Had Meagher in particular pleaded for mercy, it might have been given. But he believed it would be spiritual death, and death of honour, to do so. His speech from the dock proved of the same character as Smith O’Brien’s, equally likely to seal the prisoner’s fate, but it was of course more overtly eloquent—prepared and delivered as if he fully expected that in short order it should be printed up on handbills; as if he foresaw the generations of fair and freckled Celtic children who on St Patrick’s Day concerts from Derry to Montreal, from Butte, Montana, to Sydney, would recite it. He had no enmity against the jury, he said, for Chief Justice Blackburne had left them no option but to find him guilty.
To the efforts I have made, in a just and noble cause, I ascribe no vain importance, nor do I claim for those efforts any high reward. But it so happens, and it will ever happen so, that they who have tried to serve their country, no matter how weak the efforts may have been, are sure to receive the thanks and blessings of its people. I am here to regret nothing I have already 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 … To lift this island up—to make her a benefactor to humanity instead of being the meanest beggar in the world—to restore to her 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 … I hope to be able with a pure heart and perfect composure to appear before a higher tribunal—a tribunal where a Judge of infinite goodness, as well as of justice, will preside, and where, my Lords, many—many of the judgments of this court will be reversed.
This conclusive spate of oratory, thunderously cheered from the gallery, brought the Confederate prisoners to the close of a trial in which they had all behaved well. Blackburne and the other judges put on their black caps and Justice Doherty told Meagher that with MacManus and O’Donohoe he too would be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, to be there hanged by the neck, et cetera. Meagher’s fellow prisoners, expecting him to be acquitted, waited for him to come down the stairwell from the court, from the enraptured and weeping gallery to the holding cells. ‘We received him at the end of the corridor, and through the iron gateway grasped his hand. He laughed quietly when he met us. “I am guilty and convicted for the old country … Come into the cell, and let me have my dinner.” ’
It became known in Clonmel that the four condemned were to be conveyed to Dublin under an escort of dragoons. The prisoners were ordered to pack and hurried out of the gaol at three o’clock in the morning, and were far on their route before daylight. Several young men were arrested by the military earlier that past night while holding a secret but premature rescue meeting in a glen outside the town.
While the Clonmel trials were in progress, Duffy in Newgate had been brought by one of his visitors a sturdy rope ladder. He had raised with O’Doherty the idea of escape to America. Through some of their visitors, Duffy and O’Doherty arranged for a small vessel to be hired, and a date in late October was given for an attempt at escape, to be made from a prison courtyard at midnight.
But at noon on the day of the proposed escape, O’Doherty saw the governor and deputy-governor of Newgate, and an official from the Castle, conversing earnestly with a guard Duffy had thought sympathetic to the escape. Duffy tried to run with the ladder to the ‘jakes,’ the latrines, and drop it in. The governor and his colleagues got to his cell door before he could do it. In punishment, Duffy and O’Doherty were moved out of their rooms and locked in a stone cell under a double guard. The traducing guard, Hutchinson, displayed the near pathological duality of loyalties within the one breast, the duality many considered the true national disease. He told the authorities that though he had co-operated in preventing the escape, he remained a devout Confederate. Dublin Castle, having first rewarded him, now sacked him.
Kevin Izod O’Doherty, beloved of Eva, was tried a third time in Green Street on 30 October. ‘On this occasion the jury were more securely packed,’ said Duffy. They found him guilty but strongly recommended him to mercy. The panel of judges sentenced him to ten years’ transportation. O’Doherty’s fellow editor D’Alton Williams was found not guilty. His servant swore—a Catholic witness swearing on the King James Bible—that Williams had been ill for the two weeks before his arrest, and could not therefore have written the articles to which the Crown took exception.
O’Doherty was now moved from Newgate prison across the river to a cell in Richmond bridewell, a prison for civil cases, where Martin was already in place. He found the Clonmel condemned—O’Brien, Meagher, MacManus, O’Donohoe—were exalted by the support and outrage of their fellow countrymen. Even the Warder, organ of Orange-ism, complained that O’Brien savoured ‘his delicious immortality’ with ‘the irrepressible complacency of a gratified coxcomb.’ The Young Irelanders had, by the nature of their sentence, been ‘divested of their farcicality.’
Lady O’Brien was not as grateful as others for her son’s services to the Irish people. She sent him nineteen closely written pages marked Political Duty. ‘Persons are in very great error who suppose that men may disturb the country to promote political changes without being morally guilty.’ But sweeter missives came in, a typical one from an Irish doctor named O’Hanlon in Wisconsin: ‘how I would like to be your ordinary medical attendant in the fertile and happy territory of Wisconsin … where souls are free and tyrants taint not nature’s bliss.’
O’Brien would always ruggedly maintain that his resistance was not a moral violation but a crucial gesture of defiance. There would be many references in his later journal to Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis and Platea, physically lost but morally won battles of antiquity. If these threw an improving light upon the Battle of Ballingarry, as winter came on in Richmond he refused to renounce the impulses of the summer of 1848. The apology to the British government for which his family waited, as a prelude to possible official mercy, would never be offered.
Nor was he the only unrepentant Irish prisoner that autumn. In Mayo, Mr Michael Shaughnessy, the Assistant Barrister, a court officer who travelled on circuit with judges, complained that many of the children he interviewed pleaded with him for sentences of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. Shaughnessy noted that the children of Mayo were ‘almost naked, hair standing on end, eyes sunken, lips pallid, protruding bones of little joints visible.’ At Westport, one such youth, Dominick Ginelly, a 17-year-old charged with stealing hemp rope, said he would do it again if only he could be transported. The judge obliged by giving him a 7-year sentence. John Austin, twenty-two, and Charles Ruddy, fifteen years old, were ‘honest people’s children from Clare Island,’ where more than a third of the population had died. The boys were found guilty of sheepstealing and transported for seven years. Michael Gavin, Thomas Joyce, Martin McGinty, John McGrene, John English, all about seventeen, pleaded with Shaughnessy to be transported. A youth named Owen Eady said that even if he wore chains he would have something to eat. Mr Shaughnessy wrote, ‘I am satisfied that they have no alternative but starvation or the commission of crime.’
Many of Mr Shaughnessy’s boys were transported to Van Diemen’s Land, though one, Michael Gavin, perished in Spike Island. Dominick Ginelly, the hemp rope thief, and Thomas Joyce, after a considerable wait in prison, arrived in Hobart in March 1851 aboard the London. Martin McGinty was on the Blenheim which put into Hobart in July 1851. Eady travelled on the Rodney from Cork and did not arrive until December. Their descendants are at large today in Australia.
In Lismany, in that season when Mayo boys pleaded with the court, Esther Larkin had like a million others at first thought herself lucky. The potato flowers had been in expected, normal bloom. But when her sons drove their spades into the earth for the tubers, the fruit was again reduced to a black rotten mass by contact with the air. So began what was for her and her region the worst year of that Famine T
revelyan said had ended. Over this coming winter and on into the summer of 1849, Esther, unless saved by a financial input from Hugh, would witness what was for the country south of Ballinasloe a new level of hunger and thus of disease amongst locals. There would in fact now be a higher death-rate than in those previously stricken regions, West Cork, Mayo, Connemara, which no longer possessed enough population to figure as highly in the statistics.
By this stage the resources of many proprietors such as the Seymours were near exhausted. The Marquess of Sligo, a 28-year-old progressive, had to borrow to pay the poor rate and was rumoured to be living off rentals of the family box at the Covent Garden Opera. Lord Clarendon at Dublin Castle applied to Lord John Russell for a loan from the Treasury to meet the new emergency of the 1848 blight. Lord John replied negatively, ‘the reason being rage against Ireland on account of its faction, its mendicancy, its ingratitude.’
The results of the blight of 1848, extending bitterly into the following year, had brought what modern aid bodies call ‘compassion fatigue’ in British donors. But Patrick and Hugh, if able to get seeds, may, like other East Galway people, have planted a few turnips as a hedge against potato blight. Rural society had fallen into two camps, turnip growers and turnip thieves. In the barony of Longford, people had to stay up at night to guard their turnips from frantic men and women who came to dig them up with spades muffled with cloth. The thieving of vegetables was a matter of shame, social and moral, and for both parties. Before the Famine, a man or woman gave away food to show they had a stake in the earth and were agents of Christ’s charity. Now man-traps were dug in turnip fields.
Esther was forced back on whatever little store of yellow meal she retained from the now closed Ballinasloe commissary. This despised foodstuff was the perverse sacrament of the Famine: once you were forced to consume it, death began to make its claim! Even to throw something more accustomed, a cabbage head say, into the mess of beggar’s meal—a combination named brawlum—redeemed a person from utter shame and terror. Some in this earth of gentle hills and peat bogs were furtively eating ashes, and asking God’s forgiveness for making such a foul choice.
Since October 1847 the British Association had been feeding 200,000 orphan children under a scheme devised by its chief agent in Ireland, that remarkable Count Strzelecki, who in his avocation of explorer knew the same line of country as Hugh Larkin. Paul Strzelecki, now nearly fifty years of age, and still living off modest income from family property on the Polish-Russian border, had at first involved himself as agent of the association for the district of County Mayo. Like modern aid administrators, he quickly saw how a lack of storage facilities made hunger worse. The town of Clifden, he observed, ‘exhibits a most astonishing absence of the common agencies by which, in towns and markets, food is concentrated, stored, and re-distributed.’ From Westport, Mayo, he had assured Association headquarters in London, ‘You may now believe anything which you hear and read, because what I actually see surpasses what I ever read of past and present calamities.’ On Ireland’s disastrous western fringe, he had devised a scheme for feeding children warm broth and rye bread through the agency of local schools.
By the summer of 1847, Strzelecki had become the chief agent of the British Association in Ireland. He extended his system of feeding children broadly, the cost of which he estimated at one third of a penny per child per day. Schools sprang up in profusion, chiefly to act as feeding centres under the supervision of local clergy. Captain Mann of the Kilrush Union wrote to the association on 14 February 1848, ‘I cannot tell you how much benefit is derived from feeding the destitute children at the Schools; it prevents the little creatures from starving, and improves their habits, and leaves the parents free to seek for their subsistence.’
In late 1847, the British Association in London passed resolutions acceding to Trevelyan’s demand that a limited list of ‘distressed unions’ be drawn up, in which all further relief would be concentrated. The names of twenty-two unions were selected by Strzelecki. In practice his children’s scheme and aid to Poor Law unions continued in many more unions than that, until in the summer of O’Brien’s uprising, he began to run out of funds. Lord John Russell promised that the government would take up the burden of feeding children, but only in the unions on the list of twenty-two.
The admirable expenditures of the British Association, founded at the start of 1847, came to £603,535 8 shillings 2 pence as at 25 December 1848. Between October 1847 and July 1848, when his funds for the purpose ran out, Strzelecki’s children’s and Poor Law unions’ operation distributed £249,386. In the same period the British government expended £156,060 on relief.
As the British Association’s resources gave out, it was warned by the newly knighted Treasury Secretary Sir Charles Trevelyan not to devise any new programmes ‘which would produce the impression that the lavish charitable system of last season is intended to be renewed.’ In disbanding itself, the association gently attacked the critics of aid to Ireland: ‘any evils which may have accompanied its distribution have been far more than counter-balanced by the great benefits.’
Strzelecki himself refused payment for his services to the British Association. But in Lismany’s harshest season, he—like the world—was turning to other causes and possibilities.
12
SHIPPING YOUNG IRELAND
Below decks, chairs, casks, books, basins, trunks, jugs, hat cases, spoons, every conceivable article of dress and furniture … all came cracking, crashing, spitting … in one miscellaneous heap together, mingling and interweaving with coats, tablecloths, suspenders, Scotch plaids, shirt collars, slippers and pillow cases, utterly effacing all signs and tokens of our life, and burying us alive, like the citizens of Pompeii, beneath the complicated ruins of commerce, conviviality, literature, and the fine arts.
Thomas Francis Meagher,
on a storm aboard Swift, 1849
In Van Diemen’s Land, Britain’s furthest penal colony of all, the ramrod governor Sir William Denison received a dispatch from Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies, dated 5 June 1849, which told him that the British government had decided to commute the sentences of the condemned Irish State prisoners and send them to him. The miscreant journalists John Martin and Kevin O’Doherty would also be sent. The dispatch instructed Denison that, with consideration of the prisoners’ superior rank in society, they were not at first to be subjected to hard labour, for that would aggrieve domestic and international opinion. If the captain of the ship which brought them to Van Diemen’s Land reported well on their behaviour, Denison was to offer them special paroles, tickets-of-leave, ‘placing them as far as you can in separate Districts at a distance from the Capital.’ If they misbehaved, they could be ‘thrown back among the ordinary offenders.’
Denison was a strong-willed military engineer who had at one stage worked in that same dockyard at Ireland Island, Bermuda, where John Mitchel had lately been a prisoner. He had also been involved in the building of the Rideau Canal in Canada. A scholar in matters to do with forestry, geology and natural history, he had a two-dimensional attitude to the penal system: talk of reform was ‘maudlin sentimentality.’ In his robust mid-forties, his soul-mates were his mother in London, to whom he confided all his administrative problems, and his wife Caroline, a vigorous helpmeet who agreed thoroughly with his principles. She already thought that ‘if, indeed, he might put them into grey jackets and send them to wheel barrows on the wharf, or break stones on the roads, like any ordinary convict, it would simplify the matter very considerably.’
The subjects of the dispatch had been living many months in Dublin’s Richmond bridewell. There Meagher’s exuberance the previous autumn was unbounded when he received news of the escape of Michael Doheny, safe in New York. Meagher wrote to Doheny, ‘I made the infernal corridors ring with a shout of glee—and in this manifestation I was ably assisted by fourteen other voices amongst which Smith O’Brien’s was thrillingly effective.’ O’Brien reported to his sis
ter Anne Martineau in Wales that the end of autumn and the stony environment had brought him lumbago. But though the costs of Queen vs W. S. O’Brien, Esqu. MP were £381 18 shillings and 4 pence, about half of what was considered a gentlemanly income, stately O’Brien was able to live frugally well in Richmond. He was permitted to occupy two rooms in the residence of the governor and had the use of two courtyards with gardens. A servant from Cahirmoyle was provided by his wife Lucy, and his food was supplied amply from Dromoland, Cahirmoyle and the Dublin markets. His lawyers had filed a writ of error before the House of Lords. Meagher and MacManus did not join in this appeal in case they might be thought afraid of a martyr’s death. But O’Brien, driven both by principle and the acute fear of forfeiting his estate, his children’s inheritance, to the Crown, wanted to test the legitimacy of the concept of treason in occupied Ireland.
During their confinement, Meagher read in his book-lined cell; MacManus had got a box of tools and was turning out knick-knacks; and O’Doherty, who had not received a death sentence, was studying huge medical tomes for a surgical future. O’Donohoe was able to live like the others through the generosity of O’Brien, Meagher and various Confederate supporters. He fell into depressions though on what would befall his wife and child. Unfortunately O’Brien and MacManus found his fits both of depression and manic exuberance irksome. He was awkward in drink.
In windy December in Bermuda, three convicts from John Mitchel’s hulk had tried to row away to North America but were recovered and flogged. Mitchel watched the ceremonial punishment administered before lines of convicts and soldiers on the breakwater, and felt oppressed; another fillip to the asthma which kept him awake at night. Dr Hall, medical superintendent of the entire convict establishment, advised him that he would not get better in Bermuda. ‘I assure you many hundreds of men have died here, who need not have died.’ Mitchel could be moved out if he would consent to petition the colonial governor. The absolutist Mitchel declared, ‘I will never, by throwing myself on the mercy of the English Government, confess myself to be a felon.’ But after further vicious bouts, he decided to apply to the governor of Bermuda. His appeal had not been answered by Christmas Day, 1848, when there was a service on deck, with the entire hulk reeking pleasantly of plum pudding.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 27