The decisive victory in the Williamite wars (or defeat, if you prefer it) was not at the Boyne but at Aughrim in County Galway.
At the Boyne bridge we took our first beating,
From the bridge at Slane we were soon retreating,
And then we were beaten at Aughrim too –
Ah, fragrant Ireland, that was goodbye to you.
Frank O’Connor’s translation of the poignant ‘Slan le Padraic Sairseal’ (‘Farewell to Patrick Sarsfield’) captures to the full the demotic, plaintive note of the Gaelic original, with its Jacobite spokesman for a sorrowful and discomposed populace. With this poem, as O’Connor suggests, we hear for perhaps the first time an unadorned contemporary Irish voice lamenting the pass the country has come to – the endless defeats, the broken Treaty of Limerick, and ‘Ireland’s best’, including Patrick Sarsfield, dispersed among foreign armies all over the continent. (‘The Mother’s Lament’, mentioned above, was written, of course, long after the event it conjures up.) And the fact that it’s an anonymous voice makes it all the more telling, like the Unknown Soldier’s grave.
Fragrant Ireland, Catholic Ireland, is about to enter its darkest phase. With the Protestant ascendancy secured in the wake of the Jacobite disasters, measures are quickly enacted to keep the Catholic population in its place (its very constricted place). By means of the notorious Penal Laws, Catholic aspirations are obstructed in every area – property-owning, scholarship, freedom of worship, any kind of social advancement. A standard image from the era has a priest with a price on his head saying Mass on a lonely hillside with a rock for an altar, before a congregation of downtrodden peasants on their knees in the mud holding sacks across their shoulders against the terrible weather. This is what the tribe of Milesius has come down to! From 1691, and throughout the greater part of the following century, native Irish suffering and suppression make a powerful theme for historians and poets alike.
It was a different matter, of course, if you were on the winning side. William Blacker, fresh from his exertions at the Boyne, returns to Armagh to oversee the running of the family estate on the death of his father George in 1691, and begins the construction of what will become known as Carrickblacker House – described in 1909 by Robert M. Young as ‘an ancient battlemented mansion bearing the date 1692 on a stone in the wall’.1 (This architectural treasure eventually comes into the philistine ownership of Portadown Golf Club and is demolished in 1956 to make way, God save us, for a club house. Nearly three centuries of history eradicated at a stroke. I hope those Portadown golfers on the spot were haunted and put off their game by ghosts of the massacred settlers of 1641 spilling over from Edenderry – not to mention spectral Blackers outraged by the destruction of their family home.)
And what of William’s sister Frances, Mrs John Tipping? Had she perished along with others in the ructions of 1689, as J.S. Kane invites us to suppose, Frances would surely have been buried in Seagoe churchyard alongside her husband. Instead, the Seagoe parish baptismal register for 1691 has a Mrs Frances Tippin (sic) standing godmother to an infant named Margaret Mathers. ... Move forward into the following century, and a map of 1710 shows a person of the same name, Frances Tippin, holding substantial farmlands in the townland of Collcosh just across the border with County Tyrone, seven miles north of Gallrock. Her sons, named William and George (dear God, is there no end to bloody Williams and Georges ... there are more to come) – William and George Tipping would have been in their early thirties/late twenties at this time; both were married, and probably they farmed the lands leased by their mother. Or perhaps by now they had moved to farms of their own; we simply can’t tell.
These are the probable circumstances of Frances Tipping’s life. Girlhood at Blacker’s Bawn, with a full complement of parents, grandparents, brothers, servants and all; marriage to John Tipping (which may have represented a degree of social downgrading – he was, after all, a youngest son and had tradesmen among his immediate forebears); settling in Gallrock; motherhood; widowhood in County Tyrone; agrarian dealings and engagement in local life. Nothing out of the ordinary – well, nothing, that is, aside from the vast disruption of the pre-Boyne period, and the loss, in a single year, of husband, mother and brother.
But envisage for a moment a different scenario. Suppose that Frances does, in fact, meet her death at the hands of Jacobite soldiers in the brutal year of 1689. Say she leaves a daughter, Jane, as well as a couple of sons, and that all three children somehow scrape through, in the chaos and horror surrounding the murders of their parents. The boys then disappear from the records until they turn up as farmers in the 1700s; but two years after the fatal departure for Derry – in 1691 – the twelve-year-old orphaned Jane Tipping applies for assistance to the Seagoe Parish Church Vestry, whose members meet once a quarter to distribute alms to the poor of the parish. (Her name is there, in the church records.) And prominent among the Protestant pillars of the community charged with dispensing charity is, of course, William Blacker, Orange adventurer and poor Jane’s uncle.
A plot is forming here, a standard plot beloved of authors of historical novels. It features an impoverished, even destitute, but spirited female orphan; of good pedigree though perhaps not knowing it, a victim of adversity – and the rich relation whose esteem she gains through a combination of winning ways and sturdiness of character. Certainly William Blacker, who fits one role in this story, could have afforded to find a niche for Jane Tipping in his bustling household among her boy cousins, children of his several marriages. Perhaps he did. Perhaps Jane had a room of her own in the new great house of Carrickblacker, and servants to sweeten her bed linen with sprigs of lavender. Perhaps she grew up and made a splendid marriage from her uncle’s house. ... True, this story more often works itself out in a setting like rural Somerset or some picturesque region of the north of England. But what’s to keep it from spawning a version in rough-hewn, factionally-beset Seagoe in seventeenth-century County Armagh? Nothing, but my own want of skill in amplifying the tale, in imposing an outline both pleasing and plausible on top of its bare bones. If I were a writer of fiction I would do it – for it is only a fiction, derived from nothing more elaborate than the final name on a list of deserving poor: Jane Tipping of Seagoe parish. That’s all. I’ve made the rest up. To return to the facts: I think Frances Tipping did survive the wars in Ireland to resume, as far as possible, an ordinary farming life. And the likelihood is that Jane – poor Jane – was some Tipping by-blow, indigent and unwanted, nothing to do with Frances at all. She’d more likely have been twenty than twelve, and not destined to live much longer. Illness, malnourishment or unattended childbirth would have finished her off. No rich uncle would have taken her under his wing.
Frances’s eldest son William Tipping (c.1677–c.1735) was himself the father of three sons, of whom the youngest, Henry (c.1712–1765), is the probable renegade who twitched the family line of descent into a Papist channel. This Henry is, we remember, the great-grandson of George Blacker – but by this stage, this branch of the family is diverging at high speed from Blacker aggrandisement and prosperity. (And also from the upward moving Tippings of County Louth.)
Henry at twenty-something is a Protestant farmer in the townland of Roughan in the parish of Drumcree. The whole district is part of the Brownlow estate, and Henry’s farm is rented from a William Brownlow of Lurgan. Brownlow is the ground landlord, while a Bryan O’Neill is Henry’s immediate landlord. By 1750, though, this particular Tipping, Henry, has become a leaseholder rather than a lowly tenant-at-will, having inherited Bryan O’Neill’s rights in the Roughan property. Why? The answer would seem to be that Henry had married O’Neill’s daughter Esther – making an odd case of a Protestant advancing in the world (and this in the Penal days) by means of his Catholic connections. It wasn’t a very remarkable advancement, but it would do. And the price exacted? ‘... Turned Papish himself and forsook the auld cause ...’:2 or if he doesn’t go that far, Henry at least allows the children of the union
to be brought up in his wife’s faith. (Nearly two hundred years later, my parents will enact a version of the same arrangement.) And after Henry’s death in 1765, his Catholic widow and four Catholic sons move across the River Bann to a farm in the townland of Ballynamoney, just over a mile from Lurgan town centre. (The farm is held on a ‘Popish lease’ – thirty-one years in duration.) The descendants of these boys will become farmer/weavers.
The Tipping/O’Neill connection isn’t absolutely watertight, though it fits the facts as far as they can be ascertained. It also fits with my purpose, and I intend to stick to it. ... ‘Had I but known’ of her existence in my days of hyper-Hibernianism, I’d have latched on to Esther O’Neill as a probable and desirable ancestress – a true Gael at last, among all the Planters and Blackers and Englishmen and women and Orange ditto.
The whole of County Armagh was coming down with O’Neills, some more peaceable than others;3 and while those of Clancan and Clanbrassil (north Armagh) were distinct from the O’Neills of the Fews (south Armagh), all of them had a common ancestor in an Eoghan O’Neill who flourished in the fifteenth century. So, the Esther O’Neill whom I’m claiming as a direct forebear, would have been connected by blood to the Phelim O’Neill who instigated the uprising of 1641 and ‘slaughtered our fathers in Catholic zeal’. So the patchwork of one’s ancestry – anyone’s ancestry – will often be found to accommodate many unlikely bedfellows.
Chapter 3 – Scullabogue
There’s muskets in the thatch, and pikestaffs in the hay,
And shot in butter barrels buried in the bog,
Extrapolated powder in the tin for tay;
And everything is wrapped in blue-as-gunsmoke fog.
Ciaran Carson, ‘Lord Gregory’
Among the ironies and cultural anomalies surrounding my Belfast Catholic girlhood was my grandmother’s accent. She, my father’s mother, had as strong a Southern accent as the tinkers in their gaudy caravans parked on the old Bog Meadows near our home. She had only to open her mouth to create a wrong impression. A rich Irish voice was not a popular attribute in the Protestant North. It marked you down as a rebelly Papist and contemptible alien. Whereas my grandmother, in fact, was as Protestant as those Orange Blackers, shadowy maternal forebears on an attenuated branch of my hybrid family tree.
She was born Emily Lett in September 1889, youngest child of a County Wexford farmer named William Lett and his second wife Emily Anne Thorpe. ... I’m struck again by the Englishness of these names, to which I can add another, Eliza Stewart, my great-grandmother’s mother. Wexford, indeed, as a seaport, contained ‘one of the highest densities of Old English family names in Ireland’ (I’m quoting from an essay by W.J. Smyth in his and Kevin Whelan’s Common Ground of 1988); and after Cromwell had finished with it, bringing its ‘mediaeval era to a bloody end’, the de-populated town attracted an influx of new English inhabitants. I don’t know which wave of settlers my Wexford ancestors belonged to,1 but clearly their origins were not Gaelic. I cannot attach them to ancient romantic Ireland in any of its guises. New Ross was their territory, Clonleigh in particular, and the triangle formed by it, Enniscorthy and Wexford. But the connotations of these place names worked for me in ways antagonistic to my ancestors. They, alas, were more likely to be yeomen than pikemen.2 And rebel glamour was fodder for my adolescent view of the way things were.
‘Enniscorthy’s in flames’, goes a line from a song that would often be running through my head (it never got outside my head since I couldn’t sing):
Enniscorthy’s in flames, and old Wexford is won,
And the Barrow tomorrow we cross;
On a hill o’er the town we have planted a gun
That will batter the gateways of Ross.
And the Forth men and Bargy men march o’er the heath,
With brave Harvey to lead on the van,
But foremost of all in that grim gap of death
Will be Kelly, the boy from Killane.
People who dominated my historical consciousness were those like Kelly the boy from Killane, Henry Joy McCracken hanged in Corn Market, young Roddy McCorley going to die on the bridge of Toome today, agile Father Murphy from Old Kilcormack: all the starry dead whose resistance to injustice was woven into the vast tapestry of successive Irish causes. For me, the idea of Wexford in 1798 carried all the kudos due to insurgency and idealism. It still does, in part. No one in their right mind could quarrel with the United Irishmen’s principle, as articulated by Wolfe Tone: to substitute for Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter the common name of Irishman. And I’ve never quite divested the insurgents’ emblem – the pike – of its stirring associations. Clasped in a sturdy hand, or concealed in the thatch of a radical farmhouse, the pike of 1798 is a symbol of bravery and a clandestine exhilaration. It, and other makeshift weapons, denote a magnificent foolhardiness. There’s a potent early poem by Seamus Heaney, ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, in which the fatal confrontation on Vinegar Hill sees inadequately armed rebels ‘shaking scythes at cannon’ as the whole intrepid enterprise and buoyed-up resolution comes to nothing. A defeat, then, but the opposite of an inglorious defeat.
That is indisputably part of the Wexford picture, but it is not the whole picture. In 1993, in his review of R.F. Foster’s Paddy and Mr Punch in the London Review of Books, Colm Tóibín has the following passage:
The names of the towns and villages around us were in all the songs about 1798 – the places where battles had been fought, or atrocities committed. But there was one place that I did not know had a connection with 1798 until I was in my twenties. It was Scullabogue. Even now, as I write the name, it has a strange resonance. In 1798 it was where ‘our side’ took a large number of Protestant men, women and children, put them in a barn and burned them to death.
In that barn were people named Lett. Now, just as Armagh was awash in O’Neills, so County Wexford was home to a lot of Letts. But I’m taking it that they were all connected in some way – and therefore connected to me. And the place called Scullabogue – Scoil a’ Bothog, the school at the ruined house? A wild guess3 – Scullabogue is not many miles from the townland of Clonleigh, where my grandmother’s ancestral farmhouse stands. Protestant children in the district might well have been scooped up by rogue insurgents and added to the other ‘loyalist’ captives in the terrible barn. A Benjamin Lett, a boy of about thirteen, was among the captives and so was his sister. (Their father was a William Lett who belonged to the Orange Order and served as a yeoman in 1798 along with his brother Charles and his son Nicholas.) Perhaps as many as two hundred terrified local people were incarcerated at Scullabogue, in the thatched barn itself and at the adjoining house (the property of a Captain Francis King), though not all of them died there. Tom Dunne, in his book Rebellions (2004), puts the number of those incinerated at 126; and among these victims were about eleven Catholics. The Catholics were taken solely because they worked for, or had dealings with, Protestants. The unspeakable episode invalidates the entire ‘United Irish’ ideology, and makes a mockery of Wolfe Tone.
The two young Letts were lucky. There are several accounts of how they got away with their lives, but the one I prefer attributes their release from the barn to a couple of well-meaning and influential Catholics, Thomas Murphy of Park and a Mr Brien of Ballymorris. (It’s cited by Charles Dickson in his book of 1955, The Rising in Wexford in 1798, when he quotes from a manuscript account of the atrocity written c.1871 by a Reverend Henry Lett, and dealing with the latter’s grandfather’s experience at the time.4) Another version of the story has Benjamin’s sister Rebecca making a wild appeal to a priest and getting him to intervene to free her brother. And a disagreeable pamphlet with the lurid title Murder Without Sin: The Rebellion of 1798,5 written by an Ogle Robert Gowan and first published in 1859, contains the following stark information about the Scullabogue prisoners: ‘Out of the entire number, three only escaped, namely Richard Grandy, Loftus Frizzel and Benjamin Lett.’ You can take your pick of the three scenarios. But
whatever the truth of the matter, the Letts were safely away from the scene when the barn with its cargo of human flesh was set alight. It swiftly burned to the ground. A Quaker girl named Dinah Goff, whose home was located about two and half miles from Scullabogue, relates how ‘I saw and smelled the smoke of its burning ... and cannot now forget the strong and dreadful effluvium which was wafted from it to our lawn.’ The date was 5 June 1798. Four days later, on 9 June, the skeletons were cleared out of the barn and buried in a shallow hole with a covering of sods. As with other places of perdition – the Black Hole of Calcutta, or the Kenya Assemblies of God church at Kiambaa, where thirty-five Kikuyu were burnt alive on New Year’s Day 2008 – Scullabogue and its horrors are etched into the landscape and into the subconsciousness of local people.
Scullabogue is burning, and at the same time, distraught Protestant families from all around Clonleigh and Carrickbyrne are piling their furniture and possessions on carts and heading for Enniscorthy, where some will find shelter in houses so crammed with their fellow citizens that no place remains for them to sleep but the bare deal boards. Others, not getting that far, spend nights on end in fields and ditches. The countryside is rife with horrors and rumours. Those refugees approaching the town are greeted with the flagrant warning noise of rebel drums beating to arms – and then they find that half the Protestant population of Enniscorthy has fled towards Wexford, many women in rags and tatters carrying children and trekking the whole fourteen miles on foot. Some, on the way, experience harassment from yeomen who take their dishevelled state to mean they are Catholics. But it was asking for death to stay at home. Dinah Goff, looking back from a distance of more than fifty years, laments the once-peaceful homes, ‘abandoned in panic and destroyed in an orgy of incendiarism’.
A Twisted Root Page 9