The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  A system more ingeniously contrived, first for the debasement, and then for the continuance in that debasement, of an entire people cannot easily be imagined. On this subject I lack both the eloquence and the lucidity of George Moore of Moore Hall, a most astonishing man to discover in such parts as these, being an historian of some note, enlightened and humane in his views, and a friend of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and other notabilities. To attend to his acerb, sardonic voice as he discourses upon the ills of Ireland is to be confirmed in one’s despair, for he has never a remedy to suggest. And yet despair is rightly held the one unforgivable sin, and I have striven mightily against it.

  I have striven also to find common ground with this multitude, but with scant success. I except here Mr. Moore and also Thomas Treacy of Bridge-end House, for these are accounted gentlemen, and I have always regarded their Papistry as chivalrous adherence to a persecuted sect. And I except also, strange though this may seem, Mr. Hussey, the priest in Killala, for he is himself almost a gentleman, being the son of a prosperous grazier in the midlands. Often, it has seemed to me, he has been more dismayed than I am myself by the barbarous life and manners of those to whom he ministers. I sought, though, in my first year, to make the acquaintance of the scattering of Papist “half sirs,” such men as Cornelius O’Dowd and Randall MacDonnell, but these two in particular, to speak bluntly, I found to be irreligious men, unless we account fidelity to whiskey, horses, and wanton women to be a form of devotion; and this sorry estimation of their characters was amply vindicated by the violent courses of action which they took in the events which I shall narrate. Beneath that level, of course, were farmers and servants who both understood and spoke English, indeed some who had mastered the art of writing it. But always, below the surface of our pleasant interchanges, I could feel the tremblings of the great chasm which separated us, as though we met to parley on the quaking face of a bog.

  I propose to set forth in this narrative whatever I have learned of that singular and most unfortunate man, Owen Ruagh MacCarthy. He once came to me at my bidding, for I wished to dispose of some books, and believed that he might make use of them in his “classical academy,” a kind of hedge school in which children were given the rudiments of an education and older boys were prepared for the seminaries. I confess that I had my misgivings, for I had often seen him in the village, a tall, wild red-haired creature with a loping stride, notoriously given to drink and bad company. His earlier reputation was equally daunting, for it was said that he had wandered, or more exactly had been swept, northwards from his native Kerry to Cork and thence through Clare and Galway into Mayo, flitting from troubles with the law, some said, but according to others pursued by posses of outraged fathers and husbands and brothers, for he could keep neither his eyes nor his hands from any woman of appropriate age and here his tastes were catholic in the nondenominational meaning of the term. And yet this was a man who possessed fluent Latin and had a good knowledge of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. More astonishing yet, I have been informed by Treacy of Bridge-end House, a fanatic upon the supposed accomplishments of his race, that MacCarthy was a poet not lacking for fame, his verses being memorised and circulated in manuscript from Donegal to Kerry. I asked Treacy to render several of these into English for me, but he replied that the rhythm and metres, if such be the proper terms, could not be accommodated to English, so that words and sounds would be quarrelling together like husband and wife, an instructive view into Irish attitudes towards matrimony.

  At any event, and to end this digression, MacCarthy may for all one knows have been a second Ovid, but his words are locked forever within a barbarous language, which history has sentenced to silence and the plough. Upon this occasion, I assured him that I felt keenly the unhappy lot of his fellow countrymen, and suggested that this might somehow be improved if they were able to experience more completely the safeguards of English law. He responded with the verses of some other poet, which he then put into English for me, Treacy notwithstanding: “Troy and Rome have vanished; Caesar is dead and Alexander. Perhaps someday the English too will have their day.”

  I challenged him as to the meaning that he derived from this dark utterance, and he replied it meant only that Greece and Rome had once been empires, and England was now in its turn summoned to greatness. I told him that I did not for a minute suppose it to mean any such thing. Rather did it express the sullen vengefulness which the Irish peasantry notoriously nurse, and which, like their superstitions, distracts them from seeking proper and rational solutions to their problems. Then I reflected: What solutions? Well-meaning Protestant clergymen write books and tracts for them, urging them to dress neatly, when in fact they are half naked; to tell the truth, when only a lie will shield them from a rapacious landlord; to be sober, when the only comfort lies drowned in a bottle.

  He then smiled at me, as though he had read my thoughts, and the smile altered his coarse, heavy features, suggesting a lively if sardonic intelligence. In an obvious effort to change the subject, he picked up a small book from the pile which I had set before him, a translation of Le Sage’s romance of Gil Blas. “It is well I know this one, Your Reverence. I had it in the tail pocket of my coat when I was on my ramblings, years ago. No better book for the task.” I discovered then that he had in fact a smattering of French, as was not uncommon, apparently, among the schoolmasters of his native Kerry, where there had earlier been much traffic with France. It was from Kerry and Cork that, until some ten years before, lads were shipped off to the seminaries at Douai and Saint-Omer or as recruits for the Irish brigades in the French army, and there was also a brisk smuggling trade. Not merely the last but all three of these enterprises were forbidden by law, but this seemed not to trouble MacCarthy at all. Herein may be discovered yet another sorry consequence of those abominable penal laws by which, for a century, the Papists were kept in a condition of semi-outlawry.

  I found it curious in the extreme, this conjunction of Gil Blas and the French language with the coarse-moulded cowherd who stood before me in his long-tailed coat of rain-coloured frieze. Upon this occasion and those others when I talked with MacCarthy I was most favourably impressed by his transparent love of words and of books, though doubtless he apprehended these latter in a crabbed, provincial manner, and by his bearing, which was easy but at no time offensively familiar. And yet there was also about him something which did give me offence, a sly, slight mockery as though he knew, as well as I did myself, that we used the same words in quite different ways. How little we will ever know these people, locked as we are in our separate rooms. And often I have glimpsed him in another mood, stumbling drunkenly homewards, more beast than man, towards the bed he shared with some young slut of a widow. The course which he later followed saddened but did not surprise me. He dwelt deep within the world of his people, and theirs is an unpredictable and a violent world.

  What most weighed down upon me in my first years in Mayo was that all seemed agreed, rich and poor alike, that the dreadful circumstances to which I have alluded were changeless, woven from a history of so thick a texture that it could never be pulled or tugged to a more acceptable shape. I am no manner of a radical. I know that the laws of human economy, like those of astronomy, are inexorable and strict. Yet I cannot escape the feeling that here these laws have been pulled awry, as comets and meteors are pulled down upon the earth. The poor we shall always have with us, but need we have them in such numbers, accounting at the very least for a simple majority of the population?

  But the few remedies which have been proposed are more hideous than the disease which they affect to cure. Thus I have heard it proposed, by men no more inhumane than most, that the recurrent famines are Providential, and will in time bring down the population to a proper size, but this I hold to be blasphemy. Or, again, take the matter of the Whiteboys, which has its role to play in my narrative. For some thirty years these agrarian terrorists had been a scourge upon the land, ravaging countrysides, murdering bailiffs, maiming or killing cattle
, pulling down the fences which enclose pastures, inflicting crude and loathsome punishment upon enemies and informers. In some few places their ambitions were satisfied; rents were lowered, or the expansion of grazing was halted. But in most, the Whiteboys were hunted down as stags and wolves are hunted, and were then destroyed. As destroyed they had to be, for civilisation cannot abide such savagery. Famine or terror: what a fearful brace of proffered remedies!

  And of what assistance is religion itself? I shall say little about the Church of the people. Doubtless it has been deformed and brutalised by the century or more of persecution which it has endured, and doubtless too it exercises a moderating influence upon its children, and yet I cannot profess to a great sympathy. Mr. Hussey, as I have remarked, is a man of education and good manners. Few sights were more ludicrous than that of Mr. Hussey in his silver-buckled shoes, picking his way into some cabin where his presence was required, all but holding his nose against the stench. In his chapel, which had been erected with the assistance of Mr. Falkiner and other of the more liberal-minded Protestant gentry, I believe that he inveighed steadily alike against Whiteboys and against the superstitious practices of his auditors. And yet far more typical of the Roman clergy was his curate, the egregious Murphy, the son of peasants and a peasant himself, a coarse, ignorant man, red-faced, young, stout, with the voice of a bull calf. Risen from the people, he could offer no example to them. And when the crisis fell upon us, he demonstrated that he shared to the full their darkest passions. Neither was he cleanly in his habits, and of his fondness for the bottle there is abundant evidence.

  But of my own Church, what can I say, save that it is the Church of a governing garrison? My church, unlike those in many other parishes, is well attended, and here I claim some credit for my sermons, which are not empty vapourisings upon obscure Scriptural texts, but are addressed to the daily business of life. And yet when I look to the bare white walls and slender windows, to the two battleflags which Mr. Falkiner’s great-great-grandfather brought home from the wars of Marlborough, to the plaques erected to those who fell serving our sovereign on the fields of France and Flanders, when I look to my parishioners, stiff and erect as turkeycocks or conquistadors, then the troubling thought occurs to me that I am less minister to Christ’s people than I am priest to a military cult, as Mithra was honoured by the legions of Rome. Here, I think at such truant moments, is an outpost stationed in the land by the perpetual edicts of Elizabeth and James and Cromwell and William and charged to hold this land for our lord the King.

  Why else does the Protestant gentry of Ireland send forth its young men into the British army and the army of the East India Company if not from an instinct bred in the bone, bred perhaps of childhoods of Sundays spent staring at battleflags? And yet one thing is certain: that if England advances upon a land with the sword, there follow soon after the arts and benefits of civilisation, an orderly existence, security of person and property, education, just laws, true religion, and a hopeful view of man’s lot on earth. Only here have we failed, in the very first land we entered, for reasons which were in part our fault and in part the fault of the natives. But I think it pernicious to rummage over the past, sorting out wrongs and apportioning guilts.

  Perhaps I can see the more clearly for being English born and English bred and therefore not enmeshed by the ancient prides and hostilities of this land. Pride: above all else pride. For in the final quarter of the century, as the world knows, the Protestants of Ireland declared themselves to be a separate nation, owing allegiance to the King of England only in his capacity of King of Ireland. Nay, more, they had come to think themselves a separate people, neither English nor Irish, yet vowing the most utter loyalty to the British Crown, from which their rights, privileges, possessions first flowed. A prodigious and ludicrous creature it was, this “Nation of Ireland,” from which the great mass of the Irish were excluded upon the open ground of religion and the covert ground of race. Its capital of Dublin was as fair a city as these islands can boast, a city of warm, wine-coloured bricks and cool grey stones, dominated over by the severe, lovely lines of a parliament house in which were seated the exclusively Protestant representatives of an exclusively Protestant electorate. And yet this vaunted independence was a mockery, for the governors and administrators of the island were still appointed from London, and the Parliament itself reeked with a corruption which many of the purchased members scarcely deigned to conceal. I yield to none in my admiration for Mr. Grattan and the other “patriots” who laboured to give Ireland true and honest governance, to reform Parliament, and above all, to strike the chains from their Papist fellow countrymen. And yet their efforts were as futile as their oratory was glittering and enflowered.

  We knew little of such matters in Mayo, and we cared less. The interests of the landlords were well served in Parliament by Dennis Browne, Lord Sligo’s brother and High Sheriff of the county, a clever and high-spirited man, bluff and hearty when the occasion demanded, but with a mind as subtle and as insinuating as mountain mist. If in these pages I shall have much to say that is harsh in its judgement of Mr. Browne, I do indeed believe that his love of Mayo is most sincere, although it was to assume a terrible shape. I do confess that my feeble understanding of these people falters entirely when it confronts such families as the Brownes. Papists until well into the eighteenth century, they retained their property by a variety of ruses, and then, these being exhausted, they conformed to our Protestant Church of Ireland. They, and they perhaps alone, seem able to move at ease between our two worlds, great and powerful personages in our Protestant world, yet the native musicians and poets are made welcome by them, and songs and poems are composed in their honour. Or were until very recent years, for now the Brownes have a dark and sombre reputation, and for reasons that my narrative will make clear. If I could but understand the Brownes, I would understand much about the tangled roots of the past, its twisted loyalties and bloody memories. But I will never come to such understanding, The meanings of this land are shrouded from the eyes of strangers. Truth, like Viking treasure, lies buried in the bogs.

  Boglands and rings of mountains sealed us off in Tyrawley, and left us facing the grey ocean. But by 1797, we knew that elsewhere in Ireland events were drifting towards rebellion. The wicked and seditious Society of United Irishmen, a band of unscrupulous city radicals in Dublin and Belfast, were bent upon an insurrection, and had chosen as their instrument an unnatural alliance of the Papist peasants of the south and the Presbyterian peasants of the north. Their agent abroad, the deist and madman Wolfe Tone, had secured the assistance of regicide France: the year before a formidable invasion fleet had been beaten back from the Kerry coast only by what the peasants called “the Protestant winds.” Then, in the spring of 1798, we heard, aghast, of the dreadful rebellions in Wexford and Antrim, a murderous and insensate peasantry ravishing the countryside before being put down with great brutality. There followed then a dreadful pause, for although the rebellious counties had become vast charnel houses, the networks of the hellish conspiracy survived in the midlands and in parts of Munster. A second flotilla of invasion, it was said, was being assembled on the French coast, and Wolfe Tone hovered, a stormy petrel, above its masts. It is in this moment of dreadful pause that my narrative will open.

  But all of this came to us as tidings from a different land. Our local corps of yeomanry, an exclusively Protestant body under the command of Captain Samuel Cooper, drilled more frequently, but less to defend our shores than to remind the Papist peasantry that the present order of things was changeless. There was first one, then several, then numerous instances of cattle maiming, by those calling themselves “the Whiteboys of Killala,” but Whiteboyism was one of our old, familiar evils. The distant United Irishmen preached insurrection in the name of a desired “Republic of Ireland,” but the word republic has no existence in the Irish tongue, and far less had the meaning of the word any existence in the minds of our peasantry. To be sure, there were some among the peasant
s, schoolmasters and tavernkeepers and the like, who, upon hearing of the Wexford rising spoke in lofty terms of “the army of the Gael.” And many among the Protestants, in particular those of the more narrow and ignorant sort, spoke in fear and fury of a servile insurrection. But all was far distant from Mayo.

  I have once and again sought to imagine myself as present in one of the taverns frequented by the peasantry, a low, vile cabin choking with smoke and rank with odours. Someone describes for those present the Wexford insurrection, not as the butchery which in fact it was, but as a glorious hosting of “the army of the Gael,” with banners and bards, like a passage in Macpherson’s Ossian poems. I seek to imagine in that setting the faces which I know only from roadside or field or stable, white skin, black hair, dark eyes. With what power would not the speaker’s words burst upon such an assembly, for the native Irish, as has been remarked since the days of the Elizabethan Spenser, are easily overwhelmed by highflown rhetoric. But imagination fails me. They are an alien people.

  Once, at the home of Mr. Treacy, I heard Owen Ruagh MacCarthy recite his poetry. He was visiting the servants, and Treacy, being informed of this, brought him to the dinner table, where he stood before us and spoke a poem for which he was requited most generously with silver coins and two tumblers of brandy. It was of a kind called an aisling, Mr. Treacy informed me, a poem of vision, in which the poet, wandering in a meadow, encounters a maiden who speaks to him in cloaked and guarded terms of her present sorrows and prophesies some event of great good fortune for the Gaelic people—perhaps the Young Pretender sailing to the coast with swordsmen and casks of wine and French coins. The poem that night differed from others of its kind only in that it was not the Stuart Pretender who was invoked, but some nameless, cloudy deliverance. It is apparently a difficult and a metrically complex form, for all its conventionality, and MacCarthy’s celebrity among other native poets was said to rest upon his mastery of its techniques. It was delivered with much florid vehemence of voice and body, but I do not pretend to admire what I cannot understand.