The Rebels of Ireland: The Dublin Saga

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “Speak for yourself,” MacGowan muttered with a smile.

  “And it’s a Protestant who has chivvied us all along. You have heard, perhaps, Deirdre, of Wolfe Tone. He’s a man of remarkable charm. It’s Tone who persuaded the Ulster Presbyterians that they should campaign jointly with the Catholics—if only because there are so many of us. And he began to persuade many of the Catholic Committee, too.”

  “But not you,” John MacGowan reminded him.

  “Certainly not. I thought they were dangerous fellows. It was not until that terrible Parliament of ’92—which I’m sure you recall— that I came round.” He sighed. “And I owe my conversion to my cousin Hercules.”

  All Ireland remembered that Parliament. Perhaps foolishly, he had allowed himself to hope that something might be done. In England, the Whigs were pressing for the relaxing of the old Penal Laws: Burke was even persuading Pitt’s Tory government of the case. In Dublin, the Duke of Leinster and his friends were arguing the same thing. There was already an understanding that Catholics would be allowed back into the legal profession. So when the moderates on the Catholic Committee had presented a modest petition to the Irish Parliament, Patrick had expected at least that it would get a reasonable hearing.

  The day before the debate, he had chanced to see his cousin Hercules coming along Dame Street from the direction of the Castle. He was walking with a sturdy figure whom he recognised as Budge’s elder son Arthur. It was always unpleasant approaching a man who disliked him so much, but it seemed to him that the importance of the matter was so great that he must speak a word to his cousin; and so, approaching them and making a most courteous bow, he expressed the hope that Hercules would give consideration to the Catholic proposal, explaining: “For it seems to me that, if nothing else, this will deny to the more radical elements the excuse they seek to agitate further.” Hercules had stared at him but said nothing, so that it was impossible to know what he was thinking. Then, with what might have been a nod, he glanced at Arthur Budge and the two men moved on. The next day, Patrick had gone early to the Parliament to hear the debate.

  If he had not been there himself, he might not have believed it. If anything, the advice of the London Whigs and the aristocratic Leinsters seemed only to have infuriated the members. They were like a pack of hounds baying for blood. They threw out the proposals by an astonishing vote of 205 to 27, and they freely insulted the Catholics as well. It was as if nothing had changed since the Battle of the Boyne. But for Patrick, the speech that rankled most hurtfully had come from Hercules.

  “No matter what tricks, what cheap persuasions the Catholics may attempt, they are never to be trusted. Ireland is a Protestant land, and so it shall remain—immutable, inviolate, triumphant— not for this century only, nor for the next, but for a thousand years!”

  The speech had been greeted by cheers. Afterwards, as he had been leaving, he had caught sight of his cousin standing in one of the colonnaded hallways. A tall figure had just come up to him and was shaking him warmly by the hand. It was FitzGibbon, the most powerful member of the Troika.

  “It was that vote and the insulting words of my cousin Hercules that made me realise that John MacGowan and his friends were right,” he told Deirdre. “The Ascendancy will give the Catholics nothing, ever.”

  But if he hoped that he was making some impression, it was clear that Deirdre, who could not possibly have any love for the Protestants, still regarded him as something even worse.

  “So you say. But the Catholics were given the vote the next year,” she pointed out sourly. “Both my daughters’ husbands have it.” If she suspected that he was a devil trying to lead her into a trap, she had caught him out in a lie.

  And indeed, in 1793 the government in London, now at war with a French Republic, and fearful of trouble in Ireland as well, had begged the unwilling Irish Parliament to do something to keep the Catholics happy. The resulting legislation, however, had been less than it seemed.

  “But it was a travesty,” John MacGowan burst out in reply. “Every man with enough property to yield forty shillings may vote. I may vote myself. And what good does that do me? None at all— since no Catholic may sit in our Parliament. I may vote, but only for a Protestant. And since the majority of constituencies are still controlled by a handful of Protestants anyway, nothing will change at all. They gave me the right to join a guild as a full member also— as long as the existing Protestant members invite me in. The thing was designed to make us think we had something, and to give us nothing. It was a mockery, a swindle.”

  “And now,” Patrick added, “the Troika have gone to work on King George. The word from London is that he has now privately vowed never to let any Catholic into Parliament.”

  It had to be said that King George III of England, as usual, had meant for the best. But just as he had conceived it his duty to hang on to the American colony, he had now been persuaded, by cunning FitzGibbon, that his coronation oath, which obliged him to uphold the Protestant faith, also meant that he must deny political representation to the Catholics. Once he believed he had given his word, nothing would ever persuade honest King George to change his mind. It was one of the Troika’s cleverer moves.

  “And if that is what the king vows in private, his government in public has shown itself just as determined. When once a viceroy came here—Lord Fitzwilliam, a decent man as it happens—who wanted to meddle with the Troika, he was recalled at once.”

  “So if nothing can be done,” Deirdre remarked, “why is it you’re here?”

  Patrick looked at her seriously. His voice became quieter.

  “A little over a year ago, Wolfe Tone was arrested for agitating. He was thrown out of the country. He went to America—to Philadelphia. The home of Benjamin Franklin.” He paused a moment. “There he made many friends: men of importance who had taken part in the American War. He also came to know the representative of the French government. Most people suppose that he is still in America. But he is not. Like Benjamin Franklin, he has gone to France—Revolutionary France—to see whether they will now help Ireland as they helped the Americans before.”

  “And will they?”

  “We have no idea. But if they do, we must be prepared. If such a thing is done, it must be done quickly and effectively. The larger and better organised the rising, the less the bloodshed need be. The United Irishmen have already shown what it means to act together in brotherhood. I believe all Ireland will rise. We shall have an Irish republic. There will be freedom of religion, as there is in America and France.”

  “And what in God’s name has this to do with Conall?” she demanded.

  For the first time, Conall spoke.

  “I am to organise this area, Deirdre. From here all the way down to the border of Wexford. In fact,” he continued gently, “I started many months ago.”

  “You devil!” She turned furiously upon Patrick. “Can you leave none of us alone? Do you wish to destroy us all?”

  But Conall was shaking his head.

  “You do not understand, Deirdre. It was not Patrick who asked me to do anything.” He smiled, perhaps a little sadly. “It was I who asked him.”

  She stared at him.

  “Your travels . . . ? With my grandfather’s verses? They were all for this?”

  “No, Deirdre, I’d have done that anyway. But it was a useful excuse to move around the region, as well.”

  Deirdre made a gesture of despair.

  “John MacGowan is one of our captains in Dublin,” Patrick explained. “And as your two sons there will answer to him, I thought it good that you should meet.”

  “Our sons too . . . ?” Deirdre looked horrified.

  “They both wished it,” Conall said quietly.

  “How many men have you now?” MacGowan asked.

  “Around Rathconan, a dozen. In the whole area, a hundred that I can rely on.”

  “Who at Rathconan?” Deirdre demanded angrily.

  Conall mentioned some of the Brennans
and other local families. “Finn O’Byrne is especially eager,” he remarked.

  “Finn O’Byrne?” Deirdre gave a look of disgust. “He’s the biggest fool of them all. And he hates you, besides.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Conall smiled. “He will fight for us because he believes that if we win, Rathconan will be his.”

  “But why, Conall?” she cried suddenly. “When you’ve spent all your life avoiding trouble—why would you do such a thing?”

  Patrick thought this was uncalled for. So, by the look of it, did MacGowan. Conall seemed to read their thoughts.

  “No,” he said quietly, “she is right.” He paused a moment. “It is true that, seeing the foolishness of my father, I have always taken care not to make the same mistakes. I have never drunk more than a little; I have kept my thoughts to myself. I have made furniture, as well as I know how, for men I despise, and taken their payments politely.” And now a certain edge came into his voice. “In Dublin, I was treated like a dog at school by Protestant boys who had neither my intelligence nor my education; as a man I have seen my fellow countrymen held in subjection by these same bigots and fools. And I have hated them all. But hatred is useless, and revolt is a crime, because, unless it has the means to succeed, it is stupid. So I said to myself: ‘Wait. Wait a lifetime if necessary. But wait until the time is ripe.’ And for many years I thought that I should never live to see that time. But now I think it may have come. And if every carving and every piece of furniture that I have ever made should need to be destroyed, as we burn their houses down, I should say: ‘Light the fire and burn them all,’ and say it gladly.”

  “Oh, Conall.” His wife shook her head. “I hope to God you may be right. For if you’re not, we shall all be destroyed.”

  “Then you will help us?”

  “I am your wife, Conall.” She sighed. “Just one condition I make.”

  “Which is?”

  “Never ask me if I believe.”

  After leaving Rathconan, Patrick took MacGowan to Glendalough, which the Dublin man had never seen before. They also took note of the hamlets they passed. Patrick was pleased with the day. Though Conall and his men up in the mountains could only be marginal to any action, he was proud that he had an organization in place up there. “Besides,” MacGowan pointed out, “you never know whom you may need.” At the end of the day, they made their way down to Wicklow town, arriving there at nightfall.

  The next morning, they inspected the place. Conall had warned them that his two sons-in-law there had no interest in the cause, but Patrick already had a merchant in the town who had volunteered, and he gladly took them round.

  Like most Irish towns of the time, it had a barracks with quite a full garrison: Protestant officers, Catholic men. They seemed well-disciplined and quite smartly turned out. “We’ve tried to persuade some of the troops to join us—secretly, of course,” the merchant informed them. “But no luck so far.” Nonetheless, he informed them, he had twenty good men in the town. By midmorning they had parted from him and started back towards Dublin.

  They were both rather cheerful. Patrick certainly felt that they were making good progress in Wicklow. A month ago, he had been down in Wexford where his old friend Kelly had told him: “The gentry here are absolutely split into two parties, but many of us, including myself, are with you.” In other parts of the island, however, that lay outside his own remit, especially in Munster and Connacht, little progress had been made. “We shall all have to work hard so that Ireland is ready,” he remarked to MacGowan, “if the French do agree to come.”

  Yet whatever the uncertainties both men, for their different reasons, could express confidence. MacGowan’s reasons were practical.

  “The Ulster men are formidable,” he observed. “They are the backbone at present. But if a proper military force arrives from France—I mean ten thousand men or so—then I believe the effect upon our Catholic population would be incalculable. Up to now, any protest has been crushed, and they have no hope. But once they see the French—we’ll have a hundred thousand men the next day. Even the whole English army would find it difficult to move about the island with every man’s hand turned against them. We’d harass them and wear them down, just as the Americans did.”

  Patrick’s reasons were vaguer, yet perhaps even more strongly felt. It was not so much the Catholic generality in whom he placed his trust, important though they were. It was the involvement of his own, Old English class that moved him.

  If the great ducal house of Leinster had been the patron of the Catholic cause in Parliament, it was no less a person than the old duke’s handsome younger son, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had now emerged as leader of the cause in Dublin. He had been profoundly affected by the ideals of the French Revolution. “All men are equal,” he would remind his friends, “the duke and the street sweeper, the Protestant and the Catholic. And all social systems which deny such an obvious truth will sooner or later be swept away.” And he practised what he preached. He’d stop in the middle of a Dublin street and talk to some modest labourer with just the same, simple honesty with which he’d have spoken to a noble lord. He cut his hair unfashionably short; and in his manner of dressing, you might have taken him for a modest Paris tradesman rather than an Irish aristocrat. Seeing Patrick’s unusual household with Brigid the peasant girl, he had taken him for a member of his own class who shared the same egalitarian outlook. “It’s up to us, Patrick, to take the lead,” he had once confided in him. “I feel better, having you by my side.” And even if some of Lord Edward’s ideas seemed a little too radical to Patrick, he warmed to the aristocrat’s noble idealism.

  Two weeks ago, Patrick had chanced to meet him at his cousin Eliza’s house. Taking him to one side, Lord Edward had confided: “Patrick, I’m going to make my own approach to the French, to back up Tone. Between our two efforts, I’m sure we shall persuade them. But I beg you, not a word to anyone yet.” If this confidence—and the fact that he had a slight family connection with the great aristocratic dynasty—gave Patrick a certain snobbish delight, the idea that they were fighting side by side for the cause of the Irish people was imbued, in Patrick’s mind, with an almost mystical quality.

  Not that his religion was intense. Brought up by a physician father of liberal outlook, and coming of age when the French ideas of rational enlightenment were all the rage, it wasn’t surprising that Patrick’s religion was kindly rather than devout. If Wolfe Tone and the Ulster Presbyterians, who were now so important to him, privately thought of their Catholic allies as medieval obscurantists, Patrick would not entirely have disagreed. “I believe that the world must have been created by an eternal, all-encompassing being that we call God. And Christianity expresses the divine nature. But I don’t believe much more than that,” he once confessed to Georgiana. “So I suppose I’m what people nowadays call a Deist.”

  “So are most of the clever men I know,” she replied with a smile, “Catholic or Protestant.”

  This in no way prevented him from going to Mass or making his confession—and certainly not from fighting for justice for his fellow Catholics in Ireland. Yet if he had no interest in visiting the holy well of St. Marnock, as his grandfather had still done, when he thought of himself and Lord Edward fighting for the ancient Catholic cause, he felt that he was fulfilling a sacred trust, and he experienced a sense of rightness, as if this was what his ancestors, and no doubt the deity Himself, had destined him to do.

  They were ten miles from Dublin when they met Hercules, in the company of Arthur Budge, riding towards them.

  It was many years since Hercules had spoken to his cousin. Even when Patrick had come up to him before the parliamentary debate of ’92, he had not said a word in reply. But now, seeing him coming from Wicklow, together with that cursed Catholic merchant John MacGowan, he did not hesitate.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded roughly.

  “I’m after taking Mr. MacGowan to see Glendalough,” Patrick answered with a b
land smile. “Did you never go there, Hercules? It’s a lovely spot. St. Kevin’s hermitage may still be seen.”

  Hercules looked at the two men with disgust.

  They were all the same, these Catholics, he considered. Insinuating and deceitful. Jesuits to a man. He would never forget that John MacGowan had pretended to be a Protestant so that he could sneak into the Aldermen of Skinners Alley. Once a liar, always a liar, as far as Hercules was concerned. As for Patrick, his loathing for his Catholic cousin had only grown down the years. If as a young man he had been jealous of the love his own mother felt for Patrick—her preference for his cousin, he’d sometimes suspected—by the time his grandfather had left Patrick the legacy, it had become clear to him that his cousin was only preferred because he practised the Catholic arts of manipulation. Dishonesty: that was all it was. As for Patrick’s attempt to persuade him to change his convictions before that parliamentary debate, it had been contemptible. Did the devious Catholic really imagine he would be swayed by these hypocritical appeals to his better nature—from a man who, himself, had been living in sin with his concubine for years? No, Patrick was nothing.

  But what was he doing here? This tale about Glendalough was obviously a lie, intended to taunt him. But what did it conceal?

  If Hercules was suspicious of the two Catholics, it was not surprising. The fear of the suppressed Catholic majority was so endemic in governing circles that almost anything a Catholic did might be seen as evidence of a conspiracy of some sort. When tensions between Protestant and Catholic textile workers had flared up in Ulster, and the Catholics had formed groups they called Defenders, to protect themselves against Protestant mobs, the government had seen it as a conspiracy. As a result, the Defenders had spread, and turned into just the sort of disruptive secret society that the government feared. Before that, down in County Wexford, some rural disturbances against the high tithes and other exactions made by the clergy had soon been denounced as another Catholic assault on decency and order. The charge was absurd, but despite the fact that his own family estate was in the same county, and he should have known better, Hercules had chosen to believe it.