The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  All plans were tentative, but Mitchel, because of his sickly condition, had been informed that he could bring his wife and three boys out to live with him. The prospect of living here, even with his loved ones, did not warm him; he detested the place more with each passing day. “The birds have a foreign tongue,” he said. “The very trees whispering to the wind whisper in accents unknown to me.” O’Doherty was not offered a similar conjugal privilege for his beloved Eva, but he asked every month. To improve his chances, he dispensed free medical care at a clinic in town.

  The exiles tossed log after log onto the fire, no one sleepy, laughter chasing away the chill, Meagher in his deep singing voice leading them in rounds of “The Bells of Shandon.” To a man, they never had a happier night in the penal colony. “So ends my first visit to Lake Sorell, and it has pleased me well at any rate to find that my friends are all unsubdued,” Mitchel wrote. “The game, I think, is not over yet.”

  When the island’s governor got wind of the convicts’ reunion, he was furious. Denison wanted the Irish to suffer—alone—in emotional pain, if not physical torment. His most effective weapon was depriving the exiles of each other’s company. Van Diemen’s Land was not supposed to be a holiday, never. Technically, he could do nothing to break up dinner at a common point in three districts; it was still within the bounds of the parole terms, so long as no one stepped over the line into another’s space. A silly game—it must be reported up the lines of colonial authority and amended by the Empire. But he did go after other Young Irelanders who’d been spotted out of their districts trying to visit Smith O’Brien. In swift punishment, Denison took away the limited freedom of three prisoners: the merchant MacManus, the hard-drinking and hard-on-his-luck clerk O’Donoghue and the medical student O’Doherty. As an extra measure of petty tyranny, he meted out his sentence on Christmas Eve: three months of strenuous labor during the peak of the Australian summer. O’Donoghue was in no shape to be cracking stones in hundred-degree heat. He had broken two ribs in a drunken brawl and could not inhale without wincing in pain.

  Meagher was shocked. He too had dashed out of his district on horseback in an attempt to visit Smith O’Brien, but had managed to slip back to Lake Sorell without being seen. Meagher considered giving up his parole, he told Smith O’Brien by letter, to join the others in chains rather than live by an agreement with “a government capable of acting in so coarse, so imperious and brutal a manner.” The Young Ireland leader advised Meagher to stay put; they needed people on the outside. A note from O’Doherty on the chain gang reinforced that view. He labored in a gray uniform, harassed by sexual predators, and was hungry all day from a diet of nothing but mutton broth. “I am treated as a common convict, obliged to sleep with every species of scoundrel, to work in a gang from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock in the evening—being all the while next to starved,” he wrote. He advised Meagher to do everything he could “to keep out of the hands of these men, as you would the devil himself.”

  The brutal sentence was all the more cutting for its timing. A few months earlier, Queen Victoria had granted the island province a degree of self-government. Property-owning male settlers in the penal colony would now be free to elect representatives to their own regional parliament. Imagine. On Van Diemen’s Land, a legislative council of twenty-four members could write their own laws, appoint their own judges, levy some taxes for roads and schools. Certainly, the political prisoners of Ireland were happy that the chokehold of England had been loosened in one of its territories. But they could not shake the magnitude of this irony. Here they were, sentenced to life under house arrest. For what? Fighting to gain in Ireland the very freedom that had now been granted on their island penitentiary. A paroled rapist, trailing sheep on a Tasmanian bluff, had more political rights than a law-abiding citizen of Erin. Once again the British Empire had demonstrated that there was no greater blind spot on its map of benevolence than the conquered land closest to home.

  Exercising the new liberty, several newspapers went on an aggressive campaign against Governor Denison for his retrograde attitude toward convicts and for defending the very concept of a penal colony. Why not end transportation altogether? On the Australian mainland, that idea was ascendant, with majority backing. Well, then, was Van Diemen’s Land forever doomed to hold the Empire’s human castoffs? This question would be at the heart of the upcoming elections. To counter the growing abolitionist sentiment, the governor hired a crafty polemicist to make his case—Balfe. The informant had done a considerable amount of ghostwriting in the months leading up to the uprising of 1848, sowing discord among the rebels under one pen name, trying to push Young Ireland’s leaders to violence under another. Now a ventriloquist for the Crown, Balfe had many voices. As “Dion,” his assumed name for the system, the spy wrote essays in support of Denison’s restrictive policies. His main argument was profit: the island needed the slave labor of convicts in order to prosper. Free men would mean costly wages for a land that relied on cheap exports of wool, mutton, timber and other goods. The principle of an unfettered free market, so revered in British policy that a million Irish were allowed to die of starvation, had no place in this colony.

  With his closeness to the governor, Balfe became more visible, moving about socially, throwing around the names of his connections in Westminster. But one day in Hobart his past caught up with him. Not long after Patrick O’Donoghue had finished his punitive stint on a work crew, he bumped into Balfe on the street. He was flabbergasted. What was Balfe, a free Irishman among his old condemned colleagues, doing in Van Diemen’s Land? The informant tried to explain and dissemble, but none of it added up.

  “Would you believe it? Balfe! John Donnellan Balfe, who represented himself as a Club member, as a Confederate,” O’Donoghue wrote. This jolt of news was contained in a letter to Meagher and later forwarded to Duffy in Dublin, who would help to untangle all the threads of his treachery. “Would you believe it—this devilish rascal—this big, bloated and besotted scoundrel.” O’Donoghue was beside himself, spittle in his words. “And make no mistake . . . he had taken a grant of land. And day after day in the company of government officials . . . A huge rogue and renegade—there he is! With his dingy spectacles, one of which is cracked. There he is!” Young Ireland had finally found its traitor. Balfe now had little choice but to cling to the Crown’s skirt. He needed the protection and the money. And for his latest service to England, he was given a plum government job to go with his sawmill business—he was named deputy comptroller of convicts, overseeing the men he’d betrayed.

  In the last months of 1850, the Hermit on the Lake was a clatter of joy. Yes, Meagher agonized over the troubles that had befallen his mates, and he eagerly awaited news of his tortured homeland—a distant signal to telegraph a way for his tomorrows. But now he was preoccupied: he couldn’t get enough of Catherine Bennett. For the first time since he’d been shipped to the penal colony, he seemed to be lifting the blanket of despair over his fate. The courtship was no casual affair. Meagher threw himself all in, writing notes in his best hand, singing to the governess in his most beatific tones, tossing off bits of verse as if the words were gold dust. The dazzle of the blue eyes, the turn of phrase, the dimpled smile—the full force of his physical charisma was unleashed on his Bennie. Meagher designed his days around her. He still went through the motions of farming, but his heart was not into turnips and carrots. By the late Tasmanian spring, his deadened soul and the somnambulism of the long walks in the woods were a thing of the past. Catherine had renewed “the proud and generous nature that was sinking, coldly and dismally, into a stupid and sensual stagnation,” he told one exile. “Glory! Glory! be to Heaven, I am myself again.”

  But his friends saw only disaster. For one, something more than his heart was throbbing. Meagher was full of lust in a land with very few acceptable single women. To his mates, it was understandable that a man in his prime could not bear “sensual stagnation.” Still, couldn’t he find someone mo
re fitting of his class? Mitchel, Smith O’Brien, Martin—all may have hated Britain for its persecution of Ireland, but they adopted an English view of one’s proper place. A man of wealth, a gentleman, a graduate of Stonyhurst, did not take up with a felon’s daughter. Meagher had arranged a few surreptitious introductions of the beauty of Ross to his fellow exiles. Smith O’Brien was impressed by her looks, and little else. “She is in person and manner very pleasing,” he wrote in his journal, “but in a worldly point of view the connection cannot be seen as advantageous to him.” Martin was more blunt. “God help the poor fellow!” he wrote a friend. “I fear—I fear!—one of the finest fellows that ever lived is in great danger of rushing headfirst and with eyes open to the very pit of destruction.” What did this country governess, this girl, know of history and literature, of politics and art? How could she ever hold up her end of a conversation with the man described as the greatest orator of his generation? As for Mitchel, he was “astonished,” he said, that his friend would try to live the rest of his days with someone lacking a hint of sophistication.

  But Meagher could not be stopped. Around Christmas, he proposed. He was deeply hurt that his friends thought he was marrying beneath his standing; he couldn’t convince them otherwise. “I know full well,” he wrote O’Doherty in the neighboring prison district, that “I shall not elevate myself by the connection on which I have passionately and proudly set my heart.” Still, for him, love trumped class. Couldn’t they see that? The trappings of position, material goods, family name—damn it all, he was a felon serving a life sentence in a faraway penal colony. “Let the world pursue its own course and seek enjoyment, wealth, grandeur through the glare of gold, and old family plate amid the emblazonery [sic] of crests and shields.” A date was set for Sunday, February 22, 1851. He circulated a note. “No gloves, no cards, no cake. Everything very quiet.”

  The simple ceremony took place at the home of Dr. Hall. Looking out at the guests, Meagher spotted someone with familiar eyes, much of his face covered in a ragged beard, barely recognizable—Terence MacManus. The wool broker from Liverpool, late to Young Ireland’s cause, was the only man from their circle to attend the wedding. His very appearance was a crime. He had been doing hard labor in a prison camp when word came that he was to be released from the chain gang—a reprieve made possible by a legal technicality. MacManus promptly announced that he would no longer abide by the overall terms of his sentence, and went into hiding. Police throughout Van Diemen’s Land were searching for him. MacManus wished the groom well. He said the island was no longer for him. He intended to escape, and had one small request of his friend: to take care of his dog, a greyhound named Brian. Yes, yes, of course—the dog would join Bennie and Thomas in exile at Lake Sorell. Meagher embraced him. They held a look, each wanting some of what the other had—a look that also meant farewell, see you in another world.

  New life. 1851. A farmer. A husband. Maybe soon, a father. The cottage at the lakeshore took on Bennie’s touches, warmer, softer. He sang for his wife instead of the habitués of the island’s gum trees. He skipped like a four-year-old, one visitor remarked. He worked his land with the convict Tom Egan, took Speranza out for long sails. No wind scared him. He tried to establish new records for the trip from the lake island to his cottage—getting down to thirteen minutes, and that through a nasty squall. The home of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Francis O’Meagher would never be a cell. He built shelves, added a second writing desk. Despite “the remoteness of my friends,” as Meagher told his unbending mate O’Doherty, he was happy. “With regards to Bennie—there she is, sitting up in an armchair, looking fresher and more beautiful than ever, in sparkling good spirits.” Meagher was dutiful, riding into Ross to get things for his bride, tending to her when she fell ill. She was sickly for a girl of nineteen, suffering from rheumatism, her joints swollen and painful, and often confined to bed.

  To outsiders, Meagher seemed the portrait of a contented country squire. In that sense, he was exactly what the Crown wanted—both gentleman and oblivion, without a hint of fight left in him. They’d neutered him. One of the greatest public speakers of his era now rarely even granted his dog an audience. “A sunburnt man in a sailor’s jacket stands in the stern, holding the tiller,” Mitchel said of one visit with his newly arrived wife, Jenny. “By his side, on a crimson cushion, sits a fair and graceful girl. That sunburnt fellow is Meagher—and the girl? Why, it’s Mrs. Meagher.”

  It had been three years since Jenny Mitchel had seen Meagher, and the antipodean air had done something for him—he “is looking handsomer than he ever did in Ireland.” Jenny found the young wife to be “one of the beauties of this country,” but like her husband, she didn’t approve. In background, in mind, in spirit, Catherine was ordinary. “It’s a pity on the whole, (between ourselves),” Jenny clucked in one letter back to Ireland. “I fear his father will be very wroth with him.” Her husband, brutal in his sarcasm, was prescient about the fate of the couple. “Why, it’s almost like living.”

  As it turned out, he knew Meagher all too well. The spell of newlywed rapture could not last. The man was born for struggle on a grand stage, Mitchel believed. Just as Meagher could never be content sipping spirits in the old boys’ club in Waterford, could never be a dandy of Dublin, he could not live a life of passive domesticity at Lake Sorell. Certainly, Meagher was trying to give up the Big Fight, to turn a page, even as he acknowledged how difficult it was. “I am compelled to a life of uselessness and can do little or nothing to realize the dream that gave light and music to my early years,” Meagher wrote a friend on the island. Without meaning or purpose, the days started to move slowly. Though he was master of a small house, it was a forced charade, mostly cosmetic. He was still in prison, his every move monitored, his every plan subject to second-guessing and approval by the island’s governor. He kept thinking about what the census of Ireland had revealed: the shredding of a nation, one in four gone by emigration or starvation. The former would never forget; the latter would never be forgotten. That burden of memory was never heavier.

  As the bliss dissipated, Meagher grew tired of his leash, tired of his routine, tired of reporting himself every week to the authorities in Ross, “there to take my bow before the magistrate of the police district,” tired of being on the wrong side of the small town’s gossip, tired of the laughable imitations of Britain latched to this far domain. “Van Diemen’s Land could never be my home—not so long as the English flag flies here,” Meagher wrote to Duffy. After barely half a year of married life, Meagher was ready to chuck his domestic existence and take some risks again. “How my heart beats and pants for a quick deliverance from this abominable captivity.”

  When he got word of Balfe’s treachery, he jumped at the chance for retaliation. The blather he had heard back in Dublin about their shared Clongowes connection, school and tradition, bound by Jesuit loyalty and all that. To think of the midnight meetings where Balfe had been shoulder to shoulder with the young men sketching a free Ireland. Meagher plotted his revenge. But the pen would have to come before the sword.

  Writing under the name of Virginius, from the poems of Thomas Macaulay, Meagher produced a series of missives in a local paper about Balfe’s betrayal of Ireland. He found a wide audience in the political ferment of the island’s first election. This man Balfe, this snitch for hire, had once stood with the rebels on Tara Hill—“when he was loudest in denouncing the government of which is he now the tool,” Meagher wrote. In town, the revelations prompted protests and calls for Balfe’s head. One man paraded around Hobart with a placard bearing Balfe’s name and the image of a dog. “If found,” it read, return “to his master, Sir William Denison.” Balfe denied the accusations and threatened to strike back. When asked by a newspaper about Balfe’s claim of innocence, Meagher sent a cryptic quote from a Virginius poem:

  Wherever you shed the honey, the buzzing flies will crowd.

  Wherever you fling the carrion, the raven’s croak is loud.

&nb
sp; As Virginius, Meagher also set his pen to flight on behalf of a self-governing Tasmania. It was high time, he argued, to put an end to the humiliation of this land stocked with condemned human beings. How could people expect to live as a civilized community when the broken souls of Britain were regularly offloaded in its harbors? As he had written while a schoolboy at Stonyhurst against slavery in the United States, he now mounted a vigorous takedown of state-sanctioned human bondage in Van Diemen’s Land. Coming from a convict, these words carried more than a hint of self-interest. But Meagher was on the side of inevitability. Of late, the Young Ireland felons had been welcomed into the homes of solid, landowning citizens of impeccable English lineage. In just a few years’ time, Her Majesty’s proper subjects in the penal colony had been won over by the Irish poets, orators, statesmen and wits exiled in their midst. They wrote letters and columns, and strategized with these progressive Tasmanians on how to win the right to rule themselves.

  All of this activity enraged the head jailor, Denison. With great alarm, he reported to colonial authorities that people of standing had opened their doors to these . . . traitors. At the same time, his mouthpiece Balfe continued to argue the governor’s line: a colony built on the backs of convicts had no future without them. They needed slave labor to survive, and it was their sovereign right. But his arguments smelled, it was said around Hobart and Launceston—the stench of yesterday.

  On election day, in a political triumph unmatched in Ireland, the ideas helped along by Meagher carried the day in the most distant outpost of the British Empire. The results sent a resounding message: those who wanted to put an end to the penal colony routed Denison’s loyalists and took control of the new legislative council. In short order, that council called for transportation’s demise. The governor was appalled at the rise of “the democratic spirit” and said it “needs to be checked” immediately. “The elements of which society here is composed” could never rule themselves, he warned London. They were fatally flawed humans, with a “low estimate placed on everything which can distinguish a man from his fellows.” Most galling to Denison was that the political pot was being stirred by the Irish rebels—his prisoners—“attempting to sow dissension among the people of this Colony.” They had helped to accomplish something in the penal colony that they were never able to pull off in their native land. Meagher was behind the high prose of democracy, and Smith O’Brien was drawing up a constitution for the newly democratic state. A constitution from a convict. They were incorrigible!