The Two Kings of Ireland – Daniel O’Connell’s Salad Days.
Daniel and Maurice duly arrived in London, and their timing on this occasion had been excellent. The year 1793 saw Grattan’s third Catholic Relief Act, which removed most of the barriers that had existed preventing Catholic advancement. They could now be Grand Jurors, enter universities and a be appointed to an enormous range of positions from which they had hitherto been barred. They could even serve as Army Officers, although admittedly positions senior to Colonel were still barred to them. And above all, they could now be barristers, though not yet could they aspire to that most high office in the most honourable institution the Irish Bar, that of King’s Counsel.
The remaining strictures did not, of course, impinge on the ordinary person in the street, and Hunting Cap, the one time smuggler baron, was immediately appointed Deputy-Governor for County Kerry, a position which transformed his life. What could better illustrate the change this one piece of legislation made? And as a practical illustration of the change, he now determined that the boys should become barristers, and started to make appropriate arrangements. Hunting Cap’s brother the Count Colonel, however, was in difficulties. The Irish Brigade had been disbanded the previous year, and Colonel O’Connell, now unemployed and no longer rich, had arrived in London some months before. His old friend and former Commanding Officer, the Chevalier Fagan, had lent him some money to start, and Hunting Cap now helped too, so that by the time the two boys arrived he was able to look after them. And Chevalier Fagan had a relation who ran a boy’s school, so to Fagan’s they were sent while arrangements for law school were made.
But Maurice uncharacteristically rebelled, and refused to go to law school. Young Maurice had wanted to be a soldier since his days at Douai, and of course the Colonel was sympathetic. They stayed at Fagan’s for most of 1793, while the Count made approaches to his military friends on Maurice’s behalf, and while Hunting Cap was settling into his new role which had, in truth, changed prospects for ambitious Catholics in Ireland out of all recognition. Poor Maurice had to wait almost two years before the Colonel managed to get him a Commission in an Irish regiment, Walsh’s, posted to the West Indies.
But back to ’93. The end of the last term of ’93 at Fagan’s was the end of Daniel’s schooldays. He was now a big, strapping eighteen year old, always good humoured, and always popular. After the Christmas and New Year holidays he was admitted as a student in Lincoln’s Inn, London. The Colonel was a Godsend, and not only arranged lodgings for Daniel but also persuaded Hunting Cap to give him a decent living allowance, starting at £120 per annum and then rising to £140, to offset the rise in prices due to the war. When they left France they had had to leave with nothing but the clothes on their backs and what they could carry, so the furniture they had collected was lost. Daniel had to buy everything again now.
He went to the theatre when he could afford it. The new King’s Theatre was very grand. It was in the Haymarket, where carts carrying hay and straw for sale to owners of horses stood. It had been burned down ten years or so before, and had been rebuilt in the latest style. Gallery tickets could be had for three shillings, very expensive to Daniel. It was known as The Italian Opera House. Then there was the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, not far in the other direction, excellent with continually changing programmes. Tickets were very expensive there, too, perhaps £3. A huge bite out of his allowance.
London was full of transient Irish, mostly of the lower class employed as coal-heavers and ballast-men. This was the era of canals, and work on the new Paddington Arm of the Grand Junction Canal, linking it to the village of Paddington, employed many Irish labourers. Many more, from Dublin mainly, came over as professional beggars, though all would say they were looking for work. And then there were the poorest class, the cottars from Galway, Roscommon and Mayo who came to earn money during the summer in order to be able to pay their rents and subsist during the winter. Some stayed in London for years sending money periodically home to Ireland. They lived in slum areas, of which Daniel stayed well clear.
Daniel, on the other hand, was advised by the Colonel to associate with the ‘swells’, the gentlemen of fashion and their ladies, ‘men of the town’ as they were known. To be seen in Bond Street, elegantly dressed, was a must, Daniel was told. To be seen there at a certain hour, is one of the essentials to the existence of haut-ton, Daniel was told. There Daniel could observe splendid equipages, the haughty bend or familiar nod of arrogance, the humble bow of servility, Daniel was told.
But they were aping their betters, these young over bred and over monied layabouts. Genuine talent, genuine zeal, went unnoticed in Bond Street. And they drank, these young people, how they drank! Daniel vaguely remembered after one night out with some French friends – they gravitated to him to translate for them as much as anything, because Daniel could pass as either French or English – these French friends had involved him in a brawl with a Constable from the Bow Street Runners at Turnham Green, by knocking at the doors of several houses and awakening the indignant servants. But Daniel was not a brainless dissolute youth, and realised he had had enough of the Colonel’s so-called ‘polish’. Also that he neither liked to drink so much, nor could afford to. So he moved to Chiswick. He wrote home:
“I am now only four miles from town, and pay the same price for board and lodging as I should in London; but here in Chiswick I enjoy many advantages besides air and retirement. The society in the house is mixed – I mean composed of men and women, all of whom are people of rank and knowledge of the world, so their conversation and manners are perfectly well adapted to rub off the dust of scholastic education; nor is there any danger of riot or dissipation, as they are all advanced in life, another student of law and I being only young persons in the house. This young man is my most intimate acquaintance, and the only friend I have found among my acquaintances. His name is Bennett. He is an Irishman of good family connections and fortune.”
What Daniel did not include in his letters was that there was in fact another young person in the house, a young lady in a way, a girl. The landlady’s daughter. He didn’t realise it himself when he arrived, and only found out when on his second night there, shortly after he had retired to bed he heard his door open very quietly. It was summer, which meant that there was still some light for him to see. It also meant that he had no clothes on at all. He looked towards the door prepared to cry out, when the apparition which appeared held her finger to her lips, whispering, “Shhh!”.
He realised that it was a girl. A beautiful, young girl, too. With nothing on but a cloak which was now undone and flapped open.
“Who.. who are you?” stuttered Daniel. He was never at a loss for words normally. But this situation was quite outside his experience.
“My name is Julia”, said she, in dulcet tones, “and I live here. My mother owns this house. May I come and join you?” And she did. And did often again, after that first night. It set the tone for Daniel’s youth.
Richard Newton Bennett, the Irishman of good family, was a Protestant law student from Wexford, and the two boys had a large apartment each in the house, and were to remain lifelong friends. The landlady, Julia’s mother, was educated and cultivated, spoke French and Italian, and knew everything there was to know about the stage and about English ‘Society’. However, in appearance she was memorable, ‘extremely deformed, with a hump before and behind’, and no teeth in her upper jaw, and she was inclined to drink, and to then become rather rude. But in Chiswick Daniel could study, and there he could live within his means. Or rather, within Hunting Cap’s means.
It was time to take a trip home. It was five years since he had been home last, and things, he knew, had changed. Hunting Cap was no more a smuggler chief but one of the principal magistrates of the County. And he was older, of course, 69 years old, a great age. Getting home took a fortnight in those days, and getting back another one, so Daniel was away for the better part of two months. He wrote of the return trip: “Going back to London from Derrynane my first day’s journey was to Carhen, my second to Killorglin, my third to Tralee, my fourth to Limerick; two days thence to Dublin. I sailed from Dublin in the evening. My passage to Holyhead was performed in twenty-four hours, from Holyhead to Chester took six-and-thirty hours, from Chester to London three days”. It was a long way, Derrynane to London, at the end of the 18th. century.
Hunting Cap treated him as generously as ever, although Daniel’s profligate ways must have been a sore trial to the old man. Daniel spent time at Carhen with his parents, at Derrynane with Hunting Cap, coursing at Keelrelig, hunting at Tarmons over beyond Listowel, attending a wedding at Direen… it was a great summer. But poor Hunting Cap was getting crusty. He was rather taken aback by Daniel’s descriptions of France and the Revolution, and by his youthful zeal for reformation which sprang from those experiences. Daniel’s long evening talks with Hunting Cap had done a lot to clarify his own views to himself, if not to Hunting Cap.
“Let me try to explain, Daniel” his uncle might say. “We have been here, our family, for hundreds of years. We have ruled here in Ivereagh for hundreds of years. And this egalitarian movement from France threatens us. Imagine if we had to consult old Cahill, once your Da, about our trading, or the price of gold? He doesn’t even speak English, and Tralee is as far as he’s ever been. But in France he’d be as likely to become a general as a cowman. It’s the world turned upside down. Oh, sure, the religious issue is one we can agree on, but that is passing. Lookit, here I am a Deputy Governor, charged among other things with catching smugglers, would you believe! And you a budding barrister! For peace, you need authority, and here that’s us. In France we’d have lost our heads by now. Have another jar.”
“I haven’t the head for it, thank you Uncle. And I agree with you about France. Although I expect old Da’ Cahill would know the price of a heifer to the nearest farthing! But what I saw in England, and even in Dublin, fills me with foreboding. Has Uncle Daniel told you of the London Swells or the Dublin Bucks? People can’t behave the way they do and expect to rule. Sure, they can’t rule themselves.” And so it would go on, night after night.
A combination of being chased by Republicans when fleeing France on the one hand, his exposure to the spoiled and dissolute swells of London on the other, and his study of law were turning him into a convinced Reformer. The Revolution in France had perhaps assumed a more attractive aspect from a safe distance, but Daniel was not alone. Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s cousin Charles James Fox, who was incomparably the most compelling speaker in the House of Commons, was being driven to almost open professions of sympathy with that Revolution. All the bolder spirits among the Whigs were convinced that there was a great deal to be said for the Revolution. The Duke of Norfolk astonished everybody when at a dinner in Fox’s honour, he proposed the seditious toast of “Our Sovereign – the People.” Napper Tandy and his Volunteers in Dublin had paraded at night on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, with an illuminated display lighting the slogan ‘we do not rejoice because we are slaves; but we rejoice because of the French being free’. Daniel and many like him felt that France had taught a lesson to the old régime which would, one day, have to be brought home to the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland as well.
London itself was not immune from serious riot either, as Daniel witnessed. In one letter he wrote that while walking through St. James’ Park in October 1795 he was lucky enough to see the king’s carriage coming. A great crowd had assembled, but it transpired that it was not a crowd of welcome for His Majesty. “The carriage” he wrote, “surrounded by a noisy, angry, and excited mob, came moving slowly along. Suddenly, the glass in the royal window was smashed by some individual in the crowd, who, having read the Bible, ‘rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,’ by flinging a penny at His Majesty” writes Daniel. The penny bit sounds improbable as the windows would have been made of sturdier stuff. It was more likely a stone. Even then Daniel was not beyond elaborating the truth for the sake of a bon mot. Whatever it was, as he went on, “the flashing sabres of the dragoons were drawn immediately, the loud voice of imperative command was ringing above the tumultuous sounds, and the dragoons, clearing their way through the huddled and scrambling multitude with brandished blades and curvetting horses, advanced in a gallop in front of the king’s carriage. As the procession approached the place where I stood I pressed forward to get a sight of the king, when a dragoon made a furious slash at me, which deeply notched the tree about an inch or two above my head”. The King was in fact on his way to the House of Lords, and survived this, and a subsequent demonstration, ruffled but unhurt.
All that was in his letters home. Omitted again was another dalliance with a young lady, this time a young married lady, whom he referred to in his diary as Mrs. M. Unknown to Daniel at first, Mrs. M seems to have been rather liberal with her affections, the opposition, so to speak, being another young man, a brewer’s son named Douglas Thompson. This nearly led to his first duel, for Thompson accused Daniel of trying to steal the lady’s affections away. Daniel decided to call on Thompson at home to try to resolve the quarrel, but Thompson hit him with a cane, three times. So Daniel left him and sent ‘a friend’, in the jargon of the day, to issue a challenge. At that point Thompson’s family intervened to stop these two impetuous and foolish young men from doing each other an injury or worse, and had the ‘friend’ arrested. Thereafter the affair died down, but Daniel was still fascinated by the idea of dueling, and could easily have become addicted to it like so many young ‘bucks’ of the times. It seems incredible to me now, seventy years on, that dueling was so much a part of public life then. So far as I know, no duel had been fought in Ireland for thirty years.
Daniel was also extremely lazy in his youth. He would regularly come home in the small hours and sleep for eleven hours, and then lament his weakness, his vice as he put it, in his diary. But there was, hidden under all this bravado, the thinking man, and a major impact of these formative years in London on that thinking man was the Honourable Society of Cogers, because that was where he first learned the art of public speaking. This famous debating club boasted plenty of skilled orators whose example Daniel could follow. And he had huge sympathy with the objects and aims of the Society, ‘the promotion of the Liberty of the subject and the Freedom of the Press’, as well as the more respectable aims of ‘Loyalty to the Laws, the rights and claims of Humanity, and the practice of public and private virtue.’ It was an indulgence, Daniel thought at the time, but overtly or not, it was a school, a school for speaking.
It was time to return to Ireland. Daniel had eaten his English Dinners, and it was time to start on the Irish ones. The phrase and practice is based upon the ancient requirement that you had to attend so many terms at a school of law in an Inn of Court to qualify as a barrister, and the roll call would be taken at dinner time. ‘Eating your dinners’ means you have – notionally – kept your terms. And in order to qualify as a Barrister in Ireland, you have to ‘keep terms’ by eating dinners at both an English and an Irish Inn.[i]
So Daniel came back to Ireland in the middle of 1796, with his 21st. birthday imminent, and joined the King’s Inn, where he proceeded to embark upon what he always called ‘my legs of mutton’. He had of course been in France during the Revolution, but he had little realised what it’s effect had been in Ireland. Now he was in Ireland, he viewed events on the Continent of Europe with increasing concern, for Napoleon was making the might of France felt far and wide – at Montenotte in north west Italy in April, at Lodi further north in Lombardy in May, even taking Milan itself. Napoleon’s enemy, always Austria of course, was beaten at every turn, and Austria had been thought invincible. Where was the new France going? His old teacher, Dr Stapleton, was, he hoped, still in gaol in St Omer.
Daniel knew all about Henry Grattan of course. Grattan had been elected to Parliament the year he was born, and had been successfully attacking the English control of the Irish Parliament, and fighting for the repeal of the harsh Penal laws against Catholics, ever since. The third of his Catholic Relief Acts was the one which had enabled Hunting Cap to become a Deputy Governor of Kerry, and Daniel to study law. Grattan was working on his fourth Act now.
What Daniel had not appreciated was the disruptions going on outside Parliament. In particular he had not realised the extent to which the United Irishmen had captured the public imagination. The organisation was founded by a Kildare lawyer named Wolfe Tone, who saw in that Revolution “the dawn of a new and perfect age”, and had attacked the whole concept of English rule. ‘The Defenders’, loosely associated with the United Irishmen, were another revolutionary organisation founded to protect Irish people from the ‘Peep O’Day Group’, yet another revolutionary group, this one originally formed to attack Catholic homes at dawn and wreck their linen weaving machinery. They clashed with the Defenders at Loughgall in County Armagh in the so-called Battle of the Diamond. That resulted in the formation of the Orange Order to oppose the United Irishmen. And no sooner had Daniel arrived in Dublin than the French had tried to invade. A fleet carrying 15,000 troops under General Hoche set out, and anchored in Bantry Bay, but was prevented by offshore winds from landing. However the incident seriously alarmed the English, and Daniel kept well clear of politics for the time being.
He read copiously, courtesy of the Dublin Library. And he was beset by religion. His thoughts were imposed on whomever would listen to his ravings. “It is impossible that He whose justice is perfect should punish with eternal torments the belief which is founded on conviction”, Daniel would pontificate. He imposed on long suffering friends his reflections on death, questioning the immortality of the soul. “But the mind, the mind”, he would say. “Through what variety of untried being is that to roam?” he would ask. “What changes is it to suffer? Does it perish as a dependant on the corporal system?” and so on, and so on. What a pompous brat he must have been then! But he was serious, so serious in fact that he turned away from the Church which had until recently been an integral part of his life, a part he never doubted. Now all this thinking and questioning turned him into a Deist, a popular philosophy in that Age of Enlightenment. And a Deist he would remain for thirteen years.
Daniel’s reading kept his feet on the ground. He read everything from Tom Paine and Voltaire and Rousseau to Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’ – all of it. It was a relatively modern work having been written just 25 years ago, and reflected an obsession with the reasons behind that Fall. Might the British Empire go the same way? Then there was Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’, published at more or less the same time as Gibbon. So much new work to read!
But perhaps Paine’s ‘The Rights of Man’ was to influence him most. Even more recent, having been published only five years previously, it’s advanced common sense was very much to his own way of thinking. In the book Paine attacked hereditary government and argued for equal political rights. He suggested that all men over twenty-one in Britain should be given the vote and this would result in a House of Commons willing to pass laws favourable to the majority. The book also recommended progressive taxation, family allowances, old age pensions, maternity grants and the abolition of the House of Lords.
And of course he read, or rather studied, his law books, again of recent or even current production. Espinasse’s A Digest of the Law of Actions at Nisi Prius, for example, was written by a 38 year old Irish barrister specialising in the Dublin Nisi Prius courts, Isaac Espinasse. Perhaps his legal bible, though, was William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, a truly amazing treatise on the English Common Law published 25 years previously, and an important source on classical views of the common law and its principles. Daniel even tried writing a novel! His hero was to have been the natural son of George III by the ‘Fair Quaker’, Hannah Lightfoot. The youth was to have been early taken from his mother, and Daniel meant to make him a student at Douai, and thence to bring him through various adventures to the West Indies. He was to be a soldier of fortune, to take part in the American War, and to come back finally to England imbued with Republican ideals.
Republican ideals! That was the mainspring of his thinking as a youth. Liberty! That was his watchword, less a principle than a passion. But he was horrified as reports of the French in Bantry Bay came in, for he had been there quite recently. The memory of the waggoner at Douai was fresh still, and he knew that French victories would only exacerbate the situation, for the maintenance of law and order was paramount. He may have been an idealist in discussion, but he was still an O’Connell of Kerry, the rulers of Ivereagh for hundreds of years. The maintenance of order, law and order, was an absolute priority for him, and would always remain so. The Irish people were not yet “sufficiently enlightened to be able to bear the sun of freedom”, as he put it. Freedom would soon dwindle into licentiousness. With no law enforcement they would rob; they would murder. “The altar of liberty would totter when it was cemented only with blood, when it was supported only with carcasses, as it was doing in France” he wrote. The liberty which Daniel looked for was that which would increase the happiness of mankind. It was in the service of this liberty, of course, that Daniel was to devote his life.
But back to 1797. Daniel had joined the United Irishmen the previous year after meeting his old friend from Chiswick, Richard Bennett, who was not only a United Irishman but a member of its Directorate. Daniel’s interest was academic though, and he was only a passive observer. They were liable to become violent, he thought, and violence had no place in Daniel’s politics. Rebellion and dueling were quite different. The Brothers Sheares had been there too, they who had so horrified him with the bloodstained handkerchief on the boat from France. Daniel sympathised with their aims and objectives, but not with their proposals for achieving them. In this, perhaps because of his experiences in France and England, he was thinking beyond his years. He had no intention whatsoever of involving himself in idiocies like the planned Rebellion, or the activities of fellows like Tone and Tandy. The Sheares were executed after that rebellion next year, the Rebellion of 1798. As, in effect, was Tone. Tandy had more brains, and died an old man in his bed, a French General in France.
Instead, Daniel joined the Lawyers’ Corps of Artillery, a very ‘establishment’ body. This was to offset his United Irishmen sympathies in the public eye – for the public eye was important to him, even then, and he was sure Dublin Castle watched all Catholic law students. Or so he told himself. It was an expensive undertaking, and he very nearly came to grief over it, for the cost of the uniform and equipment was around £20, quite beyond his means. He was sure Hunting Cap would approve and support the endeavour and send him the money, but he made the mistake of not telling Hunting Cap that he had already joined. Hunting Cap however did not approve, feeling, and saying, that Daniel was in Dublin to learn law, not play at soldiers!
For once in his life he was at a complete loss. He could not now change his mind and withdraw without incurring the scorn and derision of his fellows. What a fool he would look! Scoundrel, they would call him. Coward! It might even end in a duel! And the possible end of that didn’t bear thinking on.
In the midst of this crisis he was beset by girls again, or so he said. He had been ‘in love’, as he earnestly believed, with several girls in succession, but at this juncture he was so upset that he wrote in his diary of contemplating suicide over one called Eliza. She may have been a lady of fashion or she may have been a lady of another sort entirely. “Sweet Eliza, let my love for thee weigh in the cup of my sorrows,” he wrote, “Perhaps the time is near when the infusion of so many ingredients may make it strong enough to overpower my reason. There must, assuredly there must, be an exquisite pleasure in madness. Would I was mad! Then, Eliza, I would rave of thee; then should I forget my uncle’s tyranny, the coldness and unfeelingness of his heart, my own aberrations. Would I was quietly in my grave! But what is there to prevent me from going to rest? Unreal mockeries, womanish fears, hence! Do not shake the firmness of my soul.” It was around this time, too, that he formed another close attachment with a lady we know only as ‘Mrs Y’, and he even felt obliged to contribute to her support when it ended. As in fact he was already doing to Mrs M in London
He was still wondering what to do about the Lawyers’ Corps of Artillery when a second letter arrived from Derrynane – Hunting Cap had changed his mind, and sent him the money! It was a good lesson, though, in the distinction between the truth and the whole truth, one he took to heart. So he wrote next day to Hunting Cap, “most humbly and heartily to thank you for the permission… By a change in the dress of the corps, £17 will be sufficient.”
It was in 1797 that Daniel spent the long vacation from June to November with his Uncle at Derrynane. In many ways it was a great tonic and a much needed break, the hunting of hares and the fishing and hiking on the hills, safe out of the political excitements of the big wide world.
But a split was widening between Hunting Cap and himself. Hunting Cap loved entertaining as he understood it, which meant drinking himself and his guests under the table in the manner of an age which was now passing. Daniel had never been able to manage more than three or four glasses of wine without being sick, and so was considered dismal company indeed at Derrynane. And his politics were not to Hunting Cap’s liking either, he now being a pillar of the establishment society, and no longer a smuggler chief. It was by no means a break, but it was a rift, and it saddened them both.
Meanwhile, just before Daniel’s departure from Dublin to Derrynane, General Lake had arrived in far off Ulster with orders to disarm the Defenders. This they did, and were not gentle about it either. It was an age when the cat-o-nine-tails was routinely used in the army and navy, and it was now routinely used in the Irish countryside. A team would arrive and set up the dreaded triangle in the middle of the village, and seize the most shifty looking man they could find, tie him to the triangle, and lay on the lash until his back was bloody and his ribs could be seen. By this time he would normally be screaming out the location of any arms in the village.
It is hard now to distinguish whether this level of cruelty was the result of local bullying by junior officers and non-commissioned officers, or whether it had official sanction. Certainly General Lake seems to have sanctioned it. At first he was junior to the Commander in Chief, General Sir Ralph Abercrombie, a Scot and a career soldier with firm views on army discipline and equally enlightened ones on treatment of the civilian population. But he found himself overruled by the Ascendancy dominated Dublin Castle government, and resigned. “Every crime, every cruelty that could be committed by Cossacks or Colmacks[ii] has been transacted here” he wrote to a friend. He was succeeded by Lake, and the atrocities continued. However by August Ulster was quiet, and martial law was lifted.
Back in Dublin a family called the Segersons cropped up to add some spice to Daniel’s life during those years of study. They were distant cousins, and had represented Hunting Cap’s ‘trading’ interests in France. Daniel had heard that one of them, John, had used some violent language against him in correspondence addressed to Colonel McCarthy of the Irish Brigade. A duel appeared imminent. Dueling was the normal way to settle disputes among gentlemen, and the recipient of an insult was honour bound to call the insulter out. There were rules governing the practice, drawn up in 1777, when delegates met at Clonmel and came up with the Code Duello, a dueling code which became standard in Ireland and in Britain. Much of the Code Duello dealt with how challenges were to be issued and answered. The seconds in a duel were called ‘Friends’, and were usually the same person as he who delivered the message. The message itself was normally a request for clarification of the alleged insult, and the opportunity was often taken at this point to apologise for any offense given. On this occasion, however, the duel never took place and the affair died down, although it was to have repercussions four years later.
Ireland was in many respects a lawless place, quite literally, for there was no effective police force until 1822 when the Royal Irish Constabulary was established. And yet they were an extremely litigious crowd, those Georgian Irish. They fought with their tongues and their pens with great skill. But equally they fought with their swords and their pistols too. It was quite common for two barristers to retire from the courtroom and settle a dispute in this way.
They seem not to have been all that proficient as marksmen, though, because there were far fewer injuries than duels. One such occurred at the Assizes of Waterford when Kelly and Egan fell out over a point of law. They crossed the River Suir in a boat so as to be in a different County, Kilkenny, and were taking their positions when a Justice of the Peace for Kilkenny, a large man by the name of Harry Hayden, interposed himself and instructed them to desist. They told him to remove himself or they would shoot him, and then break every bone in his body. He declared his authority as a Justice of the Peace. They said it would make no difference if he were St. Peter himself. The Justice decided that discretion was the better part of valour, the barristers exchanged shots, missed, and returned to the court. They found, as expected, the bench, jury and spectators quietly waiting to hear if one of them was killed.
There were many, many such occasions. Curran, later Master of the Rolls, and Fitzgibbon, later Lord Chancellor and Earl of Clare, fought with enormous pistols, 12 inches long. Then there was Bully Egan, Chairman of the Dublin Quarter Sessions who fought more duels than anyone, including Kelly of the Waterford story. Scott, later Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench and Earl of Clonmel, fought Lord Tyrawly over his wife and the Earl of Llandaff over his sister, and many others. The list of big name duellists is very long, and includes Grattan and, of course, Daniel O’Connell.
Things were coming to a head in Ireland at the beginning of that momentous year of 1798. Daniel was almost due to be called to the Bar, and in normal times it would have been a formality. But times were not normal, and administrative persecution of all things Catholic was energetic, to say the least. Part of the problem was that Catholicism and Revolution à la Française had become confused in those empty Ascendancy heads, and after Bantry Bay, rebellion was in the air. Daniel was making every effort to distance himself from the rabble rousing body which the United Irishmen had become, and he made a point of calling on the last Catholic peer to be still an intimate in Dublin Castle, Lord Kenmare. But the odium against the Catholics was becoming every day more inveterate. The Chancellor seemed hardly disposed to leave them the privileges which they enjoyed, nor did he conceal his opinion on the subject. So Daniel was deeply concerned that all his work so far was to be frustrated, for unless he was called to the Bar, his wings were clipped. Well and truly clipped.
So it was somewhat to his surprise, and greatly to his relief, that he was called to the Irish Bar on April 26th. 1798, just four months and ten days short of his 23rd. birthday, and took the oath of allegiance in court. He was a Barrister! Although he was already dreaming of greater things, it was a most important first step, marred by the sad news of the death of his brother Maurice in the West Indies. Like so many, he had died of the fever which was coming to be called mal aria, assumed to be carried by the bad air from the marshes there. I’m not sure if that is what they still think, for it’s unknown here in Ireland, but it was certainly a big problem in Lombardia.
In Dublin things were becoming violent. Most of the United Irishmen leaders were arrested and held. And then, just three weeks and two days after Daniel was called to the Bar, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, that liberal noble scion of the Geraldines who led the so-called military wing of the United Irishmen, was arrested. It is quite possible that the Government objective was to deport this very high profile young man, a son of the late Duke of Leinster and a cousin of Charles James Fox, no less. Sadly, he resisted arrest, killing one of the arresting party. He himself received a stab wound in the scuffle, and one report states that he was also shot in the shoulder by the infamous Major Sirr. He died of his injuries in Newgate Prison, Dublin, two weeks later on June 4th., 1798.
Rebellion was in the air in the countryside, too. There were over two dozen battles in Ireland that summer, from Antrim to New Ross. The turning point of what had become in reality a war, albeit a small one, was reached on June 21st. at a hill named Vinegar Hill, and at nearby Enniscorthy. There were 10,000 British troops involved and 20,000 Irish rebels, but the British weaponry was much more sophisticated, particularly in the matter of artillery. It was a decisive defeat for the Irish, and a most discreditable massacre of escaping Irish survivors, mostly women and children, followed. But the bulk of the Irish troops escaped, and carried on a guerrilla war until the end of the year.
During that guerrilla war the French arrived. A force under General Humbert arrived at Killala Bay, in the north-west, in Mayo. This was about as far away as possible from either Wexford in the south-east where the Irish rebel support was strongest, or the Wicklow mountains in the east where many had fled. And there were only eleven hundred or so French, and it was August, two months after Vinegar Hill.
It was too little and too late from the Irish perspective, but it was a brave little show while it lasted. There was one significant battle at Castlebar from which the English ran so fast that the Irish dubbed it ‘the Races of Castlebar’. There was only one possible outcome, and the French and Irish fought the last battle of the campaign at a place named Ballinamuck in County Longford. The French surrender was accepted, but the Irish were mostly slaughtered. As the London Times put it: ‘In these operations described by Cornwallis to the Duke of Portland as a short but very fatiguing campaign, a raiding party of 1,000 French landed in Ireland without opposition, after sixteen days of navigation, unobserved by the British Navy; defeated and drove back the British troops opposing them on four separate occasions; routed a force of second line troops of at least double its strength; captured eleven British guns; held the field for seventeen days; entirely occupied the attention of all the available troops of a garrison of Ireland 100,000 strong; penetrated almost to the centre of the island, and compelled the Lord Lieutenant to send an urgent requisition to London for as great a reinforcement as possible.’
The French party under Humbert had in fact been only one of three, but the other two were both stillborn. One was wrecked off the coast of Donegal and the other was intercepted by a British squadron in Lough Swilly, also in Donegal. Wolfe Tone came with that one, and was captured, tried, condemned, and committed suicide while waiting to be hanged. It was November 19th., 1798. He was just 35. There was a little known fourth, too, supposedly led by the Protestant Dubliner and one of the founders of the United Irishman, Napper Tandy. They arrived at Inishmacadam, or Rutland Island as it had been renamed, with supplies for Humbert. They landed and set up a camp, but finding that Humbert had by this time been beaten, they packed up and left again. That was to be the last invasion of Ireland.
Before all that happened, back in the spring, Daniel became involved in the unrest in Dublin, albeit peripherally. He had interfered to save the life of a defenceless man who was being cut down by a bloodthirsty member of the Attorneys’ Corps. Daniel rushed to the man’s rescue and caught the sword-slash with the barrel of his musket. The sergeant of his own Lawyers’ Corps, a future Recorder of Cork, happened to arrive on the scene, and only just prevented an armed fight between the two young lawyer-yeomen. It was symptomatic of the air of tension which was becoming all pervading. Rebellion was expected hourly, when, out of the blue, the Lord Lieutenant Lord Camden declared martial law, and all business in the law courts was suspended. With no law courts working, barristers were of course superfluous. Dublin was clearly no place for Daniel anyhow, unless he wished to take up arms. Which he didn’t. A foolish vanity, he thought.
Daniel had lodgings in Trinity Place, an alleyway in a respectable area just a few hundred yards from St. Stephen’s Green. He had got to know that invaluable acquaintance for all struggling law students, a grocer and cheese-monger, a man named Murray with premises just round the corner, in South Great George Street. In the words of his son Peter, “I well remember Mr. O’Connell, one night at my father’s house during the spring of 1798, so carried away by the political excitement of the day, and by the ardour of his innate patriotism, calling for a prayer-book to swear in some zealous young men as United Irishmen at a meeting of the body in a neighbouring street…..My father, although an Irishman of advanced liberal views and strong patriotism, was not a United Irishman, and endeavoured, but without effect, to deter his young and gifted friend from the rash course in which he seemed embarked. Dublin was in an extremely disturbed state, and the outburst of a bloody insurrection seemed hourly imminent. My father resolved to exert to the uttermost the influence which it was well known he possessed over his young friend. He made him accompany him to the canal bridge at Leeson Street, and after an earnest conversation, succeeded in persuading the future Liberator to step into a turf boat which was then leaving Dublin. That night my father’s house was searched by Major Sirr, accompanied by the Attorneys’ Corps of yeomanry, who pillaged it to their hearts’ content. There can be no doubt that private information of O’Connell’s tendencies and haunts had been communicated to the Government.”
Years later Daniel told his Secretary, Mr. O’Neill Daunt, that it was a potato boat bound for Courtmasherry, and that he and seventeen others had taken passage in her as normal travel within Ireland was disrupted. He never mentioned the incident with Mr. Murray! Whatever, by boat he went, and in due course to Cork or Courtmasherry. From either one, to his father’s house it was a day’s ride, most of the way along the butter road to the west. His stay was intended as a holiday, away from the tribulations of the big wide world. It did in fact start as a holiday, but after a few weeks he caught a chill when out shooting in the hills above Carhen. The cold turned to something worse, old Dr. Moriarty was called, and he was in bed for several weeks, at death’s door they told him later.
But he was not destined to die then. “It was occasioned” he said, “by sleeping in wet clothes. I had dried them upon me at a peasant’s fire, and drank three glasses of whisky, after which I fell asleep. The next day I hunted, was soon weary, and fell asleep in a ditch under sunshine”.
So he was in no condition to take in the momentous events of which news eventually reached them, the rising in Wexford, the battle at Vinegar Hill, General Lake’s adventures, General Humbert’s landing, the Races of Castlebar, Napper Tandy’s invasion, Wolfe Tone’s capture and suicide – all that passed him by. Kerry and Cork were unaffected by the troubles that year. Having seen what happened to the last French attempt at landing in Bantry Bay, they kept out of it. By the time Daniel recovered, peace of a sort had returned to Ireland, the Law had started working again, and so he prepared to leave Carhen to go off circuiteering.
It was at four o’clock on a fine sunny morning that Daniel left on horseback. His young brother John came part of the way with him, and how Daniel envied him when he turned off the road to hunt among the mountains, while Daniel had to enter on what he called ‘the drudgery of my profession’! But they parted. Daniel had left home at such an early hour that he was in Tralee, forty miles away, at half-past twelve. From Tralee he could have taken a post-chaise[iii], but they were so poorly maintained by their owners, two characters known as Davy Dog and Jack Hackney, and the roads were so poor, that it could take six or seven hours to reach Listowel. So he got his horse fed in Tralee and, thinking it was as well to push on, he remounted and took the road to Tarbert another thirty miles on, by the Shannon estuary. But a few miles beyond Tralee a shower of rain drove him under a bridge for shelter. While he was there the rain sent a family friend, Robert Hickson, also under the bridge. He saluted Daniel, and asked where he was going. Daniel answered,
“To Tarbert”.
“Why so late?” said Hickson.
“I am not late” said Daniel; “I have been up since four o’clock this morning.”
“Why, where do you come from?”
“From Carhen.” Hickson looked astonished, for the distance was nearly forty Irish miles[iv]. But he expressed his warm approval of Daniel’s zealous activity.
“You’ll do, young gentleman!” said he: “I see you’ll do.” Hickson was a popular man, in spite of having turned Protestant to save his property, a not uncommon stratagem. He was High Sherriff of Kerry twice in that guise, but when the penal restrictions were relaxed he reverted to Catholicism to save his soul in the next world, having taken the precaution of ensuring that his possessions in this world were safe.
Daniel then rode on and got to Tarbert about five in the afternoon, near seventy Irish miles from Carhen. He must have had a lot of stamina in those days, because he was invited to a Ball in Tarbert by an old friend, Ralph Marshall, and was up until two in the morning, dancing! He arose the next day at half-past eight, and rode to the Limerick assizes, thirty three miles further.
At the Tralee assizes of the same circuit another family friend, James Connor, gave him a brief. In fact he gave him most of his briefs that first year. On this occasion Daniel was Junior in a Defence team led by the famous Jerry Keller, and found himself faced with cross-examining a prosecution witness. Instead of passing the task to his Senior as was perhaps more usual, he decided to take it on himself.
“Were you not after taking a drop when this happened?”
“Sartainly, I took a drop that day.”
“How much might the drop have consisted of – a glass?”
“Yes, I drank a glass of spirits, surely”
“Maybe, if you recall, you took a second?”
“Well, I suppose I took as good as two”
“Come, man, did not you take as good as three that day?”
“I don’t know. Faith, maybe I did.”
“Now, sir, on your solemn oath, did you not drink a pint of whiskey before you saw these men a-fighting?”
“I took my share of it.”
“Was not your share all but the pewter?” he asked.
The witness confessed that it was, which brought the house down. Everyone laughed. And those that mattered, remembered. His Senior, Jerry Keller, unwittingly repeating the phrase used by Robert Hickson under the bridge, said to him,
“You’ll do, young gentleman! You’ll do”. He was to remember that phrase all his life. Curiously, Jerry Keller was another ‘convert’ to the Protestant Church, in his case also to allow advancement at the Bar.
Another of James Connor’s briefs next year gave him some notoriety for a while, too. By an odd coincidence, his client was the same Captain Whitwell Butler who had caught his father and old Hunting Cap in the act of smuggling when Daniel was a little boy. His brief now was to represent Whitwell at a Commission of Enquiry to be held in the Jury Room in Tralee, and so it was perhaps not all that surprising that the ‘Memorialist’, the person making the allegation against Captain Butler, was Daniel’s cousin Segerson.
During the enquiry he had to cross-examine his cousin, and his examination was so vigorous that Segerson jumped up and called Daniel a ‘purse-proud blockhead’.
Daniel responded, “In the first place I have no purse to be proud of; and, secondly, if I be a blockhead, it is better for you, as I am Counsel against you. However, to save you the trouble of saying so again, I’ll administer a slight rebuke.”
Before the President of the court could interfere, Daniel seized the judicial cane and whacked his cousin with it. This of course led to the challenge which had been evaded four years earlier in Dublin, but it was not to be. Perhaps characteristically, Segerson sent word that he had discovered that Daniel’s was one of the lives involved in a valuable lease, and under the circumstances he could not afford to shoot him, unless Daniel first insured his life for Segerson’s benefit! It was laughable, but it was a long case and earned Daniel a very welcome 104 guineas.
As the circuit ended in Cork, Daniel and another lawyer on the western Circuit who was quite well known at the time, Harry Deane Grady, decided to ‘post’ to Dublin together – take a post-chaise. It was not without its dangers, that journey in 1800. Quite apart from the terrible roads, the route took them through areas where the erstwhile rebel combatants from the 1798 rebellion were still hiding out, including the notorious Willie Brennan, living essentially as highwaymen. One particularly active party was hiding out in the Kilworth Mountains which straddle the road from Cork to Thurles, and through which they had to pass. The town of Fermoy is just to the south of the mountains, and Daniel and Harry had stopped at the Inn there that evening, and were having a drink in the bar room. They were discussing the next leg of their journey and how they might acquire some more ammunition for their pistols, hard to come by in Fermoy, when four dragoons walked in.
“The soldiers would be able to help us, I’m sure” said Harry, “wait till I have a word with them.” With which he approached one of them, a corporal who appeared to be in charge.
“Soldier, will you sell me some powder and ball?”
“Sir, I don’t sell powder,” replied the corporal, who resented the attitude of this well dressed fellow, and was offended and being called ‘soldier’. He was after all a corporal.
“Will you then have the goodness to buy me some?” said Grady; “in these unsettled times the dealers in the article are reluctant to sell it to strangers like us.”
“Sir” replied the corporal, I am no man’s messenger but the king’s – go yourself.”
“Grady,” muttered Daniel, “you have made a mistake. Did you not see the mark on his sleeve that the man is a corporal? You mortified his pride in calling him a soldier, especially before his own men, amongst whom he doubtless plays the officer.”
So some time later when a few jars had gone down a few throats at the soldiers’ table, Daniel struck up a conversation:
“Did you ever see such rain as we had today, Sergeant? I was very glad that the regulars had not the trouble of escorting the judges. It was very suitable work for those awkward yeomen.”
“Yes, indeed Sir” said the Corporal, happy and being called a Sergeant, “we were very lucky in escaping those torrents of rain”.
“Perhaps, sergeant, you will have the kindness,” continued Daniel, “to buy me some powder and ball in town. We are to pass the Kilworth mountains, and shall want ammunition. You can, of course, find no difficulty in buying – it is not to everyone they sell these matters.”
“Sir” said the corporal, “I shall have great pleasure in requesting your acceptance of a small supply of powder and ball. My balls will, I think, just fit your pistols. You’ll stand in need of ammunition, for there are some of those outlying rebelly rascals on the mountains.”
Daniel thanked the Corporal profusely and returned to his table.
“Dan”, murmured Harry, “You’ll go through the world successfully, that much I can see”.
And he did.
Paddington Village outside London, 1820.
[i] The practice requiring Irish Barristers to eat dinners in both England and Ireland was to continue until 1885. The practice of eating dinners in this way in England continues today in a modified form – to qualify as a barrister, each student has to undertake 12 “qualifying sessions” which can include acting in mock trials, residential weekends and other events, as well as dinners.
[ii] Tartars.
[iii] The post-chaise was a fast carriage for ‘travelling post’ in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It usually had a closed body on four wheels, sat two to four persons, and was drawn by two or four horses. The driver, especially when there was no coachman, rode postillion on the near horse of a pair or of one of the pairs attached to the post-chaise.
[iv] An Irish Mile is 2,240 yards, longer than an English mile which is 1,760 yards. America uses English miles.
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