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

by Jonathan Bardon

  The Irish army is in a state of licentiousness which must render it formidable to everyone but the enemy—this is proved by the very disgraceful frequency of courts martial.

  Leading members of the Irish government were outraged:

  I resent the peevish indiscretion of this Scotch beast ...

  For God’s sake, what is doing with our Commander-in-Chief. I wish he stayed with the Negroes on Martinico ...

  Poor creature, I pity him. He is quite in his dotage ...

  A public and indiscriminate censure—almost an invitation to a foreign enemy ...

  Because Abercromby refused to retract the conclusions of his report, he was forced to resign. General Lake took his place. Abercromby’s bloodless but effective methods were dropped in favour of a more strenuous policy, chillingly summed up by Lake himself: ‘... other vigorous and effectual measures.... You make think me too violent, but I am convinced it would be a mercy in the end.’ The actions he authorised were to do much to drive an inflamed people into open rebellion.

  Episode 151

  ‘CROPPIES, LIE DOWN!’

  In Dublin the traitors were ready to rise

  And murder was seen in their lowering eyes.

  With poison, the cowards, they aimed to succeed

  And thousands were doomed by Assassins to bleed.

  But the Yeomen advanced, of Rebels the dread

  And each Croppy soon hid his dastardly head.

  Down, down, Croppies, lie down!

  Indeed, the ‘Croppies’—those who cropped their hair short in the French revolutionary style—were ready to rise in the spring of 1798. Given information by a spy, Town Major Henry Sirr, Dublin’s police chief, seized ten United Irish leaders on 12 March in the house of Oliver Bond, a woollen merchant in the city. From the captured papers it was evident that rebellion was imminent.

  But other leaders were still at large, including the rebel commander-in-chief, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, brother of the most distinguished Irish peer, the Duke of Leinster. Famous for his military exploits when serving with the British forces during the American War of Independence, Lord Edward had acquired his revolutionary ideas from his father-in law, Philippe Égalité (‘Equality Philip’), the now executed Duke of Orléans.

  Meanwhile other United Irishmen, including Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy, were in Paris attempting to persuade Napoleon Bonaparte to send help to Ireland. But Napoleon preferred to plan an invasion of England. ‘What would these gentlemen have?’ he asked. ‘France is revolutionised! Holland is revolutionised! Italy is revolutionised! Switzerland is revolutionised! Europe will soon be revolutionised. But this it seems is not enough to content them.’ But then the great general turned to Wolfe Tone and said: ‘Mais, vous êtes brave ... but, you are brave.’

  Hearing that there would not be an expedition, Lord Edward decided in any case that the rebellion would begin without the French on 23 May. United Irishmen and their Defender allies would converge in three columns on the capital while he himself led an attack on Dublin Castle. He listed his requirements: fifty hammers, fifty groove irons, 150 hooks for scaling ladders, and so on.

  Facing a string of humiliating defeats abroad at the hands of the French and a number of alarming naval mutinies in English ports, the government made frantic efforts to prevent rebellion in Ireland. General Gerard Lake, the newly appointed commander-in-chief, unleashed regular troops, together with units of the Yeomanry and Fencibles, on the population of Leinster. Troops flogged blacksmiths until they revealed where pikes were hidden. In the village of Ballitore, Co. Kildare, a Quaker lady, Mary Leadbeater, recorded in her diary:

  They set fire to some cabins near the village—took P. Murphy ... apparently an inoffensive man, tied him to a car opposite to his own door, and these ... officers degraded themselves so far as to scourge him with their own hands. James Carney, tied to a tree, underwent a similar punishment—the torture was excessive—they did not recover soon.... The village, so peaceful, exhibited a scene of tumult and dismay—the air rang with the shrieks of sufferers, and the lamentations of those who beheld them suffer. These violent measures caused a great many pikes to be brought in.

  It was at Athy, Co. Kildare, on 1 May 1798 that the triangle made its first appearance. On this apparatus Colonel Campbell tied suspects, one at a time, and flogged them until they revealed where arms had been hidden. Thomas Rawson was one of the interrogators, as a survivor remembered:

  Rawson would seat himself in a chair in the centre of a ring formed around the triangles, the miserable victims kneeling under the triangle until they would be spotted over with the blood of others.

  Other commanders had with them ‘travelling gallows’ for half-hanging men until they would give information. Captain Swayne was credited with the invention of ‘pitch-capping’—pitch was mixed with gunpowder, then placed on a suspect’s head and set on fire. The flames were not extinguished until the whereabouts of arms had been revealed.

  I met with Napper Tandy, and he took me by the hand,

  And he said, ‘How’s poor ould Ireland, and how does she stand?’

  ‘She’s the most distressful country that ever yet was seen,

  For they’re hanging men and women there for the Wearin’ o’ the Green.’

  Captain John Edwards of the Bray Yeomanry protested that troops were attacking people in Co. Wicklow simply because they were wearing green:

  Where is the man whose blood will not boil with revenge who sees the petticoat of his wife or sister cut off her back by the sabre of the Dragoon—merely for the crime of being green, a colour certainly with them innocent of disaffection.

  Huge quantities of arms were seized, but the infuriated country people were now flocking to the rebel army in their thousands.

  Episode 152

  ‘ROUSE, HIBERNIANS, FROM YOUR SLUMBERS’

  The boys will all be there, says the Shan Van Vocht;

  The boys will all be there, says the Shan Van Vocht;

  The boys will all be there, with their pikes in good repair,

  And Lord Edward will be there, says the Shan Van Vocht.

  But Lord Edward Fitzgerald would not be there. On 19 May 1798, just four days before tens of thousands of United Irishmen were due to rise up in rebellion, he was cornered in Dublin. Lord Edward, the rebel commander-in-chief, had been lying in bed in an upstairs room in a house in the Liberties recovering from a bout of influenza. That afternoon his revolutionary uniform was brought to him: a bottle-green braided suit with silk lace and a crimson cape, and a Cap of Liberty two feet long. Then suddenly at seven in the evening Dublin’s police chief, Major Swan, and a Yeomanry officer, Captain Ryan, burst into the room. Swan declared: ‘You know me, my lord, and I know you. It will be vain to resist.’ Lord Edward, however, leaped from his bed and stabbed Swan three times. Swan fired his pistol, but only hit Lord Edward’s shoulder and ran bleeding down the stairs crying: ‘Ryan, Ryan, I am basely murdered.’

  Ryan, wielding a swordstick, now faced Lord Edward’s revolutionary stiletto. The two rolled down the stairs in deadly conflict. Stabbed fourteen times in the stomach by Lord Edward, Captain Ryan—the man who had written the most popular loyalist ballad of the year, ‘Croppies, Lie Down’—soon bled to death. Lord Edward Fitzgerald was led away, and he too was shortly to die: while in prison awaiting trial, his wounded shoulder became affected by gangrene, and he expired a fortnight later.

  Every other United Irish leader of any importance had either been hanged or been thrown into jail. The last to be arrested was Samuel Neilson, the Belfast wool merchant, now a hopeless alcoholic; it was he who had unwittingly led the police to Lord Edward’s hideout. But it had been Neilson in a sober moment who had thought up the ingenious plan to signal the start of the rebellion—simply stop the government coaches carrying the mail and other vital army communications, and when the coach failed to appear at the usual time, then it was time to lift the pikes out of the thatch.

  On 23 May 1798 many of the coac
hes leaving Dublin were stopped and destroyed on roads radiating out of the capital. What was to be the bloodiest conflict in Ireland in modern times had begun:

  Rouse, Hibernians, from your slumbers!

  See the moment just arrived,

  Imperious tyrants for to humble,

  Our French brethren are at hand.

  Revolutionary sentiments abounded and were freely expressed:

  Revenge! Glorious revenge! Your name is as sweet as liberty!

  Irishmen! ... Arm yourselves and rush like lions on your foes!

  Vengeance, Irishmen, on your oppressors!

  Vengeance! Arise, then, United Sons of Ireland!

  Vive la, United Heroes,

  Triumphant always may they be.

  Vive la, our gallant brethren

  That have come to set us free.

  In fact the French were not on their way to Ireland; and without well-known leaders, the planned attack on Dublin Castle came to nothing. But tens of thousands armed themselves, and in the first thirty-six hours fourteen engagements were fought in Co. Kildare. First of all the town of Prosperous fell to the insurgents, and Captain Swayne, the inventor of the pitch-cap, was shot in his bed with a blunderbuss and his body burnt in a barrel of tar. In Clane, Catholics though they were, forty-eight members of the militia were piked or shot or burnt to death by the insurgents. At Old Kilcullen the 9th Dragoons charged with sabres drawn, only to transfix themselves on insurgent pikes. Their commander, Captain Erskine, thrown from his horse and breaking his leg, was stabbed to death by an old beggar-woman wielding a rusty clasp-knife.

  Perhaps a thousand pikemen charged down the main street of Naas, the headquarters of the third largest garrison in Ireland, but were driven back and slaughtered by cannon firing rounds of grapeshot. Lord Gosford, who famously had denounced Orange atrocities in his native Co. Armagh, was in command. He reported: ‘The cavalry took advantage of their confusion, charged in amongst them, and pursued them all over the country in almost every direction and killed a great number of them.’

  Meanwhile the United Irish army of Co. Meath had planted the Tree of Liberty at Dunshaughlin, captured firearms and 9,000 ball cartridges, and made camp at the seat of the High-Kings of Ireland, the Hill of Tara. The problem was that most of the insurgents had no idea how to use the captured guns. And on 26 May three companies of Scotch Fencibles and Lord Fingall’s Yeomanry attacked and decimated the great rebel force.

  In fact the rebellion of 1798 had hardly begun.

  Episode 153

  THE BOYS OF WEXFORD

  Towards the end of May 1798 it looked as if the rebellion of the United Irishmen had been crushed. General Sir Ralph Dundas, in spite of fierce loyalist criticism in Dublin, offered a pardon to the rebels of Co. Kildare. Huge numbers of people came forward, and the heap of surrendered pikes on the Curragh was described as being as high as the Royal Exchange. But the Limerick commander, General Sir James Duff, had not heard of the capitulation. Making a forced march of a hundred miles northwards over two days and two nights, his militia and dragoons fell upon the unarmed rebels on the Curragh and slaughtered at least 350 of them.

  Other incidents helped to sustain the rebellion. On 25 May at Dunlavin Green on the Wicklow–Kildare border the militia took prisoners from the local jail, men who had taken no part in the rising, and summarily executed them:

  In the year of one thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight

  A sorrowful tale the truth unto you I’ll relate

  Of thirty-six heroes to the world were left to be seen,

  By a false information were shot on Dunlavin Green.

  Next day militiamen in south Co. Wicklow marched twenty-eight suspects from Carnew town prison to the local handball alley, where, one by one, they were shot by firing-squad.

  The people of Co. Wicklow and north Co. Wexford had by now become convinced that they were all going to be slaughtered. This impression was reinforced by the activities of a group of loyalists known as the ‘Black Mob’, led by the notorious Hunter Gowan. Men were flogged to death, homes and haggards were burnt, suspects were tortured with burning pitch-caps, and Hunter Gowan himself stirred the punch at a local celebration in Gorey with the amputated finger of one of his victims. Archibald Hamilton Jacob, an Enniscorthy magistrate, toured the countryside with an executioner equipped with a hanging-rope and a cat-o’-nine-tails. At Ballaghkeen he flogged a man to death, and in Enniscorthy he hanged a man and had his body dragged backwards and forwards through the market place.

  Thousands of terrified people took to the hillsides and ditches. Many turned to their local priests for leadership. One of them was Father John Murphy, whose chapel at Boulavogue had been burnt down. After seizing a great quantity of arms at Camolin in north Wexford, Father Murphy and his followers made camp nearby on Oulart Hill.

  On 27 May the North Cork Militia made ready to attack the rebels on Oulart Hill. Gaelic-speaking Catholic men from Cork, fighting for the crown, faced English-speaking rebels led by a Catholic priest. The militiamen, unused to army footwear, asked permission to attack in their bare feet. The militia were completely overwhelmed as they surged uphill. Out of 109 men, the only survivors in the government force were Colonel Foote and three of his soldiers.

  Hearing of the victory at Oulart Hill, thousands more joined Father Murphy. At one o’clock on the afternoon of Whit Monday what was described as a ‘black cloud’ of between nine and ten thousand insurgents descended on the walled town of Enniscorthy in central Co. Wexford. After fierce fighting by the Duffrey Gate the pikemen prevailed in the narrow streets. At four o’clock half the town was in flames and the garrison withdrew, leaving loyalists to their fate.

  In Wexford army discipline collapsed as masses of insurgents approached the town. Mrs Brownrigg took her two children on board a vessel in the harbour, hoping to sail for Wales. But, quite rightly, she did not trust the owner Captain Dixon:

  Great God! What a night that was. The Horns of the Rebels I heard very plainly, for the ship just lay about half way from Ferry Bank and Wexford.... At the first dawn of day, May the thirtieth, the bridge was set on fire from the Ferry Bank side; all our crew were or pretended to be asleep. I woke them and if I doubted their principles before could no longer doubt them. A wonderful scene of confusion now ensued. Boats of every description put off from the shore, and our ship and every other in the harbour was filled with women and children, some naked, several that had been in Enniscorthy the day before entirely frantic.... All this time, of course, the Rebels were advancing and increasing in numbers.... Captain Dixon got into his boat ... saying he would try what he could do to save our lives in a manner that showed he had little to hope. We were then I suppose, about forty women and children put into the hold of the ship on Coals with which it was loaded, and sat expecting immediate death.

  Soon after these dramatic events a republic would be proclaimed in Wexford.

  Episode 154

  THE BATTLE OF NEW ROSS

  It was early, early in the spring,

  When small birds tune, and thrushes sing,

  Changing their note from tree to tree,

  And the song they sang was old Ireland free.

  On the last day of May 1798 huge numbers of rebels poured into Wexford town. The loyalist Charles Jackson remembered:

  We passed through crowds of rebels, who were in the most disorderly state, without the least appearance of discipline. They had no kind of uniform but most of them in the dress of labourers, white bands round their hats and green cockades being the only marks by which they were distinguished. They made a most fantastic appearance, many having decorated themselves with parts of the apparel of ladies, found in the houses they had plundered. Some wore ladies’ hats and feathers, others, caps, bonnets and tippets.... Their arms consisted chiefly of pikes of an enormous length, the handles of many being sixteen or eighteen feet long. Some carried rusty muskets. They were accompanied by a number of women shouting and huzzaing for the Croppies and cr
ying, Who now dare say ‘Croppies, lie down?’

  General Sir William Fawcett sent the Meath Militia and eighteen gunners trailing three howitzers to relieve Wexford. But four miles outside the town, at a place called the Three Rocks, they were ambushed and overwhelmed by the rebel pikemen. The field guns were captured, all seventy militiamen were shot or hacked to death, and only one officer and two men survived to report the disaster to General Fawcett.

  Meanwhile the insurgents broke into Wexford town jail to release United Irish prisoners. One of them was found stuck half-way up the prison chimney where he had been attempting to hide himself. He was Bagenal Harvey, a local Protestant landlord, and he was now appointed commander-in-chief of the rebel army. In the presence of perhaps 15,000 insurgents the first Irish Republic was proclaimed and green flags were unfurled, some emblazoned with a golden harp and others with the words ‘Erin go Bragh’ (Ireland Forever) inscribed on them.

  Harvey planned to take the rebellion beyond the county. The first assault was to be on New Ross, a key garrison town on the River Barrow guarding the passage to the counties of Carlow, Kilkenny and Waterford. Every forge in Wexford was set to work making pike blades, and the Bull Ring in the centre of the town rang to the sound of smiths’ hammers.