MARY TEELING (née TAAFFE—1753[?]-1830[?])[30]
“He will not be seen on a swift young horse
Clearing a road over fosse and fence,
His comeliness is forever changed,
On his majesty has fallen a mist.”
—Lament for Oliver Grace.
“I MUST now say a word or two of the excellent mother of Bartholomew Teeling—not so much because of the well-formed opinion that almost all distinguished men inherit their characteristics rather from the mother than from the father, as because I myself have the liveliest recollection of the amiable and endearing qualities of this venerated being; of her ardent piety; of her active benevolence; of her cheerful spirit; and her most graceful presence.
“Whilst she was still a child, she had been seen by him who was to be her husband, and who, struck with her girlish beauty, had resolved ‘to wait for her.’ She, consequently, at the very earliest age, united her fate to his; and at the end of fifty years, during which they journeyed together through all the vicissitudes of life—
“‘In all their wanderings round this world of care,
In all their griefs, and they had had their share.’
The romance of this early attachment continued fresh and unabated. The contrast, perhaps, of her bright and buoyant spirit with the stern and unbending one of the haughty politician ... was more calculated to give endurance to their love than the most perfect similarity could have done; and to the last hour of her existence, she was the pride and idol of her family.
“It was matter of astonishment how she contrived, after the severe trials she had met with, to push the badge of grief away from her, in the society of those she loved, and to enter into the sports of her grandchildren, as mirthful as the youngest of them. She was proud of her high birth, and used to recount to her grandchildren the bright deeds of her ancestors—the loyal efforts of the noble commander of the Irish forces; of the unhappy Charles; and the heroic defence of her castle, by the Lady Cathleen, against the ruthless Cromwell and his adventurers.
“But she scarcely ever touched upon the untimely fate of her own sons, slaughtered or scattered over the world. Once only did I hear her mention her gallant son, or allude to his dark fate, and then came a gush of anguish, which showed, indeed, the sources of her grief were far from being dried up, and, under a bright exterior, how much of heart-rending suffering she had put up within her bosom; but, as I have already said, she turned from her own woes to alleviate those of others, and to spread joy around.
“By rich and poor, she was admired and she was loved. I have been told, by those whom I myself saw adorn the most brilliant circles of the metropolis of the empire, that in childhood they were taught to regard her as a model of grace and excellence; and I speak a fact, which will be testified by thousands, when I say, that in the hearts of all the poor of the neighbourhood, in which she resided, her memory remains enshrined, and that children born since her death have been taught to love it, and in their dear petitions to give her name a place.”[31]
Is it true, as men say, that the woman by whose cradle the kind, gift-bearing fairies have laid that most rare and precious gift called “charm,” is immortally dowered? Mary Teeling was an old woman, and one who had drained to its dregs the cup of life’s bitterest sorrows—when (knowing it not) she sat for the portrait which her grandson has left us of her; and she had been many years in her grave, when it was finished and hung in its place in the gallery of portraits collected by Dr. Madden of the men and women who gave their all for Ireland in ’98. But from the canvas there comes forth, stealing into the heart of each of us, the same charm which, in her radiant girlhood, won the devotion of her stately young lover, and in her beautiful old age made captive his little grandson. Neither age had power to wither, nor death to destroy, the gift which was hers to draw all hearts under her sweet sway.
We would fain know something of the training and education which, fostering her innate charm, made the mother of Bartholomew and Charles Teeling such an exquisite type of the Irish Catholic gentlewoman. “A nation is what its women make its men”; and if we want boys in the Ireland of the future like the gallant boy, who on his noble grey charger galloped alone against the cannon of Park’s Hill, and saved the fortunes of the day at Carricknagat, or like that other gallant boy, his younger brother, who rode forth—a lad of seventeen—on a yet more perilous quest: to slay unaided the dragon of Orangeism, we must take care to provide “mothers of men” like her who bore these young heroes. And not alone for the men they will make, will Ireland need such women. She will want them for their own dear selves; and she will want them, whatever be her destiny—whether she is to enter at last on the reward of her long sorrows, or whether she must tread the roadway of thorns yet a little longer. If the future of our land is to be one of peace and prosperity she will need in her homes women to “look well to the paths of their house,” as Mary Teeling did in the days of her prosperity amid the elegance and comforts of the home in Lisburn which her husband’s wealth had enabled him to provide for his family, exercising the sweet and lovely rule of the mistress of a Catholic home, training her children to the noblest ideals of life and conduct, directing her servants with gentle authority, practising a gracious hospitality, “opening her hands to the needy, and stretching out her hands to the poor.” And if, on the other hand, the whole price is not paid yet, and the era of persecution is to open again—ah! then it is that Ireland will need her Mary Teelings to stand by their husbands’ side while “they suffer persecution for justice’ sake,” as she did by Luke Teeling’s during the long years of his martyrdom; keeping in the midst of all misfortunes, loss of home and children, of wealth and ease, the same exquisite sweetness of nature and charm of manner which made her in happier days the delight of her friends, “the pride and idol of her family.”
It has seemed worth while to go to some pains to discover, if possible, the details of an education which “in the dead vast and middle” of the Penal night, produced a type of womanhood, presenting nothing less than the “fine flower” of Catholic culture. “Who shall find a valiant woman?” Have we not found her—with every exquisite trait of her immortal prototype reproduced—in this dear Irish lady, whose radiant personality, and high-bred grace, no less than her sweetness, and saintliness, and charity, survive, through her grandson’s portrait of her, even the destruction of the tomb? “Far and from the uttermost coast would be the price of her,” whatever land produced her. If it were France during the age when the education of girls was considered a subject of sufficient importance for the grave debates of a King’s Council Chamber, or a brilliant treatise from a learned and saintly prelate’s pen;[32] or Italy, in the days when wealthy and powerful princes like those of Mantua co-operated with great teachers and scholars like Vittorino da Feltre in the foundation of the schools, where the Cecilia Gonzagas won their culture; or Germany in the years when illustrious humanists like Celtes and Reuchlin were proud of the share they had taken in forming the minds of women like Caritas Pirckheimer—if it were any of these lands or these ages that claimed the “price of her” it would be a matter of small wonder. But let us try to realise that it was Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century, when education was, for Catholics, a thing banned and barred by statute. In other countries little Catholic boys and girls were enticed to their books by every loving and ingenious device. Great statesmen, great churchmen, great scholars gave their best thought to the subject of their education. In the Ireland into which little Mary Taaffe was born about 1753, “statesmen” also had given their thought to the subject of education for Catholic children—but the legislation which was the result amounted simply in Lecky’s famous phrase, to “universal, unqualified and unlimited proscription.”
Nevertheless Catholic parents managed to get their children educated, and the nation which its lawgivers doomed to ignorance and degradation produced, by some miracle, scholars like Charles O’Connor of Belanagare and high-bred, charming women like her whose life-story we are now studying. How was it accomplished? What a stirring and splendid chapter the full answer to that question would add to the history of human endeavour! How one longs for the coming of the long-delayed historian of the Irish people who shall tell, in all its fullness, the story of how they educated their children during the Penal Days.
For the boys we know in part how it was done. They were smuggled off to the Continent with other forbidden “cargoes,” and at the great colleges in Spain, and France and the Low Countries found “bourses” provided by the pious generosity of their wealthier countrymen, or were supported by remittances from home which no threatened penalty could prevent their devoted parents from sending.[33] Or a tutor was provided for them in some hunted bishop, perhaps, or friar, who found safety in the lowly disguise of a gardener or farm-servant working on their father’s place,[34] or who came there for a time, as one of the Bishops of Clogher is recorded to have made the rounds of his diocese, in the character of a wandering harper. Or they would get a course of lessons from some of the numerous scribes, who perambulated the country, stopping for a season at the houses of the gentry of the old race, and copying out manuscripts for them—Keating’s History of Ireland,[35] tales of the Red Branch and the Fenians, pseudo-historical accounts of the old families—as Sean MaGauran did for Brian Maguire.[36]
The girls in some instances shared the lessons of their brothers. Dr. Costello of Tuam tells me that his great-grandmother was taught Latin by a man working on her father’s farm—a disguised friar. The scribes put aside their copying for a time to form the little maidens’ hands to the delicate Italian script which was the admiration of the time. The wandering harper, who honoured their father’s house with a visit, could sometimes be induced to give the daughters of the family a course of lessons on his sweet instrument. Arthur O’Neill tells us of teaching the harp to two young ladies in Longford, Miss Farrell and Miss Plunkett. “Miss Farrell played handsomely; Miss Plunkett middling.”[37] Most of the old Catholic families had members settled abroad, and intercourse with the Continent was therefore so close and intimate that the outlook of the Irish at home was far less insular than it is at present. Occasionally uncles and cousins, who had won fame as soldiers in foreign services, came home to visit their people, and as they liked to have their nephews and nieces able to converse with them in French, or Spanish, or German, as the case might be, the little ones were stimulated to learn as much as they could in expectation of their kinsmen’s coming. Little Mary Ann McCracken had to learn her French from an old weaver, but little Mary Taaffe and her sisters had all around them priests, who had studied abroad, and were only too anxious to keep up their practice of foreign languages by speaking them with their little parishioners. And so when the Taaffe uncle who had fought at Fontenoy, or his son, who witnessed the dispersal of the Brigade, came home to Ireland, their fastidious ears were not tortured by the halting French or vile accents of their young kinswomen. In many a country house, as in that of the O’Connors of Belanagare, were living ladies, like Madame O’Rorke, Charles O’Connor’s grandmother, widows of distinguished Irish officers in the French, or Spanish or Imperial service, who had spent their youth in the most brilliant circle in Europe, had been the friends and confidantes of Queens, and who now took delight in forming their little grandchildren and nieces to the exquisite manners and gracious bearing which, in their own case, had won the admiration of the most polished society on the Continent. In other houses were other ladies who under the secular garb which the necessities of the time imposed on them, carried out as well as they could, in their kinsmen’s homes, the religious rule of life to which they had bound themselves in their suppressed convents. When the convents were closed, and the nuns scattered, those who, instead of going abroad, found refuge with their relatives and friends, devoted themselves largely to the education of the little girls of the household. They trained them to their own exquisite skill in needlework, they taught them something of the art of healing, and above all they filled their minds with sweet and lovely images through their stories of the girl saints who had been their own unseen but constant companions in cell, and garden, and church; they turned them steadily to the imitation of the virtues by which the Elizabeths, the Cecilias, the Catherines, the Agneses had won their place as hand-maidens of the Heavenly Queen.
There is no story more beautiful in our national annals than the story—yet untold in its completeness—of the Irish nuns during the ages of persecution. We see them avail themselves of the slightest lull in the storm to found their convents, and carry out the Magnum Opus to which they had vowed their life. The days of the Confederation of Kilkenny saw the foundation of the Dominican Convent at Galway,[38] the days of James II saw its restoration, and the establishment of the Benedictines in Dublin. To such institutions the Catholic gentry sent their daughters to be educated, and we have only to turn to the pages of O’Heyne[39] to learn what manner of women these were who had the training of their young compatriots.
We see the heroic and saintly Prioress of the Dominican Nuns in Galway, Juliana Nolan, “a woman of heroic fortitude in bearing every kind of adversity, and very firm in observance and the gaining of virtues”; her successor, Mary Lynch, who taught school in Spain before her return to Galway, “a most religious woman and of great capacity for ruling and instructing”; and above all Mary O’Halloran, than whom, O’Heyne declares, he had never known a woman of stronger intellect. “She had a more accurate acquaintance with the Spanish tongue than the Spaniards themselves, and was well versed in sacred and profane history.”
It was not alone the young girls of the “Tribes” or the chieftainly families of the West who were sent to the Convent in Galway to be trained by the women we have described. Even right across the country from Drogheda pupils came to them. One of these, Catherine Plunkett, daughter of Thomas Plunkett, of Drogheda, and a relation of the martyred Archbishop, Oliver Plunkett, passed from the school room, at an early age, to the novitiate and received her religious training under Mary Lynch. “She shared in all the vicissitudes of that Community, who were several times compelled by religious persecution to quit their convent. Some sought shelter in the homes of their relations or friends, whilst not a few experienced the utmost vigours of poverty. Father Hugh O’Callaghan, who was Prior Provincial of the Dominicans from 1709 to 1718, having during the course of his Visitation, found the Sisters in this lamentable condition, and without any hope of their being permitted to return to their Convent, obtained for them from the Archbishop of Dublin, Most Rev. Dr. Edmund Byrne, permission to settle in his diocese; accordingly in March, 1717, eight of them (of whom Catherine Plunkett was one) arrived in the Metropolis and took up their abode first in Fisher’s Lane, from which they soon afterwards removed to the ancient Benedictine Convent, Chancel Row (now North Brunswick Street).”[40]
After a little time, Catherine Plunkett obtained the permission of her Superiors to go to Belgium, where she was received into the Convent of the English Dominican Sisters, called the Spillikens, from its proximity to a pin factory. Here she remained about three years until at the urgent request of the Primate Hugh MacMahon, she was recalled in 1721, by the Provincial, Dr. Stephen MacEgan, to found a convent in her native town of Drogheda.
It reads like a chapter of the Fioretti—the record of the early days of Catherine Plunkett’s foundation in Drogheda. The first home of the nuns was a little mud cabin on the Meath side of the Boyne. Long before day broke over the shining sands and thin line of Eastern sea, the Dominican Father who ministered to their spiritual wants, used to row himself over in a little boat to say Mass and give them holy Communion. Dressed in secular garb, with their real character known only to a few discreet friends, the ladies from Brussels obtained, without much difficulty, leave from the Protestant Primate to open a school, and the Drogheda merchants were very glad to send their daughters to them. Later, they moved to a house in Dyer Street, and opened a boarding school, and an establishment for lady boarders. All the noblesse of the Pale, the Plunketts, the Bellews, the Balfes, the Dillons, the O’Reillys, the Drakes, the Fortescues, the Taaffes are represented among the first pupils—and it is not at all unlikely that our heroine, Mary Taaffe, received her education in this Dyer Street Convent, which welcomed so many of her kinswomen. The nuns of Sienna very kindly searched their old account books for her name, but unfortunately the books were missing for the years 1762 to 1765, which are the very years when we might expect to find her there—if we are right in assuming that she was born about 1753.[41]
So while it is not improbable that Catherine Plunkett’s Convent in Drogheda had the credit of the education which produced so charming a result, we cannot attain any certainty in the matter. Nor do we know much about Mary Taaffe’s childhood. Her father, Mr. George Taaffe, representative of that branch of the Taaffes who held the Earldom of Carlingford under the Stuarts, lived in Ardee on the remnant of the ancestral estates which was all the family’s devotion to the “Lost Cause” of the Stuarts had left them, and within sight of the ancestral castle of Smarmore, which his son was to purchase back for the family. His young wife, Elizabeth Keappock, died in 1753 at the early age of thirty, leaving him with one son, John, and four daughters. Of these, one married Terence Kiernan; another, a member of the Scurly family, a third, Alice, James Lynch of Drogheda. John, the only son, was twice married, first to Anne Plunkett of Portmarnock, and after her death in 1786 to Catherine Taaffe.
The ease with which Mr. George Taaffe got his girls married (an ease which anxious parents of the present day might well envy) to young men who in respect of fortune and family were among the most eligible partis in the Pale, suggests that the Taaffe girls were very attractive. Doubtless their father’s house, when his four charming daughters still graced it, was an extremely pleasant place; and it is not to be wondered at that the girls’ clever young kinsman, Mr. Luke Teeling, found himself often taking in Ardee[42] on his journeys between his father’s place near Balbriggan and the establishment of the linen merchant in Lisburn with whom he was serving his apprenticeship.
As is so often the case with serious-minded young men, there was a strong, if hidden, vein of romance in Luke Teeling’s nature, and he soon discovered that he had lost his heart irrevocably, to his pretty cousin, Mary. She was young, hardly more than a child at the time, and her father was loth to part with his little maid so soon; but he recognised the sterling qualities of her suitor and gave his consent to an engagement, which terminated in the marriage of the young couple at Ardee on April 6th, 1771.
There had been an old connection between the Taaffes and the Teelings, and we learn from Bartholomew Teeling’s Memoir of his uncle that Luke Teeling’s mother was of the house of Taaffe. After the record of the marriage of Luke and Mary (still kept at Smarmore Castle) the words are inserted, “obtenta dispensatione in consanguinitate.”
Like the Taaffes, the Teelings had suffered much during the long wars which devastated Ireland in the seventeenth century, and of the broad acres which their forefathers had held in Meath for over five hundred years there remained after the “Third Breaking” of Aughrim, in the pathetic phrase of one of the family’s present-day representatives, little more than “the semi-circular arched vault in the churchyard of Rathkenny.” But even before Father Teeling, who came back from his College on the Continent about the beginning of the eighteenth century, to endure the life of suffering, and labour, and peril of a missionary priest in Ireland under the Penal Régime, was gathered to his fathers in that vault, the fortunes of the family were already in the ascent. In truth there was something in the Teelings which forced them to the front in whatever walk of life they might choose for themselves, whether as soldiers, like the old knightly Teelings of the Middle Ages, whose names survive in many an ancient deed of gift to religious houses; or churchmen, like Father Ignatius Teeling, S. J., or scholars like Theobald Teeling, the correspondent of Justus Lipsius, and that other Teeling, who has been described by Archbishop Peter Talbot as “urbis et orbis miraculum.”[43] And this something—call it personality, force of character, or what you will—was peculiarly evident in Bartholomew Teeling whom we find settled in the neighbourhood of Balbriggan about the middle of the eighteenth century.
It was in the days when Balbriggan, under the fostering care of its landlord, Baron Hamilton, of Hampton Hall,[44] was developing from a miserable little fishing hamlet into a prosperous trading town. With the assistance of a small grant from the Irish Parliament, the Baron built the pier, in the sixties of the eighteenth century, and thus fostered a lively carrying trade with Wales. Ships of two hundred tons could unload in the new harbour, and such craft crowded the quay, unloading cargoes of slates, coal and culm, as well as rock salt and bark, and carrying back corn and cattle. In 1780 the Baron established extensive cotton works here, for the promotion of which parliament granted the sum of £1,250, but this manufacture was subsequently almost abandoned for that of hosiery.[45] When Arthur Young visited Ireland in 1776, he spent a few days with the Baron, and we learn from him[46] much of the latter’s improvements; of the one hundred and fifty acres of mountain land he reclaimed; of the agricultural methods he adopted, and of their financial results; of the local fishing industry and how he worked it. It seems the Baron had boat-building works, and out of these came his fleet of “23 boats each carrying seven men, who were not paid wages, but divided the produce of the fishery. The vessel took one share, and the hands one each, which amounts on an average to 16s. a week. A boat costs from £130 to £200, fitted out ready for the fishery; they make their own nets.”
With the agricultural experiments of the Baron, and his industrial and trading enterprises, Bartholomew Teeling was closely identified. He held the lands in Walshetown, Gardiner’s Hill, Kilbrickstown, etc., and some family documents, which I have been privileged to examine, have reference to business transactions with Baron Hamilton, which would seem to indicate that Bartholomew Teeling helped to finance the Baron’s schemes.
At all events Bartholomew prospered, and when he died the provisions he was able to make for his sons and the education he gave them, show that he had accumulated a comfortable fortune. He was married twice, it would appear, his first wife being of the Taaffe family, and his second a Miss Grace. By these he had a numerous family of sons. In addition to Luke, the eldest son, we find mention in the family papers of Christopher, a well-known doctor in Dublin; James, who seems to have remained in his father’s place near Balbriggan and combined manufacturing and farming; Joseph, and Robert, afterwards merchants in Dublin; and Bartholomew. There was also a Patrick, but if he was one of these brothers, he must have died soon, as his name early falls out of the family record.
Luke had been early apprenticed to the linen trade—and that fact in itself indicates that his father was a man of means. For in the endeavour to keep the trade “exclusive,” a high fee was charged, and a fairly long apprenticeship insisted on.
After the repeal of the Edict of Nantes many French Protestant refugees settled in Ireland. Some of these were highly skilled in the linen manufacture and a settlement of them under Louis Crommelin in Lisburn, a town on the Marquis of Hertford’s estate, made that place a thriving centre of the industry. After Luke Teeling had completed his apprenticeship, he stayed on in Lisburn, got a lease from the Marquis of Hertford, and started a bleachyard of his own; and he was so successful, that Mr. George Taaffe needed to have no misgiving about the future when he gave his beloved daughter to him.
The early years of the married life of Luke and Mary Teeling were years of unclouded happiness. A little Elizabeth, called perhaps after the mother Mary Teeling had never known, came to them the following year. She was followed by a goodly train of brothers and sisters: Bartholomew, George, Charles, Luke and John were the boys. The girls, in addition to Elizabeth, were Mary, Alice (called after Alice Taaffe who had married James Lynch, of Drogheda), and Millicent.
Fortunate families, like fortunate nations, “have no history,” and there is little to record of Mary Teeling during the years when her boys and girls were growing up. In 1782 her husband acquired the lease of some building ground on Church Hill and built a residence for his family in keeping with his wealth and position; and a decade and a half of happy years passed swiftly under its dignified roof. The large family party which gathered permanently round the Teelings’ board was seldom without a reinforcement of guests: business correspondents like Mr. Sam Wall, of Worcester, or merchants from Dublin and Belfast, were sure of a hearty welcome there. Old Mr. George Taaffe loved to come from Ardee, and spend a month or two with his beloved grandchildren. Aunt “Ally” Lynch from Drogheda, and kind Uncle James were frequent visitors. The elder boys, Bartle and George and Charles, who were attending Mr. Saumarez Dubourdieu’s famous classical school in the town, had frequent permission to bring home their schoolfellows to dinner or supper, and Mrs. Teeling’s “parties” were voted the most delightful in Lisburn. As the boys grew older other guests were much in evidence—young officers from the camp at Blaris-Moor with whom the Teeling lads fenced, or went fishing or shooting, or rode to hounds, liked to be asked when the day’s sport was over to accompany them to the hospitable mansion on Church Hill, where a pleasant supper and a dance would wind up many a delightful evening. The Teelings were noted horsemen—an hereditary trait. The writer in The Gentlemen’s Magazine, having quoted the younger Bartholomew Teeling’s description of his father and uncles as “the best horsemen and the most accomplished swordsmen in the province,” tells us that the Teelings “were proverbial for their love of small, perfectly shaped, high-bred horses,” and refers to stories, still current in the County of Meath, of the incredibly short time in which they used to ride from their home to Dublin, on their beautiful little horses.
“White with green facings their retainers did wear
And the young cavaliers were beloved of the fair.”[47]
The young men were born soldiers, and more than one effort was made by officers and others of the highest rank to induce them to enter the English army. The Marquis of Hertford, dining one day with Mr. Teeling, promised his influence to get Charles into the Guards, and pledged his powerful support towards his advancement. Luke Teeling replied that, as far as he was concerned, his son was free to accept the flattering offer—but to the surprise of the Marquis, it was declined by Charles himself.
In truth, the boy, who though younger in years than Bartholomew or George, had ripened earlier than they, had turned his thoughts in a direction not very likely to end in a Commission in the English Army. While Bartle still dallied in the pleasant ways of youth, and George was away in Dublin,[48] Charles was thrown largely into his father’s company, and imbibed the political views which the circumstances of the time forced on a man of Mr. Teeling’s logical and just mind. Though it is not said in so many words, we gather that Bartle and his father did not quite understand each other. The younger Bartle tells us that his namesake “scarcely brooked the restraint which the stoical and somewhat severe principles of his father imposed upon him; but to his mother, whose idol he was, and to his sisters, he was warmly and tenderly attached. There was no youthful adventure too daring or even extravagant for him; but nothing which inflicted pain, or which trifled with human misery ever had his countenance.” He was fond of books, too, a diligent student of the Classics, and a devotee of Shakespeare and perhaps these tastes helped to keep him for a longer time than his brother a sojourner in those regions of the Ideal where the call of the Real resoundeth not. The day was to come, indeed, and speedily, too, when the cry of his suffering country was to ring as loudly in Bartle’s ear as it had long rung in that of Charles. And how he was to answer it all men know.
In 1790 Mr. Teeling gave very active support to the parliamentary candidature of Hon. Robert Stewart—afterwards Lord Castlereagh—who stood in the Reform interest against the Downshire clique. Being a Catholic, Mr. Teeling had no vote himself, but he spared neither his money nor his personal exertions in favour of one who advocated so eloquently the causes dear to Mr. Teeling’s heart: Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform. The Teeling boys were enthusiastic admirers of the young candidate, who indeed had been the idol of every patriotic heart in the north since the day he rode—a lad of thirteen—at the head of a company of boy Volunteers in the Review in Belfast, and made men think of Cuchullin and the boy troop of Emain Macha, by the martial skill and daring of their exploits. We know from Charles’s own assurance that the tenderest ties bound him to his father: “He was to me,” he says, in one of the most moving passages of his narrative, “not only the affectionate parent, but also the companion and friend.” And doubtless, in the long rides which father and son delighted to take in each other’s company, Charles imbibed his father’s political opinions and learned to feel the wrongs which the Catholics of Ireland were suffering as intolerable.
The Catholic Convention of 1792, in which Mr. Teeling took a leading part, was a turning point in the history of the family. We know from Tone’s account of the proceedings that Luke Teeling was the man of the Convention. When the counsels of the more pusillanimous seemed likely to prevail, his commanding spirit and ability won the day for the bolder measures advocated by Tone, and it was due to him that there went forth from the great assembly a Petition to the King demanding (instead of the partial relief for Catholic disabilities to which the Sub-Committee that drew up the Petition had originally limited their request) Total Emancipation. “My instructions from my constituents,” said Mr. Luke Teeling in a speech which produced the most profound impression on his audience, “are to require nothing short of total emancipation; and it is not consistent with the dignity of this meeting and much less of the great body which it represents, to sanction by anything which could be construed into acquiescence on their part, one fragment of that unjust and abominable system, the penal code. It lies with the paternal wisdom of the Sovereign to ascertain what he thinks fit to be granted, but it is the duty of this meeting to put him fully and unequivocally in possession of the wants and wishes of his people.” The effect of Mr. Teeling’s attitude was to win to his views even the most cautious—not to say timid—members of the assembly, and his amendment was passed unanimously. We cannot help feeling, as we read Tone’s “Diary,” and follow the events subsequent to the return from London of the Delegate who had gone from the Convention with the Petition to the King, that if Mr. Teeling had been living in Dublin, instead of in distant Antrim, things would have taken a different course for the Catholic Cause, and the whole Cause of Ireland. His influence would have prevented the spirit of compromise which had such disastrous results.
The years that followed the Catholic Convention were marked by a great increase in bigotry—fomented with nefarious designs by the Irish Government of the day. The new activities of the new men at the head of the Catholic movement—wealthy and progressive merchants, like John Keogh and E. Byrne; young professional men, fresh from Continental Universities, like Dr. MacNevin—were countered by increased activities on the part of the bigots. The Grand Juries sent in to Parliament Petitions against the Catholic claims, and when these fell flat owing to the clever pamphleteers like Tone and Emmet, other methods were resorted to. The chief was the fostering of party spirit, which was first evidenced in the enormous increase in sectarian associations. Against the aggressions of the “Peep o’ Day Boys” (who got their name from their custom of repairing at that hour to the houses of their Catholic neighbours, dragging them from their bed and otherwise maltreating them, while they searched their houses for arms) the Catholics, who not only had no protection from the law or the armed forces of the crown, but saw, on the contrary, both these mights used against them, formed themselves into an association called “Defenders.” In those quarters where the contending parties were nearly balanced, the peace was kept by their wholesome fear of each other, but where the Catholics were in the minority they were obliged to adopt a system of nightly patrols, each townland or parish furnishing its proportion of armed men. But this system was intolerably burdensome, and at length some of the young men decided that there was nothing for it but to meet their opponents in the open field, and have done with the matter there and then.
News of this impending conflict came to the ears of young Charles Teeling, and although he was only a lad of seventeen at the time, he determined to try and prevent it. He was well aware, he tells us in his pamphlet on “The Battle of the Diamond,” that whether the Catholics won or lost in the fight the result would be equally disastrous for them; if they lost, they would be still more at the mercy of their savage opponents than before; if they won, Government, which was undisguisedly in favour of their enemies, would exact the severest penalties from them. He hoped that the influence which his family enjoyed both with the Catholics and the Protestants would make the opposing parties ready to listen to his proposals for peace between them. Without saying a word to anyone he set out therefore from Lisburn to the disturbed districts, but he had not gone far when he saw that the task was too serious and responsible for his seventeen years. He sent, therefore, to Belfast for Samuel Neilson, then editor of the Northern Star, who for many years had been the warm friend of his father in the causes of Reform and Catholic Emancipation.
Before Neilson could reach him, the Battle of the Diamond had been fought and won by the Protestants, and the Catholics were, as he anticipated, in a worse condition than before.
The “Peep o’ Day Boys,” on the very day of the Battle of the Diamond (September 21st, 1795) formed themselves into the famous association of “Orangemen,”[49] and these immediately set themselves to exterminate the Catholics. “They would no longer permit a Catholic to exist in the county.[50] They posted up on the cabins of these unfortunate victims this pithy notice, ‘To Hell or Connaught,’ and appointed a limited time in which the necessary removal of persons and property was to be made. If after the expiration of that period, the notice had not been complied with, the Orangemen assembled, destroyed the furniture, burned the habitations and forced the ruined families to fly elsewhere for shelter.... While these outrages were going on, the resident magistrates were not found to resist them, and in some instances were even more than inactive spectators.” Many fearful murders were committed on the unresisting Catholics, and it is estimated that seven thousand Catholics were either killed or driven from their homes by the Orangemen in the County Armagh alone. But the unhappy outcasts, even when they escaped with their lives, had no shelter to fly to. In most cases they could only wander on the mountains until either death relieved them, or they were arrested and imprisoned; while the younger men were sent without ceremony to one of the “tenders” then lying in various seaports, and thence transferred on board British men-of-war. During the years 1796 and ’97 the Orange magistrates, aided by troops, established a reign of terror over the greater part of Leinster and portions of Ulster and Munster. They arrested and imprisoned, without any charge, multitudes of innocent persons, and many of these were only removed from prison to be sent to serve in the navy.
Parliament—the famous Irish Parliament, Grattan’s Parliament, came to the rescue of the oppressed by passing the Insurrection Acts and the Indemnity Acts—the objects of which were to give the magistrates a free hand to commit the most illegal outrages against the people without fear of any unpleasant consequences for themselves. It is true that Grattan fought gallantly against these measures, and to his splendid speech in opposition to them we owe much of our information concerning the outrages perpetrated by the “banditti of persecution.”
It was felt by the most far-seeing and patriotic of the Irishmen who deplored this appalling state of affairs that the one hope of the country lay in the system of the United Irishmen, which aimed at a real union of Irishmen of all denominations in the bonds of love and loyalty to their common country. In the North, especially, the urgency of this union of hearts was keenly felt, and hence we find the younger men of the advanced party like Henry Joy MacCracken and Lowry, working strenuously with Charles H. Teeling and his brother-in-law, John Magennis, to get “the Defenders” into the ranks of the United Irishmen.
Government showed its appreciation of their labours by an unexpected coup. The most active protagonists of the policy were suddenly arrested on a charge of high treason and clapped into prison in Dublin.
On a delightful September morning of the year 1796, Mary Teeling stood on the doorstep of her beautiful home in Lisburn waving a farewell greeting to her husband and her son Charles ere they rode off together on one of those business expeditions—of which the extraordinary affection uniting this father and son always made a pleasure excursion. As she gazed on her stately husband, now in the pride of his years and his honourable prosperity, making a superbly gallant figure, as he always did on horseback, and saw how fine a pendant Charles’s dashing youth and fresh good looks, offered to his father’s, can we wonder if her heart swelled with wifely and maternal pride, and she turned to her home duties with a prayer of thankfulness to God for all the good things that were hers.
Alas! Alas! Sorrows and crosses beyond all telling were to follow that radiant moment, and ere the day was over, the fair structure of her life’s peace was to be laid in ruins.
Not very long afterwards she was startled by seeing the old groom who had ridden out with Luke and Charles return with Charles’s riderless horse. What dreadful thing had happened?
It was not the worst at all events. No fatal accident had taken her boy from her—but what really had happened it was difficult enough to make out from the servant’s narrative. She could hardly believe that Lord Castlereagh, an old friend of the Teeling family, who was under the most real obligations to Mr. Teeling for his help and support on many occasions, could really have her boy now under arrest in the house of his father-in-law, the Marquis of Hertford. Lord Castlereagh, according to the groom, had with his usual appearance of cordiality and friendship joined the master and Master Charles as they rode up the main street of the town, but when they came to the Marquis’s gates, Master Charles had been asked by his lordship to accompany him. As soon as he had entered the gates, these were closed and an armed guard had suddenly appeared. The master had demanded admission, and this, after a time, was granted. He was only allowed a few minutes with his son. Then he had come out, and leaving orders with the groom to lead home Master Charles’s horse, he had continued his journey alone.
She was not left long in doubt of the truth of the old servant’s extraordinary tale. Very shortly afterwards she saw Lord Castlereagh himself enter her house, accompanied by a military guard. Her youngest son, John, a boy of fourteen, daring to demand by what authority the house was thus forcibly entered, saw a pistol presented at his breast, and himself compelled to accompany Castlereagh and his minions in their search through the house for treasonable (?) papers. “My brother,” Charles tells us in his “Narrative,” “conducted himself on this occasion with a firmness and composure that could hardly have been expected from a lad of his years.” It is regrettable that he does not mention the name of the sister “who evinced the most heroic courage; she was my junior, and, with the gentlest, possessed the noblest soul; she has been the solace of her family in all subsequent afflictions, and seemed to have been given as a blessing by Heaven, to counterpoise the ills they were doomed to suffer.” One guesses, however, from the deep affection entertained for her by Charles all through the after years, that this heroic sister was her mother’s namesake, Mary.
As for the mother herself, she was “totally overpowered by the scene. She had just been informed of my arrest, and now saw our peaceful home in possession of a military force. Maternal affection created imaginary dangers, and in the most energetic language she prayed Lord Castlereagh to permit her to visit my prison, and to grant even a momentary interview with her son. This he had the good sense and firmness to decline, and in communicating the matter to me in the course of our evening’s conversation, I expressed my approval of his decision. But my mother felt otherwise; the afflicted state of her mind precluded that reflection which should have rendered her sensible of the propriety of Lord Castlereagh’s refusal. Agitated and disappointed, her gentle but lofty spirit was roused, and burying maternal grief in the indignant feeling of her soul, ‘I was wrong,’ she exclaimed, ‘to appeal to a heart that never felt the tie of parental affection—your Lordship is not a father.’ She pronounced these words with a tone and an emphasis so feeling and so powerful, that even the mind of Castlereagh was not insensible to its force, and he immediately retired with his guard.” That night, Charles and the other prisoners, arrested on the same day in Belfast, (including Neilson and Russell) were taken in coaches, under an armed escort, to Dublin, and thrown into prison, where he remained for about two years, without trial, until the breakdown of his health procured his release.
In the meantime all sorts of misfortunes had befallen the happy household on Church Hill. Some months after the arrest of Charles, the Orangemen, in broad daylight, had entered Mr. Teeling’s premises, wrecked his bleach-yard, looted his house, and in the course of a few hours’ deliberate devastation left the entire establishment “a desolate ruin.” And all this, as Charles points out in his narrative, “in the blush of open day, within the immediate vicinity of two garrisoned towns, an active magistrate, and an armed police.” It is quite clear that the Orangemen were the agents of vengeance of the Government, who thus designed to punish Mr. Teeling’s temerity in acting as Secretary of a meeting of the Freeholders of Co. Antrim, convened by public notice at Ballymena on May 8th, 1797, from which had gone forth a Petition to the King setting forth the intolerable grievances under which the Irish people were suffering, and praying his Majesty to dismiss the ministers responsible for them.
As their lives were no longer safe in Lisburn, Mr. Teeling moved his family to Union Lodge, near Dundalk, which had been previously used by Bartle as his headquarters, But even here they were not safe. He got private notice from a well-wisher that he was about to be arrested. He, therefore, found an asylum for Mrs. Teeling and the girls with her brother, Mr. John Taaffe, at Smarmore Castle, Ardee, while he looked around him to make fresh provision for them.
It is not very clear at what date Bartle began to identify himself with the United Irishmen; but it seems to have been about the same time as Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Arthur O’Connor joined them, that is to say early in 1796. He became the fast friend of Lord Edward, and before Charles’s arrest on September 16th, 1796, the two brothers were frequent guests at Kildare Lodge. It was here that Bartle met and loved the fair Lady Lucy Fitzgerald, Lord Edward’s favourite sister, and who shall say that he loved Ireland the less, because his vision of Kathleen Ni Houlihan borrowed the lovely ardent face, and the bright eyes, veiled with long dark drooping lashes of “Lucia.” While Lord Edward and O’Connor were on the Continent negotiating with the French Government, Bartle Teeling, under a plausible plea of a business journey, made a complete tour of Ireland on foot. His object, according to his nephew, was to make himself “perfectly acquainted with Ireland’s resources, with her capabilities of entering upon, and maintaining an internal war, with the intellectual and physical qualities, the habits and the manners of her people, with their wants and their endurance, their hopes and their resolves; as well as with the natural features of the country—her rivers, her coasts, and her harbours.” The fact shows that Bartle Teeling, for all his youth, was amongst the most far-sighted of the leaders.
After his return from this journey he took up his residence in Union Lodge, with his friend, John Byrne, of Worcester, who having served his apprenticeship to the linen trade in Lisburn had established extensive bleaching mills on the banks of the river at Dundalk.
It is from the evidence of the informers, John Hughes and Samuel Turner, that we gather our scanty information as to Bartle’s activities about this period. Hughes, a Belfast bookseller, arrested in October, 1797, turned king’s evidence in order to secure liberation. Being brought before the Lords’ Committee in 1798, he stated amongst other things, that in November, 1796, he had been sent by Bartle Teeling (then settled as a linen merchant in Dundalk) to Dublin to extend the United Irishmen societies there. Hughes seems to have been a sort of organiser for the Society, for again in June, 1797, he was sent for to come to Dublin. Before he left the north, John Magennis (Betty Teeling’s husband) administered an oath to him that he would not communicate the names of those to whom he should be introduced. In Dublin he was present at a breakfast given by Bartle Teeling, at his lodgings in Aungier Street, where the other guests were John Magennis, Anthony MacCann, of Dundalk; Samuel Turner; Messrs. John and Patrick Byrne, of Dundalk; Colonel James Plunkett; A. Lowry; Mr. Cumming, of Galway; and Dr. MacNevin. The object of the conference was to discuss the fitness of the country for an immediate rising. Teeling, Lowry and MacCann were in favour of an immediate effort; the others were afraid the people were not sufficiently prepared for it.
Shortly afterwards, before the month of June was up, Bartle Teeling, Turner, MacCann, Tennant, Lowry, etc., seeing the “Rising” postponed, fled to Hamburg; and some of the others, including John Magennis, found refuge in Scotland.
Bartle Teeling must have remained in Hamburg a very short time, for his brother states that he joined the French army under the name of Biron[51] and served a campaign under Hoche, whose death occurred on September 8th of that year. He may have returned to Hamburg after the death of Hoche, for in October of 1797 Turner reports to his friend, Lord Downshire, a letter Teeling was sending from that place to Arthur O’Connor. In November, Turner’s information shows Bartle in Paris. At a date of the same year which it is difficult to determine, he paid a stolen visit to Ireland, bearing messages from the Irish leaders on the Continent to those at home. It is said that on this occasion Lady Lucy gave him the ring which is still treasured in the Teeling family—and which he wore until the eve of his execution, when he sent it to his brother “as the dearest pledge he had to leave, of fraternal love.”
All this time Mary Teeling was without news of him, and to the burden which she already had to bear was added that of intolerable anxiety for her eldest son, and great uneasiness about Charles, of whose health his father brought back discouraging reports from his visits to Kilmainham. The kindness of her brother John and his wife Catherine, and the hospitality they so gladly offered her and her girls, could not make her forget the wreck of her own beautiful home, and the irreparable damage done to her husband’s fortune. Moreover, his health was much affected by the condition of his affairs, and the fatigues he had undergone to re-establish them. A trip to a Donegal Spa, followed by a horseback journey to Connacht (where he hoped to establish a new bleach-green) had exhausted him, and in the spring of ’98, he had been sent by his doctor to Cushendall for sea-bathing. His frequent changes of abode were represented to Government as connected with treasonable activities, and accordingly on June 16th, 1798, he was arrested, and committed to prison in Belfast, no charge being made against him.
For four years Luke Teeling was kept in prison, and was only liberated in 1802. And during all that time no charge was brought against him, nor did his repeated requests to be brought to trial bring any result. From the provost prison in Belfast, he was moved to the Postlethwaite tender, lying in Belfast Lough, one of the prison ships which were among the horrors of the day; from that to Carrickfergus Castle, and finally back to the prison in Belfast. It has been my privilege to read many of the letters addressed by Luke Teeling from his various prisons to members of his family, and truly it was with a great stirring of the heart that one held them in one’s hands, and read the story they tell of sufferings heroically borne; of a devotion to honour and principle which counted no cost too great; of a Faith and Hope, and love of God and God’s Church intense enough to make the writer free of the ardent and heroic company of the saints. There is one letter written from the Postlethwaite, where the firm hand trembles, and the strong heart shows nigh to breaking—which it is impossible to read without tears. It is the letter in which the father writes to Bartle’s old friend, Sam Wall, the news of Bartle’s execution.
For in the days when Luke Teeling was enduring the horrors of the prison ship in the sweltering summer heat,[52] Bartle’s brief but glorious day had come to its heroic close on the “martyr’s mound” at Arbour Hill, Dublin. It is not here that may be fully told the gallant story of Bartle Teeling and the part he played in the Humbert Expedition. On his white charger he rides for ever amid the “fair chivalry” of the boy-heroes of Ireland amid the
“White horsemen with Christ their Captain—forever he.”
And the day shall come, please God, when no Irish boy shall be ignorant of the lines he wrote in the Golden Annals of their knightly company.
Was it given to his mother to see her idolised son once more before he mounted the scaffold on Arbour Hill on September the 24th, 1798? To this question we can find no answer. We know, from her husband’s letter to Sam Wall, that for a time it was feared Mary Teeling would die, so completely did she break down under the agonising load of her conjugal and maternal sorrows. Bartle was not the only son whom Ireland claimed from her. Charles and John were now on their keeping. A few months after the consummation of Bartle’s sacrifice, John, her youngest son, her Benjamin, was taken from her—and of him, as truly as of Bartle, she might say, he gave his life for Ireland.
During her husband’s continued imprisonment, she tried to keep as close to him as she could, and for a time, it would appear she was permitted to share it in Carrickfergus Castle. Stifling her own sorrows she found strength to comfort him, and to lend him courage. His affairs had been reduced to ruin, by the vindictive action of Government, and to all his other woes was now added that which must have been of a peculiarly galling character to a man of his fastidious sense of honour: his inability to pay his creditors in full.
In 1802 Mr. Teeling was liberated, and after a time spent with Charles, 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.