BOOK III. 1728 Government before the depositions of a thousand witnesses who have no friends to back them. I wonder you would be so mad as to enterprise the like affair! Were you not afraid to be knocked on the head? My friend, this is not France; this is Kerry, where we do as we please. We'll teach you some Kerry law, which is to give no right, and take no wrong.' The offence alleged was that Sullivan was a returned convict. His identity with the transported schoolmaster was not denied, and the passport being safe in Pat Kelly's keeping, Lawder ironically asked him whether he had received permission to come back to Ireland. He pleaded that his papers had been stolen. The magistrates threatened to have him flung out of the window for insolence. The creature was not deficient in courage. Being in extremity, as he afterwards declared, and expecting no mercy, he turned on the Vicar General and asked him how it would be taken by the Government, if a clergyman and a magistrate was found to have employed a Rapparee to assault and kidnap a new convert who had just read his public recantation before the Rev. Mr. Bland, and the congregation.' The Vicar General seemingly paid no attention, but wrote out his committal as a returned Papist, and passed him over to the constable to take to Tralee gaol. The magistrates, however, hesitated before completing so glaring a piece of impertinence. Sullivan was confined for a few days at a private house in Killarney, and was then turned out of doors, with the advice to leave Ireland as fast as he could, and a promise that, if he betrayed what had befallen him to the Government, he should be promptly killed. II. 1728 Being, as he said, 'invincibly persuaded' that this CHAP. was true, he lay quiet in his lodging for two or three months. He was closely watched, but the evident tenderness for the Sullivan name and extraction again befriended him. He ventured gradually to show himself in the streets again, and at last reopened his school, where, having a reputation for learning, he gathered a knot of students about him; amongst others another young Connell of Inveragh, named Maurice. Among these lads he contrived to ingratiate himself. Some of them were strangers from other parts of the country, unconnected with the Kerry faction, and valued Sullivan for the learning which he was really able to give them.1 His classes were well filled, and the informer was forgotten in the professor; when the unlucky arrival in the town of a heavy cargo of smuggled brandy rekindled the smouldering exasperation. Once more he was waylaid, knocked down, and beaten. He escaped into his school-room, where the boys took his side, barricaded the door and windows, and beat off the mob who continued howling outside; when Fitzmaurice, resolved, once for all, to be rid of a nuisance which had grown intolerable, sent a warrant for his instant appearance at Ross Castle. Sullivan says, that Fitzmaurice desired that he should be torn to pieces in the riot, under circumstances which could be represented as accidental. The suspicion was so far justified that no escort of A young McLaughlin, for instance, from Ardagh, co. Longford, who was examined afterwards at the Castle in connexion with Sullivan's story, said that, 'living in a place inconvenient to good teachers, and hearing a famous BOOK III. 1728 soldiers was sent to conduct him down. Fitzmaurice was disappointed however, if this was his object, by the fidelity of the students who attended their master as a bodyguard. To expose the alleged occasion of a disturbance in the stocks, in the middle of the mob, would not have been considered, out of Ireland, a hopeful method of appeasing it. This, however, was the remedy which suggested itself to the Governor of Ross Castle. He sentenced Sullivan to sit in that position for two hours, in Killarney Market Place. Sullivan made his humble demonstration, that he was known to be descended from a noble, antient, and valuable family in the county.' The better the blood, in the opinion of Lord Fitzmaurice, the deeper the disgrace. The prisoner was taken back for the sentence to be executed -the stocks were prepared-' evil persons' were filling their pockets with stones, to make an end of him as soon as he was secured. Once more the faithful students came to the rescue. The stocks were upset and broken in pieces; Sullivan was hurried away in the dusk to some temporary hiding-place; and that night young Maurice Connell, a young McLaughlin of Ardagh, in Longford, and two other lads, conducted him, by byeways and paths, over the mountains out of Kerry; never leaving him till they had seen him safe in Dublin, when he told his singular story at the Castle.1 1 'Examination of Sylvester as O'Sullivan, and, so far as their knowledge went, his account is confirmed by theirs. SECTION IV. On the most superficial insight into the condition of The CHAP. II. 1728 BOOK III. 1728 of evidences of administrative weakness. Soldiers might be quartered a few roods off; but the soldiers were so ostentatiously indifferent, that they must have been ordered at all hazards to avoid unpleasant collisions. What could magistrates do so circumstanced, but, since they were forbidden to force the people to submit to the law, submit the law and ultimately their own manners, and sympathies, and characters to the ways of the people. A story, told by an informer like Sylvester O'Sullivan, would, by itself, have been an insufficient witness to the habits of the gentlemen of the South of Ireland. Another incident, almost exactly contemporary, a matter which became at last of international consequence, and was made the subject of judicial investigation, exhibits the country in the same aspect of lawlessness; and, one at least of the same parties-the Vicar General of the diocesein a position which singularly confirms O'Sullivan's account of him. Ballyhige House, or Castle, the seat of a younger branch of the family of Crosby, stands at the northern extremity of the Bay of Tralee. The sand and powdered shells, which form the bed of the Atlantic, are swept in by the eddying tides behind Kerry Head, and lie for miles as a fringe upon the shore. The shoals reach far to the sea, and the rollers with a north-west wind break over it in sheets of yellow foam. Blown sand heaps, covered with long pale grass, and burrowed by rabbits, divide the beach from the brown morass which stretches inland over the level plain. At the north end of the sands where the ground rises out of the bog is the castle, which was the scene of the following story:— The Crosbies of Kerry were descended from John |