The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  After the scare, an excitable, opinionated young man named John Donnellan Balfe offered his services to Meagher. He was also a graduate of Clongowes Wood, though six years older than the Young Tribune. Balfe was hard-drinking and voluble, a towering six foot four inches, with a whisk broom of a red beard and a nose showing an early-middle-age blush. He had once been a guard in Windsor Castle, on duty at the coronation of Queen Victoria, as he told it. But he had since soured on the British Empire, he explained—aghast that the richest nation on earth could let its partner under the Crown go to an early grave. He offered to protect Meagher. And he could write, with a pen almost as toxic as Mitchel’s. Young Ireland’s leaders liked Balfe’s energy. In no time, he had worked his way into the inner circle, doing political jobs for Smith O’Brien, writing with Duffy, socializing with Meagher. They dispatched Balfe to London, where he had many connections, to make common cause with a movement of young reformists, the English Chartists.

  Meagher toured the countryside to the west and north, recruiting for the Irish Confederation movement. “Every eye is fixed as he depicts the wrongs of England, and every hand is clenched,” wrote George Pepper, a witness to one speech in Ulster. “The next day, 5000 people joined the Young Ireland party and prepared to raise the standard of revolt.” The goal was to build a community of the defiant in every town. One trick of the charismatic Meagher was to set up hurling clubs, that infectious sport of rebels past, as a gateway to politics. The shop clerks, the small-town editors, the barristers, the nonstarving young—they were quick to join the cause. Catholic clerics remained on the fence, fearing that an uprising would get out of hand. Meagher didn’t hide his whereabouts. He publicized his appearances, laughed openly at the Crown’s informants in his audiences. Away from the stiff formality of Dublin’s podiums, he was playful, closer to the people, and working to rid himself of his upper-class accent. At last, he felt, the Irish were rousing themselves—for what, he did not know. He attracted enormous crowds, the women in particular drawn to the radiant eyes and silken voice of the young man now called Meagher of the Sword. “A glorious canvass today,” he wrote Duffy. “All the people—emphatically, the people—and the girls, and women. My God! I can hardly believe my senses!”

  That he could find any reason for lightness of soul in that year was a triumph of hope over the grim spectacle of a collapsing nation. Ireland was starting to empty out. Emigration was already woven into the national experience. But nothing like the famine years. Clothes in a bundle, families fled their villages on foot, trudged to cities like Limerick and Cork, Newery and Waterford, from there to the transatlantic departure point of Liverpool. Passage to Canada cost about £6 for a family of five, more than triple that to get to the United States on one of the better ships. It took five to eight weeks to sail to the American mainland, four months or more to Australia. The English wanted them gone, particularly to Canada and Australia, two of the Empire’s big empties in need of field hands and laborers.

  What started as a trickle became a river of out-migrating people: almost a quarter million in 1847. Those who had some money would host a wake—a departure ritual, not unlike one held for the dead. By law, each passenger on an emigrant ship was entitled to ten cubic feet in steerage. But once at sea, captains did what they pleased. In crammed and filthy spaces over a great ocean under sail, typhus followed the poor out of Ireland. The disease and all its grotesque humiliations were more feared than a storm. In the cheap ships, where humans were cargo on the way to North America, just as timber was on the return, nearly one in five emigrants died that year. Thus a new term was added to the pile of Irish miseries: the coffin ships. Speranza’s poem “The Exodus” was full of rage at the hemorrhaging of the island.

  “A million a decade!”—of human wrecks,

  Corpses lying in fever sheds—

  Corpses huddled on foundering decks,

  And shroudless dead to their rocky beds;

  Nerve and muscle, and heart and brain,

  Lost to Ireland—lost in vain.

  Her voice matched the mood of 1847. In County Tipperary, corn stores were pillaged, the grain spilling onto wet streets, onto the sticky bare feet of the hungry. In Donegal, a mob stormed a flour mill. Just outside Limerick, 5,000 people crawled and stumbled up a hill to declare to the skies, to the English, to God, a single vow: We will not starve. The cry went unanswered: by year’s end, about 400,000 people had perished. English authorities started shipping Irish orphan girls to Australia, there to labor as domestic servants. Trevelyan approved, noting that Australians were less likely to object, because they were “not quite so fond of grievances as the excitable and imaginative Irish.”

  A warm summer in Ireland had produced a huge harvest in grain, bound once more for stomachs in foreign lands. To those holding dead children in their arms, the polemicist John Mitchel had a response: drive the English to the sea. He baited the Castle, calling the Lord Lieutenant “Butcher Clarendon,” betting that an overreaction on England’s part would prompt the masses to rise. Duffy was not yet there with him, and when he tried to moderate Mitchel’s tone at the Nation, his best-known voice quit. Mitchel soon started his own paper, for those who no longer saw a lawful way to right the wrongs in Ireland.

  Meagher struggled with his feelings. His heart was with Mitchel, but his head was full of his father’s caution. Who would fight? What would they fight with? The country people had no shoes, let alone guns. Against upwards of 50,000 troops and assorted mercenaries and police backups, how could a ragged formation of Irish with pitchforks possibly prevail? “Without discipline, without arms, without food, beggared by the law, starved by the law, demoralized by the law, opposed to the might of England they would have the weakness of a vapor,” he said in a speech in Dublin in early 1848. “Be bold, but wise. Be brave, but sober . . . watch, wait and leave the rest to God.”

  But just a few days later, his caution was gone. The curfews, emptying Irish neighborhoods of their own people at night, infuriated him. British artillery pieces rolled down city streets, and dragoons of snarling men passed by, leering at the women, insulting the men. “When I see all this my heart sinks under a weight of bitter thoughts,” Meagher wrote Smith O’Brien in January of 1848. “I am almost driven to the conclusion that it would be better to risk all, to make a desperate effort, and fix at once the fate of Ireland.”

  A few weeks later, deep into the Irish winter, the tug of insurrection pulled him further. A revolt in Sicily, an uprising against Bourbon royal rule, boosted the hopes of Young Ireland. A handful of pamphleteers had inspired Sicilians of all ranks to take over the streets of Palermo. The news from France was even more breathtaking: firing nary a shot, citizens forced King Louis Philippe to abdicate and flee in disguise. From the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, the birth of a new French republic was announced—with a poet, Alphonse de Lamartine, among the leaders. A poet! In Vienna, a populist blow at the heart of the Austrian Empire drove a despotic leader out of the country. In a flash, the impossible seemed within reach.

  In Dublin, an immense crowd squeezed into the Music Hall on March 15, 1848, ready to accept a baton of revolution from the Continent to Ireland. Smith O’Brien gave a speech of pragmatism: all of the island must be engaged in the struggle, starving and well fed, Catholic and Protestant, landowner and tenant. They would attempt to unite with the O’Connell faction, and across the water, with like-minded friends in England. Meagher followed with his usual flair, and an unusual dose of militancy. “If the government of Ireland insists upon being a government of dragoons and bombardiers, of detectives and light infantry—then up with the barricades, and invoke the God of battles!” he said, to a roar of applause. “Should we fail, the country should be no worse than it is now. The sword of famine is less sparing than the bayonet of the soldier.”

  The Castle feared that an uprising in Dublin could happen any day—“a rebellion of slaves,” in Clarendon’s words, that might wash over the island. He kept abreast of the strategy, t
he specific plans, the strengths and weaknesses of the leaders. What he knew came from a talented “Mr. B.” This was John Donnellan Balfe, Meagher’s fellow Clongowes graduate. Not long after Balfe had dedicated himself to Young Ireland and the personal protection of Thomas Meagher, he offered his services to the Castle—a well-placed informant. “I am now at the disposal of Your Excellency, should it be deemed serviceable to the causes of peace and order to obtain exact information on the procedures of the War Bodies,” he wrote the Lord Lieutenant in March of 1848. When his movements attracted the suspicion of those he would betray, he was grilled by Mitchel and Duffy. Balfe explained it all away to their satisfaction. As proof, he continued to write incendiary articles of his own. Once hired by the Castle, Balfe delivered—times, places, names, dates, conversations—and was well paid for it. The English were building a case from the inside. “Balfe is a treasure,” Clarendon wrote his superiors in London, “and through him I hope to defeat much that is intended.”

  Clarendon dispatched troops to the hospitals, to the General Post Office, to the Bank of Ireland, to Trinity College, to line the Liffey’s docks, to squat in Merrion Square and St. Stephen’s Green. Dublin was fully occupied and under heavy guard. The Royal Navy redirected vessels from the Portuguese coast to Ireland. The big gunships steamed north, toward the ports. The armored brawn of the British Empire was brought to bear against a few unarmed essayists, orators and poets, not a seasoned soldier among them.

  “Ireland is a starved rat that crosses the path of an elephant,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish philosopher. “What is the elephant to do? Squelch it, by Heaven! Squelch it!”

  Less than a week after the Music Hall event, the squelching began. Meagher and Smith O’Brien were arrested and jailed for their speeches. Mitchel was locked up at the same time. His offense was the prose he’d been rushing into his new journal. All three were soon out on bail. Meagher never felt more alive.

  “The language of sedition,” he told a cheering crowd, “is the language of freedom.”

  Just days after his release, Meagher was off to Paris with a small delegation, including Smith O’Brien. He stopped briefly in London for dinner with his father, a member of the House of Commons. Once again the elder Meagher tried to persuade his son to give it up. “He warned me,” Meagher recalled, “about trusting the fortunes of our cause” to luck and desperation. It was too late. Meagher’s ideas had taken flight, and he was aloft with them. He had to see this through.

  In Paris, strolling along the Seine, seeing the great public spaces of the City of Light bedecked in a tricolor of inspiration, Meagher’s step was quick. At night, the Young Irelanders walked the gaslit length of the Champs-Élysées, ducked into clubs, into theaters, pressed influential Parisians about the logistics of throwing off an oppressor. One night Meagher tried to strike up a conversation with a beggar who’d been foraging for fish bones in the garbage outside a restaurant. The man growled at them with a profane slap at the English.

  “We are not Anglais. We are Irelandais.”

  “Irelandais?” the pauper said. “Tous ivrognes.” All drunks.

  The delegation from Dublin aimed high: a recognition by the new French government of the legitimate grievances of Ireland—and, in the event of armed revolt, support. They poured their hope into Lamartine, for surely a man who roused his countrymen in verse was a kindred soul. They waited in bistros and cafés, day after day, for an appointment. At last: an audience with Lamartine, the acting foreign minister. But the Paris poet was dismissive and noncommittal. Good luck, gentlemen. What he didn’t say was that England had warned the fragile new French government not to interfere with the affairs of Great Britain.

  Back home, the Confederation clubs marched in formation into the Music Hall, looking for the first time like an organized force, one that might be converted into a corps of fighters. As the restless settled into their seats, a woman dressed in white walked slowly down the aisle. All eyes turned to the poet Jane Elgee, towering over Duffy, her editor and escort. In a nest of Ireland’s budding rebels now stood “a tall, stately and most beautiful lady with exquisitely chiseled features, dark eyes and hair,” wrote one witness, Michael Cavanagh. Her poetry, signed as always in the hand of Speranza, had shown a rough edge of late, born of the great loss afflicting Ireland. Lines from “The Famine Year” called out English genocide:

  But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses,

  From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses,

  For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.

  A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand,

  And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

  When she sat, a chant rattled the walls of the great hall.

  “Speranza! Speranza!”

  She rose and acknowledged the crowd, tried to sit, but again they took it up.

  “Speranza! Speranza! Speranza!”

  On it went, “a soul-thrilling scene,” Cavanagh recalled, that was quieted only when Duffy forced the meeting to business. At the end of the session, Young Ireland was ready to take on the Empire. The time had arrived, Jane sensed—there was no turning back. “I believe insurrection is certain,” she wrote a friend in Scotland. “Truly, death is certain, either by the bayonet or on the scaffold.”

  Despite the rejection by the French, the lift of a Paris spring proved lasting in one respect. Meagher conceived an idea for a flag: one third green, one third orange, as a nod to the Protestant north, and a unifying white in the center. He presented it at a gathering in Dublin. On stage was a harpist—the oldest of political prisoners in Ireland—dressed in the musician’s costume that had been outlawed by the Penal Laws. The silken flag of three colors was unveiled. “I present it to my native land,” said Meagher. “And I trust that the old country will not refuse this symbol of new life from one of her youngest children.” A few days later, the banner flew over Waterford, and in time became the national flag of Ireland. The internal dithering was over; he felt invincible now. “He would have gone to battle for Ireland more joyfully than to a feast,” Duffy noted with some amusement. In perpetual motion, Meagher was at his best.

  The Crown forced a quick trial on the Young Ireland leaders. Ten thousand people lined the streets leading up to the law courts. Meagher was thrilled. He poked his head from a carriage taking him to an uncertain fate in a hissing rain, waved and exulted with the men and women of Dublin. The jury was packed, as usual, with Protestants and loyalists, but a lone dissident had made it onto Meagher’s panel; it was enough to prevent a verdict. “We are eleven to one, my lord, and that one is a Roman Catholic!” a juror shouted out to the court as Meagher was released. A Quaker and a Catholic provided the margin of liberty for Smith O’Brien.

  Now the Castle’s plan to sweep away Young Ireland by trial would have to change. At the prime minister’s urging, Parliament rushed through a much harsher, much broader law: the Treason Felony Act, essentially making it a crime to be an Irish nationalist. Any slight against the Crown or Her Majesty’s government in Ireland would be considered grounds for a hard felony. This offense carried the penalty of “transportation”—the inventive British term for shipping someone out of the country to one of the Empire’s distant colonies, for labor or imprisonment. In fact, it was a vanishing.

  The first victim of the new law was John Mitchel. He was arrested on May 13, 1848, dressed in criminal gray and locked deep in Dublin’s Newgate Prison. The dungeon was filled with emaciated Irish who had stolen a loaf of bread or a meat pie—crimes that now warranted transportation. Mitchel was tried a week after he was plucked from his home. This time the Castle took no chances. Of 3,000 Catholics eligible for his jury, not a single one was chosen. It took less than two hours to reach a verdict, followed immediately by the sentence:

  “Jailer, put forward John Mitchel.” He moved toward a bewigged and petticoated judge, his stare as level as a plumb line, the heav
y clank of metal shackles on the floor.

  “The sentence of the court is that you be transported beyond the seas for the term of fourteen years.”

  Meagher was dazed by the suddenness of it all. Ten days earlier, Mitchel had been a journalist with a cause; now he was headed for banishment in the West Indies. Throughout his life—at home with his father, at Stonyhurst, in courts where he studied when he first moved to Dublin—Meagher had been taught that the English, for all their faults, revered the rule of law. What he witnessed in 1848 was a farce, a system of “subsidized perjurers and armed butchers,” as he called it. He rushed to the front of the gallery, shouting while reaching to grasp the hand of his departing friend. Police officers seized him. Blows were exchanged. Meagher was dragged outside, blood on his waistcoat.