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

by Thomas Keneally

  Of John Martin, Mitchel’s friend and the Irish Felon’s unlikely editor, Duffy said that he was upright, simple-minded, in feeble health; ‘as unfit to play a part in a revolution as in a pantomime.’ The Felon’s edition of 8 July, largely put together by young Devin Reilly, reported an attempt to arrest Martin on a charge of treason-felony at the offices of the newspaper. But Martin hid in the suburbs, since a special judicial commission had been appointed to deal with the rash of radicalism, and he wanted to make it adjourn for lack of men to sentence. By using couriers, he and Devin Reilly managed to produce a further edition of the Felon on 15 July.

  After the judicial commission had adjourned, Martin drove up to the College Green police station, was quickly indicted by the grand jury, and refused to take bail. Bail money, he said, might better be used on Famine victims. In an attempt to help Martin, Lalor wrote to Under-Secretary Redington, assuring him that the articles with which Martin was charged had been written by himself and by Devin Reilly.

  In Newgate Martin found Gavan Duffy already installed. For as Duffy was walking to dinner at his home in the suburb of Ranelagh on the Saturday evening of 9 July, a party of detectives had arrested him too. The staff of the Nation still managed to get the edition on to the streets. ‘On this Saturday evening Mr Charles Gavan Duffy, the Proprietor, was arrested under the New Felony Act for the articles in pages 441, 2, 3.’ The articles nominated by the authorities were ironically very Mitchel-ite, the article being ‘How To Break Down a Bridge or Blow One Up.’ Also in residence at Newgate, Martin found, were the Tribune editors, O’Doherty and D’Alton Williams, and their printer Hoban. One of the articles for which they had been arrested had been entitled ‘Blood for Blood,’ a reference to 1798 that also had a ring of which Mitchel might have been proud. ‘Every ditch has its corpse, and every lordling Moloch his hecatomb of murdered tenantry. Clearly we are guilty if we turn not our hand against the enemies of our race.’

  As these gentlemen in their common room at Newgate discussed the chances of transportation, the last edition of the Nation for the present was on the streets. For it Margaret Callan, Duffy’s sister-in-law, wrote a famous article—‘Alea Jacta Est’ (‘The Dice Is Cast’), stirring Irish men to rebellion. ‘Now, indeed, are the men of Ireland cowards if this moment for retribution, combat, and victory, was to pass by unemployed. It finds them slaves, and it would leave them infamous.’ Because some thought Speranza wrote it, it would figure in her mythic repute.

  There was appropriately a verse in that edition from teenaged Eva, urging men to follow Silken Thomas, a reference to the original ‘Silken Thomas’ Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, who had led resistance against Henry VIII, but also to Tom Meagher: ‘Our silken Thomas may be seen, all glorious from afar.’ This poem was one of the last printed effusions of Young Ireland’s intent.

  Smith O’Brien was still trying to make a national front, but his negotiations in Dublin with John O’Connell were destroyed by new events in Paris. In a rebellion against Lamartine’s republic, 100,000 workmen marched into the centre of Paris and demanded a socialist state. Unlike the earlier, praised rebellion, there was an enormous slaughter of soldiers and insurgents. The crucial death, however, was that of the Archbishop of Paris, who went to the working men’s barricades as a negotiator and was shot dead. Some Dublin press asked of O’Brien and Meagher, ‘Would not they too murder Archbishops if they got the opportunity?’

  So be it, thought the young men of the Confederate clubs. In Dublin they elected a further ‘secret’ executive committee of five, Dillon, Meagher, O’Gorman, Devin Reilly and a talented and elfin boy journalist, D’Arcy McGee, to prepare the Confederate clubs for harvest time and its uprising. Above all, Michael Doheny and Tom Meagher had planned for the weekend of 16 and 17 July an event which aspired to be like the monster meetings of O’Connell. It was to be held atop Slievenamon Mountain in County Tipperary, a location which possessed, as had the site of the Liberator’s meeting at Hill of Tara, a mythic significance. Its ancient name, Sid ar Femin, was associated with the warriors—the Fianna—who followed the ancient mythic giant, Finn MacCool.

  On the Tuesday before the meeting on the mountain, Meagher was club-visiting in Waterford when a troop of the 4th Light Dragoons and three companies of the 7th Fusiliers appeared on the waterfront and formed up outside Mr Thomas Meagher senior’s residence. Police entered the house and Thomas Meagher junior was arrested on a charge of having uttered seditious language at the town of Rathkeale. As Meagher was taken by carriage to the police station, the news of his arrest spread through Waterford. Church bells were rung and a special corps from Waterford Club, ‘the Ballybracken men,’ hurried to the centre of town and on to the quays. Club men intended to rescue him immediately, barricade the wooden bridge over the Suir, the route to Dublin, and take over the city.

  At last the Young Tribune, a little relieved to find that he had been arrested for harder-to-prove sedition rather than for treason-felony, was brought out from the Waterford police headquarters, and placed in a locked police carriage which set off for Dublin guarded by his escort of dragoons and fusiliers. As he neared the blocked bridge Tom Meagher could hear the angry citizens shouting at the escort. The officers commanding the infantry and cavalry units unlocked the back door of his carriage and appealed to Meagher to restore order. Tom Meagher, tickled to be asked, climbed on to the roof of the wagon to thunderous cheers, and ordered the crowd to wait for word from Dublin. ‘We fear you will be sorry for it, sir!’ a man in the crowd cried. It would later be argued that a good chance for a successful uprising was thrown away here by Meagher. But he had been warned by his captors that three warships, the Dragon, the Merlin and the Medusa, lay in the estuary, and would take less than an hour to reduce the town to dust.

  After a night in a police cell in Dublin, Meagher was moved by train to Limerick, close to Rathkeale, the scene of his seditious speech. Like Mary Shields ten years past, he appeared before a Limerick grand jury in that town and an indictment against him was found. But Dublin Castle, alarmed at the popular reaction if he were refused bail, ordered he be allowed it. Doheny, held in Nenagh on the Limerick-Dublin road, was also bailed. He rushed back to Tipperary, travelling all night, on horseback and on foot, and in a hotel in Cashel met up with the inexhaustible Meagher. The two of them, with supporters from the clubs, rode south through fields of barley and oats to Slievenamon, Tipperary, followed by 50,000 men ‘under a scorching July sun.’

  Though less than 3,000 feet high, Slievenamon rises above the Tipperary farmlands with the assurance of a Kilimanjaro, and with all the presence of a peak inhabited by deities. Lord Clarendon feared the insurgents would begin operations in the triangle of Kilkenny, Waterford and Tipperary—Slievenamon marking one of its corners. Thousands climbed the hill that weekend, Meagher on horseback making a brilliant figure in his tricolour sash and gold-braided cap. ‘Wending their way up the side of the mountain from the direction of their various locations,’ a journalist wrote, ‘might be seen the men of Cork, Waterford, Wexford, and from all sides the “Boys of Tipperary”…. At four o’clock Messrs Doheny and Meagher, headed by the Cashel band, arrived at the mountain, when the huzzas commenced like the rumblings of a thunder storm.’ Doheny, an unpretty, unfashionably dressed but generous man, told the mass of men and women that they had a right to the coming harvest on the plains below. ‘The potato was smitten; but your fields waved with golden grain. It was not for you. To your lips it was forbidden fruit.’ Before leaving the summit the next day, Sunday 17 July, the Young Tribune, Meagher of the Sword, issued his own proclamation on the rights of Irishmen, to independence and the fruits of the coming harvest, which many Confederates on their way home pasted up over a new seizure-of-arms proclamation from Dublin Castle.

  Hearing that a crowd of supporters who had not reached Slievenamon were in the town of Carrick, Meagher and Doheny rode to visit them. In late afternoon, they found a crowd in the market square, so urgent in their cries for action that
they insisted on escorting them on to Waterford. The procession did not arrive in Waterford until three o’clock the next morning. From an upstairs window Meagher and Doheny addressed the mass of men, women and flaring torches. How achingly close Ireland’s deliverance must have seemed in those wide-awake night hours. Meagher believed that in the face of the great popular demonstrations, no sane government would continue with the charges, or rig a jury against Duffy, O’Doherty, John Martin and the others.

  From Waterford, Meagher felt some urgency to get to Dublin and tell his fellow executive committee how ripe Ireland was:

  in the evening, between seven and eight o’clock, I ordered a covered car…. Whilst the car was getting ready, I ran up to the drawing room, where my father and aunt were sitting at the time, to wish them goodbye. I put on my tricolor sash—green, white and orange—buckled on my sword-belt, cross-belt, cartouche-box—and flourishing a very handsome sword which belonged to a grand uncle of mine in the days of the Merchant Corp of the Waterford Volunteers, gave myself up to the gay illusion of a gallant fight, a triumphal entry, at the head of armed thousands, into Dublin, before long!

  His father, he remembered, was ‘mournfully serious.’

  Arriving in Dublin by hired carriage the next day, Meagher told Dillon, Smyth, O’Gorman and others at the Nation office and the Confederation council rooms that ‘The crowds had been restrained with difficulty and would re-emerge when the word was spoken.’ O’Brien, recently returned to Dublin too, reported that ‘at Cork he met ten thousand Confederates as capable of effectual action as any troops in the Queen’s service.’

  Already Dublin Castle, centre of the British administration, had a spy in Confederation. His name was John Donnellan Balfe, four years older than Meagher but another graduate of Clongowes. He was one of the corps of 400 protectors who accompanied speakers like Meagher and O’Brien to their homes after Confederate meetings in the Rotunda or the Dublin Music-Hall. The Irish Confederate leadership gave Balfe the sensitive task of liaising with the English Chartists, but even when he was seen talking to English detectives in the London Inn near Confederate headquarters, he for the moment explained away any suspicions.

  After an intoxicating day, that Friday night Meagher slept at Pat Smyth’s family house, Mount Brown near Kilmainham. He had meant to rise early, but slept till noon. Pat Smyth let him rest, but at midday, came in to his schoolfriend’s bedside with the news that the House of Commons had voted for the suspension of Habeas Corpus in Ireland. This would enable Dublin Castle to issue warrants for the immediate arrest of all Young Ireland leaders.

  Young Ireland had presumed that they would have another three or four weeks before harvest to prepare themselves and the people. ‘There is nothing for us now,’ Meagher told Smyth, ‘but to go out; we have not gone far enough to succeed, and yet, too far to retreat.’ Taking a hackney coach into the city they met up with Dillon and others. Dillon suggested that he and Meagher should pursue Smith O’Brien, who was in Wexford visiting Confederate clubs, and refer all plans to that sage’s judgment: ‘it struck us,’ said Meagher, ‘that the smallest victory … would be a very great influence on the spirit of the country at large.’ Young D’Arcy McGee had already left for Glasgow to gather volunteers, intending to seize merchant vessels in Scotland to transport expatriate Irish back to the west of Ireland. This was characteristic of Young Ireland’s rough plan for a revolt in the provinces. Years later in exile, Meagher still believed that departing the city was the correct choice. A Dublin uprising would have been ‘stifled in a pool of squandered blood.’ Similarly, Doheny left Cashel and rode to a farmer’s house below Slievenamon, a place known to Meagher, to await communication from the unquestioned leader, O’Brien.

  On their mission to find O’Brien, Meagher and Dillon caught the five o’clock train on the newly built railway line to Kingstown and then on to the seaside resort of Dalkey, where they caught a trap to the hotel in Killiney where Mrs Dillon was staying. The Dillons were said to be the most striking couple in all Ireland, yet for once picturesqueness was not on Meagher’s mind. During dinner they all discussed whether they should accept arrest, try to escape, or instigate an uprising. Brave Mrs Dillon agreed on the last.

  So her husband and Meagher must catch the coach to Wexford, in hope of intercepting O’Brien in Ballinkeele, where he was rumoured to be. They ordered two inside seats, but thought it safest to walk some miles out of town to get aboard in the dark. They proved to be the only inside passengers. Small farmers and peasants in sundry states of health hung to the outside of the vehicle as the young gentlemen slept within. In the small hours, getting down in Ballinkeele, they found Smith O’Brien had gone on with a friend, John Maher, who lived in Wexford. It was at first light on the morning of 22 July that Meagher and Dillon, on a cart, caught up with O’Brien at Maher’s house and told him he was a fugitive. O’Brien turned to Mr Maher and asked him to ‘have breakfast made for me and send us on our way.’

  On that first morning, Smith O’Brien wanted to go to New Ross, scene of a battle of 1798, and the location of a strong Confederate club. But Meagher urged they go to Kilkenny, where the Royal Agricultural Society Show was then in progress. ‘With some hundred head of the finest cattle in the island, we could have managed admirably behind the barricades for three or four days.’ Worthies could also make good hostages. O’Brien agreed that he should test the Kilkenny area first—to check whether there was a high level of support.

  Heading south, Meagher and Dillon attended Mass at Enniscorthy in County Wexford, where they discovered many of the churchgoers weakened by hardship, and unprepared to fight in an insurrection. They were prepared, however, to protect the Young Irelanders from arrest. But travelling on, having met up with O’Brien, the three rebels were mobbed by the people of Craiguenamanagh, who were ready to fight. O’Brien was not sure, however, if he yet had an adequate picture and, continuing in a trap through the pass between Mount Leinster and Blackspur’s Mountain, the three came in the rain to the city of Kilkenny.

  In steaming clothes, they went at once to the house of a Dr Cain, the Confederate mayor. There they were told to their chagrin that there were not—as earlier reported—17,000 club members in Kilkenny but only 1,700, of whom only one in four had arms. As they emerged into the street, a number of famished townspeople and farmers told Tom Meagher to find a priest who would consecrate the resistance. For it was the truth, one of them told Meagher, that ordinary people were sick of staying quiet and dying day to day. Though Meagher sent off messages to presbyteries, no Kilkenny priest turned up at Cain’s house.

  Basically, O’Brien’s Young Irelanders would spend the next week swinging across the south of Ireland, through Waterford and Tipperary, raising the populace; but no sooner did they succeed in doing so than the clergy would use their influence to disperse the gathered force. But despite all disappointment, these men were committed to rebellion by the warrants out for them, to a rebellion chaotic in its shifting schemes, sweeping in its intent, massive in its possibilities, brave in its execution, disastrous in its effect, and to some people at least, laughable in its form. It would confirm O’Brien and Meagher as two of the most admired Irish figures of the nineteenth century and feed an Irish sense that it was always the irrepressible myth, not the potent battalion, which conquered in the end.

  An as yet relatively obscure member of Young Ireland, Patrick O’Donohoe, a Dublin law clerk with a weakness for drink, married and with one adored little daughter, had discovered that his name too was on a warrant. A member of the Grattan Confederate club in Dublin, he had received from the imprisoned Gavan Duffy a note to be passed on to O’Brien. O’Donohoe travelled the first leg by train, but got to Kilkenny after O’Brien had already left. Inquiring after the great man at hotels, he found himself visited by a group of militant Young Irelanders who sombrely told him they would take him to O’Brien, but if O’Brien did not greet him, his safety could not be guaranteed.

  O’Brien and the others had b
y now moved on to the town of Callan, County Kilkenny, where a crowd materialised in the market place as a band struck up the old Jacobite tune ‘The White-Cockade.’ Some 8th Royal Irish Hussars applauded as O’Brien addressed the people. Meanwhile, Tom Meagher, riding ahead and already entering County Tipperary, ran into men who had been on Slievenamon. They told him that there were hundreds ready to join him. Meagher said of the countryside and towns of Callan and Carrick as they were that day: ‘It was the Revolution, if we had accepted it.’

  O’Brien caught up with Meagher in Carrick, Tipperary, that night, and the local leader, a stripling named John O’Mahony, led O’Brien and the other leaders to a house where refreshments were served and a confused meeting developed between the leaders and local supporters. ‘One was for commencing, there and then,’ O’Mahony later wrote:

  Another proposed that … the morning should be ushered in with the volleying of guns and the gleaming of pike heads. A third suggested … that the elections of the Council of Three Hundred should take place with as little delay as possible, and that the delegates should proceed immediately on their election to the Rotundo, each escorted by a thousand armed men.

  A wearied O’Brien stepped up to the window the following morning to remind the crowd waiting outside that many had pledged to struggle and die with Young Ireland if need be. ‘We are here to demand the redemption of the pledge, in the name of our enslaved country.’ In the street, local clergy and other voices began to ask, ‘Why should Carrick be selected?’ The longer the debate continued the more diffused the intentions of the populace became.