The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “Why, the court-martials, of course. The hangings. What else have we been talking about, man?”

  “I am not your man.” Master of Moore Hall to Killala farmer. What difference does it make?

  “We have been topping them in batches. Three or four a week.”

  Mean garrison town—courthouse, prison, shops, taverns. The capital of Mayo. Moore looked down the street to where it straggled away in cabins, and upwards, where it rose to the courtyard, beyond the crowd.

  “I have never been able to draw much pleasure from hangings,” he said.

  “Well now,” Cooper conceded. “I am not a bloody-minded man myself. But this is a different matter. They are beaten now and we will put the fear of God into them. Take a look around the county. See what they have done.”

  “You call freely upon God,” Moore said, and then said, in the same flat, casual tones. “You would have hanged my brother, you know. John, my younger brother.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Cooper said, startled and abashed. “I had forgotten John, I had forgotten your brother. I ask your pardon. You did well to get him away out of this. Where is the poor fellow now? In Clonmel is it not, or Waterford?”

  “Waterford,” Moore said. “His difficulties are being sorted out. I expect that shortly he will be permitted to leave for Spain. We have commercial interests there, as you know.”

  Cooper knew. Moores, Brownes, Martins, Glenthornes. Nothing could touch them. Gentry. Everything arranged over a glass of sherry— marriages, bonds, the hunt, even a case of high treason. But John was a decent fellow, high-spirited. Cooper did not begrudge him Spain. Not like this glass of cold water.

  “That is welcome news,” he said.

  “These fellows whom you are topping in batches,” Moore said. “They should have had commercial interests in Spain. They were short-sighted.”

  Cooper looked sharply at the impassive face, pale eyes. Cold, sardonic bastard. Eyes like arctic ice.

  “I have my own cause for joy,” he said.

  “I am certain of that,” Moore said. “A length of hemp and a trapdoor.”

  Puzzled, Cooper drew his hand across his round chin. A vulgar man.

  “You must have mistaken my meaning. The fact is, Moore, that all the while I was wearing my heart out in that prison, near mad with rage, my wife Kate was carrying our child. She had the news waiting for me when I got back to Mount Pleasant.”

  “My congratulations to you, sir. And to Mrs. Cooper. We have never met, I believe.”

  “You would have known her father, Mick Mahony the grazier. He held lands near Ballycastle and near Crossmolina.”

  “I have heard the name,” Moore said. “You have a worthier cause for happiness than a hanging, and I do indeed wish you joy.”

  “A great beauty she was in the county. And still is. A black-haired woman.”

  “Black-haired women are often beautiful,” Moore said.

  “But a most dutiful wife,” Cooper said hastily. Moore lived quietly in Mayo, but his reputation had followed him from London. “A most dutiful woman. She is one of yours.”

  “One of mine?”

  “A Papist. I have never tried to change her. She says her confessions and goes to Mass, the same as you do.”

  “More frequently, I trust. You mentioned Friday. Why is Friday a special day?”

  “Friday?” Cooper blinked. “Oh, to be sure. Friday. They will be hanging Owen MacCarthy on Friday.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Well may you ask.” Cooper spat, and ground the gob into the dirt with the toe of his boot. “He was the schoolmaster at Killala, and he was one of the ringleaders of the Whiteboys. He wrote that bloody proclamation that started the whole business. The one I brought to you at Moore Hall.” Clownish churl, you count your cows in children’s lives.

  “I remember it,” Moore said. “A most peculiar paper. It had a touch of the poet, I thought.”

  “He is a poet,” Cooper said, “and a damned good one, Kate tells me. They often are, those schoolmasters. And they are often the greatest ruffians left unhanged.”

  “And you will remedy that omission on Friday.”

  “He has admitted it all,” Cooper said. “The proclamation and the rest of it. A few brisk lads of the Killala Yeomanry visited him in Castlebar gaol one evening. He took little persuasion, though. He is a beaten cur. Ballinamuck took the fight out of him, and the poetry as well.”

  A dusty street, the houses grey and drab in the even sun of afternoon. In a side street, invisible, a dog yelped in pain.

  “God damn you,” Moore said mildly. “God damn us all. God damn this country.”

  Cooper, legs spread wide apart, fists planted on hips, watched the coach roll away, towards Ballintubber. Moore had placed a touch of winter upon his pleasure, English accent strained through his long, arrogant nose, his Papist creed flaunted like a decoration. Mayo was settling back into place, thanks to the tough fibre of its loyal Protestants, a touch of the whip, a touch of the rope. But nothing could touch Moore, not even a brother’s disgrace. The great families were all alike—Browne or Moore, Protestant or Papist. They lived within a conspiracy of kinships and secret alliances, spoke a secret language which was a rebuff to ordinary men like himself who were the backbone and sinew of Ireland. I declare to Jesus, Cooper thought, I had more that I could share with Mick Mahony than I have with these bastards.

  But by nightfall he was himself again, sitting in the Wolf’s Head with two officers of the Kerry Militia, and describing to them the arrival of the French and his defence of Killala.

  “It could as easily have happened to us,” Captain Stack said. “In ’ninety-six when Hoche’s fleet was beaten into Bantry Bay at Christmas, with Wolfe Tone aboard the flagship. It was only that miracle of a storm that prevented them from landing in Kerry. They would have burned Tralee, the bastards.”

  “What the people there call that storm,” Lieutenant Hassett said, “is the Protestant wind.”

  “We have been lucky with our winds,” Cooper said, “and we have been since the days of the Armada.”

  “It is more than luck,” Stack said. “I believe that. I believe that it is Providence. We are a people placed under God’s protection. How else could we have survived, a small garrison surrounded by that great mass of ignorance and idolatry?”

  But Cooper was less certain. Winds came and went. There were terrible winds off the Mayo coast and Kerry was even worse. But it was comforting to think of the Protestants of Ireland as a people protected by Providence, a spare, taciturn people, the heirs of Cromwell, resolute in adversity, forthright in their dealings with themselves and others, God-fearing, shunning idolatry and superstition. The people of an unbroken tradition of courage and respectability. On the strength of that feeling, he ordered another round of porter.

  “Mind you,” Stack said, half smiling, half taunting, “I can only speak for the Protestants of Kerry. The Mayo Protestants may be another lot entirely. Sure, the Mayo Protestants may be half Papist for all I know. ‘Turned rotten’ is the word we have in Kerry for a Protestant when that happens to him. First he will find himself a Papist wife, and after that the rot sets in. When the children begin to arrive.”

  Over his tankard, Cooper peered at him. Was this an unlucky hit, or had Stack been talking to people?

  “There is nothing wrong with their women,” Cooper said. “Some of them. Bed them down with good Protestant farmers and you have the best stock in Europe. In such matters, it is the man that rules. And Protestant men are bred up from birth to rule. It is our special skill.”

  “Best to stay with your own,” Hassett said.

  “Best indeed,” Stack said.

  “It is said in other parts of the kingdom that Kerry is a nursery for treason,” Cooper said. “The lad who is going to swing on Friday is a Kerry man.”

  “Driven out from there,” Hassett said. “With his tail between his legs. Sure, I know all about that lad. He was born in Tralee and his father worked
as a labourer for my own grandfather. It was the people of Mayo who took up that lad and let him have his own school. Kerry knows how to deal with wild lads.”

  “ ‘Wild’ is the word,” Stack said. “Sure how many years is it since he left Kerry, and they haven’t done talking about him? Didn’t the priests themselves denounce him from their altars?”

  “One of them did,” Hassett said. His mouth softened to a reminiscent smile. “Away to the east, at Castleisland. There were two lassies big with child at the same time, and each of them claiming MacCarthy as the lucky man, so to speak. The Papists still say that he couldn’t be left alone with any woman be she maid, wife, or mother.”

  But Stack’s mouth remained firm. “The Papists can have little enough to boast of, if they keep a thing like that in memory.”

  “Ach, now fair is fair,” Hassett said. “He could write a lovely song. It is the songs that will keep him in memory, and not the other thing.”

  “Much good that will do him on Friday,” Cooper said.

  “I know the sort,” Stack said. “Kerry spawns them. You have the right of it there. Get drunk and take a man’s daughter to bed with you, and the next day off to confession and write a hymn to the Blessed Virgin.”

  “Or a Whiteboy proclamation,” Cooper said. Clownish churl, you count your cows in children’s lives.

  “Their religion suits them,” Stack said. “Spend your shilling on drink and never a thought about tomorrow. Confession works the same way.”

  “He was the same here,” Cooper said. “He lived in a cabin with a wild young widow. Be a very pretty little piece if you gave her a good wash. And God knows what other women.”

  “When he was pitched out of Kerry,” Hassett said, “he landed in Macroom, and there is a story about him there that I have from a Macroom grazier of my acquaintance. It seems that MacCarthy and a priest were interested in the same lassie, a servant girl at one of the big houses.”

  “Their priests are the worst,” Stack said. “Whitened sepulchres.”

  “Get on with your story,” Cooper said, leaning forward.

  This was more like it, a pleasant tavern with lads like these two, scarlet-clothed elbows leaning on table, jests and stories given salt and savour by shared loyalties. Up the dogleg road to the gaolhouse, where the man sat waiting to be hanged, was distant by a thousand miles, a remote arctic far removed from the warmth of the tavern.

  When Moore’s carriage drove back between the gates of Moore Hall, one half of his life ended. The other half, a slow movement towards an acceptance of his character and fate, did not reveal itself to him for several years.

  The first months of 1799 were given over to a fulfillment of the promise which he had made to Dennis Browne in exchange for John’s removal from Castlebar gaol. In a series of pamphlets, five in all, he argued the case for the abolition of the Irish Parliament and the union of the two kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. It was the great issue of the moment, overshadowing even Buonaparte’s failure to capture Acre—“that miserable hole which came between me and my destiny.” The first two pamphlets, which set forth the general considerations, were couched in terms too lofty to be of consequence, but the other three set forth with great persuasiveness the grounds upon which the Catholic nobility and middle classes should support union as best calculated to secure the restoration of their civil and political rights. These pamphlets were an immediate success, and they led to an extensive correspondence with Archbishop Troy and with Lord Kenmare. He travelled several times to Dublin to present his views to the Catholic Association, and it has been accepted by historians that his was one of the chief voices by which the Catholic community was led to endorse the policy of Pitt and Cornwallis. He received a cordial letter from Pitt, in which the Prime Minister hinted that Catholic Emancipation would indeed receive the early consideration of a united parliament.

  Moore cared nothing for either Pitt’s gratitude or Archbishop Troy’s admiration. He had expressed his actual political convictions. The “Protestant Nation,” as it was now being called, seemed to him hopelessly venal and corrupt, and its parliament an assembly of placemen leavened by a handful of patriotic but ineffectual rhetoricians. Any hope for reform or for the removal of Catholic disabilities lay with London. His own instincts and preferences were English rather than Irish, and he relied upon England to drag his country forward into the modern world. It was a most tentative and conditional reliance, for he did not expect England to act upon any motives other than those of selfishness and the need to protect itself. This too he presented in the pamphlets with a candour which lent weight to his arguments. And his cynicism seemed justified as the country watched the ill-concealed process by which Cornwallis and Castlereagh set to work bribing the legislators in Dublin with pensions, titles, and promises of sinecures. The “Protestant Nation,” so he insisted, did not deserve to survive, and was proving the point by being bribed out of existence.

  And yet his brief adventure into practical politics filled him with disgust and self-loathing. He had written what he believed to be the truth, but he had done so in payment of a debt to Dennis Browne, who had devoted months to a remorseless dragooning of Mayo. At Browne’s instigation, companies of militia and yeomanry had crossed and recrossed the county, burning hamlets which had sheltered rebels, lashing suspects at the cabin door, dragging them at the rope’s end to the gaols in Castlebar and Ballina. Informers, working under the direction of Paudge Dineen, one of Browne’s creatures, brought word to him of rebels who had taken refuge in remote villages, and these were hunted down upon the bogs or the hillsides, frightened men in stained and damp clothing. A whipping triangle was set up at the cross of Ballintubber, upon Moore’s land, and remained there until he tore it down with his own hands. And as he wrote his pamphlets, as he conducted his correspondence with clerics and gentry, with the Catholic bankers and merchants of Dublin and Limerick, he had always before him, in a corner of his imagination, the memory of Dennis Browne at Westport House, leaning forward towards him across the table, bland and insinuating. Moore felt himself soiled beyond the possibility of cleansing.

  He was visited once by Thomas Treacy of Bridge-end House, on his way to Dublin. In the cool evening they sat together on the balcony.

  “Your father sat here often,” Treacy said. “Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” Moore said. “I remember.”

  “Would that he could see you now,” Treacy said. “Taking your place among us at last. He had great respect for your abilities of mind, George. Great respect. He felt that you were wasting yourself over there in London. You were the clever one, and John was—” He paused.

  “He loved John,” Moore said. “We both did.”

  “And so did I.” Treacy looked away from him, towards the dark green of the evening lake. “I should tell you about Ellen. She is becoming interested, I believe, in a young man. You know him, perhaps, Dominick O’Conor of Roscommon. A good family. His father is a cousin of O’Conor of Clonalis. Nothing has been settled, of course. It is too early for that.”

  “That is welcome news,” Moore said without irony. “I am most fond of Ellen. She has wit, and spirit.”

  “I had wished a different life for her,” Treacy said, his eyes still upon the lake. “They were very much in love. Herself and John. She was heartbroken. You can well imagine how she felt.”

  “Yes,” Moore said.

  “My God, what a waste,” Treacy said. “But his motives were generous. You must remember that, George.”

  “History does not judge us by our motives,” Moore said.

  “History does not judge us at all,” Treacy said. “God judges us.”

  “God does,” Moore said.

  “I was reflecting upon that as I read your latest paper. It was most kind of you to send it to me. It is the judgement of God upon this Protestant nation of theirs that it is perishing at last in squalor. They have lorded it over us since the Boyne, since Cromwell. Moss-troopers and jumped-up joiners�
�� apprentices, and their sons and grandsons and great-grandsons. The judgement of God. You might well have made that point.”

  “And so they will in the future,” Moore said. “The property and commerce of this island are firmly in the hands of the Protestants. That will not change. But with a London parliament there is a chance that we will have our liberties restored to us. A chance only. That is all that I have argued.”

  “A most lucid argument,” Treacy said. “If only your father— He would have been most proud of you.”

  “We may gain our liberties,” Moore said. “The Papists may. But the country will lose whatever independence it has enjoyed. John would not have been proud.”

  “John was a boy,” Treacy said. “What liberty could we have been given by the French? Cutthroats and blasphemers.”

  “Yes,” Moore said. “I know.” He passed his hand over his eyes, rubbing them. “I made a bargain with Dennis Browne,” he said. “Browne got John out of here, to a safe gaol in the south. In time we would have got him out of the country. To America, perhaps. Or Spain. And in exchange I agreed to argue on behalf of the Union. I was bribed. As those wretched timeservers in Dublin are being bribed with ribbons and pensions. I had my price.”

  Treacy turned to look at him. He paused, puzzled, before he spoke. “But you believe what you have written?”

  “Oh, yes,” Moore said. “Every word of it. But I would not have written save for that bargain. I gave Browne his pound of flesh.”

  “That is a disagreeable way to put it, surely,” Treacy said. “It was for John’s life that you bargained. God Almighty! Dennis Browne is a man beneath contempt. I would not have thought it of him.”

  “He kept his part of the bargain and I have kept mine. It was a worthless bargain. John is dead.”

  “Not useless,” Treacy said gently. “It was for John that you made it. To save John.”

  “I would have made any promise. Strung lies together, given him money. Whatever.”

  “But you did not. You promised only to make public your true opinions. You are troubled by a scruple of conscience which any intelligent priest could resolve for you. Speak to Hussey. I can assure you that he admires what you have written.”