Fitzpatrick and her husband in Kilcomney. Like the other defenceless
inhabitants of Kilcomney, a hundred and forty of whom were murdered that
day by the yeomanry under Sir Charles Asgill, their sole “offence” was
that the insurgent army had passed through their district on its retreat
from Scollagh Gap. When the butchering “yeos” entered the cabin of
Patrick Fitzpatrick, the poor wife, with her baby in her arms, ran to
her husband’s side, and while she was endeavouring to protect him, a
volley was poured into them, and they fell dead at the same moment. “The
cabin was then set fire to as a matter of course over the heads of the
children of this unfortunate couple—six in number; and five of them,
‘poor innocent creatures,’ ran into the house of a neighbour, who had
escaped the massacre, one of them crying out, ‘My daddy is killed—my
mammy is killed—and the pigs are drinking their blood.’ A poor woman of
the name of Kealy, an aunt of theirs, took the children home, and when
her scanty means were exhausted for their support, she became a beggar
to get them bread; the neighbours helped her, they gave her assistance,
and God, in His mercy to her, enabled her to bring them up.” “There may
be no space,” writes Madden with that quick sentiment of his for heroic
deeds which gives to his work an atmosphere so inspiring, “in the
records of the noble deeds of women for the goodness of this poor
creature; but her conduct will not be forgotten, at all events, on that
day when virtue is destined to receive its own exceeding great
reward—the awful recompense of all its sufferings and sacrifices here
below, and when the man of blood will find no act of indemnity available
for his sanguinary and inhuman deeds.”
On June the 3rd, 1798, occurred the massacre of Gibbet Rath—“the place
of slaughter”—on the Curragh of Kildare. There the insurgents, who had
entered into terms with General Dundas, assembled, according to
stipulation, to lay down their arms and receive the “protections” which
were to enable them to return to their homes without further
molestation. Suddenly on their unarmed ranks fell Sir James Duff with
his cavalry, and Lord Roden’s “Fox-Hunters,” and the slaughter began.
“Three hundred and fifty men, admitted into the king’s peace, and
promised his protection, were mowed down in cold blood.”
Let us turn our eyes for a moment from that bloody “Place of Slaughter,”
where the gory corpses of their men lay all through that bright June
day, to the cabins where the women vainly awaited them through its
slowly passing hours. To help us to realise the scenes that must have
taken place in many of them, we have the story, related by Fitzpatrick,
of Mrs. Denis Downey, the grandmother of Canon O’Hanlon, the
distinguished hagiologist.
She was a young wife, with two little children, when the “word” came
which called her husband to the fight. As their home in Grey Abbey near
Kildare was attacked by the soldiers, she and her babies took refuge at
her parents’ house near the River Barrow. The day before that fixed for
the surrender of the insurgents, it was said that Lord Roden’s
“Fencibles” (or “Fox-Hunters”) paraded the streets of Kildare, mad with
drink, and carrying articles of apparel on the end of their bayonets,
shouted “we are the boys who will slaughter the croppies to-morrow at
the Curragh.” On this account a great many of the insurgents wisely
stayed away. Unfortunately Denis Downey was not one of them. Mounted on
a fine horse he presented himself with his comrades. When the massacre
began he leaped on his horse, and in all probability would have made
good his escape, had he not stopped to take up a relative. A bullet
found him, and he fell dead from the saddle. His riderless horse, which
had been stabled at his father-in-law’s place, galloped thither, mad
with terror.
That night his wife, who had felt all day the most harrowing
presentiment of impending woe, had a dream of her husband lying
weltering in his blood. Her wild cries roused the household, and her
father, finding his efforts at comfort unavailing, finally determined to
go out and seek for news. At the end of the lane leading from his house
to the highway he met his son-in-law’s riderless horse, saddled and
bridled and covered with foam—and the early June dawn discovered groups
of country people passing along the highway with faces and gestures and
voices, all eloquent of some dreadful tragedy. “What news from the
Curragh?” he asked a group which passed. “Bad news, bad news,” came the
answer like some tragic chorus, “our friends were all slaughtered on the
Curragh, to-day.”
When her father came home with his tidings, Mrs. Downey insisted on
getting out one of the carts, and proceeding to the place of the
slaughter to search for her husband’s body—for she was quite convinced
that her dream was true, and she would find him among the slain. She
came at last to the bloody plain, and found it littered with corpses.
She turned over two hundred dead bodies before she discovered her
husband’s. She laid him in the cart, covered him with straw and a quilt,
and proceeded to the house of a relative to wake him. But the word had
gone round that wherever a rebel corpse should be found the house
sheltering it would be burned by the “yeos.” Without waiting even for a
coffin, the broken-hearted young widow had to wrap her man in a sheet,
and so see him laid in the hastily made grave. When quieter days came
and she was able to return to the home he had made for her, she found it
a wreck. She sold her farm and went to live in Monasterevan.
Her story presents to our imagination the tragedy of the “Widows of the
Massacres” in concrete form. But it is the story of only one woman.
Think of it as multiplied by the number of all the women who were left
desolate on that day—and estimate the sum of woman’s misery caused by
that one day alone—if our hearts dare!
Think of the women left desolate by the wholesale massacre of Carnew, of
Gorey, of New Ross, of Enniscorthy, of Carrigrew, of Killoughrim
Woods—and estimate these contributions to the sum of woman’s misery—if
our hearts dare!
* * * * *
To renew our courage, it is time to tell a tale with a happier ending,
though it, too, has to do with one of the most horrible massacres which
disgraced the period—the Massacre of Dunlavin.
One day, Captain Saunders of Saunders’ Grove, reviewing his yeomanry,
suddenly announced that he knew those who were United Irishmen among
them, and ordered them to fall out. About thirty-six of them did; but
the others, imitating the example of one Pat Doyle (who had had word of
what was forward from the Captain’s brother) stayed in their places. The
thirty-six who had “given themselves away,” were locked up in the
market-house of Dunlavin, and on the Fair Day of Dunlavin, they were
marched out to a hollow near the Catholic Church, while a number of
Ancient Britons were posted on a height at some little distance. The
word was given; the Ancient Britons fired—and the men fell in their
blood, amid the shrieks and groans of the bystanders, among whom were
their widows and relatives.
Among the victims was a man named Prendergast. In his case the ball made
two orifices, but he had sufficient presence of mind before he lost
consciousness, to detach his cravat and stop the blood of one orifice
with it, while his clenched hand acted as a styptic for the other. A
brave girl happened to see the motion, and she found an opportunity to
staunch the wounds with her shawl, while she went off to Prendergast’s
house, whence she presently returned with his brother, leading a horse
and cart. They put the wounded man into the cart, covered him with
bloody straw and carried him back to his widowed mother’s home. News
reached Saunders that “some of the croppies were getting alive again,”
so he sent back the Ancient Britons to finish their work, and hack and
gash any of the bodies which might possibly harbour a spark of life. He
then proceeded to Prendergast’s house, and genially addressed the widow.
“Well, widow, I hear that that croppy scoundrel of a son of yours is
living still.” “Yes, your honour,” said the poor woman, “the Lord has
been pleased to grant the poor boy a longer day.” “Come on now,” said
his Honour, forcing his way into the house, “I will put him out of pain;
he can’t possibly recover, and your time can’t be taken up by attending
on him.” The poor mother found strength to hold the great brute back,
while the wounded man was conveyed out of the house by some of the
neighbours. An angry crowd gathered round the Captain, and he thought it
better to get away. At nightfall Michael Dwyer came down from the hills
and carried off young Prendergast to his eyrie. And here during many
months the wounded boy was nursed by Michael Dwyer and his “Mountain
Mary”—and he lived to marry the brave girl who had saved his life.
And this, did space permit, would be the appropriate place to tell the
story of one of the bravest women of ’Ninety-Eight—Mrs. Michael Dwyer
(we have already met her name in connection with Anne Devlin, her
husband’s niece). She was a beautiful Wicklow girl, the daughter of a
“strong” farmer named Doyle; but she left all the comforts of her
father’s well-stocked farm to share the outlaw’s “wild and uncertain
life in hill and vale, in mountain cave and fastness.” The story of her
romantic marriage is the subject of a well-known and very stirring
ballad which tells how:—
As the torrent bounds down from the mountain
Of cloud-helméd stormy Kaigeen
And tosses, all tawny and foaming,
Through the still glen of lone Carragean;
So dashed a bold rider of Wicklow,
With forty stout men in his train,
From the heart of the hills, where the spirit
Of Freedom had dared to remain.
Thou leader of horsemen! Why hasten
So fleetly to Brusselstown hill?
What foemen, what yeomen await thee
To question in Wicklow thy will?
But though armed to the teeth, the grey-friezed horsemen were on no
business of blood to-day:
Their leader he loves a young maiden
And he’s speeding to make her his bride.
They come to the home of the bride, and presently
Mary came out in her beauty
The loveliest maid in Imale;
The loveliest flower that blossomed
In all the wild haunts of the vale.
Arrayed in an emerald habit
And the green and the white in her hair.
* * * * *
They led out a horse on the heather;
She patted his neck with her hand,
Then sprang on his back like a feather,
And stood in the midst of the band.
Then to the priest’s house for the wedding—
Away dashed the cavalcade fleetly,
By beauty and chivalry led,
With their carbines aflash in the sunlight
And the saucy cockades on their head!
No braver tale could be told of any woman than the story of Mary Dwyer
during the years that followed. She stood by her husband, ready to
endure to the end in the struggles of ’98 and ’03; she shared the
horrors of the prison ship that bore him into exile. She stood by his
deathbed in 1805, and lived on, herself, to rear his children in a
manner such that their father and their native land might be proud of
them—though, alas! it was not Ireland that was to enjoy the finished
work. When she died in 1861, the touching obituary notice of her in the
Sydney _Freeman’s Journal_ could say of her with truth: “All her wishes
in life were accomplished before her eyes closed in death. When she
lived to see her two grandchildren sheltered under the guardianship of
Mother Church—one a holy young priest, the other a dweller in the
peaceful shadow of the cloister, she sang her hymn of resignation, ‘Now
Thou dost dismiss Thy servant, O Lord.’”
Another brave woman whose _Nunc Dimittis_ was sung in a foreign land was
Mrs. Gallagher. Her husband was a confidential clerk of James Moore’s,
and he often acted as one of Lord Edward’s bodyguard when the Chief went
abroad for any purpose during the weeks he was “on his keeping.” On the
night on which Lord Edward was going to Magan’s and was met by Major
Sirr, Gallagher was wounded in the encounter, which ensued with the
Major’s men. He was afterwards identified through this wound, and
ordered for execution. He managed, it is said, to save his life at the
foot of the scaffold by his possession of the Masonic signal. He was
then taken back to prison. During all this time the executions were
proceeding in Thomas Street, and the blood from the block on which “the
rebels” were beheaded and quartered flowed in such quantities that it
clogged the sewers, and was licked up by the dogs. The Lady Lieutenant,
passing one day, fainted at the horrible sight; and at her urgent
entreaties the executions were stopped. Transportation to one of the
Penal Colonies was substituted for the death-sentence. Gallagher was
conveyed from his prison to one of the convict ships, heavily ironed.
But by a special grace the irons were taken off him while he bade
farewell to his wife, who had made her way on board to see him for the
last time. She stayed on until nightfall, and before she took her
departure she managed to convey to her husband one end of a coil of rope
she had concealed under her cloak. The other end she carried ashore with
her, as she rowed back. After her departure Gallagher was about to be
ironed again, but he pleaded so eloquently for “one minute more” that it
was granted him. That minute was sufficient for him to leap into the
dark waters—and be towed ashore by his faithful wife. He subsequently
made his escape to France in a lugger of smuggled salt—and died, in
1813, a wealthy ship-broker of Bordeaux.
Miles Byrne knew the Gallaghers very well. He tells us of meeting Mrs.
Gallagher, who was then on a visit with Mrs. Thomas Addis Emmet, when he
called to take leave of the latter before joining his regiment in 1803.
Mrs. Gallagher he found “handsome and highly accomplished, and worthy of
her patriotic husband. I had the pleasure of dining with them at
Bordeaux, in 1812, when I was returning from Spain; and I was happy
indeed to see them so prosperous; he was in the shipbroking trade, and
he was carrying on a vast business with the Americans. Their children
were growing up very handsome. Poor Gallagher’s health was then
delicate. He died at Bordeaux the following year, much regretted by his
countrymen and friends. To his last moment, he spoke of Lord Edward
Fitzgerald with the greatest veneration.”
No story of the Women of ’Ninety-Eight would be complete without some
mention, at least, of Rosie Hope, the heroic wife of James Hope. But in
truth her life deserves a fuller account than the plan of this work now
allows for her.
It was while he worked in her father’s house as a journeyman linen
weaver that James Hope first met and loved Rosie Mullen. He himself has
described her for us both in prose (“a young woman gifted with noble
qualities, with every advantage of mind and person, she was everything
in this world to me, and when I lost her, my happiness went to the grave
with her. She died in 1831”); and in very tender and dainty verse, with
a pretty play of words on her name:—
THE ROSE-BUD
In life’s sprightly morning, how pleasant the hours,
When roaming the fields, and surveying the flowers,
I picked up a rose-bud, select from the rest,
And divested of thorns, it remained in my breast.
Its fragrance refreshed me, inspiring with love,
Till that fragrance was drawn to the regions above.
And now every wish of my heart’s to repose,
In that region of love with my own little rose.
In the _Shan Van Vocht_ of March, 1896, _à propos_ of a letter of James
Hope’s therein first published, we find an interesting editorial note:
“James Hope brought his wife and younger children up from Belfast to
Dublin as soon as he undertook the work of organising under Emmet, this
not without a reason. Rose Hope was a valuable and courageous ally in
her patriot husband’s work, and before the northern rising had helped to
provide the United Men with arms and ammunition, carrying them backwards
and forwards through the country as she went a marketing. The same good
work she daringly undertook in Dublin, and had some narrow escapes as
she threaded her way through the streets with the arms carefully hidden
under her cloak along with her baby. This younger child was called
Robert Emmet, after the patriot.” Another child was called after Henry
Joy McCracken, and another Luke, after Mr. Luke Teeling. For Jamie Hope
was much attached to the McCrackens and the Teelings, for both of which
families he had worked.
Some of Rosie’s adventures are related by her husband. They occurred
during Jamie’s absence in the North with Russell when they were trying
to get Ulster to rise in support of Emmet:
“In 1803, a short time after Henry Howley’s arrest, and the death of
Hanlon, who was shot by him, while the soldiers were bringing Hanlon’s
body on a door, through a street in the Liberty, my wife was passing,
with her youngest child in her arms, having under her cloak, a
blunderbuss and a case of pistols, which she was taking to the house of
Denis Lambert Redmond, who suffered afterwards. She stepped into a shop,
and when the crowd had passed, she went on, and executed her orders. On
another occasion, she was sent to a house in the Liberty, where a
quantity of ball-cartridges had been lodged, to carry them away, to
prevent ruin being brought on the house and its inhabitants. She went to
the house, put them in a pillow-case, and emptied the contents into the
canal, at that part of it which supplies the basin.”
“At the death of Pitt, the system underwent a change. The Castle spies
were discharged, and the State prisoners set at liberty. My wife sent in
a memorial to the Duke of Bedford, in her own name, acknowledging that I
had fought on the side of the people, and had been driven like
thousands, unwillingly to do so.” As a consequence, Hope and his family
were allowed to return to the North.
Rosie Hope had been lying for more than fifteen years in her last bed in
Mallusk graveyard when Dr. Madden first met Jamie Hope in the flesh. And
yet he noted that when Hope spoke of his wife it seemed “as if he felt
her spirit was hovering over him, and that it was not permitted to him
to give expression to the praise which rises to his lips when her name
is mentioned. There is something of refinement—rare as it is pleasing to
contemplate, in the nature of his attachment—in the ties which bound him
to that amiable, exemplary, and enthusiastic creature; for such she is
represented to have been by those who knew her, amongst whom was Miss
McCracken, of Belfast.”
The name of Rosie Hope reminds us of her friend, Miss Biddy Palmer, who
with Rosie and Anne Devlin, were associated in what we of to-day should
call _Cumann na mBan_ work in the Rising of 1803. Madden says of her:
“Miss Biddy Palmer, daughter of old John Palmer of Cutpurse Row, was a
confidential agent both of Emmet and Russell. She was a sister of young
Palmer who took a prominent part in the affairs of 1798. Biddy Palmer
was a sort of Irish Madame Roland; she went about when it was dangerous
for others to be seen abroad, conveying messages from Emmet, Long,
Hevey, Russell, and Fitzgerald to different parties.”
One half suspects, from the way Miles Byrne speaks of Miss Palmer, that
he was in love with her. Having mentioned Emmet’s “implicit confidence”
in her, he adds, “and indeed no one was ever more worthy of such trust
than this young lady, who had suffered severely in 1798 by her father’s
imprisonment and the ruin of his affairs, her brother’s exile and death
on the Continent. Still she bore up under all her misfortunes like a
heroine of the olden times, and was a comfort and a consolation to her
family and friends.” On the eve of Miles Byrne’s romantic escape to
France he called to take farewell of Miss Palmer and her father, and she
gave him a present of some French money for his _viaticum_.
Poor Biddy Palmer had a sad old age. Dr. Madden discovered her (she was
then a Mrs. Horan) “in very reduced circumstances, far advanced in
years, in the neighbourhood of Finsbury Square, London, earning a
miserable livelihood by keeping a little school for the female children
of the poor, in a neighbourhood where indigence and want abounds.”
For some reason (perhaps it was in part the long life and faithful heart
of Mary McCracken and the influence she radiated around her) the North
has kept a richer record of the sufferings and heroism of its obscurer
women in ’98 and ’03, than other parts of the country. Some very
precious _reliques_ have been gathered up in the pages of the _Shan Van
Vocht_, and make of them a most valuable repository of patriotic
memories.
One of these tells of a sister, whose brother, with another lad, had
undertaken the dangerous office of posting up Robert Emmet’s
proclamation around Carnmoney, a few miles to the north of Belfast. For
this they were subsequently hanged, drawn and quartered on the Gallow’s
Green at Carrickfergus. At dead of night the sister, who had walked all
the way from Carnmoney, was led by pitying friends to the spot where the
poor mangled bodies lay. “She knelt down and with stifled sobs and much
difficulty removed the clay that had been hastily piled above them. Her
hand first came upon a head which by the feel of the features she
thought was that of her brother. She wrapped it in her apron and carried
it back to her home, so absorbed in her grief that she felt not the
miles her speeding feet covered. When she arrived home, she discovered
that the head she had borne on that sorrowful journey was not her
brother’s, but that of the other poor lad. She retraced her steps,
running between the hedgerows in her anxiety to reach the Gallow’s Green
before the people should be afoot, stumbling on the uneven stones, and
praying with all her tortured heart that her strength might last until
her purpose should be accomplished.... She arrived at the grave,
reverentially deposited the head back in its place, and taking up the
one she had come to seek departed again for Carnmoney.”
It is to Mary McCracken that we owe our knowledge of the story of young
Willie Neilson, of Ballycarry, and his poor mother. Willie, who was only
fifteen years of age, had on the eve of the Antrim Rising formed one of
a party which made a prisoner of a Carrickfergus pensioner called
Cuthbert, and conveyed him to the Insurgent’s place of muster at
Donegore Hill. For this he was arrested, court-martialled and sent to
prison, where his two elder brothers were already lodged. But on account
of his extreme youth neither he nor his friends anticipated any danger
to his life.
At midnight he was taken from prison, and offered his freedom on
condition that he should give information against the leaders at Antrim.
He refused; and no amount of pressure could make him yield one inch.
They told him he must die; his only request was that he might see his
minister, and be allowed to say farewell to his brother, Sam. Sam
Neilson expected to share Willie’s fate, but that fact did not prevent
him from encouraging Willie to die rather than “inform.” Soon after
daybreak the boy was taken to his native village of Ballycarry, there to
die. On the way he met his poor mother, who had set out to visit the
prison. When she saw him in the midst of the soldiery, she rushed
towards him, and while the soldiers tried to separate them he caught her
hand, and exclaimed “Oh! my mother!” But they dragged him from her arms.
She threw herself at her landlord’s feet, as he rode past, in the midst
of the cavalry, begging him to intercede for her boy. His only answer
was, “Get out of my way, or I’ll ride over you.” They brought Willie to
his mother’s door to execute him there. But, brutes as they were, they
saw this would be too iniquitous, and they yielded to the boy’s prayer
and took him away to the end of the village. Even then the undaunted boy
had leisure of heart to think of his dear ones. He begged that the
sacrifice of his life might expiate the offences of his brothers, and
that his body should be given to his mother. The soldiers tried to make
him use the bandage for his eyes. But he refused with the proud word
“that he had done nothing to make him screen his face.” Then, looking as
his mother always remembered him afterwards, “very handsome and fair and
blooming, with his light hair tossing in the wind, and the open
shirt-neck, emphasising the youth of him,” Willie Neilson went forth to
his death—for Ireland.
* * * * *
Even in the most tragic moments of our history, a certain sense of
humour has never deserted us Irish. It has helped, perhaps, to keep us
sane in the midst of our woes; and it has certainly saved us from the
deplorable sentimentality, which we find so trying in our Teutonic
neighbours (including the Anglo-Saxon) and the emphatic bombast which
tinges with insincerity our Latin cousins. We may be sure there was many
a ludicrous incident in ’98, as in ’16—and the men and women of ’98 had
the same faculty as their descendants of to-day of seeing the humour of
the situation. Some of the jokes of ’98 are current to-day—and since
laughter is as characteristic of life as weeping, I will end my book
with one of them. It comes from the village of Ballyclare, and was first
told in print in the _Shan Van Vocht_.