The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  Ultimately the recession hit Melbourne too, put an end to rewards for overlanders of cattle and sheep, and so set a limit to the adventures of Brodribb and his assigned convicts. Both Brodribb and Larkin went off now to work for Bradley, to be in place for Mary’s arrival at Coolringdon in the late southern winter of 1843.

  7

  IRELAND YOUNG AND OLD

  The car-boy who drove me had paid his little tribute of four pence at the morning Mass. The waiter who brought me my breakfast had added his humble shilling. And the Catholic gentleman with whom I dined and between whom and O’Connell there was no great love lost, pays his annual donation out of gratitude for old services and to the man who won Catholic Emancipation for Ireland.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  In 1843, as Mary Shields exercised her new Australian freedom, Thomas Francis Meagher, home from Stonyhurst at nineteen years of age, settled not in Waterford but in racy Dublin. Obviously he did not see himself as a merchant; he and others were persuaded he would make a lawyer. He enrolled in the Inns of Court, his application signed by his father’s friend, O’Connell, the Liberator himself. The florid young man took rooms in the fashionable south-east segment of Dublin between the Liffey and the Grand Canal, around Lincoln Place, and went to Dublin soirées with eagerness and an air of nervous striving, which made an impression on people of being foppish. Yet he was not unaware of the Liberties slums a little to the west, of the claustrophobic misery of older Dublin, between the Castle and the river, the stench, the washing-hung crevices of streets, and windows patched with paper. He was always a lusty fellow and was likely to have made early excursions, for curiosity and out of a Jesuit-repressed taste for low life, to Peter and Bride Streets.

  He did not spend time reading case law in the law libraries at the Inns or the Four Courts. Almost immediately on settling in Dublin, he joined the Liberator’s ‘Loyal National Repeal Association,’ founded three years before and headquartered for the time being in the Corn Exchange building on the Liffey quays. Repeal’s glittering aim was at one with his own: the legislative independence of Ireland. In his splendid coats and elegantly cut trousers, Meagher became a volunteer apparatchik, willing to attend Repeal rallies all over the country. He would please his eminent father by achieving election to the Repeal Parliamentary Committee, which liaised with Irish politicians serving in the House of Commons. In that way, he first sighted in some Dublin drawing-room the austere, well-regarded Smith O’Brien. But Meagher was as yet awkward with great men, willing to chase any stick the Liberator threw him, trying to adapt his schoolboy debating arts to real politics.

  Meagher had arrived in Dublin after the close of O’Connell’s lord mayoralty of Dublin, which had begun in 1841 with Repeal getting control of the Dublin corporation. But the predominant gestures of that mayoralty were still being talked about in a Dublin part loyalist, part nationalist. Lord Mayor O’Connell would bellow to the crowds who mobbed his carriage outside the Mansion House: ‘Boys, do yez know me now?’ And the roar would come back: ‘Ah, sure, aren’t ye our own darling Liberator?’ ‘Does the hat suit me, boys?’ he would ask, slanting his hat comically on his head. There would be a frenzy of cheering. But behind the posturing, there was substance: the Liberator was administratively gifted.

  The talkative youth Meagher, watchfully attending Repeal meetings with his handsome schoolmate from Clongowes, Pat Smyth, was aware too that O’Connell had recently been preoccupied by a large non-Irish issue: American slavery, the plausible serpent at the heart of that republic’s Jeffersonian Eden. In 1841, when the liberated slave Charles Lenox Remond visited England and Ireland, he felt entitled to ask the Lord Mayor O’Connell to sign a petition calling on Irish Americans to join the abolitionists. The result in America was an education for the Liberator. On one hand, abolitionists, brave Anne and Wendell Phillips and blazing William Lloyd Garrison, travelled from Boston to Ireland to greet him. By contrast, most of America’s Irish, including miners in Pottsville, and Bishop Hughes of New York, superintendent of a slave plantation in Maryland in his youth, resisted the concept that they had a unique duty to unite with abolitionists, and to oppose decent men and women in the South who had been friendly to them. Didn’t the Liberator know that Irish workers were America’s true slaves? Didn’t he know some slaveholders in the South used Irish to clear their swamps rather than risk the lives of valuable slaves? So O’Connell performed mental and oratorical somersaults to keep Repeal money flowing from America.

  He was now nearing sixty-seven, was overweight, but still possessed a resilient soul. His beloved wife and cousin, Mary O’Connell, had perished five years before of a respiratory disease. He bore great financial burdens, and was particularly exercised to secure the futures of his three sons. Maurice O’Connell, member for Tralee, was—a little like his father—an energetic philanderer; Morgan had served in Devereux’s Irish Legion under Simon Bolívar in South America but was now Assistant Registrar for Deeds; and John, member for Athlone, increasingly took over the administration of Repeal. The Liberator spent spacious sums on marriage settlements for all his sons, and his three daughters Ellen, Kate and Betsey.

  It was to maintain the O’Connell Repeal machine in Dublin, and meet the Liberator’s and other Repealers’ parliamentary expenses at Westminster, that Esther Larkin, leaving Mass at Clontuskert chapel, like hundreds of thousands of other peasants throughout the land, paid her Repeal ‘rent’ on the first Sunday of the month to local association wardens.

  Some young Repealers were beginning to feel that the movement needed a new voice to complement Repeal newspapers such as the highly Catholic, O’Connell-controlled Pilot. And so it was that a handsome, muscular, pensive young Protestant, Thomas Davis, five years older than Meagher and already admitted to the Bar, walked out from the Dublin quays to the thickets and open lawns of Phoenix Park, one day in 1842, taking along two interesting companions. One was John Blake Dillon, a Catholic contemporary, an extremely handsome and eloquent man from the Mayo-Roscommon border, a former Maynooth seminarian and a graduate from Trinity. The other was a talented young Monaghan-born journalist from the Belfast Vindicator named Charles Gavan Duffy. Under a large elm opposite Kilmainham the three junior Repealers paused, and here, Duffy claimed later, a jointly owned weekly newspaper was proposed to be an aggressive voice for Repeal.

  It was decided to call the paper the Nation. Davis wrote a prospectus that spoke of the new nationality, which would draw on Catholic, Protestant, Milesian (native Irish) and Cromwellian. In the Nation’s rented office in 12 Trinity Street, Thomas Davis and Gavan Duffy quarrelled constructively over whether the Belfast Protestants would ever take anything but a hostile attitude towards Repeal. But hope, excitement and fervour impossible to recapture marked the new paper’s appearance on 15 October. Duffy, recently married, was its managing editor, and—without family wealth—needed it to succeed. So it carried race results from the Curragh of Kildare and from Kilkenny, and advertisers such as the United Kingdom Life Assurance Company and Paul’s Everyman’s Friend for Corns and Bunions. Its first printing of 12,000 copies sold out by noon, despite the high cost of 6 pence per copy. It excited readers, particularly young Irish adults, by calling on them to be done with ‘rubbish nicknames…. With all the nicknames that serve to delude and divide us—with all their Orangemen and Ribbonmen, Tory men and Whig men … there are in truth but two parties in Ireland: Those who suffer from her National degradation, and those who profit by it.’

  As a safeguard, contributions on political matters would be printed unsigned, itself a confession that liberty of expression could not be relied on. But most observers could work out who wrote what. Duffy’s opening editorial complained of Ireland’s ‘mendicant spirit.’ Dillon attacked Irish landlordism. Davis criticised British policy everywhere, finding in the invasion of Afghanistan parallels to British occupation of Ireland. He also fervently attacked the touted option of emigration as any cure for Ireland. Equity, not emigration, was ever his li
ne.

  Duffy’s poem ‘Faugh-a-Ballagh’ (Irish for ‘Clear the Way’) also set the Nation’s tone:

  As your fears are false and hollow,

  Slaves and Dastards stand aside—

  Knaves and Traitors, Faugh-a-Ballagh.

  When he first heard Duffy’s verses, Davis himself was catalysed to write his own poems: For example, his ‘Lament for the Death of Owen Roe O’Neill’:

  Your troubles are all over, you’re at rest with God on high;

  But we’re slaves, and we’re orphans, Owen!—Why did you die?

  Owen Roe O’Neill, leader of the Gaelic forces against the Cromwellians, had died in circumstances bespeaking treachery in 1649, and this ballad did for the young Thomas Meagher what the Jesuits had failed to do: it connected the struggles of the Irish past with the aspirations of the present. The sentiments of Davis’s verse may seem merely workmanlike from this distance, but to his contemporaries he appeared to imagine the Irish for them in song, and their gratitude would be massive.

  The young men of the Nation still saw themselves as faithful votaries of great O’Connell. They published his Repeal Catechism, a series of questions and answers between an Agitator and a Farmer:

  FARMER: By what means then, was the Union carried?

  AGITATOR: The means were three-fold—atrocious fraud, the vilest corruption, and the most profligate exhibition of military violence.

  In the House of Commons, where he presently represented Cork, O’Connell controlled for now a loosely allied Irish party of between twelve and twenty members, depending on what issue was being voted. Smith O’Brien was still only sometimes with him. A former duelling opponent of O’Connell’s, the Tory Sir Robert Peel, was Prime Minister with a massive and hostile Tory majority, and was still a personal enemy. A quarter of a century past, in 1815, Peel had accepted a challenge from O’Connell, who felt Peel had called him dishonest in a parliamentary speech which depicted the Catholic Association and O’Connell as acting like affronted parties if they were offered less than their full demands. The first confrontation was arranged for Kildare, and when that fell through, for Ostend. In the latter case, Peel was accused of arranging for O’Connell’s arrest by the Home Office on his way through London. Now O’Connell’s political instincts, still bitterly personal and sweepingly universal, told him to make some unanswerable and climactic mass gesture against his old enemy, and Ireland’s, Peel.

  He decided that three million new members of the Repeal Association, commonly named Repealers, would be recruited in 1843, and Repeal would be carried by moral force. He planned to hold what the Times would dub ‘monster meetings.’ The idea was said to have come originally from a pug-faced Tipperary lawyer, Michael Doheny, who wrote in the Nation under the pen-name ‘Eirenach.’ These vast ‘moral force’ gatherings were designed as peaceful meetings which also served to indicate the potential size of the forces behind Repeal.

  One of the more important crowd-gathering devices for the monster meetings, in the midst of which the law student Meagher found himself that summer, was the procession which preceded the meeting itself. Among the floats that passed in front of O’Connell at the start of the Cork procession was one that featured two boys, one painted black, the other white. The black figure bore the label Free, since Westminster had abolished slavery in the West Indies. He displayed to the crowd his broken chains. The white figure, representing the Irish, wore intact chains, and a label round his neck which proclaimed: A Slave Still!

  Varying estimates exist for the numbers who attended these great events. The meeting at Castlebar in Mayo was stated by the Repeal press to be somewhere from 150,000 to 400,000 although a British army officer put the same crowd at 15,000. Esther Larkin, beginning to age under her unyielding widowhood, would have walked in a mass of farmers and peasantry to witness the Messianic entry of the Liberator to Tuam, the Galway monster-meeting venue closest to her, or else to the Athlone event in Westmeath, some 20 miles by road or River Shannon. It was possible that she, or her boys, attended both. Waiting for harvest or lambing, peasants had some time to spare in summer, and an independent Ireland under the Great Dan O’Connell would surely bring her husband home.

  The mass parades Esther and her sons experienced resembled moving forests, since marchers carried the green bough of liberty—some even entire trees—in their hands. Given that these needed to have been taken from landlords’ woods, the carrying of a bough was itself a political statement at which the Repeal wardens, O’Connell’s security force, were forced to blink. Other members of the crowd carried their membership certificates on the end of sticks, or strapped around their hats, coats or necks by green ribbons.

  When Esther reached the place where the platform for the speeches had been set up, she might have glimpsed the Liberator over the shoulders of masses of frieze-coated peasants and farmers, and beheld the banners stitched in red on green: Erin go bragh and Ireland for the Irish. The Repeal wardens, nicknamed ‘Repeal cavalry,’ led by Tom Steele, O’Connell’s chief warden, patrolled the perimeter of the crowd, giving it unity, and all around were the carriages of better-off supporters, and stalls for sale of food and non-alcoholic drink. Irish-speaking spectators often turned home now, satisfied to permit the Liberator to deliver his speech to those close enough to hear and take note.

  By the time of the meeting in Athlone on 24 June, O’Connell was under pressure to show that his movement was not traitorous. He attacked Peel, who ‘had the audacity to assert that Her Majesty had expressed herself against Repeal. It was a lie (immense cheering)…. Oh, God bless the Queen. Three cheers for her. (Tremendous cheers).’ But then he went on to promise the crowd what he always promised, and what they desired: the rule of just law from a sovereign Irish legislature.

  As massive as the monster meetings were, there were parallel meetings in the new world, at one of which in New York, attended by Governor Seward, a motion had been passed: ‘That it is the opinion of this meeting that, if England invades Ireland, she will do it with the assured loss of Canada by American Arms.’ Repeal members in America included some notable citizens, people from both sides of the slavery issue. One was James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a future President. The New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley was notable in Repeal, and an abolitionist. But the chief of United States Repeal was the son of slave-holding President Tyler.

  Other monster meetings occurred in the summer and autumn of 1843 at Dundalk, Wexford, Castlebar, and elsewhere. But the meetings which particularly captured the enthusiasm of Repeal’s young foot-soldier, Thomas Francis Meagher, were the ones held in legendary locations. The Hill of Tara in Meath, where the O’Neill kings of Meath ruled from the fifth to eighth centuries, and where the remains of their forts and banquetting hall stood, was the scene of a Lady Day, 15 August, meeting, all within sight of the sloping churchyard where the peasant United Irishmen—Croppies, as they were nicknamed—had been slaughtered by royal forces in a battle in May 1798. In September the Rath of Mullaghmast in Kildare, a hill fort where on 1 January 1577 Irish chieftains of two significant Kildare tribes were massacred by the forces of Elizabeth I, was used.

  As the summer ended, the Nation reported massive Repeal ‘rents,’ that is, collections. The rent for the week ending 4 September was £1,097. Throughout 1843 it came to total over £20,000, which helped pay for the newly decorated headquarters of triumphant Repeal, opened before the end of October on Burgh Quay, and named Conciliation Hall. Conciliation Hall featured a grand assembly room and gallery, all decorated with mouldings of Irish wolfhounds, shamrocks and round towers, and offices to accommodate a fifty-strong staff who administered Repeal and the monster meetings. The high tide of Irish confidence caused by monster meetings was never to be matched again in that century. But the axe was being sharpened. Peel had been informed by observers that at Mullaghmast in Kildare in late September, O’Connell had been crowned king of Ireland. O’Connell’s speeches had regularly defied Peel and British power. In Kilkenny he had roared,
‘Wellington never had such an army. (Cheers) There was not at Waterloo on both sides as many brave and determined men as I see before me today.’ In Mallow in June, Peel heard, O’Connell had uttered what became known as the Mallow Defiance. ‘In the midst of peace and tranquillity our Saxon traducers are covering the land with troops.’ Someone in the crowd called, ‘We are ready to meet them.’ To which O’Connell replied, ‘Of course you are. Do you think I suppose you to be cowards or fools? … We were a paltry remnant in Cromwell’s time. We are nine millions now!’

  Now the thirty-second, culminating monster meeting for that year was planned, to be held on 8 October at Clontarf on the north side of Dublin Bay. Clontarf was the scene of High King Brian Boru’s victory over a Viking invasion force and their Irish allies in 1014, and of his death from wounds in that same battle. The meeting would attract Irish from England, Scotland and Wales. Terence Bellew MacManus, a young Dublin woolbroker who had founded a business in Liverpool trading East Galway’s fine wool to the textile mills, chartered four steamers to bring Repeal supporters from England. Thomas Davis asked if, with 45,000 Irishmen in the British army, the government would dare call on the Irish to suppress the Irish? This rhetoric bespoke the fatal belief of Irish activists that numbers could somehow equal military organisation.

  Though recently O’Connell had been deliberately moderating his speeches, in Downing Street they did not understand that rhetoric and imagery were to some extent ends in themselves for the Irish; the uttering of violent metaphor a prayer for legislative equity. Far from being lawless, the meetings had in fact been heavily policed throughout by the corps of wardens. But in the notices of the Clontarf monster meeting posted throughout Ireland and in Merseyside and Glasgow, the Repeal officials had made the mistake of referring to ‘Repeal cavalry.’ When O’Connell saw the notice he denounced the phrase, but it provided Peel with an opportunity. He ordered that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland proclaim the meeting illegal. British warships appeared in the bay off Clontarf, and troops with artillery massed at Pigeonhouse fort on Dublin Bay. At 3.00 p.m. on the day before the meeting the proclamation proscribing it was pasted on walls. O’Connell had two hours before dark to decide whether to cancel or risk a collision between his cheering multitudes and the British army, in which every serving Irish private was, after all, only one man caught in a mighty machine! At Conciliation Hall, amongst his followers, there were some voices in favour of defiance. Meagher accepted O’Connell’s decision to cancel as the right one. But any attempt to arrest O’Connell should be grandly resisted!