The Rebels of Ireland (35 page)

His father was white with anger. His eyes were blazing. But the eyes of the old Dutchman were even worse. They gazed at him silently, but with an awful, pale blue certainty that, before his family and before Almighty God, he stood accused and guilty. Maurice cast his eyes down before them.

“You have been paying court to this gentleman's granddaughter.” His father's face was tight with suppressed anger. “Without our knowledge. Without any reference to me. Or to you, Sir.” He turned to old Cornelius van Leyden.

“It is true, Father.”

“That is all you have to say?”

“I should have spoken to you.”

“But you deceived me, because you knew very well what I should have said. Do you not see the disgrace you have brought upon yourself and upon us all? And worse by far, do you not understand the terrible wrong you have done to this gentleman and his family, not to mention his granddaughter herself? Do you not see the wickedness of it, Maurice?” The Dutchman might be a Protestant, but it was clear that Walter had already conceived a respect and liking for old Cornelius van Leyden, and that he was hugely embarrassed as
well as angry. “How long has this been going on?” his father demanded.

In fact, it was not so long. Maurice had encountered Elena several times in Dublin the previous autumn, but it was only in the spring that they had started walking out together. They had kissed. Matters had gone a little further. He had hesitated to go beyond that. Marriages between Catholics and Protestants might not be uncommon in his class, but it depended on the family. If Elena had been the daughter of Doyle, whose Protestantism was entirely pragmatic, and who wouldn't have cared much what church his daughter's children belonged to, then things might have been different. But the van Leyden family were as sincere in their faith as Walter Smith and the Walshes were in theirs. It had been Elena who had been less bashful, more eager to experiment than he. For much of the summer, however, she had been away in Fingal, and they had only had the opportunity to meet a few times.

“We became friends in the spring, but we hardly saw each other all summer.” In so far as it went, this was true.

“How far has this matter gone?” Cornelius van Leyden's voice was quiet but insistent.

Maurice gazed at the floor. How much did the old man know? How much had Elena told him?

“Not too far.” Cautiously, he allowed his eyes to lift and observe the two men. He saw that his father was about to ask him what he meant, but then thought better of it.

“You will wait outside, Maurice,” his father said. “I shall speak to you later.”

As soon as the door had closed behind his son, Walter Smith turned to Cornelius.

“No words can tell my shame, Sir, for the wrong my son has done your family.”

“The girl was at fault also,” the old man said simply. “It was ever thus.”

“You are generous.”

“If there had been a child…”

“I know. I know.” Walter groaned. “I give you my word, he shall never come near her again. He shall also keep silent about the matter,” he added meaningfully.

“It would be best.” The old Dutchman sighed. “Were we of the same faith, our conversation might have been different.”

It was true, Walter thought, that if only the girl had been Catholic, she might have made an excellent match for his son. But there was nothing to be done about it, and soon afterwards, old Cornelius van Leyden went upon his way.

Alone with his son, Walter Smith did not hold back. He accused Maurice roundly of seducing the girl. It was bad enough that she came from a respectable family; that they were Protestant only made it worse. “What will they think of us?” he cried. Had matters gone further, he pointed out, had she conceived a child, there would either have had to be an impossible marriage, or Elena would have been ruined. Maurice was lucky not to be cast out of his family forever, he went on. “To think that your mother and I…” he began; but then, suddenly remembering Anne's behaviour with O'Byrne, he fell silent and threw up his hands in despair.

“You are never to see her again. Swear to me.”

“I swear,” said Maurice reluctantly.

And Walter Smith might have had more to say, but just then, from outside, came the sound of the great bell of Christ Church ringing out, not as it usually did, in a sonorous manner, but with a wild, urgent clamour. Tidy must have been hauling on the bellrope with all his might and main. Turning to the door, they both rushed out into the street.

People were running by. There seemed to be a general panic. Walter stopped an apprentice and demanded to be told what was going on.

“It's war, Sir,” the young man cried. “The whole of Ulster has risen. And they're on their way here.”

Though the news of the revolt in Ulster was certainly disturbing, and though within weeks it would spread across all Ireland, at no time in the months that followed did it ever occur to Walter Smith or any of his family, or anyone they knew, that one of the great watersheds of Irish history had just been passed. For centuries to come it would be portrayed as either a mass, nationalist uprising of the Catholic people against their Protestant oppressors, or else as a wholesale massacre of innocent Protestants.

It was neither.

On October 22, the Irish gentry of Ulster began a series of coordinated operations. In the absence of any trained commander, Sir Phelim O'Neill had assumed the leadership. He had, after all, the blood of the old High Kings in his veins. The aim of the rising was quite limited. Having decided that neither the Irish nor the English Parliaments would ever give them the security for their lands or the concessions to their Catholic faith as matters stood, Sir Phelim and his friends had decided to put pressure on the government by taking over the province and refusing to budge until some concessions were granted. Well aware that if the Scottish settlers in Ulster were harmed, the mighty army of the Covenanters might come over from Scotland to punish him, O'Neill had given strict orders that the Ulster Scots were to be left alone.

But it didn't work. Sir Phelim O'Neill was not a soldier. A few small inland towns let him in, but Ulster's strongly defended ports were all in the hands of tough Scottish Presbyterians; he led his men up to their walls, but the citizens weren't impressed and he couldn't take a single one of them. Worse, out in the countryside, he couldn't control the people or even his own troops. Soon bands of looters were roving the land. Quite often they were helped by O'Neill's ragtag troops. Falling on Protestant farmsteads—English or Scots were
all the same to them—they looted, stripped, and, if the people resisted, they frequently killed them. Nor was it long before Protestant settlers sallied forth from their walled boroughs to take their revenge in a similar manner. There was no single massacre; but day by day, week after week, there were scenes of scattered chaos and killing. Protestant deaths mounted: hundreds, a thousand; still it continued and spread beyond Ulster. The settlers, some of them stripped even of their clothes, were soon straggling into the ports to leave for England, or making their way south to the safety of Dublin, fifty miles away.

Meanwhile, the Justices in Dublin hastily called upon the head of the mighty Butler dynasty, the rich and powerful Lord Ormond, who, thanks be to God, was a member of the king's Protestant Church of Ireland, to take command of whatever forces the government could muster to deal with this terrible threat.

All through the month of November, the refugees were streaming into Dublin. And it was no surprise that some of them should seek sanctuary in the great cathedral of Christ Church. Still less was it surprising that they should find a ready welcome from the verger's wife.

Tidy's wife had never been busier. If one of the cathedral clergy should see a cluster of children's faces staring unexpectedly from the window of some underused lodgings in the precincts, or suddenly come upon a family camping by some old tomb in the crypt, and should ask the verger, “Is it really necessary, Tidy, for these people to be in the cathedral?” Tidy would only sigh and answer, “I can't stop her, Sir.” And since every Protestant in Dublin was united in outrage at what had been done to the godly folk in the north—and Christian charity should in any case have stifled any criticism—there was really nothing to be done. Nor could they very well complain at the substantial bill that the verger submitted for ringing the great bell for several hours when news of the rising had first come.

In all these ministrations, besides, the Tidys had one powerful champion.

If people had formerly considered Doctor Pincher an eccentric, if young Faithful Tidy had even thought the old man was going mad, nobody thought so now. Hadn't he warned of the Catholic menace? Hadn't he believed a Catholic conspiracy was brewing? He had. And now he was revealed as a prophet.

Doctor Pincher emerged into his new role like a swan. Every day he came to Christ Church, where he was received by Tidy's wife as a hero and taken to see the new arrivals. His thin, inky-black figure strode among them, but to each one he would bend kindly and say: “Take heart. I know what it is to suffer for the cause.” He was especially gratified one day when a grim Scots Presbyterian declared: “The fault was our own. It was a judgement of God upon us for taking the Black Oath.”

In the middle of November, the doctor even preached in the cathedral again, to a congregation swelled to capacity with Ulster refugees. Once again, he took for his text the words, rendered so timely now:

 

I come not to send peace, but a sword.

 

But there was no need for him this time to warn his congregation of the Catholic menace. They knew it all too well. His theme, on this occasion, was more inspiring. If their suffering had been terrible, he told them, they should not despair. For had not Our Lord declared: “The Son of man must suffer many things”?

The sword of Christ, he reminded them, divided the elect from the damned.

“Ye are the salt of the earth,” he cried. “Ye are the light of the world.” A quiver of grateful recognition passed through the congregation. “Be glad, therefore,” he admonished them, “for your suffering.”

The Catholic idolators might wield the sword and seek their blood. But in due time, the sword of Christ should strike them down.

“The unrighteous shall perish, and we, God's chosen, shall be brought into Israel, and there we shall build a new Jerusalem,” and now the doctor's voice grew in strength so that, despite his age, it thundered, “from which we shall never be driven out again, no, not in a thousand years.”

It was, by universal agreement, one of the finest sermons ever heard.