It took almost a week to take the rebel army to New Ross. First they camped at the Three Rocks, where they danced to the tune of the French revolutionary song, the Carmagnole. Then they moved on westwards, as one fleeing loyalist put it, ‘moving with slow but irresistible progress ... like an immense body of lava’. They halted at Corbet Hill overlooking New Ross. The delays gave Major-General Henry Johnston time to prepare, though the town’s medieval walls had not been repaired since they had been breached in 1649 by Oliver Cromwell. Luke Gardiner, now Colonel Lord Mountjoy, arrived with a substantial force of the Dublin Militia.
Shortly after dawn on 5 June waves of pikemen and musketeers, led by John Kelly, the ‘Boy from Killane’, surged down Corbet Hill and swept aside the redcoats guarding Three Bullet Gate. Men of the 4th and 5th Dragoons charged the insurgents as they entered the main street only to be transfixed by pikes. A woodcutter’s daughter ran about the dead and dying cavalry men, cutting off their cartridge cases with a billhook and passing them to the rebels. One of those killed was Lord Mountjoy, who had done more than anyone else in the Irish parliament to have Penal Laws against Catholics removed.
After seven hours continuous fighting in the intense heat of that June day, almost all of New Ross had fallen to the United Irishmen. Now the exhausted insurgents turned aside to look for food and drink, and many lay down to sleep. Still in control of a small corner of the town, General Johnston rallied his men. ‘Will you desert your general?’, he shouted. ‘Will you desert your fellow-countrymen?’ Taken completely by surprise, the rebel army was shattered by this counter-attack. No prisoners were taken, and even sleeping insurgents were shot or bayoneted. About a hundred wounded rebels were burnt to death when a building serving as a temporary hospital was set on fire. Major Vesey, now commanding the Dublin Militia, admitted: ‘The carnage was shocking, as no quarter was given, the soldiers were too much exasperated and could not be stopped.’
The fury of the soldiers would have been all the greater had they known of a rebel atrocity that day, the massacre of loyalists a few miles away at Scullabogue.
Episode 155
THE REBELLION SPREADS NORTH
Following the victory of the crown forces at New Ross, Co. Wexford, on 5 June 1798, James Alexander was given the task of disposing of the dead. He reported:
The rebel carcasses lay in the streets unburied for three or four days; some perforated over and over with musket balls or the bayonet; some hacked with swords; some mangled and torn with grapeshot and worse still with pigs, some of which I have seen eating the brains out of the cloven skulls and gnawing the flesh about the raw wounds! Many rebels were reduced to ashes ... and many partly burned and partly roasted.
Sixty-two cartloads of bodies were thrown into the River Barrow, in addition to those buried with quicklime in mass graves. Almost 3,000 bodies had been disposed of.
But there were more to be buried. Not far from New Ross at Scullabogue, the insurgents held a large number of loyalists prisoner in a house and a thatched barn. Most of them were Protestants, though there were also a few Catholics among them. On the same day that the battle took place in the town several of these prisoners were brought out and lined up on the lawn in front of the house. Having been made to kneel down, four at a time, they were shot; thirty-five men were killed in this way. The insurgents then set fire to the barn. The prisoners inside, including twenty women and children, twice managed to break open the door, and on both occasions they were forced back by pikes. One two-year-old child crawled out from under the door, but the poor creature was piked to death. For two days after the event the insurgents turned over the charred bodies, over a hundred in number, in search of coins.
Had the United Irishmen of Ulster heard in time of this ghastly atrocity, they might have acted very differently. Once the very heart of the United Irish conspiracy, the province had been very effectively disarmed in 1797. Nearly all the leaders had been seized. But a humble Presbyterian weaver from Templepatrick, Jemmy Hope, was determined to raise the standard of revolt:
‘I will not desert my neighbours,’ said I, ‘though I do not like the road; I’ll travel it, however, as clean as I can.’
Hope was joined in Belfast by Henry Joy McCracken, just released from Kilmainham Jail for fear he might die after a fellow-prisoner had thrown a basin of boiling water over him. As the second-largest garrison in Ireland, Belfast was an impossible target. Instead McCracken and Hope planned to attack Antrim town on 7 June, the day the magistrates of the county were due to meet there:
Army of Ulster! Tomorrow we march on Antrim. Drive the garrison of Randalstown before you and haste to form a junction with your Commander-in-Chief. Henry Joy McCracken. 1st Year of Liberty, 6th day of June 1798.
As darkness fell on Wednesday 6 June armed United Irishmen met at the Cold Well near Larne and in the small hours moved into the town, driving a party of Tay Fencibles back to their barracks. Then as dawn came they drew off to join their comrades on Donegore Hill. They had fired the first shots of the rebellion in Ulster.
Next day the Ballymoney United Irishmen gathered at Kilraghts and then, with other parties, advanced on Ballymena. Joining them was a contingent from Crebilly, wearing green cockades; as they marched north through Broughshane they were cheered by children bearing green branches representing the Tree of Liberty. However, thanks to General Lake’s sweeps for weapons the year before, very few had firearms. According to the yeoman Samuel McSkimin, many had no weapons at all and the rest only had ‘pitchforks, peat spades, scythes, bayonets, sharpened harrow-pins fixed on poles, old rusty sword blades and reaping hooks’. Entering by Church Street, they nevertheless forced the surrender of Ballymena after a brisk battle by placing tar-barrels against the Market House. Meanwhile Randalstown fell to the insurgents by a similar device—the Yeomanry were smoked into submission when straw was set on fire underneath the Market House. One party was sent to break down the bridge at Toome to prevent the military from further west from crossing the River Bann. This task took fourteen hours of hard manual labour. The main contingent at Randalstown then hastened to reach Antrim to join McCracken in his attack on the town.
That morning, 7 June, McCracken gathered his men at Craigarogan Fort near Roughfort north of Belfast. As they advanced through Dunadry and Muckamore the United Irish army kept spirits high by singing the Marseillaise. They had only one cannon, however, a brass six-pounder long hidden under the floor of Templepatrick meeting-house and insecurely mounted on the wheels of an old carriage.
What McCracken did not know was that the authorities in Belfast, thanks to efficient informers and spies, knew what his plans were in perfect detail.
Episode 156
REBELLION IN COUNTY ANTRIM
An Ulsterman I’m proud to be,
From Antrim’s Glens I’ve come,
And though I’ve laboured by the sea,
I’ve followed fife and drum.
I’ve heard the martial tramp of men,
I’ve watched them fight and die,
And well do I remember when
I followed Henry Joy.
At nightfall on 6 June 1798 Major-General George Nugent, in command in Belfast, received news from an informer that Henry Joy McCracken would attack Antrim town on the following day. An order was quickly sent to Blaris military camp near Lisburn, and early in the day Colonel Henry Clavering led out two companies of militia and 150 light dragoons trailing two six-pounders and two modern howitzers. They sped north by a route along the eastern shores of Lough Neagh towards Antrim. Two hours after McCracken’s United Irishmen had marched out from Roughfort, Colonel James Durham advanced from Belfast by the same road with 250 men of the Monaghan Militia, a troop of 22nd Dragoons and men of the Royal Irish Artillery taking with them two field guns.
Meanwhile Major Daniel Seddon, in command in Antrim, had discovered to his alarm that many in the town had left to join the rebels. He immediately issued orders that their houses should be burnt. Thatch was blazing
as the insurgents approached from the south by Scotch Street. McCracken delayed fatally for half an hour to allow his other three rebel columns to converge on the town from other parts of the county. This gave time for Clavering’s troops to enter the town on the north side.
It was not until 2.45 p.m. that McCracken gave the order to advance. Preceded by fifes and a single drum, the United Irish recruits from Templepatrick, Carnmoney and Roughfort marched into Scotch Street with around eighty musketeers, followed by a single six-pounder cannon and the rest of the force armed with pikes and pitchforks. The newly arrived government troops positioned two cannon and fired badly aimed canisters of grapeshot at the insurgents, doing little more than casting gravel in their faces. Then the cavalry charged the rebels, only to be greeted by two rounds of grapeshot and a deadly retaliation by pikemen. As McCracken’s men fought towards the town centre, men from Ballyclare fought their way forward down Bow Lane. It was in this last action that Lord O’Neill—once the darling of the Presbyterian freeholders now in combat against him—was killed near the Market House. Colonel Durham’s force had now arrived and bombarded the town from Sentry Hill; his men then swiftly poured into the streets, scattering the insurgents.
The soldiery finished off any wounded rebels they found and summarily executed thirty others captured in arms. It was only three days later that Antrim’s streets were cleared and the bodies thrown into sandpits on the shore of Lough Neagh. Samuel Skelton, Lord Massereene’s agent, recalled:
As a cart-load of dead and dying arrived at the sandpit a yeoman officer asked the driver ‘Where the devil did these rascals come from?’ A poor wretch raised his gory head from the cart and feebly answered ‘I come frae Ballyboley.’ He was buried with the rest.
McCracken, Jemmy Hope and a few others attempted to rally the fleeing insurgents, but to no avail.
It was for Ireland’s cause we fought,
For home and sire we bled,
Our numbers were few but our hearts beat true,
And five to one lay dead.
And many the lassie mourned her lad
And mother mourned her boy,
For youth was strong in that gallant throng
That followed Henry Joy.
Elsewhere in Co. Antrim rebels in arms anxiously awaited news. Great numbers had gathered at Bellair Hill at Glenarm. On the preceding Sunday their leader, the Rev. Robert Acheson, had preached to them in Glenarm meeting-house on a text from the Gospel of St Luke: ‘Be not afraid of them that kill the body’. Ten thousand occupied Ballymena and, beating drums and blowing conch-shells and tin trumpets, noisily greeted fresh arrivals with cries of ‘Ballymena’s our own!’ ‘Hurrah for the United Irishmen!’ ‘Friends from Clough!’ ‘More friends from Clough!’
Here a Committee of Public Safety kept guard over loyalist prisoners almost suffocating in the Market House dungeon, known as the Black Hole. Under the direction of James Dickey, a deranged lawyer from Crumlin, some suspects and prisoners, although they had offered no provocation, were stabbed to death, and taverns and homes of the wealthy were wrecked in the search for plunder. Ballymena held out longest, but when news of the defeat at Antrim arrived the insurgents melted away, throwing their pikes into ditches.
After hiding out on Slemish and the Cave Hill, McCracken from the slopes of Collin Mountain watched Saintfield burn and heard the distant guns at Ballynahinch. The Co. Down uprising had begun.
Episode 157
REBELLION IN COUNTY DOWN
On Friday 8 June 1798 a number of armed United Irishmen from Killinchy came to Saintfield and laid siege to a farmstead owned by the McKee family, thought to be informers. Next morning they set fire to the building, and the entire household perished in the flames—a deed for which eleven were subsequently hanged. It was a grim beginning to the rebellion in Co. Down.
On the following day Colonel Chetwynd Stapylton approached Saintfield with the Newtownards Yeomanry cavalry and 270 York Fencibles. About 4.30 p.m. the insurgents ambushed this force, Richard Frazer of Ravarna leading a charge of pikemen from the demesne woods on the Comber Road. Before he was driven off, Stapylton lost three officers, five sergeants, one clergyman, two drummers and forty-five other ranks. A York Fencible was heard to recall that ‘for danger and desperation this skirmish exceeded anything he had before witnessed’.
Other actions that day were not so successful. Men from Bangor and Donaghadee were driven out of Newtownards by volleys from the Market House and survivors were forced to spend the night on Scrabo Hill. An attack on Portaferry Market House was beaten back when insurgents came under flanking fire from a revenue vessel anchored near the quay. News of the victory at Saintfield spread rapidly, however, and United Irishmen hurried to join the rebel camp here at the Creevy Rocks.
On Sunday 10 June the Rev. Thomas Ledlie Birch preached to the insurgents on the Creevy Rocks. He took his text from Ezekiel: ‘Cause them that have charge over the city to draw near, even every man with his destroying weapon in his hand.’ But who was to command them? The Co. Down leader, the Rev. William Steel Dickson, had been arrested at Ballynahinch five days earlier. Eventually Henry Munro, a Scottish merchant from Lisburn, agreed to head the Down insurrection. Munro ordered his rebel army south to Ballynahinch, where a new camp was made at Montalto on Ednavady, with an entrenched forward position on Windmill Hill.
On 11 June Major-General George Nugent issued a proclamation in Belfast warning that unless the rebels laid down their arms and released their prisoners he would
proceed to set fire to and totally destroy the towns of Killinchy, Killyleagh, Ballynahinch, Saintfield and every cottage and farmhouse in the vicinity of those places, carry off the stock and cattle and put everyone to the sword who may be found in arms.
Nugent was as good as his word: on the following day the Ballynahinch insurgents could see columns of smoke rising into the still air as the troops set fire to farmhouses and haggards and burnt Saintfield to the ground.
The weather was perfect that day as it had been for weeks. James Thomson, then a boy of twelve and later the father of the great scientist Lord Kelvin, accompanied women carrying food to the rebel encampment. Here he found
a considerable number sheltering themselves from the scorching rays of a burning sun under the shade of the trees.... They wore no uniforms; yet they presented a tolerably decent appearance being dressed, no doubt, in their ‘Sunday clothes’ ... The only thing in which they all concurred was the wearing of green: almost every individual having a knot of ribbons of that colour, sometimes mixed with yellow in his hat ... and many ... bore ornaments of various descriptions and of different degrees of taste and execution; the most of which had been presented as tributes of regard and affection and as incentives to heroic deeds, by females whose breasts beat as high in patriotic ardour as those of their husbands, their sweethearts and their brothers.... On a sudden an alarm was given.... In a moment all was bustle through the field.
The experiences of a humble participant in the fighting are captured in a contemporary ballad:
My name is George Campbell, at the age of eighteen
I joined the United Men to strive for the green
And many a battle I did undergo
With that hero commander, brave General Munro.
Nugent began pounding the rebel positions with his eight guns, which included two howitzers firing exploding shells. The insurgents on Windmill Hill were overwhelmed, and one of them, Hugh McCulloch, a grocer from Bangor, was captured and hanged from one of the mill’s sails.
At nightfall the Monaghan Militia occupied Ballynahinch. Awed by Nugent’s artillery, many insurgents deserted the field of battle that night. Those remaining launched a dawn attack on the militia, which, a survivor recalled,
did not fail to salute us with a brisk fire. We ran up like bloodhounds and the Monaghans fled into the town where they kept up a kind of broken fire, although only about twenty of us were armed with muskets.
At about seven o’clock
on the following morning the rebel ammunition ran out and Nugent’s army overwhelmed the United Irish on Ednavady Hill. The rebellion in Ulster was now over, and in the south too the tide had turned against the United Irishmen.
Episode 158
VINEGAR HALL
Have you heard of the Battle of Ballynahinch
Where the people oppressed rose up in defence?
When Munro left the mountains his men took the field,
And they fought for twelve hours and never did yield.
Contrary to the balladmaker’s proud claim, the Presbyterian United Irishmen did in fact yield on 13 June 1798. No quarter was given as the cavalry in relentless pursuit hacked down those in flight through lanes and byways. Betsy Gray of Gransha, who had stayed on the field of battle, was overtaken and killed with her brother George and her lover Willie Boal. She was the first to die, shot through the eye by a yeoman from Annahilt.
Two days later troops captured the rebel commander, Henry Munro. Condemned and then taken to the market place in Lisburn, he prepared himself to meet his Maker. An officer present recalled:
I stood very near him when at the foot of the gallows, and he settled his accounts as coolly as if he had been in his own office, a free man.... This done, he said a short prayer.
The reprisals following the Battle of Ballynahinch were fearful, but they could not equal in ferocity those that were about to take place in the province of Leinster.
A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process Page 43