The Rebels of Ireland (42 page)

Pincher stared at him in stupefaction.

“The difference, young man,” he thundered, “is that we are right.”

Since leaving Trinity, Pincher thought, young Faithful was getting impertinent. But Pincher was profoundly shocked that he should even think such a thing.

Some of the civil ideas of the army men were just as bad. One group of these insolent fellows had started a new and hideous argument. According to them, all men were equal. Levellers, these vil
lains called themselves. Their ideas varied, but they wanted all men to have the right to choose their government, and some of the most extreme were even questioning the right of men to own private property. So appalled was Doctor Pincher by what he heard that he even wrote to Barnaby about it.

“These Levellers,” his nephew wrote back, “are dangerous and ungodly men.” They would be dealt with, Barnaby assured him, in due course. But every report reaching Dublin suggested that the number of Levellers was increasing.

And if Doctor Pincher was alarmed by the radical spirit of the Roundhead army, he was not alone. All over Britain, as that year progressed, people were beginning to ask: did these soldiers recognise no authority but their own? Was power only to be maintained by the sword? “Are we to exchange King Charles's tyranny for an even worse one?” In Scotland especially, the Presbyterians looked at the army's religious independence and did not like what they saw.

In Dublin, Doctor Pincher spent an uncomfortable winter, afflicted with chilblains. The spring of 1648 came, but still he felt depressed.

And then an astounding series of events occurred. All over England, people started rising for the king—not because they liked him, which they didn't, but because they had no wish to be ruled by the army. Even some of the ships of the royal navy mutinied. In Scotland, one of the great lords was gathering a Royalist army. Lord Ormond, with the help of the queen, who was in Paris, and King Charles's son, a gangling but cunning youth also called Charles, had agents active in Ireland. For the Catholic Confederation, Lord Inchiquin now declared firmly that he was for the king. Within a month the Supreme Council had met, voted out the Nuncio, and declared for King Charles also. Only Owen Roe O'Neill held out. It seemed that the Civil War was about to be fought all over again.

So distressed was poor Doctor Pincher that twice in one week he took to his bed, to be ministered to by Tidy's wife, who brought him healing broth.

Only a letter from Barnaby gave him any comfort.

 

I am with General Cromwell now. He is not only our finest commander, but a wise, kindly and godly man. He is strong in the Lord. And he will deal firmly with the Royalists and the levellers alike, I promise you.

 

Though he had heard a good deal of this rising general, Pincher had not been especially impressed. The man sounded solid enough. A Member of Parliament who had turned soldier, Cromwell had inherited large estates and was a wealthy man in his own right. As a rich squire, Cromwell would have no patience with the social ideas of the Levellers. But his religious ideas were less clear. He had grown so close to his men that Pincher was not sure he was a Presbyterian at all. Certainly, he'd lent his name to one pamphlet which had argued for religious independence. Pincher had read it with disgust.

As the weeks went by, however, Cromwell's generalship could not be disputed. As the main Parliamentary forces ground down the Royalist risings on the eastern side of England, Cromwell stormed up the west, from Wales to Scotland, and every opponent he met was smashed by the iron hammer of his battle-hardened troops. By autumn, it was all over. The Roundhead army had won.

And now the army had had enough. Sweeping down into London and finding a large part of the Presbyterian Parliament men still trying to negotiate with King Charles, they kicked them out and announced: “We'll try King Charles after Christmas.”

In January 1649, the trial took place. At the end of the month, they executed him. In the weeks that followed, the monarchy and the hereditary House of Lords were abolished, a Council of State was chosen, and England was declared a Commonwealth.

It was an extraordinary business. To execute a king, with all the forms of legality: such a thing had never been done before. The world was turned upside down, and Pincher was not at all sure he liked it. But he also noticed before long that Cromwell, who increasingly
dominated the Council, was taking quite a conservative line. He'd even been reluctant to execute the king, according to Barnaby. Sound Presbyterian gentlemen were being brought back into the Parliament; the army radicals were being quietly ignored. Having given them the head of the king, Cromwell was returning England to a state of normalcy. Perhaps, Pincher dared to hope, Cromwell could provide a godly order in Ireland, too.

For at Easter that year came the letter from Barnaby that Doctor Pincher had been living for.

 

Cromwell is to come to Ireland. He will come this summer. And I shall be coming with him.

 

Several parties of men had arrived at the camp that day. From his position on the slope, O'Byrne observed the small group of horsemen as they came up the track below, but he paid them no special attention.

The August sun was hot on his face. It was midafternoon. In the distance lay the walls and steeples of Dublin. To the right, clearly visible through the slight haze, he could see the soft blue waters of Dublin Bay. Here on the slopes of Rathmines, a few miles south of the capital, thousands of men were waiting, just as they had waited all day before. They were waiting for Cromwell. O'Byrne turned to the young soldier standing beside him.

“Go and see who those men were that just arrived,” he said. He didn't really care, but the youth had been getting restive and it would give him something to do.

The armies waiting to confront Oliver Cromwell as he sailed to Ireland were a strange collection. For a start, they were partly Protestant. Overall command was in the hands of Protestant Lord Ormond, who had returned to the island now on behalf of the late king's son. The troops he had gathered at Rathmines today contained a large number of Old English Catholics, but many Protestants also. Also in the Royalist coalition, Lord Inchiquin the Irish
Protestant had added his forces from Munster. And up in eastern Ulster, the coalition had been joined by an army of Ulster Scots who, as Presbyterians, had declared themselves the enemies of the religious independents of Cromwell's army. Only the main army of native Irish had failed to join the coalition, because Owen Roe O'Neill was still holding out, in splendid isolation, in western Ulster. Altogether, Lord Ormond had over fourteen thousand men.

And the coalition was formidable. They had already boxed in Owen Roe O'Neill up in Ulster. The Parliamentary garrison in Dublin was now pinned down again. And Lord Inchiquin had surprised everyone by sweeping up from the south and taking over the fortified port of Drogheda, the gateway to Ulster, and then nearly all the Ulster strongholds except Derry. Just recently, a squadron of Royalist ships had come to Ireland's southern coast, where, together with the local privateers, they hoped to harass Cromwell's fleet.

Ormond had chosen his position well. If Cromwell landed in the south, Ormond blocked his path to Dublin. If Cromwell's fleet sailed into Dublin Bay, their ships would be in range of the artillery that Ormond had placed on the coast nearby.

Yet as Brian O'Byrne gazed down at the camp on the slopes below him, he had only one question to ask himself: why was he here?

He scarcely knew. His wife and son were with her family, in the relative safety of Ulster for the moment. He'd been up at Rathconan only days ago, and wished he were back up there now, skulking and trying to stay out of trouble. There was nothing fine about war: he'd seen enough to know that. If he had to fight, he'd sooner have been with Owen Roe O'Neill. But he'd made too many commitments to the Confederates and his wife's relations now. He must fight with them, even if his heart wasn't in it.

Nor was the reluctance only on his side. For the greatest opposition to the coming of Cromwell to Ireland had already come from another quarter entirely: Cromwell's own troops.

It was the Leveller element, of course. But this was just a matter of radical individuals: whole companies, entire regiments of his
iron-willed model army, had refused to serve in Ireland. Cromwell had threatened, he had cajoled, but his faithful English soldiers would not come. They had refused for several reasons. Some had demanded their back pay; others wanted political reforms in England. But the most powerful argument advanced, which came from soldiers in all ranks, was the most astounding.

“A man's religion is a matter of personal conscience,” they said. “Why should we force the Irish to be Protestants?”

Nobody had ever heard such an argument before. Rulers, from personal cynicism or for political reasons, might sometimes tolerate other religions within their realm—though, of course, a Catholic king would know that his Protestant subjects were bound for hellfire, just as the Protestant communities knew the same about the Catholics. But no political body, since the days when the Roman Empire had made Christianity the state religion, had ever supposed that a man's church could be a purely private matter, of no business to anyone but himself. The idea was shocking both in its novelty and its blinding simplicity. And even to a sympathetic army general like Cromwell—who was disposed to allow that the Protestant revelation might be celebrated in different ways by the congregations—to suggest that the great evil of Catholicism could be treated as if it were just another godly sect, and that the great divide between Catholic and Protestant could be ignored, was anathema.

But although Cromwell and his fellow generals had moved swiftly to crush the Leveller mutinies, he was still obliged to allow numerous companies of English soldiers to go home, because they could not see why the Irish should be forced to be Protestants.

And as O'Byrne gazed sadly at the encampment below, and considered the blood that had been shed during even his own short life in religion's cause, he shook his head and allowed himself to wonder whether, perhaps, those heretic English mutineers might even have had a point.

The young fellow he had sent to check on the new arrivals came riding back.

“A party from Fingal came to join us. All Catholics. I heard one was a Dublin man named Smith.”

“Smith?” O'Byrne's face creased into a smile. “Did you say Smith?” His sadness was forgotten. “It's young Mwirish,” he cried happily, and began to ride down the slope.

So he was greatly surprised, having ridden through the camp, to find himself face-to-face not with Maurice at all, but his father.

Something had happened to Walter Smith. He had changed. Not to look at. He was still the same stout family man with balding grey hair that he had been before. But something had happened to him, and he was changed within. That was how it seemed to O'Byrne as they sat by the campfire that evening.

The merchant had not been especially pleased to see O'Byrne, though he must have known that the Irishman might be in Ormond's camp. He appeared to accept O'Byrne's presence as another fact of nature, like the weather, in an existence which, after a lifetime of seeking order, he had now ceased trying to control. And so when, out of courtesy, O'Byrne had invited him to eat at his tent that evening, Walter had nodded briefly and answered: “As you wish.” So now, as they ate, O'Byrne gave him a good account of the military state of affairs, the strength of the various parts of Ormond's forces, and the likely tactics if they engaged Cromwell's army.

That afternoon, Ormond had decided to place a forward battery right down at the mouth of the Liffey. But the battery would be dangerously close to the Dublin defenders, and as dusk fell, he prepared to send a large contingent, some fifteen hundred men, to secure the position first, under cover of darkness.

“It's an excellent move,” O'Byrne told Walter, as they saw the men gathering to leave. “A battery there could wreak horrible damage on Cromwell's ships if he tries to sail into Dublin.”

For his part, O'Byrne was eager to learn the latest news of his friend Orlando, of young Maurice, and of the household in Fingal
where the Smith family was still living. Walter confirmed that young Maurice was now running the family's business affairs, although trading was not easy. He was often impatient, and had wanted to come and fight with Ormond; only the fact that the family needed him had kept him at home. Anne was well, but suffered from a stiffness in her joints. The person who had been most ill at ease, it soon became clear, was Walter himself.

O'Byrne could imagine it. Walter did not say so in so many words, for neither of them wished to refer to the matter that lay between them, but O'Byrne could imagine it all too well.

The barn, the outbuildings, the house itself, all filled with Protestant soldiers. That would have been bad enough. But to be crammed in close, as a permanent guest in his brother-in-law's house—no matter how much Walter and Orlando liked each other—must have increased the strain. And then, to be sharing rooms each day with a family that included the simple boy, Daniel, the ever-living reminder to all of them—except Maurice, who knew nothing—of his humiliation…For myself, thought O'Byrne, I couldn't have borne it.