Irish Crystal

by Andrew M. Greeley

  12

  Francis Higgins and Francis Magan betrayed Lord Edward. The former was a well-known Castle spy, a man who played the game for amusement, a bibulous, gossipy fellow who brought other spies, more sinister and dangerous than he, to the service of the Castle. None of us in the United Irishmen—and I was only on the fringes in those days not a formal member—would have dreamed of entrusting Lord Edward to Higgins’s protection. Magan was another matter. He was one of us. I didn’t like him much, he was a sly reclusive man, but I never thought he was a traitor. Neither did anyone else.

  Lord Edward had already tried on his special uniform as Commander of the Revolutionary Army, something like the red coat the Brits wear but green with fancy trim. He had many doubts about the Rising but typically wanted to appear beautiful when it happened

  He never had a chance to wear the uniform. In the middle of May he was hiding out in the Yellow Lion, Moore’s tavern on Thomas Street. Moore heard a rumor that the Castle was about to search the tavern, so he left town, having told his daughter to find another place to hide Lord Edward—down the street in the house of a certain Mr. Murphy. The young woman, however, was fearful that the police would search Murphy’s house too because he was known to be a close friend. So she decided to take Lord Edward to the house of another friend, Francis Magan on Usher’s Island. The young woman’s intelligence was admirable. However, little did she realize that she was delivering him into the hands of his worst enemy.

  Magan could hardly believe his good fortune. However, he did not want Lord Edward to be captured in his own house. He alerted the Castle. Major Sirr, the head of the Dublin police, threw a ring of police around the island.

  Sirr was one of the worst of the enemies of Ireland. He was almost killed in a skirmish on Usher’s Island, but, worse luck, he survived. Lord Edward escaped from the island and was brought back to Moore’s on Thomas Street. Magan found out and promptly informed Sirr, who swept down Thomas Street to search every house. I had visited His Lordship to bring him a letter from his wife, whose hiding place over on Usher island was close to where His Lordship had been hiding. He was up in the attic, tired and, it seemed to me then, unwell. Still, he grinned at me and thanked me for the letter. I declined his tip as I always did. Then, when I went into the street, I saw Sirr and his Yeomen striding down the street and breaking into every home with noise and brutality. I slipped back into the Yellow Lion and warned them that Sirr was coming. I escaped from the tavern just as the Yeomen arrived. I understood that Moore was going to hide Lord Edward in this storeroom on the roof.

  Lord Edward was reading a book Gil Blass by Le Sage. Lieutenant Swan, one of Sirr’s henchmen, broke into the room and cried out for help. Lord Edward, determined to die rather than surrender, grabbed the black-handled dagger he always carried and slashed Swan on the forehead. Then Captain Ryan charged into the room and seized His Lordship. They struggled desperately. Ryan, brave in an evil cause, would not let Lord Edward go, though he stabbed Ryan repeatedly.

  Sirr entered the room, drew his two pistols, and calmly shot Lord Edward. Wounded, but still shouting defiance Lord Edward was dragged off to Newgate Prison, where he died a painful and horrible death. Sirr and his Yeomen destroyed all the houses on Thomas Street where they thought Lord Edward might have hidden. Magan went back to Usher’s Island and a promise of a lifelong pension.

  The Rising was still set for May 23. Samuel Nielsen, Lord Edward’s second-in-command, met with his colonels and gave them their orders. The mail was to be stopped from leaving Dublin in the morning. This would be a signal that the Rising was to commence. But Nielsen was arrested in front of the prison as he contemplated an attack to free Lord Edward. There were no leaders left. The Dublin United Irishmen went back to their homes to hide their weapons. In the countryside the news that Dublin had not risen and that Lord Edward was dead spread quickly. Most of the United Irish vanished into the mists. In Wexford, however, twenty thousand men stormed into Wexford Town, under the leadership of Father John Murphy, and proclaimed a Republic. Hundreds, maybe thousands of Protestants were slaughtered. The Yeomanry and the English army battled the rebels at Vinegar Hill and destroyed them. The Wexford men continued to fight in a cause that was lost before it was begun. Lord Edward died of his wound in Newgate on June 4, murdered by the Camden, the Lord Lieutenant who refused adequate medical help until it was too late. Thirty thousand would die before the Rising collapsed.

  Lord Camden was replaced in part because the accusations of Lord Leinster (Edward’s brother) that he had deliberately let Lord Edward die. The new Lord Lieutenant was Lord Charles Cornwallis, conqueror of India and conquered by America, a strange, upright, and compassionate man, a paragon of Christian virtue in a social class permeated by corruption and immorality. The Rising was mostly over, but Cornwallis put an end to hanging. There’s many a Dubliner who’s alive today, successful in his work and respected in the city, who would be in the cemetery with Lord Edward if it were not for the sense and moderation of Charles Cornwallis.

  I dined with him one night at the viceregal lodge. Well, to be truthful, I was present at a dinner with many other people. What I was doing there is irrelevant to this story. I was the youngest one there. Lord Cornwallis did not know who I was and indeed most of the others at the table did not either. He was gracious to me as he was to everyone. Our conversation turned to the American war, a revolution that he was not able to put down.

  “Is it true, sir, that General Washington was a colonial bumpkin and an incompetent commanding officer?”

  “Quite the contrary, he was a perfect gentleman in all respects, much more so than some of my English colleagues at the time. I invited him to dinner after I had surrendered at Yorktown. We had a delightful conversation. I told him quite candidly that as a Whig I thought the war against America was a mistake. I added that we had not lost the war at Yorktown, where, as I have often said Sir Henry Clinton never sent the reinforcements I needed. We lost it in New Jersey. My very words in my toast to the victor were, if I remember correctly, ‘when the illustrious part Your Excellency has borne in this long and arduous contest becomes a matter of history, fame will gather your brightest battles rather from the banks of the Delaware than from those of the Chesapeake.’”

  “New Jersey, sir!”

  “Indeed yes. I had routed him in Long Island and at White Plains with few casualties on our side. The ragtag Continental Army retreated across the Hudson River to New Jersey. It appeared that the war was over. Yet he resisted with irregular forces and beat me very badly at Trenton and Princeton. We suffered heavy losses. The army that had triumphed in New York scarcely existed anymore. I knew then that the war was lost. It dragged on for five more years only because of stubbornness in certain quarters in London.”

  He meant because of the stubbornness of King George III who was, as the saying went in Dublin, half-mad, half the time.

  “It was much different here, was it not, sir?”

  The Lord Lieutenant shifted uneasily in his chair and permitted himself a small sip of claret.

  “Was it, sir? I agree with Lord Castlereagh, that there was never in any country so formidable an effort on the part of the people. Far more formidable than in America or in France.”

  “If Lord Edward had not died.”

  “Lord Edward served in one of my regiments in America. He was a fine officer. I would not have tolerated his death.”

  No one dared to ask whether he would have pardoned Edward as he had pardoned so many others.

  If England had sent other men like him to govern Ireland, the history of the two nations might be different.

  As I walked back towards the Liffey from Phoenix Park, where the Viceroy lives, I wondered about the Rising. Cornwallis probably knew more about it than anyone else. He thought that the United Irishmen might actually have won, an opinion few in Dublin shared.

  Well, they didn’t win. Near victories do not count.

  Months later I encountered someone els
e who seemed to agree with Lord Cornwallis—Bob Emmet, walking along the beach south of Dublin, lost in thought. At first I didn’t recognize him. I could not say why he looked different. He always was a master of disguises when he wanted to be.

  “We might have won,” he said, as soon as he saw me, “if it were not for the failure in Dublin. If we had seized the Castle, there would have been a general rising.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Kildare and Wexford would have joined and we would have squeezed the Yeomen and the army between his. We had them frightened for a day or two. If only they had not taken Lord Edward.”

  “I’m not sure we would have won even then. We were terribly disorganized. Lord Edward and Sam Nielsen were unbearably reckless.”

  “So, my friend, was the English army. Perhaps the leaders next time will not make those mistakes,” he said mysteriously.

  After we set off in opposite directions, I pondered what he had said.

  I wondered if Bob fancied himself the leader of a betterorganized and more successful rising. He was only twenty-two. Was he already planning another and better rising?

  I dismissed the thought, but it remained with me.

  Ironically, he would make the same mistakes that Lord Edward made with the same disastrous results, though many fewer casualties.

  13

  “What a terrible story,” my wife cried out. “What ever happened to his wife and children?”

  “His family gained control of the children. His daughter became Lady Pamela Campbell and contributed to the first biography of her father. His wife fled to Hamburg, a hideout for refugees from both England and France in those days. She remarried—the American ambassador. She did not have a happy life.”

  “Thank God we live now instead of then.”

  “I don’t need to tell you that governments are cruel these days too.”

  “’Tis true. So are people.”

  I had been able to clean up her e-mail before she saw it. The S mail got through. A lot of it. The main points of it were that if she didn’t like it here in America, she should go back to Ireland and that like all other immigrants she was exploiting America and should return the money she had taken from her fans. Americans, all of them immigrants, even if they came across the Bering Straits long ago, have always hated immigrants, especially if a given immigrant is rich and successful. Nuala’s fan mail had always been good. Now she was hearing from the eejits. And the nine-fingered shite hawks too. May Rosen, our media adviser, said that it would last just one news cycle and that the people who loved her music would keep right on loving her. That sounded like something God would have said to Joan of Arcadia.

  We had encountered a couple of haters when we went over to the parish for our First Communion classes.

  Herself objected to the classes. I’m not making me First Communion. Why do I need to go to school? The answer from the school was that either we came to the classes or Nelliecoyne would be denied the sacrament.

  “Can they do that?” I asked George the Priest.

  “They cannot, but a lot of them do it just the same and you lay folk don’t figure it’s worth the fight.”

  “How do we fight?”

  “Call the chancery and demand that they vindicate Nelliecoyne’s right to the sacrament. Or better yet call your very good friend the coadjutor Archbishop.”

  Nuala vetoed that. We’d embarrass our daughter.

  I doubted that. Our little redhead was incapable of embarrassment.

  So we strolled into the ancient school hall and promptly encountered a tiny woman with fierce eyes and tight lips.

  “You have a lot of nerve,” she spit out at us. “If you get rich in America, you should respect America or go home to where you came from.”

  Nuala stopped in her tracks, took a deep breath, and replied quite calmly, “I do respect America. That’s why I hold it to its highest ideals.”

  The little woman’s husband was a large man in a leisure suit, overweight commodities broker perhaps.

  “You make me sick, both of you,” he growled. “You are a disgrace to the Catholic Church. I’d like to beat the shit out of you.”

  “Catholics don’t settle differences of political opinion by fighting,” I said lightly.

  “You want to come outside and settle this like a man?”

  “Go find a bar and another drunk,” I suggested.

  “I’m not drunk,” he shouted.

  Everyone in the hall turned to look at us.

  I wished that he would take a poke at me. Then I’d have an excuse.

  “Come along, Dermot,” my wife warned. I did.

  The lecturer was a thin elderly nun who stirred in my metaphor-deprived imagination images of a praying mantis.

  She passed out an attendance sheet and warned us that if our names did not appear on all three of the evenings, our children would be denied the privilege of the Eucharist.

  Nuala opened her collection of Seamus’s poetry and tuned the nun out. The daimon inside me, not to be confused with the Adversary who would also doubtless get into the fight, made me stand up and say, “S’ter, may I ask a question.”

  And myself urging patience to my wife.

  “You may not till after my lecture.”

  “I’m going to ask it anyhow. What authority do you have to deny a child the sacrament of the Eucharist? As I read canon law, the Catholic laity have the right to the sacraments and no one can deny them that right.”

  “I am the DRE, Director of Religious Education, in this parish.”

  “Again, as I read canon law, the DRE is not given such a right … I have inquired and I am told that the Chancery Office will vindicate my daughter’s right to the sacrament. I’m willing to come to these classes. Maybe I’ll learn something. But I won’t sign this paper.”

  “I’ll begin my lecture now.”

  I noted with some satisfaction that most of the people in the group did not sign the paper. The pastor had a rising on his hands and would back down, because of fear of a declining collection if for no other reason.

  “Now who’s kicking the shite,” said a voice next to me.

  The lecture was allegedly about the Eucharist as a sacrament of community. In fact it was an anti-American diatribe. Americans were unworthy of the Eucharist because of their consumerism, secularism, materialism, selfishness, pollution, destruction of the environment, global warming, and so on and so on. I am not an admirer of American foreign policy but there’s a bit of rebel in me. I don’t like being hectored with clichés, especially by a nun.

  Me wife’s hand rested firmly on me and not as a gesture of erotic invitation either.

  “Keep your friggin’ shanty Irish mouth shut, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  So I did. Naturally.

  After sister had wound down, there were no questions. She departed in the highest of dudgeons. She had borne witness.

  The pastor waited at the door to greet us as we left, doubtless having pulled himself away from the television.

  “How do you get away with this sort of shit,” I said amiably, “forty years after the Vatican Council?”

  “Sister is elderly and she works very hard.”

  “You know damn well you can’t deny any of these children the sacrament unless for extremely serious reasons. A refusal to sit through this nonsense is not a serious reason.”

  Nuala tugged at my sleeve.

  “Why do you two have to spoil everything?”

  “Funny thing, Father, I thought we were the Church too.”

  Me wife and I walked out into the deluge that was still falling on Southport Avenue.

  “I’m ashamed of you, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  “You’re angry because you didn’t get a chance to say the same things.”

  “Weren’t you brilliant altogether … and yourself shooting them ducks in the shooting gallery—an elderly nun and a clueless priest.”

  Good enough for me. Anyway, we didn’t return for the second lec
ture and neither did most of the rest of the parents.

  BIG-DEAL VICTORY

  Small-bore victory

  “What do the kids say about Sister Anattracta?” I asked Nelliecoyne in her mother’s presence.

  She did not look up from her work.

  “I can’t tell you the word they use, Da, and herself standing here listening to me.”

  “Where do second-grade girls learn that word, Mary Anne Coyne?”

  “From their ma.”

  FAIR PLAY TO YOU, DERMOT COYNE.

  Safe in our study, me wife said, “We’re not getting anywhere, Dermot love.”

  “Oh?”

  “We’re having a brilliant lesson in Irish history and learning about the traitors and spies, but we haven’t done anything about the spies all around us.”

  “We got rid of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. We frightened off the man down the street. We put Ms. Carson in her place. We’ve frightened the pastor.”

  “Small fry.” She waved her hand, partly in pride at her use of colloquial American.

  “Well, who’s the big fry?”

  “Them as sent them terrible lies about me to the FBI.”

  I was worried about them too.

  “Happen it the same low-down, holler-sulking polecat bad’uns who a-denouncing everyone else.”

  She giggled at my imitation of her friend Cindasue.

  “Are they the evil you sense are near?” I asked, edging into the dark domains where her fey self lurked.

  She shrugged her shoulders, causing a current of desire to run through my nervous system. Damn woman was ruining my powers of logical deduction.