parte was the worst enemy Ireland ever had," a man who played with her hopes and utilised them for his own purpose. In 1804 Emmet shook the soil of France from his feet forever, and set sail for the great Western Republic where fame, success and happiness, and in the fulness of time, an honoured tomb were awaiting him. As for his brother, Robert, when he saw the blood of Lord Kilwarden stain the stones of that Dublin street, he dispersed his followers, and sought out Michael Dwyer in the Wicklow hills. Dwyer and his men (whose failure to be present at the rendezvous was due to a gross dereliction of duty on the part of the man charged with the message for them) urged that an attempt should be made on the neighbouring towns, but Emmet determined to do nothing more until the promised French aid had arrived. To expedite its coming he sent Myles Byrne to France with an urgent message to his brother, Thomas Addis. Before Myles Byrne had arrived in Paris, Robert had been arrested by Major Sirr at Harold's Cross, to whose dangerous neighbourhood he had been drawn by an overpowering desire to see once more his "bright love" the exquisite Sarah Curran. On the 19th of September, two days after Byrne had delivered his message to Thomas Addis, Robert Emmet stood in the dock in Green Street, uttering that immortal oration which no one who loves great poetry or high passion can ever read without all that is best in him flaming up at the contact of its fire. On the 20th of September the sacrifice was consummated. The brave youth was publicly beheaded on a Dublin street. Authorities: Madden: Lives of the United Irishmen. Myles Byrne's Memoirs. Thomas Addis Emmet: The Emmet Family. Mitchel: History of Ireland. CHAPTER LXII DANIEL O'CONNELL THROUGHOUT almost the first half of the nineteenth century Ireland's history is reflected in the life of Daniel O'Connell. O'Connell was thirty-three years of age when his national career began. That was in 1808, when the Catholic Committee, which sought to get for Catholic citizens their rights, began to be riven between the aristocratic advocates of "dignified silence," led by the aged Keogh, and the revolutionary advocates of agitation, of whom O'Connell assumed the spokesmanship. The great man was born in Cahirciveen in the southwest of Kerry. Various biographers of O'Connell give us interesting glimpses of what life was like on the western seaboard in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Cut off, as they were, from the rest of the world by wild mountain ranges, the ancient family of the O'Connells had succeeded in retaining a larger share of the world's goods than the laws permitted to Papists, though even for their partial good luck they had to thank strategy as well as the mountain barriers. O'Connell's father held his lands for long years by leaving them in the legal possession of his Protestant friend, Hugh Falvey (who had conformed for emolument sake). From the smuggling trade then common in the whole west of Ireland, the O'Connell family had long derived a steady income. Wines, brandies, velvets, and other taxable commodities, were being constantly imported from the Continent, without getting the gauger's blessing-and circulated inland. The smuggling smacks which constantly ran these goods into the western bays, carried away with them miscellaneous export cargoes-"Wild Geese," young men for the Irish Brigade in France and for other Continental armies; students for the schools of Spain, Italy, Austria, France, Flanders; the flannel homespun of the cottage looms; Irish butter, hides and wool. And the seaweed called slaucan (sloke) for which the Spanish appetite craved, was exported by the women to raise spare money for themselves. We are told that in the O'Connell country-as probably happened in many other western regions-the women used to borrow one another's cloaks to go to the Spanish market in the smuggling smacks, and there sell their own slaucan. O'Connell's uncle, Daniel, was one of the many Wild Geese which the smuggling smacks carried away to the great world of war and romance, abroad; and when that man sailed there were no less than seventeen of the O'Connell kinsmen in foreign service. He became Count O'Connell, and was the last Colonel of the Irish Brigade. As he was a royalist, the French Revolution, in time, threw him back upon England-where he became a fine, crusty old Tory-and bitter opponent of his nephew's Repeal idea. In O'Connell's infancy the splendid Paul Jones was scouring the seas off the Kerry headlands, and giving England many uncomfortable gasps. Then, the banned priest, Father O'Grady (graduate of Louvain) hidden by the great hills from the Government's eyes and spies (though once tried for the crime of being a Papist priest, and freed for want of evidence) was teaching the child Dan his catechism. And the itinerant schoolmaster, David O'Mahony, likewise banned by the paternal government, was instructing the child in the complications and combinations. of Cadmus' invention-and while he nursed him and combed his hair "without hurting," the infant protégé, it is recorded, learned the whole alphabet in an hour and a half. And the child saw "Cousin Kane," a landless half-sir who was typical of the times, with his pair of hunters and twelve couples of dogs, circulating among the gentry of Kerry, and honouring and living off each in turn. The O'Connells were a great, strong, long-lived and prolific family. Though, in those days and in those districts, such was too common to deserve mention. Dan's immediate parents indeed were somewhat exceptional. They had only ten children. Grandfather O'Connell and his celebrated wife (of the O'Donohue family) Maire Ni Duibh, had twenty-two. The ancient Irish system of fosterage was still common in the mountains, and Dan's father and many uncles had all, for the first few years of their lives, been fostered by neighbours, relatives, friends, tenants. Young Dan himself was fostered by his Uncle Maurice-"Old Hunting Cap" as he was known, because to evade the tax upon gentlemen's beaver hats, Uncle Maurice resolutely lived under a hunting cap. The unceremoniousness of Old Hunting Cap and his household is well illustrated by a characteristic incident recorded of the country carpenter's shoving his tousled head in at the dining-room door when the household with their guests had well begun upon the plentiful pile that always bent their festive board. "Go away, Buckley," said Mrs. O'Connell. "This is no time to talk business." "I'm sorry, ma'am, in troth, but I just only wanted a word of his honour, about his coffin." Old Hunting Cap a few days before had given orders that a coffin should be prepared for him from a loved oak-tree that was being cut down on the lawn. "Coffin or no coffin, to-morrow will be a long enough day to talk of it." "No, no, bean a'tighe, let us hear what he wants-what's the matter about the coffin, Buckley?" says Old Hunting Cap. "'Tis to fix about the measurements that will make your honour comfortable." Then ensues a wrangle between Old Hunting Cap and the carpenter regarding the space that should make a coffined man comfortable-while the diners pause and listen. Old Hunting Cap objects to the generous measurements that the carpenter insists on allowing him. "You know my height is only six foot two." "But your honour forgets that you'll stretch after you're a corp. "That's so, to be sure. You're right, Buckley. Then leave me three inches for stretching." "All right, your honour, I'll make it six so as to give you no chance of complaint. cuse me.' "Good night, Buckley, and thank you." foot six to the good, Good night and ex And while knives and forks begin to ply again, Old Hunting Cap bravely resumes the discussion in which he had been interrupted by the coffin-maker's intrusion. After David O'Mahony's fireside teaching, and then some schooling in Cork, Daniel O'Connell had a short university term at St. Omer, in Flanders, and then at Douay in France-short, because of the French Revolution, which closed Douay in the beginning of 1793-just when he had completed two years of university study. What he saw and heard of this revolution made him a Tory. It might be more correct to say that it confirmed Toryism in him; for the O'Connell family, taking example from their friends, the well-to-do Anglo-Irish county gentry, were always Tory. And when the French came into Bantry Bay in '96 to assist the United Irishmen, Uncle Maurice, good loyalist, just missed. being the first to get the intelligence to the English Government. The man who was first got a fortune. In his diary Dan then wrote apropos of the French visit (probably recalling his experience of one revolution): "Liberty is in my bosom less a principle than a passion. . . . But Ireland is not yet sufficiently enlightened to bear the sun of liberty. Freedom would soon dwindle into licentiousness. They would rob; they would murder. The altar of liberty totters when cemented only with blood, when supported with carcasses. The liberty I look for is that which would increase the happiness of mankind."1 But Dan's Toryism almost completely fell away from him when, studying for the Bar at Lincoln's Inn in London in '94— for the ban against Papists entering the outer bar, had just been lifted-he attended the trial of Horne Tooke, and saw and learnt at first hand the astounding tyranny and intolerance practised by the rulers on their own people. And in Dublin, a few years later, he associated with the United Irishmen and, it is believed, joined them. Anyhow he shared their national sentiments. Yet, when the hour of action came, Daniel O'Connell slipped out of Dublin by sea, and rusticated for a time in the safety of his Kerry home. There evidently reading the official accounts of the barbarity of the wicked rebels, whom the kind Government reluctantly chastised, he grievingly communes with his diary about the outrages that are committed in liberty's name! He thinks he sees in Ireland a repetition of what he knew in France-the unbridled blood-lust of a frenzied and ignorant populace that had suddenly burst its bonds. And when he returned to Dublin he evidently became a good, pious Tory again. For although he was bitterly anti-Union (like the great body of the Tories in Ireland), when the Emmet alarm burst on the country in 1803, he flew to arms to preserve the Constitution. He was one of the Lawyers' Corps that was then formed for defence of the realm against the assault of French principles. In far later days when it was less objectionable to sympathise with Emmet, O'Connell tried to justify his action by exclaiming: "Poor Emmet, he meant well! But was ever a madder scheme conceived outside of Bedlam than that of facing, with seventy 1 This is the first indication we have of O'Connell's abject respect for law. It did not press itself upon him that the foreigner in his country was every year indulging in robbery and murder-even of his own kin. The foreigner did it "legally" -prescribed robbing and killing by Parliamentary Statute, and hence it shocked him not. |