The Year of the French (6 page)

Perhaps I can see the more clearly for being English born and English bred and therefore not enmeshed by the ancient prides and hostilities of this land. Pride: above all else pride. For in the final quarter of the century, as the world knows, the Protestants of Ireland declared themselves to be a separate nation, owing allegiance to the King of England only in his capacity of King of Ireland. Nay, more, they had come to think themselves a separate people, neither English nor Irish, yet vowing the most utter loyalty to the British Crown, from which their rights, privileges, possessions first flowed. A prodigious and ludicrous creature it was, this “Nation of Ireland,” from which the great mass of the Irish were excluded upon the open ground of religion and the covert ground of race. Its capital of Dublin was as fair a city as these islands can boast, a city of warm, wine-coloured bricks and cool grey stones, dominated over by the severe, lovely lines of a parliament house in which were seated the exclusively Protestant representatives of an exclusively Protestant electorate. And yet this vaunted independence was a mockery, for the governors and administrators of the island were still appointed from London, and the Parliament itself reeked with a corruption which many of the purchased members scarcely deigned to conceal. I yield to none in my admiration for Mr. Grattan and the other “patriots” who laboured to give Ireland true and honest governance, to reform Parliament, and above all, to strike the chains from their Papist fellow countrymen. And yet their efforts were as futile as their oratory was glittering and enflowered.

We knew little of such matters in Mayo, and we cared less. The interests of the landlords were well served in Parliament by Dennis Browne, Lord Sligo’s brother and High Sheriff of the county, a clever and high-spirited man, bluff and hearty when the occasion demanded, but with a mind as subtle and as insinuating as mountain mist. If in these pages I shall have much to say that is harsh in its judgement of Mr. Browne, I do indeed believe that his love of Mayo is most sincere, although it was to assume a terrible shape. I do confess that my feeble understanding of these people falters entirely when it confronts such families as the Brownes. Papists until well into the eighteenth century, they retained their property by a variety of ruses, and then, these being exhausted, they conformed to our Protestant Church of Ireland. They, and they perhaps alone, seem able to move at ease between our two worlds, great and powerful personages in our Protestant world, yet the native musicians and poets are made welcome by them, and songs and poems are composed in their honour. Or were until very recent years, for now the Brownes have a dark and sombre reputation, and for reasons that my narrative will make clear. If I could but understand the Brownes, I would understand much about the tangled roots of the past, its twisted loyalties and bloody memories. But I will never come to such understanding, The meanings of this land are shrouded from the eyes of strangers. Truth, like Viking treasure, lies buried in the bogs.

Boglands and rings of mountains sealed us off in Tyrawley, and left us facing the grey ocean. But by 1797, we knew that elsewhere in Ireland events were drifting towards rebellion. The wicked and seditious Society of United Irishmen, a band of unscrupulous city radicals in Dublin and Belfast, were bent upon an insurrection, and had chosen as their instrument an unnatural alliance of the Papist peasants of the south and the Presbyterian peasants of the north. Their agent abroad, the deist and madman Wolfe Tone, had secured the assistance of regicide France: the year before a formidable invasion fleet had been beaten back from the Kerry coast only by what the peasants called “the Protestant winds.” Then, in the spring of 1798, we heard, aghast, of the dreadful rebellions in Wexford and Antrim, a murderous and insensate peasantry ravishing the countryside before being put down with great brutality. There followed then a dreadful pause, for although the rebellious counties had become vast charnel houses, the networks of the hellish conspiracy survived in the midlands and in parts of Munster. A second flotilla of invasion, it was said, was being assembled on the French coast, and Wolfe Tone hovered, a stormy petrel, above its masts. It is in this moment of dreadful pause that my narrative will open.

But all of this came to us as tidings from a different land. Our local corps of yeomanry, an exclusively Protestant body under the command of Captain Samuel Cooper, drilled more frequently, but less to defend our shores than to remind the Papist peasantry that the present order of things was changeless. There was first one, then several, then numerous instances of cattle maiming, by those calling themselves “the Whiteboys of Killala,” but Whiteboyism was one of our old, familiar evils. The distant United Irishmen preached insurrection in the name of a desired “Republic of Ireland,” but the word
republic
has no existence in the Irish tongue, and far less had the meaning of the word any existence in the minds of our peasantry. To be sure, there were some among the peasants, schoolmasters and tavernkeepers and the like, who, upon hearing of the Wexford rising spoke in lofty terms of “the army of the Gael.” And many among the Protestants, in particular those of the more narrow and ignorant sort, spoke in fear and fury of a servile insurrection. But all was far distant from Mayo.

I have once and again sought to imagine myself as present in one of the taverns frequented by the peasantry, a low, vile cabin choking with smoke and rank with odours. Someone describes for those present the Wexford insurrection, not as the butchery which in fact it was, but as a glorious hosting of “the army of the Gael,” with banners and bards, like a passage in Macpherson’s Ossian poems. I seek to imagine in that setting the faces which I know only from roadside or field or stable, white skin, black hair, dark eyes. With what power would not the speaker’s words burst upon such an assembly, for the native Irish, as has been remarked since the days of the Elizabethan Spenser, are easily overwhelmed by highflown rhetoric. But imagination fails me. They are an alien people.

Once, at the home of Mr. Treacy, I heard Owen Ruagh MacCarthy recite his poetry. He was visiting the servants, and Treacy, being informed of this, brought him to the dinner table, where he stood before us and spoke a poem for which he was requited most generously with silver coins and two tumblers of brandy. It was of a kind called an
aisling
, Mr. Treacy informed me, a poem of vision, in which the poet, wandering in a meadow, encounters a maiden who speaks to him in cloaked and guarded terms of her present sorrows and prophesies some event of great good fortune for the Gaelic people—perhaps the Young Pretender sailing to the coast with swordsmen and casks of wine and French coins. The poem that night differed from others of its kind only in that it was not the Stuart Pretender who was invoked, but some nameless, cloudy deliverance. It is apparently a difficult and a metrically complex form, for all its conventionality, and MacCarthy’s celebrity among other native poets was said to rest upon his mastery of its techniques. It was delivered with much florid vehemence of voice and body, but I do not pretend to admire what I cannot understand.

Leaving Bridge-end House some hours later, and walking towards the boy who held my horse, I passed the open door of one of the outbuildings, and again hearing MacCarthy’s voice, I looked within. A number of the servants were gathered there, and MacCarthy, very drunk, was standing with one foot upon a bench. A girl was standing beside him, and his free arm was curved around her waist, his hand fondling her bosom. I needed no cicerone to explain to me the meaning of the song which he was singing. As I rode off, the song ended, but the air was then filled with the sound of a violin, playing a most engaging air, very quick and lilting, as though for a dance.

Music and dance. What I have written must surely suggest a people cursed by Heaven, men sullenly in movement beneath a lowering sky. And yet most, were they to hear my words, would deny them utterly. For if the mind’s eye perceives the grinding poverty, the ear of the mind hears music. No people on earth, I am persuaded, loves music so well, nor dance, nor oratory, though the music falls strangely upon my ears, and the eloquence is either in a language I cannot understand or else in an English stiff, bombastic, and ornate. More than once I have been at Mr. Treacy’s when, at close of dinner, some travelling harper would be called in, blind as often as not, his fingernails kept long and the mysteries of his art hidden in their horny ridges. The music would come to us with the sadness of a lost world, each note a messenger sent wandering among the Waterford goblets. Riding home late at night, past tavern or alehouse, I would hear harps and violins, thudding feet rising to frenzy. I have seen them dancing, at evening on fairdays, in meadows decreed by custom for such purposes, their bodies swift-moving, and their faces impassive but bright-eyed, intent. I have watched them in silence, reins held loosely in my hand, and have marvelled at the stillness of my own body, my shoulders rigid and heavy.

Darkness hides them from me, and my sympathy is un-Christian and chill. We fear the unknown. Most earnestly do I wish to enter their lives, yet everywhere my wish is mocked, by Captain Cooper’s complacent swagger, by the memory of MacCarthy’s foot upon a bench, by a cabin bursting with music, by the thronging foreign faces at markets and fairdays, by dancers in a meadow, by the sounds of an alien speech. Yes, and by the very look of the land itself, the forbidding hills, the monotony of brown moorland, the small lakes set like watchful eyes upon the bog. It seems to me a land furiously guarding its meagre secrets, gloating over its incomprehensibility. Whether it seems so to the people themselves, I cannot say. They are an ancient people, and possess an ancient knowledge which, because it falls short of wisdom, is frightening to a stranger.

And thus, in the narrative which I shall now commence, many of the actors come from a world which is recognisably my own, however altered by local conditions. Mr. Falkiner, my dear friend, might well be found in my native Derbyshire, arguing crops or politics with my brother. And Mr. Moore of Moore Hall would surely be more at home in London than in Mayo. Nor can England boast that it lacks such men as Captain Cooper, village Caesars and Hannibals, doughty captains of Sunday soldiers. But there my pen pauses, for one at least of Cooper’s feet rests upon the bog. And when my thoughts move from him to the native Irish, to O’Dowd and to MacDonnell, to MacCarthy and above all to Ferdy O’Donnell, I feel them slipping towards the unknown, towards men whose actions and passions issue from that fearsome world of hillside and bog, choked with the petrified roots of the past. And beyond such men lies the multitudinous world of the peasantry, the dark sea which swept up upon us so suddenly that we were almost covered by its waves.

I shall nonetheless strive to present those events with such understanding of them as I have come to possess, and with an attempt at a strict impartiality. I fear in advance that I shall fail, for my knowledge of events is not matched by an understanding of their causes. But yet I hold it almost sinful not to seek after causes, the black roots of flowering passions. The rain has ceased to fall, and beneath a sky suddenly bright and almost cloudless, fields of a most intense green stretch northwards towards the bay.

Mount Pleasant, June 16

It was a long letter, closely filling three sheets of excellent paper. Copies had been nailed by night to Cooper’s door and to the door of the Killala market house. Cooper held the pages flat beneath one hand, while the other, elbow propped on breakfast table, supported a head within which brandy seemed to roll as in a half-filled jug. Across from him sat his wife, Kate, and at his side, perched on the chair’s edge, sat Fogarty, his steward.

“It’s hard to believe,” he said, temporising, while studying the wild blur of words.

“Not all of them, by no means all or even most,” Fogarty assured him. He was a jovial man, and could not help but bring an air of buoyancy to the least appropriate circumstances. “Only the cows we turned onto O’Malley’s acres. Squint O’Malley. Do you remember the way he kept bobbing his head when he talked to you? It was the shut eye that did it.” He imitated the gesture, and Cooper closed his eyes against the sight.

“These are terrible times for Mayo,” Kate said, “when a man cannot use his land as he sees fit.”

“Sees fit, be damned,” Cooper said. “Uses it as some bloody mortgage broker in Capel Street sees fit. I think I might be able to take some tea.” He sucked it in red and strong, heavily sugared. He pressed small, square hands on plump knees which strained against buff breeches, a short-legged man with a head round and compact as a cannonball. “As if the country wasn’t in bad enough trouble. The Whiteboys of Killala. O Jesus, what have I ever done to deserve my troubles.”

“Troubled times, Captain,” Fogarty said. “Troubled times.”

“I’ll trouble them,” Cooper said. “I’ll trouble them to dance on a rope’s end in Castlebar.”

“To be sure you will, Captain. To be sure you will. No better man. Once we know who they are.”