The Year of the French (89 page)

As counsel to the late Malcolm Elliott, I spent much time with him both before his trial and in the two days which preceded his execution. I talked also with his widow, a most handsome young Englishwoman, who has returned with his body to Mayo. Elliott, it is true, was a member of the Provincial Executive for Connaught, but his discussions with me added nothing to what we already know. The events of the past two months destroyed all of his illusions, and his mood was sullen and despairing. His attitude reminded me much of Bagenal Harvey of Wexford fame, like him a gentleman of advanced republican sentiments who found himself caught up in the miseries of a servile insurrection and lost thereby his taste for sedition. I found him, I must confess, a much more attractive specimen, for he was a man of considerable intelligence, and his disgust was directed chiefly towards himself rather than his confederates.

There could be dealings more profitable with Cornelius O’Grady of Limerick, a member of the Munster Provincial, also a prisoner in Kilmainham, although on a lesser charge. Here also I am counsel for the defence, being junior to Mr. Curran. He is a man far different from Elliott or Teeling, being a grain merchant large and jovial in manner, although much dashed down by present circumstances. Should he be offered terms by the Crown, dependent upon his disclosure of the names and state of his Provincial, I am confident that they would be accepted, and I would encourage him to that end. But I must insist, as always, that the Crown keep its part of the engagement, for I will not be party to shabby dealings.

I must now, and yet again, remind you, at whatever embarrassment to myself and to you, that with me you have not to do with some common informer, some Samuel T—— or Thomas R——. Much less am I one of Higgins’s band of spies and turncoats, basely and for profit betraying men who are their superiors in rank, spirit, and aspiration. As you well know, and as others at the Castle know, I joined the Society of United Irishmen from a wish, sincere though misguided, to better the lot of my unfortunate fellow countrymen and to strengthen their just liberties. Only when I had become convinced that their enterprise was destined to serve far different purposes did I offer my services to the Crown. And for the Crown I have laboured in the most odious of ways, by tampering with the sacred relationship which should exist between a defendant and his advocate. For this I have received as recompense a pension of three hundred pounds upon the Secret List, together with some trifling additional sums tossed to me as to the conscienceless wretches who slink into the Lower Castle Yard, and the vague promises of honourable employment at some future time. I received promises fairer than these when first I engaged with Lord Castlereagh and yourself.

You may depend upon it that my services to this realm are of incalculable value. Dangerous conspirators remain undetected, especially in the southern counties, and of these you will not make discovery by turning loose upon the peasantry such bullies as Lord Carhampton and Mr. Dennis Browne, nor by placing a gallows at every crossroads. For that you require the services of someone as public-spirited as myself, and with an earned reputation for patriotism among the advanced elements of the population.

We live in evil times. As I sat with Malcolm Elliott in his narrow cell, I could not escape the reflexion that many gifted and honourable men have been dragged down to ruin by this wretched affair. And I recalled, with an ache for which there is no remedy, words spoken by one of the great orators of antiquity to the effect that no duty is higher or more painful than that which obliges us to deliver friends to the punishment of the state.

FROM THE REMINISCENCES APPENDED
BY JUDITH ELLIOTT, TO HER MANUSCRIPT,
ALL DRESSED IN GREEN:
MEMORIES OF AN IRISH PATRIOT

I took Malcolm back to Ballina and buried him there, where his ancestors lay buried, and placed above his head a simple stone on which are inscribed the dates of his birth and death (1798, that fatal year!) and the words
dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
.

For several years I attempted the management of the estate, although I understood little of such matters, until at last the loneliness of Mayo became too oppressive. The first months were bitter to endure, for even as I nursed my deep grief at my own loss, I was painfully conscious of the
dragonnade
of the county by forces of the Crown under the command of General Trench, most brutally assisted by Mr. Dennis Browne, High Sheriff and brother to Lord Altamont. Many hamlets were put to the torch, especially in the outlying lands beyond Belmullet and many a peasant or small huckster was strung to the triangle and his back lashed into bloody ribbons. Hangings were an almost daily occurrence at Castlebar and the gibbets bore their dread cargo of bodies coated with tar and caged in iron. Michael Geraghty, a tenant farmer upon the Elliott lands, was among those hanged, having been transported for that purpose from the battlefield at Ballinamuck, and I sought to offer sisterly comfort to his widow, but with scant success, for she had scarce a hundred words of English to her credit, a tall, heavyset woman old before her years, barefoot and slovenly. From the families of all those whom Malcolm had led into battle I was cut off by deep trenches of class and language, and, indeed, of nationality itself, for deprived of Malcolm’s companionship I grew increasingly aware that his people were not mine, and had never been.

The county families, need I say, treated me with a cold and almost contemptuous incivility as the widow of a hanged rebel who made no secret of her patriotic sentiments, for I lost no occasion to speak of Colonel Elliott and of the brave fight which he had waged for Irish liberty. Some few, it is true, Mr. and Mrs. Broome in particular, and Mr. Falkiner, showed to me an unfailing sympathy and courtesy, but this too I found unendurable in its way. They saw in me, I am certain, a lost and bewildered young Englishwoman, taxed beyond her capabilities by a sprawling and near-bankrupt estate, and mourning a husband who had fallen in what was to them an unworthy cause. I remember an evening at Mr. Broome’s, in Killala, when I found myself speaking yet again in glowing words of Malcolm’s chivalry, and of the selflessness which had placed him at the head of a daring and forlorn enterprise. Between the candles, Mr. Broome’s head bobbed in sympathy, his hair a fuzzy grey aureole about his bald pate. Behind him, beyond the high window, stretched the dull waters of the bay, sullen and lifeless. I felt myself alone and frightened.

And yet within two years, wonderful to relate, the rising had begun to fade from Mayo memory, or rather to recede into that past, compounded of legend and fact, which lies as an almost palpable presence upon the heavy Irish landscape.
Bliadhain na bhFranncach
, the peasantry now called it, which is to say, the year of the French, and they spoke of it as an event remote in time, equal in its distance from the present to a horse race run a decade before or to the wars of Elizabeth. Songs were sung, the most in Irish but a few in English, and these celebrated chiefly young Ferdy O’Donnell, a Mayo youth, or Malachi Duggan, described to me by Malcolm as a most fearful ruffian but transformed by folk imagination into a Robin Hood. No song of those that I heard enshrined the memory of Malcolm Elliott, their gallant leader. He has left no memorial upon the land save the simple tombstone in the Ballina churchyard. A mountain path leading into Castlebar became known as the “road of straw,” for along it the rebels had been guided in dark of night by the blazing straw brands of the cabin dwellers. And Ballinamuck, far off in Longford, was spoken of as a place of terror and destruction yet mercifully remote from the here and now of things. English-speaking children had a rhyme they would shout to one another, “Be a good boy, And I’ll buy you a book, And I’ll send you to school at Ballinamuck.” The burned cabins were rethatched, and there is about the Irish a savage and unfeeling ability to link sorrow and pleasure, to wash a river of easy sentiment over cruelty and bloodshed. But surely the blame for this rests not with them but with the harsh facts of their dreadful history.

But it was the landscape itself which I came in time to find unbearably oppressive, that very landscape which once had seemed to me endowed with a magical power and beauty. The River Moy, which formed one boundary of the estate, flowed dull and sluggish towards Killala and the sea, and the red bog which stretched westwards was desolate and sombre. The low hills, upon which cottiers crouched in their misery, were formless and mute of meaning. And above all arched the immense Irish sky, at times bright as porcelain, but often sunless and heavy, terrifying in its ability to drain all human definition from the earth and water beneath it. It was a landscape which hugged dark and unfathomable secrets before which I stood alien and unprotected.

In 1804, I resolved to return to England, leaving the estate in the capable hands of Mr. Robert MacAdoo, a Scottish agriculturist who has since then tended my Irish interests in a most able and diligent manner. I have become, in short, an absentee, a class of landlord towards whom Malcolm was always most unsparing in his scorn, and yet I am confident that he would not have wished me to remain in Mayo, lonely and burdened by unhappy memories. On my journey home I paused in Dublin for a visit with Mr. Leonard MacNally, the advocate who so courageously defended Malcolm at his trial. There at least, in Mr. MacNally’s bosom, the memory of Malcolm Elliott is green, and the cause for which he fought is honoured and cherished. He held my hand in his two. “Do not think harshly of us,” he implored me. “We are a confused and divided people, but we have our memories of the dead, and someday, God willing, the tree of liberty will flower from those memories.” I pray that this will be so, and yet I lack his serene and affecting confidence. We strolled together through the streets of the city, and he pointed out to me scenes which he knew would claim my interest—the house where poor Lord Edward was run to earth, and the one in which Malcolm paid his fateful visit to the Directory in the month before the rising. It was a sunny day, and beyond the rows of brick and stone the Dublin hills glistened in the distance. His voice brought back the past to me, and yet it was a past compounded only of that voice and of shadows moving across the screen of imagination. All about us was the bustle of a city indifferent to that noble enterprise to which Malcolm had given his hope, his energies, and, at last, his life.

Time has been kind to me. In 1811 I married Mark Matthews, who is not without celebrity both as a watercolourist and as the author of several delightful books on the hill towns of Italy. Much of our life together has been spent in that fragrant and sun-drenched countryside, for Mr. Matthews serves as British Consul in Florence, and we have many friends in the large British colony here. The story of Malcolm Elliott, his share in the Mayo rebellion and his tragic death, is for them among the most romantic of legends. The English are gallant and chivalrous towards those who oppose them in a manly and straightforward spirit, and in no other people does a respect for high enterprise glow more ardently. Lord Edward and his Pamela, Robert Emmet and his Sarah, Malcolm Elliott and poor me—we will be forever touched by the pale light of an old romance.

No shadow of a needless jealousy has clouded Mr. Matthews’s sentiments. Indeed, he has painted for me from my descriptions a portrait of Malcolm which he presented to me upon the occasion of my thirty-eighth birthday and which now hangs in our drawing room. In the year of ’ninety-eight, Mr. Matthews was serving with the Somersetshire Militia and it was only by chance that he was not sent to Ireland. Strange are the workings of Providence! Often, in jest, he will remind me that “the year of ’ninety-eight” has a different signification. It was the year which saw the publication of the
Lyrical Ballads
by Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge. “And which will history deem the more important,” he will ask me playfully, ‘The Ancient Mariner’ or an obscure uprising in Mayo? To my best knowledge, there were no poets among the Mayo rebels?”

It was all poetry, I think to myself. It was all a dream.

Waterford to Moore Hall, Early October

In October John Moore of Moore Hall, prisoner, was transported, under a guard of Hompesch’s cavalry, to the gaol at Waterford, in the south of Ireland. Waterford is a coastal town, and the window of his cell faced south, toward Spain. He was never well enough to rise from his cot and look out across the town, across the wide wharfs, towards the sea. He carried with him from Castlebar a draught for a thousand pounds upon his brother’s Dublin bankers and a case of gaol fever, two spots of hectic red upon his cheeks. After a week, his condition had so worsened that he was removed to the Royal Oak Tavern, where, on the nineteenth, he died.

George Moore rode to Waterford upon receiving word of his brother’s dangerous condition, but he arrived too late. He stood beside the body. The skin was drawn tight over the bones of the face and was covered by a bristle of yellow beard. The eyes had been closed, but the mouth was half open, giving the face a dull, vacant appearance. George sat for a time before the body, and then walked downstairs to the taproom, where the commander of the Waterford garrison, Colonel Harrison, had been waiting for him.