The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  Need, anger at an ignored warning, anxiety, pride and peasant politics drove Hugh towards the coming tragedy. But so did Irish history. The defeat of deposed King of England James II and his Irish Catholic allies at the Boyne River in 1690 is the core event in the long struggle between Catholics and Protestants. The victors were the Protestant army of James’s son-in-law, King William of Orange, who had been handed the British throne by Parliament in 1688; his reign was confirmed at the Boyne. William’s triumph made the final collapse of James’s forces inevitable, and to prevent any further Catholic uprising a series of Penal Laws were passed in the years following, aimed at keeping the native Irish powerless, poor and stupid. Some of this legislation was not to be repealed until Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

  Under the Penal Code the Catholic Irish were barred from serving as officers in the army or navy, or from practising as lawyers—a profession for which they would later prove to have an appetite. They could hold no civic post or office at all under the Crown. At the death of a Catholic landowner his land was to be divided amongst all his sons unless the eldest became a Protestant, in which case he could inherit the whole. A Catholic could not own a horse worth more than £5, was prohibited from living within five miles of an incorporated town and from attending or keeping schools. Hugh, who like most Irish was aggrieved at his own unschooled condition even after Emancipation, saw his ignorance as yet another result of an unjust society.

  The practice of the Catholic faith had been proscribed in penal times, too, and even though primitive Catholic chapels were permitted to be erected throughout the eighteenth century, the old, more august churches now belonged to the Church of Ireland, the religion of the Protestant establishment. Hugh was raised with tales of the hunting of priests for sport, and of Masses said by priests on Mass stones—suitable flat rocks—in the open countryside, lookouts being posted to warn of approaching army units. The priesthood was legalised in 1782, but the memory of religious persecution was fresh, particularly in a society in which the aged took energetically to their role as story-tellers.

  Edmund Burke, eighteenth-century orator and Member of the House of Commons, fulminated against the Penal Code as ‘a machine as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of the people, and the debasement of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.’ Despite the letter of the law, a small class of Catholic merchants and professionals had arisen, but, even after Emancipation, men of Hugh’s class still felt that something like Penal Laws operated in the countryside in which all relationships were marked one way or another by religious bigotry and in which the court system supported whatever a landlord chose to do. The landlord was upheld by law, was validated in the seizing of livestock and furniture against ‘a hanging gale’—a lateness in paying the heavy twice-yearly rent—and was supported if he evicted tenants.

  In Hugh’s era and later, there was a common requirement before marriage that permission be sought, cap-in-hand, at the big house. The insolence of the gentleman landlord was typified by the practice by which his carriage was often preceded by footmen who whipped peasants and their carts into the ditches to make way for the master. Hugh had also heard of, if not experienced, gentry who required their peasantry to hide before the landlord’s carriage came along, lest the gentry should have to look at the facial dirt and hunger of the bedraggled. But whether or not Seymour himself, the substantial pastoralist, followed such feudal practice or not, his rents were considered exorbitant by the peasantry, and to Hugh his face was that of the oppressor, the depriver, the apostate, the occupying power. Thus, in his daily life, Hugh still practised the habits the Penal Laws had created, the habits of powerlessness, masked feelings, apparent subjection, slyness, and dreams of vengeance. Since there was nothing in society to help him towards his rights, since he could seek from neither court nor landlord help in adjusting the balance of the world, he turned to the secret companies of other men, to men of similar mind to himself.

  On the night of Hugh’s attack against the Seymours, Hugh, Esther and Mrs Larkin ate the accustomed peasant dinner, sitting in a circle on stools or on the floor around a basket of potatoes, with a mug of buttermilk at the side of each of the diners and a little bowl of salt conveniently placed. This sort of meal was commonly called ‘dip-at-the-stool.’ Hugh and Esther peeled the jackets off the potatoes with their thumbnail, grown long to fulfil the task. ‘So expert were the people at peeling potatoes in this way,’ said one commentator, ‘that nobody with a knife and fork could divest a potato of its jacket half so quickly.’ Fragments of potato, sips of buttermilk, were fed to infants.

  ‘The Irish diet,’ wrote a modern expert, ‘while monotonous and perhaps tasteless, was probably richer than all but the most advanced regions of Europe.’ Except in summer when potatoes were scarce, an Irish male such as Hugh Larkin had an intake of over 3,800 calories per day from eating potatoes, and was provided with an extraordinary armoury of vitamins, twice the recommended modern intake of protein, calcium and iron, and a low fat content. Potatoes were the only cheap crop which could support life when fed to a peasant as the sole item of diet. They possessed too ‘a capacity not to cloy the appetite’ and were also suited to the conditions of land tenure, under which the tenant could not afford to build barns or sheds in which to store food.

  The choicest varieties of potato, the ‘apple’ and the ‘cup,’ were the most savoury, but were not as enduring, or as resistant to the potato disease called curl, as was the ‘lumper.’ But whatever variety, the potato helped combat in Ireland the common scourges of hunger found elsewhere in the world—scurvy, pellagra and malnutrition blindness.

  A commentator has argued that the potato was looked upon askance in a Protestant country such as Scotland because it had not been mentioned and sanctioned in the King James Bible. In Ireland, where amongst the Catholic peasantry dogma was more important than the King James version, there was no such inhibition.

  The family pig, bought each year and fattened on the coarser lumper variety of potatoes grown near the cottage, was also present for Hugh’s last meal at home. The young French traveller Alexis de Tocqueville observed of cabins like the Larkins’, ‘The Irish pig lends himself to the innocent games of his host with a perfect charm. It is not rare to see the children of the house hanging on his tail.’ Paddy’s pigs, as the English music-halls had it! The pig was not a resident of the house for the sake of providing the cottier with bacon for himself and his family, but so that, in the lean summer months, fattened up, it could be sold. With the cash it fetched, the Larkins bought their summer oatmeal.

  Inside Hugh, the angry intent lay fixed in place. If Mrs Larkin and Esther suspected what he had in mind that night they would have been bent on dissuading him. But Larkin clung to his male purpose and to the brothers of his sworn society. The threatening notice had already been posted on Seymour’s door. The next customary level of protest was the armed invasion, and the utterance of face-to-face threats.

  Hugh had grown up with the tradition of secret societies of Catholic tenants. Variously named—Whiteboys, Rockites, Ribbon societies—they had existed in his childhood to threaten both the landlord and bailiff who evicted, and any tenant rash enough to take up an evictee’s house and land. When Hugh was ten or eleven years old, the 28th Regiment of Foot was stationed in Woodford, East Galway, to protect landlords, agents and others against the activism of secret rural groups. Leaders of such protests had been hanged or sent to Australia. The tale of the Ribbonman protester Ned Lohan of Ballymacward, three parishes to the west, hanged near his house in front of his wife and three daughters in 1820, would certainly have been canvassed around the hearths of Hugh’s childhood.

  Now a fresh age of peasant uncertainty had produced a new generation of what were called Ribbon societies in East Galway. The terms ‘Ribbonism’ and ‘Ribbonmen’ were titles of convenience, however. The true Ribbon organisation, with its secret oaths, passwords, ribbons and cells of no
more than thirty-six men, had had a rough national structure and had been made up of workers from the cities. But in the west of Ireland the word Ribbonism was a portmanteau term for any act or assault arising from peasant or small farmer grievances.

  To confuse matters, the Galway Advertiser also used the term ‘Terry Alts’ as meaning the same as Ribbonmen. The Terry Alts were a regional branch of Ribbonism, and the name derived from a particular Ribbon assault in 1829 on a landlord’s agent named Edwin Synge in Corofin, County Clare. Synge was attacked leaving church, and his servant shot dead. A witness said that the attacker had been wearing a straw hat. An innocent shoemaker named Terry Alt, in the vicinity and wearing a straw hat, was immediately arrested. The local groups of oath-taking young men did honour to the shoemaker by signing their threatening notices and statements with his name.

  Indeed at some stages of 1832 the Galway Advertiser had been in a position to fill an entire column of its broadsheet with notices of Terry Alt warnings and attacks.

  On the night of 13 March, the house of Pat Morgan, of Clontuskert … was attacked by an armed party, who swore him to surrender his present holding to former occupier, and beat him dreadfully for not complying with a former notice … the house of Thomas Madden, of Skycur, was attacked by an armed party who fired some shots and demanded money, which they forcibly had obtained for the purpose as they stated of enabling them to employ Council, support witnesses &c. on behalf of unfortunate men, now in custody in Galway Gaol.

  It is more than possible that Hugh participated in one of these two local actions. And his wife and mother, who at least suspected Hugh’s Ribbon tendencies, must have feared that he himself might soon be in Galway gaol, in need of ‘Council.’

  Somewhere around Lismany, Hugh had hidden a clandestinely manufactured pike or a musket stolen in a Ribbon raid on a house. On this night, he went out to fetch it, loaded it and started for Seymour’s house, barely a mile west across the fields from Lismany crossroads. He lacked shoes, since Ireland was a nation of the bare-footed. He moved with a conviction that his title to Hy Many was better than Mr Seymour’s, and that title would be reasserted tonight.

  Approaching Seymour’s, Hugh and his fellow Ribbonmen saw the landlord not only as a potential, individual enemy but as an enemy to culture and religion as well. Though there were some Catholic landlords—the Liberator himself was one—to most peasants landlords were an incarnation of Protestantism, and of the entire threatening order of things. Seymour therefore stood for the other great grievance of Hugh’s era: Emancipation had not brought an end to the system of tithes, a tax on the crops, livestock and earnings of Catholics that went to the upkeep of the Established Church—the Church of Ireland and its ministers and doctrines—which Hugh considered heretical. Most progressive British opinion was by now opposed to the system. But the issue was still being fought on the ground in Ireland, and sometimes detachments of the British army were marched off to villages for futile and bloody confrontations about overdue tithe payments. Sometimes, too, the local grandee added his clout to the collection of tithes. ‘Lord Courtown’s agent,’ The Times correspondent would report in Hugh’s last year in Ireland, ‘has demanded from His Lordship’s tenantry the arrears of the tithes due to the Rev. Roger Owens for the years 1831, 1832 and 1833 … In case of noncompliance, he has threatened that ejectments will be served forthwith … and the occupants turned out into the road.’ The tithe proctors, who represented the local Church of Ireland minister and visited tenants to assess this tax, were oppressive figures in the landscape, agents of the alien system at whose apex stood tonight’s target: the landlord.

  Our knowledge of Hugh’s crime is a little inexact—did he blacken his face, did he wear a white shirt over his head? We would have known all the alleged details of Hugh’s ‘outrage,’ including the precise night, had nineteenth-century court records not been destroyed by fire when the Dublin Four Courts were mined by Republican forces in 1922. As for constabulary reports, it was only after the Royal Irish Constabulary was founded in 1836 that all rural ‘outrages’ were reported in some detail to Dublin Castle.

  But somewhere on the dark walk from Lismany, Larkin met up with other armed Terry Alts, and together they advanced on Seymour’s home to put their landlord in his place, entering through a gate in the high garden wall at the rear of the house and gathering themselves in the yard by the kitchen for the imminent uttering of serious threats. Their aim was not the taking of property, but the adjustment of a basic social lesion. Theirs were crimes of protest, very different from the crime of stealing a horse or a pig. Hugh’s kind of protest was part of a tapestry of popular and protest movements throughout nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Under the influence of his peasant culture, and by temperament, Hugh was no member of a criminal class.

  The party of Terry Alts arrived at the back of Seymour’s property, a two-storeyed, functionally designed structure spacious enough to bear the name Somerset House. Because Larkin had a grievance against Seymour, he was theoretically violating Terry Alt guidelines by participating in this local affair himself, but an intimate sense of personal wrong often guaranteed such violations. Somerset House still stands, the path by which the party came, the gate by which they entered, the back door they approached are all confidently and credibly pointed to today.

  The party broke down the back door. Assaulting habitation and being in arms—as the charge against Hugh would have it. The noise and shouts brought servants and the Seymour family to the back of the house, but Seymour himself was not with them. Mrs Seymour faced them—a characteristic landlord’s wife, rugged of soul, unlikely to admit her fear. Given the earlier threat hammered to her door, she had pistols handy but may not have seized them up in time. Hugh and others shouted that she was hiding her husband, but that proved wrong. The sight of this familiar woman, of her gestures of command, her body wrapped in fabrics unaffordable by Esther, her mouth full of the threats of the law, very likely betrayed Hugh, however disguised, into angry exchanges. According to the oral testimony, a male servant of the household, a man named Walsh, recognised Larkin and would later, under threat or inducement, identify him at trial.

  Hugh and the others assured Mrs Seymour that this was a final warning. Though the only damage that had been done was the breaking-down of the door, for Mrs Seymour and her children there had been distress and fear. She would have had some certainty they did not mean her immediate harm. Though there had been a case in the 1820s when a group in Cork had descended on a convoy of coaches carrying soldiers’ wives and raped them, an assault against women was alien to Ribbonmen, since they believed that they must act according to conscience. However, as Larkin and the others withdrew across the fields they must have known that they were now in more peril than the Seymours.

  When Seymour returned home, and his shaken wife relayed the threats to him, he rode off to swear a charge against Larkin. There was a period in the early 1830s when local ‘outrages’ required a garrison to be stationed in the village of Laurencetown, some 5 miles down the road. So either to Laurencetown a little way south or to bigger Ballinasloe, a little further north, Mr Seymour went for help.

  Against Ribbonism of Hugh’s brand, the authorities could employ the Whiteboy Acts of 1767 and 1777, which strictly defined and punished illegal assembly and the sort of angry protest Hugh had just made. Punishable too were the administration of illegal oaths and the posting of threatening notices. Of one at least of those charges, it seems, Hugh was also guilty.

  A military detachment and county constables marched on Lismany and, surrounding Larkin in the fields, arrested him in a mêlée of roars, blows, punishment with the butts of muskets. They chained him down before a watchful population. Men shouted curses in Irish, the Larkin women keened. In the eyes of Esther Larkin must have risen the awareness that a special kind of widowhood was about to descend upon her—that which derived from execution or transportation.

  Hugh’s prospects as he was manhandled on to a barge fo
r Ballinasloe—trees suitable for hanging him being pointed out to him along the canal—were not bright. At the recent Kilkenny assizes, two men had been sentenced to be hanged immediately for Whiteboyism; two others were to be hanged on a date to be decided, and twelve more to be transported. Men and women charged by magistrates and on their way to trial would be facing a jury not of their peers, but one selected from the county ascendancy. Even though Catholics could now serve on the grand juries made up of county property owners, the county sheriff could select a jury to his liking, and one very sensitive to Ribbon threats.

  Hugh spent weeks if not months in prison in Galway, living a communal life in the stone wards. These county penitentiaries were run by governors under the appointment of the Superintendent of Prisons. In one sense they were private enterprise operations, the governor excellently placed to make deals with the contractors of Galway for the supply of goods, sometimes at inflated prices, or to over-order or pare rations. He could also rent his own apartments, or spacious cells on the debtors’ side of the gaol, to affluent prisoners, who were able to furnish them more or less at will. If everyone from the matron of female convicts to the turnkeys and the porters wished to exact bribes and a part of all goods and cash that entered prison, there was nothing to prevent it.

  The common criminals in the communal holding pens or wards sat, conversed, ate and slept on straw of varying quality. A prisoner from the country such as Hugh Larkin might have found the companionship of Galway city pickpockets and small criminals in the wards undesirable, but there were many men from the country, and other Ribbonmen from areas and protests different from Hugh’s.