The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  Thomas Francis Meagher at the age of seventeen, when he was a student at Stonyhurst College in England. Born into wealth, young Meagher chafed at British rule even as he was warned not to take on the most powerful empire on earth

  COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF IRELAND

  The Act of Union, as the breakup was called, was performed with a shopkeeper’s precision: members were efficiently bribed to dissolve themselves. In return, Ireland was offered seats in the British Parliament. Good news: you could now vote to send a member to the House of Commons. Bad news: you could not vote unless you were wealthy. Property requirements mocked the pretense of democracy. The number of eligible voters in Waterford, with 28,000 people, fell to barely 700. Ireland had a population of about five million, nearly half that of England at the nineteenth century’s dawn. But its caucus in the Commons would be 15 percent, ensuring that nothing which displeased the English majority would ever pass. And of course, you couldn’t govern your own country if you were like more than three fourths of the people who lived there—Catholics who refused to take an oath to the Crown’s religion. Oh, and there would still be an English viceroy, the Lord Lieutenant, who ruled Ireland from the Castle in Dublin. Taxes and tariffs rose. Once-vibrant cities fell into despair. The press was muzzled. Habeas corpus was suspended at whim. The Act of Union, in the words of the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, was “the union of a shark with its prey.”

  Surrounded by the trappings of an empire in full, Thomas Meagher chafed. But why resist it? A great life was ahead for a graduate bearing the stamp of Stonyhurst. All that a man might want came through England. Queen Victoria, just four years older than Meagher and crowned while still a teenager in 1837, was such a dear, as everyone attested. Meagher could serve Her Majesty abroad, gleaming in a crisp scarlet coat with a saber at his side, an officer, like any graduate of Eton and Oxford. Looking back across St. George’s Channel was futile: the boy’s homeland was no more. His passport carried the formal name of this entity: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

  Resentment stirred with every display of England’s might and pride. Not long before graduation, Tom was given a plum role in the school play, King Lear. He was the Earl of Kent, with ample lines for a voice already distinct within the ramparts of Stonyhurst. His master was a priest from Lancashire, Reverend William Johnson, an Anglophile to his bones. At dress rehearsal, a week before Christmas, the Jesuit came up behind Thomas and smacked him over the head with a wad of King Lear. You can’t do Shakespeare that way, he told him. Why not? Thomas had the emotion, the lift of words, the rise and fall of the face at the right time. The priest slapped him again with the bard’s leather-bound words.

  “Meagher,” said Father Johnson, “that’s a horrible brogue you’ve got!” As the priest coughed up phlegm into a tattered handkerchief, Meagher launched into his lines:

  Fare thee well, King; since thus though will appear.

  Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here—

  Thwop. Once again. The sting of the Jesuit.

  “’T’will never do, Meagher!”

  But—

  “That frightful brogue of yours will never do for Shakespeare.”

  He was stripped of his role. Earl of Kent no more, he was demoted to a lowly soldier, a bit part. On opening night, well into Act IV, Thomas jumped onto the stage. In the deepest invocation of his native Munster province, he bellowed his line: “The British powers were marching thitherward.”

  The audience roared, and Thomas repeated it, in a still more exaggerated Irish accent. For bringing the house down this way, the young scholar was flogged on both hands, and of course never returned to nobility in future performances. But one of England’s finest schools had failed to squeeze the Irish from the man. “I had my revenge,” Meagher noted later. His demotion “was not the first time the brogue entailed the forfeiture of title and estate.”

  Home, and free of school at last, 1843. He would be twenty in August. The steamer William Penn huffed up the Suir to Waterford, past the landmarks of his youth. Meagher was torn. He loved the old Viking port, but the tableau was stale. “Everything was the same as I left it.” Along the quay strolled the clueless constable, chewing straw as always. The Protestant dean skipped past the Norse tower in his black knickers and ebony cane, little children laughing at him behind his back. Most everyone in town knew of Thomas Francis Meagher, the Prince of Waterford. Here, this way for a pint, lad. Can you come by and visit the daughter? She’s quite the pretty young lady now. The road ahead could be without complication. Just say yes. Picnics in summer, lavish balls in winter, holiday excursions on the Continent. He could slide into the family business, live in the biggest house on the water, move money from one bucket to the other, never be cold, never break a sweat, never be hungry, never worry.

  And, just now, the doors opened to the honeyed light of the family home: such a crowd. All the chums of the province out to greet him, gorgeous young women but also the first Catholic mayor of Waterford in nearly 200 years—his father, the elder Thomas Meagher. He controlled the city, its patronage, the courts. What a change! This political miracle had come about because of the Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, the most towering figure in Meagher’s Ireland. He was Swaggering Dan to some, glib, his hand on a lady’s rear. Tall, fleshy-faced. Though educated in Europe, a barrister and landowner who had amassed a fortune, he spoke Gaelic like a chieftain of old. Wherever O’Connell went, crowds followed. Many just wanted to kiss him, to say they had planted lips on the man who freed the Catholics.

  Ireland’s population boomed in the first four decades of the nineteenth century—from five million to eight million by the time Thomas returned to Waterford. As the great majority remained disenfranchised, even leading Protestants called for giving a voice to these powerless Irish citizens of the United Kingdom. O’Connell was elected to Parliament in 1828. But as a Catholic, like the vast majority of the population, he could not be seated unless he took the Oath of Supremacy to the Crown’s religion. In Westminster, he forced the issue. Huge protests broke out at home, mobs of people on a scale never before seen, frightening the government. The British had 25,000 troops in Ireland now, which said plenty about the relationship between the government and the governed. No such force was garrisoned in Scotland or Wales. As the demonstrations swelled, Parliament caved in: it passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, ending the last of the Penal Laws.

  Standing up to the British Empire made the Liberator a national hero. His legacy in place, he moved on to a second monumental campaign: a repeal of the Act of Union. This was impossible, said even the most sympathetic of English liberal thinkers. Not so, O’Connell answered. Ireland would govern itself—soon, perhaps—if a political majority in England could be won over. His movement would be peaceful, lawful, civil. And he was joined in this cause by Thomas Meagher’s father, who gave a considerable amount of money to the cause of Repeal, and who befriended the Liberator.

  The elder Meagher, a man of few words, pressured the son of many words about his next step. The boy could speak, or at least understand, five languages now—Latin, Greek, French, Gaelic and English. But could he put any of them to good use? He would not be following the patriarch into the temperance movement, an attempt to right the character of the Irish by getting rid of drink. That was clearly not for bon vivant young Meagher. Well, then, maybe he could find a role in O’Connell’s organization. Start small, learn from the master, try to persuade the persuadable in power. The elder Meagher informed his son that the Liberator knew something of the young man. What flattery was this? O’Connell had been visiting Clongowes, the school of his own family, when he was shown Thomas’s history of the debate society. He was impressed. “The author of such a work,” he said, “was not destined to remain long in obscurity.” Indeed, Meagher was in a hurry to make his mark. He did not share his father’s satisfaction at the pace of reform. Emancipation through the Catholic Relief Act was a sop. The Irish still had no real po
wer. To keep the Catholic vote to a minimum, property requirements were raised fivefold. It was thrilling to see the mayor of his hometown—his own beloved father—going to Mass, and the streets, courts and hospitals in the people’s hands, but consider the larger picture, he argued.

  “It looked well,” said Thomas. “But it was a fair skin with cancer below it.” Real power still belonged to England. Armed soldiers, as always, were never far. The sheriff was an appointee of the British ruler, the Lord Lieutenant. “Catholic emancipation has enabled a few Catholic gentlemen to sit in Parliament and there concur in the degradation of their country,” said young Meagher, having done little to curb the impertinent bite of his opinions. “It has brought a handful of slaves from the field, and gives them appointments in the master’s house.” His father, by implication, was one of the bound.

  Thomas appreciated all that his family had done to educate him, to build a sumptuous life in occupied Ireland, but the merchant business was not for him, nor was his hometown—its entitled class “stiff with illiterate conceit.” In September, a month after his twentieth birthday, Thomas gave his first political speech. He’d been attending Repeal meetings, in awe of the Liberator. Abolishing the Act of Union, the cause of Repeal, made the boy’s pulse jump. Looking very much like the well-dressed schoolboy, Meagher gave the dinner speech of one such gathering. Afterward, the mighty O’Connell clapped the kid on the shoulder. “Well done, young Ireland.” Did he have plans? In fact, Thomas had been thinking of moving to Dublin to study law. O’Connell thought this a fine idea. He had a big Georgian home there, in Merrion Square. The Liberator offered to write a letter of recommendation.

  At age sixty-eight, O’Connell was living off past glory. He had gained a great amount of weight, and preferred evenings of praise from adoring fellow countrymen to effective provocations. But here, fourteen years after emancipation, he roused himself for the last big battle in the campaign he’d waged his entire adult life, declaring 1843 the Year of Repeal. His gatherings ballooned—vast protests, dubbed “monster meetings” by the London press. In Sligo, in Cork, in Limerick, in Wexford, the Irish were rising in a single voice to break from England. O’Connell never issued a call to arms, never cast an aspersion on “the darling little queen” he professed to adore. But he had crossed a line with the English overseers. Around 300,000 turned out in Waterford, the largest crowd in the country’s history. The next protest, planned at the sacred site of Clontarf, north of Dublin, where the high king Brian Boru had driven the Vikings from the land 800 years earlier, would be even bigger—a million Irish, possibly. The diaspora in Scotland and Wales, in Liverpool and on the Continent, made quick plans to mass at Clontarf.

  The Empire struck back. Warships crowded into Dublin’s harbor, a blustery reminder that the Royal Navy could level the city in an afternoon. The British prime minister, the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet, despised the Irish. They were mongrels, incapable of caring for themselves, a nation of drunks. As home secretary, Peel had signed on to Catholic emancipation in 1829 while holding his nose; it was the only way to avert a full-fledged revolution. He hated O’Connell in particular, had challenged the Liberator to a duel some time ago. Now he was in a position to shut the great man down at the height of his influence. Just days before what would have been the largest single protest in Ireland, Peel declared the Clontarf meeting a criminal assembly. Anyone who attended would be arrested.

  Meagher watched his hero. The old boy had moves in him yet, yes? The nation would stand with O’Connell—just say the word! “Hope, delight, ecstasy, defiance—a tumultuous life leaped to the summons,” Meagher said. But O’Connell surrendered. He lost his nerve and called off the protest. Everyone should go home peacefully. Those boats that had been chartered to cross the Irish Sea turned around. Shortly thereafter, O’Connell himself was arrested on a trumped-up charge. Prime Minister Peel won this duel.

  Dublin, winter of 1844. Black rain on black cobbled streets, carriages splashing through puddles, the bruised-looking Liffey lumbering to sea. Thomas moved in with Patrick J. Smyth, a schoolmate from Clongowes, in a comfortable home in the city. Studying and sputtering with mentors at the dining halls of the Queen’s Inns, he couldn’t keep his mind on the law; it grew less interesting by the day. At night, Meagher and Smyth attended soirees with other educated strivers. Thomas was often mistaken for an Englishman. Something about the accent, proper and upper class. If only Father Johnson could hear this. Dinner parties and dances grew stale. The life felt fake, treading in mediocrity while his country fell into a torpor. He was not proud of himself. “Flaunting and fashionable,” he said, by way of self-description. What rubbish. Irish high society was a fraud, “the pretentious aping of English taste, ideas and fashions,” he called it. His worst fear was that he would become “a silken and scented slave of England.” The city itself had long been cleansed of indigenous taint, its streets named for the conqueror’s kings and queens, for earls of this and dukes of that.

  Outside the warmly lit interiors of the salons, the Crown kept guard over it all from the immense stone fortress of the thirteenth-century Dublin Castle, just blocks from the river. The garrison in Ireland was larger than the Empire’s troop placement in India. In Dublin alone were 10,000 men, with hussars bunked at the Royal Barracks, the light cavalry unit ready to strike—where? Why, here at home! Meagher sleepwalked his way through the shortest days of the year. The colossus O’Connell was tried in January 1844. He had been mayor of Dublin two years earlier, in the promising period that followed emancipation, but now he was just another educated prisoner of English rule. No Catholic would ever convict O’Connell, and so, as was common in political trials in Ireland, the jury was packed with Protestants under orders of the prosecution. The Liberator was found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail. Off to prison he went—a heavy-lidded, wheezing old man, his spirit broken, a warning to anyone who would think of defying the British Empire in its backyard.

  3

  * * *

  Poetry in Action

  It was poetry, the bend of words to frame a cause, that lifted Ireland from its gloom in the last good months before catastrophe. Thomas Davis, educated at Trinity, the Protestant son of a British army surgeon, came forth with a burst of verse that roused a generation. He was trained as a lawyer, but wrote as if he’d never put his nose inside a book of law. He was romantic, able to call upon the nation’s gauzy clutter of mythic figures without having his head in a cloud. And he possessed a clear vision for his native land. It was not Catholics versus Protestants, not the north against the south, Orangemen against Friends of St. Patrick. With a pair of journalists, Davis founded the most influential journal of nineteenth-century Ireland, the Nation. Though only 10,000 copies were printed each week, the paper was passed around, twenty-five readers to an issue, and became the island’s first national publication. In a country where most peasants were illiterate, the poetry of Tom Davis spread by word of mouth—stanzas repeated on a sheep path or a loading dock. On publication day, long queues formed on the streets for fresh issues. The paper’s essays were muscular, unblinking, original. The writers were young, educated, not afraid to poke at the old order, to mock English rule with unflinching satire, to recast tired stories into allegories of modern struggle. Davis himself was an elegant agitator with a fine face, though prone to wheezing and a cough, which made him seem vulnerable.

  In the lengthening light of spring, 1845, Meagher grew infatuated with this rarest kind of subversive: a poet with power. He memorized Davis’s best lines, and repeated them in argument. He waited outside the paper’s office to try to meet him. He dropped his law studies, to the disappointment of his father. He scribbled verse in his room, sent poems to the Nation. He imagined himself one of them. Everything Davis wrote, Meagher consumed.

  “This country of ours is no sand bank, thrown by some recent caprice of earth,” said Davis in one essay. “It is an ancient land, honoured in the archives of civilization, traceable in
to antiquity by its piety, its valour and its sufferings.” For people accustomed to looking down as they walked, to being told they were apes in waistcoats, beggars fit for Calcutta’s Black Hole, this jolt of strong prose and rhyming journalism was spine-stiffening. The Davis lament for Owen Roe O’Neill, who died young while trying to ease Irish pain during the Cromwell conquest, was a favorite:

  We thought you would not die—we were sure you would not go,

  And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell’s cruel blow—

  Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the sky—

  Oh! why did you leave us, Owen? Why did you die?

  The guiding words of the new journal were a call to action, but a clever call, saying much without saying anything that could get a poet strung from the gallows:

  As your fears are false and hollow

  Slaves and dastards stand aside—

  Knaves and traitors, Faugh-a-Ballagh.

  That was it. Faugh-a-Ballagh: Clear the way! Meagher heard the ring of a bell. At night, he parked himself in the rear of Conciliation Hall, a chamber of Irish discontent under high ceilings along the quay. This was home to the oratorical music of Gaelic nationalism. Here Meagher saw the poet Davis speak, his words no less lofty in person than they were on paper. Here he heard people question the Liberator, or at least the timidity of his followers. O’Connell had been released after less than a year of incarceration. The great man returned home to Merrion Square, his health ruined by the cold months in a cell. He was nearing seventy and out of ideas. Yet he insisted on controlling the forces calling for freedom, with his sons doing much of the speaking for him, while insulting the new voices—heralded now as the Young Ireland movement.