Later, he walked along the shore of the lake. Its waters lapped against stones. If only he had been less stiff, lecturing the boy like a schoolmaster. Romantics like John had no ears for lectures. History loved them, chose them as its favoured victims. It flung them, bright as new-minted coins, into the puddles of disaster. John should be courting girls, riding to hounds, gaming, writing sonnets. Instead he was involved in this trumpery melodrama, a few thousand peasants and a devious French general. The lake was clear. Rushes moved softly, faintly. A melancholy hour. Some distance away, a wild swan floated with her cygnets, elegant and calm. Her ugly feet could flail and trample, fouling the shore.
FROM THE MEMOIR OF EVENTS,
WRITTEN BY MALCOLM ELLIOT
IN OCTOBER, 1798
In the early afternoon of August 22 I rode into Killala and presented myself as agent to County Mayo of the Society of United Irishmen. I was received most cordially by General Humbert, who seemed delighted to encounter anyone who possessed even a smattering of French, and was placed upon his staff to serve under Bartholemew Teeling, who was to act as a liaison between the French and the Irish forces. At that first meeting I gained but a shallow impression of Humbert, a slow-moving and large-bellied young man with soft, dangerous eyes. He had established his headquarters in the residence of poor Broome the clergyman, and the courtyard and ground floor were crowded with men, intent upon a dozen errands, but Humbert moved quietly among them in his ill-fitting uniform, his paunch pressing against his waistcoat. All of them save for Teeling were French, and he was in French uniform. The Irish were in the outer courtyard, a mob of countrymen. They seemed leaderless and bewildered but most excited. Later in the day, the men who were appointed to command them rode in one by one, Randall MacDonnell and Cornelius O’Dowd and George Blake, but in those first few hours, they were left to themselves while the French secured the town and requisitioned horses and food.
Teeling and I had known each other for some years and had a great mutual trust and respect: I was most happy to discover him here with us. He found an early opportunity to discuss our situation. The French had been shamefully derelict in not setting sail upon first news of the uprisings in Wexford and indeed might not have sailed at all had it not been for the persistence of Wolfe Tone and the energy of Humbert. They sailed, however, in the belief that those insurrections were still in progress, and word of their suppression came as a hard blow to Teeling, who was a close friend of the unfortunate Henry Joy MacCracken. It was a blow from which he soon began to recover. Rarely have I met a man of such calm and equable determination, nor, as events were to prove, of such swift and unreflecting courage. He seems to me now a figure from Plutarch, measured and just in his actions, stoical in adversity. There was somewhere near the centre of his being a dark pool of melancholy, but this I attribute to his life in Ulster, a chill and forbidding province, as I do also his occasionally mordant and sardonic speech.
Although I then knew little of soldiers or warfare, and know little more now despite my experiences, it was at least clear to me from the first hour that we had taken up a difficult task. Peasants had been pouring for several hours into Killala. Four days later, after the battle of Ballina had been fought and won, their number had swelled to some five thousand. Far less even than myself, of course, did they have knowledge of military life or of the ways of war, save for the occasional clandestine drilling which some had received. The French sergeants began their training on the second day, but with no happy results, for each group was to the other a source of ridicule, barbarous and strange, speaking not words but an outlandish gabble. Those who were placed as their commanders knew almost as little. These for the most part were down-at-heels Catholic squireens, such as Randall MacDonnell, George Blake, and Cornelius O’Dowd, or else strong-farmers and celebrated faction fighters, of whom the most notable were Ferdy O’Donnell, Malachi Duggan, and later Michael Geraghty, one of my own tenants. These men were denominated as colonels or majors of those whom they brought in with them, and in turn they appointed their subordinates. But large numbers of leaderless men also drifted in, and these were formed into companies by Teeling, and made to choose their own captains. The streets of Killala were also clotted that day by men who had come in from idle curiosity or in hopes of being given one of the French firelocks. It was in this manner that Owen MacCarthy hung about on the edges of the crowds. I saw him twice that day, once lounging in Broome’s courtyard, and once holding conversation in the tavern, with his long legs thrust out, a hazard to those passing by. He seemed to me then a large-boned, hulking peasant, much given to whiskey and idle laughter, and I would not have remarked him at all save for his friendship with Ferdy O’Donnell, a virtuous and steadfast fellow.
I well remember the arrival of Corny O’Dowd. It was late at night on the first day, and the French had fixed torches along the street and in the courtyard, for they were still shifting supplies. There rose a general hubbub in the street, with wild shouts of greeting, and several muskets were fired off. I left the house, and walked towards the courtyard gate, beyond which I could see O’Dowd riding in at the head of a hundred men, mounted on a handsome mare, and wearing a broad-brimmed hat, like a preacher’s, with a blackcock’s feather fixed in its brim. The men behind him were farmers or labourers, clad in frieze and a number of them barefoot. Some carried pikes of straight ash. There was no attempt at order; they walked quickly but not in rank, and they shouted out to friends whom they recognised in the crowd. These were men who had taken the oath of the Society, but it was some older and deeper loyalty which brought them into Killala that night. They were a feudal band, mustered behind their chieftain. When O’Dowd came abreast of the gate he reined in, and at the same moment he saw me standing there, and greeted me with a shout. “Elliott,” he called out, as he dismounted, “is Randall here?” “He is here,” I told him. “In Broome’s house, or in the tavern.” “How many did he bring with him?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Damned few, I will wager,” O’Dowd said; “they are a mean-spirited lot, the Ballycastle men. I have more than a hundred men from Enniscrone here, and they are spoiling for a fight. Where is the Frenchman?” He walked over to me, a tall man but bow-legged. “Take a look at them,” he said; “have you ever seen the like?” And I had not. I tried to make out their faces where the ruddy lights burned into the darkness. “Are there men here from Ballina?” he asked. “There will be,” I said. “I rode on ahead of them.” “Weren’t you the cute whore?” he asked with a delighted crow; “commend me to the Protestants. You have us beat every time. Are you a general now?” “There is only one general that I know of,” I said; “the Frenchman.” “That will never do,” he said. He jerked his head backward towards the Enniscrone men. “Those fellows know as much about Frenchmen as about the man in the moon.” “You will need to talk to a man named Teeling,” I said. Two days later, before the battle of Ballina, O’Dowd was made “General of the Army of Connaught.” It was an empty title, but it delighted him, and for a time it made Blake and MacDonnell furious. There was a hat that went with the honour, black and dripping with lace. O’Dowd transferred his blackcock’s feather to it.
By the time O’Dowd arrived, our headquarters were well established in poor Broome’s commodious residence. Broome and his wife, together with their servants and several guests, were relegated to the second floor, but this was ample for their needs, as it contained six rooms, including the large one which faced the street and which Broome used as a library. During the time of Humbert’s occupation of the house, its residents were entirely secure from harm. I am informed that such was not the case after the army moved forward from Killala, and I keenly regret such perils as Mr. Broome may have endured. He is a most humane and estimable gentleman, although knowing nothing about Ireland.
Of General Humbert my opinion was to change and modify itself constantly during the time of my service with him. This much is certain, that he was a man of most remarkable ability, seemingly bold and reckless, but in fac
t a calculator. There is no need for me to laud his military prowess, for the British generals who encountered him, including General Taylor and especially Lord Cornwallis, have been generous in their praise, and indeed the campaign upon which he led us is said to have had few parallels. And yet I do not believe that we ever knew more than a portion of his mind. Certainly we Irish did not, and I believe this also to be true of his French subordinates. It seemed from my conversations with them, and especially with Colonel Sarrizen, that they were bound to him by duty and by a professional admiration for his skills, rather than by trust or affection. But then trust was in short supply among the French officers, although this did not impair their efficiency. There was a touch of the playactor in him, which would explain why he and Tone got on so well. He could exhibit cheerfulness and high spirits at one moment, and the next fall into a savage rage. This perhaps was changeability, but perhaps the cheerfulness and the rage were but shows, behind which dwelt the unknowable man. This may be true of all commanders.
Late that first night, the prisoners were transferred to the market house, where they were to remain under guard for the duration of the campaign, their numbers being augmented with each passing day, and the air became more and more noxious as men were crowded in upon each other. They lived in terror, being persuaded that they were destined to be butchered by the Papists, and their defenceless families as well. Indeed, in the final days, a small number of them were brutally slaughtered, but by that time our army was far distant from Mayo, and Ferdy O’Donnell, who commanded the small garrison left behind, had despite his courage an imperfect control upon those insurgents. For Captain Cooper the imprisonment was unendurable. He had the intelligence to know that massacre was not imminent, and endeavoured to reassure his men, but for the first weeks, I am told, he remained in a black, towering rage, and would sit upon the floor gnawing at his fingernails and knuckles. I did not visit him, for reasons of delicacy, but MacDonnell had no such scruples. The interview was a painful one, for the two had in earlier years been cronies, but now MacDonnell did not hesitate to mock him in his misfortune. His mind was made no easier by the actions of his wife. Mrs. Cooper, a bold, handsome woman, decisive in speech and manner, made two visits to our headquarters to demand his release, thereby arousing the admiration of the officers but serving no other purpose.
Killala remained a centre of the insurrection even after our army had moved forward, being garrisoned, as I have said, by a body of Irish troops under the nominal command of Ferdy O’Donnell. Of what transpired there I have no first-hand knowledge and the stories which have been made current in recent weeks have upon them the mark of infuriated loyalists, anxious to represent themselves as the victims of Papist savagery. No one, not even among these loyalists, questions the humanity and generosity of O’Donnell himself, but I can well believe that the task of maintaining order was beyond his abilities. The rebellion drew to itself not only those willing to fight in the field, but a large mob of fellows whose only thoughts were for plunder and for vengeance against their Protestant fellow countrymen. I can well believe that without O’Donnell’s firmness and popularity among the people, Mayo would have been stained by crimes such as those which have brought Wexford under an eternal disgrace.
At the outset, I had doubts that even Humbert could maintain order, but in this I was happily mistaken. The fellows who poured into Killala had but the haziest notion of our enterprise and its objectives, and many of them were bold and reckless fellows, Whiteboys and faction fighters. These were encouraged by the events of the first hours, for of course it was necessary to make requisitions upon the countryside for supplies and horses. It may well have seemed to them that this signalled a more general assault upon property. Like the peasants of most countries, they held literally to the idea of revolution, even though they had never heard the word itself. Tyrants were to be brought low, and stripped of their possessions, and their lives were held in no high account. But Humbert’s discipline, and the flat of his sergeants’ sabres, made short work of that notion. It is unfortunately the case that the houses of certain landlords were pillaged and set afire, both in Killala and along our line of march, but these were the works either of mobs or of bands such as those of Malachi Duggan, over which we maintained an imperfect authority. And yet taken as a whole, the conduct of the Irish forces was most creditable, as the more generous of our foes have avowed.
Just now I have read over these pages of notes, and am appalled by their falseness to my true recollections of the first days. The facts are there, without colouring or extenuation, and set down in as flat a language as I can command. But in truth what I best recall is great confusion, both in the streets of Killala and in my own feelings. Foreign troops had landed and an insurrection was being set into motion in which I had my part to play, as I did not for a moment question. And yet these were in truth my only certainties. The streets were crowded with men remote and alien to my own troubled feelings. They spoke in French and in Irish, languages of which I possess a serviceable knowledge, but not a true intimacy, and the words, familiar but foreign, were like the sounds of distant waves. Then too the French officers and their men knew what they were about, but I did not, and I was chilled by the confidence with which they shouted orders at each other. For them, it was certain, this town in Mayo was but a conquered village which may as well have been in Africa or the Caribbean. More than by the French, however, I was chilled by my own countrymen, separated from me by language, by passions which I did not share, emotions which I had no wish to express. The market house was filled with men with names like Elliott, Protestants like myself and English by blood, and I was walking the streets with their captors. Papists armed with pikes filled the streets of Killala, and I was one with them. Deeper than politics, deeper than thought, my blood stirred in sluggish protest against my belief and my actions.
The first battle of the campaign was for Ballina, my own town, which lies on the Moy, seven miles to the south of Killala. It was garrisoned by the Prince of Wales’s Fencibles, some six hundred, under the command of Colonel Chapman, augmented by a detachment of carbineers and several companies of yeomen. The choice which lay before Chapman was of accepting battle or retreating southwards to Foxford, thereby abandoning a considerable stretch of Mayo to his enemy yet preserving his force intact should a later attempt be made upon Castlebar. Humbert gave him the better part of two days to decide, for it was late on the twenty-fourth that he sent us forward, six hundred of the French under Sarrizen, and five hundred Irish, including MacDonnell’s and O’Dowd’s men, who moved through the Glenthorne estate along the old Rosserk road. MacDonnell rode at the head of the Irish, but it was Teeling who gave the orders.
I should perhaps have more vivid memories of my first military engagement, but I do not. And yet the march was sufficiently romantic. The Rosserk road is little better than a narrow, treacherous path which runs past cabins of Lord Glenthorne’s tenants and issues onto the Ballina road about a mile north of the town. We moved in darkness, and the tenants first of one, then of another cabin came outside and lighted hay and straw to show us our way. Women came from the cabins to bring us bread and bowls of milk. From that night forth, the path was called bother-na-sop, the road of straw. But I was possessed by a sense of the matter-of-factness of these extraordinary happenings. Men had to be organised, and formed up in lines, and they jested and grumbled, but with a white-hot wire of excitement running just beneath the surface, for like me they were moving towards their first battle, in which some would be killed in all likelihood. Yet this sense of the ordinary existed most curiously within me beside a strong feeling of unreality which had been with me from the moment that the rider brought me news of the French landing. I moved through a dream in which the landscape was known, the faces recognised.
Bother-na-sop.
Killala, August 24
On the Sunday morning of the night march upon Ballina, Mr. Hussey knelt before the altar, turned then to face his congregation, and folded
his hands beneath his chasuble. Conscious of the occasion and its needs, he spoke slowly and vehemently.
“My dear people, an anxious and a dreadful time has come upon us. In the past month, it has been my sad duty to speak to you of acts of violence, beyond question committed by men of this parish. Such acts, although certainly they are black with sin, have had at least the human explanation that life in our barony is hard, and that some few of our landlords have acted in a manner which some might term un-Christian. But today I speak to you of a far greater danger to the souls of each one of you.”
He was a frail, fastidious man, the son and brother of prosperous middlemen in County Meath. His previous parish of Bective in that county had been as much delight as duty, and his memory lingered upon the rich green pasturelands of the Boyne valley, the ruined Bective abbey, the graceful bridge across the river. Mayo was a place of exile, endured without pleasure or complaint.
“Several months ago, as you well know, large numbers of misguided men in the east and in the north took up arms against the King. Their rebellion has been broken by the King’s powerful army. But now, as the embers of that rebellion are being stamped out by the soldiers’ heavy boots, Frenchmen have landed on our strand, and seek to lure you away from your homes, your families, your little farms. These Frenchmen come from the nation which murdered its king and queen and many thousands of innocent people, which has become the persecutor of all religions but in particular of our own Holy Church. These infidels and murderers now ask you to go into rebellion, that you may be slaughtered. And it grieves me to say that certain Irishmen who have banded together with them will ask the same of you. My words are not mine alone. I declare to you the words of our Church, as they have been given to us by our bishops. To take arms from the Frenchmen or to help them in any way would be a mortal sin by which your souls would be blackened.”
The Year of the French Page 26
