The Rebels of Ireland (82 page)

As for the situation of Trinity, it was unrivalled.

For by now, after St. Petersburg, Dublin was the most splendid Roman capital in northern Europe. The great courtyards and buildings of Trinity itself were magnificent; step out of the main gate onto College Green, and the grandeur of the Parliament building greeted you immediately opposite. Past that, Dame Street led past the theatre towards the Castle and the Royal Exchange, another fine, classical structure. Stroll a few yards to the banks of the Liffey, and there, just across the stream, stretched the imposing façade of the completed Custom House. Look upstream, and your eye would rest upon the rotunda and dome of the Four Courts. And all around, on both sides of the water, the wide streets and squares of Georgian Dublin spread, in their gracious assemblage, beside the harbour and under the timeless gaze of the Wicklow Mountains.

Professors and politicians, government officials and lawyers, clergymen, merchants, actors, fashionable gentlemen and ladies, they all converged on the area round College Green, and the Trinity College men were in the centre of it all. There was no better place to attend university in the world.

From time to time he would catch sight of his father coming
from the Parliament. Two or three times, his grandmother Georgiana came to see him. She would walk round the college with him. If they encountered any of his professors or acquaintances, she would ask him to introduce them; and it was obvious that her reputation preceded her, for even those of his fellows who usually avoided him seemed to smile when they saw the rich and kindly old Lady Mountwalsh.

Unfortunately, there were quite a lot of people who avoided him.

Not all the undergraduates had clear political opinions—about half of them, he guessed. He wasn't sure he had himself. But the two most fashionable camps were those who supported the French Revolution and its ideals, and those who opposed it. These were the great questions argued over at the Historical Society, as the university's debating club was known, where arguments were passionate and, this being Ireland, eloquence was prized. It had become the fashion for those who most passionately espoused the revolutionary cause to follow the example of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and crop their hair short. “Croppies,” their conservative opponents contemptuously called them. With most of the students, however, their affiliation was not so obvious.

But as the weeks went by, he began to realise that there was an easy way of telling where someone's sympathies lay: if they were revolutionaries, they avoided him. In the end, he decided to ask Robert Emmet about it.

Despite the embarrassing incident at his grandparents' house, Emmet had been very kind, sought him out when he first arrived, and shown him around. Every week or two he'd have William round to his rooms, and he'd introduced him to a few pleasant fellows. When they were alone, he'd always talk to William in a very easy way, and even share personal confidences. “I'm still foolishly shy sometimes,” he might confess; or, smiling ruefully at his hands: “Why do I bite my fingernails?” William noticed, however, that he always kept these confidences to trivial things. If ever William introduced any subject that might lead to a philosophical or political
discussion, Emmet would deflect him with some light remark and turn the conversation to another topic. Nonetheless, towards the end of November, he did manage to pin him down on this question, when he asked him bluntly: “Emmet, why do so many people avoid me?”

“Well,” Emmet had responded after a pause, “why do you think it is?”

“I suppose they think that, because Lord Mountwalsh is my father, I must share his political views.”

“And do you share your father's views?”

“I don't know,” William answered honestly.

Emmet regarded him curiously.

“You're telling the truth, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to know what they really think? They think you're a spy. Anything they say to you will go back to your father, and from him, straight to the Castle and the Troika.”

William blushed and looked down.

“I see.” He sighed. “And do you think that of me? Do you imagine I would do anything so low?”

“I don't know. You can't blame us,” he added.

“No.” He nodded sadly. He couldn't. “I'd rather die than be a spy,” he burst out miserably. “What shall I do?”

“Nothing,” his friend sensibly replied. “If you try to prove you aren't a spy, that will only make people more suspicious. You'll just have to be patient.”

And so William went about his business as quietly as he could; and then the Christmas season came, and he spent some time at home. He still didn't know what he thought about the great political questions, and he wasn't intending to think about them over Christmas when, two days before the day itself, his father came hurrying back to the house.

“It's beginning,” he cried. “I knew it would. The French have arrived. In Cork. The French fleet's been seen in Bantry Bay.”

History furnishes many tantalizing moments—turning points when, had it not been for some chance condition, the course of future events might have changed entirely. The arrival, on 22 December 1796, of the French fleet in sight of Bantry Bay, at the south-western tip of Ireland, is one of them.

God knows, the idea that the French might invade Ireland was nothing new. During the course of the eighteenth century, as the British Empire had found itself sometimes the ally but more often the enemy of France, the fear that the French might try to stir up trouble by sending troops to Ireland had come and gone many times. But now it had actually happened.

And the results of Wolfe Tone's efforts in France had been remarkable. So well had he impressed the Directory who governed the new, revolutionary republic that they had sent not a token contingent but a fleet of forty-three ships, carrying fifteen thousand troops. Equally important, the ships also carried arms—for forty-five thousand men. And perhaps most important of all, they were under the command of a general, named Hoche, who was the rival of the republic's rising star, Napoleon Bonaparte. If he could take Ireland, Hoche might eclipse the upstart Bonaparte entirely.

But the fates, that winter, with or without reason, had decided to deny the French general his chance of immortality. As the fleet made its way into the northern seas, it encountered veils of mist which soon enveloped it; the mist grew ever thicker, until half the fleet lost its way. Those who continued towards Ireland were met with gales, and by the time they came within sight of Bantry Bay, it was impossible to land. Day after day, Wolfe Tone gazed through the spray at the distant Irish hills, rolling and dipping tantalizingly upon the horizon. He even persuaded the captain of his vessel to make a run towards land, but the others would not follow him, and at last, on the fifth day, the fleet sailed away. Had the weather been better, and had so large a force landed, they might have been successful. But as
it was, the forces of nature had preserved the Protestant Ascendancy that Christmas season, and the men in Dublin Castle were not slow to claim that they saw in this the hand of God.

The French invasion had failed. Yet when the news of Bantry Bay reached Rathconan, Conall was not downhearted. Quite the reverse: he felt a sense of elation.

“I never thought they'd come,” he confessed to Deirdre. And late in January, when he paid a visit to Patrick in Dublin, he learned that he was not alone.

“They have come once. They will surely come again,” Patrick told him. “The effect upon people is remarkable. Now that they see there is hope, men in every county are coming forward. By summer, we shall have an army of men right across Ireland, ready to rise. The only difficulty,” he added, “is how to arm them.”

Though the legislation of '93 had taken away the absolute ban, Catholics had been forbidden to own arms for a century; muskets and pistols were hard to come by.

“We'll do our best,” Conall had promised him. And on his return to Rathconan, he had received help from a rather unexpected quarter.

For when he had mentioned this problem to Finn O'Byrne, the shaggy-haired little fellow had nodded eagerly, and a few days later had appeared at the door of Conall's cottage proudly bearing a bundle wrapped in a blanket.

It was a remarkable collection: an old ploughshare, two scythes, an axe head, even an old metal breastplate.

“What do you want to do with them, Finn?” Conall asked.

“Find a good blacksmith. Melt them. Make them into pikes. You're a carpenter. You could make the shafts.”

“That's true.”

“There'll be more,” Finn promised. And hardly a week went by without the fellow turning up with some piece of scrap metal he'd scavenged from the area. It was extraordinary what he could find.
Sometimes these items could be used, sometimes not; but every month, when Conall made his run down to Wicklow, he would take the scrap metal with his furniture and deliver it to a blacksmith in the town. By the summer, there were thirty pikes secreted in half a dozen hiding places around Rathconan.

But if the threat from France had brought a new hope to the United Irishmen and their friends, it also had two other effects.

Wolfe Tone and his friends might be happy to cooperate with the Catholics for the sake of a new and tolerant state, but there were still many Ulster Presbyterians of the old school who were outraged by such a collusion with papists—who, after all, were still agents of the Antichrist. To combat this growth of papist influence, they had recently begun to form their own secret associations, which, in memory of good King Billie, they called Orange lodges. With the growing threat of invasion, these lodges were spreading even beyond the enclaves of Ulster.

Of more concern to Conall, however, was the other development. For this was local. Though their British troops and Irish militia drilled in the garrison towns like Wicklow and Wexford, the Troika wanted something more. And so a third force had been set up.

“They call them Yeomanry,” Conall remarked. “I call them bandits.”

The purpose of the Yeomanry was to act as a local presence, something between a police force and a vigilante group. Their character and discipline depended on the local gentlemen who recruited and led them. They were manned, almost entirely, by Protestants. Budge's younger son Jonah commanded the force that covered the area between Rathconan and Wicklow. As Rathconan was frequently visited by Arthur Budge now, and his old father, though walking a little stiffly nowadays, still kept a sharp eye on the place, there was little reason for Jonah Budge and his Yeomen to trouble the quiet of the hamlet much. But it meant that there were more eyes that might be watching, and Conall was always afraid that he might be stopped and searched on his way down to Wicklow.

The spring passed without incident. The work continued quietly through the summer. In August that year, he went to Dublin to see his children for two days. He visited both his sons and stayed with Patrick and Brigid. The night before he returned, John MacGowan came round and the three men talked together for some hours. The mood was cautious, but Patrick was optimistic.

“Lord Edward estimates that by the end of the year we shall have half a million men in Ireland who have taken the oath,” he told them. Since taking an oath to support the United Irishmen was now a criminal offence, this was a remarkable figure. But even if the figure was high, it suggested an entirely new level of commitment to the cause. “When the French come next time, so many will rise that no English force will be able to do anything at all.”

MacGowan was less sanguine.

“The English are equally determined to crush us before that happens,” he said. Certainly, a British army under a brutal commander named Lake was scouring Ulster in search of troublemakers, Presbyterian or Catholic. “They are terrifying Ulster,” he continued. “In one family I know, the Laws, two have been arrested, and one of those, a respectable man, was flogged. Some of the Belfast men are having second thoughts. And it will be our turn next.”