(Dear God, is there no end to the agitating revelations popping up like hybrid excrescences wherever I peer among the clustering branches of my chequered family tree! Where now are all my carefully cultivated liberal credentials? Not only do I have to take [ancestral] responsibility for fighting against Sir Phelim O’Neill in 1641, for allying myself with Cromwell in 1649, for defending Derry against the Irish troops of King James in 1689, for fighting under the standard of William at the Boyne, for ministering to wounded yeomen in 1798 ... but it seems I’m personally implicated in the founding and upholding of the Orange Order too. I’m joking.)
We haven’t heard the last of the egregious William Blacker, but now it is time to consider events in the north of Ireland while Wexford went into its almighty convulsion. Those involved in fostering rebellion were frequently at cross-purposes, as we’ve seen. Some set out filled with oafish glee to turn the tables on their local enemies; while others, well-principled, held fast to an idea of social reform – reform much needed, with rising rents, leases unrenewed, unacceptable tithe demands, hearth money-collectors and excise officials making life difficult for everyone. Some, for these reasons and others, were driven to take up arms – but then came the news from Scullabogue, bringing despair to the hearts of Presbyterian Ulstermen and causing some of them to throw in the towel at this point. It must have seemed that the sectarian instinct in Ireland was endowed with an alarming tenacity – and for those committed to the union of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter as a motivating principle, this was a considerable blow. Why bother, the argument might have gone, to fight for religious tolerance and an end to political abuses, when the country was coming down with sectarian diehards for whom ‘patriotism’ was cast in an inveterate and vicious form? The tree of liberty, that flourished in America and in France, had no chance of taking root in Ireland, it appeared, where blight had the upper hand. Where the immemorial struggle between tyranny and freedom was always adulterated by indigenous complications. Nevertheless, the Rising went ahead, more or less as the leaders – visionaries – had planned it. Two weeks after Wexford erupted, on the morning of 7 June 1798, thousands of United Irishmen assembled at Donegore Hill on the outskirts of Antrim, ready to march on the town; and two days later, battalions of insurgents from north Down joined in the action. Once more, the game was afoot.
... And it was quickly quelled. The story has been well told, by Charles Dickson and A.T.Q. Stewart among others; and I won’t repeat it here. When it was all over and the leaders executed, myth, romance, all the glamour of enlightened dissent began to gather round the stark event, the United Irish defeat. ‘Well, they fought for poor old Ireland, and full bitter was their fate ...’: this is one expression of the popular nationalist view. But however you look at it – a resounding moment, a great endeavour, a bloody rebellion – 1798 carries the strongest possible charge of fatefulness and exhilaration.
In Presbyterian folk memory, the year – ‘the trouble year’ – came to be viewed as a highly consequential time when ordinary people, the opposite of hotheads, left their farms and businesses in a spirit of revolt against unutterable injustice.
… Us ones quet from mindin’ the farms.
Let them take what we gave wi’ the weight o’ our arms,
From Saintfield to Kilkeel.
I’m quoting these lines from Florence M.Wilson’s sterling ballad ‘The Man From God-Knows-Where’, a party-piece in the North but more than that, a reminder of the Presbyterian heritage of high-minded revolt. It was written in 1918, and its subject is Thomas Russell, librarian of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, United Irishman and close friend of Henry Joy McCracken and his sister Mary Anne. Russell was arrested in the run-up to the Rising and seethed in a Dublin prison, unable to take part. When he got out, he returned to the North, and to his seditious ways. He was destined to go the way of his friends, McCracken and Wolfe Tone, only a few years later. A new century had arrived and with it, the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, but parts of Ireland remained unpacified, even if the end of the Rising had, for the moment, knocked the spirit out of them. Thomas Russell had hoped to stir things again towards a new revolutionary enterprise, but nothing came of it. The mood in the country was utterly changed, and revolution – rebellion – was viewed with horror, not optimism. Instead of mustering a northern contingent, Russell was arrested again and executed at Downpatrick gaol in 1803, following his forlorn attempt to rally the North in support of Robert Emmet’s Dublin affray. The ballad by Florence Wilson covers the years between 1796 and 1803, and as Charles Dickson says in his book Revolt in the North, it expresses ‘admirably the spirit of the United Irishmen in County Down’. It’s a Presbyterian spirit it expresses, indeed, with its emphasis on everyday dealings and a slow-burning anger and bitterness.
Well ’twas gettin’ on past the heat o’ the year
When I rode to Newtown fair:
I sold as I could (the dealers were near –
Only three-pound-eight for the Innis steer,
An’ nothin’ at all for the mare!)
I met M’Kee in the throng o’ the street,
Says he, ‘The grass has grown under our feet
Since they hanged young Warwick here.’
Hanging is the end of the road for many of the rebels, as all the bright hopes for social amelioration come to nothing. Among those who died in this manner was Henry Munro, a linen draper from Lisburn and chief commander of the County Down insurgents at Saintfield and Ballynahinch. (Here we have another instance of things coming round full circle. Henry Munro could claim collateral descent from the Colonel Robert Munro who, with his army of Covenanters, had landed at Carrickfergus in 1642 and assumed command of all the Scottish and English forces in Ulster, whose mission was to subdue the natives.)
When Munro stepped out to meet his death on a gallows set up in Lisburn’s Market Square, the person appointed to carry out the execution was so incompetent that the thing was bungled and the unfortunate insurgent left half-dead. ... And here comes William Blacker again bristling with loyalist heave-ho, rushing up to lend the hangman a hand. Whether an impulse of humanity or vengefulness dictated this action, I cannot say. It was due to Blacker’s Seagoe Yeomanry that Henry Munro was captured, and William was designated ‘Officer of the Day’ for the execution. (‘He with his loyal Orangemen united to the king/While other haughty rebels in a halter they will swing,’ goes a couplet from a makeshift contemporary ballad, not one by William himself.) Years later, however, he described Henry Munro as ‘shrewd, brave and active’ and commended his leadership, arguing that his plan of attack might well have succeeded, had it actually been carried out. That it wasn’t, he speculated, might have been because ‘the Popish portion of the rebels disliked going under the command of a Presbyterian ...’. (Actually, Henry Munro was an Episcopalian, but the point remains.) So there you have the ‘Popish portion’ in the Blacker view: sectarian, pig-headed and inept.
Why did Armagh stay out of the Rising of 1798? For some not very creditable reasons. When the Society of United Irishmen was founded in 1791 (in Belfast, by William Drennan), its ideals and objectives were somewhat at odds with the way things were managed in County Armagh. That part of the North was saturated in ancient enmities, and a popular means of expressing hostility and resentment already existed there for young malcontents on both sides – the notorious faction fights. ‘Unity’ on the whole was not an option in the county while factional imperatives predominated. Though some Defenders did merge with United Irishmen, you weren’t, by and large, about to see Defenders and Peep o’ Day Boys sink their traditional differences in the interests of a French- or American-inspired egalitarianism. In a version of what happened in Wexford, Armagh men stuck to their sectarian guns – and without the overlying ideological gloss that gained Wexford a place in the nationalist pantheon. And when the new loyalism began to be consolidated, it was a natural progression for Peep o’ Day Boys to become full-blooded Orangemen.
And now we
reach a reversal of the set-piece exodus of desperate Protestants all over Ireland running for their lives (a compelling image for me, now I’ve discovered that so many of my ancestors were among them). In her magisterial history, The Catholics of Ulster (2000), Marianne Elliott quotes a set of verses written in County Armagh in the 1790s:
The jails they are filled with your nearest relations,
Your wives and your children are sorely oppressed,
Your houses are burned, your lands desolated,
By a band of ruffians with Orange cockades.
She goes on: ‘When threatening notices signed “Oliver Cromwell” were affixed to Catholics’ homes, ordering them to quit or be burnt out, most chose to leave without question.’ They scattered in all directions, into County Down, southwards to Tipperary, north-west towards Donegal: any locality, however remote, in which it seemed a life free of intimidation might be a possibility. The apocryphal Cromwellian dictum, ‘to hell or Connacht’, took on a horrendous contemporary reality.
Some of these refugees made their way to Connemara, where they arrived in a desperate state. Help was at hand: they were taken under the wing of Richard Martin of Ballynahinch and his wife Harriet, who supplied food, accommodation, and sympathy for the Northerners’ plight. Martin – ‘Humanity Dick’13 – was a substantial landowner who presided over what the author Tim Robinson calls ‘a kingdom within a kingdom’: a place of ‘equivocal allure’ due to Martin’s scant regard for law, and other exorbitant qualities.14 By providing succour for some of the people exiled from Armagh, he gained a position on the extreme edge of the Ulster story, and placed himself on the side of the angels as far as northern memories of persecution are concerned. The opposite of ‘Cromwell’ in every respect.
(Incidentally, Oliver Cromwell has much to answer for in Ireland, but making him a scapegoat for every atrocity that occurred is really going too far. I’m thinking here of Scullabogue, and how it gradually got transformed in one section of the popular mind – a mind reluctant to admit even the possibility of sectarian wrongdoing on the Catholic side. Tom Dunne, in Rebellions, mentions passing the site of the barn in the company of an elderly relative and being told by him in all sincerity: ‘That’s the place where Cromwell burned the Catholics.’)
In the midst of all the alarms and instability and night frights besetting County Armagh, the Tippings stuck it out. They weren’t among the thousands of Catholics forced to abandon their homes and livelihoods in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The last of the Crossmacahilly clan was still inhabiting the same ramshackle house as late as 1944. But, for many reasons, life must have lacked overwhelmingly congenial elements for struggling cottiers, subsistence farmers and hand-loom weavers, battling to scrape a living while coping, day in, day out, with neighbourly hostility. (I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but there it is.) This was a time of exorbitant sabre-rattling in County Armagh, of brawlers, fanatics, hangmen, outrages, flames from burning houses lighting up the night sky, unnerving encounters along secluded lanes. ‘And neighbours on the roads at night with guns.’15
One’s heart goes out to young Sarah Magee in the middle of it all – newly widowed, with four or five children under the age of ten, a farm to run, home-based weaving to carry on, day-to-day living with all its exertions and vexations to oversee. And no prospect before her but the fields and meadows stretching away into the distance, and beyond them the bog, and so on to infinity. How she managed in the circumstances I do not know, but manage she did. Like her great-granddaughter (my grandmother, another Sarah Tipping), who found herself similarly bereaved in 1915, James Tipping’s widow showed her mettle by not falling to pieces, by acting out a dogged determination to make a go of things. Possibly, again like my grandmother, she had friends and relations at hand to ease the worst of the burdens, practical or financial or psychological as the case may have been. The rent was paid, the farm kept up, the children reared. In 1812, when the oldest son James comes of age, his mother gets him to take out a lease on the farm, which gains the family an enhanced security.
Ancestral houses. I never set eyes on the Crossmacahilly farm until it was nothing but a rickety survival fast returning to the clay. It had dwindled to a store for cattle-feed, in the middle of a morass. It was stuck at the end of a bothairin, or loanen, or whatever you like to call it, and approachable only by means of this swamp-like footway through which you had to struggle and squelch. The winter sky is overcast, the surrounding mud is prodigious, and the emptiness of the fields all around strikes a desolate note. You feel you might have stepped back into the early nineteenth century – only then, of course, the house and land, on the estate of the absentee Duke of Manchester, would have had a kempt appearance. I won’t go as far as roses round the door, but the house and its adjunct, a smaller building at a right angle to the main dwelling, would then have been neatly thatched and the garden cultivated. Indoors, sugan chairs, settle beds, creepie stools, deal tables, a turf fire blazing in the open fireplace ... all the fixtures of a farmer-weaver’s living quarters would be in place. Perhaps a dog and a cat made their home here too. A degree of order and diligence would have prevailed.
Hard to reconcile all that with the tumbledown wreck now standing – barely – on a byroad somewhere in the wilds between Lurgan and the recent town of Craigavon. Due to a quirk of temperament, I have always been enthralled by historic buildings and the associations they encompass – but Crossmacahilly is too far gone, too wretched looking, to chime with any invigorating sense of the past. It requires a tremendous act of the imagination to restore to it any form or substance whatever. Carrickblacker, on the other hand ... well, that’s a handsome pile I’d have taken great delight in. I like, as I say, to savour a house with a history, and the denser the history, the more enraptured my responses. My actual claim to a share in Carrickblacker may be genetically exiguous, but it stands up well in terms of affinity (aesthetic affinity, that is, not fellow-feeling for its Orange ambience). Alas, the great house was wiped out of existence before I ever heard tell of it. It and I overlapped by about thirteen years, not long enough for it to impinge on my antiquarian consciousness. I know it only from photographs.
Robert M. Young, writing in 1909, describes Carrickblacker as ‘an ancient battlemented mansion’, standing in 250 acres, with the River Bann flowing through the grounds before it merges with the Newry canal about a mile away. Like the even more resonant Springhill at Moneymore, Carrickblacker was a rare Northern Irish architectural treasure from the seventeenth century. Unlike Springhill, it was considered dispensable. In the inter-war period, when the role of military grandees in Portadown was failing somewhat, the current Lieutentant-Colonel Blacker moved his family to Devon and sold the house to people named Atkinson, who in turn allowed it to come into the disrespectful hands of the golf club mentioned above. And that was the end of it and its vivid narrative, its venerable interior and ethical heritage attached not to Ireland and liberalism, but to Protestant conservatism and soldierly integrity. Its heavy old chimney-pieces, oak panelling, yew bannisters, Jacobean furniture, equestrian portraits lining its stately walls ... all dispersed or destroyed.
And so to Clonleigh. This was a sturdy, prosperous, two-storey Wexford farmhouse, built in the eighteenth century. Containing at least six rooms indoors, it had plentiful outbuildings and farm offices besides. It included stables, a dairy and a piggery. Five plain sash windows gleamed in sunlight at the front of the house: one on each side of the door and three above, like a house on a child’s embroidery sampler. In the garden were flower beds and a vegetable patch. A high, dry-stone wall surrounded it, and an iron gate was hung between a couple of those characteristic round white gateposts, which feature so prominently in the Irish countryside. Some horses lived there, and a donkey was kept to draw a small cart. There were mongrel sheepdogs everywhere. And hens. And fuchsia bushes. And the view from the front windows included a low range of blue enticing Wexford hills. And some miles to the south, beyond another h
ill, Carrickbyrne, lay Scullabogue.
The farmhouse survived the turbulent events of 1798, but, as we’ve seen, the house and its neighbourhood weren’t untouched by them. Then, as far as we can tell, came years and years of obscurity and repose. More than a century and a half went by with nothing happening in this part of rural Wexford but the routines of farming and daily life. (Well, with one or two exceptions which I’ll touch on later.) My great-grandfather William Lett was born at Clonleigh in 1841 and when he died in the same place in 1932 he left the farm and everything in it to his second daughter Miss Annie Tennant Lett.
My grandmother, Emily Anne Craig, received a legacy of £50 from her father, and the same amount went to one of William’s Wexford granddaughters. There was a son, Thomas, who was due to receive £200 according to the terms of an earlier will, but this legacy was revoked in a codicil. Having provided for Thomas during his lifetime, William announced, he was damned if he was going to go on doing so after his death. (Or words to that effect.) Let Thomas fend for himself – not before time. So we gain an impression of twice-widowed William Lett as a forthright and doughty old farmer, a person who knew his own mind and never hesitated to assert his authority as head of the household.
A Twisted Root Page 12