Before the anticipated eruption occurs – to return to the newly arrived Tippings where we left them, maybe digging the foundations for a house in a future high street, or helping to plot out the fortified tower house of their patron Sir Fulke Conway, with its gardens and orchards sloping down to the River Lagan – before the year of wholesale slaughter, the settler drive to wrest order from the wilderness is making headway. Hewitt again:
We planted little towns to garrison
the heaving country, heaping walls of earth
and keeping all our cattle close at hand ...
The site chosen for the Conway mansion had previously been known as Lios na gCearrbach, Fort of the Gamblers, though who or what the eponymous gamblers were is a mystery. Were they servants or retainers attached to the stronghold nearby, so addicted to games of chance that they never stopped playing until they’d gambled the clothes off one another’s backs? Or outlaws taking a break from their depredations on the earliest wave of settlers? Different accounts have different surmises to offer. But whatever the truth of the matter, the name took hold – and perhaps it wasn’t too wide of the mark in settler terms as well. The whole new way of life for the ordinary colonists was a gamble, as to whether they would prosper, or go under.
We don’t know, either, how ‘Lisnagarvey’ turned into Lisburn – Lisbourne, Lisburne in early documents – ‘burn’ having no obvious Irish derivation. It is surely too literal-minded to relate it to the burning of the town in 1641. But ‘burn’ it became, and stayed. And while I’m on the subject of obscurities and inconsistencies, I should mention that the Conway castle at Lisnagarvey was either the old O’Neill castle renovated, or a fortified manor built from scratch; that it was either Sir Fulke, who died in 1624, or his brother Sir Edward, who undertook the necessary refurbishment, or demolition and reconstruction (you can take your pick). It’s certain, though, that by 1630 – when Sir Edward died in his turn – an anglified structure had taken the place of the original Gaelic castle. Its gardens, outbuildings, brewhouse, oathouse, powderhouse and office were enclosed within a wall, while the stables, stable yard, kitchen garden and slaughterhouse stood outside. With the flower gardens and orchards mentioned above, and the salmon-filled river, it was certainly an idyllic habitation.
The indigenous Irish may have watched with amazement as radical alterations to the landscape and native architecture took place around them; and we know that many of them were not too set in the ways of Gaelic feudalism to accept employment with the newcomers. The old world was giving way to the new; and no amount of Gaelic recalcitrance, or allegiance to the past, was going to halt the process. For those of a pragmatic cast of mind, the way forward was clear enough, and entailed adapting to current circumstances. At the same time, they’d have waited to see if the overthrow of the Gaelic world might not be followed by a reversal: who knew what plans for a coup or a military campaign were being fomented from above! They, the ordinary Irish, certainly had cause to resent the labels – ‘barbarous’, ‘savage’, ‘churls’, ‘bandits’ – foisted on them by colonists unfamiliar with the intricacies and sophistications of the Gaelic way of life. Settler presumptions of superiority, and contempt for an old and alien civilisation, didn’t make for an easing of suspicions and hostilities.
The basic obstacle to meaningful communication between settler and native was of course the language difficulty, with the edict coming down from the new administrative class that inclusion under the heading ‘civil Irish’ depended on a person’s command of the English language. If you couldn’t speak English you were seen as nearly Neanderthal. Well, Edmund Spenser in the previous century had taken the view that the only way to deal with the entire unruly population of Ireland was to exterminate it or anglicise it, that extermination wasn’t too dire a fate for those who wouldn’t be anglicised. But it often happened instead that settlers became gaelicised, though it could take a few generations for the process to get truly under way.
When John and Katherine Tipping uprooted themselves from well-regulated Warwickshire and headed for the woods of Ulster, they brought with them a family of five children aged between four and seventeen. The oldest, Thomas, was born in 1605; then came Anne (1608), John (1610), Alicia (1614) and William (1617). All English-born, all attuned (we may suppose) to the enlightened civilities of the age. One would like to think these younger Tippings regarded the Irish enterprise as a great adventure. Did they exhibit a Children of the New Forest type of resourcefulness once they’d reached their own new forest, Killultagh? Was the strangeness of Ireland, the dark aboriginal woods sheltering mysterious ill-wishers, will o’ the wisps, the beehive-shaped huts housing seeming savages, the gloomy days of winter, the fraught silences punctuated by snatches of a foreign tongue – were these things an enticement or a cause of nightmare? Did they hanker after a Warwickshire peace and quiet? Or did they soon begin to feel at home? They had their little community around them to keep the worst of the colonists’ perils at bay – or so it seemed – and there in front of their eyes a whole new town was taking shape, with castle, church and street of houses.
The earliest map of Lisburn, preserved in the Dublin Rent Office and dated to 1640, lists the names of the original builders of the town. Alongside ‘John Tippen’ we find a George Rose who can’t have been other than the Tipping children’s uncle, Katherine’s brother; and probably there were cousins too, in the little settler enclave. Most of the names on the builders’ list are clearly English in origin (Dobbs, Bones, Butterfield), a few are Welsh (John ap Richard, Owen ap Hugh), and there’s even one Irish name, Peter O’Mullred (O’Mullan, Ui Maol Riada?), to bring in a suggestion of a rudimentary democracy operating at the time (democracy, or sycophancy: again, you can take your pick). The same map shows the Tippens (Tippings) established at No. 12 the High Street (the present Castle Street), with Bridge Street on the other side of the castle descending pleasantly to the River Lagan. In 1640, this was the whole extent of the town.
Perhaps the younger children attended school in the centre of the Market Place, getting up early in the morning and, after a breakfast of porridge and buttermilk, crossing the road with their satchels and hornbooks. In winter, they might have carried lanterns to see them safely home. In the long days of summer, there were abundant fields behind the houses to play in, or to gather herbs for cooking and healing. Would the older ones have learned to read and write before they left Stratford? We have no way of telling – or of envisaging what kinds of commerce and social activity the adults engaged in. Was their aim to make a replica of an English town? More than a century later, in 1759, an English traveller called Willes compared Lisburn to Stratford-on-Avon – but by this time the town had been destroyed twice, and twice rebuilt, and descendants of the first inhabitants were long dispersed. Nevertheless, perhaps something survived, in Lisburn’s layout and atmosphere, of the settler impulse to create a home-from-home; and, in the peculiar conditions of seventeenth-century Ulster, a pocket of sanity and calm amid the general disorder.
Bridge Street today (2009) is a sorry sight. Its straggle of rickety houses and shops has a dank, abandoned look about it. Redevelopment, not conservation, is horribly in the air. Well, Lisburn, now a city, is no less prone than anywhere else in the North to modern forms of crassness and philistinism. (I’m talking architecture here.) But up until a couple of years ago, there was at least one good reason for visiting Bridge Street. Right at the top, on the corner opposite the present linen museum (the old market house) stood a second-hand bookshop run by a Church of Ireland minister named William Harshaw. The Old Bookshop, Lisburn, had everything to gladden the heart of a collector. You could hardly get in for the piles of books crammed in every corner and cranny. Books spilled over from the sagging shelves and colonised large sections of floor space. Falling on them with a whoop, if your eye was caught by some desirable title wedged in the middle, might cause the whole tottery structure to topple over – but it didn’t matter. The helpful, knowledgeable, laid-back propr
ietor was only too happy if you’d lighted on something you were looking for.
The Old Bookshop was not exactly run as a commercial concern and so it became unsustainable, in the brutal days of rising rents and rates. Its alluring abundance of bibliomaniac’s desiderata has been transported elsewhere. Like the old Smithfield Market in Belfast, foremost resort of the bric-a-brac addict, it had about it a ramshackle headiness: you were always certain to emerge from these eccentric premises with your arms overladen. Both rarities and standard works in any subject were copiously on offer. I don’t know what led me to the Old Bookshop (other than an instinct for acquisition), but shortly after I’d moved back to Northern Ireland, after long years in London, I could count myself among William Harshaw’s most persistent customers. My book interests are eclectic: first editions of the twentieth century, poetry, detective fiction and what-have-you. I’m principally a children’s-books accumulator, and hard-to-find titles by Mabel Esther Allan, Elinor Lyon, Winifred Darch, Evadne Price and others were apt to turn up here. Children’s books – yes. But I’m also always on the look-out for material to do with Ireland, past and present, and in this respect too the Old Bookshop turned up trumps. Ulster and Ireland, by J.W.Good, published by Maunsel in 1919; the Talbot Press edition of Ferguson’s poems; The Truth about Ulster, by F. Frankfort Moore; the Northern Banking Company’s Centenary Volume of 1924 ... all these, and more, many more, arrived on my shelves by way of Bridge Street, Lisburn. And among them was Mary Hickson’s Ireland in the Seventeenth Century – published in 1884 – which describes in some detail ‘the Irish Massacres of 1641–42’. What I didn’t know, when I first read Mary Hickson’s account of this atrocious episode, was that an ancestor of my own, a Tipping in-law, was conspicuous among the massacred. His name was Edward Alleyn, or Allen, and he lost his life in horrific circumstances, and as a consequence of the Irish, with their exterminatory instincts aroused, paying no heed to chivalrous rules or merciful strategies available in wartime.
Between 1622 and the autumn of 1641 the Tippings seem to have lived peaceably enough in their two-street town with the broiling countryside beyond it, the ageing parents and the growing children, who, in due course, followed the impulse to found families of their own. (The two girls, alas, as is generally the way with female siblings and the female line, disappear from the story.) By the 1630s, Stratford-on-Avon would likely have faded in the minds of all the High Street and Bridge Street immigrants, especially those of the younger generation. Ulster was the here-and-now, and a kind of social order and civic consciousness was being established in Lisburn itself and in all the little Planter towns, in small ways and according to an English pattern. The Protestant religion loomed large as an aspect of the ‘civilised’ life, as much for what it stood for, among a rudimentary bourgeoisie – the past, moderation, respectability – as for its value as a theological comfort.
But Irishness wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle to the forming of attachments. The first Tipping to marry outside the tribe was the youngest son of John and Katherine, William, whose bride’s name, Margaret O’Hoole (O’Toole, Ui Thuathail?) suggests a different type of upbringing and family background. (This is an assumption – and so is a good deal of what follows.) William, we remember, had only had four years of being a little English boy in the reign of King James, before the woods of Ulster closed in on him, bounding his horizons and perhaps endowing him with a degree of sympathy for the local underdog, the ill-treated Irish. … However it came about, the marriage of William and Margaret in the summer of 1640 is recorded in the sole surviving fragment of the earliest register of Lisnagarvey Parish Church, St Thomas’s – so the bride can’t have been of an unshakeably Catholic faith. No children are attributed to the couple, but that’s not to say they didn’t have any: we simply don’t know. William went on to become an officer in the Royalist army and after the Restoration of 1662 he was granted lands in County Leitrim and County Armagh, as we shall see. But in the year of the uprising the twenty-four-year-old William was probably still in Lisburn, along with his brothers John and Thomas. All three were married by this time; John was the father of an infant daughter, and Thomas had four young children (a fifth, a girl, had died shortly after birth). ... Apart from a few brief mentions later on, the middle Stratford son, John, at this point passes out of my Tipping narrative, I am thankful to say: there are far too many Johns and Williams and Thomases making it difficult to disentangle one from t’other. One might have wished for a tad more originality in the matter of the naming of offspring; where are the Hercules and Horatios and Henriettas who might have made things easier for a future chronicler (not to mention reader)?
But now the autumn of 1641 is creeping up on us, and we have the whole lot of the Ulster Tippings – not yet multiplied immeasurably – assembled in or near the original settlement (I think). Settler fears of a native outbreak had never been entirely allayed, although – as I’ve suggested – life in Lisburn and other embryo towns had assumed as far as possible a flourishing character. Prophetic voices like that of Sir Thomas Phillips, governor of Coleraine, had warned against complacency: ‘It is fered that they will Rise upon a Sudden and Cutt the Throts of the poore dispersed British.’
The signs were there, and eventually the time was right. It’s recorded in The Montgomery Manuscripts that, on the afternoon of 23 October, a man, ‘half-stript’, dismounted from his horse and came running to the Montgomerys of the Ards bearing a missive from Bishop Leslie in Lisburn to the effect that all hell had broken loose. ‘Insurrections, Murthers, and burnings’ were being carried out by ‘ye Irish’ on all sides. The first messenger was swiftly followed by further out-of-breath runners bringing the alarming news of ‘Crewell Massacres of divers persons’. Panic set in, and soon the countryside was alive with the terror-stricken settler population fleeing in droves towards reputed places of safety, towns such as Lifford, Strabane and Derry. Their houses, lands, hay, corn, farming implements, furniture, clothes ... everything they had owned was in flames behind them. ‘There hath been seen great fires so near as were discerned from this place,’ Lord Edward Chichester in Belfast wrote in agitation to the king on 24 October.
Two days previously, a section of the Ulster Irish under the leadership of Sir Phelim O’Neill had launched a surprise assault on major fortified positions in the North, and by now nearly the whole of Ulster, from Newry to Donegal, was in Irish hands. The game was afoot. And some of the Irish were running amok. Most people nowadays would agree that the rising was not planned as a wholesale massacre of English and Scottish settlers – that it wasn’t the ‘fiendish Romish massacre’ of popular Protestant mythology. But it also seems clear that the military commanders quickly lost control of headstrong recruits whose pent-up angers and resentments had finally gained an outlet – a savage outlet. The settlers, it seemed, were fair game. They could be slaughtered, robbed, stripped of their clothes and possessions, and driven naked into the wilderness with impunity. They were paying a terrible price for the depredations wrought earlier in the century on the orders of Lord Mountjoy and Sir Arthur Chichester. ‘We have killed, burnt and spoiled all along the lough within four miles of Dungannon,’ the latter had written in 1601. ‘We spare none of what quality or sex soever, and it hath bred much terror in the people.’ In Irish eyes, the long-awaited vengeance was justified in matching ‘excess with excess’. I’m quoting here from the Colville Papers of 1717, in a different context but with equal relevance: ‘for as we know savage customs always beget a corresponding darkness of the soul’.
As days and weeks went by, the horror stories proliferated. Lurgan was burnt to the ground, Portadown was the scene of a hellish event, when about a hundred of the settler community were flung into the River Bann and drowned, and more helpless victims were burned to death by a sept of the Maguires at Lisgoole Castle in County Fermanagh. What, we might wonder, went through the attackers’ heads as they put whole communities violently to death? Did they think of themselves as avengers, heroes?
The final sight to meet the eyes of many of those cut down would have been their mad malignant faces glorying in a homicidal frenzy. The imprint of these occurrences must be etched into the landscape, branded for ever on the places where the worst of human impulses erupted.
The reality was terrible enough, but it wasn’t long before rumour and fabrication spewed up ever more gruesome enormities. Colonel Manus O’Cahan, a commander in the Irish army, for example, was envisaged gorging himself at the breakfast table on the heads of murdered Protestants (like a worse version of the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk). The bridge at Portadown soon acquired an evil reputation as cries and howlings, believed to signal a ghostly re-enactment of the drownings, made it a place to avoid after dark. (A more prosaic explanation for the eerie nocturnal noises put them down to wolves, or to packs of dogs made homeless by the murder of their masters.)
Meanwhile, back in Lisburn. ... The townspeople, including, no doubt, the able-bodied Tippings, were rallying against the menacing Irish forces. Some among the Planters were rather disposed to stand their ground than to fly for their lives, and among them was a Captain Robert Lawson who beat a drum through the emptying streets of Belfast calling for volunteers. Having ‘gathered in all about 160 horse and foot’, Captain Lawson then proceeded to Lisburn, where he and his men beat off an attack on the town by Sir Conn Magennis. It was the night of 25 October. Reinforcements arrived, led by Lord Montgomery and Lord Hamilton, and by Sir George Rawdon, the current Lord Conway’s agent in Ireland. In all, up until the evening of 28 November, when the ground was covered in ice and the dregs of snow, three assaults on the town took place, and all were repelled. Even stampeding a herd of cattle at the town gates didn’t achieve the attackers’ objective. In the aftermath of the third attack, led by Phelim O’Neill himself, Bridge Street and High Street were chock-a-block with corpses of both factions, lying where they’d been struck down. The lovely meadows behind the houses had become a killing ground too, a place of pure horror.
A Twisted Root Page 4