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

by Thomas Keneally

  The trial of Mitchel’s gentle friend John Martin, editor of the Felon, had meantime already been held at Green Street courthouse before O’Doherty’s first no-verdict. The jury was a long time out but returned to find Martin guilty on the basis of an article advising people to retain their arms. As with Mitchel, the catch-all nature of the Treason-Felony Act gave Martin little chance. The jury recommended him to mercy, since the articles had been written in disturbed political circumstances. Martin stood up to the trial with a calm courage which his delicate appearance had not prepared some observers for. Called upon to state his principles, he expressed sentiments closer to O’Brien’s than Mitchel’s: ‘My object in all proceedings has been simply to assist in establishing the national independence of Ireland for the benefit of all the people of Ireland—noblemen, landlords, clergymen, judges, professional men—in fact, all citizens, all Irishmen.’

  On his sentencing day he was brought at the rush from nearby Newgate prison into court and condemned to be transported beyond the seas for ten years. He was moved in a black carriage south of the Liffey to Richmond prison, which backed on to the Grand Canal, to await transportation. Here he had rooms on the better side of the gaol. His health was not robust and he must have despaired of his life. His brother would administer his inherited land in County Down, and given that the blight and hardship had hit Down harder this autumn than in previous years, he was oppressed by the fact he would not be in position to give any succour to the local populace around his estate of Aston.

  With Martin in the bag, and O’Doherty’s and Duffy’s cases pending, the Dublin Commission into the State prisoners closed on 19 August, needing now to go off to Clonmel, Tipperary, to try O’Brien and his associates. During the week after the commission went into recess, O’Doherty was visited by a parish priest, the Reverend Dr Ennis—‘a pious corporal,’ said Duffy. Sent by Lord Clarendon, Ennis told O’Doherty that if he would plead guilty, he would not be called up for judgment. This proposal caused O’Doherty to consider the realities. Transported, he would not be able to finish his studies or marry adored Eva. One afternoon, in the garden at Richmond, he discussed the matter with the ‘fair poetess of Portumna’ herself. Possessed of all the absolutism of an untempered soul, she told him to be true to Ireland, and in return she, Eva, would be true to him. O’Doherty rejected Clarendon’s offer.

  By late September, O’Brien, Meagher, MacManus and O’Donohoe were gathered from Kilmainham and transported secretly by train in a jovial bunch back to face the grand jury in Clonmel, southern Tipperary’s county town. In Clonmel gaol, they awaited trial for high treason. O’Brien’s enlightened sister Grace, coming there to visit her brother, feared ‘the cry for blood from some of the tyrannical landlords.’ Sir Lucius worried as well about the influence of his brother’s failed rebellion on Westminster—the government now had a pretext to ignore the latest seasonal disaster. Lucius had read in The Times an editorial which rang like a death sentence: ‘In no other country have men talked treason until they are hoarse, and then gone about begging for sympathy from their oppressors.’ Sir Lucius wrote what he hoped were instructive letters to Cabinet ministers and to those Dublin newspapers that belittled the sufferings of the countryside. He pleaded with Lord Bessborough not to suspend road works in Clare: a thousand people in the Ennis and Newmarket area would starve. ‘What am I to say to them?’ But in the wake of O’Brien’s rebellion, the government had run out of mercy, and the British Association out of cash. Since Lord George Russell, British Prime Minister, believed the crisis over, the commissariat was ordered to close its depots for good, and would leave Ireland in August. Trevelyan announced a special new poor-rate levy, to be collected from the almost universally money-short landlords and landowners, to deal with the new potato failure. For these new severe policies, most of them based on decisions taken long before Ballingarry, Smith O’Brien had to face the reproach, in veiled and in more naked form, from visitors and relatives and in a mass of gently chastising mail from his peers.

  His sister Anne Martineau had now travelled from Wales to Clonmel to be close to him. ‘We have had a levee all day … Mama seems quite up to it, and I do not think will suffer. She saw William at twelve o’clock today and bore it pretty well … Lucy cannot walk through the town at all as she is known and the poor prisoners’ wives follow her.’ Going to the abbey church with Lady O’Brien and Anne, Robert O’Brien was appalled that ‘A great number of people … ran out to see my mother, as we drove by no man touched his hat and no woman curtseyed or said God speed. Such are the persons for whom a man of honour has sacrificed life, property, wife, children, friends.’

  Smith O’Brien had adequately furnished his rooms in stony Clonmel, but Meagher decorated his own with typical stylishness. A young man named William Lyons remembered being collected from a handball game by an elder and taken to see the Young Tribune in his cell:

  we found ourselves at the end of a long corridor … ‘That is mine,’ said Meagher … Imagine a little room, about the size of an ordinary pantry, lighted from the top by a large skylight, with bare whitewashed walls … A warm crimson cloth lined the walls, and at once removed the fever-hospital look of the place. Handsome French prints hung in rich profusion … a pretty sofa bedstead completely filled the farthest end of the cell. Around three sides of it were arranged well-stocked bookshelves, just within reach of his hand; he thus lay nestled in books … There were keepsakes as well, many of them sent by women, and a dressing table with flowers on it.

  The Clonmel prisoners were, however, deprived of seeing the indictments against them until 21 September, the first day that the Judicial Commission, headed by Chief Justice Blackburne, assembled. The charges against O’Brien and his three confrères consisted of a number of counts of high treason. They were claimed ‘to have levied war on our Sovereign Lady the Queen in her realm.’ They had marched ‘in a warlike manner through diverse villages, towns, places and highways and did maliciously and traitorously with great force and violence march to a certain dwelling house in which a large body of constables then were lawfully assembled.’ They were also accused of traitorously building barricades across the highway. They had by implication attempted to destroy the Constitution and to ‘compass’ the death of the queen. Before a standing-room-only gallery in Nelson Street court, Clonmel, the grand jury found that the prisoners had a case to answer, ‘which in the strange jargon of criminal pleading, declared that, moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil, they had treacherously assembled, with divers other false traitors, at Ballingarry.’

  Observed by parties hostile and friendly, by correspondents from The Times and the Irish papers, by artists from the pictorials. On 29 September O’Brien was the first to go to trial. Bare-headed, he rose from his holding cell into a courtroom which not only had a crammed floor but a crowded and emotionally engaged public gallery. Applause greeted him. He seemed composed. James Whiteside, QC, chief counsel for O’Brien and the others, who had defended O’Connell in his prosecution after Clontarf, had no input into jury selection and complained that the panel of jurors was taken from the grand jury list which had already found O’Brien had a case to answer. A hundred possibly sympathetic men had been struck off the panel. In a recent English case against a Chartist named Frost, the jury had been taken from the panel by ballot, and Mr Whiteside asked that this be the method of proceeding in Clonmel. But Attorney-General Monahan, who had the jury he wanted, did not consent.

  The prosecution produced against O’Brien a letter from Duffy, the one found in O’Brien’s seized portmanteau. Written a few weeks before the uprising, it urged O’Brien to more decisive action. Duffy was dubbed by the Solicitor-General a ‘diabolical tempter.’ He was offering O’Brien a lifeline—to agree to the mitigating factor that Duffy had had a seductive effect on him. To tears and shaken heads from Lucy and Lady O’Brien, William refused to seize the chance. ‘I must say that it is wrong.’ O’Brien told the court, ‘at a time that gentleman himself is
awaiting his trial, to take this opportunity of prejudicing the public mind against him.’

  A policeman was brought forward and told the Solicitor-General that when the police at the Widow McCormack’s refused to surrender, O’Brien said, ‘Slash away, boys, and slaughter the whole of them.’ O’Brien cried, with an ‘abrupt vehemence,’ ‘Don’t you know you are swearing falsely when you swear that, sir?’ Grace, staying in Golden Cottages in Clonmel, and coming every day to court to see her brother, wrote, ‘I become every day more alive to one fact—it was not so much because the Young Ireland Party ministered to William’s vanity that he was taken by them’ (as her mother believed) ‘… as that among them alone he found that deep sympathy in the dreams of his youth that he found nowhere else.’

  Whiteside’s defence of O’Brien began and was eloquently managed. He urged that O’Brien’s behaviour was based on a desire not to be arrested, ‘and not in pursuance of a universal design.’ He made much of O’Brien’s family—O’Brien had heard from his father how Union with England ‘was carried with corruption. That father recounted to my client what Plunket, Bushe and Grattan spoke on the last memorable night of our national existence.’ And other family considerations were invoked by Whiteside. ‘A venerable lady, who had dwelt amidst an affectionate tenantry, spending her income where it was raised, diffusing her charities and her blessings around, awaits now, with trembling heart, your verdict … Alas! More dreadful still—six innocent children will hear from your lips whether they are to be stripped of an inheritance which has descended in this family for ages.’ At this point, O’Brien suffered a storm of grief. The correspondent of the Illustrated London News said: ‘the prisoner shed tears towards the conclusion, and on the faces of many … the same evidences of deep emotion were visible.’

  Character witnesses for O’Brien, including parliamentarians Sir David Roche, Sir Denham Norreys, and an old parliamentary friend Mr Monsell, brother-in-law of Harriett O’Brien, the prisoner’s sister, had been produced to prove that throughout his parliamentary career, O’Brien’s opinions had been ‘favourable to constitutional agitation and to the monarchy, and opposed to Republicanism and Communism.’ And the supreme character witness was the handsomest and most heroic officer in the British Army, Sir William Napier, a Scots Irishman. Napier had considered taking up arms in support of the Reform Bill of 1832, which had broadened the electoral system of Great Britain. A Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne, had arranged secretly with Napier that if the Tories blocked reform, he should take command of the artisans of Birmingham. Napier was not only willing to give potent testimony to O’Brien’s uprightness of character, but answered questions about his own involvement in what he called ‘Reform agitation.’ It was all in a letter, he testified, written to him by Mr Young, private secretary to Lord Melbourne. The prosecution appealed to the court to disallow a question about the contents of this letter, and Justice Blackburne agreed.

  O’Brien’s trial lasted a mere eleven days, considered short given the complexities and penalties attaching to the charge of high treason. Prosecution concluded, the jury retired, but came back not in days but in a few hours with a guilty verdict, coupled with a recommendation that O’Brien should be spared the statutory brutality attached to high treason. Judgment calmed and stiffened O’Brien. Following the verdict, he manifested a ‘self-possessed countenance.’ When the court adjourned overnight, O’Brien ate a normal gentleman’s dinner with Meagher and the others in the common room in Clonmel prison, and spent the normal talkative hours. They surmised that things might go badly for MacManus and O’Donohoe. But Meagher had not been at Ballingarry. Because of all his galloping around rallying people in Waterford, Callan and on Slievenamon, he had not so much as directed a muzzle at the Crown.

  The next morning, a Monday, Lucy’s blood must have run cold at the economical and impenitent speech O’Brien made before sentence was imposed. ‘My Lords … I am perfectly satisfied with the consciousness that I have performed my duty to my country; that I have done only that which, in my opinion, it was the duty of every Irishman to have done … Proceed with your sentence.’ There were huge cheers from the gallery. Journalists prepared for the dash to the telegraph office, but so did many laypersons who simply wanted to send the grievous news off as soon as the statutory sentence was uttered.

  The sentence is, that you, William Smith O’Brien, be taken from hence to the place from whence you came, and be thence drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, and be 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, and to be disposed of as Her Majesty shall think fit. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.

  A profound sensation followed. Friends rushed forward to farewell O’Brien. He leaned down from the dock and shook hands. ‘Several women ran to the gates shrieking and throwing up their arms in violent grief.’ Despite the family bemusement, Robert O’Brien felt it had to be admitted that the ‘trial was fair and the verdict just.’ Robert possessed a particular view of why his brother had been seduced into high treason. ‘Sad indeed is the contemplation of what a person may be driven to by allowing his mind continually to foster a feeling of discontent of everything about him.’ So Lady O’Brien saw vanity in her son, and Robert a maiming melancholy in his brother.

  Later, when Lucy and Lady O’Brien visited him in the room where their State prisoners received their guests, their mouths were twisted with similar loving incomprehension, and O’Brien comforted them softly but intractably.

  On 9 October, MacManus almost routinely stood trial. ‘MacManus’s achievements in Tipperary were proved by the Crown,’ Duffy succinctly wrote, ‘and the only answer it was possible to make was to exhibit his personal and commercial character in the favourable light they deserved.’

  One of the documents presented against MacManus was a letter from Philadelphia, dated 10 May 1848, signed by Robert Tyler, son of President Tyler, offering the support of American citizens in the coming struggle ‘in any mode they think proper to designate.’ The jury quickly found MacManus guilty, and sentencing was held over. And so next, hapless O’Donohoe, who through the support of the other prisoners, notably of Tom Meagher, had the same excellent counsel. Isaac Butt argued that although O’Donohoe had been present at Ballingarry, he was ‘ignorant of treasonable intent.’ He was found guilty on 17 October, and he too was held for sentencing.

  Adored Tom Meagher was now to stand trial, beginning on 18 October. ‘I understand that four hundred of the Rifles are ordered to this town immediately,’ The Times correspondent told his readers. In contrast to the number of O’Briens in Clonmel, an eloquent absence was that of Thomas Meagher the elder—even though it was largely his money which had guaranteed Meagher and O’Donohoe a gentlemanly incarceration and a good defence. Thomas Meagher senior certainly disapproved of his son’s summer rashness, but did not believe these men should be tried under the severe rubric of high treason by an administration which had so unjustly and typically suspended Habeas Corpus.

  The trial begun, The Times correspondent in Clonmel reported ‘the court was greatly crowded and the majority of those in the galleries were ladies. The prisoner had frequent demands for autographs.’ The case against Meagher was weakest, but the Attorney-General reminded the jury that in treason there was no such thing as an accessory—all the persons engaged were principals. Meagher’s speeches were used as evidence. Butt argued that most of them had been made at least six months before Ballingarry, and words on their own could not constitute high treason. If the jury pronounced Meagher guilty, their verdict would mean that on their oaths they found that he had appeared in arms at Mullinahone and erected barricades, etc. Meagher did not seem to lose any standing at all amongst his fellows through his lawyers’ having used such a defence. ‘You may be well assured,’ wrote Gavan Duffy, ‘that this contention had not Meagher’s assent.’

  The Attorney-General now produced an elderly police sergean
t whom Meagher had met on Young Ireland’s progress through Callan, and the old man proved less than willing to swear that in conversation Meagher had uttered traitorous sentiments. Whiteside asked the old man what his conversation with Meagher had been.

  Sergeant: ‘Only I told him I was at his grandfather’s funeral.’

  Whiteside: ‘Then, sir, the sum total of your connection with Mr Meagher is that you told him you were at his grandfather’s funeral?’

  Sergeant: ‘Why then, that’s all; and I agree with the Learned Counsel, that much is not much.’

  This reply, said to have produced ‘convulsions’ in court, showed Meagher had his admirers even amongst the police. As for the clergy, contrary to expectations, Meagher did not use the trial as a forum to express his disappointment in them.

  On 22 October, the jury returned a verdict of guilty against Meagher with a recommendation of mercy on account of his youth. Sentencing of MacManus, O’Donohoe and Meagher occurred at once. In the customary pre-sentence speech, MacManus said that he placed his life and, above all, his honour, in the hands of his advocates, and faced the sentence which awaited him with a light heart and a free conscience. He had passed some of the happiest and most prosperous years of his life in England, and his actions did not bespeak enmity to England but love of his own country. Both MacManus and O’Donohoe were briskly sentenced to death, and waited serenely in the holding cells under the dock for Meagher’s sentencing.