now married to Catherine Carolan, and settled at the Naul, near
Balbriggan, he made a home for his wife and girls in Belfast. Though an
elderly man—older than his years, indeed, from the hardships of his
imprisonment—he made a characteristically gallant effort to make a new
start in life. His sons, George and Charles and Luke, helped as far as
they could to re-establish the family fortunes, but the times were
against them. George and Luke went finally to America and died there.
On a certain day in 1822 a letter arrived, re-directed from Belfast to
Castlecomer, where Mr. and Mrs. Teeling and their unmarried daughters,
Mary and Milly, had gone on a visit to Charles and his family. It was in
an unknown hand-writing, and was signed by an unknown correspondent,
William Cullen, from the City of Natchez, State of Mississippi. It
contained the sad tidings of the death of George, and enclosed a ring
which had been given to Bartle by Hoche, and to George by Bartle on the
eve of his execution. It was Mary Teeling’s destiny to read the letter
containing the news of her son’s death, by the coffin which contained
the mortal remains of her husband. In the bitterness of her grief her
wifely devotion could find comfort in the knowledge that this last
earthly sorrow had been spared her beloved Luke—and that from the
heavenly vantage ground whence he now looked, it was turned for him into
a joy.
The few remaining years of Mary Teeling’s life were spent with Charles
and his wife and little ones. And it is to the loving memories of these
years, cherished by her grandson Bartholomew, that we owe the vivid
portrait of her which I have borrowed to adorn my pages.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE WIVES OF ’NINETY-EIGHT
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Wife of Theobald Wolfe Tone
MATILDA TONE _née_ WITHERINGTON (1769-1849)[53]
“I thought, O my Love! you were so—
As the moon is, or sun on a fountain.
And I thought after that you were snow,
The cold snow on top of a mountain;
And I thought after that, you were more
Like God’s grace shining to find me,
Or the bright star of knowledge before,
And the star of knowledge behind me.”
—Hyde’s “Love Songs of Connacht.”
Footnote 53:
_Authorities_: “Autobiography of Wolfe Tone,” edited by R. Barry
O’Brien; Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Second Series, Second Edition,
1848.
IT was where a man should always find the Ladye of his Dreams that
Theobald Wolfe Tone found his sky-woman—above the crowded ways of life,
and yet not so far above them but that a man might, by raising his eyes,
see her leaning towards him, bending upon his path the star-like
radiance of her beauty, or that by climbing to her, a man might reach
her side.
On a certain day, early in the year 1785, young Tone, then in his
twenty-second year, and a scholar of the University of Dublin, went out,
as his custom was after commons, with a fellow student for a stroll in
Grafton Street. They were on the way to Byrne’s, the bookseller’s—a
favourite _rendezvous_ of intellectual and political Dublin—when,
happening to glance up, they saw leaning from the window of a house near
Byrne’s, as once “the Blessed Damozel leaned out from the gold bar of
Heaven”—an exquisite young girl.
It was a case of mutual love “at first sight.” The passionate adoration
which the romantic young student of Trinity—with his head full of love
poetry from his rehearsals for private theatricals, and dreams of
military glory from his constant attendances at parades and field days
in Phoenix Park—brought to the young loveliness of sixteen-year-old
Matilda Witherington, was fully returned. Every day he passed her window
and every day he found her there watching for his coming; and so it fell
out that these two, who were to endure so much together, whose
love-story was to be remembered, as long as Ireland keeps a place in her
faithful heart for the constancy, and heroism and gallantry of her sons
and daughters, had given their hearts irrevocably to each other before
ever they knew the sound of each other’s voices.
He might be a dreamer, this slightly built, pock-marked young man with
the keen eyes, and resolute, soldierly gait, who haunted Grafton Street
so persistently through the spring and early summer of 1785. But he had
an astonishingly practical turn for making his dreams come true. The
time was to come when the dream of French aid for Ireland was to
materialise through his instrumentality, in an expedition composed of
fifteen thousand of the finest troops of the Republic, incomparably
equipped, and commanded by one of the foremost generals in Europe. The
secret of his success was that he always knew perfectly what he wanted,
and having decided on the best road to reach his goal, walked it with
that light but resolute soldier’s step of his, humming a gay tune, and
allowing nothing to turn him aside. Having ascertained, now, that the
house where his lady dwelt, and to which he desired an introduction,
belonged to a rich old clergyman, called Fanning, and that the lady
herself was the Rev. Mr. Fanning’s grandaughter, he contrived to make
the acquaintance of her brother, and “as _he_ played well on the violin,
and I was myself a musical man, we grew intimate, the more so as it may
well be supposed I neglected no fair means to recommend myself to him
and the rest of the family with whom I soon grew a favourite. My affairs
now advanced prosperously; my wife and I grew more passionately fond of
each other; and in a short time I proposed to her to marry me without
asking consent of any one, knowing well that it would be in vain to
expect it; she accepted the proposal as frankly as I made it, and one
beautiful morning in the month of July we ran off together and were
married. I carried her out of town to Maynooth for a few days, and when
the first _éclat_ of passion had subsided, we were forgiven on all
sides, and settled in lodgings near my wife’s grandfather.”
It non-plussed the Duke of Wellington at a later date, to think of Tone
arriving in Paris “with a hundred guineas in his pocket, unknown and
unrecommended,” and, by mere force of personality, obtaining from the
French Government the wherewithal to overturn the British Government in
Ireland. But I doubt if that achievement was any more remarkable in its
own way than to find him, as we do now, winning the pearl of all
women—and a happiness such as it is given to few mortals to taste—with
nothing better to back up his suit than his flute—on which, we are given
to understand, he was an indifferent, if enthusiastic performer!
For a time all went well with the young couple. The husband resumed for
a short time his studies at the University, from which he graduated in
February, 1786, and the girl-wife was happy not only in his love but in
the restored favour of her relatives. “But,” as Tone himself says, “it
was too good to last.” The Fannings and Witheringtons suddenly began to
make themselves as disagreeable as possible, and to escape from them it
was necessary for the young _ménage_ to take refuge with old Mr. and
Mrs. Tone, who were, for the moment, farming near Clane in Co. Kildare.
The Tones received their new daughter with open arms. Peter Tone, the
father, idolised his clever eldest son, and if Matthew was the mother’s
favourite, she, too, was proud of brilliant, fascinating Theobald. Mary
Tone, the only girl of the family, lost her heart at once to her
charming sister-in-law, and henceforth the bond that united them was
only to grow closer with every danger and sorrow shared together through
all the passing years. Unfortunately old Peter Tone’s finances were not
in a very flourishing condition at this time—but, whatever was going,
his son and his daughter-in-law were perfectly welcome to share.
It was in her father-in-law’s place at Clane that Matilda Tone’s first
baby was born, a lovely little girl, whom they called Maria. Little
Maria was but a few months old when her seventeen-year-old mother gave
evidence of that marvellous courage and heroic devotion to her husband,
which were so often to be displayed during her married life.
One October night a band of six robbers burst into the home of Peter
Tone, armed with pistols and having their faces blackened. “Having tied
the whole family, they proceeded to plunder and demolish every article
they could find, even to the unprofitable villainy of breaking the
china, looking-glasses, etc. At length, after two hours, a maid-servant
whom they had tied negligently, having made her escape, they took the
alarm, and fled with precipitation, leaving the house such a scene of
horror and confusion as can hardly be imagined. With regard to myself,
it is impossible to conceive what I suffered. As it was early in the
night I happened to be in the courtyard, where I was seized and tied by
the gang, who then proceeded to break into the house, leaving a ruffian
sentinel over me, with a case of pistols cocked in his hand. In this
situation I lay for two hours, and could hear distinctly the devastation
which was going on within. I expected death every instant, and I can
safely and with great truth declare that my apprehension for my wife had
so totally absorbed the whole of my mind that my own existence was then
the least of my concerns. When the villains, including my sentry, ran
off, I scrambled to my feet with some difficulty, and made my way to a
window where I called, but received no answer. My heart died within me.
I proceeded to another and another, but still no answer. It was
horrible. I set myself to gnaw the cords with which I was tied, in a
transport of agony and rage, for I verily believed that my whole family
lay murdered within, when I was relieved from my unspeakable terror and
anguish by my wife’s voice, which I heard calling on my name at the end
of the house. It seems that, as soon as the robbers fled, those within
had untied each other with some difficulty, and made their escape
through a back window; they had got a considerable distance from the
house, before, in their fright, they recollected me, of whose fate they
were utterly ignorant as I was of theirs. Under these circumstances, my
wife had the courage to return alone, and, in the dark, to find me out,
not knowing but she might again fall in to the hands of the enemy, from
whom she had scarcely escaped, or that I might be lying a lifeless
carcase at the threshold. I can imagine no greater act of courage; but
of what is not a woman capable for him she truly loves? She cut the
cords which bound me, and at length we joined the rest of the family at
a little hamlet within half a mile of the house, where they had fled for
shelter.”[54]
Footnote 54:
“Autobiography of Wolfe Tone,” pp. 14, 15.
It will easily be believed that during the rest of that dreary winter
none of Peter Tone’s household—except perhaps Baby Maria—slept sound o’
nights. “I slept,” says Theobald, “continually with a case of pistols at
my pillow, and a mouse could not stir that I was not on my feet and
through the house from top to bottom. If any one knocked at the door
after nightfall we flew to our arms, and in this manner, we kept a most
painful garrison through the winter.”
Fear of external enemies was not the only trouble the little garrison
suffered. Within there was an ever-growing poverty, an ever increasing
load of financial troubles. Theobald could bear no longer to be a
useless “mouth” in the hunger-besieged citadel of his father’s home—and
so he scraped together in some way a little money and went off to London
to keep his terms as a law student of the Middle Temple.
During the period of his absence in London (January, 1787, to December,
1788) Matilda Tone and her little girl remained with her father-in-law
in Clane. Her husband tells us that she and little Maria were treated by
his father with great affection. But the situation was very painful. Old
Peter Tone’s affairs grew every day more involved, and the letters she
got from her husband in London brought little comfort. She knew how he
hated Law, and how unwillingly he drudged at the study of it. If, as was
his habit in later years, he made her at this period the _confidante_ of
all his schemes and dreams, it is certain that she must have had many an
anxious moment at the prospects they presented to her. Now it was a
project for establishing a colony on a military plan, in one of Captain
Cook’s newly-discovered islands in the South Sea. Fascinating as Captain
Cook’s description of these islands might be, it was not to be expected
that a young mother of eighteen could picture herself and her little one
exiled to one of them from the fair hills of Ireland without dismay. But
at least if that project materialised she should have her husband with
her. Not so with the second project—conceived in a fit of black
despondency when everything else seemed hopeless. It was to “list” as a
soldier in the East India Company’s service: “to quit Europe for ever,
and to leave my wife and child to the mercy of her family who might, I
hoped, be kinder to her when I was removed.”[55] Brave as Matilda Tone
was, it is not surprising to learn that her health broke down under the
strain of her anxieties.
Footnote 55:
“Autobiography,” p. 19.
At length a friend, touched by the hapless condition of the young pair,
made intercession for them with old Mr. Fanning. The grandfather was
induced to give Matilda £500 of the dower he had promised her—and on the
strength of this advance, Theobald returned to Ireland.
There was a joyful re-union in his father’s house at Blackhall on
Christmas Day, 1788. Matilda’s wan countenance brightened into its old
beauty when she had her husband by her side again, and the pride of the
young father in his charming little daughter was a subject of great
delight to her. Now the world was a delightful place once more.
They left Blackhall after New Year’s Day, 1789, and after a short stay
with Mr. Fanning in Grafton Street, took up their residence in Clarendon
Street. Theobald was soon after called to the Bar, and went circuit in
Leinster. His success was surprising—especially to himself who
considered that he knew exactly as much of law as he did of necromancy.
“I was, modestly speaking,” he confesses in his pleasant way, “one of
the most ignorant barristers in the Four Courts.” But it is plain that
if he had cared to succeed he could have succeeded brilliantly.
As it was, he soon gave up law for politics—his first venture in which
was a pamphlet in the interests of the Whig Club. This procured for him
the favour of Grattan, Forbes and Ponsonby, and put a little profitable
law business in his way. But the prospects which were held out to him of
a seat in Parliament did not materialise; and very soon, Tone, whose
opinions matured rapidly under an “intensive” method of political
culture, found he had so far outgrown “Whig” principles that he could
enter into no alliance with them. Briefly put, the points of difference
were these: Tone held that “the influence of England was the radical
vice of the Irish Government, and consequently that Ireland would never
be either free, prosperous or happy until she was independent, and that
independence was unobtainable whilst the connection with England
existed.” Grattan and those who thought with him were attached to the
connection with England, and considered that if certain grievances
(which they could not see were inherent in the system) were removed, all
would be for the best, in the best of all possible worlds. In the
illumination of his discovery Tone “began to look on the little politics
of the Whig Club with great contempt: _their peddling about petty
grievances instead of going to the root of the evil_,” and he rejoiced
that with his poverty he had kept his independence and could develop his
political creed without being bound by the tenets of the Whigs.
One afternoon Theobald brought home to dinner a new acquaintance whom he
had met the previous day in the gallery of the House of Commons. Mrs.
Tone was as much taken as her husband by the fascinating address of this
tall soldierly man with the dark eyes, coal black silky hair, and olive
complexion, whom Theobald introduced to her as Thomas Russell. Long
afterwards these three who dined together then for the first time,
remembering the date of their first re-union, felt inclined to keep its
anniversary as a festival. As Tone, on the eve of the most momentous
crisis of his life, the departure of the Bantry Bay expedition, sat in a
quiet corner of Paris reviewing his past, he counted the day he made
Russell’s acquaintance as one of the most fortunate in his life. He
joins the name of the passionately loved wife with that of the beloved
friend. “I frame no system of happiness for my future life on which the
enjoyment of his society does not constitute a most distinguishing
feature, and if I am ever inclined to murmur at the difficulties
wherewith I have so long struggled, I think on the inestimable treasure
I possess in the affection of my wife, and the friendship of Russell,
and I acknowledge that all my labours and sufferings are overpaid. I may
truly say, that, even at this hour when I am separated from both of
them, and uncertain whether I may ever be so happy as to see them again,
there is no action of my life, which has not a remote reference to their
opinion which I equally prize. When I think I have acted well, and that
I am likely to succeed in the important business wherein I am engaged, I
say often to myself: ‘My dearest love and my friend Russell will be glad
of this.’”[56]
Footnote 56:
“Autobiography,” p. 29.
A short time after they had made the acquaintance of Russell, the Tones
went to spend the summer by the seaside at Irishtown, the doctor having
prescribed sea-bathing as a cure for Mrs. Tone’s continued delicacy.
Thither came Russell every day to visit them, and thither came also very
frequently in his company Russell’s venerable father and his delightful
brother, Captain John. Room was found, too, in “the little box of a
house” for Mary Tone, and for William whenever he could spare a week
from Matthew’s cotton factory at Prosperous. As Tone writes of these
happy days he grows lyrical in his praise of them. “I recall with
transport the happy days we spent during that period; the delicious
dinners, in the preparation of which my wife, Russell and myself were
all engaged; the afternoon walks, the discussions we had, as we lay
stretched on the grass.... If I may judge we were none of us destitute
of the humour indigenous in the soil of Ireland; ... add to this I was
the only one who was not a poet, or at least a maker of verses, so that
every day produced a ballad, or some poetical squib, which amused us
after dinner; and as our conversation turned upon no ribaldry, or
indecency, my wife and sister never left the table. These were delicious
days. The rich and great, who sit down every day to the monotony of a
splendid entertainment, can form no idea of the happiness of our frugal
meal, nor of the infinite pleasure we found in taking each his part in
the preparation and attendance. My wife was the centre and the soul of
all. I scarcely knew which of us loved her best; her courteous manners,
her never-failing cheerfulness, her affection for me and for our
children, rendered her the object of our common admiration and delight.
She loved Russell as well as I did. In short, a more interesting society
of individuals, connected by purer motives, and animated by a more
ardent attachment and friendship for each other, cannot be
imagined.”[57]
Footnote 57:
“Autobiography,” pp. 29, 30.
During these long days of summer leisure and talk, Tone’s old project of
a military colony in the South Sea was revived, and a memorial on the
subject was drawn up by him and Russell and sent to the Duke of
Richmond. Both the Duke and Lord Grenville, Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs, showed an interest in the scheme, and it is possible
that it might have led to something had not the threatened wars between
England and Spain been averted by “a kind of peace called a convention.”
Shortly after this disappointment Russell was appointed to an Ensigncy
on full pay in the 64th Regiment of foot and sent to Belfast where his
regiment was then quartered. The last day he dined at Irishtown he
arrived in a “very fine suit of laced regimentals,” and was set by his
irreverent friends to cook the dinner in this attire.
The Tones did not remain long in their seaside cottage after Russell’s
departure for Belfast. They returned to town for the winter, and here
their eldest son William was born.
The winter found Theobald pursuing his political studies and founding a
political club, consisting of literary friends of his who had already
attained eminence; they included Dr. Drennan, the poet; Whitley Stokes
and John Stack, Fellows of Trinity College; Joseph Pollock, Peter
Burrowes and Thomas Addis Emmet. In spite of the distinguished talents
each member brought to the re-union, the Club was anything but a success
and it was soon dissolved.
At this time all Ireland was in a ferment owing to the influence of the
French Revolution. The partisans of a settled order of things, including
Grattan and his Whig friends, had followed Edmund Burke in their
opposition to the new principles on which the French had set out to
remodel the world. But those in Ireland who felt themselves “an
oppressed, insulted and plundered nation” were heart and soul with the
French people in their struggle for freedom. “In a little time the
French Revolution became the test of every man’s political creed, and
the nation was fairly divided into two great parties, the Aristocrats
and the Democrats.”
Tone, of course, was an ardent Democrat, and these views of his, being
speedily known, injured beyond any possibility of repair his prospects
of success at the Bar—but brought him into close touch with two bodies
of men who were each in their own way, struggling to be free—and nerved
by the fight in France “to do or die” for liberty. These were the
Catholics of Ireland, and the Dissenters of the North.
Russell’s stay in Belfast had brought him into close touch with the
leaders of advanced thought in the northern city, whose programme of
freedom embraced freedom not for themselves only but for the Catholics
still enslaved by the Penal Laws. On the occasion of some Volunteer
celebration in Belfast a resolution in favour of Catholic Emancipation
was to be put forward, and Russell undertook to get Tone to draw it up.
The commission was willingly accepted, and though the resolution was
eventually not put to the meeting in the form Tone had given it, the
circumstance had the result of setting him thinking more seriously than
he had yet done on the state of Ireland. “I soon formed my theory, and
on that theory I have invariably acted ever since!”
What was that theory which was to give a new impetus to Irish
nationality, which was to be upheld at the cost of so much bloodshed and
suffering, which was to be a dogma as living and peremptory in 1916 as
in 1798—and in defence of which Patrick Pearse and his men were to face
the guns of General Maxwell, as proudly as Wolfe Tone took command of
the battery of the _Hoche_, in the glorious fight she put up, one little
vessel against a whole fleet, on an October morning one hundred and
eighteen years earlier. Here it is in Wolfe Tone’s own words: “To
subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connection
with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and
to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects. To unite
the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past
dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of
the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter—these were my
means.”[58]
Footnote 58:
“Autobiography,” pp. 50, 51. Pearse held “all Irish Nationalism to be
explicit in these words. Davis was to make explicit certain things
here implicit, Lalor certain other things; Mitchel was to thunder the
whole in words of apocalyptic wrath and splendour. But the Credo is
here: ‘I believe in One Irish Nation and that Free.’”—(“Ghosts,” p.
16.)