The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  Thomas Francis Meagher was born on August 3, 1823, in one of the largest houses of the oldest city in Ireland—Waterford. The workaday port on the River Suir was founded in 914 by Vikings with ambition and a talent for on-shore piracy. Thomas grew up just steps from where conquerors had tramped through and a tower that had withstood a siege by the hated Oliver Cromwell. As a boy, he climbed up the chapped hills across the river, looked down at the port and seethed at the sight of British warships in the harbor. He imagined the last gasping breaths taken by Francis Hearn, hanged from the Waterford Bridge until his neck snapped for his role in a failed 1798 uprising. He played inside the eleventh-century round tower of the Vikings, said to be the oldest surviving building in Ireland.

  The town motto was Urbs Intacta—Unconquered City. But Waterford was the most conquered of cities, evident throughout the bundle of strong buildings, shoulder to shoulder along the quay. Every street and structure bore some scar of defeat. A cannonball was lodged inside that Viking tower, left over from Cromwell’s rampage of 1650. King Richard II had landed there in 1394, leading the largest armada ever to sail into an Irish port—duly noted on a much-vandalized plaque. King Henry VIII had converted a monastery in the center of town into an almshouse. For 350 years, poor inmates were obliged to pray for the soul of the wife-killing king, as a condition of the charity. Thomas knew all of this, in great, gritty detail, not because of his schooling, which was formal and devoid of passionate obsessions, but because it was passed down—an inheritance of memory. The systematic savagery, the stripping of ethnic pride and religious freedom, the many executions of men of conscience: he carried these stories throughout his life, the weight increasing with the years.

  The seven-plus centuries of organized torment originated in a letter from Pope Adrian IV in 1155, which empowered King Henry II to conquer Ireland and its “rude and savage people.” It was decreed that the rogue Irish Catholic Church, a mutt’s mash of Celtic, Druidic, Viking and Gaelic influences, had strayed too far from clerical authority, at a time when English monarchs still obeyed Rome. Legend alone was not enough to save it—that is, the legend of Patrick, a Roman citizen who came to Ireland in a fifth-century slave ship and then convinced many a Celt to worship a Jewish carpenter’s son. Patrick traveled with his own brewer; the saint’s ale may have been a more persuasive selling point for Christianity than the trinity symbol of the shamrock. There followed centuries of relative peace, the island a hive of learned monks, masterly stonemasons and tillers of the soil, while Europe fell to Teutonic plunder. The Vikings, after much pillaging, forced interbreeding, tower-toppling and occasional acts of civic improvement (they founded Dublin on the south bank of the Liffey), eventually succumbed to the island’s religion as well. They produced children who were red-haired and freckled, the Norse-Celts. But by the twelfth century, Ireland was out of line. Does it matter that this Adrian IV, the former Nicholas Breakspear, was history’s only English pope? Or that the language of the original papal bull, with all its authoritative aspersions on the character of the Irish, has never been authenticated? It did for 752 years.

  So with the blessing of God, a Norman force landed not far from Wexford in 1169, followed by an invasion of Henry and his army two years later in Waterford. He was the first English king to leave a footprint on Irish soil, and would not be the last to pronounce the people ungovernable. He could have learned from the Romans, who called the island Hibernia and deemed it not worth the lost lives needed to force it into their empire. After Henry’s march, the chieftains and family leaders who pledged fealty were allowed to hold on to their estates, and a degree of self-government was granted to those residents with Anglo-Norman lineage.

  Still, the indigenous culture—lively, excitably clannish, infectious—would flourish, as the English print on the land faded. The horse racing, the storytelling, the epic versifying over strong drink and tables heavy with trout and partridge, became the way of the occupiers. English soldiers married Irish women and had big Irish families, and power grew ever more distant from the Crown. The sons of men named James and Edmund became Seamus and Eamann. The daughters of Mary and Evelyn became Maire and Eibhlin. To the horror of the royal court, these offspring of the invaders had become ipsis Hibernicis Hiberniores—more Irish than the Irish. They had gone native.

  The remedy was one of the most exhaustive campaigns to strip a people of their pride of place that any government had ever devised—the Statutes of Kilkenny. Starting in 1367, assimilation was outlawed. Nearly three dozen laws criminalized Irish dress, Irish hairstyle, Irish sport, down to a detailed description of the lawful way to mount a horse. Punishment for riding without an English saddle was jail: the offender’s “body shall be committed to prison, until he pay a fine according to the King’s pleasure.”

  The statutes carried the death penalty for the worst offenses. Family mingling was at the top of the forbidden list, sanctions for “fostering of children” and “concubinage.” Article VI went after a beloved Irish sport—“the plays which men call horlings, with great sticks and a ball upon the ground, from which great evils and maims have arisen.” Henceforth, all men were to play English sports—archery, “throwing of lances and other gentlemanlike games.” Though most people on the island, no matter their ancestry, were Roman Catholic, religion was strictly a nationalistic affair for one side. No Irish could enter a chapel, church, cathedral or any other house of prayer in his homeland if an Englishman was present. Speaking Gaelic, or using Irish place names, could result in forfeiture of land and property to the king.

  In love and play, music and worship, sport and dress, these laws were nearly impossible to enforce. The Irish language, scattered into corners and vales of the land, was banished but never killed. Stories still passed, secret societies developed, romances between English and Irish could not be prevented by whippings and threat of jail. The clans still reigned, enforcing their own laws, abiding by their customs. The English, badly outnumbered, retreated to a few towns along the eastern shore closest to their own nation. They built estates of thick limestone, peopled them with down-lineage barons and earls, ladies and lords. At Christmastime, the cream of the conquering class paraded in silk, fur and feather. English power was clustered around Dublin, an urban fortress, a nation within a nation. The siege mentality grew even stronger when a physical boundary went up—the Pale, from the Latin word palus, for stake. In places, it was an actual fence, marked by said stakes. By the late 1400s, the Pale covered four counties. Inside the Pale was an Anglo-Norman kingdom with armed security, a structured feudal system and a sense of settled superiority. Beyond the Pale—that was beyond all civilization, an unruly Ireland living on its own terms.

  As the size of the Pale shrank, fear within it rose. By the early 1500s, the Irish inside the circumscribed area were acting freely Irish again. Power flowed back to families with ancient ties to the land. One of those clans produced a fine-robed young rebel by the name of Silken Thomas Fitzgerald, who raised a sizable force and launched a revolt in 1534. As Thomas marched on Dublin, the Pale panicked. He was within conquering distance of driving the English out when an invading army arrived to turn him back. It had superior new weapons—cannons. Whereas before it took waves of men on ladders to scale a compound, now a few well-placed iron balls could breach a fortress. Thomas was powerless in the face of English artillery. Captured, carted off to England, he was dragged through the streets and left to slow-starve in the Tower of London. As a rebel, he was supposed to have his genitals severed before execution. But as the son of the Earl of Kildare, Thomas had some special rights. He was hanged and then beheaded, his testicles intact. Thereafter, an English army garrison would remain in Dublin for nearly four centuries.

  The Crown then launched a second big wave of suppression—against the religion that had clung to the land since just before the time of Saint Patrick, more than a thousand years earlier. The change of faith came about because of a change of wives by the English king, Henry VIII. Yes, him. Athl
etic before an accident led to a life of sloth and overindulgence, the king grew fat, hateful and murderous in his middle age. At 400 pounds, he was a seasoned killer, having orchestrated the execution of wife number two, Anne Boleyn, and wife number five, Katherine Howard. After breaking with a corrupt Rome that would not grant him his first divorce, Henry declared himself leader of a new English church—from now on, the state religion of Ireland as well. The same year that Anne’s head was severed from her body, Henry was declared the Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England. Irish Catholics were ordered to become Anglicans or forfeit their land and all their holdings. Outside the Pale, this edict had the effect of a mortal ordering the sun to rise at midnight on a winter’s eve.

  Henry’s legacy in Ireland was a religion planted by force but never to flourish in most of the country’s soil. But not for lack of trying. Monasteries were seized. Priests were forced underground and into caves along the coast. The Latin Mass was outlawed. The remainder of the century was a bloody thrust and parry, the Irish attacking, the English countering. In the north, the Crown gave its combatants government backing to undertake widespread theft, the beginning of a process known as the Plantation of Ireland. Large estates, held by families for centuries, were confiscated. The owners and their servants and tenants were kicked off the land and left to starve. Villages were ransacked and burned, leaving hungry children to flee with their mothers. “Out of every corner of the woods and glens, they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them,” wrote Edmund Spenser, the English poet. “They looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves.”

  To populate these newly stolen lands, the English brought in Protestant settlers, many from Scotland, and were generous with their handouts. So was born another hyphenate from this soil: the Scotch-Irish. Those natives who trickled back, bereft and broke, were allowed in some cases to work their old property as serfs. Inevitably, the people rose up, first with guerrilla raids of pitchforks, pikes and arson strikes, and then with larger, organized rebellions. But by 1602, England controlled nearly all of Ireland. Foreign rule was buttressed by foreign religion. Both would be held in place by a foreign army.

  The dispossessed took on their oppressor again in 1641. Sick with hatred for those who had cast them from their homes, they killed innocents and tyrants alike, rampaging through the north. Children and women—it didn’t matter, if they were Protestants they were massacred. At least a hundred people were drowned in one town. The roads were choked with refugees. The Irish had been encouraged to strike by a burgeoning English civil war, and felt compelled to seize the moment and side with King Charles I.

  Back in London, stories of atrocities stirred the English. Parliament called for Catholic Ireland to be destroyed once and for all. “No quarter shall be given to any Irishman, or Papist born in Ireland,” a new law declared. Within weeks, the captain of the frigate Swanly seized a ship with seventy Irish. The sailors were tied, one to the other, and thrown into the sea. Extermination on a mass scale would be carried out over the next ten years. The most horrific slaughter arrived in the form of Oliver Cromwell, leading his New Model Army of 12,000 men, with another 7,000 in reserve. North of Dublin, he laid siege to the well-fortified town of Drogheda. For several days in late summer of 1649, his cannons fired away at the town walls. On September 11, troops stormed the broken city, using Irish children as human shields. By evening, the conquest well in hand, soldiers took swords to anyone still alive—no matter that they’d been offered safety if they surrendered. Children who had huddled with their mothers in St. Mary’s Church were burned alive. Women who had escaped to a vault were butchered. By Cromwell’s own account, only 30 people from a town of 4,000 survived. Those who lived were sold as slaves to Barbados.

  Cromwell was in the country only nine months, but in that time he imprinted himself on every Irish parish and every Irish family. Only in the Burren, a moonscape of rock in County Clare, was he repelled. In that treeless plain, the land itself held him back—“for there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, or earth enough to bury him,” said one of his officers. Throughout Ireland, Cromwell left behind “a name for cruelty such as the passage of three hundred years has scarcely erased from memory,” wrote the historian Giovanni Costigan.

  In his letters and official papers back to England, Cromwell gloated. He believed he had performed a righteous killing “upon these barbarous wretches.” In describing his triumphs, he gloried in the intricacies of bloodlust by his fighting machine—death by sword to the heart and lungs, by fire to hair and face, by the crushing of skulls, the gouging of eyes, the strangling of throats, drowning and smothering, all for the greater good. “It hath pleased God to bless our endeavors at Drogheda,” he wrote.

  This latest failed Irish rebellion was capped by a disastrous epilogue: the systematic eviction of people from their homes and land, far more comprehensive than what had taken place earlier in the north. Under the Act of Settlement, Cromwell’s soldiers and their supporters would seize more than half of all the good land in Ireland, about eight million acres. Any landowner who took part in the fight against Cromwell was arrested and sentenced to a life of bondage, his land confiscated. In this way, another 40,000 Irish were deported to the West Indies as slaves on sugar plantations. Nearly two centuries later, the French journalist Gustave de Beaumont toured Ireland with his lifelong friend Alexis de Tocqueville, fresh off a thorough exploration of the United States. “I passed through the country traversed by Cromwell and found it still full of the terror of his name,” Beaumont wrote. The worst thing one Irish peasant could say to the other was “The curse of Cromwell be on you.”

  To ensure that the conquered people would never again rise above a degraded state, a series of Penal Laws were enacted at the end of the seventeenth century. These dictates, as with the Statutes of Kilkenny more than 300 years earlier, were a far-reaching attempt to tear apart what was left of the ties that held the Irish together as a people. With the plantations the English took land; with Kilkenny’s statutes they took language, sports and culture; with the Penal Laws they took religion. Ever since Henry VIII tried to make the Irish bow to the king as the highest spiritual authority, persecution had been haphazard and poorly enforced. The Penal Laws would show the world how a well-armed minority could snuff out the native worshiping habits of a majority by criminalizing the faith of eight out of ten residents of Ireland. It was the Penal Laws that made it illegal for a Catholic to own a horse worth more than £5, to live in major cities, to pass property on to the eldest son. It was the Penal Laws that made education the monopoly of one religion, that led to the branding of priests with hot irons on their cheeks. And it was the Penal Laws that ensured that a Catholic would never sit on a grand jury, never vote, never raise a voice of protest or be granted the rights of citizenship, even as England expanded those rights to her own subjects. In Ireland, people were to be forever illiterate, forever poor, forever powerless.

  The language of these laws could serve as a template for future despots trying to rid a land of its indigenous ways. “No person of the popish religion shall publicly teach school or instruct youth, or in private houses teach youth.” Should a priest “celebrate marriage between two Protestants, or a Protestant and a Papist, he shall be guilty of a felony and suffer death.” A Protestant landowner, subservient to the Crown, could vote for members of an Irish Parliament, though if that freeholder fell under suspicion, he was required to take this oath: “I am not a Papist, or married to a Papist.” Catholic assembly in areas of “pretended sanctity” was outlawed as a form of insurrection—“all such meetings shall be adjudged riots and unlawful assemblies, and punishable as such.” The long arm of London extended even to the Irish grave. “No person shall bury any dead in any suppressed monastery, abbey or convent.” In all, the Penal Laws were a marvel of institutionalized racial and religious supremacy. The British had thought of everything.

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�A machine of wise and elaborate contrivance,” marveled Edmund Burke, the Irish-born statesman, “as well-fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”

  The laws were enforced by an occupying army of at least 15,000 men and by schools of informants. The authorities had learned that a soldier was no match in efficiency for a well-paid spy. In some cases, the snitch could reap 50 percent of a guilty man’s seized goods. “One half of all forfeitures shall go to his Majesty,” a penal law of 1695 decreed, “and the other half to the informer.” Some indignities were never codified, though the laws seemed to give blanket support to treat the Irish as subhuman. A poor man showing lack of respect to his Protestant superior could be whipped until he collapsed or beaten until his bones snapped. It was not uncommon, as on the cotton plantations of the American South, for a master of the estate to summon from his tenants an Irish girl to his bed.

  And yet this well-constructed design, one of the most sophisticated attempts to deny a people of basic human dignity, failed miserably. The campaign to strip the Irish of their religion had the opposite effect, making them more loyal to their faith. Certainly, Rome was corrupt, deceitful, the Church ruled by a knot of conspirators whose pronouncements were delivered on a breeze of hypocrisy. The Church meddled in the affairs of every Catholic nation, blessing murder of their enemies and of nonbelievers. They persecuted men of science and voices of common sense. Even as the Renaissance brought fresh light, art and thought to Europe, as the Reformation prompted half of the continent to turn away from the medieval mandates of Rome, as the Age of Enlightenment spawned thousands of conversions from belief to reason, the Irish clung to their Roman Catholicism. For the same reason that hurling never died, that the harp became a national symbol, that epic poems were still recited in Gaelic, religion was a way for a conquered nation to remain defiantly Irish.