The Year of the French (45 page)

He walked to the water’s edge, and dashed water over his head. “God Almighty,” he said, shaking himself. “That stuff is as cold as a witch’s cunt.”

“We can depend upon what Sam MacTier says,” I said. “He is an honest man.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” MacCarthy said. “ ’Tis little call I have to buy linen. He has a good voice.”

He was looking out to sea. All was empty and still in the cheerful light of morning. I would even have welcomed the sight of a fishing smack.

Galway City, August 30

The mansion of the Browne family stood facing Eyre Square, a tall, assertive town house of dark limestone, its windows intricately ornamented. Nicholas Browne, who built it in 1627, wanted a city mansion which would surpass those of the Blakes and the Martins, and the builders gave it to him. But Galway was then at the late climax of its long career as a coastal city trading with Spain and France. It was still the historical capital of Connaught, but what now was Connaught? The once-thriving city was lovely, fading, wild, and stricken. Although the mansions of the great Galway families still stood, they were only seldom used. Some had been shuttered for years, their owners gone, sunk down into the peasantry or vanished away, generations before, into the armies of France and Spain, Austria or Russia. And the mansions of others, the clever ones, the Martins and Brownes, were rarely opened. Their owners were off in their remote big houses, or else in London. The Atlantic winds were wilder here than in Mayo or Sligo, cutting over unused quays, in winter shrieking down the narrow streets.

Two rooms only of the Browne mansion were furnished, and into these Dennis Browne had moved with a single servant, travelling from Westport by night, a bare hour or two before the rebels seized Westport House. He was dining this night at a table set before the fireplace, massive and convoluted, with the date of the house, wreath-encircled, incised upon pale, veined marble. Gammon and potatoes, with a heavy tankard of porter beside the plate.

His alert, intelligent face was at most times an amiable one, lines of laughter cut about the mouth above a fleshy chin, not quite a jowl, but tonight his eyes, moving from flame to food and back to flame, were savage. Mayo was his county, as much his possession as though he owned it, and not merely because his brother was Lord Altamont, and he himself High Sheriff and Member of Parliament. The Brownes had staked their first claims upon Mayo in 1580, when one John Browne settled at the Neale, near Kilmaine, a Sussex man, the restless, wild younger son of Sir Anthony Browne of Cowdray Castle. The Brownes were Tudor, heirs of adventurers who seized their lands with silver-hilted swords, and the land was theirs as once they were of the dispossessed Gaels, as they had never been the possessions in spirit of Cromwellian jobbers or smooth-cheeked Williamites. Mayo was Browne country, as Connemara was Martin country. Browne and Richard Martin, between them, managed West Connaught, and managed it well, in Browne’s judgement. Until a few months before, there had been no Whiteboy disturbances in Connaught, the Catholic squireens had been loyal, the United Irishmen had made no inroads. But now! Mobs roving at will, burning, looting, killing, Westport House itself in rebel hands, every acre from the ocean to Sligo outside the law, an army of Jacobin frog-stickers swaggering through the province, a British army scattered, and Castlebar captured.

And for all this he held himself partly to blame. When the Whiteboys perpetrated their first outrage at Killala, when they houghed little Cooper’s cattle, they should have been put down ruthlessly, as Cooper had proposed. Instead, Browne had allowed himself to be persuaded by Falkiner and Moore, the same Moore whose brother was now head of the rebel government. A Moore of Mayo, ancient allies of the Brownes in the dead days when they had all been Papists together, allied with Whiteboys and spalpeens. But at the time, George Moore had made sense. Keep Mayo quiet in a troubled time, move quietly, no need to close the heavy fist of power. But George Moore, for all his suppleness of mind, had been wrong, and Cooper had been right, little pigheaded Cooper, a jumped-up Cromwellian with dirty linen and a mortgaged estate, a tinpot captain of yeomen, married to a peasant with a trollop’s body. Just brains enough to have been right. A show of force, burned cabins from Killala into Ballina, would have given them something to think about.

When this was over there would be a reckoning, or Mayo would never again know peace. The rebels and those who supported them would have to be taught an enduring lesson, and a painful one. And the task of imparting such instruction to the town of Killala would be entrusted to little Cooper, to make amends for what he was suffering now. Cornwallises came and went. British armies came and went. Lord Glenthorne and Lord Claremorris lived safe and snug in England. And someday soon the task of restoring Mayo to tranquillity would have to be taken up by the gentlemen of Mayo, with the assistance of doughty, faithful, pigheaded little Cooper.

A restless exile in his own province, Browne planned on the following day to take the Ballinasloe road to Athlone, where he was confident that he would find Cornwallis. If Cornwallis followed his practice in Wexford, the suppression of the insurrection would be followed by the hanging of the ringleaders, but an amnesty for their followers. It wouldn’t do for Connaught, whose peasants learned their laws and their lessons from the lash and the triangle.

Atlantic winds shook the windows, and Browne rose to fasten the shutters. The night was black, and no candles answered his from across the square.

SELECTED PASSAGES
FROM THE DIARY OF SEAN MACKENNA,
SCHOOLMASTER IN COUNTY MAYO.
TRANSLATED FROM THE GAELIC
AND EDITED BY SAMUL FORRESTER,
BARRISTER AT LAW, B.A.,
UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN, DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE,
VOLUMES XVI–XVII (1848–49)

E
ditor’s
I
ntroduction

Sean MacKenna, who kept a “classical academy” in Castlebar, County Mayo, died in 1833, leaving behind him a diary in the Gaelic tongue in which he had made entries over a period of four decades. These entries, set down in a heterogeneous assortment of ledgers and copybooks, do not deserve to be termed literature, and yet translations of selected passages, chosen whether for their representative or their dramatic interest, may reward the reader’s attention.

They offer an entrance into the mind of a man belonging to that race of hedge pedagogues in whose care reposed, until recently, the education of the common Irish. Such men were scattered throughout the island, and although MacKenna, who had also a drapery shop, was fairly prosperous, there were many who taught in barns and hovels. In some parts of Munster and Connaught, the language of instruction was Gaelic, although the more progressive masters, like MacKenna, employed English. His own preference in the matter, however, is revealed by the language in which his diary is composed. The government’s farsighted and magnanimous Education Bill of 1831 has sounded the death knell to this picturesque tribe, and MacKenna lived long enough to record his resentment of a policy which seeks to replace bog-Latin and muddled “patriotic” history with arithmetic and the rudiments of English grammar. To enter one of the new National Schools, as the present writer has done, and to hear the children chanting together, barefooted perhaps but clean of countenance, “It is my greatest pride and joy, To know myself a British boy,” is to realise that civilisation is entering every part of the island, slowly yet steadily.

And yet, together with much that was lax or pernicious, much also vanished which was both picturesque and “racy of the soil.” The hedge schoolmaster first made his appearance in the days of the penal laws, when harsh and unwise legislation placed obstacles against the proper education of a people once celebrated for their love of learning. The typical master, like MacKenna himself, knew the ancient languages and was familiar with their principal classics. Often he was a failed, or as the county saying has it, a “spoiled” priest, and in many instances the spoiling was the consequence of intemperate habits, which were of course carried into his new calling, and therefore many were known as drunkards or libertines. But at least as many resembled MacKenna, who liked his drink, as they say, but was a peaceful and industrious man, whose rectitude shines through the pages of his diary.

Once and once only did public history touch the life of this tranquil diarist. As a resident of Castlebar, he watched the Mayo insurrection of 1798, and he was the intimate friend of Owen MacCarthy, an actor in the rebellion. Although MacKenna took no part in the outrages, one discovers traces of disloyalty even in the heart of so law-abiding a Celt. His diary entries for the late summer of 1798 are therefore of historical interest, and I have translated them without abridgement. In recent years we have witnessed a growing cult of “ ’Ninety-eight,” fostered by the high-minded but misguided enthusiasts of the Young Ireland party, and prompted to outright treason by the skilful but envenomed pen of Mr. Mitchel. Ballad poetry and song now abound with such titles as “The West’s Awake” and “The Men of Castlebar.” MacKenna gives us a truer picture of confusion, random violence, cowardice, rage, and on occasion a deluded and futile bravery. It is the more convincing by reason of his lurking sympathy for the rebels, of which he was himself not fully conscious, and his friendship with Owen MacCarthy.

MacCarthy himself kept a school at Killala, the coastal village at which the French landed. He was by birth among the lowliest of the low, the son of a seasonal labourer, or spalpeen, in County Kerry. He was a schoolmaster not of MacKenna’s kind, but of the sort more frequently encountered, given over to drinking, brawling, and other kinds of mischief. Yet the extraordinary fact is that this wastrel was a most delicate and sophisticated poet in the Irish tongue, a paradox encountered in other native bards of the period; in, for example, his fellow Kerryman, Owen O’Sullivan. The present writer has been for some time engaged in the preparation of a volume which will contain most of MacCarthy’s surviving verses, with faithful translations. These verses, it will be found, are at once elegant and passionate, whether they be impromptu drinking songs or his elaborate and considered elegies, of which the most affecting are three laments, one for his father, one for the ancient hero O’Sullivan Beare, and one titled, most bafflingly, “Lament for a Chieftain.”

It seems probable that this gifted but badly flawed man drifted into rebellion through a boisterous love of excitement fostered by his unsettled habits. Certainly he possessed little of the martial ardour attributed to him in recent ballads bawled out in Dublin pothouses—“Bold Owen MacCarthy, the Darling of Erin” and “Dauntless Owen, the Boy from Tralee.” Indeed, given his distaste for what he called “jinglejangle English songs,” he would surely wince could he but hear these. It would appear that at first he moped about uncertainly at the edges of the rebellion, only casting in his lot after the battle of Castlebar, enboldened, as were others, by that shameful and bewildering defeat of British arms. But by the battle of Ballinamuck he had become a full-fledged rebel, a woeful instance of the effects of a dissolute life upon a temperament all too abundantly supplied with creative energy.

And now, without further delay, I shall open to you this eccentric curiosity, the Diary of Sean MacKenna. Its style, casual and homely for the most part, often rises to an Hibernian grandiloquence or pathos. For this, I have sought to find an English equivalent, without violating the spirit of the text.

Early September, 1798
. When Owen returned from Sligo, he came round to call on me, with a bottle for the two of us, and three most elegant thimbles for Brid, and sweets for Timothy. He is a most thoughtful man, God spare him. But it was little enough that I could comprehend of his conversation. He has grown most knowledgeable about movements of troops and lines of advance. Let Owen but take a peep into something and he is an authority upon it when next you see him. He was as always courteous and gallant towards Brid, as if she were the rarest beauty in Connaught. Set a glass before Owen and he will drink it; set a woman there and he will make love to her. Nothing stops him. Not that I believe what I have heard about himself and old Mahony’s daughter who married the Orangeman. I believe that he courts women as a duty imposed upon him by the profession of poetry.

I told him that Castlebar had become a lunatic asylum, with O’Dowd and MacDonnell and John Moore calling themselves “the Republic of Connaught,” and spending their days writing proclamations. Bands of lads like the one Malachi Duggan leads rove the country, paying off old scores and carrying what can be carried. Mickey Keough of Turlough took the grandfather clock from Mount Lawrence Hall and it so high he couldn’t stand it upright in his cabin, and there it lies on the dirt floor, so it is said, and everyone has to step over it when they come in. In the town itself, the French keep good order, and when some men tried to loot Jacky Craig’s shop, the ringleaders got ten lashes each from a French corporal. John Moore’s proclamations must be read to be believed, and for this a knowledge of English is necessary, so that the citizens of his “republic” can be observed admiring the pleasing copperplate while remaining in ignorance of the lofty sentiments. His brother, George Moore, the lord of Moore Hall, has come several times to meet with him, riding coolly and slowly up Castle Street. But once their voices drifted through an open window of the courthouse, fierce and heated in angry conversation. George Moore and I take much the same view of this republic, and although he has not consulted me, it is well known that great minds move in the same channel.

But Owen is much changed, and not for the better, with his talk of battles yet to come, and a Whiteboy glint in his eye. He had gone with Elliott to make their report to Humbert, which did not diminish his self-esteem. If the second fleet lands, he kept saying, and, if the people rise up in the midlands. “Owen,” I told him, “if I had a few more hairs on my head and a few more teeth in my mouth, it is above in Killala I would be, paying my respects to Kate Cooper.” I smiled at Brid to make clear that I would do nothing of the sort, and at Owen, to hint that I might. But he said nothing that would confirm what gossip reported. Then he recited to me bits of a poem he was working on, a queer misshapen thing full of moons and much else, and we fell to arguing about the forms and structures of verse.