larkin who falls down with the effects of a stroke, in shock. Larkin, in a twist of fate takes his own time to die. Not being able to work for a living, Larkin becomes destitute and relies on alms from the people he tormented
in his prime. He is buried in the same graveyard alongside Long Ned Moran.

With two stories already set around the graveyard, Le Fanu features the cemetery in the third story: ‘Sexton's Adventure'. The parish sexton, Bob Martin, drinks a good deal more punch than is good for his health and than is consistent with the good character of an ecclesiastical functionary. His thirst was such that at times he drops in on drinking friends who had forgotten to invite him to the drinking session. He misses no opportunity to attend wakes or anything else that passes for an excuse to consume drink. He befriends Phil Slaney, the proprietor of a public house on the road to the city, just outside the town of Chapelizod. It is near to where the old turnpike or toll gates stood on the road. Slaney does not drink alcohol to any great extent when the friendship begins. But such is Bob Martin's engaging company and store of stories and gossip that the publican begins matching the sexton drink for drink and before long is a drunkard himself.