Part 26

“Hollo! hollo! hollo! Captain, and brave boys,” cried Attorney Potterton: “I’ve got a lad sure enough; and though he has no arms about him, there can be no doubt but they lie hid in the corn: so his guilt is proved; and I never saw a fellow a more proper example to make in the neighbourhood!” In this idea all coincided. But what was to be done to legalize his death and burial, was a query. A drum-head court-martial was very properly mentioned by the captain; but on considering that they had no drum to try him on, they were at a considerable puzzle, till Mr. Malony declared “that he had seen a couple of gentlemen hanged in Dublin on Bloody-bridge a few days before, without any trial, and that by martial law no trial was then necessary for hanging of any body.” This suggestion was unanimously agreed to, and the rebel was ordered to be immediately executed on an old leafless tree, (which was at the corner of the field, just at their possession,) called in Ireland a rampike.

It was, however, thought but a proper courtesy to learn from the malefactor himself _whom_ they were to hang. He protested an innocence, that no loyal man in those times could give any credit to; he declared that he was Dan Delany, a well-known brogue-maker at Glan Malour; that he was going to Dublin for leather; but the whisky was too many for him, and he lay down to sleep it off when their hands waked him. “Nonsense!” said the whole troop, “he’ll make a most beneficial example!”

Nothing now was wanting but a rope, a couple of which the bailiff had fortunately put into his coat-case for a magistrate near Rathfarnan, as there were no ropes there the strength of which could be depended upon, if rebels happened to be fat and weighty, or hanged in couples.

This was most fortunate; and all parties lent a hand at preparing the cravat for Mr. Dan Delany, brogue-maker. Mr. Walker happened to be the most active in setting the throttler, so as to ensure no failure. All was arranged; the rebel was slung cleverly over the rampike; but Mr. Walker, perceiving that the noose did not run glib enough, rode up to settle it about the neck so as to put Mr. Delany out of pain, when, most unfortunately, his own fist slipped inadvertently into the noose, and, whilst endeavouring to extricate himself, his charger got a smart kick with the rowels, which, like all other horses, considering as an order to proceed, he very expertly slipped from under Attorney Walker, who was fast, and left him dangling in company with his friend the brogue-maker, one by the head, and the other by the fist; and as the rope was of the best manufacture, it kept both fast and clear from the ground, swinging away with some grace and the utmost security.

The beast being thus freed from all constraint, thought the best thing he could do was to gallop home to his own stable (if he could find the way to it), and so set out with the utmost expedition, kicking up behind, and making divers vulgar noises, as if he was ridiculing his master’s misfortune.

He was, however, stopped on the road, and sent home to Dublin, with an intimation that Captain Ferns and all the troop were cut off near Rathfarnan; and this melancholy intelligence was published, with further particulars, in a second edition of the Dublin Evening Post, two hours after the arrival of Mr. Walker’s charger in the metropolis.

Misfortunes never come alone. The residue of the troop in high spirits had cantered on a little. The kind offices of Mr. Walker to Mr. Delany being quite voluntary, _they_ had not noticed his humanity; and, on his roaring out to the very extent of his lungs, and the troop turning round, as the devil would have it, another tree intercepted the view of Mr. Walker, so that they perceived a very different object.—“Captain, Captain,” cried out four or five of the troop, all at once, “Look there! look there!” and there did actually appear several hundred men, attended by a crowd of women and children, approaching them by the road on which the rebel had been apprehended. There was no time to be lost; and a second heat of the horse-race immediately took place, but without waiting to be started, as on the former occasion; and this course being rather longer than the last, led them totally out of sight of Messrs. Walker and Delany.

The attorney and rebel had in the mean time enjoyed an abundance of that swing-swang exercise which so many professors of law, physic, and divinity practised pending the Irish insurrection; nor was there the slightest danger of their pastime being speedily interrupted, as Captain Ferns’ troop, being flanked by above three hundred rebels, considered that the odds were too tremendous to hold out any hopes of a victory: of course a retrograde movement was considered imperative, and they were necessitated, as often happens after boasted victories, to leave Messrs. Walker and Delany twirling about in the string, like a pair of fowls under a bottle-jack.

But notwithstanding they were both in close and almost inseparable contact, they seemed to enjoy their respective situations with a very different demeanour.

The unpleasant sensations of Mr. Delany had for a considerable time subsided into a general tranquillity, nor did his manner in the slightest degree indicate any impatience or displeasure at being so long detained in company with the inveterate solicitor; nor indeed did he articulate one sentence of complaint against the boisterous conduct of his outrageous comrade.

The attorney, on the contrary, not being blessed with so even a temper as Mr. Delany, showed every symptom of inordinate impatience to get out of his company, and exhibited divers samples of plunging, kicking, and muscular convulsion, more novel and entertaining than even those of the most celebrated rope-dancers; he also incessantly vociferated as loud, if not louder than he had ever done upon any former occasion, though not in any particular dialect or language, but as a person generally does when undergoing a cruel surgical operation.

The attorney’s eyes not having any thing to do with the hanging matter, he clearly saw the same crowd approaching which had caused the retrograde movement of his comrades; and, as it approached, he gave himself entirely up for lost, being placed in the very same convenient position for piking as Absalom (King David’s natural son) when General Joab ran him through the body without the slightest resistance; and though the attorney’s toes were not two feet from the ground, he made as much fuss, floundering and bellowing, as if they had been twenty.

The man of law at length became totally exhausted and tranquil, as children generally are when they have no strength to squall any longer. He had, however, in this state of captivity, the consolation of beholding (at every up glance) the bloated, raven-gray visage of the king’s enemy, and his disloyal eyes bursting from their sockets, and full glaring with inanimate revenge on the loyalist who had darkened them. A thrilling horror seized upon the nerves and muscles of the attorney: his sins and clients were now (like the visions in Macbeth, or King Saul and the Witch of Endor) beginning to pass in shadowy review before his imagination. The last glance he could distinctly take, as he looked upward to Heaven for aid, (there being none at Rathfarnan,) gave a dismal glimpse of his once red-and-white engrossing member, now, like the chameleon, assuming the deep purple hue of the rebel jaw it was in contact with, the fingers spread out, cramped, and extended as a fan before the rebel visage; and numbness, the avant-courier of mortification, having superseded torture, he gave himself totally up to Heaven. If he had a hundred prayers, he would have repeated every one of them; but, alas! theology was not his forte, and he was gradually sinking into that merciful insensibility invented by farriers, when they twist an instrument upon a horse’s nostrils, that the torture of his nose may render him insensible to the pains his tail is enduring.

In the mean time the royal troop, which had most prudentially retreated to avoid an overwhelming force, particularly on their flank, as the enemy approached, yielded ground, though gradually. The enemy being all foot, the troop kept only a quarter of a mile from them, and merely retreated a hundred yards at a time, being sure of superior speed to that of the rebels,—when, to the surprise of Captain Ferns, the enemy made a sudden wheel, and took possession of a churchyard upon a small eminence, as if intending to pour down on the cavalry, if they could entice them within distance; but, to the astonishment of the royal troopers, instead of the Irish war-whoop, which they expected, the enemy set up singing and crying in a most plaintive and inoffensive manner. The buck parson, with Malony the bailiff, being ordered to reconnoitre, immediately galloped back, announcing that the enemy had a coffin, and were performing a funeral; but, both swearing that it was a new ambush, and the whole troop coinciding in the same opinion, a further retreat was decided on, which might be now performed without the slightest confusion. It was also determined to carry off their dead, for such it was taken for granted the attorney must have been, by the excess of his agitation, dancing and plunging till they lost sight of him, and also through the contagion and poisonous collision of a struggling rebel, to whom he had been so long cemented.

In order, therefore, to bring off the solicitor, dead or alive, they rallied, formed, and charged, sword in hand, towards the rampike, where they had left Attorney W—— and Mr. Delany in so novel a situation, and where they expected no loving reception.

In the mean time, it turned out that the kicking, plunging, and rope-dancing of the attorney had their advantages; as, at length, the obdurate rope, by the repeated pulls and twists, slipped over the knot of the rampike which had arrested its progress, ran freely, and down came the rebel and royalist together, with an appropriate crash, on the green sod under their gibbet, which seemed beneficently placed there by nature on purpose to receive them.

The attorney’s innocent feet, however, still remained tightly moored to the gullet of the guilty rebel, and might have remained there till they grew or rotted together, had not the opportune arrival of his gallant comrades saved them from mortification.

To effect the separation of Attorney W—— and Mr. Delany was no easy achievement: the latter had gone to his forefathers, but the rope was strong and tight, both able and willing to have hung half a dozen more of them, if employed to do so. Many loyal pen-knives were set instantly at work; but the rope defied them all; the knot was too solid. At length Sergeant Potterton’s broad-sword, having assumed the occupation of a saw, effected the operation without any accident, save sawing across one of the attorney’s veins. The free egress of his loyal gore soon brought its proprietor to his sense of existence; though three of the fingers had got so clever a stretching, that the muscles positively refused to bend any more for them, and they ever after retained the same fan-like expansion as when knotted to Mr. Delany. The index and thumb still retained their engrossing powers, to the entire satisfaction of the club of Skinners’ Alley, of which he was an active alderman.

The maimed attorney was now thrown across a horse and carried to a jingle,[59] and sent home with all the honours of war to his wife and children, to make what use they pleased of.

Footnote 59:

A jingle is a species of jaunting-car used in the environs of Dublin by gentry that have no other mode of travelling.

Captain Ferns’ royal troop now held another council of war, to determine on ulterior operations; and, though the rebel army in the church-yard might have been only a funeral, it was unanimously agreed that an important check had been given to the rebels of Rathfarnan; yet that prudence was as necessary an ingredient in the art of war as intrepidity; and that it might be risking the advantage of what had been done, if they made any attempt on the yellow house, or the captain’s _Bourdeaux_, as they might be overpowered by a host of pot-valiant rebels, and thereby his Majesty be deprived of their future services.

They therefore finally decided to retire upon Dublin at a sling-trot—publish a bulletin of the battle in Captain Giffard’s Dublin Journal—wait upon Lords Camden and Castlereagh, and Mr. Cooke, with a detail of the expedition and casualties,—and, finally, celebrate the action by a dinner, when the usual beverage, with the anthem of “God save the King,” might unite in doing national honour both to the liquor and to his Majesty, the latter being always considered quite lonesome by the corporators of Dublin, unless garnished by the former accompaniment.

This was all carried into effect. Lieutenant H——, the walking gallows, (_ante_) was especially invited; and the second metropolis of the British empire had thus the honour of achieving the first victory over the rebellious subjects of his Majesty in the celebrated insurrection of 1798.

FLOGGING THE WINE-COOPERS.

Account of the flagellation undergone by the two coopers—Their application to the author for redress—Tit for tat, or giving _back_ the compliment—Major Connor, and his disinclination for attorneys—His brother, Arthur Connor.

An anecdote, amongst many of the same genus, which I witnessed myself, about the same period, is particularly illustrative of the state of things in the Irish metropolis at the celebrated epocha of 1798.

Two wine-coopers of a Mr. Thomas White, an eminent wine-merchant, in Clare Street, had been bottling wine at my house in Merrion Square. I had known them long to be honest, quiet, and industrious persons: going to their dinner, they returned, to my surprise, with their coats and waistcoats hanging loose on their arms, and their shirts quite bloody behind. They told their pitiful story with peculiar simplicity:—that as they were passing quietly by Major Connor’s barrack, at Shelburn House, Stephen’s Green, a fellow who owed one of them a grudge for beating him and his brother at Donnybrook, had told Major Connor that “he heard we were black rebels, and knew well where many a pike was hid in vaults and cellars in the city, if we chose to discover of them; on which the Major, please your honour, Counsellor, without stop or stay, or the least ceremony in life, ordered the soldiers to strip us to our buffs, and then tied us to the butt-end of a great cannon, and—what did he do then, Counsellor dear, to two honest poor coopers, but he ordered the soldiers to give us fifty cracks a-piece with the devil’s cat-o’-nine-tails, as he called it; though, by my sowl, I believe there were twenty tails to it—which the Major said he always kept saftening in brine, to wallop such villains as we were, Counsellor dear! Well, every whack went thorough my carcase, sure enough; and I gave tongue, because I couldn’t help it: so, when he had his will of us, he ordered us to put on our shirts, and swore us to come back in eight days more for the remaining fifty cracks, unless we brought fifty pikes in the place of them. Ah, the devil a pike ever we had, Counsellor dear, and what’ll we do, Counsellor, what’ll we do?”

“Take this to the Major,” said I, writing to him a note of no very gentle expostulation. “Give this, with my compliments; and if he does not redress you, I’ll find means of making him.”

The poor fellows were most thankful; and I immediately received a note from the Major, with many thanks for undeceiving him, and stating, that if the wine-coopers would catch the fellow that belied them, he’d oblige the chap with a cool hundred, from a new double cat, which he would order for the purpose.

The Major strictly kept his word. The wine-coopers soon found their accuser, and brought him to Major Connor, with my compliments; who sent him home in half-an-hour with as raw a back as any brave soldier in his Majesty’s service.

Learning also from the coopers that their enemy was an attorney’s clerk, (a profession the Major had a most inveterate and very just aversion to,) he desired them to bring him any disloyal attorneys they could find, and he’d teach them more justice in one hour at Shelburn Barracks, than they’d practise for seven years in the Four Courts.

The accuser, who got so good a practical lecture from Major Connor, was a clerk to Mr. H. Hudson, an eminent attorney, of Dublin.

The Major’s brother, Arthur, was under a state prosecution, and incarcerated as an unsuccessful patriot—but one to whom even Lord Clare could not deny the attributes of consistency, firmness, and fidelity. His politics were decidedly sincere. Banished from his own country, he received high promotion in the French army; and, if he had not been discontinued from the staff of his relative, Marshal Grouchy, the battle of Waterloo (from documents I have seen) _must_ have had a different termination. This, however, is an almost inexcusable digression.

THE ENNISCORTHY BOAR.

Incidents attending the first assault of Wexford by the rebels, in 1798—Excesses mutually committed by them and the royalists—Father Roche—Captain Hay, and his gallant rescue of two ladies—Mr. O’Connell in by-gone days—Painful but ludicrous scenes after the conflict at Wexford—Swinish indignity offered to a clergyman—A pig of rapid growth—Extraordinary destination of the animal—Its arrival and special exhibition in London—Remarks on London curiosities—Remarkable success of the Enniscorthy boar—Unhappy disclosure of the animal’s previous enormities—Reaction on the public mind—His Majesty’s comments on the affair—Death of the swinish offender, in anticipation of a projected rescue by the London Irish.

A most ludicrous incident chanced to spring out of the most murderous conflict (for the numbers engaged) that had occurred during the merciless insurrection of 1798 in Ireland.

The murdered victims had not been effectually interred, the blood was scarcely dry upon the hill, and the embers of the burned streets not yet entirely extinguished in Enniscorthy, when, in company with a friend who had miraculously escaped the slaughter, and Mr. John Grogan, of Johnston, who was then seeking for evidence amongst the conquered rebels, to prove the injustice of his brother’s execution, I explored and noted the principal occurrences of that most sanguinary engagement. I give them, in connexion with the preposterous incident which they gave rise to, to show in one view the _mélange_ of fanaticism, ferocity, and whimsical credulity, which characterised the lower Irish at that disastrous epocha, as well as the absurd credulity and spirit of true intolerance which signalised their London brethren, in the matter of the silly incident which I shall mention.

The town of Enniscorthy, in the county of Wexford, in Ireland, (one of the first strong possessions that the English, under Strongbow, established themselves in,) is situate most beautifully on the river Slaney, at the base of Vinegar Hill; places which the conflicts and massacres of every nature, and by both parties, have marked out for posterity as the appropriate sites of legendary tales, and traditional records of heroism and of murder.

The town is not fortified; and the hill, like half a globe, rising from the plain, overlooks the town and country, and has no neighbouring eminence to command it.

The first assault on this town by the rebels, and its defence by a gallant, but not numerous garrison, formed one of the most desperate, heroic, and obstinate actions of an infatuated people. It was stormed by the rebels, and defended with unflinching gallantry; but captured after a long and most bloody action, during which no quarter was given or accepted on either side. Those who submitted to be prisoners only preserved their lives a day, to experience some more cold-blooded and torturing extinction.

The orange and green flags were that day alternately successful. But the numbers, impetuosity, and perseverance of the rebels, becoming too powerful to be resisted, the troops were overthrown, the rout became general, and the royalists endeavoured to save themselves in all directions: but most of those who had the good fortune to escape the pike or blunderbuss were flung into burning masses, or thrown from the windows of houses, where they had tried to gain protection or conceal themselves.

The insurgents were that day constantly led to the charge, or, when checked, promptly rallied by a priest, who had figured in the French revolution in Paris—a Father Roche. His height and muscular powers were immense, his dress squalid and bloody, his countenance ruffianly and terrific; he had no sense either of personal danger, or of Christian mercy. That day courage appeared contagious, and even his aged followers seemed to have imbibed all the ferocity and blind desperation of their gigantic and fearless pastor.

The streets through which the relics of the royal troops must traverse to escape the carnage were fired on both sides by the order of Father Roche, and the unfortunate fugitives had no chance but to pass through volumes of flame and smoke, or yield themselves up to the ferocious pike-men, who chased them even into the very body of the conflagration.

My accompanying friend had most unwittingly got into the town, when in possession of the army, and could not get out of it on the sudden assault of the rebels. He had no arms. Many of them knew him, however, to be a person of liberal principles, civil and religious; but he with difficulty clambered to a seat high up in the dilapidated castle; where, unless as regarded the chance of a random shot, he was in a place of tolerable safety. There he could see much; but did not descend till the next morning; and would certainly have been shot at the windmill on Vinegar Hill had not the Catholic priests of his own parish vouched for his toleration and charity; and above all, that he had, early that year, given a large sum towards building a chapel and endowing a school for the cottagers’ children.

His description of the storm was extremely exciting; and the more so, as it was attended by an occurrence of a very interesting nature.

It was asserted by some of the loyal yeomen who were engaged, that the rebels were commanded, as to their _tactics_, by Captain Hay, of the —— dragoons, who had been some time amongst them as a prisoner; a report countenanced by the disaffection of his family. This gave rise to charges against Captain Hay of desertion to the rebels, and high-treason. He was submitted to a court-martial; but an act of the most gallant and chivalrous description saved him from every thing but suspicion of the criminality imputed.

Mrs. Ogle and Miss Moore, two of the most respectable ladies of Wexford, happened to be in Enniscorthy, when it was assaulted, without any protector, and subject to all the dangers and horrors incidental to such captures. They had no expectation of escape, when Captain Hay, in the face of every species of danger, with a strength beyond his natural powers, and a courage which has not been exceeded, placing them on a horse before him, rushed into the midst of a burning street, and, through flames and shots, and every possible horror, bore them through the fire in safety; and, although he sadly scorched himself, proceeded in conveying and delivering them safe to their desponding relations. Mr. Ogle was member for the county. The act was too gallant to leave any thing more than the suspicion of guilt, and the accused was acquitted on all the charges.