A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process
Page 30
Solicitor-General: Pray give the court and the jury an account of what you know of any plot in Ireland, to introduce the Romish religion, or to bring in the French king.
MacMoyer: Yes, I know there was a plot.
MacMoyer was only one of several priests and friars brought over by the prosecution to give evidence of the plot. All of them had been disciplined for bad behaviour by Plunkett.
Plunkett: Tell me this—
Lord Chief Justice: What is your question, Dr Plunkett? Pray tell it us.
Plunkett: I say, my lord, why did he not tell some justice of the peace that I was on such a design ... and never speak of it till now.
[MacMoyer hesitates]
Lord Chief Justice: What say you to the question? [MacMoyer hesitates]
What religion were you of then?
MacMoyer: I was a Roman Catholic.
Lord Chief Justice: And are you not so now?
MacMoyer: Yes, I am so.
Justice Dolben: Therefore it will be no wonder that you did not discover it.
Attorney-General: Then swear Hugh Duffy.
Duffy was a Franciscan friar who had been expelled from Rome for deliberately smashing a bust of Plunkett in the Vatican library. Now he gave the court damning evidence. This was too much for the archbishop:
Attorney-General: Pray let him have fair play to ask any questions.
Plunkett: Mr Duffy, one word with you: is not this out of malice to me, for correcting some of the clergy?
The next witness to be sworn in was Father Edmund Murphy. He had been suspended by Plunkett for constant drunkenness and disorderly conduct. Murphy was less reliable than the prosecution hoped. In court he was clearly petrified.
Lord Chief Justice: Answer me directly, did he claim to be titular primate under the pope?
Murphy: I suppose he did ...
Lord Chief Justice: You are upon your oath, you must speak the truth, and the whole truth. You must not mince or conceal anything.
Attorney-General: Upon your oath, did you converse with him about bringing in the French?
[silence]
Serjeant Jeffreys: Declare the truth, come! [silence]
Lord Chief Justice: Come, don’t trifle! What discourse have you had with the prisoner about bringing in the French, sir?
Murphy: ... It was a general expectation that all the French and Irish would come and fall upon the English nation, as I understood.
Lord Chief Justice: Pray answer the question directly; you must not come and think to trifle with the court.... You must not come to quibble and run about to this, and that, and t’other, but answer directly.
Suddenly Father Murphy reached for his hat and dashed in terror from Westminster Hall. As he was dragged back Friar MacMoyer was called again. He was questioned about the raising of money and was shown a paper signed by Plunkett:
Attorney-General: It is £500 in the whole.
Plunkett: Is it £500?
MacMoyer: It is in figure a 5 and two 00s.
Plunkett: My lord, this is counterfeit, it is put in by other ink.
Justice Dolben: Like enough so.
Not one of the witnesses for the prosecution had produced any real evidence of treason. The jury now retired and returned after fifteen minutes.
Clerk of the Court: Oliver Plunkett, hold up thy hand. How say you, is he guilty of the high treason whereof he stands indicted, or not guilty?
Jury foreman: Guilty.
Plunkett: Deo gratias, God be thanked.
When sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, the archbishop responded:
Plunkett: God Almighty bless your lordship.... I die most willingly. And with God’s grace I shall give others the good example not to fear death. I do forgive all who had a hand directly or indirectly in my death and in my innocent blood. As for my religion, ’tis glorious for all my friends that I should die for it.
Episode 106
‘LILLIBURLERO’
Look you, Mr Plunkett, you have been here indicted of the greatest of all crimes, and that is, high treason. The bottom of your treason was your setting up your false religion ... a religion that is ten times worse than all the heathenish superstitions.
So spoke the Lord Chief Justice in Westminster Hall after the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh had been condemned. Then came the sentence:
And therefore you must go from hence to the place from whence you came, that is to Newgate, and from thence you shall be drawn through the city of London to Tyburn; there you shall be hanged by the neck, but cut down before you are dead, your bowels shall be taken out and burnt before your face, your head shall be cut off, and your body be divided into four quarters.
This was nothing short of judicial murder: not a shred of evidence had been put forward to prove treason. On 11 July 1681 Archbishop Oliver Plunkett was tied lying down with his face uppermost on a sledge, shaped like a flat-bottomed boat, and this was drawn by three horses along rough cobbles for more than two miles. In front of the sledge a fife and drum band played; then followed a company of mounted soldiers.
At Tyburn a huge crowd watched as the hangman and his assistant, a butcher, took their instruments from a cart. The prisoner was untied and taken to the gallows, where he forgave his enemies and prayed briefly. One witness recalled:
His speech ended, and his cap drawn over his eyes ... the cart was drawn from under him. Thus he hung betwixt Heaven and Earth ... the executioner ripped up his belly and breast, and pulled out his heart and bowels, threw them into the fire, ready kindled.
And what did King Charles II think of this? The French ambassador to London observed:
I spoke to the King of England on this matter of Monsieur Plunkett and he told me he was more sorry than he could possibly express to see a man condemned to death who was in no wise guilty, but that his enemies were watching for him to make a false step.
Indeed, King Charles had to watch his step during this wave of anti-Catholic hysteria in England, known as the Popish Plot. Charles, having no legitimate child to succeed him to the throne, took serious risks when he refused to exclude his Catholic brother James from the succession.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this Popish Plot is that the king’s viceroy in Dublin Castle, the Duke of Ormond, succeeded in keeping this frenzy of religious hate out of Ireland. Catholic bishops had to go into genteel hiding for a time, certainly, but there was no repeat of the religious persecution of Cromwell’s day.
Then, rather suddenly, Charles II died in 1685. His brother was now King James II. Protestants on both sides of the Irish Sea dreaded what would come next.
They did not have to wait long. In 1687 a Catholic, Richard Talbot, was appointed Lord Deputy, the king’s chief governor in Ireland. Talbot, the sixteenth child of an impoverished Kildare landowner, had been one of the very few royalist officers to escape Cromwell’s massacre in Drogheda in 1649. Now created the Earl of Tyrconnell, he was a man dedicated to the Catholic cause. Protestants in Ireland referred to him as ‘Lying Dick Talbot’, and in England a song of derision written by Thomas Wharton—a take-off of the Irish brogue—very quickly reached the top of the 1687 hit parade:
Ho brother Teig, dost hear de decree,
Lilliburlero Bullen a la!
Dat we shall have a new Deputy?
Lilliburlero, Bullen a la!
Ho, by my Soul, it is a Talbot,
Lilliburlero, Bullen a la!
And he will cut all de English throat.
Lilliburlero, Bullen a la!
Tyrconnell did not delay in his mission. All counties but Donegal acquired Catholic sheriffs. Boroughs—that is, town and city councils—were overhauled to give them Catholic majorities. The army was purged of most of its Protestant officers. A Gaelic poet in Munster, Dáibhidh Ó Bruadair, rejoiced at the change and at the discomfiture of ‘John’, the archetypal English planter:
Behold there the Gael in arms in every one of them,
They have powder and guns, hold the castles and
fortresses;
The Presbyterians, lo, have been overthrown,
And the fanatics have left an infernal smell after them.
Whither shall John turn? He has now no red coat on him.
Nor ‘Who’s there?’ on his lips when standing beside the gate.
‘You popish rogue’ they won’t dare to say to us,
But ‘Cromwellian dog’ is the watchword we have for him.
Catholics may have been exulting, but the Protestants of England had decided that King James would have to go. Fearing that Tyrconnell was about to send a Catholic army across the Irish Sea, they turned to William of Orange for aid.
Episode 107
THREE KINGS AND THIRTEEN APPRENTICE BOYS
Dare was an auld prophecy found in a bog,
Lilliburlero Bullen a la!
That we would be ruled by an ass and a hog.
Lilliburlero Bullen a la!
And now the auld prophecy has come to pass,
Lilliburlero, Bullen a la!
For Talbot’s the hog and James is the ass.
Lilliburlero, Bullen a la!
Richard Talbot, the Earl of Tyrconnell, appointed Lord Deputy by James II, was busy clearing Protestants out of the Irish army and the country’s administration. Following the birth of a male heir to the throne in June 1688, thereby ensuring the Catholic succession, the Protestant gentlemen of England became convinced that King James would have to go. William of Orange, ruler of the Dutch Republic, accepted their invitation and landed with an imposing army at Torbay in the south-west of England on 5 November 1688.
While King James was in London making frantic efforts to stop his support melting away, Protestants in Ulster were rallying for their own defence against Tyrconnell’s Catholic troops. On 3 December 1688 an anonymous letter was found lying in a street in Comber, Co. Down, addressed to Lord Mount Alexander. It began:
Good my lord, I have written to you to know that all our Irishmen through Ireland is sworn that on the ninth day of this month they are to fall on to kill and murder man, wife and child ...
Almost certainly a forgery, the ‘Comber Letter’ nevertheless galvanised the Protestant population of Ulster. Indeed, one of the aldermen of Derry was reading out the letter to citizens when a messenger arrived warning that Lord Antrim and his troop of soldiers was approaching. The Earl of Antrim had been ordered by Tyrconnell to place a garrison in the walled city. Fortunately for the Protestants of Derry, Lord Antrim was elderly and a little crazy, and it took weeks before he was ready to move. He insisted, for example, that all his Redshank soldiers should be over six foot tall. Nevertheless, the appearance finally of 1,200 Catholic soldiers on 7 December caused instant alarm inside the walls.
The Protestant Bishop of Derry advised citizens to admit Lord Antrim’s troops. But when the Redshanks entered the Waterside and began to cross the Foyle, thirteen apprentice boys seized the keys from the main guard, raised the drawbridge at Ferryquay gate and closed the gates. This swift action by the apprentice boys, an army captain recalled, ‘acted like magic and roused an unanimous spirit of defence; and now with one voice we determined to maintain the city at all hazards, and each age and sex conjoined in the important cause’.
On 23 December 1688 James fled to France, and on 13 February 1689 William and his wife Mary, a Protestant daughter of James by his first marriage, were declared joint sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland. Louis XIV now persuaded James to go to Ireland to recover his kingdom; the French king’s plan was to keep William busy in Ireland while he overwhelmed the Dutch Republic.
On 12 March 1689 a French fleet of twenty-two ships steered into the Bandon estuary and James stepped ashore at Kinsale. From there to Cork and north to Dublin the Irish turned out to give him a rapturous welcome, as one of his officers recalled:
All along the road the country came to meet his majesty with staunch loyalty, profound respect, and tender love as if he had been an angel from heaven. All degrees of people and of both sexes were of the number, young and old; orations of welcome were made to him at the entrance to each town, and rural maids danced before him as he travelled.
Men took off their coats and laid them in the mud before his horses’ hooves. In Carlow he ‘was slobbered with the kisses of the rude countrywomen, so that he was forced to have them kept away from him’.
James entered Dublin in triumph on Palm Sunday. Two harpers played on a richly decorated stage; below it friars, holding a large cross, were singing; bells rang; guns fired in salute; and there were ‘about forty oyster-women, poultry- and herb-women in white, dancing’. The Lord Mayor and Corporation presented James with the keys of the city while pipers played ‘The King Enjoys His Own Again’. The king dismounted and approached Dublin Castle on foot. All fell silent as James received benediction from the Archbishop of Armagh. Overhead the white standard of the Stuarts was unfurled with the motto:
Now or Never
Now and Forever
Then a great cheer erupted from the dense crowd. These people were pinning all their hopes on this deposed king.
Meanwhile Louis XIV had sent out another formidable fleet. Over two thousand seasoned French troops came ashore, bringing with them engineers and an impressive quantity of munitions and artillery. Very soon King James had control of the whole island—or rather, almost the whole island, because there were two or three places in the north which refused to accept his authority. One of these was Derry.
Episode 108
‘NO SURRENDER!’
On 7 December 1688, thirteen Protestant apprentice boys closed the gates of Derry against the forces of the Catholic King James II. The mayor expelled the remaining Catholics from the city and issued this proclamation:
We have resolved to stand upon our guard and to defend our walls, and not to admit of any papists whatsoever to quarter amongst us.
On 22 March, King James arrived from France with a large professional army sent by Louis XIV. Meanwhile the ‘Jacobites’—those who remained loyal to King James—were sweeping northwards.
On 14 March 1689 the Protestant gentlemen who had declared for William of Orange had suffered a crushing defeat in Co. Down—this was to become known as the ‘Break of Dromore’. Lisburn, Belfast and Antrim fell to the Jacobites without a fight, and, after a brisk engagement in a snowstorm, the Coleraine garrison, ‘Williamites’ who supported William, pulled west to Derry. On the other side of Ulster the men of Enniskillen, also loyal to William, kept the Jacobites at a respectful distance with their long fowling pieces.
Meanwhile, from all over the north, Protestants poured into Derry, then under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Lundy. As well as a garrison of over 7,000 men, perhaps another 30,000 colonists sought sanctuary in the city. So, in a very real sense, the fate of the entire Protestant settlement in Ulster depended on Derry’s ability to hold out.
In April men from the Derry garrison were overwhelmed by James’s French and Irish troops. Driven out of their trenches at Lifford and Cladyford, about fifteen miles south-west of the city, Protestant foot-soldiers were hacked down, while their cavalry support ignominiously galloped in retreat back to Derry. Thomas Ash recorded in his diary that the Williamites had been beaten ‘although we were five to one against them, which caused suspicion that Colonel Lundy was a traitor to our cause’.
When Lundy, the governor of Derry, refused the support of two regiments sent out from Liverpool, that suspicion became a certainty. The citizens revolted, overthrew Lundy, and appointed as joint governors in his place Major Henry Baker and the Rev. George Walker, the Church of Ireland rector of Donaghmore. They were to provide inspired leadership, and they both humanely allowed Lundy, disguised as a common soldier, to slip away over the walls. Walker described the prospects of a successful resistance:
We had but few horse to sally out with and no forage; no engineers to instruct us in our works; no Fireworks, not so much as a hand-grenado to annoy the enemy; nor a gun well mounted in the town.
> Well-mounted or not, some of the guns in the city were impressive. The largest was ‘Roaring Meg’, given to the city in 1642 by the Fishmongers’ Company. And there was no shortage of powder and handguns.
Exhilarated by the victory at Lifford and Cladyford, King James travelled from Dublin to join his besieging army. On 18 April he advanced towards the walls and offered terms. He was greeted with cries of ‘No surrender!’ This was followed by a sustained barrage of shot and ball from the city walls. Just out of range, James sat motionless on his horse for several hours in the pouring rain. Then the king was persuaded to return to Dublin, where the French ambassador observed that ‘His Majesty appears to me to be very mortified over his latest proceeding’.
The Jacobites were badly equipped for a long siege. One French supply officer reported that ‘most of the soldiers in front of Derry have still only pointed sticks, without iron tips’. A single mortar was the only artillery piece the besiegers possessed. More heavy guns arrived later, but these were not sufficient to attempt a breach of the walls, except at very close quarters. Indeed, the defenders made several audacious sallies from the city, mortally wounding two French generals.
The defenders had entrenched themselves on a hillock to the west of the city, where a windmill stood. The Jacobite general, Richard Hamilton, resolved to drive them back, as one of his Irish officers recalled:
General Hamilton, observing that the rebels made a walking place of this entrenched ground for the preservation of their health, and that they gave great annoyance with their cannon from the said mill and with their long fowling-pieces.…Whereupon he commanded, on the sixth of May, an attack to be made upon the entrenchment.