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

by Thomas Keneally

  On the day of the proposed meeting then, the ‘Head Pacificator,’ Tom Steele, helped the 60th Rifles and the 5th Dragoons turn away the few brave spirits who came to Clontarf The Repeal rent defiantly increased afterwards, but the day after the failed meeting, warrants were issued for the arrest of O’Connell, his son John and seven others, including Gavan Duffy, editor of the Nation, on charges of sedition. The young men of the movement, Duffy, Davis, a young solicitor named John Mitchel of Banbridge, County Down, who was just emerging as a Nation feature writer, and the acolyte Meagher, all now expected that O’Connell would call on them to resist the arrest. At the time touring Mayo, Davis wrote: ‘We promised loud, and boasted high, “To break our country’s chains or die”; And should we fail, that country’s name will be a synonym of shame.’

  But O’Connell ordered his disciples not to oppose the arrest. That ensured there could not be massed resistance. The seven men, nicknamed the Traversers, were flatly arrested, brought to Green Street courthouse and charged with conspiracy before a packed jury. In various of the young men, an unease grew at this avoidance by O’Connell. There was an element of lost nerve, they thought, which sharpened other grievances they had. O’Connell, said the Nation set, was too Catholic. And the Repeal rent, coming from the shoeless people, instead of maintaining O’Connell and his lieutenants in undue style, ought to be fed back to the poor in widespread Repeal reading-rooms, where tenant and artisan could educate themselves.

  In the light of O’Connell’s arrest, however, William Smith O’Brien at last sent from his house at Cahirmoyle in Limerick a £5 subscription to the Repeal Association, together with an application for membership. His accompanying letter expressed his scepticism about the policy of British governments since Emancipation. ‘Fourteen years have elapsed since that event, and the experience of each succeeding year has tended to show the fallacy of these expectations, and to dissipate those hopes.’ From summer travels in France, the Netherlands and Germany, O’Brien believed that Ireland suffered from unique levels of poverty, and he considered the moral pressure represented by O’Connell’s meetings to be legal and honourable.

  O’Brien’s widowed mother Lady O’Brien, reading that her 40-year-old son had joined Repeal, wrote from Dromoland Castle telling him she wanted to ‘clasp your knees and hold you fast until you gave a promise that you would separate yourself from these ungodly men.’ Indeed, joining Repeal was by some lights the fatal decision of his life. His loyal wife Lucy suspected as much, and her husband’s alliance with O’Connell passed like a shadow over the nurseryful of young O’Briens in Cahirmoyle. By late January 1844 O’Brien would come forward to chair a session of the Repeal movement at Conciliation Hall as the most visible and esteemed Protestant convert of all to Repeal.

  At liberty on bail, O’Connell continued to call for utter calm. ‘Keep the peace for six months, at the utmost twelve months longer, and you shall have the parliament in College Green again.’ But in February, four judges directed an all-Protestant jury to find the 70-year-old O’Connell and the other Traversers guilty. They were all permitted to remain at large, however, pending sentence. In the interim between verdict in February and sentencing in May, a meeting of the Repeal Association was held in which the shaken and despairing O’Connell proposed to disband the organisation. Under the candlelit columns of Conciliation Hall, Duffy and Smith O’Brien argued against the idea. In compromise it was voted that all the newspaper editors—Duffy of the Nation, Barrett of the Pilot and Dr John Gray of the Freeman’s Journal—resign from the Association so that any indiscretion of theirs might not rebound on the Liberator and Repeal.

  When O’Connell returned to the Green Street court for sentencing on 30 May he was cheered and applauded by Repealers, including Meagher, in the courtroom, and many members of the Bar stood as he passed. He was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment and fined £2,000. Duffy and the other Traversers were sentenced to nine months. The Liberator’s lawyers got leave to appeal to the House of Lords, but in the meantime the prisoners were taken in a police cart to the south side of the river, to Richmond bridewell—a prison for civil cases such as debt—which Gavan Duffy found surprisingly pleasant. The governor and his deputy were allowed to sub-let their houses and gardens to the prisoners.

  The edition of the Nation which appeared the week Duffy and O’Connell went to prison was printed in green ink.

  In O’Connell’s absence, Smith O’Brien’s was for the moment the face and voice of Repeal. At weekly meetings and at speeches in his home area, his level, statistical tone and honourable demeanour attracted more people to Repeal than did the Liberator’s son John O’Connell. The Repeal rent surged to £3,000. This was due to the influence of O’Brien in attracting affluent Protestant nationalists and to the imagined penal hardships of the Liberator. Between Westminster and Conciliation Hall, O’Brien, living in Dublin in economical lodgings in Westland Row, now had little time for the idyll of Cahirmoyle, for Lucy and his young family.

  On the evening of 13 September 1844, as the prisoners assembled for dinner in Richmond bridewell, they were told that their appeal to the House of Lords had succeeded. Next morning, after a celebratory breakfast, the Liberator was driven to his house in Merrion Square in an ornate triumphal car 30 feet high. It was a characteristic O’Connell event—200,000 men took part, it was claimed. But gaol had shaken the Liberator, and now freedom did not favour him.

  As O’Connell grew uncertain, Meagher began to gain a greater presence within Repeal, and to become more vocal on some of the proposals O’Connell and his son John now brought before the committees of Repeal. The organisation, said John O’Connell on his father’s authority, should work not for total Repeal but for Ireland to become a self-governing unit within a federal Great Britain—what would be called, later in the century, Home Rule. Taking a lead from adored O’Brien, dandy Meagher despised the idea. All the Liberator and his son seemed to be offering was a timid constitutional nip and tuck. It would need more than that. Meagher had taken fire as O’Brien introduced him to the dreadful statistics of the decline of Irish linen manufactures, and the quantities of Irish produce—grain, dairy products, livestock—exported each hungry year. These wrongs grew directly out of the Union with Britain. And Meagher had recently read Carlyle’s The French Revolution and absorbed the idea that the sovereignty of the people would one day soon irresistibly assert itself. Yet he was still boyishly uncertain, as a later confession to Gavan Duffy seems to show. ‘Flaunting and fashionable as I sometimes was,’ said Meagher, ‘I thoroughly hated Dublin society for its pretentious aping of English taste, ideas and fashions, for its utter want of all true nobility, all sound love of country, and all generous and elevated sentiment.’

  The loose alliance of writers, orators and activists associated with the Nation began to be referred to as ‘Young Ireland.’ It is not certain where the term came from—there were Young’ movements throughout Europe; Mazzini’s Young Italy was the foremost instance. ‘Young Ireland’ may have been attached to the Nation group by the Warder, the Northern Unionist paper, which also suggested the term ‘middle-aged Ireland’ when talking about Smith O’Brien. Young Ireland wanted total Repeal, and to achieve it many of them were willing to accept the idea of armed uprising.

  The Nation’s occasional swipe at Repeal headquarters was very mild, but O’Connell’s touchier supporters complained about Davis’s series of articles, ‘Letters of a Protestant on Repeal,’ which argued that Protestant power was so strong that nationality could not be achieved without it. Protestantism’s hold on Ulster was weakening, claimed another Repeal paper, the Pilot, with blithe inaccuracy. Sectarian perception, ever Ireland’s poison, began to do its work between the Pilot and the Nation.

  As John Blake Dillon’s law practice absorbed his efforts, and as management of the paper, and the building of circulation and advertising absorbed Duffy’s, Davis became editor. He had by now become something akin to an outcast in polite Protestant circles, but
was too passionate to notice.

  One of the most renowned members of Young Ireland was the young Unitarian lawyer John Mitchel. Mitchel possessed blazing eyes, had great charm and was intense in a more absolute way than the playful Meagher. He had been born in Derry in late 1815. His father, the Reverend John Mitchel, who had been associated with the United Irishmen of the 1790s, had seceded from the Orange-dominated wing of the Presbyterian Church in Derry, when his son was still a child, and had found a Unitarian post in Newry, County Down, the town on the estuary of the Bann. At school in Newry, young Mitchel met an older, milder boy, another Northern Protestant, John Martin. They would go together to Trinity, into Repeal, into Young Ireland and on into shared exile and long years of struggle, sharing a friendship that was to last half a century.

  Mitchel and Martin were both at Trinity in the days of Davis, graduating in 1834, and John Martin studied medicine but was saved from the practice of it by inheriting a modest but profitable estate named Aston near Loughhorne, County Down. Like O’Brien then, he was a landlord. Mitchel in the meantime worked in his uncle’s bank in Derry, hating it. He was an asthmatic, and had the toughness and fixity of purpose that often characterises those who habitually struggle for breath. In Newry, as he was studying under a solicitor, he sighted a beautiful 16-year-old named Jane, or Jenny, Verner, a student of Miss Bryden’s Select School. His sister Matilda, Matty, arranged an introduction and provided chaperones for their walks together. But in the winter of 1836–7, Captain Verner intended to take his daughter to France on an educative tour, and rather than be parted from her, Mitchel suggested an elopement. The young couple hired a boatman to take them from Newry Harbour out to the Liverpool steamer, and then, upon landing, went on by coach to Chester to seek a marriage licence. Waiting for the licence at their hotel, in conditions of the most stringent chastity, Mitchel was reading Jenny a novel by a young English Tory named Disraeli, when the Verner parents and a policeman broke into the room. Returned in custody to Newry, he was released after two days when a judge dismissed charges of abduction. The Verners had by now hidden their daughter with friends in the countryside, but Mitchel tracked her down, fell back on his limitless eloquence and pursued a more conventional courtship. If the Verner parents had realised the shifts and griefs through which John Mitchel would lead Jenny, they would not have been won over, but the marriage took place in February 1837. His meek schoolfriend John Martin stood by him at the altar in an austere Presbyterian church at Drumcree, and would be a reliable friend to both parties and to the children of the marriage.

  In 1839, when O’Connell visited Newry, Martin and Mitchel were already devout believers in Repeal, were on the dinner committee, and were captivated. They joined the Repeal Association just before Meagher in May 1843. After the Nation began publication, Mitchel went down to Dublin to introduce himself to Davis at the Nation’s editorial offices, and contributed to the paper from his law office in Banbridge. His father the Reverend John Mitchel died in O’Connell’s Repeal year, by which time Jenny had given birth to two sons and a daughter at Dromalane House, the Mitchel family home. Needing to support Jenny and his babies by his law practice, John Mitchel could contribute for now only intermittently to the Nation, but when he did, as in his article ‘The Anti-Protestant Catholics,’ he generally managed to upset the Liberator.

  In early 1845, Thomas Francis Meagher came into Conciliation Hall out of the spring air above the Dublin quays to witness one of the bitterest Repeal meetings to that point. Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, had offered to establish colleges in Belfast, Cork and Galway, where Catholics and Protestants could study together. But the Catholic bishops had already decided Peel’s colleges to be ‘dangerous to faith and morals.’ O’Brien spoke for the colleges, but in a two-hour speech the Liberator condemned the Colleges Bill as ‘a nefarious attempt at profligacy and corruption.’ When Davis replied, the Liberator said that everyone knew the national bard considered it a crime to be Catholic! ‘There is no such party as that styled “Young Ireland,” ’ cried the Liberator in what Gavan Duffy called a ‘tipsy rhodomontade.’ ‘There may be a few people who take that denomination on themselves. I am for Old Ireland…. I shall stand by Old Ireland; and I have some slight notion that Old Ireland will stand by me.’ Smith O’Brien asked the Liberator to withdraw the slighting nickname ‘Young Ireland,’ and faced with O’Brien’s moral authority, the Liberator did so. Davis, relieved and filial, rose to applaud him, and to everyone’s astonishment, burst into tears before he could finish speaking. There was a temporary reconciliation, with Davis weeping and shocked, and O’Connell holding him by the hand and crying, ‘Davis, I love you.’ Despite the amity in which the session ended, in the lawyer Michael Doheny’s judgment it was this bitter meeting from which ‘the Association never recovered.’

  Young Ireland wished to create a meeting ground away from the Liberator’s ‘rough demagoguery.’ So the ’82 Club was founded, in part as a social group where ideas could be uttered without the rancour that now typified Repeal meetings, and in part as if to create a highly informal officer corps for some coming national resistance. A uniform was devised for members, for in its name the club looked back to the Volunteers of 1782, predominantly Protestant gentlemen who had mustered on College Green and successfully demanded an Irish Parliament. Even sober Smith O’Brien wore the ’82 Club uniform. He declared in a Kilkenny speech, ‘I am not sorry that the Government should feel that the dress we wear wants nothing but the sword attached to it to constitute us as officers of the Irish people.’ In their sashed uniforms the ’82 Club met at the Rotunda, where in the Pillar Room dinner was served and—John Martin, gentlest of members of the Club, would remember—young Meagher, the emergent orator, wore his tailored green and gold club uniform splendidly. Mitchel thought Meagher’s accent marked by Stonyhurst. But: ‘in speaking of Davis, his Lancastershire accent seemed to subside; and I could perceive, behind the factitious intonations of Cockaigne, the genuine roll of the melodious Munster tongue.’

  The morning after an ’82 Club affair, Mitchel, who had left lawyering to work full time at the Nation, met Meagher at the editorial office (which had by now moved to D’Olier Street, very close to Repeal headquarters). ‘We walked out together … almost into the country, near Donnybrook. What talk!’ Mitchel said that Meagher spoke fervently of politics, ‘but had much to say concerning women and all that eternal trouble, also about Stonyhurst and his college days.’

  As Old and Young Ireland grew apart, in Australia Mary Shields was becoming inured to her work in a slab timber and bark homestead. Had she heard anything of her husband O’Flynn and of her lost child Bridget? If living, Bridget would now be six or seven years. Where was O’Flynn? Was he dead, or serving in the British army in the West Indies or India; was he an itinerant Irish labourer, a servant, an industrial worker in Manchester, or an emigrant to North America? Had letters been received? Had he perhaps perished, cancelling out the M beside her name in the convict records? Or did she anticipate ultimately filling out the same application for reunion as Hugh had? In courting her, did Hugh break the news that that would not work?

  Apart from the bush flies, ants, large but not particularly vicious spiders, and the occasional hut-intruding brown or red-bellied black snake, a particular terror to the natives of snake-free Ireland, the homestead must have seemed habitable, and freer and more pleasant than the Factory. As the Australian spring came on, in the rush of activity around shearing when excitement, talk and the flow of liquor were at their peak in the Monaro, Larkin and Shields took each other as partners. The following July, screaming at a bark ceiling, she gave birth on a bed of saplings and leather strapping to a boy. Though an observing Anglican, Brodribb seemed philosophic about these liaisons between felons; such flexibility, shocking to visitors from Britain, was not considered extraordinary in New South Wales.

  Brodribb himself was to be married that year, 1844, and bring his wife Eliza Matilda Kennedy to Coolringdon. She was a cult
ivated young woman who had grown up on her father’s pastoral stations. In the bush’s natural democracy, her children when young would play around the woolshed with such convict children as the Shields-Larkin son, or under the care of Michael O’Flynn, the boy from Whitby, now nearing ten years of age.

  The new child was baptised Thomas by Father Walsh at the end of August 1844. The priest gave the couple the usual talking-to for begetting an Australian bastard. If wise, Hugh took this in silence. After all, Mary’s sentence would be fully served by October the following year. She would then be free to live and marry as she chose. And one day he would get a conditional pardon, making him his own man within the colony’s borders. Besides, like other convicts, Hugh must have thought that if authority could make his marriage to Esther a dead letter, he was in return entitled to be indifferent to the letter of authority, even to the Canon Law.