Harcourt, in answering, made a reference to O’Reilly’s ‘Prison Breach,’ and this may have helped generate a rumour that, in escaping, O’Reilly had been in violation of a parole. The journalist Roche, who had joined the Pilot in the early 1880s, got a pithy response on the matter from Father McCabe in Waseca County, Minnesota. ‘John Boyle O’Reilly never broke his parole, never having one to break.’ But Sir William Harcourt’s attitude towards John Boyle O’Reilly’s case was certainly influenced by the year’s dynamitings, funded from America. He saw O’Reilly as no better than the Invincibles and the Chicago Triangle.
Harcourt and others would be pleased to find that another former Fenian prisoner, O’Donovan Rossa, did not go un-bloodied for his role as founder of the Skirmishing Fund. A young English woman, giving the name of Mrs Yseult Dudley, called on him in his office in New York. She told him she was anxious to help with operations against England, and Rossa organised to meet her the following morning on a corner of Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan. As Rossa came up to greet her the next day, she drew a revolver and fired five shots at him, only one of which struck home and wounded him. When asked by the New York police why she had committed the crime, Mrs Dudley said, ‘Because he is O’Donovan Rossa.’ Some British newspapers compared Mrs Dudley to Charlotte Corday, who had stabbed the demagogue Marat in his bath. ‘When thirty million English people,’ wrote O’Reilly, ‘wildly cheer a half insane and wholly disreputable murderess, and thirty million people of Irish blood half sympathise with the desperate lunatics who would burn down London—it is time for both sides to pause.’
Though O’Reilly could not go to Canada to address a St Patrick’s Day crowd, it was consistent for him to urge Boston Irish on St Patrick’s Day 1887 to consider that ‘we can do Ireland more good by our Americanism than by our Irishism’; and at the same time to resist any official celebration in Faneuil Hall, a site identified with American revolution, of Queen Victoria’s jubilee. ‘Irishmen should be as thankful for the reign of Victoria as they might be for the plagues of Egypt.’ Still, on the eve of the jubilee, he told a meeting, ‘The man who would raise a finger against an Englishman tomorrow in Boston, is unworthy to be present here today.’
He had been a Bostonian long enough now to absorb a civic pride in the holy places of the American Revolution. He had a place on the committee of a project which combined his passion for Jeffersonian republicanism with his commitment to coloured America—the committee for the construction of a memorial to those who died in the Boston Massacre on the eve of the American rebellion. To O’Reilly the most eloquent amongst the Boston dead was Crispus Attucks, the freed black man who was the first to fall to British bullets, and who symbolically linked American liberty to emancipation and the ascent of black America. In his commemorative poem for the 1888 opening of the massacre memorial on Boston Common, the Crispus Attucks Memorial, O’Reilly elevated Attucks into an American pantheon.
Where shall we seek for a hero, and where shall we find a story?
Our laurels are wreathed for conquest, our songs for completed glory.
But we honour a shrine unfinished, a column uncapped with pride,
If we sing the deed that was sown like seed when Crispus Attucks died.
Though he was still clearly in his prime, men with whom O’Reilly had been fraternally joined in revolution were dying, and death had always a particular impact on an increasingly delicately balanced spirit. On 2 December 1888, Corporal Thomas Chambers died in his early forties at the Carney Hospital in Boston. ‘In his case at least,’ wrote O’Reilly, ‘England’s vengeance was complete: the rebel’s life was turned into a torture.’ O’Reilly had placed him in the hospital six months before his death and had paid his medical expenses, reflecting that Chambers had once been the happiest and merriest, the youngest and strongest man he had known. O’Reilly remembered that for two years, in prison in England, he and Chambers had been chained together whenever they moved, and often had another Fenian, McCarthy, attached to the same chain. ‘McCarthy’s health was quite broken, and he had sunk into a melancholy … I remember one day, when we were marched through the streets of London … with the crowd staring at us, Chambers made McCarthy laugh so heartily that it brought on a fit of coughing, and we had to halt until the poor fellow got his breath.’
Though O’Reilly might have repented of Fenianism, he retained an affection and loyalty for Fenians, and indeed was sensitive to the honour of the Irish in America. Perhaps the clue to his appalling record as a political tipster lay in the fact that, as one of his modern biographers wrote: ‘Political bias at times so ruled this man of passion that even an apparent affront to Irishmen or Catholics was considered a challenge.’ His endorsement of political candidates combined the two requirements that they be both Democrat and pro-Irish.
More than a year before the 1880 elections, O’Reilly began editorialising for Thomas Bayard of Delaware. When the Democrats chose not Bayard but Meagher’s old friend General Winfield Scott Hancock, O’Reilly threw his support behind Scott. And when the new Republican president, Garfield, was assassinated less than a year later by an aggrieved place-seeker, Charles Guiteau, O’Reilly described the assassin as a poisoned flower of the spoils system, and pleaded for civil service reform.
In 1884 O’Reilly led a robust campaign against the Republican party’s presidential candidate James G. Blaine. For the Democrats, he liked Bayard or Ben Butler, but when the Democrats in the end nominated Cleveland to face Blaine, ‘We shall faithfully and earnestly work for the election of Cleveland, the Democratic standard bearer,’ O’Reilly dourly pledged. For, as O’Reilly wrote, ‘Irish Americans have been Democrats not by chance, but by good judgement. Tried in the fires of foreign tyranny, their instincts as well as their historical knowledge of Jeffersonian Democracy, led them to the American party that expressed and supported the true principles of republican government.’
With Cleveland elected—a rare O’Reilly success—O’Reilly himself expected that his Land League friend Patrick A. Collins would be given a senior cabinet post—perhaps Secretary of State. The continued passing over of Collins and the appointment of anglophile Edward Phelps to the US embassy in London turned O’Reilly into a critic of the Cleveland administration. However, in 1888 O’Reilly threw his support behind Cleveland again.
O’Reilly was now in his early forties. He was restless still, but seemed to be driven more by literary than political ambition. Not that he was unpleased to have a part in the expulsion of the British ambassador to Washington, Lord Lionel Sackville West, even if it was initiated through a tricky piece of work by the Republicans. A Republican agent provocateur wrote a letter, purportedly from a British-born American in Pomona, California, asking Sackville West’s advice on who to vote for in the coming elections. Sackville West fell into the trap of suggesting that since the Republican majority voted down what would have been for Great Britain a lenient fisheries treaty, the conciliatory Cleveland should be voted for. When this letter appeared in the press, Irish voters—as the Republican party had hoped—deserted the cause of Cleveland. O’Reilly stayed with him, but demanded that Sackville West be expelled. Cleveland wrote to Secretary of State Bayard saying that Sackville West must be sent away precisely because, ‘John Boyle O’Reilly of the Boston Pilot who was doing good work will falter, or worse, if this is not done.’ When Sackville West went home, the Tory press cried for war. The Daily Chronicle declared: ‘If President Cleveland is of opinion that it consorts with his dignified position to abase himself and his country before the O’Reillys, Collinses and other Irish demagogues, and to reserve his rudeness for accredited diplomatists of friendly powers … it is our duty to resent the insult put upon us as promptly as it was offered.’
O’Reilly’s life was if anything too restive. Years past, in prison, someone had passed The Imitation of Christ under his cell door, with its intimations of the folly of human frenzy. There was a sense in which O’Reilly knew that by his activities he was evading m
ore absolute questions. The confession had been there in In Bohemia.
I am tired of planning and toiling
In the crowded hives of men;
Heart-weary of building and spoiling,
And spoiling and building again.
He relished the summer house in Hull, but did not necessarily have as much of his summer there as his daughters would have liked. Part of his problem was that he now had the full credentials of a literary man. During 1888 he read at the Boston Museum with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Mark Twain. ‘I am now suffering the consequence of overwork,’ he wrote poignantly to a woman editor. ‘My poem for your collection I have had mapped out and partially written for over a month; but now I am stopped by an attack of insomnia. I trust that in a few days I shall be able to finish the poem; but the very thought of my inability aggravates my sleeplessness.’
A Mr Burren asked him to come to Woodstock to read a poem. ‘I am overworking,’ wrote O’Reilly, ‘and I cannot help it for a year or two more … a few years hence, when I shall have “eased up” on the journalistic labour, I shall have my chance of reading a poem at Woodstock.’ He was telling near-strangers of his exhaustion, as if they might have suggestions of ease. He still found time though for great bardic events, and it might have been the apogee when in the summer of 1889 he was selected as the poet for the Plymouth celebration honouring the Pilgrim Fathers. There was considerable mumbling, since the Yankee poets Holmes and Lowell were still alive. But he had an utterly unfeigned admiration for the dissenting founders of Massachusetts, and a facility in identifying a common cause in Irish and dissenters alike against ‘Norman’ tyranny communally suffered.
Here, on this rock, and on this sterile soil,
Began the kingdom not of kings, but men:
Began the making of the world again.
In post-Civil War America it was a popular line, and when O’Reilly boarded the Hull ferry the morning his poem was published in the Globe, other passengers held up their copies of the paper and cheered him. Such praise might have been evanescent, but helped confirm O’Reilly in his role of Boston literary man.
Now O’Reilly was old enough to have protégés. One of them was a young sculptor named John Donoghoe, about whom O’Reilly wrote unsolicited letters of enthusiasm to various important people, including on 2 June 1887 to Governor Ames of Massachusetts. ‘Sending you a copy of Art Review to call your attention to the magnificent Young Sophocles by John Donoghoe the sculptor (he is the gentleman I introduced you to on the Lowell train) … An order from you would be a great benefit at this stage of his life, and he would give you the greatest portrait of the time.’
In the late winter of 1890, O’Reilly, beginning at the Boston Theatre, embarked on what would prove to be his last lecture series, fund-raising for Home Rule. This tour would occupy the spring and early summer and add to his habitual exhaustion, while the Pilot operated in the safe hands of Denis Cashman and Roche. His route sounds like the sort of oratorical Stations of the Cross followed by eager young Meagher years before—Syracuse and Chicago in quick succession, then St Paul, where the Reverend Patrick McCabe was present in the audience. The priest stayed with O’Reilly at a St Paul hotel as his guest, and persuaded him that in the following fall he would return to McCabe’s parish and give a series of public speeches. Since McCabe had saved his life and his soul, he could hardly plead exhaustion and insomnia. After a lecture in Minneapolis, he went on to Butte in Montana, a considerably Irish mining city, barely a village in the days of Governor Meagher. On 14 March O’Reilly spoke in Spokane Falls in the east of Washington State, and then in Seattle. In Tacoma for St Patrick’s Day, he participated in the procession in an open barouche drawn by four white horses. After his speech, a dinner was given by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who kept him up until 4 a.m. The following evening he appeared in Portland.
Like others before him, he thought that this north-western region was the country to which the Irish urban poor should come. ‘That matchless country, as large as an empire, and filled with all kinds of natural wealth, contains only about as many people as the city of Boston.’ From Portland the steamer Oregon took him to San Francisco. By now he was surprised to find himself utterly exhausted, but mentioned in his journal that he had got a ‘great rest’ aboard the Oregon. Every other night he had suffered insomnia.
After central California, he returned by way of the great, admirable western vacancies to Boston to take up the active editorship of the Pilot again throughout a busy summer. He took time to go with his daughters to Revere Beach, north of Boston, where on 6 August he was the guest of honour at the Gaelic Athletic Association Sports Day. The day was very hot and a crowd of 4,000 Irish hemmed him in. O’Reilly collapsed and returned by the ferry to his house in Hull, where he rested all the next day on a sofa in a sitting room—O’Reilly liked to call it the Tower Room—next door to his wife’s bedroom. But the next morning, a Friday, he was back in the Pilot office, complaining again to Cashman of insomnia. He had some committee work to attend to—he was involved in the organisation of a Grand Army of the Republic convention which was due to muster on Boston Common and would march past the Pilot building the following Tuesday.
On Saturday afternoon he left sweltering Franklin St and went to catch the ferry to Hull, out past the light of Deer Island where the Famine Irish had been quarantined, and snugly in between Peddocks Island and the Nantasket Peninsula near whose head stood the town. He was met at the pier by his youngest daughter, Blanid, a fragile but mentally lively child who would not long outlive her father and with whom, playing word games, he went laughing home.
A little after midnight on that Saturday night, Mrs O’Reilly called out to her husband, who was reading and smoking in the family sitting room. She said she felt very ill and feverish. She asked him to get some medicine for her from Dr Litchfield, the family physician. O’Reilly walked a few blocks to the doctor’s house. The medicine Litchfield prescribed had no effect on Mary O’Reilly’s discomfort. In preparing what he had given her, O’Reilly had spilled a portion. He therefore made a second visit to the doctor, who renewed the prescription and said, ‘Mr O’Reilly, you should take something yourself.’ Back home, after administering the mixture to his wife, O’Reilly himself went to the medicine closet, looking for a sleeping draft.
Mrs O’Reilly woke in the small hours after a short sleep. She found her husband on a couch in the sitting room, still reading and smoking. She insisted on his getting some rest. He said, ‘Yes, Mamsie dear, I’ve taken some of your sleeping medicine.’ As she watched he stretched out on the couch he was sitting on and looked unusually pallid. He seemed to grow comatose very quickly. She spoke to him and tried to rouse him, and he murmured, ‘Yes, my love!’
She became worried about his condition, and sent for Dr Litchfield. The doctor spent fifty minutes trying to revive him, but O’Reilly died at ten minutes to five that Sunday morning, 10 August. The death certificate, signed by Litchfield, indicated ‘Heart Failure, superinduced, perhaps, by an overdose of chloral, taken for insomnia.’ As a modern writer says, the insomniac O’Reilly, with many physician friends, must have used chloral before. The overdose might have been a mixture error of Litchfield’s or of a pharmacist. But the possibility that O’Reilly may have committed suicide was tentatively raised. Obviously O’Reilly had the necessary streak of morbidity, having tried it in Western Australia.
When his heart stopped, O’Reilly was forty-six years old. Mary O’Reilly, desperately grieving, travelled with her daughters to her widowed mother’s house in Boston. Her brother John Murphy, and O’Reilly’s eldest daughter, Molly, took the body across to the family’s town house in Winthrop Street, Charlestown. Former President Cleveland sent his condolences, as did Cardinal Gibbons—‘It is a public calamity,’ said the Cardinal. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, ‘John Boyle O’Reilly was a man of heroic mould and nature; brave, adventurous, patriotic, enthusiastic, with the perfervidum ingenium which belongs quite as much to the
Irish as the Scotch … His poems showed us what he might have been had he devoted himself to letters.’
At the close of the National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, a resolution unanimously carried mourned his death. A meeting of Parnellite members from the House of Commons sent their sympathies and testified to the great services of the dead patriot. On Tuesday, his body was taken from Winthrop Street to St Mary’s Charlestown for the funeral service. His pallbearers included O’Donovan Rossa, with whom he had quarrelled but who nonetheless came up from New York for the event, and Denis Cashman, fellow prisoner in Western Australia, fellow journalist in Boston. Amongst his honorary pallbearers were a number of former generals and Captain Henry C. Hathaway of New Bedford. Then the family and mourners endured a considerable train ride through Boston to Roxbury, where O’Reilly was buried.
There followed eulogies preposterous for a former convict. A memorial service was held in the Tremont Temple, and there Mayor Hart, Judge Woodbury, Father William Byrne, Vicar General of Boston, General Ben Butler, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and the Honorable Patrick A. Collins all spoke. In regretting O’Reilly’s inability ever to return to the sites of his childhood or his parents’ graves, Collins himself called on all the gifts of the bardic orator to evoke the countryside around the Boyne: ‘By the banks of that lovely river, where the blood of four nations once commingled, in sight of the monument to the alien victor, hard by the great mysterious Rath, over one sanctified spot dearer than all others to him, where the dew glistened on the softest green, the spirit of O’Reilly hovered, and shook the stillness of the Irish dawn on its journey to the stars.’
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 86