The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  Bearing in mind that it occurred upon a festival night, I am certain that the men who attacked Saunders’s estate were in a state of sodden drunkenness, a circumstance which warrants comment even at the risk of digression. In most lands, and here I do not exclude England itself, strong liquors are the cause of much social and personal unhappiness, but in Ireland this malady surpasses all belief, and I assert this not upon my own testimony alone, but that of all visitors. The peasants make use of whiskey both to ease their burdens and to exalt themselves at their frequent festivals and fair-days. The beggars expend upon it the pennies they have cadged. To walk after dark through any of the large towns is to be made distressed by the sight and sound of bawling and unsteady men. Men, and women too, lie sprawled in doors and alleys. Neither is such drunkenness limited to the poor, for the squires (if unlettered oafs may be so named) are yet more reprehensible, if only because of their more ready access to spirits. Were an account to be given of a ball or a hunt, or even an assize, which failed to remark upon this insobriety, the picture would lack verisimilitude. Strong drink, which induces first high spirits, then belligerence, then lachrymosity, then utter insensibility, is the constant attendant upon every occasion, however inappropriate. I am myself far indeed from being a canting Puritan, and derive a reasoned pleasure from wines at dinner, a brandy at night, hot punch to take off the winter’s chill. With the Irish it is far different. The very atmosphere of this waterlogged island, its rain-heavy clouds and dripping tree branches, its lakes and boggy soil, is drawn off, distilled, and consumed.

  Towards the end of July, an atrocity occurred, far worse in its character than any of the offences against property which preceded it. Sam Pryor, a bailiff, was dragged from his cabin to a neighbouring bog, and there was used most barbarously by a party of masked men. His ears were cropped from his head with a shearing knife and he was then buried to the neck in a pit which had first been half filled with thorns. There he remained for a night and part of a day, until his screams attracted the attention of samaritans.

  I of course visited the afflicted man as he sat disfigured and swathed with bandages in his cabin, which is little better than those of the peasants. I found myself also in the presence of six of my parishioners, shopkeepers of Killala and men with farms close by. Their mood was sorrowing and wrathful. All were members of the Tyrawley Yeomanry, and one, Bob Tompkins, was its sergeant.

  It was a matter of much concern to me that they described the perpetrators of the outrage not as “the Whiteboys,” but as “the Papists.” I argued with all the vehemence I could muster that these “Whiteboys” were perhaps fifty in number, by most accounts, out of the many thousands of Papists in the barony, but my arguments fell weakly to the ground. These men, sitting in grave and sullen mood, hands grasping their knees, believed themselves to be surrounded by violent and superstitious enemies, and they were surprised and scandalised that I did not share their angry fears.

  The history which forms the very substance of their thoughts is a series of grim tableaux, after the fashion of woodcut illustrations to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs—the Protestants of Ulster sent naked on the roads in 1641, monks and friars preaching the massacre of heretics, drunken Papist hordes with simian faces. And they have their hagiology—brave English planters defending their homes, the Prentice Boys of Londonderry barring the gates against the besieging Jacobites, William the Protestant champion at the Boyne on his white charger, and above all Cromwell wrathful and implacable in a suit of black armour clanking across the countryside, crushing out rebellion and Popery with each tread of his metal boots. It will seem to my English readers ludicrous and pathetic that such bogeymen should instruct the fears of men gathered in a cabin to solace an outraged friend, King William and King James hovering like wraiths in the oppressive air.

  I am tempted here, as I shall be in other portions of my narrative, to reproduce for my readers their exact words, or as much of them as I can recall. Nevertheless I am daunted by my lack of even the rudiments of the romance writer’s art. These people, Protestant and English-speaking Papist alike, employ what we in England term the “brogue,” a form of speech not unmusical but thick in texture and of course outlandish. And it but adds to the horrors of Irish life that the two communities address each other in identical accents, cursing and vilifying one another with a common tongue. My dear friend Mr. Falkiner assures me that my ear lacks the necessary training from childhood, that no Irishman would confuse Protestant and Papist speech. This may be so.

  “ ’Tis the start,” Jack Stanner said. “Pray God that we may live to see the close.”

  “ ’Tis a wonder to me that I am alive to see this day,” poor Pryor said, “and that I did not perish in the bog in a welter of my own blood.” Tompkins had brought him for solace a jug of whiskey, to which he now made sparing application. “I lay there bawling like a maimed ewe, and I would have perished had MacMahon not happened by.”

  “Is not MacMahon a Papist?” I asked him.

  “He is,” Pryor said. “A decent poor herdsman. If they were all as decent as MacMahon it would be well for us all.”

  “There are decent ones surely,” Tompkins said. “There are some of them have debts to my shop which go back for two or three years, and they come in with the odd shilling when they have it. It is the poorest ones are the most decent, the herdsmen and the labourers with the spade.”

  “More credit to them,” Pryor said, “when Hussey stands up in their chapel and tells them they need not keep faith with heretics.”

  Mr. Hussey I knew to be a man of the most impeccable morality, and devout in his loyalty to the Crown. I could not say as much for Murphy, his odious curate, who was to prove by his subsequent course of action the truth of our suspicions. He was indeed an arrant rebel, lustful for the triumph of his creed and indifferent to human life. And yet the dramatic differences between these two priests were lost utterly upon the men in Sam Pryor’s cabin. Their detestation of their Papist fellow countrymen was at once wholesale and capricious. Owen MacCarthy the schoolmaster was an object of their special execration, for in many places schoolmasters have been the nursemaids of disaffection, and MacCarthy was an imprudent man, brawling and boastful when drunk. They detested the Papist landlords—Bellew, Blake, Treacy, Grace, Moore, Nugent, MacDonnell, Burke. It galled them that this handful was more prosperous than themselves and affected the airs of gentlemen. Tompkins and several of the others harked back nostalgically to the days of their grandparents, when a firm Cromwellian boot had kept the necks of Papists close to the ground. And it was indeed a matter of some significance that all of these had been spared by the Whiteboys, although several had bad reputations as rack-renters.

  “If it is the rents is their grievance,” George Standish said, “why do they not look to William Burke of Crossmolina, who is the meanest bastard in this part of Mayo since the death of Mick Mahony? No, no. ’Tis as clear as this hand before my face. They would lift no hand against a man who is a priest’s brother.”

  “ ’Tis the start,” Jack Stanner said again.

  “It was this way that it started in Wexford, and see where that ended,” Sam Pryor said. Hospitably, he shared his whiskey with the rest of us, and I found it prudent to accept a glass. It was wretched stuff, from some hillside distillery, and coursed like raw fire down my throat.

  When I could manage speech, I said, “Surely not. That was an insurrection of the United Irishmen. These are mere Whiteboys, wretched, ignorant peasants.”

  “Ach, Mr. Broome,” Stanner said. “ ’Tis little you know them. There is not a priest in Ireland was not trained in France, and there are men like William Burke who served in King Louis’ army to hunt down and massacre the poor Protestants of France.”

  Pryor drew his bandage away, to disclose a hideous lump of black blood where once his ear had been. “There you see it, Mr. Broome, another drop to add to the rivers of Christian blood which have flowed in this island since the days of Elizabeth. And still the loyal m
en of Tyrawley are bid to sit at home with their hands under their arses.”

  Ignoring his indelicacy of expression, as the reader will I trust ignore mine of repetition, I assured him, and the others, that to my certain knowledge the magistrates were pursuing their investigations with the utmost determination, and I reminded them that their own yeomanry stood ready to enforce the recommendations of the magistracy.

  “Ah,” Stanner said. “That remains yet to see.”

  “There is nothing wrong with the yeomanry,” Pryor said, “except that we have a captain with a Papist for his wife and with Papist friends like Randall MacDonnell.”

  “Come, sir! Come, sir!” I said sharply. “There is no more zealous officer in the island than Captain Cooper. He is if anything a man of too much zeal. What would you have him do?”

  “Do, is it?” Pryor asked, again touching his bloody head. “Any Protestant should know what must be done.”

  “Easy now,” Sergeant Tompkins said, with a glance towards me, the significance of which I did not then comprehend. “I will stake my word on Captain Cooper. Mr. Broome is right about him. Captain Cooper will do the proper thing.”

  I cannot censure them utterly. How little we in England understand their fears and loyalties! And yet for centuries we have depended upon such men. At every moment of crisis or impending violence, we in England speak brave and generous words about the loyal Protestants of Ireland, and yet at all other times we hold them in a negligent contempt, as a species of savage slightly superior to those by whom they are surrounded.

  I left them with a promise that my dear Eliza would next day visit to enquire about Pryor and to bring him some small creature-comforts, and they bade me a courteous good-day, Pryor thanking me for my attention to him. And I am certain that so soon as the door was closed upon my back, they resumed conversation in a manner less restrained than that which my presence had imposed. I did not know these men well, to be sure, although they were members of my parish and attended my church each Sunday. They were not gentlemen, of course, and had no such pretensions. Indeed, they were suspicious of their own gentry, whom they regarded as lacking in zeal. Yet they and their gentry were bound together by creed and formed a single community, small in numbers and yet all-powerful.

  I well remember that when I left Sam Pryor’s cabin and walked back towards the town, I encountered a half-dozen or so spalpeens, wandering labourers who had perhaps drifted to Killala for the approaching harvest. They were dressed as coarsely as may be imagined, in frieze jackets so old and weathered that they might have been ripped from the landscape, and lacking hats to cover their matted or tousled hair. So might have looked the rough wood-kernes mentioned in the historical plays of the sublime Shakespeare. They were speaking most animatedly in Irish and several were laughing at the remarks of one, a wild creature taller even than MacCarthy. But as we passed, they broke off and greeted me most courteously, and with every show of respect, standing to one side of the road. When I had walked beyond them, they resumed talking, and reentered thus that world of theirs which was to me an entire secret, locked within their language.

  It was as though I held in my hands two jagged bits of mosaic—the world of Pryor’s cabin and of the Papist labourers upon the road. The pieces would not fit together, nor had I any notion of the design of which they formed parts.

  Two nights later, the body of Phelim O’Carroll, a small farmer on the lands of Lord Glenthorne, was found lying naked in a shallow bog pool. He was most dreadfully mutilated, his back being no better than raw meat. O’Carroll, although a man of middle years, was a notorious faction fighter and therefore suspect as a Whiteboy. Doubtless, efforts had been made to extract information from him, but they apparently were futile. He was waked in his townland, but of this ceremony I fortunately can write nothing. The custom of the wake in peasant Ireland is nothing short of obscene, and to describe it would but excite disgust. It is sufficiently known that these wakes are not sober vigils by the body of a departed father or friend, but rather offer occasions for drink and licentiousness. But the nature of the “wake games,” as they are called, is such as to lead one into despair for the fate of Christianity, so abominably do they perpetuate the pagan past. Of such games as “bout,” “the bull and the cow,” “hold the light,” and “selling the pig,” I shall say only that men and women participate, that in some the men are naked, and that in others all the activities of a nuptial night are pantomimed. There is much truth to the common saying that more marriages are made at wakes than at fairs or dances, so unbridled is the conduct of young and old alike. And yet all is done in a spirit of innocence and without the intention of irreverence, not even when the corpse itself is lifted to its lifeless feet and subjected to the travesty of an improper dance. This truly is a land sunk in the bog of an immemorial past. But I digress.

  A far truer measure of the grief and passion of the people might be found at the burial of poor O’Carroll in the Killala graveyard, for the coffin was followed in silence by a long procession, which took, as is the custom, the longest route possible, making a long circle in the direction of the sun’s movement. I attended the burial, standing at a respectful distance, and was much moved. When the coffin had been lowered into the earth, a group of shawled women came forward, and commenced the keen, of which so much has been written, and which, although undeniably savage, is not without musicality, and most expressive of a tempestuous grief. It is a kind of wail, and I observed that Mr. Hussey listened to it with what seemed a chilly disdain, several times glancing towards me with embarrassment, but his curate, Murphy, was most affected, and flung his arm impulsively about O’Carroll’s nephew, a slack-jawed stripling. But for the most part, the large concourse of mourners listened impassively, their eyes fixed upon the rough wood of the coffin.

  Into the earth which was shovelled upon the coffin was added a quantity of O’Carroll’s blood, which his nephew poured out from a small flask, for there is a saying among the people that “there must be blood spilled at a funeral.” If the purpose was ritualistic, then it was a wasted symbol, for the blood shed by Pryor and O’Carroll was in coming months to shower down upon us manifoldly.

  On the following evening, as Mr. Gibson was returning home from an errand which had taken him into Ballina, shots were fired at him from behind a hedge which faces his entryway. Gibson is a bold man and rides armed at all times. He drew his pistol, wheeled his horse towards the hedge, and surprised into flight four men whom he was unable either to capture or to identify, although he later declared that one of them much resembled Malachi Duggan, one of his tenants. Gibson was unpopular, both as landlord and as magistrate, and it was known that he had, like Cooper, been arguing for forceful action against the Whiteboys. And yet Duggan, being questioned by the magistrates, strenuously protested his innocence, and offered to bring forward twenty who would swear to it.

  We had now a small war in Killala, with wounds suffered upon the one side, and death upon the other. Of rumours, born of fear and a natural suspicion, there was an abundance. Among Papists it was said that they would fare as had the peasants of Wexford under martial law in the months before the insurrection. Militia and regulars were to be brought in to lash at the triangle and to burn crops and cabins, with the Tyrawley Yeomanry to serve as their belling hounds. And many Protestants, especially among those of the lower orders, believed that a general massacre was to take place, so soon as news arrived that the French had landed. The fear and the hostility were almost palpable in the shabby streets of Killala. A peasant, bulking large and ominous in a small Protestant shop, would gesture towards the length of rope or the tin pot which he required, and the shopkeeper would hand it over in silence, tight-lipped and distant.

  Men’s fears having opened the gateways of their imaginations, fantasies more curious even than these gained entrance. The Irish are a most imaginative people, and have peopled the very earth and air with invisible presences, affixing to every hill and cairn some lovely or grotesque image.
Yet this is but another way of saying that they are credulous and sunk in superstition, guiding their conduct by the dark utterances of old women and wandering prophecy men. This is at the best of times an impediment to their progress into civilisation, and I cannot but believe, illiberal though this may seem, that the Romish faith offers shelter to the incredible. In times when great events are astir, this propensity to dream can assume dangerous forms.

  So it was now. The tumults which had ravaged Ulster and Wexford had thus far left Mayo alone, but they had not passed unnoticed. Here, as everywhere in Ireland, the prophecy men, strolling entertainers and storytellers, had carried magnified and richly coloured accounts of those wretched conflicts. Prophecies were carried from tavern to tavern, village to village, foretelling a great day of deliverance which would free from bondage the people of the Gael. So long as Mayo remained tranquil, scant attention was paid to such nonsense. But now, an apprehensive peasantry listened to and then repeated at the turf fire the apocalyptic poetry of ignorant men. A son with four thumbs had been born to a miller’s wife in Athlone, and this miller would lead the army of the Gael. The final battle was to be fought somewhere beyond the Shannon, in the Valley of the Black Pig. Black, tall-masted ships were hurrying from France and from Spain, carrying the champions of Erin. These glorious predictions, it will be observed, did not involve Mayo: the battles were to take place at a safe, indeed a legendary distance from the Moy. And in their cloudy grandeur (should four thumbs be accounted grand) they bore little relation to our own shabby sorrows—a man killed and tossed into a bog, a man maimed and tortured.

  On the first of August, the Tyrawley Yeomanry was ordered into uniform and placed on active service while the magistrates of the barony conducted an enquiry into seditious and criminal actions, with a view to the suppression of the organization styling itself the Whiteboys of Killala. The local magistrates were four in number, Captain Cooper, Mr. Gibson, Mr. Saunders, and my friend Mr. Falkiner. Of Captain Cooper I have already written, and shall have much more to say. Mr. Gibson and Mr. Saunders, although honest enough in a bluff and rough-and-ready fashion, were coarse and abrupt men. Only Mr. Falkiner at all approximated in temper what we in England understand by the word magistrate, which is to say an equable disposition and a respect for the rules of evidence and common sense. The magistrates proposed to examine anyone who might have knowledge of the crimes of the Whiteboys, and should answers prove unsatisfactory to bind such over for trial at the assizes. Thus far, they were of course but fulfilling their sworn responsibility. The proceedings were conducted with the most vivid display of force, those wanted for questioning being hauled out of their cabins in rough and peremptory fashion by squads of armed yeomen. There were more instances than one of extreme brutality, against which protests were unavailing. Far worse, it became clear to Mr. Falkiner that the intention of the others was that charges should be laid with or without the evidence to sustain them, on grounds of simple suspicion and to strike terror into the hearts of the peasantry. Throughout the hearings, he argued strenuously but without success against such shocking illegality, the consequences of which were, as we shall see, calamitous.