The Rebels of Ireland (79 page)

“Oh, Conall.” His wife shook her head. “I hope to God you may be right. For if you're not, we shall all be destroyed.”

“Then you will help us?”

“I am your wife, Conall.” She sighed. “Just one condition I make.”

“Which is?”

“Never ask me if I believe.”

After leaving Rathconan, Patrick took MacGowan to Glendalough, which the Dublin man had never seen before. They also took note of the hamlets they passed. Patrick was pleased with the day. Though Conall and his men up in the mountains could only be marginal to any action, he was proud that he had an organization in place up there. “Besides,” MacGowan pointed out, “you never know whom you may need.” At the end of the day, they made their way down to Wicklow town, arriving there at nightfall.

The next morning, they inspected the place. Conall had warned
them that his two sons-in-law there had no interest in the cause, but Patrick already had a merchant in the town who had volunteered, and he gladly took them round.

Like most Irish towns of the time, it had a barracks with quite a full garrison: Protestant officers, Catholic men. They seemed well-disciplined and quite smartly turned out. “We've tried to persuade some of the troops to join us—secretly, of course,” the merchant informed them. “But no luck so far.” Nonetheless, he informed them, he had twenty good men in the town. By midmorning they had parted from him and started back towards Dublin.

They were both rather cheerful. Patrick certainly felt that they were making good progress in Wicklow. A month ago, he had been down in Wexford where his old friend Kelly had told him: “The gentry here are absolutely split into two parties, but many of us, including myself, are with you.” In other parts of the island, however, that lay outside his own remit, especially in Munster and Connacht, little progress had been made. “We shall all have to work hard so that Ireland is ready,” he remarked to MacGowan, “if the French do agree to come.”

Yet whatever the uncertainties both men, for their different reasons, could express confidence. MacGowan's reasons were practical.

“The Ulster men are formidable,” he observed. “They are the backbone at present. But if a proper military force arrives from France—I mean ten thousand men or so—then I believe the effect upon our Catholic population would be incalculable. Up to now, any protest has been crushed, and they have no hope. But once they see the French—we'll have a hundred thousand men the next day. Even the whole English army would find it difficult to move about the island with every man's hand turned against them. We'd harass them and wear them down, just as the Americans did.”

Patrick's reasons were vaguer, yet perhaps even more strongly felt. It was not so much the Catholic generality in whom he placed his trust, important though they were. It was the involvement of his own, Old English class that moved him.

If the great ducal house of Leinster had been the patron of the Catholic cause in Parliament, it was no less a person than the old duke's handsome younger son, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had now emerged as leader of the cause in Dublin. He had been profoundly affected by the ideals of the French Revolution. “All men are equal,” he would remind his friends, “the duke and the street sweeper, the Protestant and the Catholic. And all social systems which deny such an obvious truth will sooner or later be swept away.” And he practised what he preached. He'd stop in the middle of a Dublin street and talk to some modest labourer with just the same, simple honesty with which he'd have spoken to a noble lord. He cut his hair unfashionably short; and in his manner of dressing, you might have taken him for a modest Paris tradesman rather than an Irish aristocrat. Seeing Patrick's unusual household with Brigid the peasant girl, he had taken him for a member of his own class who shared the same egalitarian outlook. “It's up to us, Patrick, to take the lead,” he had once confided in him. “I feel better, having you by my side.” And even if some of Lord Edward's ideas seemed a little too radical to Patrick, he warmed to the aristocrat's noble idealism.

Two weeks ago, Patrick had chanced to meet him at his cousin Eliza's house. Taking him to one side, Lord Edward had confided: “Patrick, I'm going to make my own approach to the French, to back up Tone. Between our two efforts, I'm sure we shall persuade them. But I beg you, not a word to anyone yet.” If this confidence—and the fact that he had a slight family connection with the great aristocratic dynasty—gave Patrick a certain snobbish delight, the idea that they were fighting side by side for the cause of the Irish people was imbued, in Patrick's mind, with an almost mystical quality.

Not that his religion was intense. Brought up by a physician father of liberal outlook, and coming of age when the French ideas of rational enlightenment were all the rage, it wasn't surprising that Patrick's religion was kindly rather than devout. If Wolfe Tone and the Ulster Presbyterians, who were now so important to him, privately thought of their Catholic allies as medieval obscurantists,
Patrick would not entirely have disagreed. “I believe that the world must have been created by an eternal, all-encompassing being that we call God. And Christianity expresses the divine nature. But I don't believe much more than that,” he once confessed to Georgiana. “So I suppose I'm what people nowadays call a Deist.”

“So are most of the clever men I know,” she replied with a smile, “Catholic or Protestant.”

This in no way prevented him from going to Mass or making his confession—and certainly not from fighting for justice for his fellow Catholics in Ireland. Yet if he had no interest in visiting the holy well of St. Marnock, as his grandfather had still done, when he thought of himself and Lord Edward fighting for the ancient Catholic cause, he felt that he was fulfilling a sacred trust, and he experienced a sense of rightness, as if this was what his ancestors, and no doubt the deity Himself, had destined him to do.

They were ten miles from Dublin when they met Hercules, in the company of Arthur Budge, riding towards them.

It was many years since Hercules had spoken to his cousin. Even when Patrick had come up to him before the parliamentary debate of '92, he had not said a word in reply. But now, seeing him coming from Wicklow, together with that cursed Catholic merchant John MacGowan, he did not hesitate.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded roughly.

“I'm after taking Mr. MacGowan to see Glendalough,” Patrick answered with a bland smile. “Did you never go there, Hercules? It's a lovely spot. St. Kevin's hermitage may still be seen.”

Hercules looked at the two men with disgust.

They were all the same, these Catholics, he considered. Insinuating and deceitful. Jesuits to a man. He would never forget that John MacGowan had pretended to be a Protestant so that he could sneak into the Aldermen of Skinners Alley. Once a liar, always a liar, as far as Hercules was concerned. As for Patrick, his loathing for his
Catholic cousin had only grown down the years. If as a young man he had been jealous of the love his own mother felt for Patrick—her preference for his cousin, he'd sometimes suspected—by the time his grandfather had left Patrick the legacy, it had become clear to him that his cousin was only preferred because he practised the Catholic arts of manipulation. Dishonesty: that was all it was. As for Patrick's attempt to persuade him to change his convictions before that parliamentary debate, it had been contemptible. Did the devious Catholic really imagine he would be swayed by these hypocritical appeals to his better nature—from a man who, himself, had been living in sin with his concubine for years? No, Patrick was nothing.

But what was he doing here? This tale about Glendalough was obviously a lie, intended to taunt him. But what did it conceal?

If Hercules was suspicious of the two Catholics, it was not surprising. The fear of the suppressed Catholic majority was so endemic in governing circles that almost anything a Catholic did might be seen as evidence of a conspiracy of some sort. When tensions between Protestant and Catholic textile workers had flared up in Ulster, and the Catholics had formed groups they called Defenders, to protect themselves against Protestant mobs, the government had seen it as a conspiracy. As a result, the Defenders had spread, and turned into just the sort of disruptive secret society that the government feared. Before that, down in County Wexford, some rural disturbances against the high tithes and other exactions made by the clergy had soon been denounced as another Catholic assault on decency and order. The charge was absurd, but despite the fact that his own family estate was in the same county, and he should have known better, Hercules had chosen to believe it.

In the last three years, however, the usual fear had turned to alarm. The Catholic Defenders seemed to be spreading and merging with the United Irishmen. Wolfe Tone and his friends were clearly up to something—but what? The Castle men weren't sure. Would revolutionary France try to foment trouble in Ireland? Quite likely. But
nobody could find any clear evidence. FitzGibbon and the Troika did not intend to wait meekly for something to emerge. They took action. In every barracks, military men were drilled. A series of raids on suspect United Irishmen served to frighten many of their friends. Landowners were told to be vigilant. New justices of the peace were appointed and given extra powers of search and arrest.

It was exactly this process that had caused the two men to undertake their present journey. Hercules was going to Wexford. None of the family had been down to Mount Walsh since the previous year, since his parents had decided to spend this summer in Fingal. And though his easygoing father had assured him that the Wexford countryside was quiet, Hercules had decided to go to see for himself. As for Arthur Budge, his journey was more official. His father had been urging him for some time to return to Rathconan and run the estate, and now he had also asked the government to appoint Arthur as local magistrate in his place. It was as a justice of the peace, therefore, with stern injunctions to watch out for trouble, that Arthur Budge was now on his way to spend a month at Rathconan. As they were on terms of friendly acquaintance in Dublin, Arthur had invited Hercules to accompany him and spend the night at Rathconan upon his way.

Having parted from Patrick and MacGowan, Hercules turned to his companion.

“I hate those men,” he remarked. “If they had their way, Ireland would be plunged into chaos.”

“You fear chaos,” Budge replied grimly. “But don't forget, I fear something worse.”

“What is worse than chaos?”

“Catholic rule. Remember, a century ago, when King James brought Catholicism back to Ireland, it only took months for the papists to start taking over everything. It can happen again, and it could be worse. If the Catholics come into power, they'll throw every Protestant settler off his land. We Budges will be lucky if we escape naked with our lives.”

“And what about their allies, the Protestant Patriots, and the Ulster Presbyterians?”

“They will lead the Catholics to victory, then they will be overwhelmed by them. It is inevitable.” He grunted. “You think you are fighting for order. But I know I'm fighting for my life.”

“Don't worry,” said Hercules quietly. “We'll destroy them.”