A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  But, gradually, the old sectarian bogey raised its poisonous tentacles again. By the 1790s, faction fights in County Armagh are taking place almost exclusively along denominational lines. When the Society of United Irishmen is founded in Belfast in 1791, its title has little meaning for those entrenched in their illiberalism. And Armagh in particular is getting a name for the bitterness of its conflicts.

  And where in all this is the newly-Catholic Tipping family? We left the widow and sons of turncoat Henry in their new rented farmhouse at Ballynamoney in the late 1760s. Before this they were living in the mainly Protestant district of Roughan, and it may have been an increase in sectarian pressures that sent them scurrying across the Bann to the rather less riotously inclined townland of Ballynamoney. Or it may have been the latter’s proximity to Lurgan, with its market for the finely-produced linen cloth in which the family specialised, that drew them in. Whatever the reason, they settled in north-east Armagh, where the widow Tipping’s eldest son, another Henry (c.1746–1797), was chiefly responsible for running the farm and the linen-producing enterprise. Perhaps, as the Antrim weaver poet James Orr recorded, ‘His thrifty wife and wise wee lasses span, / While warps and queels employed anither bairn’. Indeed, innumerable country families all over the North are employed in this way in the late eighteenth century, and Catholics, at last, are not excluded from the mild prosperity it brings.

  Henry Tipping’s second son James, progenitor of the direct line I’m more or less sticking to, was born at the Ballynamoney farm in 1770. Was he a sickly infant, with signs of the way his life would be curtailed apparent from the start? Or was he as robust as anyone, playing with his brothers in the fields and meadows round the farmhouse when he wasn’t roped in to aid the family’s finances, and loss of life only an unimaginable figment of the distant future? We can’t know. But throughout his short life James must have been aware of troubles and tensions afflicting the neighbourhood – though perhaps not so aggressively as in other parts of County Armagh. One social commentator (John Byrne), writing in 1792, commends ‘the peaceable inhabitants of Lurgan and its vicinity’ for keeping a low profile while outbreaks of lawlessness proliferate elsewhere. Not one of them, he says, has been indicted for being a Defender or a Break o’ Day man. (Can this be true?) If you headed southwards in the direction of Tandragee you’d find a very different class of carry-on. Horse-racing on narrow country roads, cock-fighting and private whiskey houses all contributing to the unruliness of the era. Coat-trailing and other provocations rampant. And underlying everything, the religious bigotry ready to flare up at the genuflection of a knee. ‘Many Protestant gentlemen,’ says the same John Byrne – I think he’s using the word ‘gentlemen’ advisedly – ‘lent arms to Papists’ to enable them to safeguard themselves and their families against the fury of fanatics and madmen. But even so – like the people of Wexford a little later on – many Armagh Catholics chose to abandon their homes at nightfall and sleep as best they could in little huts made of sods in the middle of a turf bog.

  And so it goes on. ‘Defenders’ aren’t backward in becoming aggressors, as in the case of the four arrested in Tandragee for smashing the windows of a constable’s house in pursuit of some Peep o’ Day Boys who had taken refuge there. And, as the ’80s becomes the ’90s and the Volunteer movement with its emphasis on Protestant nationalism begins to peter out – or at least to undergo certain crucial transformations – the way is open for putative unity to dissolve in a radical schism. As the historian A.T.Q. Stewart and others have pointed out, it was the Volunteer movement of Grattan and Flood that fostered the development of both the Society of United Irishmen and the Orange Society. Once again, we note the ways in which Irish history accommodates the strange and contradictory.

  There is absolutely no evidence to link the Ballynamoney Tippings with any clandestine organisation or pursuit. It’s tempting to place them in the middle of right action, as it would have appeared at the time, defensive action against bigotry and intimidation. These were things that were not to be endured or condoned. But no Tipping voice is raised in protest against abuses in County Armagh – and this does not accord with the activism of a few of their descendants when a different, but no less exorbitant, set of circumstances prevailed (as we shall see). How many of the Ballynamoney Tippings were there, who might have nurtured reasonable grievances in the 1790s? Our ancestor James had an older and a younger brother and a couple of sisters, Mary and Elizabeth; and their father Henry, still alive at the time, would have been of an age to hold forthright views and to influence his offspring. Perhaps he did influence them, to steer clear of trouble. In the absence of any information to the contrary, we have to envisage the lot of them sitting quietly at home, getting on with their hand-loom weaving and cultivation of crops, looking after their pig, cow and hens and keeping their noses clean.

  Well – clean as far as factional intrigue is concerned. There are other areas, more productive perhaps, in which a spirit of waywardness or gumption may be asserted. Courtship, for example, or domestic life. By the time he is twenty – that is, in 1790 – James Tipping has married a local girl named Sarah Magee and is already the father of a son, another James. (Just to get the chronology straight in my head – that Sarah Magee was my grandmother Sarah Tipping’s great-grandmother on her father’s side. Whew!) There seems, as in several other instances, to have been some haste about the marriage. ‘A high level of unlawful carnal knowledge’ – in the sociologists’ phrase – was maybe a thing to be acquired in the fields and byways of County Armagh. As with politics, sexual mores at the time could be said to hold out a prospect of liberation or repression – and we should be glad that James (if he did) subscribed to the former, since he didn’t have long to enjoy any of the pleasures of the world. He was dead at twenty-eight, dead in that most significant year of the century, 1798 – though with nothing (again) to suggest his death was due to anything other than natural causes. It’s just the date that makes conjecture irresistible. Perhaps James, fired by radical principles, shot up from his loom, retrieved a pike from the roof-space, and set off eastwards to join in the fighting under Henry Munro in turbulent County Down. Perhaps he died there, at Saintfield or Ballynahinch, at the hands of the York Fencibles or the Newtownards Yeomanry. But I think we’d know about it if he did. I think it’s safer to blame tuberculosis, or some other common illness, for James’s premature death.

  Four years earlier, in 1794, James had moved his growing family (two other sons were born in 1792 and 1794, and there may have been a daughter as well) to a smallholding at Crossmacahilly in the parish of Seagoe. Going round in circles, we’ve now got back to Seagoe, where James’s great-great-grandfather John Tipping is buried alongside his Blacker in-laws. (Keep that in mind: the Blackers are going to crop up again in a minute.) Crossmacahilly: the very name suggests an apex of uncouthness, just as the place itself proves the ultimate countrified locality. It sounds much better in the original Irish, Crois Mhic Eachmhilidh, McCaughley’s Cross, as it was named after a prominent local sept. It’s a townland of roughly two hundred and twenty acres, three miles south-west of Lurgan and about two miles from Portadown. In 1794, when James and Sarah Tipping arrived with their cartload of belongings to inhabit the smallholding, the whole area consisted of unreclaimed and worked-out bogland. The farmhouse and accompanying acreage of poor land was right on the verge of what contemporary maps call ‘the Great Turf Bog’, and one effect of the resulting perpetual miasma was a population particularly prone to tuberculosis – to which, as I’ve suggested, James Tipping may have succumbed, after four years of rigorous work to cultivate the land with constant deadly vapours circulating round his head. We can envisage him coughing and wheezing his way through the work of the farm, the children quickly learning not to aggravate him as his appearance grows gaunter and his temper worse. And then a coffin and candles and mourning dress. But not for being a pikeman.

  Not a pikeman – but a republican spirit is infiltrating the family s
tandpoint nevertheless. It is helped on by a marriage connection. In the ‘trouble year’, in the townland of Tamnaficarbet, three miles west of Lurgan town centre, in a two-room thatched cottage in the middle of a flood-plain, a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy named John Darragh is cheering on the rebels. Some years later, by now well versed himself in the ways of disaffection, John Darragh comes into the hands of the authorities. Charged with being ‘an Irish rebel’, he is tried at Antrim Assizes in 1809, and – after a spell in prison – transported on a convict ship to the penal colony at Port Jackson (Sydney) in Australia. A dark and horrible journey is ahead of him, but also, eventually, a new life far superior to the old one. When he sails from Cork in 1813, resentful, like Irish rebels before and since, of the convict status imposed on him, John Darragh leaves behind, in another townland of north Armagh, Tirsogue, a wife and six children. His wife, whom he’d have married around 1800 (the year of a more momentous union) was Mary, one of the Ballynamoney Tippings and the sister of dead James.

  What was linen-weaver Darragh’s actual offence? Alas, the records – along with many others – went up in smoke when the Four Courts was burnt. We’ve no resource, again, but surmise. Perhaps he was implicated in the stirring-up of trouble to coincide with Robert Emmet’s planned uprising in Dublin in 1803 (see later in this chapter), and then evaded arrest for the next six years or so. ‘On the run’ is the stirring phrase suggesting spunk and danger and outwitting strategies. If John Darragh was on the run – or ‘on his keeping’ – no doubt many interconnected scions of Tipping and Darragh and Magee families all chipped in with shelter and sustenance and an eye out for danger. Like the Armagh rapparee Seamus Mac Murchaidh in the eighteenth-century song, John Darragh would have relied on his local knowledge to stay at large for as long as possible. Like Mac Murchaidh, he might have hankered after the woods of Dunreavy, or any closer woods where a fugitive might hole up. But the thing that would mostly have kept him going was the help of friends. And the shared protective mission, the sense of opposition to the way things were run in the country, would have strengthened (in particular) the Tipping commitment to Catholic Ireland. They’d only had a couple of generations to shed their Protestant colouring, and it would take another two or three generations before the republican ethic reached its fullest expression in the family. But the process was under way.

  The ‘Irish rebel’ John Darragh, like the innocent Connerys in another popular Gaelic song, was deported to New South Wales, enduring foul conditions on the prison ship the Archduke Charles, and spending two years under the convict stigma, before being granted an ‘Absolute Pardon’ in 1815. Like many another ex-convict, Darragh then went on to prosper in his new surroundings. ... His son Felix Darragh, with wife and children, joined him in Australia in 1840. (Felix’s wife was Alice Magee, a niece of the Sarah Magee who married James Tipping. ... I am sorry to cite all these convoluted connections, which are enough to make anyone’s head spin; but I want to document, as far as possible, the influences impelling the stay-at-home Tippings towards full-blown republicanism, and the above information adds a detail to the picture.) ... When John died in 1858 Felix inherited the property at Figtree in the Illawarra on the south coast of New South Wales, and became a considerable landowner himself. These Darragh and Tipping descendants were thereby lost to the Irish cause. They made a new life for themselves and undoubtedly a better one, growing into their Australian identity. But John, remembering his Armagh origins and ‘rebel’ loyalties, called his farm at Figtree ‘Tamnaficarbet’.

  Tamnaficarbet, Crossmacahilly: it’s a far cry from ancestral Carrickblacker House, where the teenage great-great-grandson of the William Blacker who fought at the Boyne is following manfully in his ancestor’s footsteps. Once strong supporters of the House of Stuart (you remember), the Blackers turned Orange after the Siege of Derry. And in the younger William, born in 1777, the Orange affiliation reaches a kind of apex. Here he is in the mid 1790s, about to enrol at Trinity College Dublin and undergo an advantageous education – while at home in Armagh he is taking a vigorous interest in local unrest. Protestant uprightness is the bedrock of William’s creed: he views the Protestants of County Armagh as an innocent people subjected to the vilest of unprovoked attacks and intimidation.

  Or so the author of For God and the King would have it, in accord with his own opinion. In the eyes of J.S. Kane, the vicious sectarian outbreaks infesting Armagh can be laid at the door of the Catholic population. He claims the Peep o’ Day Boys came into being to defend themselves and their communities against the Defenders (most people would agree that it was the other way round).11 He attributes a Catholic origin to almost every rampaging band provoking fear by night, oddly including the Protestant Hearts of Oak. When he gets to the famous Battle of the Diamond, he is unequivocally on the side of the victorious Protestant faction – and in all this young William Blacker of Carrickblacker takes the role of hero.

  William Blacker, eighteen in 1795, is a boisterous advocate of Protestant defenderism. When Carrickblacker House gets a new roof, he commandeers the lead from the old one and sits up all night making bullets from it to aid the Protestant cause. In the early autumn of that year, after various skirmishes and outrages have made a large-scale armed confrontation inevitable, opposing forces muster at a place called the Diamond, at the junction of four highways (and only a couple of miles from Roughan, from which, we remember, James Tipping’s grandmother, father and uncles had removed themselves in haste in the late 1760s). Hostilities break out on the morning of 21 September – and galloping towards the martial spot at a furious pace is young William Blacker leading ‘a contingent of armed men’, many of whom are workers on his father’s estate. As he recalled the subsequent ‘battle’ later,

  The affair was of brief duration. The Defenders, completely entrapped, made off leaving a number killed and wounded on the spot ... from those whom I saw carried off on cars that day and from the bodies found afterwards by the reapers in the cornfields along the line of their flight, I am inclined to think that not less than thirty lost their lives.12

  The jubilant Protestants, says J.S. Kane, ‘had successfully driven off their oppressors [whew!] and had prevented the destruction of most of their homes and property’. William Blacker takes up the story again: immediately after the battle, he says, right on the field of action, ‘measures were adopted for the formation of a defensive association of Protestants’ – and thus the Orange Society came into being. Defensive: but what William Blacker fails to mention is that in the months succeeding the establishment of the first Orange Lodges, upwards of five thousand Armagh Catholics were driven from their homes.

  William Blacker, whose presence adds a touch of gentry respectability to the loyalist proceedings, is right there in the thick of the hurriedly negotiated arrangements to impose a structure and an administrative system on the new society. From the start the Orange Order is composed of separate Lodges, one of which, No. 12, is quickly set up by workers on the Carrickblacker estate (the same workers who took part in the battle). ‘Members of the Blacker family’ – I’m quoting J.S. Kane again – ‘were encouraged to join the fledgling Order and William’s uncle George, recently appointed vicar of Seagoe parish … became an enthusiastic member.’

  There’s a feature of the old-fashioned thriller, the ‘had-I-but-known’ syndrome, which provokes a sardonic response in readers of the present time. Had she, the witless Victorian heroine, but known ... that a would-be strangler or rapist lurked on the spot, she’d never have ventured into the lonely mansion, or graveyard, or oak wood at midnight, and no incident would have occurred to stimulate the plot and draw out the narrative indefinitely. I am now about to apply the ‘had-I-but-known’ principle to a few of those eighteenth-century Blackers and consequent implications for Orangeism in the North. Had William and his uncle George and his father the Reverend Stewart ‘but known’ that at nearby Crossmacahilly, in dismal circumstances, lived the stricken, industrious, Catholic James Tipping, a
near-contemporary of William’s and a blood relation of all of them. ... Had they but known this, would it have modified at all their Orange fervour and sense of utter moral rectitude? The dispiriting answer is, probably not. (I know I’m stretching the analogy here. One type of hidden factor has a bearing on an immediate action, the other on an attitude.)

  The truth is, having got the Orange bit between his teeth and running with it at full tilt, William comes out against every egalitarian principle and aspect of enlightenment thinking that illumines the era. ... Here he is in his rooms at Trinity presiding over Orange assemblies, or holding forth to ever greater numbers of potential recruits at the Druid’s Head Inn in South Great George’s Street. Soon he is immersed in a full-scale ‘war’ against fellow students suspected of being United Irishmen. Among them is his contemporary Robert Emmet; and the rather older ex-students Wolfe Tone and Whitley Stokes (not to be confused with his grandson of the same name, the eminent Celtic philologist) can count themselves among his adversaries too. Trinity is in an uproar, between the Orange and Green contingents. The authorities find it difficult to curb the students‘ partisan intensity. Running battles take place along Dame Street. Some of the ‘rebel students’ are described by William as ‘low vulgar wretch[es] ... and probably ... Papist[s]’, the ultimate slur. The University Yeomanry makes a further outlet for William’s militant drive: here he is again, boldly enlisted in the 3rd Company of the College Corps. ... Back home in Armagh for the summer vacation, he throws himself into preparations for the first Orange parades to be organised since the founding of the Order (12 July, 1796); and a year later his Orange glory is consolidated when the title of Grand Master of the new Lodge at Portadown is conferred on him. He is still only twenty years old.