The Rebels of Ireland: The Dublin Saga

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “Do you think so?” he asked. In return for which he received an exasperated look. It was time to change the subject. “What news of Orlando?” he enquired.

  And it was then that he discovered, to his great astonishment, that Mary Walsh was pregnant.

  “It must have occurred just after Easter,” the Jesuit explained. “They told no one, not even me, until quite recently. If all is well, she will have the child in December, I believe.” He smiled. “After so many years, it is indeed a gift of God.” And with that O’Byrne could only agree.

  He wondered whether he should go and see his former friend.

  When Faithful Tidy saw them part a few moments later, he made a note of the time and then followed the Jesuit back to his lodgings. Once he was safely inside, Faithful could go home himself. He couldn’t see that a street encounter between the Jesuit and O’Byrne of Rathconan could be of much interest. But he carefully noted it for old Pincher all the same.

  Walter Smith was an honest man, but he believed he was shrewd. His business dealings over the years had left him rich. When Anne had fallen in love with O’Byrne, he had perceived it a great deal sooner than she had realised. As for public affairs, he followed them closely. And on most counts, in the autumn of 1641, he was modestly hopeful.

  Was Anne still in love with O’Byrne? Probably. But she had been hurt by him, and disappointed. She had yearned for the wild freedom of the Wicklow Mountains, but they had turned out to be a harsh terrain. O’Byrne might be a romantic figure, but in Walter’s estimation, he was ultimately cold. With O’Byrne’s baby safely out of sight in Fingal, the warmth and security of her loving family and the comfortable house in Dublin may not have looked so bad. That, her sense of guilt, and her gratitude for his forgiveness had helped to reconcile his wife to him, and they were now, he supposed, as happy as many couples at their time of life.

  He was also pleased about Maurice. His son was turning into a hardworking young man. If his green eyes sometimes flashed splendidly, they made him look handsome, and no doubt that would be attractive to women. But he always attended to business in a thorough manner, and Walter was really becoming rather proud of him.

  As he looked at the political situation, Walter believed that there were grounds for cautious optimism. Dublin was quiet. In August the Parliament was prorogued, and Phelim O’Neill and his friends had gone home to their estates to salvage what they could of the harvest. King Charles was still getting nowhere with the Scots. With the king so weak, it still seemed to Walter that he might be induced to grant the Catholics of Ireland some concessions. Even failing that, he supposed that the usual uneasy tolerance would continue.

  One thing worried him a little. The troops that had been sent home in the summer had not all been paid, and bands of them would appear from time to time. “It’s a pity the government won’t allow them to be recruited by some of the mercenary commanders in Europe,” he told his son. “At least it would get rid of them.” But his greatest concern as October began was the food supply for the winter. On the land he still held above the Liffey, he had been able to save part of the harvest, and according to Orlando, most of the Fingal farmers had been able to do the same. Farther north, in Ulster, the situation was worse. In Dublin, bread prices, which had been rising since last year, were even higher. Rich men like himself would get by, but the poorer folk would need help. “In my grandfather’s youth, before the Protestants abolished the monasteries,” he liked to say, “it was the religious orders who fed the poor in time of trouble.” He, Doyle, and several other merchants had already discussed what measures might be proposed to the city council if things got too bad.

  Saturdays were market days in Dublin. Carts with all kinds of produce rolled in from the surrounding countryside, and a stream of people came to buy, or to enjoy themselves, too. Saturdays were cheerful, busy days. And Saturday the twenty-third of October 1641 began like any other. Almost.

  The rumour started early in the morning. Maurice, who had gone out to the market, brought it to the house.

  “There are troops at all the city gates, and the castle is closed and guarded. There’s been a revolt up in Ulster. They say that a plot was discovered here in Dublin, too. Nobody knows what’s going on.” Shortly afterwards, Doyle looked in with further news.

  “A fellow got drunk at an inn last night and started boasting that he and his friends would be taking over Dublin Castle in the morning. Someone went to the justices, and he was taken in for questioning late last night. At first nobody took him seriously, but then fires were seen up in Ulster. We’re still waiting for news. The Castle men are in a ferment. They’re rounding people up. It’s a Catholic plot, apparently,” he added, with a sidelong glance at Walter. “Though it seems to have been poorly planned.”

  “I know nothing of it,” Walter replied with perfect truth.

  “I did not suppose it,” Doyle said pleasantly, and went on his way. Maurice went back to the market at once to try to learn more.

  So it was with great surprise that, half an hour later, being told by Anne that a gentleman had arrived at the door asking to see him privately, Walter entered the parlour to find an old man sitting there whom he had never seen before, and who, rising stiffly to his feet, bowed politely and informed him:

  “I am Cornelius van Leyden.”

  Maurice had been in the market for less than an hour when he heard the news. A merchant he knew came up to him. Looking worried.

  “They’ve arrested thirty people. And can you believe it? One of them is Lord Maguire.”

  A parliamentary leader. The plot might have miscarried, but if a man of that importance was involved, then the business must be serious. And Maurice had just begun to question the merchant further when he saw his mother, accompanied by one of the servants, hurrying towards him.

  “Maurice,” she told him urgently, “you must come home at once.”

  He had never seen his mother look so distraught before. There was little time upon the way, but she told him what he’d been accused of. “Tell me it’s not true,” she begged. How could he explain?

  “It’s true,” he said. Yet strangely, she hardly seemed to hear him.

  “It’s me your father will blame,” she cried with a sad shake of her head—which made no sense at all.

  “Oh, you and Father would never have done such a thing,” he said with some bitterness. “I know that.”

  “You know nothing,” his mother snapped, and spoke no more until they were home.

  His father was white with anger. His eyes were blazing. But the eyes of the old Dutchman were even worse. They gazed at him silently, but with an awful, pale blue certainty that, before his family and before Almighty God, he stood accused and guilty. Maurice cast his eyes down before them.

  “You have been paying court to this gentleman’s granddaughter.” His father’s face was tight with suppressed anger. “Without our knowledge. Without any reference to me. Or to you, Sir.” He turned to old Cornelius van Leyden.

  “It is true, Father.”

  “That is all you have to say?”

  “I should have spoken to you.”

  “But you deceived me, because you knew very well what I should have said. Do you not see the disgrace you have brought upon yourself and upon us all? And worse by far, do you not understand the terrible wrong you have done to this gentleman and his family, not to mention his granddaughter herself? Do you not see the wickedness of it, Maurice?” The Dutchman might be a Protestant, but it was clear that Walter had already conceived a respect and liking for old Cornelius van Leyden, and that he was hugely embarrassed as well as angry. “How long has this been going on?” his father demanded.

  In fact, it was not so long. Maurice had encountered Elena several times in Dublin the previous autumn, but it was only in the spring that they had started walking out together. They had kissed. Matters had gone a little further. He had hesitated to go beyond that. Marriages between Catholics and Protestants might not be uncommon in
his class, but it depended on the family. If Elena had been the daughter of Doyle, whose Protestantism was entirely pragmatic, and who wouldn’t have cared much what church his daughter’s children belonged to, then things might have been different. But the van Leyden family were as sincere in their faith as Walter Smith and the Walshes were in theirs. It had been Elena who had been less bashful, more eager to experiment than he. For much of the summer, however, she had been away in Fingal, and they had only had the opportunity to meet a few times.

  “We became friends in the spring, but we hardly saw each other all summer.” In so far as it went, this was true.

  “How far has this matter gone?” Cornelius van Leyden’s voice was quiet but insistent.

  Maurice gazed at the floor. How much did the old man know? How much had Elena told him?

  “Not too far.” Cautiously, he allowed his eyes to lift and observe the two men. He saw that his father was about to ask him what he meant, but then thought better of it.

  “You will wait outside, Maurice,” his father said. “I shall speak to you later.”

  As soon as the door had closed behind his son, Walter Smith turned to Cornelius.

  “No words can tell my shame, Sir, for the wrong my son has done your family.”

  “The girl was at fault also,” the old man said simply. “It was ever thus.”

  “You are generous.”

  “If there had been a child . . .”

  “I know. I know.” Walter groaned. “I give you my word, he shall never come near her again. He shall also keep silent about the matter,” he added meaningfully.

  “It would be best.” The old Dutchman sighed. “Were we of the same faith, our conversation might have been different.”

  It was true, Walter thought, that if only the girl had been Catholic, she might have made an excellent match for his son. But there was nothing to be done about it, and soon afterwards, old Cornelius van Leyden went upon his way.

  Alone with his son, Walter Smith did not hold back. He accused Maurice roundly of seducing the girl. It was bad enough that she came from a respectable family; that they were Protestant only made it worse. “What will they think of us?” he cried. Had matters gone further, he pointed out, had she conceived a child, there would either have had to be an impossible marriage, or Elena would have been ruined. Maurice was lucky not to be cast out of his family forever, he went on. “To think that your mother and I . . .” he began; but then, suddenly remembering Anne’s behaviour with O’Byrne, he fell silent and threw up his hands in despair.

  “You are never to see her again. Swear to me.”

  “I swear,” said Maurice reluctantly.

  And Walter Smith might have had more to say, but just then, from outside, came the sound of the great bell of Christ Church ringing out, not as it usually did, in a sonorous manner, but with a wild, urgent clamour. Tidy must have been hauling on the bellrope with all his might and main. Turning to the door, they both rushed out into the street.

  People were running by. There seemed to be a general panic. Walter stopped an apprentice and demanded to be told what was going on.

  “It’s war, Sir,” the young man cried. “The whole of Ulster has risen. And they’re on their way here.”

  Though the news of the revolt in Ulster was certainly disturbing, and though within weeks it would spread across all Ireland, at no time in the months that followed did it ever occur to Walter Smith or any of his family, or anyone they knew, that one of the great watersheds of Irish history had just been passed. For centuries to come it would be portrayed as either a mass, nationalist uprising of the Catholic people against their Protestant oppressors, or else as a wholesale massacre of innocent Protestants.

  It was neither.

  On October 22, the Irish gentry of Ulster began a series of coordinated operations. In the absence of any trained commander, Sir Phelim O’Neill had assumed the leadership. He had, after all, the blood of the old High Kings in his veins. The aim of the rising was quite limited. Having decided that neither the Irish nor the English Parliaments would ever give them the security for their lands or the concessions to their Catholic faith as matters stood, Sir Phelim and his friends had decided to put pressure on the government by taking over the province and refusing to budge until some concessions were granted. Well aware that if the Scottish settlers in Ulster were harmed, the mighty army of the Covenanters might come over from Scotland to punish him, O’Neill had given strict orders that the Ulster Scots were to be left alone.

  But it didn’t work. Sir Phelim O’Neill was not a soldier. A few small inland towns let him in, but Ulster’s strongly defended ports were all in the hands of tough Scottish Presbyterians; he led his men up to their walls, but the citizens weren’t impressed and he couldn’t take a single one of them. Worse, out in the countryside, he couldn’t control the people or even his own troops. Soon bands of looters were roving the land. Quite often they were helped by O’Neill’s ragtag troops. Falling on Protestant farmsteads—English or Scots were all the same to them—they looted, stripped, and, if the people resisted, they frequently killed them. Nor was it long before Protestant settlers sallied forth from their walled boroughs to take their revenge in a similar manner. There was no single massacre; but day by day, week after week, there were scenes of scattered chaos and killing. Protestant deaths mounted: hundreds, a thousand; still it continued and spread beyond Ulster. The settlers, some of them stripped even of their clothes, were soon straggling into the ports to leave for England, or making their way south to the safety of Dublin, fifty miles away.

  Meanwhile, the Justices in Dublin hastily called upon the head of the mighty Butler dynasty, the rich and powerful Lord Ormond, who, thanks be to God, was a member of the king’s Protestant Church of Ireland, to take command of whatever forces the government could muster to deal with this terrible threat.

  All through the month of November, the refugees were streaming into Dublin. And it was no surprise that some of them should seek sanctuary in the great cathedral of Christ Church. Still less was it surprising that they should find a ready welcome from the verger’s wife.

  Tidy’s wife had never been busier. If one of the cathedral clergy should see a cluster of children’s faces staring unexpectedly from the window of some underused lodgings in the precincts, or suddenly come upon a family camping by some old tomb in the crypt, and should ask the verger, “Is it really necessary, Tidy, for these people to be in the cathedral?” Tidy would only sigh and answer, “I can’t stop her, Sir.” And since every Protestant in Dublin was united in outrage at what had been done to the godly folk in the north—and Christian charity should in any case have stifled any criticism— there was really nothing to be done. Nor could they very well complain at the substantial bill that the verger submitted for ringing the great bell for several hours when news of the rising had first come.

  In all these ministrations, besides, the Tidys had one powerful champion.

  If people had formerly considered Doctor Pincher an eccentric, if young Faithful Tidy had even thought the old man was going mad, nobody thought so now. Hadn’t he warned of the Catholic menace? Hadn’t he believed a Catholic conspiracy was brewing? He had. And now he was revealed as a prophet.

  Doctor Pincher emerged into his new role like a swan. Every day he came to Christ Church, where he was received by Tidy’s wife as a hero and taken to see the new arrivals. His thin, inky-black figure strode among them, but to each one he would bend kindly and say: “Take heart. I know what it is to suffer for the cause.” He was especially gratified one day when a grim Scots Presbyterian declared: “The fault was our own. It was a judgement of God upon us for taking the Black Oath.”

  In the middle of November, the doctor even preached in the cathedral again, to a congregation swelled to capacity with Ulster refugees. Once again, he took for his text the words, rendered so timely now:

  I come not to send peace, but a sword.

  But there was no need for him this time
to warn his congregation of the Catholic menace. They knew it all too well. His theme, on this occasion, was more inspiring. If their suffering had been terrible, he told them, they should not despair. For had not Our Lord declared: “The Son of man must suffer many things”?

  The sword of Christ, he reminded them, divided the elect from the damned.

  “Ye are the salt of the earth,” he cried. “Ye are the light of the world.” A quiver of grateful recognition passed through the congregation. “Be glad, therefore,” he admonished them, “for your suffering.”

  The Catholic idolators might wield the sword and seek their blood. But in due time, the sword of Christ should strike them down.

  “The unrighteous shall perish, and we, God’s chosen, shall be brought into Israel, and there we shall build a new Jerusalem,” and now the doctor’s voice grew in strength so that, despite his age, it thundered, “from which we shall never be driven out again, no, not in a thousand years.”

  It was, by universal agreement, one of the finest sermons ever heard.

  During this period, the Catholic forces of Sir Phelim O’Neill were laying siege, without much success, to the port of Drogheda, fifty miles up the coast from Dublin. The Justices in Dublin, meanwhile, were still taking Depositions from anyone who could give them evidence of who was behind the original plot. Informers were coming forward regularly, though it was hard to know how much of their evidence was true and how much invented. In the last week of November, the Dublin administrators did manage to send out a force of six hundred poorly trained troops to relieve Drogheda. Two days later, however, the news came back: “The Catholic rebels have smashed them.”

  It was time for the Justices in Dublin to take more serious measures.

  It was at this juncture that Tidy’s wife witnessed a curious meeting. She was taking Doctor Pincher to visit a family lodged in Dame Street when they saw Father Lawrence Walsh coming towards them. She expected the two men to ignore each other; but after the triumph of his recent sermon, Doctor Pincher was in no mood to avoid anyone. He began to reprimand the Jesuit from ten paces.