The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “Is he indeed? And yet he spared time from his studies to ruin the name of that poor girl in the Acres.”

  “By God, she wasn’t the first one, poor creature. He is the very devil with women, and would you not know it to look at him? Red hair and a ready tongue will always win the day.”

  And yet O’Donnell was a man who would defend the sanctity of his own home with utmost ardour, and several times suppressed with zeal and fury the offending conduct of his men. A primitive yet a complex people, they tease my curiosity without rewarding it. For they maintain a strict decency in sexual matters, despite the opportunities for sin which are provided by their cramped domestic arrangements, yet a man such as MacCarthy is accorded a kind of licence, and his transgressions form the staple of crossroads jests. But this tolerance had most strict limits, and did not extend to the unfortunate girl. She lived in the melancholy section known as the Acres, upon land sufficient for the pasturage of a few cows, managing by herself her poor resources, for MacCarthy, into whose other vices laziness was compounded, had never lifted a hand to give her help. And if his sin was winked at hers was not, a most unjust and un-Christian apportionment of blame. Poor child—for though a widow she was little more—she would slip into the village upon her errands and then return, cowled and barefoot like the other women, small, triangular face shadowed by the folds of the shawl. Nor could I accept the argument of O’Donnell that she was content with her lot, and fretted only that MacCarthy was far off and in danger for his life.

  This, at least, gave her common ground with other women, for of course many hundreds of men, from this and from other baronies, were away with the French, and might as well have been upon the moon or in High Tartary. Few Irish peasants ever wander far from their country, which is for them a sufficient, even an ample world. Now they were swallowed up by the blue, hazy mountains to the east, within landscapes which those who remained could scarcely imagine, an infinity of space. Dublin, Belfast, Cork, words scattered across the map of a small island, were cities more distant than Rome or Bethlehem. It must have seemed to them that the men had been spirited away, and would not return for years, or would never return.

  For our other half-world, the world of my Protestant parishioners, life presented a different but an equally frightening aspect. Although our churches in Wexford had been savagely and vilely used during the rising there, the churches of Mayo were accorded respect or at least neglect, and no hindrance was placed upon my services. On the Sunday, I conducted both morning and evening services for a congregation larger and more zealous than any before or since. For the most of us, I am certain, the very walls, whitewashed and severe, carried welcome messages from that world of civility and industry from which we had been so suddenly and so violently cut off. I remember in particular allowing my eyes to dwell upon a brass plaque erected to the memory of Mr. Falkiner’s grandfather, which bespoke the earnest wish of his descendants that he had now entered into “the citizenship of heaven”—a noble phrase, in its pious belief that hereafter we may enjoy a blessed state akin to the best which we have known upon this earth. Mr. Falkiner and his family, Mr. Saunders and his, took on these occasions their accustomed pews, the men past middle age but both still tall and unbent, the women becomingly dressed and tranquil, hands folded in laps about their books of prayer. I will not, I trust, be thought a ranting patriot if I declare that in such hours I grew inwardly firm and resolute in the knowledge that the people of our race, male and female alike, are fortified by adversity, and summon forth that which is hardiest and most enduring in our characters. Alas, we were not a full congregation, for Captain Cooper’s yeomen still languished in the market house, and their wives, by their presence, reminded us that the parish had suffered and still was suffering. Nor did we lack, even in such sacred hours, reminders of our present peril, for once I looked up from the Book towards the window, to discover there malicious faces peering in, with broad, grinning faces and suspicious eyes.

  It seemed a time suited to prudence in discourse, and in my sermons, accordingly, I limited myself to assuring my auditors that God’s will would be done, a sentiment not merely true but irreproachable. I could contrive nothing of more immediate comfort, and yet I fear that my words fell tamely upon ears familiar with the Protestant martyrology. For to these English-in-Ireland, if I may term them so, the calamity which had befallen us had the familiarity of lessons and legends learned from infancy. For several centuries now, they and their forebears had told and retold their stories of the fearful Papist uprising of 1641, when the luckless Protestants of Ulster were slaughtered or driven naked upon the winter roads, alike women and infants, of the brutal rapparees who roved the hills after Aughrim, cutthroats and brigands, of Whiteboys banded together against lonely and defenceless Protestant farms. A melancholy litany, decade after decade of hatred and brutality. It was as though our backs now smarted from the cuts of an ancient whip, a scourge devised to test the British spirit. The Old Testament abounded in episodes and language suited to this fierce perception of history, but I felt little inclined to roll out denunciations of Philistines and Canaanites. Far better to remind my unhappy flock of the merciful God of the New Testament, the God who forgives sinners and comforts the helpless and the afflicted. Mr. Saunders, in especial, received my news of this benignant deity almost as though I had introduced a novel heresy. And yet perhaps, I now conjecture, the God of Abraham and Isaac was better suited to their present difficulties, the God who had sustained his Elect People against all tribulations and wickedness.

  And yet Mr. Saunders had at least the safety and the comparative ease of the church on Sabbath, and at other times his cot beneath my roof, where he dwelled with other loyalists whose houses had been destroyed by the banditti. Far different were the circumstances of Captain Cooper and his yeomen, crowded together in the stenches of the market. Whenever in these present days I encounter Captain Cooper, I have occasion to reflect upon the resiliency of the human spirit. For there he stands before me, buoyant and confident, busy upon the world’s and his own affairs, as though the time of his imprisonment and humiliation had never been, an old scar healed over and leaving but the thinnest of lines. But I can remember, if he does not, the ravaged face with its red-rimmed eyes and rug of black beard. He and his men were fed, it is true, but fed most grudgingly, and upon occasion went for entire days without food, owing to the forgetfulness of their captors.

  He had recovered most admirably from the black and wrathful despair into which he had at first been plunged, and was able now to rally the spirits of the poor fellows who shared captivity with him. Upon my visits to the market house, bearing with me such modest provisions as Eliza was able to supply from her depleted larder, he would greet me as of old, with a genial and complacent vulgarity, by which I was always deceived, thinking that he had returned entirely to his senses. He would enquire as to the health and well-being of Eliza and of the other ladies beneath my roof, and upon hearing my reply, would nod briskly, saying, “Good, good, good! Excellent!” Then he would distribute to the company my little treats, reserving for himself perhaps a single oaten cake, nibbling at it slowly so as to make it last. Only after some minutes of my visit had passed would I realise, with a sick and sudden sorrow, that all was not well with his spirit.

  “And our friend Mr. Duggan,” he might say, licking the crumbs from his fingers. “Has he been keeping himself busy? Slaughtering the cattle of honest men? Burning the crops in their fields?”

  “No, no,” I would assure him. “We have heard little of Duggan these past few days. And Ferdy O’Donnell keeps order in the town.”

  “Ferdy O’Donnell! It is my own Mount Pleasant that that lad has his eye on. It was O’Donnell land a century or more ago, black Papist land. Do you know how those fellows worked the land? By a plough tied to the horse’s tail by a rope of straw. Connaught was dirt before we took the sword to it. Red Indians were kinder to the soil than the Papist tribes.”

  “A long time ago,” I said,
bland and foolish. For it is true that proper methods of farming and husbandry came in with the English. We brought with us from England the secrets of seed and plough, of tillage and harvest.

  “Long ago, is it?” he asked sharply. “Tell that one to Duggan and to O’Donnell. By God, they are all alike. If they pass you on the road, they will take off their hats and give you a bow, but what they are thinking all the time is that we have no right to be here. No right, is it? By God, before we are done with this, they will learn lessons about rights.”

  When he was on this tack, there was no turning him aside, yet I always endeavoured to do so.

  “Ballina has been retaken,” I might tell him, “and the rebels themselves admit that to the south of us a mighty army of the Crown is advancing. Your imprisonment is galling, but deliverance is certain.”

  “It is worse than galling,” Cooper said. “I marvel that you can endure our stench. The bloody English have left us here to stew in our own shit, while they march along at their leisure, with banners flying and fifes tootling. I declare to Christ that the Protestants of this island are the most put-upon of God’s creatures, with the bare-arsed Papists on one side of us, and English thicks on the other.”

  “Certain it is that God has placed severe tests upon us,” I said. “I pray that we may give them a proper answer.”

  “We know the proper answers well enough,” Cooper said. “The rebels of this county are going to be given a drubbing they will not forget. The gallows and the pitch cap. Croppies lie down. There is but one weapon that can teach peace to these people, and it is a length of hempen rope.”

  “Peace is not taught with weapons,” I said, but might as well not have spoken, for all the attention he paid to my words. Squatting there in half-darkness, his uniform soiled, his beard a coarse mat, and his head round and hard, he might have been that first ancestor of his, a Cromwellian ferocious in his piety, his sword a Scripture.

  “By God, you are wrong there, Mr. Broome,” he said. “ ‘I bring not peace but a sword.’ That is in the Scriptures, is it not? The Protestant Scriptures?”

  “In the Christian Scriptures,” I said. “A perplexing text. So much else in the New Testament speaks with a different voice.”

  “Not to me it doesn’t,” Cooper muttered, with a quick jerk of the compact head.

  “ ’They that live by the sword shall perish by the sword.’ Those are also the words of Our Saviour.”

  “And He never spoke a truer word,” Cooper said. “Have you not seen those fellows swaggering around with great cutlasses strapped to their waists? By God, there will be a reckoning made one of these days. If you drink the porter you must pay the tapster. This was a peaceful land a year ago, and it will be one again, please God.”

  “Please God,” I said, overjoyed to encounter a sentiment which I could applaud without reservation. “If I am not here tomorrow, I shall be upon the day following. Mrs. Broome and I are most heartily sorry for your present circumstances. I am certain that your courageous stand in the streets of this town will be remembered by the government.”

  “The government!” Cooper said. “Cornwallis and his gang of clerks and parade-ground English soldiers. Don’t talk to me about the government!”

  It was an injunction which I was most ready to obey, and after a few meaningless civilities, I escaped from the foetid room, for as he had truly said, the air was vile-smelling and oppressive.

  And yet a twenty-minute walk would take me away entirely from the grey, stony town and into the green and abundant countryside. Even in early autumn, it is a most astonishing green, unmatched in either England or France, a deep and seductive hue, and rich beyond the point of healthiness, being nurtured by the heavy rainfalls. Black cattle grazed in upland pastures, tended by women, or else by men too sensible to wander down into that disastrous village. I fell into the habit of riding the narrow roads between the fields, under the protection of my suit of black and low, broad-brimmed hat. In early morning, bird song filled the sea-washed air, and the heavy scent of wheat, corn, and barley. A most abundant crop, and its neglect may truly be called sinful. How merciful is the Creator in the simplicity of His instructions, bidding us to those tasks which lie closest to hand: the harvester’s scythe, the fisherman’s net, the carpenter’s hammer commend us to our duties. I hold that the sin rests most heavily upon those who incited such simple men to rapine and rebellion—vainglorious squireens, tavern bards, briefless barristers drunk upon Rousseau and Tom Paine. The simple of this world are ever the prey of the clever and the unscrupulous. Most willingly and despite my cloth would I have placed the hempen noose around the neck of Mr. Theobald Wolfe Tone!

  “Sure what have they to lose?” O’Donnell asked me, “those cowherds, as you call them?” It was long after midnight, with a sea wind wet against the windowpanes, and two bottles of my madeira before us. “Cowherds, spalpeens, cottiers, labouring men. A bad crop one year and they are on the winter roads, huddling in ditches with rags and bits of blanket, more naked to the rains than cows or sheep or potatoes, and of less value. You’ll not frighten them with talk of hanging.”

  “But not you,” I said. “You have fields and pastures, and you have a family. And all this you have foolishly thrown away.” I would not have spoken so bleakly, almost in taunt, had I not conceived a desire somehow to extricate him from his desperate situation, for as I have said he was a young man of several estimable virtues, though mingled with vices and a foolish temper.

  “I watched them take poor Gerry away to the goal,” he said. “And I knew then that I have nothing at all. Slaves we are, upon our own land and in our own country. The poor niggers in North America fare better.”

  But at other times he would speak of the round of peasant pleasures and pastimes with a zest and an affection which I found most moving—their feast days and patterns, even their wakes. Joy was interwoven with the harshness of their lives. Cabins bursting with music came alive for me as he spoke, the feet of the young dancers, the plaintive violins, voices thick with whiskey and song. Their lives have ever been a mystery to me, but a door will at times be briefly opened, and peering through it I can perceive essences, vivid but imprecise. Some slight distance, thin and sharp as a knife’s edge, set O’Donnell too apart from those of whom he spoke, as though he spoke of a world well and richly remembered from which he had stepped aside. I thought then that this was a consequence of his years abroad, at the seminary in France. But I now believe that he realised that all had been changed for him by his fatal act of rebellion.

  And all this while, as we lived with our uncertainties, the wretched affair was drawing to its predestined close. Upon that very night of sea wind and madeira, Humbert, many miles to our east, swerved from his northward path, and began his march to the south, along Lough Allen, to the midlands. Colonel Crauford, it has been said, was beside himself with rage when he entered Manor Hamilton to find the trap sprung but the quarry vanished. But to the south lay a larger trap. Lord Cornwallis had secured one side of it to the Shannon, at Carrick, and was marching eastwards, to deal with the risings in Longford and Granard. Humbert’s only hope now lay with the size and the success of those risings, for if the main road to Dublin lay open, he could then move upon the undefended capital. In Killala, day drifted into day, but for the two armies, time was shrinking to hours.

  It has been stated that as Lord Cornwallis made ready to move he received a despatch from Dublin which afforded him welcome amusement. The second French fleet of invasion had at last set sail, but Admiral Warren stood ready to receive them as they approached the Irish coast. And this, as my readers will surely recall, was accomplished, at which time it was discovered that aboard one of the French ships was the celebrated Theobald Wolfe Tone, who was not shielded by his French rank and uniform from the fate which he deserved. And thus all the knots of the wretched enterprise were pulled neatly together. I have not seen so much as a cheap engraving of Mr. Tone, but in my mind have formed a picture of him, an agile l
ittle fellow, sharp of nose and thin of mouth, all ambition and egotism, his head crammed with humanitarian cant, and his heart bursting with mischief. But perhaps I wrong him. It may be that he had little understanding of the bloody engines whose springs he touched. I know only what I have myself experienced, the men I have seen slain, the thatch in flames, the homeless upon the roads. May the Almighty show to him more mercy than I can summon up!

  When I seek to recall those days and nights in which we were all locked together in Killala, prisons within prisons, it seems strange that I remember most vividly evenings spent in talk with O’Donnell. Imagine us if you will, a clergyman past middle years, balding but with a ludicrous aureole of greying hair falling to the collar’s edge, plump and soft after a half-century of sedentary life, with no height to give me dignity, but round, full legs swinging back and forth as I sat facing him, the tips of black boots barely touching the polished wood. And a large-boned young peasant, a face firm yet puzzled, skin coarse and reddish of hue, great murderous pistol thrust into his belt. As we leaned towards each other across the table, we leaned from two worlds which had no knowledge the one of the other. Perhaps my face, like his, bore the marks of puzzlement, as I strained to understand him.

  I can stand now, any day I choose, on the broad green at Castlebar, that green where I was one day to look upon the gibbeted bodies of the rebels, and if it is a fair day can listen to fiddler and piper, their notes jostling the lowing of cattle and the shouts of pedlar and card-trickster, and all will seem but an ugly jangle, raw, brutish sound. But on another day, as I am riding, it may be, to some ailing or infirm parishioner, a voice will float to me across half a valley, or even a voice drifting from pothouse window in the grey, sea-streaked village, and I can almost read its meaning, a voice across mountain grasses or slippery cobblestone.