The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  Later than night, plotting with Smith O’Brien and Duffy, Meagher was beside himself, the eloquence replaced by a sputtering rage. They had to rescue Mitchel, he insisted. A call to the people was needed. Storm the prison.

  Duffy feared the cost. “There was not a week’s supply of food in Dublin,” he said, “and all the food in the island, except what was growing in the soil, was in warehouses where the English army could reduce it to ashes in four hours.” Would Britain starve a nation to death as a punitive move? It already had, Duffy argued.

  Thanks to the industrious spy Balfe, the Castle was one step ahead of the Young Irelanders. Just hours after being sentenced, Mitchel was frog-marched away under heavy guard, through a long tunnel from the prison to a dock and a warship waiting in the harbor. Before dusk, a mere two weeks after his arrest, he was on his way across the Atlantic. From his cell in steerage, he started “Jail Journal,” a diary:

  “May 27, 1848—On this day, about four o’clock in the afternoon, I, John Mitchel was kidnapped and carried off from Dublin, in chains, as a convicted ‘Felon.’”

  At home in Waterford, on Tuesday, July 11, Meagher walked the length of the main room in the big family house. His father sat in a stuffed chair, trying to reason with him. Deep, wheezing sighs. A furrowed brow. Fear, and a hint of disgust. One year into his term as a member of Parliament, the elder Meagher was serving a government that was at war with his son. Out the window, the Suir in its summer sloth glided by, blue water to the sea. Smith O’Brien was in Limerick, trying to time an uprising by the Confederation clubs. Assorted members scrambled around the island on the same mission. One was sent to America, for guns and money. Another was assigned the task of winning over the Catholic Church; no revolution could succeed without parish priests blessing the barricades. Mitchel was in his prison cot on a ship anchored off Bermuda, struggling with the heat and his asthma. An antique clock ticked in the Meagher home. His father started in again, very deliberate, the words slow. You know the consequences will be dire, son. The boy’s fate was not, as Mitchel had said just before his goodbye, in the hands of Ireland. He could call it off. Britain did not need another Irish martyr. Stop this madness now. The patriarch was a man of sizable influence, a loyal subject of the queen. And certainly, the good life was tempting. A few days earlier, friends had asked Thomas to dinner on St. John’s Hill in Waterford, in a home as anchored and ivy-covered as he was unmoored and peripatetic. A pleading followed.

  “There’s no use. You’ll fail. You’ll lose everything.”

  “I must stand my ground,” said Meagher.

  “Oh, nonsense. Quit it and come with us.”

  “Where to?”

  “To Italy, to Greece, to Egypt.”

  Meagher thought about Rome in the fall, as Ireland turned sodden and cold. He thought of the Nile, the pyramids, carefree days with “a party of honest, cheerful, spirited fellows, full of life, intelligence and the best good nature, to ramble from the Suir to the Mediterranean.” He was still a member in good standing at the Waterford Club. He liked the whiskey and wit, a welcome place for him by the fire at night, even after a speech in which he’d excoriated the Tories who held sway in that den. There, he was a Meagher from Waterford, all politics checked at the umbrella stand. But enough daydreaming. Ireland was in ruins. And now, a bang at the door.

  “Police!”

  At the porch stood Captain Gunn and Constable Hughes, both acquaintances of the family.

  “Sir. We have a warrant for the arrest of your son.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Seditious language. A speech at Rathkeale.”

  A neighbor spotted the authorities and dashed down the street, pounding on doors, sounding the alarm. Church bells rang, alerting the rebels of Waterford in the clubs Meagher had helped organize. A crowd quickly formed, blocking the streets. Meagher went to the window and pleaded with the mob to disperse, else one of his friends could be shot. He would work it out with the police in private. He made his case for ten minutes, to no avail. In his parlor, he was soon joined by the leading citizens of Waterford. Outside, the crowd filled the mall that met the quay, 20,000 or more people—most of the town. For a second time he went to the window, begged people to peacefully retire. Now soldiers appeared, an entire unit of the 4th Light Dragoons and three companies of the 7th Fusiliers, with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, all advancing on the Meagher household.

  Word came of Irish clubs in neighboring communities rushing with knives and pikes to his defense. At 6:15 p.m., young Meagher stepped outside, accompanied by the chief of police and two constables. With a nod of his head, he could spark a war. But he feared the streets of his hometown would be a river a blood, his father’s house burned to the ground. Do nothing rash, he pleaded with the crowd. They pressed in as the guards escorted him to a carriage. They pumped his hand, tousled his hair, patted his back, kissed him. The soldiers drew their swords as Meagher was pushed into the transport. Two lines of troops on either side. Slowly the carriage moved toward the bridge over the Suir, and with it moved the crowd. Women leaned from open windows in second stories along the quay, waving handkerchiefs. Young men pushed past the troops, pressed up against the carriage windows.

  “For God’s sake, sir—give us the word. Give us the word!”

  Here was the revolution, if only he would say yes. His supporters cut the reins from the horses, leaving the carriage dead on the road. A priest jumped up on the driver’s seat, pleading for calm. By 7 p.m., animals and buggy were reunited and started to move again. A volley of stones came from the crowd. One hit Captain Gunn in the eye. He raised his pistol, held it above the swarm of Waterford citizens. At the bridge, the crowd had formed a human barrier. Thomas Meagher would not be taken from Waterford. Fretting, looking for a peaceful way out, the prisoner saw no choice. His allies were just townspeople with stones. The British forces could mow them down in a minute’s time. Three of the Empire’s warships lurked in the river, the Dragon, the Merlin and the Medusa. Waterford might be blown to rubble before midnight. The faces of the mob—tight, clenched—were familiar, his neighbors, his family, his lifelong friends. Meagher poked his head out of the carriage to speak again. He vowed to return, soon, when the time was right. After this pleading, the crowd moved aside to allow the carriage to cross the river. On the other side was an obstruction of heavy timbers. As the soldiers removed this latest obstacle, they were pelted with rocks. Then, free of Waterford at last, the police escort made a gallop to a terminal for the mail train, seventeen miles away. Meagher was conveyed under guard on the overnight transport. He arrived in Dublin at 3:15 a.m. He had not slept. In his jail cell, replaying the past twelve hours, he was troubled by a persistent thought: had Ireland missed its moment?

  As promised, Meagher returned. He paid an outrageous sum for bail and was released. His restraint and good conduct in Waterford had persuaded a judge to unshackle him, pending a hasty trial. Then the Crown could put him away for good. At once, he rushed south, to match strides with the other Young Ireland leaders. They called for a mass meeting at a sacred site—the sentinel of Slievenamon, known in Gaelic mythology as the Mountain of the Women. But only men were summoned to this summit; on Sunday, July 16, 50,000 answered the call. Wearing a green cap with a gold band, Meagher trudged up the mountain under a blistering summer sun. Near the top, at 2,300 feet above sea level, he looked out at the rumpled, rock-fenced spread of three counties, Tipperary, Waterford and Kilkenny, staring down at slight, gaunt-faced men ready for battle, squinting in the bright light. Just after 2 p.m., Meagher turned to address his countrymen, to speak and commit an act of legal treason before 50,000 witnesses. He was an accidental rebel, Meagher explained. But with the Great Hunger, he saw with perfect clarity the worst of all English crimes. That tragedy had left him with no choice. As a final incentive, two months earlier, Charles Trevelyan had declared the famine over, despite all evidence to the contrary. He’d seen early reports of peasant fields growing free of blight
, and took the opportunity to proclaim victory and bring what passed for British relief efforts to a close once and for all. For his work during the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan had been knighted.

  “The potato was smitten, but your fields waved with golden grain,” Meagher shouted down from Mount Slievenamon. “It was not for you. To your lips it was forbidden fruit. The ships came and bore it away, and when the price rose it came back, but not for the victim whose lips grew pale, and quivered and opened no more.” Many in the crowd bowed their heads, a tribute to the lost, and murmured a prayer. “The fact is plain that this land, which is yours by nature, and by God’s gift, is not yours by the law of the land. There are bayonets between the people and their rightful food.” He brought up John Mitchel, more than 3,000 miles away in the hold of a ship. He named others who were in jail, awaiting Mitchel’s fate.

  “Will you permit the country to be deprived of these men?”

  “Never!”

  “I stand here on the lofty summit of a country which, if we do not win for ourselves, we must win for those who come after us.” The hungry masses were primed to fight. They awaited a signal from the young leaders.

  By sunset, Meagher was back at his father’s house in Waterford. He stayed for four days, barely sleeping, couriers bringing him news of the others. Any knock on the door could be a soldier with orders to whisk him away. Father and son knew an end was approaching; the reasoned pleas from the elder Meagher were over. The plan now was to start the revolution in Kilkenny, the lovely medieval town built along a kink in the River Nore. It was chosen for its strategic position—inland, safe from the Royal Navy’s gunships. And think of the symbolic importance: a free Ireland rising from the very place where an enslaved Ireland had been designed with the Statutes of Kilkenny. A carriage arrived for Thomas. He bounded up to the drawing room, where his father sat with his aunt. He put on his tricolor sash, buckled on a sword belt to hold a saber that had been in his family for a hundred years. He was free of worry, free of misery, imagining himself leading an army of Irish into Dublin to take the Castle, to sweep the English away forever. “I was full of liveliness and hope at that moment, and welcomed the struggle with a laughing heart,” he wrote. “That evening, July the 20th, 1848, I saw my home for the last time.”

  5

  * * *

  The Meanest Beggar in the World

  Underground now, traveling in the shadows beneath the murk of Munster skies, at night moving from cairn to cairn in countryside lit by spotty moonlight. When the rains came that week and the temperature dropped, he shivered and took shelter below rock overhangs. The fields were littered with abandoned scraps of the island’s struggles. Here a broken-topped round tower from the tenth century, there a moss-covered altar from the fourteenth, where a priest once celebrated an illegal outdoor Mass, with a tiny window through the rock pile as a lookout for authorities. It was refuge then for a spiritual outlaw, now for a political one. Meagher had no sooner left for Kilkenny than the British government dropped a legal bomb on the Irish: habeas corpus was suspended immediately, the country placed under martial law. Anyone could be arrested and held without cause, without hearing, without bail, even without being told what they were held for—indefinitely. As of July 22, 1848, the leading journalists, poets, barristers and orators of Young Ireland were criminals in the eyes of the Empire. Arrest warrants were issued for all. A price was put on Meagher’s head, a bigger one on Smith O’Brien’s.

  “Death itself could not have struck me more suddenly than this news,” said Meagher. He blamed himself for not seeing it coming. Of course England would suspend the rule of law. What in Ireland’s history made him believe otherwise? Optimism, as always, was the blind spot of youth. Still, he had to try to ignite something in Kilkenny. He reminded himself of the line of the late poet Thomas Davis: “We promised loud, and boasted high, / To break our country’s chains, or die.” The last word seemed the more likely outcome.

  “We are driven to it,” he said to Patrick J. Smyth, his friend since they were choirboys at Clongowes. “There is nothing for us now but to go out. We have not gone far enough to success, and yet, too far to retreat.”

  In Dublin, on his way home for dinner, Duffy was arrested yet again. The police put him in a carriage and rushed him off to prison. With the editor of the Nation in jail, Jane Elgee helped to put out the paper with two other women. In a fit of high outrage, she dashed off a piece calling for all of Ireland to take on the government without hesitation. “Jacta Alea Est,” she titled her charge, The Die Is Cast, though she had slightly mangled her Latin. It was unsigned, as protection—no Speranza this time.

  “England has done us one good service at least,” she wrote. “Her recent acts have taken away the last miserable pretext for passive submission . . . We appeal to the whole Irish Nation—is there any man amongst us who wishes to take one step further on the base path of suffering and slavery? Is there one man that thinks that Ireland has not been sufficiently insulted, that Ireland has not been sufficiently degraded in her honour and her rights, to justify her now in fiercely turning upon her oppressor?”

  To the Castle, this was the final slight they would take from these rhymesters and revolutionaries. A spy had alerted the authorities of the coming issue. Before it could be distributed, British troops stormed into the offices of the paper, seized all copies, grabbed the press, type and manuscripts, and carted it all off to the fortressed walls of official England in Dublin—the Castle. Jane Elgee was not apprehended; her role was unknown. But Duffy would soon be charged with treason felony for her essay “Jacta Alea Est.”

  Meagher and a friend, the Nation journalist John Blake Dillon, boarded a train in Dublin. Two women recognized them, giggling as they looked their way. At the next stop, the rebels got off at a small village. Meagher pulled his cap over his face, head down. The men passed police officers on the way to an old tree, where they took shelter from a summer squall. Still, the rain filtered through the canopy, soaking Meagher’s clothes and shoes. The great “liveliness” he’d felt barely a week before was gone. “I entertained no hope of success.” But his words of the past two years carried a responsibility; there was no escaping what he had helped to start. “Our entire career, short as it was, seemed to require from us a step no less daring and defiant than that which the government had taken.”

  They hired a coach, rode all night. At 5 a.m. they arrived at the Georgian mansion of Ballinkeele for a rendezvous with Smith O’Brien, protected there by a friend in the titled class. A light frost covered the large grounds. Meagher’s wet clothes were now stiff. They found Smith O’Brien in bed, the aristocratic sheen gone. Over coffee, the rebels considered three choices: to turn themselves in, to flee Ireland or to fight. With little discussion, they chose insurrection, hoping that outrage over the suspension of habeas corpus would fan a broad uprising.

  Off to Kilkenny. In town, some black humor: the Royal Agricultural Society was holding its annual cattle show. Amid the starving, several hundred of the fattest, healthiest beeves on the island were paraded down High Street by a cluster of pipe-smoking, plaid-vested noblemen. Perfect, Meagher remarked: they could start the revolution with enough meat to feed those manning the barricades, while holding hostage a half-dozen baronets, a couple of dukes and a marquis or two.

  At noon on Sunday, just outside of town, Meagher and Dillon went to Mass, greeted by an affable priest with unwelcome news: don’t look for many clerics on the front lines of a revolt. The killing of an archbishop in France a month earlier, during a violent outburst by the still-untamed remnants of that country’s revolution, had chilled the ardor for fighting the state. Nor was the condition of the congregants encouraging—they were weak, thin-limbed, dazed. “The truth,” said Meagher, was “cold and nakedness, hunger and disease, to the last extremity.” He saw no future Irish warriors in this chapel; they were the kneeling dead. It should have been obvious that a people mortally weakened by hunger could not be moved to anything but a pra
yer and an extended hand begging for crumbs. Famine was supposed to be the motivation for revolt. Instead, it was the undoing of it.

  A meeting with the mayor, a sympathizer and a confederate, brought more bad news. Of 1,700 club members in town, only one in four had weapons, such as they were—sharpened farm tools, scythes, pikes and pitchforks. The rebels decided to spread out to the nearby towns of Carrick, Callan and Cashel, where the men were said to be better prepared to fight, and then return to Kilkenny.

  In Callan, a market town 600 years old on a fertile plain, a reception awaited: a band, a bonfire on the main street, the houses bedecked in laurel boughs, green flags draped from windows. The pending arrival had been announced earlier. Hundreds of skinny young men rushed to greet Meagher and Dillon. Black-eyed girls, as Meagher remembered them, “bounded through the crowd, threw their arms around our necks and kissed us.” Cromwell had been through Callan in 1650, destroying much of the town and gutting its Norman castle. A force of hussars, having just marched into town that morning as news of Meagher’s pending arrival spread, stood by, carbines and swords at the ready. They were Irish hussars, to Meagher’s delight. He might have remembered Duffy’s line about similar soldiers in Dublin: “Their Irish hearts were not dead under the scarlet jacket.” Ever the fatalist, Meagher climbed up a step above the crowd and called for three cheers for the boys of the 8th Royal Irish Hussars. He was careful with his words to the people of Callan, nothing too specific, just keep up the spirit, lads, word will come, and again, how about another hand for those hussars.

  On to Carrick, a change of horses along the way, a full gallop. “What a hurry we were in to be shot,” said Meagher. A guesthouse took them in, with a dinner of hard-boiled eggs, salted butter, a cup of milk. When Meagher went outside in the dark, three policemen were lounging by a carriage. They’d been spotted. One of the officers approached him, tipping his hat.