The streets of Enniscorthy are burning too, as yeomen and Unitedmen butcher each other in droves. Genteel Protestant ladies, some never before confronted with death, step and stumble over a profusion of corpses as they head in desperation towards the Market House to put at least a solid door between themselves and the fighting in the streets. But there are no safe places. The whole town is a shambles, brimful of the noise and confusion of slaughter. Hopes for peace and prosperity, ‘live-and-let-live’, after gaining some ground in the course of the century, are once more dashed to pieces. A young insurgent, Thomas Cloney, looking on with horror, registers deep despair and records this emotion years later when he comes to write his Personal Narrative of 1798 (published in 1832): ‘This was my first time to behold the work of destruction performed by man against his fellow man.’
Thomas Cloney was twenty-five years old at the time, and, according to his later testimony, a reluctant rebel overtaken by the pressure of events (and by more immediate pressure from a band of his contemporaries, who turned up at his father’s farmhouse ‘and pressed me to proceed with them to Enniscorthy’). Of course, his Narrative is the work of a man in sober middle age, looking back; but Cloney makes out a good case for his youthful involvement in the insurgents’ campaign, despite his many reservations. Things had fallen apart – and what could he do but make a stand against perceived abuses, with outlets for injustice proliferating in County Wexford of the 1790s? As a Catholic he lived his life in fear: fear of dispossession, fear of all the powers invested in ‘a furious Orange ascendancy ... a bloodthirsty yeomanry, and a hireling magistracy’, fear of going the way of his ‘unoffending neighbours’, whom he’d seen done to death and their property destroyed. ... Douglas Hyde, a century later, gives the picture in his ‘Ballad of ’98’ (written under the name of An Craoibhin Aoibhinn):
... Their Captain’s a fiend, from hell let loose,
His men were the devil’s crew,
They burnt my gear; they burnt my house,
My only son they slew.
The constant fear that gripped the Catholic population has its counterpart in stirred-up Protestant fears which come to a climax in the early months of 1798 – when everyone, it seems, Protestant and Catholic alike, is afraid to sleep at home and instead, at nightfall, makes tracks for the fields and woods where all of them will pass a troubled night. Any ditch or clump of brambles or ‘friendly thorn tree’ can do duty as a makeshift refuge – anywhere out of the reach of predatory neighbours intent on causing harm to neighbours. It’s as if the whole of Wexford has turned into a vast open-air camp filled with cowering, frightened families trying to blend into the undergrowth, hearing any noise in the night as a portent of disaster. Most of these outdoor sleepers are women and children, men of a suitable age being occupied elsewhere – or no longer occupied. In one garden alone, it was said, thirty-two ‘new-made widows’ lay all night in the shelter of its rhododendron bushes. Neither faction has a monopoly on distress. And the psychological effect is ineradicable. A long way into the future, at the age of eighty-two, Mrs Barbara Lett of Killaligan, recalling the events of that dreadful year, comes out with a heartfelt imprecation: ‘May we never more fall into the hands of our neighbours, who are more barbarous than any foreign enemy.’
People, neighbours, vying with one another to commit the bloodiest acts – yes, this is a part of the Wexford uprising as its purpose becomes distorted and brutality prevails. But a good many ordinary instances of humanity are on record too, some not too far away from Barbara Lett herself. At the time, she is twenty-one years old, the wife of a Mr Newton Lett – twenty-seven years her senior – and the mother of at least one infant son. She is connected in some way6 to a Mr Joshua Lett of Ballybane House, Clonroche – who, though a man of nearly seventy, is a friend of the young rebel Thomas Cloney; and when Cloney accidentally shoots himself in the thigh and nearly bleeds to death, it’s Joshua Lett who leaps on his horse and rides at high speed into Enniscorthy to fetch a surgeon, having first had the wounded Cloney ‘conveyed’ to Ballybane, and leaving him there in the care ‘of his amiable daughters’ (as Cloney describes them). (This shooting, horrifying though it must have been at the time, brings a relieving note of farce to the very fraught proceedings.)
Amid the awful spites and divisions in Wexford there were those who, like Mr Lett, refused to lead their lives in accordance with sectarian dictates. They had friends among ‘the other sort’, and among Mr Lett’s was a Catholic schoolmaster named Walsh. At one point during the Rebellion, when it seems the insurgents have gained the upper hand, a rumour begins to circulate in the district to the effect that all Protestants, whether Orangemen or not, are about to be put to death. There’s only one way they may save themselves – by assuming a spurious Catholic identity. So the schoolmaster Walsh, in deep anxiety about the danger facing his old Protestant friend, forces a moderately unwilling Mr Lett to sit down and undergo a crash course in Catholic theology. ‘Never,’ says Thomas Cloney, who is present at the scene, ‘did any instructor labour more zealously for the improvement of his pupil than poor Walsh, and never did a pupil hang with more earnestness upon the dictates of his instructor than Mr Lett.’ The effort of concentration required of the two old men has tears running down the faces of both. How will you feel, says the schoolteacher, if they come to pike you to death and all you have to do to save yourself is respond correctly to a question from the Catechism – and you fail to do it? But it isn’t a bit of use. In the end, an exhausted Mr Lett declares roundly that even if his life were to be forfeit on account of it, he can’t remember as much as a syllable of all the information so arduously imparted to him. Fortunately it doesn’t come to that.
It doesn’t come to that, but the danger was real. Bagenal Harvey (the rebel leader) at one point was heard lamenting to a friend that the war had become a war of religion, as certain misguided insurgents went about trying to ascertain people’s denominational position – or, in the case of known Protestants, applying stringent proselytising tactics, as though an instantaneous conversion might be synonymous with a change of heart. While they thought they were carrying all before them – as in 1641 – the rank and file of Irish rebels jettisoned common sense, as well as common humanity. But sometimes they found themselves up against total defiance – and might even have been disarmed by it.
A relative of Joshua Lett’s, a Richard Lett,7 fell into rebel hands and wasn’t having any of their bludgeoning and bluster. Asked if he was willing to embrace the doctrines of Rome, accompanied by a bit of jostling and threatening movement of pikes, he came back at his tormentors with the sturdy answer, ‘Divil a bit’. Perhaps his candour was appreciated. At any rate, he escaped with his life; and for ever after the sobriquet, ‘Divil a bit’, stuck to him.
‘The Letts, though belonging to the “gentry” class, were always a very broad-minded and liberal family.’ This assertion comes from Katherine Lucy Lett’s family history, written in 1925, and to back it up she cites the case of young James Lett, the only one of that name who fought on the rebel side in 1798. (I’ll get to him in a minute.) We also have liberal Protestant Joshua, mentioned above. Other Letts, though – according to the Reverend Henry Lett, writing in 1871 – ‘the descendants of men who had entered Ireland under Cromwell, who had suffered from O’Neill and Tyrconnell and James II, and who had been with Dutch William at Oldbridge, did not remain inactive during the rebellion ... [and] were found armed on the side of truth, law and order.’ He means they were yeomen. Among them was Barbara Lett’s husband Newton, and also Charles Lett (the Reverend Henry’s grandfather), his brother William8 and his nephew Nicholas.
When Barbara Lett succumbs to the panic-stricken mood of the day and leaves Killaligan with whatever she can carry, she gains a temporary shelter at the Enniscorthy home of a relative named Stephen. ... And here I have to attempt a bit of clarification concerning family relationships and allegiances. In the notes accompanying a recent book, Protestant Women’s Narratives of the Ir
ish Rebellion of 1798, edited by John D. Beatty, this particular Stephen Lett is confused with a different person of the same name: I don’t know who exactly he was, but he wasn’t Barbara Lett’s brother-in-law Stephen. That Stephen, the older brother of Newton, had died in 1786, when his son James – the future rebel – was just one year old. His wife was a relative of Bagenal Harvey, and his family’s sympathies were with the United Irishmen (see later in this chapter) – whereas the Stephen Lett of Duffry Gate, Enniscorthy, ‘took an active part on the side of the loyalists’, opening his doors to all manner of distressed Protestant refugees. And among them is Barbara, safe for the moment, though her arrival is not without its hazards, further shocks to the system. The house and its surroundings bear witness to the hellish disruption afflicting the town. In front of the house is the body of a dead rebel lying on his face beneath the parlour window. Go to the back, and, as a grisly counterpart, you find a dead yeoman lying on his face in the yard.
Further horrors are in the offing in these dark days. An elderly Protestant clergyman named Mr Hayden is piked to death by a local butcher (his trade as well as his nature), and the clergyman’s body left lying ‘on the steps of Mr Lett’s Hall door’. Barbara Lett then adds a distressing detail: onlookers witness the corpse of poor Mr Hayden being eaten up by pigs. Couldn’t someone have rescued it from this final indignity? Could it not have been dragged indoors? It seems a bit much, on top of the homicidal free-for-all and frantic debacle, to have carrion pigs roaming freely through the charnel streets.
A wounded yeoman is carried into the house of Mr Stephen Lett and tended by Barbara, who tears up a pillowcase to make a bandage for the gash in the yeoman’s back. She may be thinking at the time of her own yeoman husband and hoping he will survive (he does). But this is a time when not only national, but family discords are brewing. Newton’s brother Stephen, had he not been twelve years dead, would doubtless have found a different outlet for his civic consciousness; as it is, it’s left to his thirteen-year-old son James to act the rebel part. James Lett makes himself conspicuous by his antics during the Battle of Ross, when he goes about waving a bannerette and egging on the pikemen. Wherever you look, you can’t get away from confusion and inconsistency. Young James’s cousin Benjamin Lett (the Scullabogue survivor), on the other hand, is supposed to have flaunted his Orange allegiance by festooning the bridles of the family’s horses with orange and blue ribbons. I suppose these instances of juvenile bravado can be taken to represent an unthinking partisanship, a bid for top-dog status. But they take us as far as we can get from a non-sectarian blueprint, from the whole idea of an equitable society.
Reforms were needed, no one denies it, but a great divergence occurred between the Society of United Irishmen’s grand revolutionary purpose, and what actually happened on the ground. Many people, historians and archivists and teachers, biographers and social commentators, have assessed the extent to which the Rising in Wexford was fuelled by United Irish principles. The inescapable conclusion is, not very much, as the green tree of liberty sprouted deplorable excrescences. In the main, the Rising broke out as a spontaneous local revolt against insupportable ills – though for some of the leaders, such as Bagenal Harvey, it was necessary action undertaken in a rightful cause.
How did the violation of the United Irishmen’s anti-sectarian imperative come about? Well, perhaps Thomas Cloney has the answer – terrible social conditions, and masses of people recruited to the rebel cause who simply don’t know any better. They can’t differentiate between actual oppressors – i.e. the government in Dublin, the military presence, some magistrates and others in positions of authority – and their Protestant neighbours. They think they are being handed an opportunity to turn the tables on those they consider to be in the ascendant. They think they have a licence to burn and kill and maim and terrorise – and, inevitably, ferocity is matched with ferocity. A bloodbath ensues. And, when it’s all over, the poor of Wexford are no better off than they were.
Barbara Lett has cause to sustain the bitterness that bedevils her even in old age. As well as Scullabogue on 5 June, another massacre of Protestants takes place on Wexford Bridge where prisoners are brought down in batches to be piked to death and thrown into the River Slaney. The date is 20 June 1798. Among the people murdered in this way is Barbara Lett’s father William Daniel, who is forty-four years old at the time. (His home was a lovely eighteenth-century house, Fortview, near Wexford: now demolished by a local council to accommodate a link road.) ‘Could anything be more atrocious or barbaric,’ his daughter exclaims, shortly before her own death at ninety-one, ‘than the cruelties inflicted at that time on innocent and inoffending persons?’ To this rhetorical question we can only answer, no.
The same fate was nearly suffered by Charles Lett, also a prisoner in Wexford gaol and marked down for execution. What saved him was a band marching into the town playing ‘Croppies Lie Down’ at full volume, in celebration of the just-past rebel defeat at Vinegar Hill. (‘At Vinegar Hill o’er the pleasant Slaney, / Our heroes vainly stood back to back ...’.) Charles manages to get out of the gaol in the ensuing confusion, and goes through Wexford broadcasting the good news – having first had the foresight to don an ill-fitting and ragged old army red coat, retrieved from a hook on a wall. Never mind how peculiar he looks, if he’d appeared in civilian garb he’d have run the risk of being shot as a rebel.
I don’t know which of these Letts, if any, are among my actual forebears, so I am going to lay claim to all of them. The facts in my possession are as follows. My great-grandfather William Lett, the father of Emily Lett, was born at Clonleigh around 1841. His father was a Thomas Lett, to whom, logically, we can attribute a birth date at any time between 1810 and 1820. If the former, Thomas could be a son of Benjamin Lett or of the underage rebel the bold James Lett.9 If, on the other hand, Thomas wasn’t born until 1820, it’s possible that his grandparents were Barbara and Newton Lett. (I’m not forgetting Charles Lett10 and all the other Letts who crop up in connection with 1798, and their probable progeny. But, again, in the absence of documentary evidence, I’ve no resource but conjecture.) If the last should prove to be true – then my antecedents on both sides take on an alarming symmetry. On one side (my mother’s) is an ancestor hanged by a mob outside Lord Aungier’s castle in Longford for being a Protestant; and on the other side (my father’s) is an ancestor done to death by a mob on Wexford Bridge for the same reason. And here’s me – well, there I was, around 1960, daring to saunter down Sandy Row in Belfast with a tiny tricolour pinned to the lapel of my convent school blazer, and bringing no retribution down on my foolhardy head beyond some low-toned rumbles and growls from a gathering of elderly men outside a bookie’s, whose ire is mildly aroused by the sight of the seditious emblem – what they call a ‘wee fleg’.
When Thomas Cloney refers in his Personal Narrative to ‘a furious Orange ascendancy’, he, at least, unlike the rebel rank and file, holds in his mind a clear distinction between his Protestant friends and neighbours whom he cherishes, and the new Orange system which already seemed to embody all the worst excesses of bigotry, triumphalism and religious intemperance. Other accounts of the Wexford Rising single out the anti-popery brigade – the Orange Order – as a major trigger of explosive Catholic disaffection. Some would argue that rebel aggression was never meant to be directed against ‘ordinary’ Protestants, only against Orangemen – not, as we’ve seen, that this was of much benefit to the former, once all hell had broken loose.
If the Orange Order made a powerful focus for Catholic fear and detestation, it wasn’t because the sentiments it purveyed were unprecedented. It was the organisation that was new, not the attitude. For at least twenty years, antagonistic factions had been active throughout the country, Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys and Catholic Defenders – or whatever the equivalent local designations were, Shanavests or Caravats or Hearts of Steel, Whiteboys and Rightboys and Kick-the-Shite Boys (I’ve made the last one up) – all specialists in agra
rian uproar. Periodic disturbances were a feature of everyday life in many rural areas, especially – and here the ubiquitous Tippings are about to re-enter the picture – in County Armagh.
It’s true that some of these illegal societies didn’t start by being overtly sectarian. Some, bands of tenant farmers, came into being to protest against increased tax demands and the current method of collecting tithes. Some were willing to jettison religious animosities in the interests of effective action against economic abuses. For example – the poet Art MacCooey (see Chapter 2) has among his works a ringing tribute to young Art O’Neill, last of the O’Neills of Glassdrummond, dead at twenty-six (in 1769). In his lament MacCooey refers to O’Neill’s position as an elected captain in the Hearts of Oak, or Oakboys, a Protestant secret society whose members sported oak boughs in their hats and engaged in intimidatory pursuits by night. The fact that a Catholic O’Neill was selected from among scores of contenders to lead this illicit band suggests a state of Protestant disaffection so extreme as to render temporarily insignificant the ‘natural hostility’ between Planter and Gael.
A Twisted Root Page 10