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

by Thomas Keneally

  From the Coleman House, the family moved to lodgings at the house of a Knoxville lady. The family were visited by some very pleasant Tennessean citizens, among them one of Mitchel’s most enduring friends, the personable Knoxville circuit district attorney, Mr William G. McAdoo. McAdoo was in the strange position of having inherited some slaves, yet believing in the preservation of the Union even at the expense of abolition. One day he took Mitchel up 35 miles into the blue, vapour-shrouded ridges in the foothills of that lovely stretch of Alleghanies now called the Great Smoky Mountains. This was remote but lovely country, intensely green in the valley bottoms, which local people called coves. The forests were abundant in timber and game; the locals were tough Scots-Irish whose forebears had driven the Cherokees out in the eighteenth century and had barely wandered since. Through a rocky, forested gorge, McAdoo and Mitchel entered an exquisite valley or cove named Tuckaleechee, at the present town of Townsend in Blount County. The brawling Little River rushed through Tuckaleechee, and above it splendid escarpments rose. Mitchel returned to Knoxville enthused. The cove was remote from politics, abolition and urban fretfulness. Like many turbulent men, he saw the world’s frenzy as the cause of his own feverishness, and believed that all he needed for redemption was a pastorale.

  Although happy at the prospect of settling down again—Jenny had written to a friend, ‘I am sick and tired of this changing … Of all our household goods we brought only our piano and linen.’ (The piano was for Minnie, who was expected to keep practising.) Jenny had doubts about this latest plan.

  ‘When we do get a place, it may be twenty miles from a neighbour, and the truth is I think that Mr M will tire of that before I do.’ Jenny also suspected that with herself and the children safely settled, Mitchel might start for Ireland any day, appear amongst his fellow countrymen and call on them to seize the chance of an Irish republic.

  On 1 April 1855, Mitchel and his second son James started on foot for Tuckaleechee Cove to look for likely farms, and found a 133¼-acre mountain farm on the Little River. A two-room log cabin was located—as Mitchel would have liked it to be—on the mountain slope; of all houses in the Cove, closest to the clouds and thunder. Though Swan, McAdoo and other friends tried to dissuade him, he bought this farm. The deed, registered on 8 May, had an informality to it: ‘Beginning at a stake on the bank of Little River corner to Frederick Rushes’ Survey thence with the Same south fifty three West forty chain to a Hickory …’ The price was $1,550.

  Tennessee was far from Meagher’s desires. New York held what he sought. He had been studying law with Judge Robert Emmet, and was encouraged by Court of Common Pleas Judge Charles Daly, a good friend of the Barlows and the Townsends. As a result of these connections, Meagher was admitted to the New York Bar in September 1855. He hoped to achieve the same glittering American careers as had Barlow and Daly, and thus be a valid husband to Elizabeth Townsend. As he was a foreigner—he could not yet legally take citizenship—his admission required a special order of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, but these matters were arranged through the Democrat connections of O’Gorman and others.

  And in the midst of the outlay of these energies he persuaded Peter Townsend that he was a proper husband. Neither the canon law nor the Townsends wanted a full-scale St Patrick’s Cathedral wedding. Meagher enthusiastically exchanged marriage vows with Elizabeth on 14 November 1855, in a small ceremony at the residence of Archbishop Hughes in Madison Avenue. Elizabeth, possibly to save her father’s old Yankee feelings, had not yet turned Catholic—though she would after a few years become a devout one. The New York Times noted the union in a sneering way, claiming Peter Townsend had disinherited his daughter. This was an absurd statement, not least because of the fondness of Mr Townsend for his children and grandchildren, abundantly apparent in his letters to the Barlows and his comments on Elizabeth. In any case, it suited all parties for the couple to move almost at once into the Townsend house on Fifth Avenue with Peter and Mrs Townsend, a move not usual in cases of disinheritance.

  Meagher wrote to O’Brien of his ‘noble and beautiful American wife … so intelligent, so cultivated, so generous, so gentle and unaffected.’

  He had made a partnership with a lawyer named Campbell, and they rented an office in Ann Street, near City Hall, the courts, and haunts of the denizens of that Democrat faction named Tammany. To supplement his earnings, he needed to continue to lecture. He had a crowd of 5,000 people in the Music-Hall, Boston; 3,000 at the Tabernacle at New York. He did not plan to be always on a train, however, orating his way around the country.

  In East Tennessee, Mitchel was astonished to hear that his old colleague, and now enemy, Gavan Duffy had gone voluntarily to the Australian colonies; even though they were by now transformed by gold and by new institutions, he found it difficult to comprehend that a man who had struggled so vigorously through many trials to escape transportation to Australia was now so thoroughly severing all his connections to go there of his own choice. Yet Ireland itself seemed dormant. No one expected much of parliamentary activity, not least Gavan Duffy, Member of Parliament himself. The failure of the Tenant Rights Association and the Irish Party in Parliament, Duffy told Martin, was due to Archbishop Cullen, who suspected Duffy of being anticlerical, and was willing to use his spiritual authority to frustrate him. ‘I have laboured till my health broke down,’ Duffy told O’Brien. ‘I have neglected my family and lived only for the Irish cause, and at every point I have found myself thwarted.’ He asked the newly freed O’Brien and others who had experienced the Australian colonies for advice on eastern Australia generally, now that it possessed representative government and had cast off convictism. Despite dust and flies, he was told the climate was vigorous and books could be had just as in London and Dublin. In March 1855 Duffy had published a report in the Nation of an Australian Declaration of Independence; there was a sense of a glorious future. In a few years, the colony of Victoria, Duffy believed, would grow to a population of a million. ‘And a million men and women of more than ordinary courage and vigour.’ Between elections he extricated himself from Parliament by one of the accepted formulae—taking the meaningless office of Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds. He wrote a famous farewell in the Nation before turning the paper over to younger men. ‘The Irish Party is reduced to a handful … prelates of the Irish Church throng the ranks of our opponents, priest is arrayed against priest, and parish against parish … Till all this be changed, there seems to be no more hope for the Irish Cause than for a corpse on the dissecting table.’ It was an image which in the future would be angrily quoted back to him by members of new revolutionary groups.

  On 5 November 1855, the 39-year-old Duffy, his ten years younger wife, Susan, his 7-year-old daughter and his two sons, sailed from Liverpool.

  In Hugh Larkin’s Australia, to which Duffy was on his way, the poorer Irish free settler often made friends with former felons of similar background. And so the Larkins of Goulburn became friendly with a free settler, Cornelius Sheahan, a native of the area of Mallow in North Cork, and his wife Mary. Cornelius and Mary Sheahan arrived in Sydney in 1854 with their four children, helped by Mary Sheahan’s sister Margaret, who had married an Irish farmer near Goulburn and who had sent home £20 towards the cost of the Sheahan family’s passage to Australia. Cornelius went to work on his brother-in-law John Lawrence’s property, and it was through one of the potential points of contact—buying farm hardware, attending Mass, or in the pub—that he met Larkin. Cornelius had been through the Famine; Hugh through transportation. Between them they understood the entire dialectic of oppression. Mary Shields-Larkin was pregnant at the time this association between Larkin and Sheahan began. The Larkin children spoke to Sheahan’s children with the newest of English-language accents, the long, laconic, sometimes whimsically elliptical accent of Australians. The eldest Larkin, Thomas, born in servitude, was now aged ten years. Goulburn-born Anne was six and John a little more than four, having been born in 1850. Cornelius S
heahan and his family were amongst those available to take care of these three Larkin children, when in the Australian spring of 1854, late October, Mary came to term and called the midwife to her home in Grafton Street.

  After frightful labour, before the eyes of a bewildered midwife, the 36-year-old ex-clothes thief died: her heart stopped on All Saints Day, 1 November 1854. The son she gave birth to survived, and was christened Hugh after his father, an Australian version of the other and earlier Hugh Larkin now nearing manhood in East Galway. As if to point up the futilities of life, the body of an unwanted infant had been found that day in Mulwaree Ponds.

  Hugh Larkin the Ribbonman, it would appear, felt the bereavement fiercely. He had resources he would never have had in Galway—he could afford to advertise his grief and the first listing under death notices in the 6 November Goulburn Herald read: ‘At her residence, Grafton-street, Goulburn, Mary, the wife of Hugh Larkin, after a short illness, leaving three children to mourn her loss.’ (The ‘three’ was a typographical error.) Settlers and former convicts rode in from the bush to drink with Hugh, console him, and remark on the tranquillity in the face of the little thief from Limerick. She was buried at Mortis Street cemetery by a young Irish priest.

  Larkin found himself alone in this the largest town he had ever lived in. Its new golden allure permitted it the pretensions of a boom town in the midlands of England, and his own material fortunes, modest in Australian terms, were considerable enough. Well or ill, he continued to operate his chandler’s shop and had a monument built over Mary’s grave which declared that she had died ‘in Travail of her Seventh Child.’ So Hugh knew of the lost child Bridget. In case Mary should be mixed up with some other Shields, the stone mentioned, as the graves of relatively affluent deceased convicts always did, the name of her ship: ‘per Whitby.’ It declared too that Hugh, four Australian sons and a daughter bewailed her death, and since Hugh and Mary had between them only four surviving children, it must have been Michael O’Flynn who was included in the count.

  The death of Hugh Larkin seemed inherent in the death of his convict wife. By 1857, when Hugh had been three years a widower, the New South Wales Constitution had been finalised and a colonial legislature was in place in Australia. What was in terms of the world then a wide male franchise had been introduced. There was still a property qualification for voters—to be owner of £100 in property value or £10 a year rent—a scale Larkin was perhaps able to meet, given the way property values had boomed since the discovery of gold. Within a year, all property basis for the vote would give way to universal male suffrage. The old Chartist option of secret ballot was about to be introduced in Victoria and then New South Wales. So Hugh was that Chartist dream: a common man on the verge of exercising his franchise. A society which when Hugh arrived on Parmelia had been a penal experiment was now clearly a social experiment.

  Despite the best efforts of republicans such as Dan Deniehy, New South Wales, dependent upon British capital investment, and rendered psychologically dependent by its huge distance from the British Isles, remained loyal to the Crown. The scale of inequities which had provoked rebellion in America and Ireland, however, did not operate in the former penal colonies of Australia. There was not the same pressing basis as elsewhere for wide republican agitation, although Hugh and Cornelius Sheahan, listening to brilliant Dan Deniehy, representing the County of Argyle as an ‘extreme Liberal’ in the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, would have felt the attraction of the republican proposition.

  Only for the native peoples was there no advance; the gold craze and the need of beef and mutton to feed it eroded further their hold on the earth. Brodribb began to run herds and flocks on the Murrumbidgee hundreds of miles to the west of Monaro, near the present town of Deniliquin. The Ngarigo who had gone in the spring into the upper Monaro for Bogong moths were encouraged by mission and government hand-outs of tea, flour and tobacco to go into sedentary reservations either down the escarpment on the coast south of Sydney or in scrubby land south-west of Goulburn. Some males served as police blacktrackers or ill-paid horsemen on pastoral land, and some females as servants. Grief, malnourishment, European disease, alcoholism were the marks of their communities.

  The white community also had notable struggles with alcohol. Dan Deniehy, member for Argyle, had wrestled and embraced that demon, as did that humbler Irish-Australian Hugh Larkin, who had drunk absconders’ moonshine, the solace of the exile, in the remotest Monaro. Over time, Hugh fell into dark ravings, and in 1857, to protect himself and his children, he was hospitalised. The Sheahans and the Goulburn priests nodded sadly over him and his children. The eldest of them, Tom, was now thirteen and already a reliable and muscular blacksmith’s apprentice.

  It was considered a remarkable era, the one in which Hugh went raging downwards. A Sydney-to-London telegraph was now proposed. Yet another goldfield was opening up at Oban Creek. A search for the lost Arctic explorer and former governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Franklin, was under way. Over all this hugeness and energy the queen seemed the immutable and undying high priestess. ‘The Queen is now thirty-eight years of age,’ said the Sydney Morning Herald, as Hugh fought demons in hospital in the week leading up to the celebration of her birthday. ‘She has worn her crown for more than half her life.’

  A notice appeared in the Goulburn Herald for Saturday, 23 May 1857, the rather festive Saturday of the Queen’s Birthday weekend.

  Effects of Intemperance—Yesterday week a man named Hugh Larkin, who for many years had kept ‘a Chandler’s Shop’ in Grafton Street, was conveyed to the hospital, labouring under the effects of excessive intemperance. It is stated that, during the two previous days, he had consumed as much as two gallons of rum. It was found necessary to put him under restraint, and up to the time of his death, which took place on Thursday morning, he continued to rave in a frightful manner.

  So, in his last days, he reattained the fury he had unleashed at the Seymours’ door a quarter of a century before. The cosmic argument he had with himself as he lay dying would have included the old quarrel at Somerset House, the violent arrest, Esther Larkin and his Irish sons, and their too well-imagined hunger. Spike Island was part of his cyclical dispute with God, as was Parmelia, the journey to Monaro, the withering bush loneliness, quarrels with Aborigines and with absconders, Mary Shields arriving full of defensive charm at Coolringdon, and the brisk clarity of the Australian Alps over which Brodribb drove livestock in the Monaro drought seasons. ‘Two or three days before he died he managed to escape from the hospital,’ the Goulburn Herald said of Hugh, ‘and, with nothing but his shirt on, rushed to the nearest public house for a glass of brandy.’ His death certificate said that his date of death was 22 May, and cause of death was delirium tremens. He was forty-seven years of age. ‘The unfortunate man’s wife died from a similar cause about two years ago. They have left several children, we believe, wholly unprovided for.’

  It seems that these last two ideas—Mary’s death from alcoholism and the unprovided-for children—have a Dickensian and moralistic neatness which appealed to a developing rectitude in New South Wales but which were not matched by reality. Mary may have had a taste for liquor, but it is not likely that while fatally giving birth to a child, she had much heart for it. Nor did any of the Larkin children grow up with a sense of having been left unprovided for.

  Hugh, like Mary, was buried in Mortis Street Cemetery, but no monument marks his burial place; if there were any, it has long since crumbled. The Sheahan family and others subsumed the Larkin children. Cornelius was Hugh’s executor and advertised a sale of his merchandise in the Goulburn Herald of Saturday, 23 May, to take place the following Wednesday, ‘The whole of the Stock-in-Trade, Comprising Groceries, Provisions, &C. Terms—Cash.’ Hugh may have had liabilities, but he had been provident enough to authorise executors.

  Hugh and Mary had managed to set in place an indomitable progeny for which the Goulburn Herald gave them little credit. Thomas Larkin, the firs
t child of Shields and Larkin, would marry a Welsh captain’s daughter, Harriet Jones, and settle in Gundaroo near Canberra in 1884, where he was a blacksmith and mail contractor. He died with an excellent reputation in 1921. The last of his seven children, born in Harriet Jones’s late forties, was my mother-in-law.

  John Larkin, born in Goulburn in 1850, perished as a youngish man of thirty-seven years. When his body was railed to Goulburn from his farm in the spring of 1887, the Goulburn Herald advised his friends to meet the train carrying his coffin at Goulburn station. Annie Larkin, the girl born in Goulburn in the wake of her parents’ marriage, would marry Cornelius Sheahan’s son John in 1866. Annie Larkin-Sheahan worked with her husband, blacksmithing on cattle stations near Wilcannia in the far west of New South Wales, and bore seven children. After John Sheahan died of a respiratory illness, she remarried, had three more children, and lived till 1926. The last child of the felon marriage, the Australian Hugh, would flourish, and though he would die in the end in his parents’ town, Goulburn, he would not do so until 1949—outliving his mother by close on a century.

  By the time of Hugh the Ribbonman’s death at the age of forty-seven years, his East Galway sons, Patrick and Hugh, were twenty-six years and twenty-four respectively. Patrick had herded for the Seymours when they left Somerset House, scene of his father’s outrage, and settled at nearby Grove Hill. He married a woman named Eileen Martin and had at least six children, none of whom emigrated. In adolescence Hugh worked a small piece of land near Eyrecourt, but then moved to Killimor. He came to own a pub and a timber mill. The legend is that Patrick Larkin became a Fenian sympathiser and was politically engaged, particularly in the Land Wars of the late 1870s and early 1880s, and that his brother, rather like Edward O’Brien in relationship to William Smith O’Brien, provided a home for his now middle-aged mother, and eschewed radical politics. The blood of both sons is well represented in the areas of Laurencetown, Eyrecourt and Killimor.