The Rebels of Ireland (100 page)

“I had to give him quite a bang on the head with my pistol,” MacGowan explained when the three of them were alone. “Then I gagged him and tied him up in the alley, and prayed no one found him before I could get back. I thought I'd have to get a cart from my house when, by God's providence, I recognized your carriage.

“But the rising…” William began weakly.

“It's over, William. You could see it was collapsing before Emmet left. There's nothing but some drunks in the street, who have killed several innocent people, and who nearly killed your grandmother. You must rest now. Nobody knows who you are, and that's for the best. We'll decide what to do when we know more in the morning.”

It was Georgiana who devised the plan. The following morning, she went to the Castle herself to ask for information. She then declared loudly to the officials there, and to her servants when she got home, that she wasn't staying another day in Dublin if the government couldn't keep better order than that; and she practically ordered MacGowan to accompany her to Mount Walsh, and to bring his nephew with him. By late morning, they were on their way.

They spent the night at Wicklow, where MacGowan made some enquiries. In the morning, capriciously, Lady Mountwalsh decided to board a vessel which was leaving for Bristol that day. MacGowan's nephew went with her as a servant. When they disembarked at Bristol, the young man changed his identity again, between the dock and the inn, so that he now became her grandson William. A week after that, with personal letters to her relations in Philadelphia and letters of credit to several merchant houses, the Honourable William Walsh, who so far as anyone knew hadn't been in Ireland for years, embarked on a ship bound for America.

“As soon as it's certain that no one has given you away, you can return,” she told him.

The rising of Robert Emmet was very brief. As a rising, it was an utter failure. The Wexford men, after looking for him half the night, melted away like the rest. Russell, Hamilton, and their friends found the men of Ulster sceptical—with good reason—and Ulster did not rise. The mobs in the Dublin streets were dispersed by troops in the end, with some loss of life, but not before they had killed several innocent people, including the judge and clergyman whose murder Georgiana had witnessed. About a dozen men with pikes were arrested, most of whom were later executed. Some others were transported. But that was all. For weeks the government expected a larger insurrection.

But there was none, and the leadership was gone, and Napoleon looked elsewhere. With only two exceptions, the leaders of the revolt vanished abroad.

Emmet remained. Though racked by a sense of guilt at the useless deaths he had caused, his main reason for continuing to reside near Rathfarnham was the presence of Sarah Curran, the girl he was courting there. He begged her to elope with him to America, and had she agreed, he would have emigrated and become no more than a footnote to history. As it was, more than a month after the rising, he was found and arrested.

The sixteen-year-old girl who had acted as his housekeeper was also thrown in jail. Since she was only the daughter of a farmer, she was interrogated and lightly tortured. The authorities made clear their nicety of feeling, however, when it came to Sarah Curran: as the daughter of a gentleman, she was, of course, only questioned most politely. She was not unpunished, though, for loving Robert Emmet. Her father, a lawyer with liberal ideas, being now desirous of showing his loyalty to the government, threw her out of his house and cut her off entirely.

There was one other casualty. Russell, who had urged that the rising should go ahead, and who had failed to rouse Ulster, returned to Dublin in a futile bid to rescue Emmet from jail, was caught, and was executed. Some of his friends thought he was seeking martyrdom.

But to Georgiana, it was truth which was the greatest casualty. It was not long before the government, reverting to ancient prejudice, declared that the rising had been a strictly Catholic affair. “How they can say it,” MacGowan pointed out to her, “when Emmet is a Protestant—as, indeed, is every single one of the leading conspirators—I cannot understand.” Even the conservative Roman Church was accused of complicity, since, it was argued, the conspirators must surely have told their priests all about it in the confessional. The spirit of Hercules was still very alive in the Ascendancy.

But the person of Lord Mountwalsh was very dead indeed.

A week went by before a certain smell caused neighbours to seek out the spot where he lay. By then, his disappearance from his household had been well known. Georgiana herself had gone to make the identification. That one of the rebels should have killed such a hated Ascendancy figure was not surprising, but how he came there was a mystery. His servants knew he had left in a hurry. And a military patrol, discovering the depot late on the night of the rising, had reported finding an empty hansom cab waiting at the place. But the cab had vanished later, and the cabby was never heard from. So the thing remained a riddle, and Georgiana herself was not inclined to pursue the matter.

“And the fact is,” she would often remark as the years went by, “that it's young Emmet who, after all, has triumphed.”

For if Robert Emmet in life had been unfortunate, history had prepared him a place among the heroes. That September, at his trial, he scorned to defend himself; but then, the jury having found him guilty, he claimed the last word by making a speech which all Ireland heard, and which even his accusers admired.

“I was there,” Georgiana liked to remind people. “The judge tried to interrupt him, but he had his say. And what a gift he had. I've heard Grattan, and many others, but he would have surpassed them all.”

Using the material he had already worked up in his manifesto, but adding to it the passionate inspiration of the final moment, he drew his rising together and launched it into the annals of national legend with his peroration. He asked only, he declared, to depart in silence; his noble motives need not be explained.

 

Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character; when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.

 

His words would echo, and never cease to echo, in Ireland's mind thereafter.

In March of the following year, young William Walsh, residing in Philadelphia, was greatly surprised to receive a letter from his grandmother telling him firstly that, all enquiries into the rising having ceased without any mention of his name, it was safe for him to return. And secondly, that he should do so at once, since he was already the Earl of Mountwalsh.

 

FAMINE

1828

 

T
HERE WAS NOBODY
like her father. When he picked her up in his great, strong arms and looked at her with his laughing eyes, she knew there was nobody so brave and strong in all of County Clare.

So when her mother said that she was afraid of what Mr. Callan the agent might do to him, Maureen hardly heard. Father could crush little Mr. Callan with one arm, she thought to herself.

Not many people would have cared to take on Eamonn Madden. Though he was the youngest of the four brothers, he was the largest. They were all proud. “On our father's side, there are Maddens with fine estates in many parts of Ireland. On our mother's side, we are the descendants of Brian Boru himself,” her father had told her. “Along with all the other O'Briens, of course,” he allowed. Down in the rich parklands towards Limerick, a lordly O'Brien owned the huge castle and estate of Dromoland; and there were several other O'Briens among the prominent landowners of Clare. His mother's
family might have been only tenant farmers, but they felt themselves, however distantly, to be of the same great descent.

Eamonn was not only large and strong, he could run like a deer. Hurling he loved: he would pluck the ball out of the air and run with it in a single movement that was beautiful to see. “Your father's a wonderful dancer,” he mother had also told her.

As a very young man, before he married her mother, Eamonn had a dashing reputation for all sorts of devilment. A dozen years ago, when a landlord a few miles away had threatened to evict a widow from her husband's cottage the very month after his death, a storehouse had been burned and some cattle maimed on his land in the middle of a dark night. A message had been left for the landlord, and the widow had stayed, rent free. Most people believed that Eamonn Madden had led that raid, and it had made him something of a hero in the locality.

Such illicit rough justice had always been part of life in the countryside. Sometimes it might erupt into a local rising, but more often it consisted of isolated incidents. At different times and places, the men who banded together would go by different names, though generally they were known as Ribbonmen, or Whiteboys. But whatever his past, Eamonn Madden did not hold with violence now.

“There are better ways of getting justice than maiming cattle, Maureen,” he would tell her. Although she was only nine, both her parents would share their thoughts with her sometimes, because she was the eldest. “Daniel O'Connell has shown us that.”

O'Connell, the Liberator, the greatest man in Ireland. If her father was a hero, O'Connell was a god. But it was because of O'Connell that her mother was so worried now.

“For this time,” she said, “he's gone too far. And pray to God, child,” she said to Maureen, “that he doesn't cost us our house and home, and all that we have.”

If Eamonn and his brothers carried themselves with pride, it wasn't just because, like many Irish people, they considered them
selves to be the descendants of princes. It was above all because, within living memory, the family had occupied a much larger land-holding. Three generations ago, their great-grandfather had been the tenant of a substantial farm, though it actually belonged to a landowner who lived in England. Down the generations, this holding had been subdivided amongst sons, some of whom had left. By the last generation, Eamonn's father had been down to about twenty acres, and now even that had been divided into four. Yet in his own mind, Eamonn felt that he represented, at least, his grandfather's holding, which some of his older neighbours could still remember. As for the land he rented, he privately considered it as his own.

Maureen loved the countryside of County Clare. From the wide waters of the Shannon estuary in the south, to the strange, stony wilderness of the Burren in the north, Clare had a magic all its own. If down in lower Munster, the mountains of Cork and Kerry caused the prevailing south-westerlies to release huge quantities of rain, here in Clare the Atlantic winds swept in unchecked over low hills and bogland, stony fields and water meadows. Sometimes, on windy days, it seemed to Maureen that the little thorn trees and briars dotting their land were so bent by the breeze that they must, at any moment, tear themselves from their roots and fly wildly, like so many witches, towards the island's interior.

Down by the Shannon, the soil was rich. Here in the centre of the county, around the market town of Ennis, the landscape varied, but the soil was relatively poor. Nonetheless, wheat and oats were grown there, barley and flax. And, of course, the potato.

They might have only a few acres, but her family lived quite well. They kept a cow for milking, a number of pigs, some hens, and a dog. There was also a donkey which pulled her father's cart. They grew cabbages, mostly, and potatoes.

Her great-grandfather's sturdy, two-storey farmhouse was still there to be seen; Eamonn's abode was more modest—a long, single-storey cottage with thick, dry-stone walls and a thatched roof. Like everyone else in the region, they had a turf fire, since turf was plen
tiful and wood fuel almost nonexistent. And if the wind could seep through the dry-stone walls, it hardly signified, for the climate of Clare was mild. There were three children in the family so far: herself, her younger sister Norah, and her little brother William; though another baby was on the way. They had good linen shirts which their mother had made, woollen dresses and stockings, and sound boots for the winter. So they were comfortable enough.

And they ate well—three times a day, usually. If her father had been to the market, then he might bring back a little meat or fish; there was often some cabbage or other green vegetable; and their staple diet, which kept them all well fed and healthy, was the nutritious potato.

The potato: what a blessing it was. “It's manna from heaven,” her father always used to say, “America's gift to Ireland.”

Her father was an intelligent man. He could read and write, and saw to it that she could, too. He liked to know things; he was always curious. And since she was his eldest child, and his son was still only an infant, he liked to talk to her. She knew, therefore, that the potato had been brought from the New World many generations ago; and when she was a little girl, he had explained its properties to her.

“You see these, Maureen?” He had taken a seed potato, from which little white tubers were sprouting like tiny, curling horns. “Very few roots form their own buds, but the potato does. These tubers contain the nourishment for the new shoots that will grow from them. The shoots will form stems with their own roots and leaves, from which will come the new crop of potatoes. So that's all you need to do: dig up the potatoes, keep some back for seeding, replant the seed potatoes in the spring, and you'll have a fresh crop in the autumn. And as it happens, Ireland has the perfect climate for them. They like our mild, damp weather.”

“So do the Indians in America eat the potato wherever they find it, growing in the wild?” she asked him once.

“You would think so. But they do not. Left to themselves, the tubers from the seed potato shoot up towards the surface and catch
the light. Then the new potatoes grow near the surface, and they're green and bitter. You wouldn't want to eat them at all. That's why we keep the seed potatoes in a dark place, and pile the earth up over them when they are planted.”

Their land lay in stony terrain. But the fields had been cleared and the stones used in dry-stone walls, several feet thick in places. Like his neighbours, Eamonn Madden planted potatoes for an early crop in August, followed by a later crop in October or November. Their nutritional value was unrivalled. With a little butter and milk, a few vegetables or some fish, the potato could produce a race of healthy giants, so long as you ate enough. And the Irish did. When Eamonn Madden was working hard on the land, he'd consume fourteen or fifteen pounds of potato in a day.

Could anything be objected against the potato as a crop?

“It is subject to blight,” Eamonn admitted. There had been numerous potato blights, some quite serious, in recent decades. “But against that, you must consider three things,” he would add. “The first is that the potato produces far more food per acre than anything else. The second, that the blights are usually local, and soon pass. But the third thing, which is sometimes forgotten, is that potato crop failures are less frequent and less severe than the failures of cereals. There is actually less risk, Maureen, in planting a field of potatoes than there is in sowing a field of wheat or oats.”

Her father worked the potato field with his spade, and all the family helped with the harvest. The pigs they kept were partly fed on potato peelings, and provided manure for the fields in turn. Once a year, the family killed a pig for their own consumption, but the rest of the pigs were fattened and sold to market. “That pays the rent,” her father told her. This regime left him many months in the year when he could go and work for others. He would also earn money by carting, travelling quite large distances sometimes.

Sometimes, he would take Maureen with him. Once, they went up to the huge, stony wilderness of the Burren. She had been impressed by its bare loveliness, and quite surprised to see sheep graz
ing there. “You wouldn't think they could find enough nourishment here, would you?” her father remarked. “Yet they do, and the herbs they find amongst the rocks give their meat a particularly fine flavour.” They had also visited the mighty cliffs of Moher, and she had gasped at the huge, sheer drop, almost a thousand feet, into the roiling waters of the Atlantic far below. Then, as he held her, he said “Lean forward,” and she had leaned out over the cliff and felt the great rush of air as the Atlantic wind struck the cliffs and came racing up, thrillingly supporting her and pushing her back. “There's nothing between us and America from here,” he called, “except that churning sea.” She didn't know why she found this thought so exciting.

“Shall we ever go there?” she called back. It was a natural question. Most of the farming families she knew seemed to have a relation in America. One of Eamonn's brothers and two of his uncles had gone there with their families. It was the better-off people who went to America. The poor could not afford the fare.

“Why, would you want to leave Clare?” he shouted.

“Never,” she cried.

Another time, they went down to the shores of the Shannon and watched the fishermen going out in their little curraghs made of skins.

“The lands along the Shannon here are known as the corcasses,” Eamonn said. “The blue corcasses, as we call them, are wonderful soil; but the black carcass is so rich that you can get twenty harvests out of it before you have to manure.” He said it with as much pride as if he owned it.

But mostly, he went into the local town of Ennis, taking the cart in early morning and returning at dusk. But whenever he asked her to accompany him there, she tried to find an excuse. She dreaded going into Ennis.

It was not large, but it was a place of some importance. Barges brought goods from the northern inlet of the great Shannon estuary, up the River Fergus to Ennis. It had a cattle market and a court-
house, and you could buy all sorts of things there. Once, she remembered, because it was going cheap, he had bought a load of seaweed there, which had been shipped up from the Shannon estuary. When they got it home, he asked her to help him spread it on the potato field. “It feeds the soil,” he told her. “Down by the coast, they use it instead of manure.”

But it was the road into Ennis that she hated.

There had been landless folk in Ireland for centuries. In a way, they were part of a natural process. When the lands of a chief were subdivided amongst his sons, they soon took over the lands of the larger tenants, forcing them onto smaller holdings. The tenants, in turn, subdivided their holdings, and so on down the scale to the cottager, with his acre or two, and below him, the landless labourer. Even Cromwell, by kicking out a layer of Irish landlords in favour of English ones, had only added one more to the endless waves of displacement down the generations.