The Rebels of Ireland: The Dublin Saga

by Edward Rutherfurd

  All around St. Stephen’s Green, Trinity College, and behind the quays north of the Liffey as well, these classical brick terraces and squares were spreading. As the city’s wealth and population continued to grow, it seemed to Walsh that a new street sprang up every year. Dublin, after London, would soon be the most gracious European capital in the north.

  “What’s wrong with him, anyway?” asked Fortunatus, as they reached the corner of the green.

  “He is Catholic.”

  “So are you.”

  “He carries a deep resentment.”

  “Ah.” Fortunatus sighed. “He has not been as lucky as we.”

  Looking back now, he could only be amazed at the foresight of their father. Dutch King William might have promised tolerance to the Irish Catholics, but his parliaments, especially the Irish Parliament, had other ideas entirely. The English Parliament, after all, had gone to all the trouble of throwing out King James just to keep England free of Catholicism. But James was still at large with his young son, supported by his bellicose Catholic cousin, King Louis XIV of France, and Ireland, as always, looked like a perfect base from which to harass England. The western island was to be kept garrisoned, therefore, and under the iron control of English administrators and the established Protestant Church.

  As for the new, Cromwellian settlers like Barnaby Budge, hadn’t God sent them to Ireland to humble the papists and ensure the triumph of His Protestant faith? And weren’t they, besides, occupying the land that the papists would still like to claim back now? Not only their consciences, but their very survival, depended on keeping the Catholics down.

  So they had started to pass laws for the purpose. Through the reigns of William and Mary, then of her sister Anne, and now of their German cousin, George of Hanover, the list of anti-Catholic laws had grown longer.

  A Catholic could not hold public office or sit in the Dublin Parliament. He could not become a full member of a city guild. Most of the professions were closed to him. He could not attend university himself, or—at least legally—send his children abroad for their education, either. He could not buy land, or even hold it on more than a thirty-four-year lease. Any land he already owned at his death would be divided up equally amongst his sons, unless the eldest converted to the Protestant faith, in which case the Protestant son was to inherit all and his brothers get nothing. And so the list went on.

  It was an iniquity; it was an insult; above all, it was calculated to destroy Catholicism in Ireland.

  Donatus had died late in the reign of Queen Anne, but he had seen enough to see the wisdom of his decision that Protestant Fortunatus should protect his Catholic brother. Other families since had made similar arrangements, but the early conversion of Fortunatus Walsh had stood him in good stead. He’d married well. Friends in high places, pleased with his loyalty, had several times given him those genial government posts—inspector of this, collector of that, or some other position in the sought-after Revenue— with which, for very little work, a gentleman could handsomely increase his income. Thanks to all this, Fortunatus had been able to add several hundred acres to the family’s holdings. Why, when a member of the Dublin Parliament had died recently, he had even gotten a seat in the Irish House of Commons. He had been in a good position to help his brother Terence, therefore.

  And Terence had needed it.

  “I’d have liked to be a lawyer,” Terence had always said. But although, as a Catholic, he might have been a lowly attorney, the profession of barrister—the gentleman lawyers who argued the cases in court and made all the money—was for Protestants only. For a time, he had tried to be a merchant in the city and had joined the Merchants Guild. As a Catholic he had to pay fees every quarter, higher than those a Protestant paid, and was denied any voting rights in the guild elections; he was also unable to become a freeman of the city. But he could trade.

  “Swallow your pride and make money,” Fortunatus had advised him. “Even a Catholic may get rich.” And he had gladly staked Terence with some capital so that he could trade. But after five years, though he had made a living, Terence returned the money and told him: “I’m not cut out for this.”

  “What will you do, then?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Terence had replied, “that I might practise medicine.”

  Fortunatus had not been pleased. The practice of medicine was not, in his judgement, a very respectable business. True, anatomy and medicine were studied at the great universities. But the surgeons who pulled your teeth or amputated your leg shared a guild with the barbers—indeed, the surgeon might be the same man who cut your hair. And there was nothing to stop anyone in Dublin setting up as a medical man, whose methods were mostly confined to cupping and bleeding you, or applying herbal remedies of their own invention. Most of these physicians, in his private estimation, were quacks.

  But a Catholic could be a physician. There were no restrictions at all.

  So after a period of intense study with one of the better medical men, Terence had set himself up near Trinity College, and Fortunatus had recommended him to everyone he knew, with the cheerful injunction to his brother: “Try not to kill all my friends.”

  And Terence had done uncommonly well. He had a pleasant manner; the fact that he had gone prematurely grey, and wore a little pointed beard, gave him a look of kindly authority that his patients found reassuring. “It is even possible,” his brother allowed, “that you may do your patients some good.” But above all, Doctor Terence Walsh was a gentleman. The whole of fashionable Dublin agreed. The fact that he was Catholic and that most of his patients were Protestant was not an issue. Old ladies asking him to come to their bedside, aristocrats who might need to confide some medical embarrassment over a glass of claret, could feel that he was a discreet and trusted member of the family. Within three years, he had all the patients he could handle. And being an honourable man, he also set aside time for the poor folk living near him, whom he treated without charge.

  The family had been able to help him in other ways. His father might not be allowed to leave him anything directly, but by making use of family trusts, it had been easy enough to give him the use and the income of a small estate out in Kildare. Other families they knew had done the same. If the authorities in Dublin Castle were aware that the law was being quietly flouted, they never said anything. And last year, Fortunatus had seen another way to help his brother.

  “Terence,” he announced, “you’re going to become a Freemason.” There had been craft guilds of stonemasons since the Middle Ages. It was not until sometime after 1600, and for reasons unknown, that some gentlemen in Scotland had decided to form what they called a Freemasons’ lodge, which used the ceremonies and “mysteries” of the medieval guild but was dedicated not to the building trade, but to general good works. Only gradually did this new Freemasonry, which was run as a friendly secret society, spread to England and Ireland. But in the last two decades it had suddenly become fashionable, and Fortunatus had joined the most aristocratic of the new Dublin lodges.

  “We must get you in, too, Terence,” he had explained. “The Masons make no religious distinctions. Your being a Catholic is not a barrier. And it will be good for your career.” Indeed, they were on their way to a meeting of the brethren that very evening.

  Having enjoyed so much support from his own loving family, it was natural as well as commendable that Terence, in turn, should have wanted to help a kinsman himself.

  Like young Garret Smith.

  If old Maurice Smith hadn’t been killed at the Battle of the Boyne, his descendants might not have fared so badly. For King William’s Treaty of Limerick was generous to those of King James’s army who had surrendered. But for those who had been killed back at the Boyne, there was no such provision. They were judged to be rebels and their estates were confiscated. By the time it was all over, the Smiths were ruined.

  Fortunatus remembered the family at that time very well. Maurice’s son Thomas had been philosophical, but his grands
on Michael—a boy a few years younger than himself—had not taken it well, becoming bitter and withdrawn. The Walshes had done all they could to help. After all, Fortunatus remembered, old Maurice was actually my father’s first cousin. But Thomas had died, Michael had been resentful, and the two families had drifted apart. Michael had clung to a heroic picture of his family’s role and of the character of King James, and always swore that the Stuart king, or his son, would return and restore the Catholic faith to Ireland.

  The Jacobite cause, as this longing for the Stuarts was called, might not have been entirely hopeless. When the unpopular German, George of Hanover, had come to the English throne, there were many who wanted to have the son of King James back instead. There were even scattered risings. But they soon fizzled out, and nobody rose for the Stuart Pretender in Ireland. Soon after that, Michael Smith had lapsed into disappointment and drink. Two years later, he was penniless and dead.

  But he had left a little son. And it was young Garret Smith that Terence had determined to help. He had found lodgings for the boy and his mother—modest certainly, but cleaner than the ones they’d had before—in Saint Michan’s parish on the north side of the Liffey. At his special request, the priest there had ensured that the boy received some education. Then, a few years ago, he had made the necessary payments for the boy to be apprenticed to a respectable grocer in the parish. And once a month, without fail, he would bring the young man to dine with his wife and children in the friendly comfort of their family home in the hope that, in due course, when he had set himself up in business and found a sensible wife, young Smith might follow a similar, if more modest, path himself. In short, he had done everything that a kindly member of the Walsh family might be expected to do.

  It was hard to say exactly when the trouble had begun. He had not taken the boy’s scrapes or his brushes with authority too seriously. “It’s just a young man’s devilment,” he would say genially. More problematic had been the day when his wife had found Garret teaching their children to be Jacobites.

  “I’ll not have him bringing trouble of that kind into this house,” she had protested to her husband. And it was only after much pleading, and the promise that young Garret should never be left alone with their children, that Terence had been able to bring him to the house again. “He shall not come here while you are away in France,” she had declared.

  During the last year, there had been some complaints from his master the grocer, as well. Terence had encouraged the good grocer to take a firm hand.

  “I must confess that I’m concerned,” he told Fortunatus. “I shall be away a month, and there’s really no one to keep an eye on him, or take charge if there should be any trouble. But I feel that I’m taking advantage of your good nature in turning to you.”

  “The young man is just as much my kinsman as yours,” his brother pointed out. “I’m probably at fault for having done nothing for him before.” He smiled. “I’m sure I can handle him.” Fortunatus prided himself on his ability to manage people.

  “I may tell his master, and the priest, that you will act for me in my absence, then?” Terence said with great relief.

  “I shall go to see both those gentlemen myself. Set your mind at rest.” Fortunatus put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “And now,” he continued cheerfully, “we are about to enjoy a dinner with our brother Masons at that excellent tavern in Bride Street. And since I intend to consume at least three bottles of claret, I shall expect you to carry me home.”

  The sun was already high the next morning when the servant girl drew back the long curtains. Fortunatus blinked, and wished that he had not. The sunlight hurt his eyes.

  “Will you close them again, for the love of God?” he groaned hoarsely. His throat was a desert, his head a cavern of pain. “Too much claret,” he said shakily to the girl.

  “We heard Your Honour singing when your brother brought you home last night,” she answered amiably. “You have visitors, Sir,” she continued, “waiting below.”

  “I have? Send them away.”

  “We can’t, Sir. It’s Mrs. Doyle.”

  She was waiting for him in the front parlour. Like all the houses on St. Stephen’s Green, the main rooms were very tall, and like most Irish houses, sparsely furnished. The hanging on one wall, and the dark and clumsy little portrait of his father on another, did little to add cosiness to what might otherwise have been mistaken for the stately anteroom or a public Roman mausoleum.

  She made no comment upon his haggard appearance as he gazed at her with hollowed eyes and wondered why it was, even on the best of days, that his cousin Barbara made him nervous.

  It was getting on for two centuries since his ancestor Richard had married the Doyle heiress. How many generations had passed since then? Six or seven, he supposed. But the families had always kept on close terms. “Our Doyle cousins were uncommonly good to me and to your grandfather,” Donatus had always told him. If the Walshes were generous to relations less well-placed than themselves, they prided themselves on remembering favours received as well. And Barbara Doyle was not only the widow of one of these kinsmen, but she had been born a Doyle herself; so she was a kinswoman on two counts. “Cousin Barbara,” the whole family called her. When her husband had suddenly died, leaving her with a young family, they had been there at once to support her, and she recognized the fact. Anyone less in need of support, Fortunatus considered, it would be hard to imagine.

  God knows what she was worth. She’d been left a rich woman, and she’d made herself richer. Every year, as a new terrace of houses would spring up in Dublin somewhere, you could be sure that Barbara Doyle owned one of them. Indeed, she owned the very house they were in now, since Fortunatus rented it from her. He wondered nervously why she had come.

  Hastily, he urged her to his best armchair—for her comfort, no doubt, but chiefly because she wasn’t quite so infernal sitting down as standing up. Even her little son John, whom she had brought with her for some reason, was quickly offered a silk-covered stool.

  Yet even if she was richer than he was, she was still only the widow of a merchant, whereas the Walshes, since time out of mind, belonged to the landed gentry. So why was he afraid of her?

  Perhaps it was her physical presence. She was large, stout in leg and body, and undoubtedly weighed more than he did. In the enduring fashion of the Restoration, she wore a low-busted dress, from which her breasts swelled out mightily. Her hair was thick and black, her face was round, her cheeks a blotchy red. But it was her basilisk-brown, cold-staring eyes that always disconcerted him. Sometimes, under their bellicose glare, he would even find himself stuttering.

  “Well, Cousin Barbara,” he said with a forced smile, “what can I do for you?”

  “Now that you’re in Parliament,” she answered firmly, “a good deal.”

  And his heart sank.

  If it hadn’t been for the seat in Parliament, he probably wouldn’t have rented the house. Usually, a country gentleman would rent a Dublin house for the social winter season if he had a son or daughter to marry off—and Walsh had no children of that age at present—or if he had parliamentary business to attend to. Having got his seat, Fortunatus, who was usually careful with his money, had decided that if he was going to do the thing, he’d do it in style. So he had taken a big house on fashionable St. Stephen’s Green. But it had cost him dear, for rents in the best parts of Dublin were scarcely less than those in London, and he was paying Mrs. Doyle the princely sum of a hundred pounds a year—which was almost more than he could really afford.

  Barbara Doyle fixed Fortunatus with a baleful gaze. Then she made her announcement.

  “It’s time,” she said, “that Ireland stood up to the English.”

  There was hardly a person in Dublin who would have disagreed.

  For if the English Parliament wanted the Irish kept safely under Protestant rule, that did not mean that they were interested in the welfare of the rulers. They weren’t.

  After all, Ir
eland was a place apart. True, many of Cromwell’s English followers had obtained Irish land. But often they had sold it, taken their profits, and returned to England. Some of the largest English landowners held huge tracts there now, but engaged middlemen to extort the highest rents they could and remit the money to England, where these great men preferred to live as absentees. As for the Protestants who actually lived in Ireland—and their number was large—even the new arrivals had mostly been there a couple of generations now, and time and distance had bred forgetfulness. The English wished them well, of course, so long as they weren’t a nuisance.

  “But these Irish colonists need to be kept in their place,” the English judged. Even back in the days of Charles II, the English Parliament had found it needful to restrict Ireland’s time-honoured exports of beef, for an obvious cause: “Their beef competes with our own.” During the reign of King William, it had also been necessary to embargo the Irish wool trade for the same excellent reason. And when Ireland’s almost entirely Protestant gentry and merchant class had protested, the Parliament men in England knew what to think: “There’s something about that damned island that makes people disloyal.”