The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  “Here’s hoping that Mr. Meagher is in good health, and won’t come to any trouble, for I know your family.”

  “How’s that? Were you ever in Waterford?”

  “Yes, sir . . . I seen your father and the rest of the family, at your grandfather’s funeral, and a splendid funeral it was. It covered the length of the quay.”

  They waited out the daylight inside the house, getting back on the road at night. Exhausted. A gray dawn. Midmorning, into Carrick, and sweet mother of Jesus, what’s this? “A torrent of human beings, rushing through lanes and narrow streets, surging and boiling . . . with sounds of wrath, vengeance and defiance.” Again, women with hugs and kisses, and men with slaps on the back, here to hail the liberators. Banners and music, but mostly huzzahs, cheers for the boys of Young Ireland. The bony hands, waves of voices, hair tousled and disordered. The crowd’s purpose was inchoate, like the revolution itself—a mist of hope here and there, with no real foundation. For country towns like Carrick, the uprising was all of the stomach; maybe some morsels of food would come from these witty lads. For the leadership, the uprising was all of the heart: language and history against muskets, cannons and warships. An iron will, no matter how lyrically shaped, they had to know, never beats an iron fist.

  Smith O’Brien had made his way to Ballingarry, County Tipperary, where he took up with a small force, some of them armed. He was no soldier. He was trained in philosophy and speech, politics and law. But the oldest, most experienced member of the rebel leadership forced himself to be a general on this first and last day of the Young Ireland revolution, July 29. His band spotted a hostile group of police and followed them to a house with a large cabbage patch out back, home of the Widow McCormack and her five children. The police took the family hostage and went inside, barricading the windows with furniture and mattresses. Smith O’Brien ordered them to throw down their arms, release the widow and her children, and come out.

  “We shall not hurt a man of you,” said Smith O’Brien. “You are Irishmen.” In response, the police opened fire. One of Smith O’Brien’s men, Thomas Walsh, was shot dead, dropping at Smith O’Brien’s feet. Another, Patrick Kavanagh, was gravely wounded. He fell to the ground, blood spurting from his thigh over the cabbages. The children shrieked. Police reinforcements, more than a hundred, soon arrived. Smith O’Brien and his men scattered. He was ushered out of Ballingarry at night.

  A few days later, though dressed in a hooded cloak, he was recognized at the railway station in Thurles. Arrested without a scuffle, he was turned over to a British general in charge of the occupying force of southern Ireland. The officer wanted to make sure he had his man. The informant John Balfe was brought just outside the cell, shielded from view. Balfe pointed to Smith O’Brien and identified him as the leader of the Young Ireland rebellion. The prisoner had no idea he was being betrayed.

  “Ballingarry killed us all,” said Jane Elgee after the debacle of Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch. “I have never laughed joyously since.”

  For more than a week, Meagher slept in haylofts and roadside ditches, an invisible man by day, a phantom on the run at night. The time he spent in midsummer fields gave him a close view of yet another collapse of Ireland’s food, for the blight had reappeared. The year before, potatoes had come up clean and remained so to the harvest. But the planting had been small, producing not nearly enough food to curb the Great Hunger. This year, more seed potatoes were put in the ground, and with every spade of earth turned to cover a future meal went a dollop of hope. But here it was again, acres rolling away beyond rock fence lines to other acres, in shades of hideous black—“from sea to sea one mass of unvaried rottenness and decay,” said a man who was on the run with Meagher.

  A fellow rebel, Terence MacManus, went looking for Meagher, searching throughout the south for him. A prosperous Irish wool broker from Liverpool, MacManus was drawn to the spirit of 1848, giving up his business for revolution. He had been with Smith O’Brien at Widow McCormack’s. But with a bounty on his own head, and unable to find Meagher, he decided to make a run for America. He was able to board a ship lying at anchor in Cork. Just before it sailed, the police found him. They dragged him off to jail, a state prisoner.

  In a hideout provided by a priest, Meagher was told to try the MacManus option, to leave the shores of his homeland. The cleric had it all arranged—ship, travel logistics, connections in New York. Meagher never gave it a thought. It would be unfair, he explained, to run away while his brother rebels faced a vengeful Crown. The priest tried another route, negotiating with the Lord Lieutenant. What came back from Clarendon was an offer: Meagher’s life would be spared if he pled guilty to crimes against England. He rejected it immediately. But the British press, which had already made a laughingstock of Smith O’Brien’s stand at the cabbage patch, printed a lie floated by the Castle—that Meagher had cut a deal to leave the country. Meagher was infuriated by this slap at his honor. He sent a letter to the Evening Mail in Dublin, demanding a correction. “My character is now more dear to me than my life,” he wrote. It is “all that now remains to me.”

  In hiding, in desperation, the outlaw and his confederates hatched one final plan. They schemed of taking over the Rock of Cashel, the great, chiseled stone stronghold that rises out of the Tipperary Plain. The kings of Munster had been seated there starting in the fifth century. One of the exalted shrines of Ireland, the rock was a religious center until a siege by English forces resulted in a massacre of nearly 1,000 in 1647. The bodies were stacked five deep in the churchyard. Try to imagine, Meagher said, the new Irish tricolor flying over the highest turret of that ancient and nearly abandoned castle. They took off at once, three men on foot at night. Passing the police barracks outside the village of Holycross on August 12, a sergeant thought he recognized Meagher in the darkness.

  “Fine night, gentlemen,” said the officer. It was them. He made a signal, and six officers grabbed the rebels. Meagher’s pants were ripped and filthy. He was wearing a straw hat, like that of a peasant. For the arrest, the sergeant was rewarded with £100—almost a year’s pay. Bound in chains, Meagher was taken by train to Dublin, thrown into a cell in darkest Kilmainham. A few days later came the indictment: the charge for a quartet of Young Ireland leaders was high treason—“to have levied war on our Sovereign Lady the Queen in her realm.” It carried a penalty of death. When news of the arrests arrived with the mail in the West Indies, John Mitchel predicted a grim outcome. “It is possible these four worthy men will be hanged.”

  When it opened in 1796, Kilmainham Gaol was supposed to be a model prison—airy, perched atop a hill, large enough that prisoners were not just tossed into a heap, but given separate quarters. It soon became a byword for hell. Debtors were locked away and forgotten. In the famine years, the jail was a warehouse of the hungry, their crimes dominating the ledgers—“attacking a bread cart,” “stealing a goose,” “being in possession of stolen butter.” And the design was significantly flawed in one respect: the impenetrable fortress was made of limestone blocks, which not only held the moisture from Dublin’s porous skies, but emitted it as well. The walls of Kilmainham wept.

  This concentration of petty criminals, not far from the Castle, was also a favorite lockup for prisoners of conscience. Robert Emmet had been chained inside the jail before being hanged and beheaded, his body torn into four parts and dumped in the streets. Emmet’s background—a Protestant from a wealthy family, a student at Trinity—could not spare his life for leading an uprising in 1803. Like Thomas Meagher, Emmet had been the darling of Dublin, an orator with flair and flash. Emmet’s fate now looked to be Meagher’s—his crime called for the guilty to endure the ritualized barbarism that had been the English penalty for high treason since 1351. Whether it had a deterrent effect was beside the point. It killed traitors. The guards at Kilmainham may have reminded Meagher that, following the butchery of the beloved Emmet, no one would claim his body parts.

  For a month, the Young Ireland Four—Me
agher, Smith O’Brien, MacManus and a heavy-drinking law clerk named Patrick O’Dono- ghue—marked the days in Kilmainham. O’Donoghue, with his rough-whiskered face and mournful eyes, had been thrown in with the leaders of the uprising because he’d been a close associate of Smith O’Brien’s in the days leading up to the cabbage patch debacle. At summer’s end, the prison filled with people who preferred the loss of freedom over death by starvation. Each cell had a tiny barred window that had been cut into the thick flank of the limestone walls. Over the course of a day, you could follow the sun’s direction by how a square of light moved across the cold floor and walls.

  Meagher the elder came to commiserate with his son. He was working his connections, scheming of some way for the boy to plead guilty to a lesser charge. Thomas would have no part of it. He welcomed the clothes his father brought him, the blankets and good food. (A typical day’s ration at Kilmainham called for milk and stirabout in the morning, bread in the evening.) He had plenty of regret—over the timing of the revolt, the failure to secure support from Catholic priests, the poor organization of the clubs, the foolish belief that starving people might put up a fight against the British Empire. Worst of all: two years of agitation never came to a climax—there was no showdown, nothing to rouse the Irish on three continents. “We were routed without a struggle,” Meagher said. “A humiliating fiasco.” But he had no remorse for his actions.

  In mid-September, the prisoners were taken by train from Dublin to Thurles, and then by coach to the town of Clonmel, in south Tipperary. The authorities wanted the trial to be held somewhere out of the way, far from the crowded discontent of Dublin. Smith O’Brien went first, facing a jury of select Protestant loyalists. The trial lasted nine days. It took barely nine minutes to reach a verdict. A member of Parliament for seventeen years, a father of six, heir to a castle and descendant of a family of Irish kings, William Smith O’Brien was found guilty and faced the death penalty. “I have done only that which, in my opinion, it was the duty of every Irishman to have done,” he said. MacManus the wool broker and O’Donoghue the disheveled law clerk followed with the same result.

  Meagher, the youngest of the four, was the last to be tried; the case against him was the weakest. He had thrown not a stone, pulled not a trigger, ignited not a fire. He had not been at Ballingarry, had never erected a barricade. Meagher wore a black frock, black silk stockings and a light-colored waistcoat to the proceedings. He had many admirers in the gallery, women in the majority, slipping him papers to autograph and a stream of notes. Among them was Jane Elgee, having retired her nom de guerre, Speranza, for now. The long-limbed poetess dressed in her usual low-cut dress and short sleeves of lace, a ribbon in her hair.

  At night, the prisoners played backgammon, drank whiskey that had been smuggled in, and recited poems about patriots and love of the land. Most evenings, they would assemble in a common room on the second floor of the jail before retiring to individual cells. They were all doomed; all but one of them knew it formally, and yet the mood was light, following Meagher’s cue. He was the prankster, as he’d been at Stonyhurst. Smith O’Brien credited Meagher with keeping his spirits up, telling racy stories into the late hours. And he led them in song with his clarinet, the one he’d used in his first insubordinate act at school in Lancashire. The guards couldn’t help but like him, and looked the other way when favors came to the cell. One of those favors, as insinuated by a cryptic aside, was Jane, who apparently contributed more than her poetry to the cause of Young Ireland. “He was brought to see me at his particular desire,” she wrote to a friend, without elaboration.

  On Saturday evening, eight days into his trial, Meagher was alone in a cell, awaiting a verdict. In case anyone doubted the outcome, a scaffold was under construction outside; guards could be seen checking the “drop.” Meagher was prepared to die. He saw a priest. He wrote a storm of letters, telling friends old and new that he loved them. Late that Saturday, a message arrived. “The jury has disagreed!” A cheer rattled the stone walls of the jail. But then, ten minutes later, a second message: “The report was false. He is convicted.” The prisoner was led back to join the others. He would be sentenced the following Monday. Instead of a mournful face, Meagher greeted his fellow traitors with a flash of a smile, eyes lit, a clap of his hands.

  “Here I am, boys! Here I am and found guilty! And glad, too, that they did convict me, for if I had been acquitted, the people might say I had not done my duty. I am guilty and condemned for the old country . . . Come in, come in! I’m starved. Let us have one hour’s fun.” One of the men could not stop crying. Another held Meagher in a tight hug, refusing to let him go.

  On Monday, October 23, 1848, Meagher dressed again in his black suit and walked under armed escort into court. Just before sentence was passed, he was given a chance to offer a few words why he should not be executed. He rose from the dock, silent for a long moment, taking in the packed courtroom, making eye contact with all.

  “My lords, you may deem this language unbecoming in me, and perhaps it may seal my fate. But I am here to speak the truth whatever it may cost. I am here to regret nothing I have ever done, to retract nothing I have already said. I am here to crave with no lying lip the life I consecrate to the liberty of my country . . . No, I do not despair of my poor old country, her peace, her liberty, her glory. For that country I can do no more than bid her hope. To lift this island up, to make her a benefactor to humanity instead of being the meanest beggar in the world, to restore her to her native powers and her ancient constitution—this has been my ambition, and this ambition has been my crime. Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails the penalty of death, but the history of Ireland explains this crime, and justifies it. Judged by that history, I am no criminal.”

  If the presiding judges were moved, they showed no indication of it. The applause from everyone else was deafening, as at the close of a great play, Meagher in the starring role of the drama he’d always dreamed of. The judges banged their gavels and ordered bailiffs to bring the room to order. A lone member of the bewigged panel then pronounced his sentence. Mercy was expected, per the jury’s recommendation for a man so young.

  “You, Thomas Francis Meagher, are to be taken hence to the place from whence you came, and be thence drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, and there hanged by the neck until you are dead and that afterwards your head shall be severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters, to be disposed of as Her Majesty sees fit.”

  In Dublin, Charles Duffy was the last of the Young Ireland leaders whom the authorities tried to put away. He had faced several earlier trials, but managed to elude a Crown-ordered outcome. They had him dead to rights this time. Even though he wasn’t physically present, he was editor of the Nation when the journal printed “Jacta Alea Est.” He had languished in jail for months without trial, the blunt effect of the suspension of habeas corpus. Maybe he would sit an entire year. There was no hurry on the part of England. Jane Elgee was torn: she knew her close friend might be banished from Ireland, forced to sweat away the days in the penal colony of Australia for something she had written. Overwhelmed by guilt, she went to the prosecutor’s office and confessed. The piece in the Nation, from the title to the overt call for insurrection, was hers.

  This put the Crown in a difficult position. Beautiful, famous, well-spoken Speranza, daughter of a fine Protestant and monarch-loving family, was the kind of martyr that might prompt the Irish to take a second look at rebellion. A deal was cut: no prosecution if Jane Elgee promised to give up writing political poetry. She agreed. “I shall never write sedition again,” she told a friend in a letter. “The responsibility is more awful than I imagined or thought of.” With “Jacta Alea Est” removed from Duffy’s indictment, no verdict could be reached. But he was not given his freedom. A retrial was ordered—the fifth.

  At the same time, the global Irish community, its ranks swelled by famine exiles, called on England to spare the lives of the political pris
oners in Clonmel. From the U.S. Congress, from newspapers in New York, Sydney, Toronto and even London, the Crown was castigated for sentencing these young men to death. How dare England condemn the savagery of other nations when it was throwing body parts of its brightest Irish subjects into the streets. Meagher seemed resigned to death, but he would not go quietly. He had a string of visitors, friends, members of the press. He dashed off more letters, decorated his cell and wrote poetry standing up. One, titled “Prison Thoughts,” was composed just days after his death sentence had been pronounced.

  I love, I love these grey old walls!

  Although a chilling shadow falls

  Along the iron-gated halls

  And in the silent, narrow cells,

  Brooding darkly, ever dwells.

  His celebrity grew with every day that brought him closer to the knotted end of a rope. Words from his speech in the courtroom at Clonmel were framed and hung in Boston slums and Liverpool docks and Australian farm huts. His boyhood friend Patrick Smyth, soon to depart for America, was surprised to find Meagher so upbeat. “He was never more exuberant than when he lay hopeless of life, awaiting the final strokes of destiny and death,” he wrote. When a reporter from a Dublin newspaper arrived to do a profile of the Young Tribune in his last days, he discovered a witty jailhouse host. “Imagine a little room, about the size of an ordinary pantry, lighted from the top by a large skylight, with bare whitewashed walls, neither fireplace nor stove, and a cold stone floor,” the journalist wrote. “These were the materials Meagher had to work on, and this dreary spot, which would have struck a less brave heart with helpless despair, he had with his own hands converted into a genuine expression of the poetry which formed the basis of his character and genius.” The writer noted piles of letters, bookshelves stocked with all manner of tracts, bright rugs, paintings on the wall, scraps of half-written verse on a small desk. Meagher left the visitor in stitches. The mirth, at times, may have been forced. Alone, in his darker moments, Meagher gave away his earthly possessions and tidied up his affairs.