A jolly enough Christmas 1848 was spent by the Richmond prisoners. William Smith O’Brien dispatched a charming note to his mother, Lady O’Brien, inviting her to dine at three o’clock with the family ‘at our Christmas table.’ Grace O’Brien, as ever, found Meagher amusing, and Lucy did her best to chuckle while having at her breast the recently born seventh child of the O’Briens, a son. O’Brien was not as worried about his land as he had been, she noticed. On the advice of his lawyers, O’Brien intended to place his property in trust, to secure it for his family, should he be executed, Cahirmoyle being managed for his eldest son, Edward, by his brother and trustee Robert. Lucy and the children would live at Dromoland Castle, which was huge enough to absorb the brood. It seemed a wise provision at the time.
Some 12,000 miles removed from Richmond prison and Lismany’s bleak crossroads, Mary and Hugh faced each other over ham and poultry in the normal sweltering but enthusiastically celebrated Australian holiday season, and doused memory and imagination in rum, ale and the bounty of the country, all at a table where their first Australian child Tom sat, and their newborn infant daughter Anne was at Mary’s breast, and where a strapping adolescent Michael O’Flynn, who had learned to ride and crack a whip and rope steers in Monaro, had a seat as well.
O’Brien’s brother Robert, managing Cahirmoyle, wrote to his brother in February 1849 with restrained compassion both for William and the local peasantry. ‘I regret your absence for the sake of the poor as well as for your own account … The men called able-bodied who are evidently stumbling with fever, dysentery and the course of famine are now refused all relief.’ The local overseer of public works had told Robert that two thirds of the men on these works were suffering from dysentery.
In East Galway in those early months of 1849, a new epidemic of cholera descended as the Famine’s final deft killer. By March 1849 it dropped people in their tracks in Lismany and Laurencetown. Peasant women who had always dressed elegantly for Sunday Mass were now clothed in shreds. One of Ballinasloe’s two hated pawnbrokers, William Hines, told the Poor Law commissioners: latterly wearing apparel has not been much afforded; instead articles such as blankets and sheets were being pawned indicating a more advanced stage of distress.’
Cholera increased the number of cremations, some of which Esther beheld with a numbed horror. ‘Michael Garvey got the cholera, and he and the entire household succumbed … He had a daughter, and had she survived she would have been the finest girl in the parish of Dún Chaoin. Somebody went to their cottage door, and could see that they were all dead. All they did then was to set fire to the thatch on the cottage, burn it, and knock in the walls.’
Because people were now without remaining resources to take into the summer, in June 1849, about the time Earl Grey was writing to Governor Denison of Van Diemen’s Land, the highest number of people ever was sheltering in Irish workhouses—227,000 inmates. The following month the highest number on outdoor relief occurred: 800,000. So, in the summer of 1849, over one million people would be in receipt of relief, despite the fact that close on two million were already dead or emigrated.
In seeing her community shrink, Esther suffered like others a peculiarly daunting sense of being in a cursed place in which the populace was subject to a bitter culling. She had until about 1846 lived in a world of natural increase in population. Not any more. Even the bare facts for the barony of Longford supported her perception. At the start of the Famine there were nearly 6,000 habitations. By the end of the decade there were less than 3,900. The population similarly fell from more than 33,000 to 21,000. The smaller electoral division of Laurencetown dropped from 1,650 people to just over 1,000.
But there were to be no further universal blights for now. In an altered Ireland, hunger and fever imperceptibly relaxed their fierce disciplines. At the end of the attrition, Esther, according to local memory, was still standing, and her sons certainly were, already knowing more of humanity than was safe. At some time in the 1840s Seymour’s lease on Somerset House expired and was taken over by a Scots family named Pollack, who gained a local reputation as ruthless evictors. Esther continued to walk to work, however, for the Seymours, who took over a local property named Grove Hill, and she laboured a few years there until her sons were fully grown and took over her care.
Gavan Duffy, the man most likely to share Mitchel’s exile, would be tried on the present charges five times without a verdict being reached, the last trial closing on Good Friday, 1849: ‘Dies Irae but with the hope of resurrection.’ At midnight, with the court ‘as crowded as a theatre on a command night,’ the Sheriff announced that the jury could not agree. ‘A shout of triumph, that made the roof ring, burst from the audience…. Bankers, magistrates, manufacturers, desired to pronounce a verdict of not guilty. They were locked up all night, and twelve hours reflection added one more to the number for acquittal.’ The Attorney-General admitted him to bail, and it was clear Duffy would not be further prosecuted: ‘so I saw the daylight again. I walked out amongst stalwart men whose manly faces were wet with tears.’
The writ of error against the finding of high treason which O’Brien had taken was heard in the House of Lords in May 1849. It was based on a claim that the statute of Edward III had defined treason as levying ‘war against the King in his realm.’ Ireland had not been a realm of Edward III. But the Lords dismissed the writ, and their judgment caused not a ripple of agitation in Thomas Meagher, who was planning parties. ‘My dear O’Farrell,’ he wrote to Michael O’Farrell, junior counsel to O’Loghlen and Butt, ‘we shall have a little Soiree here on Monday evening, and we all jointly unite in requesting the very considerable pleasure of your company … The Governor has most kindly given us the use of his apartments, and desires me to intimate to all our friends his wish that they should ask at the hatch (that is, at the outward gate) for the Governor.’
Mitchel had heard at last, in his cell in a Bermuda hulk, of the death sentences against O’Brien and the others, and complained in frustration that a ‘mighty game of sixty years’ was beginning, and yet he would have ‘through all these crowded years of life, to sit panting here … and rot among Bermudian blattae beetles.’
But there was now a chance he might escape the beetles. A committee of officers selected Mitchel amongst men to be sent to the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. This new penal venue had been chosen because the populace of New South Wales had baulked at receiving more convicts. ‘Me vel extremos Numidarum in agros, Classe releget,’ wrote Mitchel. ‘He banishes me therefore by sea to the furthest fields of the Numidians.’
The transport for Africa, Neptune, 700 tons, arrived in Bermuda on 5 April that year. Its officers socialised on the hulks. Though Mitchel was delighted to find from the newspapers brought by them that Duffy had been released, he thought Duffy’s defence was ‘wretched work.’ Duffy had Father Mathew in court to say that he was pious, the novelist Carleton to say that he was a solid citizen, and he had also pretended that the articles for which he was prosecuted were written by someone else.
Members of Parliament, Mitchel also discovered, had been asking questions about his kindly treatment. Was he convict No. 2014, it was asked in the House, or was he not a convict at all? Mitchel himself saw the logic of these questions; he despised the policy of pretending he was a convict but making special accommodations for him. But as the cedars of Bermuda receded, he found perhaps that some special accommodations also marked his time on Neptune. At sea he was permitted to walk the poop deck, but in silence, while far forward the other prisoners in their Bermuda uniforms swarmed over the deck. The captain and mates would not risk talking to him. The biblical instructor, a Glaswegian, immune to fear of parliamentary questions, loaned him books.
By July 1849, Neptune had tacked back and forth three times across the Equator looking for winds. The drinking water aboard ‘has grown very bad, black, hot and populous with living creatures.’ Seven prisoners had died. The transport turned towards Pernambuco in Brazil to re-provision. When,
off the hip of South America, rain came, ‘I went out to the gangway, stark naked, and stood there awhile, luxuriating in the plenteous shower-bath.’ Soon there was the added pleasure of mooring in Recife, Pernambuco province’s chief port. From his strolling place on the poop deck, Mitchel was delighted after the monotony of ocean to see the vigorous vegetable life on the mountains, and the sides of fresh beef, panniers of yams, limes and oranges, being brought aboard. Most significantly, watching, he beheld for the first time ‘a slave in his slavery—I mean a merchantable slave, a slave of real money-value, whom a prudent man will, in the way of business, pay for and feed afterwards.’ The state of the slave carrying the fruit and beef aboard seemed preferable to that of Irish peasants. ‘Is it better, then, to be the slave of a merciful master and a just man, or to be serf to an Irish land-appropriator?’ It was a question that in time would harry him and devour his sons.
The same day Earl Grey was drafting the Denison dispatch, 5 June 1849, O’Brien, O’Donohoe, Meagher and MacManus were called out of their rooms at Richmond prison into the yard to hear a letter from Sir Thomas Redington announcing that the death sentences had been commuted to transportation for life. O’Brien still thought a pardon a possibility and did not consider transportation a legal option. In Van Diemen’s Land too, he would be removed not only from the comfort of his family, but from the support, comfort and faith of the Irish.
Descending the staircase from O’Brien’s rooms that day, Sir Colman O’Loghlen and the young counsel Michael O’Farrell met Lady O’Brien and William’s sister Grace ascending. ‘Oh my son, my poor son,’ exclaimed Lady O’Brien. Grace told them in passing, ‘He will be transported at seven o’clock tonight.’ Indeed, a transport named Mount Stewart Elphinstone had arrived in Cork, and it was intended the prisoners be sent to join it. The immediate and engrossing game for O’Brien and the others was to ensure Elphinstone, also loading general convicts from Spike Island, left without them. O’Loghlen and O’Farrell rushed off for Dublin Castle to find Redington, but it was Saturday evening and they could not. O’Loghlen surmised the Dublin Castle authorities had chosen a Saturday to act because it would not be possible to get a writ of Habeas Corpus, it having by now been restored, out of any judge on a Saturday night or Sunday, and by Monday the prisoners would be on a steamer to Cork.
Going back to the prison, O’Farrell found a police van in the courtyard and the prisoners—his friend Tom Meagher calling out something whimsical—lined up to enter it. As the prisoners and O’Farrell argued for a delay, an order came to postpone the movement. The escorts of dragoons and mounted police trotted away. Towards midnight Butt, O’Loghlen and O’Farrell raced along to the Merrion Square house of Baron Pennefather, a friend of the O’Brien family. When a servant admitted them, Pennefather descended the stairs in his dressing gown, consulted Redington’s order, heard the arguments of the lawyers, and at once issued a writ. The Whig government would now need to pass an enabling Act to make it lawful to transport the condemned men to Australia. Though O’Doherty and Martin were not protected by this technicality, for the moment they were also spared a sudden move.
O’Brien’s friends in the House of Commons, including Chisholm Anstey, a Young Irelander, and Sir Lucius O’Brien, were assigned the job of trying to delay the enabling bill, since transportation meant their rebellion had been branded a felony. In the meantime, while Governor Denison of Van Diemen’s Land awaited him, young Meagher expatiated on his politics to a visitor of uncertain identity who took notes. This supposed red republican showed a sentimental leaning towards an Irish monarchy of the old Gaelic type. He considered a republic the highest order of government, but one which required a nearly impossible level of intelligence and virtue amongst the citizens. However, ‘Had the Irish people fought and been victorious,’ this unspecified visitor wrote, ‘Meagher would have insisted upon a republic as a compensation for their blood, and in honour of their heroism.’ At the end of all his speeches he was like O’Connell in trying to avoid being closely identified with the atheistic or deistic revolutionary movements of Europe. ‘He did not desire to import, as he often said to me, any of the “raw modernisms” of the Continental Revolutions.’ This view of Meagher, no doubt reasonably accurate, was nonetheless intended for ultimate publication and designed to exculpate him with all those who considered him a red and a heretic.
Kevin O’Doherty and John Martin were roused at five o’clock on 16 June, given an hour to pack and say goodbye, and, without a chance for O’Doherty to scribble something to Eva, taken at the gallop across town attended ‘by a nearly complete regiment of dragoons,’ and put aboard a warship, the Trident, for Cork. There they were transferred straight to the Elphinstone, which already had on board 163 English prisoners from Pentonville, Millbank and the hulks at Woolwich, and 70 Irish convicts loaded at Cork. The captain’s orders, O’Doherty and Martin were told, were to deliver the entire penal mélange to Sydney, and receive further orders there from the governor of New South Wales, FitzRoy. While O’Doherty and Martin were certainly bound for Van Diemen’s Land, it was correctly suspected that the others were all to go to the convict settlement of Moreton Bay, more than 600 miles north of Sydney.
On Elphinstone, a number of cabins had been specially built for the State prisoners, each of which contained a mahogany sofa. O’Doherty and Martin expected that the rest of the State prisoners would join them in this space. In the meantime, Captain Loney permitted O’Doherty to receive last letters and poetry from his pure, betrothed, heroic Eva. He read them for comfort and was cheered by Martin, who would prove adept in dealing with the younger man’s depression. But no one else would be joining them. The debate on the enabling bill, and its passage through the Commons and Lords, occupied weeks.
In Richmond, MacManus now gleefully told the young lawyer O’Farrell, ‘You will doubtless be surprised to hear that we have a new ally—Viz the cholera—There are three cases on board “The Elphinstone” yesterday…. Would it not be well for some member to move an amendment that we should be allowed to transport ourselves, and that the money it will cost the Govt. be applied to the relief of the dying in Connaught?’ Four days later, on 28 June, the Elphinstone weighed anchor without O’Brien and the other three—a victory of sorts. As the ship sailed out of Cobh, the guns of Spike Island and from moored naval vessels thundered out a salute for the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession. Already, in fact, Clarendon the Lord Lieutenant had been informed that despite cholera in Dublin, the queen, her consort and family would visit Ireland, as an antidote to the virus of subversion.
O’Doherty and Martin, isolated aft by a nervous master and by Surgeon Moxey, were permitted access to the deck once the ship left Cobh, but had to retire to their cabins by nine, and only the master and the surgeon were to address them. Fortunately the Catholic physician and the slightly desiccated Newry Protestant landowner liked each other greatly. They gave each other nicknames—‘Saint Kevin,’ the rigorously chaste saint of Glendalough, for O’Doherty, and ‘John Knox’ for the Presbyterian Martin.
Elphinstone was far gone out into the Atlantic when the House of Commons voted the enabling bill through. Sir Lucius, having lost the legislative fight, crossed to Dublin to see his brother in Richmond and console him with the fact that Earl Grey had given assurances ‘to the effect that no indignity should be offered to him on the passage or afterwards.’ Devoted Lucy wrote to Redington to ask whether O’Brien would be able to receive drafts of money in Van Diemen’s Land, and was wrongly reassured that of course he could.
Tom Meagher was still talking politics with his visitors. ‘Walking one evening with me in the garden of Richmond Prison,’ wrote Meagher’s unnamed recorder, ‘—the week of his transportation … he said, “Should our country be born again, she must be baptized in the old Irish Holy Well.” ’ Meagher, who loved a nice image, would find that this one—despite the term ‘baptized’—ran him into trouble with the clergy. What was this ‘old Irish Holy Well?’ It seemed to
the clergy to bespeak Celtic myth, and no doubt French deism, the European belief that an architect God had made the earth but abandoned its further functioning to human reason.
Lucy and Grace had proposed coming on to Van Diemen’s Land by passenger vessel to keep William company. He wrote his response to Lucy in verse.
Yes! I forbid our children dear
To share their father’s lot
Nor fear however lone and drear
To be by them forgot.
Meagher had no women of his family in a position to make similar offers, but was typically well prepared for transportation. He paid Henry Fitzgibbon over £19 for clothing, including a rifle-green cloak. From Wright & Foxley he equipped himself with feint-ruled notebooks, pencils, indiarubber, envelopes. He had also ordered a rug and counterpanes, and paid £9 for chests. From Stephen Phelan, bookseller, he had ordered a mini-library—The Life of Petrarch, Punch’s Almanac of 1846, Shelley’s Essays, a multi-volume history of Germany, Kohl’s Ireland, Coningsby by Disraeli, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.
On 9 July, at nine in the morning, the prisoners were informed that they would be leaving for Van Diemen’s Land at twelve noon. For Patrick O’Donohoe, the meeting with his wife and children in the prison yard that morning was a dismal affair. He left for Van Diemen’s Land with only 11 shillings and 6 pence to his name. Lady O’Brien, Grace and Lucy were there to say goodbye, but soon all four State prisoners were seated a little stunned, facing each other in a wagon rolling out of a back entrance of Richmond prison towards the port of Dublin. Fifty mounted police with carbines and pistols, three troops of dragoons, and a company of the 6th Carbineers escorted the prison wagon. As the vehicle neared Pigeon House, a fortress by the harbour, the prisoners were able to observe through a small window that artillerymen were standing by their cannon and boatloads of armed sailors had landed from naval vessels. The four State prisoners were rushed down steps to ship’s boats, which pulled away immediately towards the 10-gun brig Swift, their ship. O’Brien wrote that after the long eight months in Richmond prison, ‘in monotonous though not disagreeable residence,’ and despite ‘the pain incidental to departure’ he felt a ‘short-lived sentiment of release.’
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 28