The Year of the French (40 page)

My place of residence remained the headquarters for the rebel force left behind, under the command of a most intelligent fellow named Ferdy O’Donnell, a man of some education and with an abundance of that rough courtesy which can often be discovered among the Irish. I shall have much to say hereafter concerning O’Donnell, whom I might almost call an excellent creature, had he not stained his soul with the dark red of rebellion. On more occasions than one we were to owe our very lives to him, and once at least he put his life at risk to preserve ours. I often reflect upon the mysteries of the human soul, wherein good and evil are so intricately intertwined that no man has either the wisdom or the virtue to know where the one leaves off and the other begins. For the present, it will suffice to say that he seldom intruded upon the privacy of the rooms which had been allotted to us (in my own house!), and that this was one of those occasions.

He came pounding up the stairs and beat upon the door to my library, which I opened with trepidation to behold him standing there and trembling with excitement. A large army under the command of General Lake himself had been defeated at Castlebar, he informed me, and all the northern part of Connaught had passed into the hands of the rebels. I endeavoured to soothe him with words while I considered the dangers now presented to us, not by his news, which not for a moment did I believe, but by the fact that he believed it. At that time, I shared the fears of other loyalists that the rebels might well choose to slaughter us either to celebrate a triumph or to avenge a defeat. The fate of the poor Protestants of Wexford was constantly in our thoughts.

I am not certain how O’Donnell expected me to respond to his words, whether with rage or with a sudden conversion to his cause. It is possible that he wished only to share with me an excitement which had brought him to the point of bursting. He was in any event unprepared for my response, for I was unable to dissemble my disbelief. At this a tumble of words fell from him which served but to heighten my scepticism. If he was to be believed, a small army, the half of it made up of rude and ignorant peasants, had defeated a large one, formed in part of British regulars and fortified by artillery. And it was no mere defeat, he claimed, but an utter and shameful rout. Faced by this band of bumpkins and French banditti, a large British army, commanding the heights, had turned tail and run, flinging away both muskets and honour. It was this wild final improbability which set the crown upon my disbelief, and I feared for our safety at the hands of men who believed so unlikely a tale.

My incredulity was shared by most other loyalists. Mr. Falkiner, who had seen service in his youth, sought with ill-concealed impatience to demonstrate the improbability of the tale which I carried to him. Not even Frenchmen, he explained, would in such fortunate circumstances turn tail; no, nor Spaniards either. And so thought we all, or rather, as I have been told, all of us save Captain Cooper. Even at his best, Cooper was after all an Irishman, and never more so than when strenuously denying the fact. Now, in his market-house prison, he seemed at times half mad, raging in impotent fury. The rumour of the Castlebar defeat he confirmed at once, shouting out that the cowards of England had always abandoned the Irish Protestants in their hour of peril, to be slaughtered by peasants or by God’s grace to be rescued by Dutch princes. The rest of us, however, were slow in accepting his mad wisdom. Only after days had passed, with peasants and rebels moving back and forth between Killala and Castlebar, carrying with them calm and certain testimony, did we accept the truth. Even then, we consoled ourselves for some days with the fiction that the British army had been evacuated southwards before the battle, leaving only a garrison to defend the town.

But alas, as all the world knows, British arms had suffered a humiliating defeat, and a dangerous one. Connaught lay at the mercy of the rebels, with many of them swaggering through the streets of Killala. These were not O’Donnell’s men alone. There was much movement between the towns in rebel hands—Killala, Ballina, Westport, Foxford, Swinford, Crossmolina, and of course Castlebar, and each day brought news that some remote hamlet had declared for the rebel cause. Most menacing of all were the small bands of ruffians captained by men akin to the brutal Malachi Duggan. These raided and burned whenever they could move beyond the discipline which Humbert had imposed, and a number of Protestant houses were set afire, but none near Killala, where Ferdy O’Donnell, “Captain” O’Donnell as he styled himself, maintained order. The wives of the imprisoned yeomen were especially fearful of vengeance. All of them, that is, save Mrs. Cooper, who gathered up a band of rough and uncouth peasants with whose help she proposed to defend Mount Pleasant against all attack. I several times saw her striding through the streets, an Hibernian amazon, holding in her hand a folded whip of the sort which legend has associated with her father’s name. She could easily have been overborne, for all her truculence, but the countryside held her in a wry respect which ill accorded with their hatred and contempt for her unfortunate husband.

We were not long in discovering that we had become citizens of a newborn state, the Republic of Connaught, a pledge against that Republic of Ireland which was the ambition of the rebellion. This was no playacting, but a government which asserted its rights over us all, and demanded both our loyalty and our material support. Young John Moore, brother to the justly celebrated George Moore of Moore Hall, was appointed its President, and he governed as head of a Council of Twelve. This council issued orders that all able-bodied men not otherwise serving with the rebels were to report to Castlebar. A levy of two thousand guineas was made upon the town of Castlebar and of ten thousand guineas upon the county. Additionally, assignats were issued, signed by Mr. Moore, whereby goods were requisitioned with payment promised upon the establishment of a Republic of Ireland. I have seen a number of these instruments of plunder, although by good fortune none came into my possession.

The order directing all males to report to Castlebar was not intended as a means of universal conscription. Rather, its purpose was to place those who did not comply in a position of disloyalty to the newly founded state. Almost all Protestants, and the majority of the respectable Papists, found themselves in this situation. My own position I regarded as in several ways peculiar. I suffer, although without undue pain, from the gout, and am therefore less than able-bodied. Moreover, the order clearly held only Irishmen in its contemplation, and, by what I have come to regard as one of the chief mercies granted to me by the Almighty, I am not Irish. I discussed these several points with “Captain” O’Donnell, and he readily agreed that they were well taken. Indeed, he offered it as his own opinion that my cloth alone would exempt me from what he called “this Castlebar foolishness.”

A time of turbulent passions and oppressive imaginings had come upon Killala, and it was to endure for many weeks. As we shall discover, the extraordinary drama of the Mayo rebellion had not only its prologue but its epilogue here, where both the first battle and the last one were fought. But between the two, we lived upon rumours and fears. We were uncertain of our lives and our properties, and we came in time to fear for the kingdom itself. The rebels must sooner or later encounter the main body of the British army, but after the dark and sinister event at Castlebar, who could predict the outcome? To judge by our barony, Ireland may well have been in the grip of a vast servile mutiny, for the like of which one must look far past the peasant revolt of the Middle Ages to antiquity and Spartacus. Our captors, save only O’Donnell, had scant knowledge of ancient history, but to judge by their jubilant faces, they needed none.

After Castlebar, an air of carnival descended upon the town. Many of the men, and especially the younger ones, had gone off with the rebels, but many others stayed peaceably at home, where the crops were now ready for the harvest. Yet most of these were in warm sympathy with the insurrection, despite the courageous denunciations issued each Sunday by Mr. Hussey. And had they not here the example of his curate, the repellent Murphy, who had in very fact joined the rebels and gone off with them to Castlebar, where doubtless he was celebrating Mass in ensanguined vestments. The taverns were noisy throughout the night, with shouting and drinking and singing, with the music of pipe and fiddle. Often I was fearful that not even O’Donnell would be able to restrain his people, if strong liquor should work malignantly upon their natures. During this early period of our captivity, however, they were fully occupied by their rumours of victory and triumph.

From time to time, Killala men active in the rebellion would ride in from Castlebar, and among them Owen MacCarthy, but a MacCarthy changed for the worse. He was now an avowed rebel, and had taken part in the battle. I encountered him once in my place of residence, for O’Donnell was his close friend. He had a rank of some sort, but unlike the others he was not wearing the uniform with which rebel officers had been furnished. Instead, he wore a silk shirt, and a fine coat which had once belonged to some gentleman more slightly built than he. A pistol, however, was the emblem of rank among them, and he wore one in a handsome case, strapped around him by a wide leather belt. When he saw me staring at him, he had at least the grace to look sheepish as he stood there in his plundered finery. He was at best a large, awkward man, and now he looked outlandish as well.

Because of their respect for my cloth, I was myself allowed the liberty of the town, but I seldom availed myself of this, in part because of the fears of my dear Eliza and in part because of my own timorousness. It was a saddening experience to walk through the few streets, for Killala, like MacCarthy, had changed for the worse. It had been a dour, cheerless place, its low buildings stained by the wet Atlantic winds, but it had at least been quiet. But the streets were always crowded now, and the air heavy with that menacing, incomprehensible language, so unsuited to polite or even rational discourse. Standing at the foot of the street which ran down to the pier, I felt as lonely and as abandoned as Crusoe in Defoe’s romance.

And yet all these weeks, as I have told the reader to his weariness, we lived within the golden weather of late summer, and the crops now dropped their heavy heads, to signify their readiness for the scythe.

Castlebar, August 28

Humbert had learned late in life to read and write, and he managed these arts awkwardly. Throughout his career this had been troublesome, not because it embarrassed him, but because it forced him to rely upon aides and secretaries. His report to the Directory, written the day after the battle of Castlebar, was dictated to Bartholemew Teeling and then carried by an Irish recruit to Newport, where a fishing smack had been awaiting it. He spoke slowly, in deference to Teeling’s French but also because it was an important letter.

“. . . Then, after a march of seventeen hours, through a desolate and almost trackless waste, I arrived near Castlebar at six in the morning. The English position was a very strong one, and they greatly outnumbered my combined force of French soldiers and Irish . . . what shall we call those fellows, Teeling?”

“Patriots,” Teeling said, unsmiling.

“Good. French soldiers and Irish patriots. Moreover, they were supported by artillery, whereas I had been obliged to leave behind in a village called . . .”

“Crossmolina.”

“. . . called Crossmolina all save a few light guns. Lake and Hutchinson, the English generals, had centered their defence upon a low, wide hill about a thousand yards’ distance from my advance column. I decided to use the Irish patriots for a massed attack upon the centre. These troops, commanded by a brave native officer named O’Dowd, and armed with long-handled pikes, made, in all, four attacks upon the hill, and suffered heavy losses, being subjected to cannon fire. I then ordered a general attack. Sarrizen drove in the enemy’s left. Fontaine compelled his right to retreat in disorder. The retreat was soon entire. In his flight, the enemy abandoned both guns and honour. An attempt was made by elements of his regiments to fight a rear-guard action in defence of the bridge which crosses into the town of Castlebar. A charge by the Third Regiment of Chasseurs dispersed them and forced them across the bridge in panic. There was some fighting within the town, but it was trifling. A brave gunner manned a curricle gun from the top of the chief street of the town. He was slain by an even braver Irish patriot. The enemy was pursued for some seven miles southwards of the town. The defeat was utter. Arms, ammunition, even General Lake’s luggage, were left behind. Do you have all that, Teeling?”

“Yes, sir.” Teeling held his pen poised in respectful, faintly ironical readiness.

“There, now. That is how the report of a battle should read. Simple, no flourishes. A soldier is a blunt man but he can order his ideas with clarity.”

“Especially the report of a victory.”

Humbert smiled. “Just so. Have Sarrizen give you an account of the killed and wounded on both sides, a list of the cannon and equipment captured, the names of the British regiments which took part in the battle. Submit the list to me, and after I have initialed it, add it to the report.”