By this stage (the 1640s) the ongoing troubles of King Charles I with his parliament had altered the colouring of the Irish picture. As the people of England split into two factions, Royalists and Parliamentarians, so the English in Ireland correspondingly sided with one or the other. Add the Irish Catholic rebels who came out in support of the king, the Protestants and Presbyterians who defected to the king, and Ulster Catholics who became Cromwellian converts, and you get the right conditions for chaos piled on top of pandemonium. Within every discernible social grouping in the country you find variation (in outlook) and vacillation (when it comes to commitment). A sense of unstoppable movement characterises the age, movement to the country and within the country, movement of troops in all directions preparing for military action, evasive movement on the part of rebels and woodkerne, restless movement of wandering poetic beggars lamenting the overthrow of the overlords, hectic movement of settlers fleeing for their lives or towards their deaths, movement of the dispossessed, westwards movement of Cromwell-created refugees, movement of irresolute recruits from army camp to camp. And against this background of disruption, you had ordinary decent Irish people, and ordinary decent settlers, doing their best to achieve a bit of stability and get on with whatever might pass for a normal life.
It’s impossible for us, at a distance of more than four and a half centuries, to fully comprehend the massacres of 1641 and after. We can, of course, experience intellectual outrage on behalf of anyone caught up in annihilating events; but emotional outrage eludes us, when these events occurred so far in the past. There’s only so much horror you can properly respond to before it loses its impact. After a time, the dreadful details contained in the 1641 depositions hardly seem to relate to flesh-and-blood suffering, but belong more to the realm of statistics (well, either to that or to some blood-bolter’d genre of historical sensationalism).6 So many hacked to pieces, such-and-such a number incarcerated and burnt alive, a further lot stuck with pikes as they try, half-drowned, to scramble from the River Bann. These scenes from hell are as remote from us as Hieronymus Bosch. We can – and must, as I’ve said – deplore the cruelties of this incredibly historic time; but the fullest emotional involvement evades us, the recognition that these things really happened to real people.
It was all so unimaginably different, as Louis MacNeice said about the ancient Greeks, and all so long ago … and this means I can’t (for instance) realistically attribute any kind of personality or domestic circumstances to my great-grandfather-at-an-immeasurable-remove, the atrociously executed Edward Allen, or to his Carolean in-laws the Tippings, since he and they are essentially unknowable, if not entirely unimaginable (pace MacNeice). Something of their stories can be imagined, by building on the information we have, the bare bones, the meagre outline – and for that, the available data, enormous thanks are due to the record-keepers of old, and (personally speaking) to the ancestral detective work of my scholarly second cousin Harry Tipping.
A hanged ancestor: now there’s a ghost that could haunt you, if you let it. It could come supernaturally dragging the ball and chain that secured it in a dungeon, bleeding from its head-wound – a spectral presence and nightly embodiment, or disembodiment, of accusation, re-enacting its deathly predicament by the sole surviving outer wall of Lord Aungier’s castle, as avid for vengeance as Brian Boy Magee in Ethna Carbery’s poem. Or, more subtly, it could insinuate itself into the brains of susceptible descendants, colouring their attitude to enormities of the past. But I don’t think so. I think Edward Allen, Gent., of Longford, would wish to dissociate himself from a lurid afterlife. I think he’d like the emphasis to fall on his orderly and upright existence, not his awful death. (Sheer guesswork here, again: it’s just the ‘Gent., of Longford’ bit that’s prompting this supposition.) But the effect of his murder on those closer to him in time, his children and grandchildren – to stick with those two generations – would naturally have been vivid and extreme. (His posthumous grandson John, my particular concern, will have his say – or what can pass for it – in Chapter Two.)
For numerous succeeding generations, my own included, the knowledge that Edward Allen was hanged, not for being a law-breaker, but simply for being who and what he was (a Planter and a Protestant) – this deprives our ancestor of any of the delinquent glamour his death might have carried in other circumstances. He never lived a life of sturt and strife – or so I believe. Basically, he died for attaching credence to the binding nature of a pledge of clemency, never suspecting it to be as worthless as a wandering beggar’s rags. An upsurge of hysteria and blood-thirst had O’Farrell’s followers in its grip. And no supposed invader of Irish lands need expect humane treatment from them, or fair dealing. From a perspective in the present, the fate of Edward Allen can only be contemplated sombrely, the tale told with intentness and dispassion.
Chapter 2 – Valentine Brown and Valentine Blacker
... Winding-sheet and swaddling-band
Were one. Needle-flute and thimble-drum
Stitched the way to kingdom-come, to Derry,
Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne:
Rat-a-ta-ta, rat-a-ta-ta, rat-a-ta-ta,
Humdrummery of history.
W.R. Rodgers, from Epilogue to The Character of Ireland
The great Munster poet Aodhagán Ó Rathaille (O’Rahilly) (1670–1726) has a bitter poem whose ironic adaptation of an English name – ‘Bhailintín Brún’ – sounds a note of increasing weariness and contempt. I first read this poem as a simple indictment of an unwelcome infiltrator into seventeenth-century Gaelic Munster; and Frank O’Connor’s adept translation of three verses, under the title ‘A Grey Eye Weeping’, confirmed me in this view.
That my old bitter heart was pierced in this black doom,
That foreign devils have made our land a tomb,
That the sun that was Munster’s glory has gone down,
Has made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown.
O’Rahilly, says O’Connor, ‘would have considered “Valentine” a ridiculous name for anyone calling himself a gentleman, and as for “Brown”, he would as soon have addressed a “Jones” or a “Robinson”.’ Well – not quite. O’Rahilly’s preferred patron would certainly have been one of the country’s traditional Gaelic elite, the MacCarthy Mór – of a clan now dispossessed and dispersed. But the poet’s relations with the Browns, new Lords of Kenmare, were perhaps not altogether as clear-cut as the poem called ‘Valentine Brown’ suggests. By one of those historical ironies I’m constantly invoking, the Catholic Browns were both supplanters and supporters of the MacCarthy sept, and adversely affected in their turn by King James’s defeat at the Boyne. Sir Nicholas Brown, Sir Valentine’s father, is lamented in one of O’Rahilly’s poems as ‘the prince who sheltered me’ – but with the son it’s a different matter. The son, educated in England, arrives in Kerry displaying his total ignorance of the Gaelic world and its system of patronage of the arts. O’Rahilly, an ollamh, a scholar and a poet, an aristocrat of the intellect if nothing else, gets short shrift when he comes within the orbit of ‘Sir Val’. Sir Val, the fool, takes the great, learned poet for a beggar, in his tattered coat held together with a sugan belt. Hence O’Rahilly’s litany of reciprocal insults, the ‘foreign devils’, the ‘foreign raven’ preying on the native birds, the blighted streams devoid of fish. The poet’s sense of a shattered Irish world throws up abundant images of desolation: a clouded sun, a waste of scrub and heather, a drift of feathers, a palace forsaken, an ollamh relegated to the margins of society. The ultimate triumph, however, belongs to O’Rahilly. Valentine Brown has gone down in history – at least, in literary history – as a deplorable parvenu, an importer of new and uncongenial manners and customs into regal Kerry. O’Rahilly has set him up for perpetual ridicule, ‘Sir Val’ of the oafish vainglory.
Now another seventeenth-century Valentine is coming into focus, a Valentine Blacker. (I can’t resist the coincidence of the forenames, even if there’s little else to link
the two.) Captain Valentine Blacker was a Royalist officer from the village of Poppleton, near York, who came to Ireland some time in the early seventeenth century and never went home again. He was also, to bring in a personal element once more, another of my far-back forebears. At this point I should, perhaps, make it clear that I’m not about to embark on a genealogical jamboree. My purpose is different – and besides, anyone on the trail of ancestors knows that the further back you go, the more selective you have to be (if selectivity weren’t already imposed by the quantity of information available). Once you’ve got to some reasonably remote era of the past, the possibilities for uncovering distant progenitors are extended ad infinitum, with thousands and thousands of anonymous begetters branching off into an infinity of consanguinity. It’s enough to derange one’s equilibrium. In the interests of sanity, if nothing else, you have to stick to a particular familial line – with allowance for twists and meanderings and even dead-end diversions. Of course, anyone susceptible to the lure of continuity will get a tremendous kick out of placing themselves in an actual, personal historical sequence – and I’m no exception. It’s great to be able to single out a few distinctive forebears among the myriads who, of necessity, must remain unidentifiable and irreclaimable. All vanished – some of them utterly, attenuated to nothingness, some bequeathing a fact or two, nothing more, to future generations, many existing as nothing more than a name on a document, or a gravestone. ... Judith Harrison, for example, daughter of Sir Michael Harrison of Ballydargan, County Down, who became the wife of Valentine Blacker and the mother of two sons and three daughters, who lived through the wars and massacres of the mid seventeenth century. ... What was her family doing in County Down? Were they part of the Old English colony in east Ulster, or new English adventurers? Did she grow up in the townland of Ballydargan? What was life like for a Jacobean Ulster girl? Did she witness terrible occurrences? Where did her loyalties lie? ... I’m lumbering myself with a lot of unanswerable questions here. One thing is certain, though, and disconcerting to a would-be Irishwoman. If I make a list of my known female ancestors of the seventeenth century – Katherine Rose, Judith Harrison, Elizabeth Allen, Rosa Young, Rose Latham, Frances Blacker (I’ll get to the last two in a minute) – what strikes me about this list is the unequivocal Englishness of the names. Ah well.
Valentine Blacker. A little book, For God and the King, written by J.S. Kane and published by the Ulster Society in 1995, traces the history of the Blackers of Carrickblacker. A lot of my information about the family comes from this source, and I’m grateful for it. ... It starts with a Viking raider named Blacar, or Blacaire, a cousin of King Sitric III, sailing up the River Bann towards the future site of Portadown on a night unlike the one evoked in a heartfelt quatrain of the eighth or ninth century, translated by F.N. Robinson:
Fierce is the wind tonight,
It ploughs up the white hair of the sea.
I have no fear that Viking hosts
Will come over the water to me.
A calm night for the warrior Blacar, then, horrors for the preyed-on Irish, with a furious battle to follow; the defeat of a sept of the O’Neills, and a temporary Viking settlement in a townland called Drumlisnagrilly, which Kane translates as ‘the fort of the dagger’: ‘broadsword’ (greillean) would be closer. So Blackers – Blacars – were on the spot in the tenth century before making tracks for the north of England; and then, seven hundred years later, a Royalist descendant returns to Ireland ‘to claim his ancient lands’, as Kane has it. These ancient lands, true enough, include Drumlisnagrilly along with six other townlands. One of these, Ballynaghy (Baile an Achaidh, the Townland of the Plains), soon becomes the site of a manor house known as Blacker’s Bawn.
‘Blacker’s Bawn’ takes us up to the 1660s: Cromwell dead, one king executed and another restored to the English throne, and Valentine Blacker’s career as a Royalist officer long in the past. He was pretty elderly by this stage – well over sixty – though energetic enough to undertake the building of his new manor house, as well as setting in motion the restoration of the Church of Ireland parish church at nearby Seagoe. The earliest church on this site – according to Kane – had been built by English settlers during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. When the alien edifice appeared in the landscape it didn’t go down too well with the native Irish, who promptly made short work of it. By 1609 the church was in ruins. Settler tenacity raised it up again, and again an Irish assault destroyed it. Its second demolition occurred during the uprising of 1641, when many of Seagoe’s beleaguered parishioners found themselves rounded up like a herd of cattle and driven to the bridge at Edenderry to meet their deaths in the Bann, whose level rose with the numbers of corpses crammed into it – shot, stabbed, piked, bludgeoned, whipped to death or simply drowned. (A grisly reminder of this atrocity shook the people of Portadown nearly three hundred years later, in the 1930s, when workers laying out a new bowling green near the site of the massacre turned up hundreds of bones from the Edenderry victims.)
It was due to Valentine Blacker that Seagoe Church got rebuilt yet again, and he and his wife were granted the first pew in the church when it opened for worship in 1662. In the following decade, it became their burial place. So Valentine Blacker can be judged a benefactor of his adopted Northern Irish community, and a notable presence in the locality – even if, like that other Valentine, Valentine Brown, he probably had little acquaintance with native Gaelic traditions in the area, seasonal rituals with song and dance and girls garlanded with flowers, fertility rites, mourning customs and so forth: all hidden from Protestant incomers but flourishing around them none the less. Tugamar Fhein an Samhradh Linn.
It is time to return to the mid seventeenth-century wars, and the brothers Tipping. The youngest, William, is listed among ‘the ’49 men’ – that is, those who backed the king’s cause in Ireland before 1649 (when the execution of Charles I took place). William’s brother John was also a Royalist recruit. What caused the eldest, Thomas, to take up the cudgels for Cromwell isn’t known, but probably it had more to do with expediency than ideology. Given the uncertain and insane conditions prevailing at the time, it might have seemed prudent to have at least one family member on the winning side, whatever that should turn out to be.
The outstanding Royalist in Ireland was the Protestant Earl of Ormond, James Butler, of the prominent Old English Catholic Butler family (Ormond was a Protestant convert). Lord Ormond commanded forces for the king – and with the Catholic Confederates and Puritan Parliamentarians thrown into the mix, not to mention deserters and tergiversators – the scope for mayhem and slaughter was intensified. Were the Tipping brothers in the thick of it? How much actual fighting did they do? Did they ever come face-to-face in a skirmish? Where did they settle their wives and children once they’d gone for soldiers? What happened after Cromwell came, with his assumption of a God-given licence to wipe out the perpetrators of 1641, and his terrible subduing tactics? It would be horrendous to think that Thomas Tipping had any part in the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford. One hopes (and this is likely) he was quartered elsewhere in the country; and at least we know that, Parliamentarian or not, he didn’t come over with Cromwell’s invasion force, which was chiefly responsible for the indiscriminate slaughter. No, I think I can absolve my ancestor of military brutality on the scale it erupted in these Irish towns. Drogheda and Wexford: the names remain conspicuous in the catalogue of horrors inflicted on the Irish. It was the number of civilian victims laid at Cromwell’s door that consolidated his reputation for creed-condoned mercilessness and ethnic abhorrence, at least as far as Ireland is concerned. ... Cromwell is, of course, in one sense an anomalous figure. In England, as Elizabeth Bowen puts it in her book, Bowen’s Court, ‘he had fought for the English conception of “freedom”; in Ireland he fought against the Irish conception of it’. No Irish republican, indeed, would want to claim Cromwell as an ideological ancestor, but it’s a different matter if you’re an anti-monarchist in England.
&nb
sp; The Irish conception of freedom included the freedom to be as Catholic as Mary Tudor. Even as late as the mid twentieth century, integrity in Catholic circles was measured by the way the faith had been adhered to, through thick and thin (or dungeon, fire and sword, as in the hymn we sang at school). Turncoats in one’s lineage were a cause of shame. One of my great-grandmothers, Ellen Jordan, used to boast of an unfaltering Catholicism in her family, stretching back unbroken to the days of the Normans. No recusants among the Jordans! Considering what’s emerged in other sections of my adulterated ancestry, though, I am not sure how far her claim to an entirely Catholic descent will stand up. (I am not sure, either, that it won’t stand up; it’s just that, given her forthright and argumentative nature, I can’t help envisaging a sturdy Protestant or Presbyterian element creeping in somewhere.) Following the Jordan line, I can only get back as far as Ellen’s parents, Edward Jordan of Tannaghmore West and Susan McCorry of Moyraverty, born c.1812 and 1815 respectively. My great-great-grandparents – and I love the pungency of those placenames, Tannaghmore West and Moyraverty, both of them well off the beaten track, in the hidden seductive depths of leafy north Armagh.
A Twisted Root Page 6