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

by Thomas Keneally

  O’Brien’s father, Sir Edward O’Brien, baronet, had in the 1820s converted the old house at Dromoland into the ‘baronial castle’ seen today. But the O’Briens were characteristically encumbered with debt, especially from the renovations. Sir Edward had followed as a young man the normal stratagem of marrying the daughter of a financially secure commoner. No Gaelic fervour marked such marriages, but undertaken dutifully, they produced contentment. Sir Edward O’Brien married Charlotte, daughter of William Smith, a lawyer and landlord who had held mortgages over the Dromoland estate and who waived them in time for the wedding.

  Given his grandfather Smith’s name out of family piety, William Smith O’Brien was the second son of Sir Edward and the Lady Charlotte. He experienced the benefits of the upbringing of his class, which should have ensured that he would never have fellow feeling even with Meagher, let alone Hugh Larkin. He went to preparatory school in Kent and then to Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. But: ‘From my boyhood I have entertained a passionate affection for Ireland … I have never witnessed the miseries and indignities which its people still suffer without a deep sentiment of indignation.’

  By 1828 O’Brien had graduated from Cambridge, and was admitted to the Bar after attending Lincoln’s Inn. He was by then a tall young man, a good, austere speaker, but certainly without Daniel O’Connell’s hulking charm and common touch. He possessed a thorny sense of honour and astounding energy. For the sake of an active life, he thought of entering the Royal Navy. Instead, almost immediately he was ‘brought into Parliament by my father as member for the borough of Ennis—a closed borough to which our family possessed an alternating nomination with the late George Fitzgerald.’ In other words, he inherited a so-called ‘rotten borough,’ a parliamentary seat to which men were not so much elected as virtually appointed, and he served until such anomalies were swept away by the Reform Bill of 1832. He was considered slightly dangerous, the sort of Protestant establishment figure who supported Catholic Emancipation on grounds of equity. He shocked his mother, Lady O’Brien, by joining O’Connell’s Catholic Association.

  Then to her further horror, when Daniel O’Connell so cunningly forced the issue, O’Brien voted for Emancipation. Though a Catholic and by law ineligible, O’Connell had decided in 1828 to stand for County Clare, the O’Briens’ own county. This was an election in whose result shoeless and voteless Irish like the Larkins and Tullys were engrossed. Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington and Home Secretary Robert Peel were compelled now either to declare the election invalid or to confirm it by legalising the election of a Catholic and granting Catholic Emancipation. The young O’Brien was delighted, though he believed O’Connell had brought it about in a cheap, vulgar way, and was not even a Clare man to begin with, but an outsider from Kerry.

  Some of O’Brien’s statements about O’Connell’s opportunism led to a duel between O’Brien and O’Connell’s lieutenant Tom Steele. Both men survived. According to a gracious legend, after Steele had fired and missed, O’Brien himself—to the applause of a large open air audience—turned in his loaded weapon. If true it was an act of crushing contempt for which Tom Steele would never forgive him.

  Then when Lucius, Smith O’Brien’s brother, contested Clare at the next election, a friend of Steele’s voiced some insults against the O’Brien household which led to another duel, conducted before a large crowd at Ennis racecourse. Mahon fired and missed, and William Smith O’Brien’s pistol failed to fire at all. By some Irish gentlemanly formula not immediately clear, this settled the affair. Such confrontations naturally suggest that beneath O’Brien’s external reserve lay an intense temperament. His brother Lucius was aware of it: in 1830 he extricated William from an affair in London, during his sojourns at Westminster, with a woman named Mary Anne Wilton. She would bear Smith O’Brien a child, but she was not marriageable by O’Brien standards, and Lucius, on the basis of discussions with his father Sir Edward, promised the young woman in return for silence an annuity of £50 for life. ‘With this proviso that if ever at any time this affair be brought before the public … my promise shall be void.’

  Smith O’Brien, still representing Ennis, was now steered towards marrying a loyal, genial, loving young woman, Lucy Gabbett. Lucy’s father was a liberal-minded landlord of High Park, who had been mayor of Limerick, and she was part of a large Church of Ireland and farming family. O’Brien, who had already inherited one of his grandfather’s estates named Cahirmoyle in County Limerick, persuaded his mother to let Lucy and himself live in a handsome but dilapidated Georgian house there. It was a delicate request. Lady O’Brien said that her father had ‘in fact let the whole place go to ruin by giving it to Bridget Keevan for a dairy and letting the cows into every part of it …’ Keevan had been her father’s mistress.

  Though Smith O’Brien loved women and charmed them with a quiet ease, Lucy would, in politics—though, like O’Brien’s mother, she would never understand his political commitment—as in prison, be his lodestar and, as the devoted mother of his children, a centre of calm amongst the flux and frenzy of politics. And in the first year of Larkin’s labour in Monaro, tall, earnest Smith O’Brien seemed to be safely rusticating at his estate of Cahirmoyle, in the renovated estate house with Lucy and their three young children. But in 1835 he was easily enough persuaded to stand as an independent Liberal candidate for the County of Limerick.

  His large family were still ambiguous about his politics. Of his earlier published pamphlet on disestablishing the Church of Ireland, his father Sir Edward wrote: ‘You certainly would destroy the Protestant religion altogether in Clare when you would give but five clergymen to our population of 5,000 persons.’ It all savoured, said Sir Edward, ‘of the O’Connell school,’ a school of which he thoroughly disapproved.

  Now, after a hard campaign Smith O’Brien was elected to the House of Commons by a constituency he described as a progressive landlord or two and the humbler end of the £10 leaseholders. He would hold that seat for fourteen years, crossing to England by ship for sittings of Parliament, travelling to London by coach and later by rail, a regimen of which many other Irish MPs soon tired. He was always careful with expenses, and Lucy, aware of his cautious spending, wrote to him from Cahirmoyle, ‘I wish you were settled in nice, clean and elegant lodgings. Pray do not spare upon yourself but make yourself comfortable. I hope you will go to many literary evenings and it will beguile the long and lonely evenings.’

  Because a fire had gutted the chamber of the Commons in Westminster Palace, Parliament then met in the less than cosy St Stephen’s Chapel. Here, Smith O’Brien voted with the Whigs under a succession of Prime Ministers beginning with Lord Melbourne. Unlike the Irish masses, he still found middle-aged, tall, beefy, amiable and internationally renowned O’Connell, and the relatives O’Connell swept into the House with him, vulgar, populist and grandstanding. Yet though he disapproved too of the fashionable house they kept while in London, he pursued the same issues as they did, and voted with them frequently. He pressed particularly for an Irish Poor Law, under which absentee and other Irish landlords would be required to provide the funds for the relief of the evicted, the landless, the widowed. But he wanted relief to be distributed on an outdoor basis, not through the institution of the workhouse, as was the British model. Irish poverty, he told the Parliament, was a different beast from British poverty.

  Despite his aristocratic aloofness, his friends and enemies admired him. Here was a fellow who could have stayed at home, farmed, collected botanical specimens or invented irrigation systems, coming to the House of Commons to be what Tories considered an independent radical, busying himself in Westminster without any hope of, or ambition for, office. That was his stated position—he would not let himself be neutralised as a spokesman for Ireland by offers of Cabinet or other posts. Yet he was conscientious to the point of exhaustion in attendance at parliamentary sessions, paying boy runners to rouse him at night from his lodgings in Westminster if a debate he had an interest in came
on.

  He did go to many interesting evenings, including an occasional dinner with other politicians, Lord Melbourne, Lord Palmerston, or Lord John Russell, the leaders of the Whigs, and with writers like Thomas Carlyle and the just emerging, witty, but far from Irish-sympathetic William Makepeace Thackeray. To these tables he brought a passion for statistics and a strong gift for reasoning rather than graphic leaps of imagination and imagery, and he enjoyed the frisson of political discussion with handsome, Whiggish women. But he did not pay court to Cabinet ministers.

  And if there were any hubris in the distance O’Brien kept from the Liberator, it was balanced by an endearingly modest view of his own gifts. Later, he would reflect that had he not been true to his principles, he would probably have been given a place in the British Cabinet, but then he did not think that was saying much for a man’s honour or talents.

  Even when he came home to Cahirmoyle, after hours if not days in a coach, there was no rest. His young sisters Grace and Anne were promoters of what Wakefield called ‘systematic colonisation,’ schemes to help cottagers and other marginal folk to Canada, Australia and elsewhere, both as a means of rescue for the people and also, cynics said, as a means of relieving estates of squalid encampments of tenants-at-will. Grace was, more than anyone else in his family, Smith O’Brien’s soul-mate. The two of them founded in Limerick the Emigrant Friend’s Society to provide the Irish of Limerick County with information on colonies, sources of emigration funding, land-owning opportunities in the New World, shipping, available employment in distant places, and so on. With his brother, Henry O’Brien, ten years younger, Smith O’Brien set up in Limerick and Clare temperance societies whose chief purpose, said O’Brien, was to allow the peasantry and the town worker a pleasant environment in which to study at night. The societies were devised to act too as savings banks-cum-credit unions. The little reading rooms in Ennis and Limerick, rented at family expense and stocked with pamphlets, newspapers and books, were unjustly suspected by Catholic labourers as dens of heresy.

  More or less the same period as Mary Shields resided under the discipline of the Female Factory, Thomas Francis Meagher of Waterford spent at a privileged male version of the same: Stonyhurst, a Jesuit college in Lancashire founded by leading northern English Catholics. To it a number of the sons of wealthy Irish, and even the children of Spaniards and French, were sent to receive a comprehensive British education with Thomistic philosophy and theology thrown in. Tom Meagher, flirtatious, sociable, stylishly outfitted, and better suited in many ways to a worldly university like Trinity, was driven through drenched fields to the sombre front of Stonyhurst at the age of seventeen in October 1840, when Mary was already a second-year veteran of the Factory. Not excessively tall, well-muscled and sweet-featured, a good friend and a gifted hater, he was definitely an Irish nationalist by now and was set to give the English Jesuits a hard time.

  Later in life, he liked to recount well-rehearsed anecdotes of the cultural edginess of Stonyhurst. The English Jesuits, he said, attacked his ‘detested Irish brogue’—particularly so the Reverend William Johnson under whom he studied in the school of rhetoric. The sweetest words, said Meagher, ‘uttered with an Irish accent, uttered with the rich roll of the Milesian [native Irish] tongue, was enough, and more than enough, to give hysterics or nausea to the Reverend William Johnson, Professor of Rhetoric.’ When Meagher rehearsed the part of the Earl of Kent in King Lear, Reverend Johnson struck him on the back of the head with a manuscript copy of the play: ‘That frightful brogue of yours will never do for Shakespeare … I must degrade you from the Peerage…. You’ll have to be a common soldier.’ Meagher later commented that ‘it wasn’t the first time the brogue entailed the forfeiture of title and estate.’

  In 1842, while still at Stonyhurst studying Thomas Aquinas, he wrote ‘a little record of the proceedings of his favourite Society,’ that is, the Debating Society of Clongowes. This was his first published work and according to Meagher’s adoring friend, Pat Smyth of Dublin, the demigod Liberator was, that autumn at Clongowes, shown a copy of it and remarked prophetically that ‘the author of such a work was not destined to remain long in obscurity.’

  It was while on vacation as a student in the summer of 1843, touring Germany with some other students, that Meagher boarded a boat up the Rhine to visit the new nation of Belgium, whose successful revolution against the Dutch in 1830 still stood as a glamorous European exemplar of a small nation’s achievement of independence. ‘From that time,’ wrote Smyth, ‘Belgium became in his mind a model of what Ireland should be.’ That is, legislatively independent.

  By the time Meagher, a Celtic-Byronic figure, stood pulsating on Antwerp’s ramparts, Mary had spent a largely unrecorded four years in the Factory’s rowdy sorority. Though no notable misdemeanour or illness raised Shields to public notice, she suffered from the way the prison-cum-refuge was run. Embezzlement of funds, over-ordering and short-rationing were the modus operandi of steward and matron, Mr and Mrs Bell. News of Factory dissatisfaction reached Governor Gipps, and he agreed to meet a delegation of convict women. ‘They represented that they’d been sentenced to be Transported, but not to be imprisoned after Transportation.’ They adversely contrasted, ‘I must say, with great force and truth,’ their treatment with that of women in prison in Britain and Ireland.

  About the time of the appeal to Gipps, two women detained in a small cell started a fire, and their screams were heard throughout the Factory. A hundred women packed into one of the dormitories broke their door down to get to their threatened sisters. But the constables, the Bells and their sub-matron, Mrs Corcoran, got there first and rescued the two women. Abuse and recriminations were exchanged between the two sets of rescuers. Bell used colourful insults, and the women began breaking doors and windows. A detachment of military arrived at the double, but the insurgent women subjected them to a volley of stones and pieces of broken furniture. Eighty of the rioters were arrested and confined at the Factory or Parramatta gaol.

  It was reported that some women, not wanting children hurt in a general riot or in the retribution of police or military, came to the assistance of Sub-matron Corcoran. Since Mary was soon to be included in a list of the ‘best conducted,’ she was obviously not imprisoned as a rioter, but was one of those who, whether or not Corcoran deserved it, stood by her. By now the commissary officials of the colony were investigating Bell, and had found that, for the past two years, ‘Mr Bell’s expenditure appeared to be inconsistent with any means he was known to possess.’ The Bells and Mrs Corcoran had also been depositing money in the savings bank beyond their means. Mrs Corcoran, however, was now willing to give evidence that Bell had been withdrawing rations for 100 more children than the Factory contained, and that Mrs Bell had often kept money paid for needlework. To avoid questions by the visiting surgeon, Bell had once ordered Corcoran to pound to powder a secret hoard of soap. Corcoran claimed the prisoners were never issued meal, and the supply of bread to the children was intermittent. Mr Bell liked the women’s company too, and took a number of the prisoners to town on drinking sessions. The matter of the Bells, reported now to the Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley in Whitehall, drew a passionate statement from Stanley’s permanent secretary, Charles E. Trevelyan, a young man who would later have so much to do with hunger in Ireland itself. Unlike Ireland, the Female Factory was distant and based on simple propositions. It was easy to bring the appropriate thunder down on it. Trevelyan ordered that provisions must be of the ‘best quality’ and come from ‘clean, sound colonial wheat, barley, or maize.’ The fresh meat was to be delivered alternately in fore- and hind-quarters—Bell had been reserving the best cuts for himself and possibly for the black market. ‘The matter,’ said Trevelyan, ‘was at last brought to light only by the loud complaints of the females on the occasion of the Governor visiting the Factory in person.’ So the voice of Mary Shields and of other Whitby women had reached the consciousness of a man who would later hold starving Ireland in the palm o
f his hand.

  The Colonial Secretary told the Factory’s visiting justice on 3 March 1843 that Governor Gipps had approved a scheme to place some of ‘the best conducted women’ with reputable employers. Shields was due for her ticket-of-leave that year, after four years of her sentence, so it is mystifying that her release was cast in official papers as part of this plan of reward.

  In any case, by April 1843, twenty-two women—largely from the ship Margaret—were selected for the scheme, and then in June a further eleven were added, amongst them a number of the Whitby women with children, including Mary, who sat on her cot assessing the glory and the peril of being advertised as promising in the Government Gazette. Applications from potential employers were to be accompanied by references from clergymen or magistrates, and the Colonial Secretary took the trouble to draft at the time a special set of rules for the employment of these women. They were to be paid between £8 and £10 sterling per year—Gipps had said he wanted this group to have purchasing power from the day they left the Factory. ‘Women discharged from the Factory with Tickets-of-Leave are in very many cases absolutely friendless, and it is scarcely possible for them by any honest means to maintain themselves without assistance, during the first few days of their liberty.’ Money the women had earned was to be sacrosanct and not taken by the police.

  Middle-aged Cecily Naughton and her children were to go to Campbelltown, no more than a day or two’s ride away. Mary Carroll, who had a convict husband, was to remain as close as Penrith, barely 15 miles. But another Whitby woman, Anne Morrow, was to be sent by ship to distant, beautiful Port Macquarie, 250 miles up the coast, and Mary Smith and Mary Gallon to Yass, a remote town in the interior at the limits of the old Nineteen Counties.