Soon houses, meadows and corpses were all gone, all burned to ashes, reduced to smouldering ruins. The retreating Irish set fire to the town on the night of 28 November; and the following day, for good measure, they burnt George Rawdon’s house, Brookhill (built before 1611 by our old acquaintance Sir Fulke Conway, whose library went up in smoke with the rest). ... Had the women and children of Lisburn been moved to some place of safety? Were they – and I’m thinking particularly here of the female Tippings – among those residents who, with the Bishop of Down who sent the warning to the Ards, ‘fled towards Belfast’ with whatever they could carry? (I’m quoting from Lord Ernest Hamilton’s The Irish Rebellion of 1641.) There are no records of non-combatant casualties in Lisburn at this time – and we know the Tippings survived, though at least one of their kinsmen by marriage didn’t. This was Edward Allen, mentioned above (p. 16).
A wild and forsaken part of Ireland in the early seventeenth century was the Leitrim/Longford area, and it was decided, in 1621, to try to bring it under English control by importing strong colonists. Among them was a Humphrey Alleyn, or Allen, who was granted 810 acres in Toomonahan townland in the barony of Carrigallen on the shores of Garadice Lough, by edict of King James I. This Humphrey had a son, Edward, whose daughter Elizabeth, eighteen years old, came to Lisburn in 1635 to marry the thirty-year-old Thomas Tipping. This makes Elizabeth Allen from Garadice Lough the first Mrs Tipping to marry in Ireland; and she embarked on her wifely occupations with a will (for all we know to the contrary). Actually, of course, our ignorance concerning the private lives of Thomas and Elizabeth is illimitable. We can’t tell how the marriage came about, with the two of them living, as they did, at a considerable distance from one another. How did they get acquainted in the first place, and what drew them together? Was it an arranged marriage? Did Thomas have business that took him to Longford? Was he a cutler, like his father? We have nothing to go on, to further speculation – just the stark fact contained in the St Thomas Church register. They married, and had children (the youngest, John, the most crucial to my purposes, hasn’t yet put in an appearance, but he will shortly). And wherever Elizabeth and these children had taken refuge during the days of wrath, she must have been frantic with worry about her father and the rest of her family back in Longford – and with good reason.
‘The Irish massacres of 1641 became part of European history, and held a place of infamy by the side of the Sicilian Vespers and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.’ This sententious sentence occurs in J.A. Froude’s introduction to Mary Hickson’s book, Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, (see earlier in this chapter) which consists of extracts from the thirty-two volumes of depositions taken down from Protestant survivors of the bloody events. Through the centuries, doubt has been cast on the authenticity of these documents, or at least on accuracy of recollection, or concern for unvarnished veracity, on the part of some of the informants. Many people, at the time and later, had political or sectarian axes to grind, and accordingly tried to minimise or magnify the scale of the atrocities. But somewhere between the view that no massacres at all took place, and the contradictory view that entire Protestant populations were wiped out at a stroke, you might find an approximation to the truth.
The depositions, exaggerated or not, make harrowing reading; but I’m only concerned here with the murder of my umpteen-times-great-grandfather Edward Allen. The first relevant deposition has him down as Edward Allen, Gent., of Longford – so perhaps Elizabeth and his other children enjoyed a more or less urbane upbringing in a seventeenth-century house in a town, not in isolation on the sodden shores of a desolate lake, with reeds swaying in the water and curlews crying overhead. Perhaps, as time went on, the family came to believe that their lives were relatively secure and fixed in an ordained course, before disaster struck and sent them scurrying for shelter to the newly built castle of Lord Aungier in the centre of Longford, vigorously pursued by the dispossessed O’Farrell clan.
The uprising has reached the Irish midlands, and the warlike O’Farrells are out in force to repossess the lands compulsorily impounded. In their fearsome battle-garb and surrounded by Gaelic uproar, they converge on the castle where distraught Planter families are holding out – holding on for dear life until, in the first week of December, hunger and other miseries drive Longford’s besieged Protestants to enter into negotiations with their hell-raising adversaries. The Irish, armed with swords, pikes, pistols, skeans and what-not, make a sight to strike terror into the hearts of their beholders. They are far from having ‘Gent.’ appended to their names. They are not great upholders of clemency.
A four-man delegation, including Edward Allen, is suffered to emerge from the castle and conducted under armed guard to a nearby house where terms are thrashed out and agreed in writing, signed by all parties. The lives of the English settlers will be spared, and all of them assured of ‘safe convoy to Ballimowe, in the County of Westmeath ... [where] Sir James Dillon was to come ... with some English forces from Dublin.’ For the starved and frightened refugees in the castle, it must have seemed as if the worst of the ordeal was over. But the worthless guarantee of safety, written down or not, is only a ruse to flush the settlers into the open. Like beaters driving game birds upwards to be shot for sport, the Irish have arranged a victory for the most unscrupulous of tactics. As the tragic procession of men, women and children staggers out from the place of refuge, they are set upon, stripped of their clothing and slaughtered on the spot – though a few get away in the ensuing melee, and live to recount the ghastly story.
My extremely distant forebear Edward Allen does not give in without a fight. Outraged and terrified, bleeding from the head where an Irish skean has struck him, he leaps into the River Camlin hoping to swim to safety. But Brian O’Cane of Longford hauls him out of the river – or maybe this person has shoved him into it in the first place; accounts become hopelessly confused at this point. O’Cane may have tried to drown an English enemy; or it’s even possible he was trying to help. Still Edward Allen isn’t dead. Half-drowned, bloody and exhausted, he gets himself to the house of a man named Bartholomew Nangle – the house in which the mendacious negotiations had taken place – and gains a momentary respite. It is very short. A murderous bunch of Irish avengers, scenting blood, is coming up behind. Threatened with arson and goodness knows what other acts of violence, Nangle and his brother-in-law Thomas McGeoghegan part company with the fugitive. Rather than dying with him, they send him to his death. They know what they are doing, but what else can they do? ‘He forced us to take him in – here he is.’ The next act in the frightful drama sees Edward Allen chained in a dungeon, two days and two nights of appalling incarceration, before his maddened enemies drag him out and hang him from a gallows in front of Longford Castle. The fate of Edward Allen’s wife and younger children, who are mentioned in the depositions, is not known.
When I was young and in thrall to a nationalist imperative I’d never have wanted to hear anything bad about the Irish. This was Belfast in the 1950s, and the thing most dear to my heart was the noble conspiracy in a back room up a rickety staircase. Inspired, pipe-smoking conspirators in Donegal tweed jackets devoted to Ireland’s cause. I was exhilarated by the idea of a principled lawlessness. It was as much a matter of leaning as breeding. I mean, I knew that half my ancestry was Protestant. But the other half, I believed, was Catholic Irish and Gaelic through and through, and that was the side I chose to affirm. It suited me to claim connections with Irish patriots – however far-fetched – just as it suited me to block out the Orange affiliations of my father’s family, whose merits as human beings I fully acknowledged. These were my dear aunts and uncles, not oppressors or bigots or appliers of rude epithets to the pope. No member of the Craig family had the least wish to withhold from myself and my peers the package of social advantages which was increasingly coming to be known as our civil rights. Indeed, any news of our deprivation in this area would have startled and mystified my paternal relations. Aside from peri
odic ructions in the back streets, they’d have argued, didn’t life, for all of us in the north of Ireland whatever our religious persuasion, proceed in much the same non-controversial way? At one level this was indisputable – but for those of us, historically- or crusader-minded, who craved a cause to get our teeth into, the North provided plenty of scope for indignation and right action. We were ripe for recruitment to the dissenting ideologies of the time and place.
Whenever I think of Ireland, when I am sixteen, a picture comes into my head of a country wronged, violated and mutilated (six counties lopped off), but rising above every abuse to keep its mystique intact. Its personifications are poignant and alluring. Kathleen Ni Houlihan. The Poor Old Woman. Roisin Dubh. Replete with romance and secrecy, they confer an edge of glamour on our everyday existences. The history we respond to has the fullest nationalist slant imposed on it. It’s a story of unbroken rectitude on the part of the true Irish, against every kind of colonists’ and oppressors’ enormity and iniquity. For seven hundred years the Irish nation had suffered heroically and marshalled its resources, over and over, in a doomed but gallant revolutionary endeavour. In every generation, as it was said, Irish blood – copious and uncontaminated Irish blood – was spilt for the country’s sake. Patriotic verses enshrined the ensanguined. O’Neill and O’Donnell were the names, Sarsfield, Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Mitchel, Pearse. In our iconography, the emphasis will always fall on Boulevogue not Scullabogue, on the Yellow Ford and never the Orange Boyne. We envisage a state of affairs stretching back and back to ancient times, in which freedom and Erin, or some such concept, is perpetually opposed to the Saxon and guilt.
Enlightened disaffection, edifying unrest, are modes of being we uphold and immerse ourselves in. We can’t be talked to about complexity or impartiality. It’s simply a case of us and them. Of course, you can choose to align yourself with the incorruptible Irish cause even without the unblemished ethnic credentials some might call for – think Mitchel, Emmett, Plunket, Tone – but those best entitled to republican kudos have names like Maguire, McMahon, O’Reilly, O’Kane. ... And where does that leave me, Irish and Gaelic, as I consider myself, to my fingertips? ‘Craig’ does not exactly endorse that bit of wishful thinking. In my part of the Falls district of Belfast, ‘Craig’ has unfortunate associations. It proclaims the very thing I am anxious to repudiate: an affinity as Orange as a Belisha beacon.
‘Brady’ creates a better effect: my mother is Nora Brady, and in my head is some vague genealogical commonplace, neither verified nor discredited at the time, about an Irish Brady connection to County Cavan. My grandfather Brady had married a Tipping, and the Tippings, I know – in so far as I know anything at all about them – are staunchly republican. If I think about it, though, that name too is a worry: it doesn’t exactly have the Gaelic ring I’d have relished. (My cousin Harry Tipping, the family historian and a silent collaborator in this enterprise, mentions in one of his papers a desperate attempt on some family member’s part to gaelicise the name by turning it into something like O Tiomhpanaigh. The version he prefers, Harry says, is O Tarbhchach – literally, bullshit.)
Around the turn of the twentieth century – I learn from my mother on an occasion in the distant past – some of our Tipping relations go in for a bit of genealogical excavation, but hastily abandon the family history project once they get back to the 1650s and uncover the shocking fact that the founding father of the family is Oliver Cromwell. It’s nonsense of course, my mother says, her assumption being that an ancestral ‘Cromwellian soldier’ had somehow, by a process of Chinese whispers, got transformed into the old executioner and villain of Irish history himself. She’s right, as it turns out – but for her, as for me, any Cromwellian connection is a thing to keep very dark. It would be vastly preferable to claim descent from the wonderfully named Cormac Mac Ross O’Farrell, clan chieftain and besieger of the English settlers at Longford Castle – not that any of us, at the time, know a thing about that particular episode in English/Irish relations, with expected roles of victims and aggressors reversed. My mother, like me, would choose to be as Irish as possible; although, as a teacher of history, she holds a less deluded view of historical rights and wrongs (and, indeed, many aspects of English history have a strong fascination for her, as strong as anything in her own country’s past). But our lineage, as it happens, as far as pure Irishness is concerned, is worse, much worse, than she and I could ever have imagined.
I am an expert on 1641 – or so it seems to me, in my sixteenth year. I know the risen Irish have the right of it. If your lands are filched by invaders with brutal armies at their disposal, your aspirations reduced and your culture derided, you’d have to be pretty pusillanimous not to take some retaliatory action if the chance arose. Foreigners planted on stolen lands had it coming to them, in my vehement opinion. Besides, I know – everyone knows – reports of atrocities on the part of the Irish were magnified from the start for a partisan purpose. It is of course a different matter if the atrocity in question is down to the other side. An event I’m familiar with through a poem by Ethna Carbery5 makes my hair stand on end. It concerns the slaughter of almost the entire population of Islandmagee, blameless people wiped out by soldiers of the garrison at Carrickfergus in an orgy of bloodletting. That is a true atrocity of 1641, I think (or of early 1642: the date of the Islandmagee massacre is disputed, as, indeed, is the source of the attack). I am horror-stricken by the brutality involved. The poem evoking it, ‘Brian Boy Magee’, is written from the point of view of the sole survivor of the Clan Magee. Coming to his senses in the aftermath of the slaughter, ‘Great Christ! [he exclaims] Was the night a dream?’
In all that Island of Gloom,
I only had life that day.
Death covered the green hillside,
And tossed in the bay.
The terrible Phelim O’Neill of the Protestant tradition, commemorated in an Orange jingle:
Remember the steel of Sir Phelim O’Neill
Who slaughtered our fathers in Catholic zeal
that bugbear of Protestants and unionists gets a different incarnation here. Ethna Carbery’s poem goes on:
I shall go to Phelim O’Neill
With my sorrowful tale, and crave
A blue-bright blade of Spain,
In the ranks of his soldiers brave.
And God grant me the strength to wield
That shining avenger well –
When the Gael shall sweep his foe
Through the yawning gates of Hell.
The antiquated diction – ‘shining avenger’, ‘crave’, ‘wield’ – procures an uplifting effect; at least, it uplifted me as high as the peak of Errigal, while I wallowed in its romantic implacability. (I’m quoting the thing from memory; it has stayed with me.) I’d have been ready with my besom, myself, by those orotund infernal gates, given half a chance. In my book, the redressing of wrongs carries an especially thrilling charge. I might even have regarded the burning of Lisburn, on the orders of Phelim O’Neill, as an excusable act of war (not knowing I had any ancestral input into the business). I might have admitted, under pressure, that neither side in the interminable vicious conflicts had an absolute monopoly on honourable or on atrocious behaviour; but I’d always, in my besotted youth, have stood four-square behind the Irish troops, the Irish names.
The Cromwellian soldier preposterously conflated with Cromwell himself to loom menacingly and embarrassingly amongst the topmost branches of our family tree – this soldier can be identified as Thomas Tipping, husband of Elizabeth Allen, son-in-law of the murdered Longford negotiator and father of John Tipping whose line of descent includes myself and the Lurgan Tippings (about whom more anon). ‘Cromwellian soldier’, though, doesn’t seem quite right: it implies that Thomas came over to Ireland with Cromwell’s army, and as we know he did nothing of the sort. He was already established in the country and committed, no doubt, to making a go of things. Did a shift in his attitude occur after Lisburn was burnt? It is possib
le that Thomas and his brothers lost their occupations as well as their possessions in that calamitous year. Perhaps they hadn’t the heart to start all over again in the same spot; at any rate, there’s no evidence to link the Tippings with the town from this point on. They, and their families, vanish from sight for a time amid the dishevelment and uproar of the age – and when the brothers next come into focus it’s as soldiers caught up in the Cromwellian wars in Ireland, though on opposite sides.
I don’t propose to go into the twists and turns of seventeenth-century British politics and their tangled repercussions in Ireland (I hear you breathe a sigh of relief). But it’s necessary to touch on a few of the things that happened after 1641. First of all, at the time and for the future, a virtually irremovable wedge was driven between the Catholics of Ireland and the rest of the population. It left Catholic Scottish settlers in Antrim in an odd position. Some, at the start of the uprising, had joined forces with native insurgents against Protestant Planters – but, as Scottish as well as English incomers began to be listed among the massacred, significant numbers of Antrim Scots switched sides to their fellow-countrymen and deserted their co-religionists. Other Scots followed suit after April 1642, when General Munro arrived from Scotland with his army of Covenanters poised to gain redress for the murders of Presbyterians in the only available way: reciprocal massacres. A situation was taking shape whereby Planters and indigenous Irish were eternally opposed to one another; and native Irish terrain was coming to be seen as an enclave of mad brigands (an attitude persisting in some quarters right down to the present). Once the uprising was more or less quelled, the musterers of rebel forces, once again, had their lands confiscated and sold off to English investors known as Adventurers.
A Twisted Root Page 5