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

by Thomas Keneally

  Had all these forces been brought into play at the same time, Britain and Dublin Castle would have faced not something as contemptible as the ‘Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch,’ but a widely spread uprising, inchoate, and hard both for Dublin Castle to combat and for O’Brien to manage. And if O’Brien had authorised a famished and deprived people to attack the property of landlords and to commandeer resources, would clerical appeals to conscience and virtue have still worked to temper events? The image of O’Brien shaking the policemen’s hands through the windows of the Widow McCormack’s house is an abiding symbol not so much of minor vanity as of an unwillingness to declare any Irishman his thorough enemy: ‘he could never quite forget, as Mirabeau and Lafayette forgot,’ wrote Duffy, ‘that he belonged to the caste of gentlemen.’ O’Donohoe declared in imprisonment some years later, ‘A vicious man with the talents and prestige of O’Brien’s name would have overthrown English dominion in Ireland.’

  Patrick O’Donohoe, having found a horse, met Meagher riding up from the direction of Waterford. O’Donohoe, who had behaved with valour during the siege, trying to direct the rebel musket fire, told the Young Tribune the dismal news. However uneven O’Donohoe’s temperament proved to be, Meagher would be a loyal friend to the older man. The two of them travelled along country roads towards the Keeper Mountains to the north west of Tipperary, hoping to make a junction with O’Gorman and other Confederates in Limerick. At every step they were recognised, and men presented themselves voicing support, but they now knew what value to put on that. O’Donohoe the penniless clerk and fashionable Tom Meagher were forced to ride up into the hills and take to complicated glens whenever they sighted the army and police patrols and checkpoints, or were warned of them by peasants. The military had sallied out of the garrison towns and were now everywhere.

  MacManus tried but failed to find Meagher in the Keepers. He climbed one mountaintop to light a beacon and was answered from twelve other summits by the beacons of supporters, and descending to a crossroads was joined by a thousand men, but armed with nothing but pikes or stones. Without his bandolier now, he was on the run for five weeks, making his way towards Cork, finding a welcome in houses but retreating to the mountains when the valleys filled with police and redcoats. ‘Between the Keepers and Cork,’ he would say, dealing briskly with the history of those weeks, ‘I was three times in the hands of the police and three times escaped.’ Friends in the Cork City Confederate clubs sheltered him for weeks and booked him a passage on a New York-bound steamer, N. D. Chase. On 7 September, when he was waiting in his cabin for departure, he was identified and put under arrest during the final police search of the ship. Though he would never ultimately recover from this arrest, at no stage, then or later, did he voice any regret.

  It was rumoured that the warrants for the arrest of Smith O’Brien and the others had in some cases been read from Catholic pulpits. The Times of 4 August said, ‘We imagine the king of Munster is at the moment wandering about from one unsavoury boscobel to another in the shape of coal-pits, bogs, dung heaps and ditches.’ In fact O’Brien was in hiding in the mountains which lay in all compass directions from Ballingarry. When he descended at night, his direction was westwards, towards Limerick. An uprising by the Limerick people was possible, and if not that, escape to Europe or the United States. But the authorities had by now turned up the heat on potential protectors. Wherever O’Brien halted, he recognised ‘the utmost alarm’ in his hosts.

  Perhaps unwisely, since the railway was watched, he decided to enter the town of Thurles and, wrapped in a coarse cloak, catch a train home. He had bought a second-class ticket and was waiting on the station when a railway guard named Hulme made a citizen’s arrest on him. O’Brien struggled, but resistance was soon quelled by the arrival of police and soldiery. The prisoner was handed straight over to the military, who in the south were under the command of a General McDonald. Locked up in the police station at Thurles, he could hear the people gathering outside and making eloquent protests. The mass of Irish, though they had not marched with him the previous month, admired him and did not want him arrested. Indeed Hulme, who had nabbed O’Brien in hope of promotion and reward, became a pariah and had to move away and live under another name.

  In order that he would be able to change his linen before being moved to Dublin, O’Brien was permitted to send a note to Mrs Michael Doheny in Cashel asking her to forward a portmanteau he had left at her place. He believed that General McDonald and other authorities would not invade the privacy of his possessions. But the portmanteau ended up at Dublin Castle. O’Brien was appalled, especially since his old school and parliamentary friend Under-Secretary Redington seemed to be a willing party to this action. Every fragment of paper in the portmanteau—down to visiting cards—was numbered, initialled and sent to the Crown Solicitor’s office.

  11

  YOUNG IRELAND ON TRIAL

  Nothing new at Clonmel. The trial of Meagher is going forward and I hear that the courthouse is full of priests today. It is said that Meagher has given Whiteside and Butt full leave to bring out all about the priests that they like in this trial…. A visiting clergyman states that the young patriot appeared as cheerful and buoyant as in the days of his boyhood.

  Grace O’Brien to her sister Anne Martineau,

  October 1848

  The uprising had come and gone without the participation of John Mitchel, the first victim of the Treason-Felony Act, who in June 1848, less than a month after his sentencing in Green Street courthouse, arrived in Bermuda aboard Scourge. He had enjoyed on board both the leisure and the degree of isolation to savour Two Years Before the Mast, and to write a hostile analysis of Macaulay’s Essays. Since it was the government’s intention to keep him quarantined in all circumstances, he was helped, and perhaps tormented, by his voracious mental powers. When permitted on deck, he took note of everything, flying fish and dolphins and the flotillas of Portuguese men-of-war on the waves under ‘opaline sails of purple and rose-coloured membrane.’

  Then on 20 June, one of the Mulatto pilots of Bermuda boarded and took the Scourge past the main port of Hamilton, with its white houses, scraggy cedars, and low hills. ‘If I am to be allowed some moderate liberty here, say the range of one of the islands, I might bring out all my flock, and we could cultivate arrow-root, oranges and potatoes, dwelling primitively in a white-roofed cottage.’ Scourge came to anchor off the dockyard on the northernmost island, ironically called Ireland, inside the crescent of breakwater, where three naval ships were anchored: ‘great clumsy hulks, roofed over, and peopled by men in white linen blouses and straw hats, were visible.’ He hoped that he would not be put amongst these men, on whose clothing the broad arrow, symbol of the British convict system, was visible. Waiting to hear what his precise treatment would be, Mitchel was able to comfort himself by reading the Morning Post of the day after his sentencing. Edmund Burke Roche, a parliamentarian, had challenged Sir George Grey the Home Secretary about Mitchel’s ‘unjust and disproportionate sentence,’ but Mitchel thought Roche a blockhead—the nature of the trial was the issue, not the severity of sentence. It would always be an ungrateful task to be Mitchel’s advocate.

  Two boats approached, manned by men in white blouses. ‘The hulks then!’ he concluded. ‘No sea-side cottages or cedarn valleys for me.’ The Superintendent of Convicts boarded with the master of the hulks and told Mitchel he had been assigned to the one anchored furthest out, the Dromedary. He was allowed his books and his portmanteau, would be free to walk on the deck and on the adjacent breakwater, and would not be required to wear convict clothes. Mitchel packed his belongings, bade the captain and discreetly kind officers of Scourge goodbye, and was rowed across to his hulk. Here his cell below decks proved to be a 6 by 6 feet compartment, created by the space which had once boxed the mainmast. A hammock was slung diagonally, and occupying it on his first night he found the walls alive with brown cockroaches nearly 2 inches long.

  To the deck forward, where the
convicts were kept, he had no direct access. Each morning, he was permitted to descend stairs to a platform from which he bathed silently in the sea with the others, but apart from that he was meant to seclude himself. Hearing no Irish accents during his dips in the sea, he learned from an illicit chat with a steward that before his arrival some eighty or ninety on that hulk had been swapped for Englishmen. After a week’s asthmatic wheezing on board, he was given a better cabin, 6 feet high and 14 feet in length, with a spacious barred porthole and bookshelves. He would for a time be transferred under the care of the medical officer, Dr Warner, to the hospital ship Tenedos, ‘moored about a quarter of a mile from land, in a most beautiful bay.’ Sometimes, aware that hunger possessed Ireland, he felt disgraced at the enjoyment he found in his spacious two-portholed cabin on Tenedos. But soon he was unexpectedly moved back to his original hulk, the Dromedary, because of New York newspaper reports that the Irish were considering arming a vessel for a rescue attempt.

  From the window of his cabin on Dromedary, he could see the dockyard, the barracks and the parade ground. The 42nd Regiment of Highlanders was stationed there, and he watched them march up to their barracks with bagpipes playing Scottish airs. Opposite the parade ground on the breakwater the convicts mustered, sometimes to witness floggings. By late July 1848, as O’Brien marched through Tipperary, the command on board Dromedary had clamped down severely upon his access to newspapers. He saw others—guards, stewards—reading them, and consoled himself with a trunk he had been allowed from home, including daguerreotypes of John Martin and Jenny. He read Homer. ‘Weather delicious. Have also been swallowing autobiographies—Gifford’s, Thomas Elwood’s, Captain Crichton’s autobiography by Dean Swift.’ He watched the other convicts during church services on deck, when they stood holding their palmetto hats reverently in hand. ‘Closer examination makes you aware that many of them have evil countenances and amorphous skulls … burglars and swindlers from the womb.’

  O’Brien would have to be removed, the authorities decided, from disaffected Tipperary to Dublin. Cavalry was used to clear the streets of Thurles, and shopkeepers were ordered to close their doors; when some disobeyed, General McDonald himself threatened severe and summary reprisal. On 7 August, the authorities got O’Brien through a shuttered town to the railway station, but the engine driver refused to take the train on to Dublin. An officer produced a pistol and told the engineer he would blow his brains out. For had the departure of the train been delayed, Young Ireland sympathisers would have had time to pull up the lines.

  As O’Brien’s train pulled out of Thurles, Meagher was still on the run with the Cork man, Denny Leyne, and with Patrick O’Donohoe, ‘sometimes sleeping in hay lofts on bundles of straw, and other times in miserable cabins, with the most wretched and sickly of the peasantry, and once or twice by the ditchside.’ Uncomfortable billets, they seemed to release in Meagher a zany jollity. In one whitewashed farmhouse, Meagher was visited by a clergyman who proposed that they should all surrender on condition of being allowed to leave the country. Meagher consented to try this on condition that everyone in the movement would be offered the same facility. He wrote a letter outlining these terms, which was then carried to Dublin Castle. The reply was that the lives of Meagher and his immediate associates would be guaranteed if they pleaded guilty to high treason, and if the arms from all disturbed districts were delivered up. This offer, conveyed back to Meagher, was rejected. Too few rebels were covered by it, and there was unreality in the idea that the leaders of the rebellion had any control over its arms. ‘A cruel perversion of Meagher’s generous proposal appeared in some of the newspapers,’ said Duffy. ‘It was reported that he offered to surrender, if his life was spared.’ To protect his reputation, Meagher walked out of hiding towards Cashel, intending either to be taken alive or to try one last appeal to arms. On 13 August, he and O’Donohoe were arrested by a roadblock of police north of Thurles, Tipperary. They were taken unchained in a cart to the town, and then, before news of their capture could get around, quickly by train to Dublin, to join O’Brien in Kilmainham. Supplied with fresh linen, Meagher posed beside a serenely seated Smith O’Brien for a photograph taken in the prison governor’s garden.

  By then, Michael Doheny, fleeing west, saw from the top of the Comeraghs the black patches of putrefaction in the fields below. The blight was cruelly facing those like Esther Larkin who had for three years tried every stratagem. Now, again, there was no guarantee that from August 1848 until the end of time, the Irish would not be yearly mocked with this seasonal rot of their hopes.

  O’Brien’s younger brother Robert, justice of the peace for both Limerick and Clare, brought Lucy to Dublin, and from Morrison’s Hotel wrote to his wife, Ellen De Vere, ‘I sat up late last night going over all William’s speeches and indexing them for Whiteside’ (O’Brien’s senior counsel) ‘and have been struck when one comes to put them together at the noble spirit they evince.’

  Only a few days after O’Brien’s arrest, Gavan Duffy and other journalists, including John Martin and Kevin O’Doherty, stood trial for treason-felony. Duffy, standing in the Green Street dock, was told by a regular counsel of Irish rebels, Sir Colman O’Loghlan, that a letter incriminating him in high treason had been found in O’Brien’s portmanteau. High treason was a hanging, drawing and quartering offence.

  Twenty-four-year-old Kevin O’Doherty’s trial started the same day. Articles from the Irish Tribune of 1 and 8 July were put forward by the Attorney-General as proof of guilt. One article, ‘Our Harvest Prospects,’ after asking the usual question about whether livestock and grain would again be shipped out of a passive Ireland, cried, ‘No; the strong men of this land … will gladden our eyes by saving the coming harvest and easing their longing thirst deep, deep in the blood of the English foe.’ In leading O’Doherty’s defence, 35-year-old Isaac Butt admitted the articles were seditious, but his client was not being tried for sedition. To convict him, said Butt, the jury would have to believe that in the recesses of his soul he intended treason.

  No portion of handwriting had been produced to show that the articles were O’Doherty’s. Butt now referred to O’Doherty’s behaviour during the present typhus epidemic, for which he had been praised by a number of the medical profession. The young man had treated the famous physician John Curran when Curran himself had been felled with fever. In fact, as Butt spoke, many of the jury selected with a bias towards a guilty verdict could understand if not condone the sense of outrage behind the open features of this decent young man who in a saner time would make a splendid surgeon. When, on Friday night, 11 August, the chairman of the jurors declared that a verdict seemed impossible, they were ordered to be locked up without ‘food or easements.’ But even a night of discomfort did not bring a verdict.

  O’Doherty was held in a cell near Duffy’s and Martin’s in the debtors’ section of the prison. The prisoners were able if they chose to have their own beds from home, French maple in O’Doherty’s case, and other furnishings. They shared a common room where they could receive visitors. Here O’Doherty and the others had been visited by a supporter named Miss Bruton, who brought with her the young East Galway contributor of verse to the Nation, Marie Anne Kelly, Eva. Just eighteen years old, Eva had come up to Dublin to visit her editors, Duffy and Martin, in prison, and to attend their trials with Miss Bruton as her chaperone. The heroic, near-operatic situation in which she encountered the valiant young physician O’Doherty must have intensified the sentiment felt by these two glittering children of the revolution. Pat Smyth, who was at the time in the process of escaping to the United States, knew Eva and would later describe her at this stage of her life as ‘tall, with daydreamy eyes and wonderful black hair reaching to her knees.’ O’Doherty and she fell in love.

  One of the tales she was able to tell O’Doherty as she formed a lifelong attachment to him was to do with John Blake Dillon’s escape. Dillon had arrived at Killeen House one evening as a fugitive: ‘he had only gone off a short tim
e when we were that night invaded by police and the magistrate. Our house was ransacked from top to bottom.’ Dillon had escaped to America from Galway dressed as a priest, so well disguised that Pat Smyth, travelling under an assumed identity on the same ship, wondered why this cleric kept staring at him across the deck.

  Though so young, Eva was still a maiden of rigorous views. ‘The rising misnamed,’ she wrote later, as an ageing woman. ‘No rising. No plans or order—no leader.’ She always believed that the time for striking the blow had come and gone when Mitchel was brought as a convicted felon through the streets of Dublin. ‘The people were then ready—were filled with rage and enthusiasm.’

  O’Doherty’s second trial began five days after the first hung jury. His counsel uttered the normal complaint that out of the panel of 150 selected as potential jurors, only 30 were Catholics. But the Crown had a new document and a new witness. A fellow medical apprentice of O’Doherty’s, McKeever, was asked under oath to look at a manuscript copy of ‘Our Harvest Prospects’ and swear that the handwriting was O’Doherty’s. He did so. Isaac Butt again took up the question of O’Doherty’s motives in establishing the Irish Tribune, pleading that his noble-hearted client’s ‘nerves were shocked’ in the fever sheds. For Eva, watching from the gallery, there was now no Nation in which to publish the verses forming in her, verses in which the beloved accused’s face became identical with the visage of the noble, misused nation. Amidst the venal faces of judges and lawyers who had made their accommodations with the ruling power, O’Doherty’s features shone with an inspiring probity. After five hours out, the jury chairman declared that not only was there no verdict but that two jurors were ill. Pending a third trial, however, O’Doherty was refused bail.