‘Oh then Teddy me boy,’ the widow cried,
‘Yer two fine legs were yer mammy’s pride;
Them stumps of a tree wouldn’t do at all
Why didn’t ye run from the big cannon ball?’
Wid yer too-ri-aa ...
These men returned to swell the ranks of the poor in Ireland, an island once again alarming the ruling classes by its turbulence.
Episode 166
CARAVATS AND SHANAVESTS
While the long war against Napoleon continued to rage, Ireland seemed to prosper as never before. The island became an important provider of wheat, barley, oats, salt pork, butter and other supplies needed by troops and sailors.
Meanwhile the Irish population was rising fast. The great majority of the poor lived in the countryside, and their search for land to rent became ever more desperate. The landless labourers and cottiers turned their anger not on the landlords—often absent from their estates, in any case—but on the better-off tenant farmers who were able to outbid them for land. The result was a fierce and savage class war which for years swept the fertile lands of Munster and south Leinster.
In the eighteenth century, because of their habit of disguising themselves with white sheets, rural vigilantes were known generally as ‘Whiteboys’. In the early nineteenth century secret societies and feuding gangs adopted a bewildering range of names, including: Caravats, Shanavests, Threshers, Terry Alts, Dowsers, Dingers, Bootashees, Bogboys, Three-Year-Olds, Moll Doyle’s Children, Polleens, Gows, Moyle Rangers, Coffees, Ruskavellas, Black Hens, Quilts, Blue-Belt Boys. Some of these were just local names for ‘Caravats’, poor labourers, river boatmen, quarrymen and military deserters who followed the lead of Nicholas Hanley. Hanley strutted about with a brace of pistols in his belt and a blunderbuss in his hands and committed a whole string of mail-coach robberies and attacks on farmers in Co. Tipperary. He was nicknamed after his elegant cravat, or ‘caravat’. In the winter of 1805 for his numerous crimes he was hanged in Clonmel before a violent crowd of supporters—wearing cravats—and an opposing, baying crowd of tenant farmers led by Paudeen Gar Connors, noted for his battered old waistcoat, or ‘shanavest’. Hanley coolly traded insults with Paudeen Gar from the scaffold, and as the rope was put around his neck he threw his cravat to his devoted followers.
For six years and more after that a fierce warfare raged between Caravats and Shanavests. The intense violence spread out from Tipperary: south to Co. Waterford, west to Limerick and Cork, and east to the province of Leinster as far north as Co. Kildare. Typically the Caravats made raids at night—perhaps a dozen men in a band, armed, mounted, and with blackened faces and disguised by wearing women’s clothes. Cases were reported of people having their ears cut off, of gang rapes, and of houses being burnt down with all the inhabitants inside. Many Caravat captains adopted the pseudonym ‘John Doe’. Waterford Caravats were led for a time by a woman, Joan Lacy, who persuaded her men to murder the lover who had jilted her and, for good measure, to kill his entire family as well.
Caravats murdered farmers in dozens, often for refusing arms, horses, bridles and food. Other victims included millers, shopkeepers, publicans, yeomen and priests. Caravats would travel up to sixty miles and often in large numbers—one band in Co. Waterford was thought to be 3,000 strong. Some Caravats simply took to the hills. The most legendary was the north Cork outlaw ‘Brennan on the Moor’:
’Tis of a famous highwayman a story I will tell,
His name was Willie Brennan and in Ireland he did dwell.
’Twas on the Kilworth Mountains he commenced his wild career,
Where many a gallant gentleman before him shook with fear.
Bold Brennan on the Moor, Brennan on the Moor.
A brave undaunted robber was bold Brennan on the Moor.
Outnumbered though they were, Shanavests were better armed, and they organised efficient vigilante patrols exacting brutal revenge. They bonded themselves by terrifying oaths and elaborate passwords. In daylight, Caravats and Shanavests most frequently clashed at fairs. Often they arrived in formation, firing shots and yelling slogans, sometimes led in by musicians. Battles at fairs could involve thousands. The traditional shillelagh, or faction stick, was replaced by the ‘clogh alpeen’, an ashplant weighted with lead. Other weapons included homemade swords and spears, and whatever firearms could be got—the sawn-off shotgun was particularly favoured. Hundreds died.
Eventually the government flooded the wide area affected with troops until by December 1810 there were more soldiers in the region than there had been during the rebellion of 1798. A special commission opened at Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, on 1 February 1811, and magistrates began by sentencing twenty men to be executed, and seventeen to be transported to Botany Bay, or flogged or imprisoned. Rural violence subsided as a result, but only temporarily.
Just four years later the Battle of Waterloo ended the longest European conflict of modern times. The long wartime boom came abruptly to a halt, heralding a period of dramatic change in the Irish countryside.
Episode 167
RIBBONMEN, ORANGEMEN AND ROCKITES
The day came out, they did repair
In multitudes to Garvagh fair;
Some travelled thirty miles and mair
To burn the town of Garvagh.
On Monday 26 July 1813 during the Lammas Fair some 400 Catholic ‘Ribbonmen’, armed with bludgeons and intent on destroying the tavern where the Orange lodge met, converged on Garvagh in Co. Londonderry. They planned to avenge a defeat at the previous fair. As trading was drawing to a close a whistle was blown. The Ribbonmen tied long white handkerchiefs round their waists and began stoning the King’s Arms.
But the Orangemen were ready. Inside the tavern, thronged with Protestants, they had their Yeomanry muskets cocked and primed. The Ribbonmen were met with a volley of gunfire. A ‘mountainy man’ from Foreglen fell dead, several others were desperately wounded, and the rest of the Ribbonmen, lacking the firearms needed for a counter-attack, fled to the open countryside.
Had it not been celebrated in an Orange ballad, the ‘Battle of Garvagh’ might be long forgotten. It was merely one of several sectarian clashes during the early years of the nineteenth century, not only in Ulster but over many parts of Ireland. Ribbonmen, in effect, were the Defenders of earlier times, organised to be a Catholic counterweight to the Orange Order. The Ribbon oath began with these words:
I ... Do Swear in the presence of My Brethren and by the Cross of St Peter and of Our Blessed Lady that I will Aid and Support Our holy Religion by Destroying the Heriticks and as far as my power & property will Go not one Shall be excepted ...
Tensions were heightened by the first major drive in more than a century to convert Irish Catholics to Protestantism. This was largely funded by wealthy English Evangelicals. By 1816 there were twenty-one Methodist missionaries operating out of fourteen stations across Ireland. Anglicans, Baptists and Presbyterians had their own missionary organisations. Over a period of ten years the Religious Tract and Book Society alone distributed 4,400,000 tracts. Between 1806 and 1823 the Hibernian Bible Society issued 218,000 copies of the New Testament and 104,000 Bibles. Over much of rural Catholic Ireland this missionary campaign caused deep resentment.
Meanwhile the Catholic poor were convinced that the day of reckoning for Protestants was fast approaching. Indeed, it was widely believed that Protestants would get their comeuppance in the year 1825, as a spy reported to the government:
They spoke of a prophecy to be fulfilled in the year 1825, for the overthrow of the tyranny of Orangemen and government, and that there will be but one religion.
The prophecies of Pastorini, the pseudonym of an eighteenth-century English Catholic bishop, foretold the violent destruction of Protestant churches in the year 1825. Cheap editions and summaries circulated freely as the year of doom approached. It was widely believed that the ‘locusts from the bottomless pit’—the Protestants—were about to meet their end. This ballad appeared in Limerick in
1821:
Now the year 21 is drawing by degrees,
In the year the locusts will weep,
But in the year 23 we’ll begin to reap.
Good people, take courage, don’t perish in fright,
For notes will be of nothing in the year 25,
As I am O’Healy, we’ll daily drink beer.
These prophecies were accompanied by sectarian attacks. Half a dozen Protestant churches were burnt in the counties of Limerick, Cork and Kerry in the early 1820s, and these acts were usually claimed by ‘Captain Rock’—and so these Catholic vigilantes became known as ‘Rockites’. Indeed, a Catholic priest in Limerick reported that he had pursued and captured, redhanded, men he described as ‘Lady Rocks’—they had disguised themselves by wearing women’s clothes. In April 1823 a large band of over 100 Rockites burnt down the village of Glenosheen in Co. Limerick, a village inhabited exclusively by Palatines, Protestants of German origin.
In Ireland this ‘millenarianism’—the belief that the world would shortly come to an end—was fuelled, as elsewhere, by the unemployment and distress caused by economic dislocation following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. This manifesto was posted in Co. Limerick in January 1822:
Hearken unto me, ye men of Ireland, and hear my voice!... Your eyes shall have no pity on the breed of Luther.... Behold, the day of the Lord cometh.... Their children also shall ye dash to pieces. Before their eyes their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.... You see misery upon misery is come upon us.... We have nothing left but to die valiantly or starve.... Lament and mourn, ye heretics, for the day of your destruction is come.
Catholic clergy and educated Catholic gentlemen were deeply embarrassed by this sectarianism of their co-religionists. They sought now to harness this discontent towards a peaceful, constitutional campaign for Catholic Emancipation.
Episode 168
EMANCIPATION REFUSED
On 28 January 1801 George III publicly declared his opposition to Catholic Emancipation.
By 1806 Pitt was dead, and, soon after, George III was gnashing his gums impotently in his strait-jacket. Now it was the Prince Regent who declared that he was opposed to further concessions to Catholics. Most Tories agreed with him. As one Tory backbencher put it, ‘I care no more for a Catholic than I care for a Chinese.’
The Whigs were in favour of Emancipation, and when they came to office in 1806, with Lord Grenville as Prime Minister, they prepared a bill to grant more rights to Catholics. This provoked so much royal displeasure that Grenville resigned in 1807. For the second time in less than seven years a Westminster government had been brought down by the issue of Catholic Emancipation.
These developments brought much satisfaction to Ireland’s elite, the Protestant Ascendancy. Many Protestant gentlemen had hated the Union because it seemed likely that it would be accompanied by Catholic Emancipation. Now they discovered that the sky had not fallen in. Catholics were still not allowed in parliament. Even better, Ireland seemed to be governed in much the same way as it had been before the Union. Though there was not a word about it in the text of the Act of Union, the British government decided that it would continue to have a separate executive in Dublin Castle: there would still be a viceroy, an Irish Chief Secretary, an Attorney-General, and so on. There would still be plum jobs for Protestants in a separate Irish civil service. And educated and propertied Protestants continued to monopolise power in city and town corporations, to rule the thirty-two counties through unelected grand juries, to be the officer class in the Yeomanry and militia, and to have the pick of legal appointments. This was in spite of the fact that most of the Penal Laws against Catholics had long since been repealed.
In 1828 it was shown that in Ireland, of 1,314 offices connected with the administration of justice open to Catholics, only 39 were held by Catholics. Out of another list of 3,033 public offices, Catholics held only 134 posts. Irish Protestant opposition to the Union now rapidly melted away.
From January 1801 Irish MPs took their seats at Westminster. They were a pretty uninspiring lot. Fifty per cent of Irish MPs never made a single speech in the House of Commons in the nineteen years between 1801 and 1820. There were a few energetic exceptions. One was Richard ‘Humanity Dick’ Martin, the MP for Co. Galway: his act of 1822 for the protection of cattle from cruelty was the first legislation for animal protection ever to be enacted.
‘Humanity Dick’ was a supporter of Catholic Emancipation. But the most determined champion of Catholic rights at Westminster was Henry Grattan, who had been the most renowned orator of the old Irish parliament. He declared:
The question is not whether we shall show mercy to the Roman Catholics, but whether we shall mould the inhabitants of Ireland into a people: for as long as we exclude Catholics from natural liberty, and the common rights of man, we are not a people.
Again and again Grattan presented petitions, put forward motions in the House of Commons and drafted relief bills. He made his last attempt in 1819; it was defeated by just two votes.
Grattan died in 1820. In the following year a Catholic Emancipation Bill did pass in the Commons, but it was defeated in the Lords. Had the Lords passed this bill, the future history of the United Kingdom would probably have been very different.
Catholic men of education and property, originally keen supporters of the Union, felt deceived and humiliated. It had become quite clear that a completely new approach would be needed to persuade Westminster to carry Emancipation. Inspirational leadership was needed. The man who provided it was Daniel O’Connell.
Episode 169
THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION
In 1823, after more than twenty years of futile campaigning for Catholic rights, Richard Lalor Sheil was full of despair:
I do not exaggerate when I say that the Catholic question was nearly forgotten. No angry resolutions issued from public bodies; the monster abuses of the Church Establishment, the frightful evils of political monopoly ... the unnatural ascendancy of a handful of men over an immense and powerful population ... were gradually dropping out of the national memory.... It was a degrading and unwholesome tranquillity. We sat down like galley-slaves in a calm.... The country was palsied to the heart.
Again and again, Westminster had refused Emancipation, that is, to remove the last of the Penal Laws, to allow Catholics to become members of parliament.
In January 1823 Sheil invited Daniel O’Connell to dinner. Drawn from a family of comfortable Catholic landowners in Kerry, O’Connell had established a reputation as a brilliant barrister. Over the years there had been many differences between himself and Sheil, but now the two agreed to be reconciled. Why not make one more effort, O’Connell suggested—unite all in favour of Emancipation into one organisation, the Catholic Association. With some hesitation, Sheil agreed.
The Catholic Association, based at first in Dublin, had a slow start. Six times meetings had to be abandoned because the agreed quorum of ten members could not be found. Then in 1824 O’Connell proposed that, while full members should continue to pay an annual fee of one guinea, the association should seek associate members paying a penny a month or a farthing a week. The whole movement was transformed. O’Connell had discovered that people have a much stronger sense of belonging to an organisation if they contribute towards it.
Great numbers of middle-class Catholics set up local committees, appointed collectors for various districts, posted receipt books, wrote articles for newspapers, and kept very strict accounts. Then Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, well known for his ‘patriotic’ views, sent O’Connell a list of priests who might be prepared to help. The Catholic Church became involved and made it easy to collect the pennies and farthings at chapel gates. In the first year £20,000—then a very large sum—was raised in what quickly became known as the ‘Catholic Rent’. The poor had been given a stake in a national movement. The money was used to organise petitions, to buy schoolbooks for poor children, and to pay legal expenses.
&nbs
p; The government was greatly alarmed. O’Connell had become a national figure. Up and down the country he electrified audiences with his witty and powerful oratory. Half a million Irish people were contributing to the Catholic Rent. Attempts to prosecute O’Connell for seditious libel failed. The Duke of Wellington wrote to Robert Peel, the Home Secretary: ‘If we cannot get rid of the Catholic Association, we must look to civil war in Ireland sooner or later.’ The government decided to suppress the Catholic Association in the spring of 1825; and, to make sure it was not accused of partiality, it banned the Orange Order as well.
But O’Connell was a brilliant lawyer: declaring that he could drive a coach and four through any act of parliament, he founded the ‘New Catholic Association’, which remained strictly within the law. The problem for the government was that this movement was peaceful, constitutional and orderly. Indeed, O’Connell should be remembered as one of the great pacifists of nineteenth-century Europe.
The initiative was now seized by a group of Catholics in Waterford city, led by Thomas Wyse and Father John Sheehan. A general election had been called in 1826. Owning vast estates in Co. Waterford, the Beresford family had always ensured that their tenants voted for its candidates. And the Beresfords were notoriously opposed to Catholic Emancipation. Could at least one MP for Waterford be elected who would be in favour of Emancipation?
First a candidate had to be found. The young liberal Protestant gentleman, Henry Villiers Stuart, was so delighted to be asked that he flung aside his hiking boots and abandoned his walking holiday in the Austrian Tyrol to dash back to Waterford. Indeed, he was to contribute £30,000 towards his own election expenses. But the real problem was how to persuade the ‘forty-shilling freeholders’, who constituted the great majority of the electorate, to risk eviction by defying their landlords to vote against the Beresfords.
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 46
