Some Obscure Heroines of ’Ninety-Eight
“All Ulster over, the weemen cried
For the stanin’ crops in the lan’.
Many a sweetheart an’ many a bride
Wud liefer ha’ gone till where he died,
An’ murned her lone by her man.”—FLORENCE WILSON.
AFTER the defeat of the insurgent army at Antrim, the yeomen were let loose in the country, and the most terrible outrages committed. Cannon were trained on the houses situated in what is known as “the Scotch quarter,” in Antrim town, and a shot having struck one of them, the inmates of the neighbouring house, a man called Quin, and his lovely sixteen-year-old daughter, made their escape from their home, and crossing the garden, made towards Belmount. They were pursued by the yeomen, shot dead, and buried where they fell. So shallow was the grave made for them that for several days after, the long beautiful hair of the girl, which was only partially covered, was seen waving in the wind.
The gentleman who related this incident to Dr. Madden noted that it excited more sympathy among the poor people than many horrid barbarities of the time. I think we can understand why it should be so. Even, at this distance of time, one cannot think of the long golden hair of the murdered girl, tossing in the wind above her shallow grave, without being gripped by the sense of pity and tragedy in a most poignant way—and feeling that here we have found the very heart of the sorrow of ’Ninety-Eight.
In the same way, it seems to me, that it is in the story of the more obscure heroines that sentiment is most inherent. The stories of the other women with which we have dealt have left us, after all, with an overwhelming feeling of “the glorious pride” of ’Ninety-Eight. But for the “sorrow” which also fills its name, we must go to the “short and simple annals of the poor.”
Very pitiful is the story, told by Cloney, of the fate of a woman called 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:—
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.
On the morning of the fight in Antrim the wife of Billy Morrison rose early and spread the table with the best in the house for her man’s breakfast. There were fine home-cured bacon, and eggs, and tea, and potato cake and oaten bread. When Billy had done justice to these good things, and had his wife’s assurance that his pockets were full of more of them, for the day’s provisions, he grasped his pike, and rose to go. Then did his guid wife, “in lieu of sentimental, or patriotic, or pious admonition,” thus address him in valediction:
“Ye hae got as guid a brekfust as ony mon in Ballyclare; sae kill naebody till they kill you, and then doe for yerself, Billy Morrison.”
One fancies that Billy Morrison gave a good account of himself that day in Antrim town, and did credit, with his strong pike arm, to his wife’s good feeding. And so it has not seemed unfitting to evoke, from the past, her homely sturdy form, and set her even by the side of the tragic figure of Willie Neilson’s widowed mother. For from the sturdiness of the one, no less than from the heroism of the other, proceeds the unconquerable spirit of Ireland.
Finis.