Part 11

The attentions of the kind friends in Dublin, great as they were, were far surpassed by those they found awaiting them in Belfast. The MacCrackens, the Simmses, the Neilsons, Dr. MacDonnell, and a host of others vied with each other in getting up entertainments for them; parties and excursions were the order of the day. Tone tells us of some of these in his Journal. He remembers particularly two days passed on Cave Hill. On the first, Russell, Neilson, Simms, MacCracken, and he climbed to McArt’s fort and took a solemn obligation never to desist in their efforts until they had subverted the authority of England, over their country, and asserted their independence. Another day they had a pic-nic in the Deer Park, for which the Belfast ladies, Mary Anne and Margaret MacCracken, Mrs. Neilson, Miss Simms, etc., exerted all their culinary talents; another day, even more delicious yet, was spent in a pic-nic party to beautiful Ram’s Island in Lough Neagh. After their return to town there were suppers and dances and a little music in these friends’ houses. Many, many years after, Mary Anne MacCracken, then a very old woman, told Dr. Madden of what she felt when she heard little Maria Tone sing in her clear voice, to the air of “The Cruiskeen Lawn,” her father’s spirited words: “When Rome by dividing had conquered the world.”

The last evening of their stay came all too quickly. They were spending it at the MacCracken’s home, of which Bunting was an inmate. The talk turned, as it was bound to do among such ardent lovers of music, as these were, on Bunting’s collection of Irish Melodies which was well on its way to completion, and Bunting was asked to play some air from it.

He chose that called “The Parting of Friends,” and as the poignant grief of the old air sought out all their hearts, Matilda Tone’s fortitude, for the first time, gave way. She burst into tears and left the room.

The next morning they went aboard the _Cincinnatus_, accompanied by their kind friends who had come to take the last farewell of them. When Matilda Tone went down to see her quarters she found the little state-room her husband had taken for his family full of the good things these friends had provided for their comfort: sea-stores, wine, porter and spirits, fresh provisions, sweetmeats, and so on. The foresight of Dr. MacDonnell had also provided a small medicine chest with written directions. This was to be of the greatest service, not for the Tones alone, but for their unfortunate fellow-passengers during the trying weeks ahead of them.

A voyage across the Atlantic in those days, in a small sailing vessel of 230 tons, was a most horrible experience. There were three hundred passengers on board this boat and they were “crowded to a degree not to be conceived by those who had never been aboard a passenger ship.” “The slaves who are carried from Africa,” Tone writes, “have much more room allowed them than the miserable emigrants who pass from Ireland to America.” The captains were out to make as much money as possible and they loaded their vessels with as little care for the accommodation of their passengers as of any other lumber aboard. The Tones had a small state-room eight feet by six. In this Tone fitted up three berths. One was occupied by Matilda and little Frank; the second by the two Maries; the third by Tone himself and the elder boy William. Tone took on himself the “policing” of the ship, and tried to introduce some cleanliness. Moreover, with the aid of Dr. MacDonnell’s medicine chest and “written directions,” he doctored the passengers—his prescriptions drawing also on his own sea-stores, and the wines and spirits provided by his Belfast friends. He had the satisfaction of landing all his patients safe and sound; and his own family, wonderfully fortunate, had not known one hour’s sickness.

But strait quarters, overcrowding and all the other horrors we have described did not exhaust the sufferings endured by Irish emigrants in the eighteenth century. “About the 20th July ... we were stopped by three British frigates, the _Thetis_, Captain Lord Cochrane; the _Hussar_, Captain Rose, and the _Esperance_, Captain Wood, who boarded us, and after treating us with the greatest insolence, both officers and sailors, they _pressed_ every one of our hands, save one, and near fifty of my unfortunate fellow-passengers, who were most of them flying to America to avoid the tyranny of a bad government at home, and who thus, most unexpectedly, fell under the severest tyranny, one of them at least which exists. As I was in a jacket and trousers, one of the lieutenants ordered me into the boat, as a fit man to serve the king, and it was only the screams of my wife and sister which induced him to desist. It would have been a pretty termination to my adventure if I had been pressed and sent on board a man-of-war. The insolence of these tyrants, as well to myself as to my poor fellow-passengers, in whose fate a fellowship in misfortune had interested me, I have not since forgotten, and I never will.”[66]

Footnote 66:

“Autobiography,” p. 217.

With such gracious sway did great Britannia “rule the waves” in the good old days!

On August the 1st the Tones landed in Wilmington, their voyage having lasted from June the 13th. They found the principal tavern of the place kept by an Irishman, Captain O’Byrne O’Flynn, a veteran of the American War of Independence. Here they rested for a few days, and made a useful and agreeable acquaintance in the person of General Humpton, an old Englishman, of the best type (“a beautiful, hale, stout old man of near seventy, perfectly the soldier and the gentleman”) who had fought on the American side in the late war. He took a great liking to Tone, and his charming wife, and sister and pretty children, and showed himself very eager to serve them.

The Tones left Wilmington, as soon as the ladies and children had recruited from the fatigue of the sea-voyage and reached Philadelphia on August the 8th. Here Tone met two old friends—Hamilton Rowan and Dr. Reynolds, both of whom had, like himself, got into trouble with the Irish Government over the “_affaire Jackson_.” They had a great time telling each other their adventures since they had last met in Hamilton Rowan’s cell in Newgate fourteen months previously. Reynolds and Rowan were athirst for news from Ireland, and eagerly listened to all Tone had to tell them.

Tone lost no time in approaching the French Minister, Adet, in Philadelphia. Bearing a letter of introduction from Rowan, he waited the very day after his arrival on Adet, and signified in as clear a way as was possible under the circumstances (“_he_ spoke English very imperfectly, and I French a great deal worse”) the desires of himself and his friends in Ireland for French aid to shake off the English yoke. Adet requested him to draw up a memorial, and promised to transmit this to his Government. He also promised to use his influence to procure the enlargement of Matthew Tone, who was a prisoner at Guise. But this was as far as he would go.

Poor Tone, much disheartened by the Minister’s attitude, found little ground for hope that the French Government would pay any attention to his memorial. It seemed to him that the only result of his exertions was the satisfaction of having discharged his conscience to his country. But as for anything being likely to come of them, he could see no prospects at all.

This being so, he bent his mind to making some provision for his family. Living in Philadelphia being enormously dear, he moved his family to Donningstown, near General Humpton’s place, and leaving them there under the General’s kind supervision, he roamed the country in search of a suitable farm. After some disappointments he found one about two miles from Princeton. He took a small house in that town, furnished it frugally and decently, moved his family into it, and having fitted up his study, determined to settle down, as contentedly as he could, to the life of an American farmer.

Then suddenly all was changed. One day Matilda came into the little study, where her husband dreamed his time away, waiting for the legal formalities attending the purchase of his plantation to be completed, and in her hand was a bundle of letters from Ireland. John Keogh had written; Tom Russell had written; the two Simmses had written—and each of them in the same strain, telling Tone that the public mind in Ireland was advancing towards republicanism faster than even he could believe, and pressing him in the strongest manner to fulfil the engagement he had made with them at his departure, and to move heaven and earth to force his way to the French Government in order to supplicate their assistance. Wm. Simms, at the end of a most friendly and affectionate letter, desired Tone to draw upon him for £200 sterling.

Tone immediately handed the letters to his wife and sister and desired their opinion which he foresaw would be that he should immediately, if possible, set out for France. “My wife, especially, whose courage and whose zeal for my honour and interests were not in the least abated by all her past sufferings, supplicated me to let no consideration of her or our children stand for a moment in the way of my engagements to our friends and my duty to my country, adding, that she would answer for our family during my absence, and that the same Providence which had so often, as it were, miraculously preserved us would, she was confident, not desert us now. My sister joined her in those entreaties, and it may well be supposed I required no great supplication to induce me to make one more attempt in a cause to which I had been so long devoted.”

It was Tone’s way never to lose time about any business he might have on hand; and accordingly, the very next morning he set off from Princeton for Philadelphia to see Minister Adet. He now found Adet as eager to forward his design, as he had formerly found him lukewarm. The Minister promised him letters for the French Government recommending him in the strongest manner, and offered him money for his expenses. Tone gratefully accepted the letters but declined the monetary assistance. He next sent a messenger to Ireland in the person of the young brother, Arthur, who had in the meantime turned up at Princeton, and charged him to tell only Neilson, Simms and Russell in Belfast, and Keogh and MacCormick in Dublin, that he was sailing for France as soon as he could get a vessel. Everybody else in Ireland—especially his father and mother—was to be left under the impression that he was farming in Princeton. Tone then settled up his financial affairs; allowed himself one day’s holiday in Philadelphia with his old friends Reynolds, Hamilton Rowan and Napper Tandy (who had recently arrived there). By December the 13th—that is to say exactly within a fortnight from his departure—he was back in Princeton with Hamilton Rowan to take leave of his family.

He has given us a graphic account of the last night in the American home. “We supped together in high spirits, and Rowan retiring immediately after, my wife, sister and I sat together till very late, engaged in that kind of animated and enthusiastic conversation which our characters and the nature of the enterprise I was embarked in may be supposed to give rise to. The courage and firmness of the women supported me, and them, too, beyond my expectations; we had neither tears nor lamentations, but, on the contrary, the most ardent hope, and the most steady resolution. At length, at four the next morning, I embraced them for the last time, and we parted with a steadiness that astonished me.”

But Tone had not yet gauged the depths of his wife’s heroic devotion to him—and to Ireland. It was only when he had reached New York and was on the eve of embarkation—too late to have his determination weakened by any anxiety for her condition—that she told him of the little life that stirred beneath her heart.

* * * * *

We have but a scanty record of the life of Matilda and Mary Tone and the children during the months when Theobald (having landed at Havre de Grace on February 1st, 1796) was making his way by the mere force of his will and personality to the cabinets of the most powerful ministers in France. But our thoughts are turned to them constantly. We know how as Tone came home from interviews with De La Croix, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, or the American Minister, Monroe, or Carnot, or Hoche, he was concerned above all for what his “dearest love” would think of how he had comported himself. “I mention these little circumstances because I know they will be interesting to her whom I prize above my life ten thousand times. There are about six persons in the world who will read these detached memorandums with pleasure; to every one else they would appear sad stuff. But they are only for the women of my family, for the boys if ever we meet again, and for my friend, P.P.” When he sees Lodoïska, wife of J. B. Loubet, and records her heroism when her husband was a fugitive from the vengeance of Robespierre, he wishes his dearest love could see her, too. “I think she would behave as well in similar circumstances. Her courage and her affection have been tried in some, very nearly as critical.” When in a fit of self-examination he seeks out his own motives, he finds it difficult to decide whether it is his country or his wife he must put first. “I hope (but I am not sure) my country is my first object, at least she is my second. If there be one before her, as I rather believe there is, it is my dearest life and love, the light of my eyes and spirit of my existence. I wish more than for anything on earth to place her in a splendid situation. There is none so elevated that she would not adorn, and that she does not deserve, and I believe that not I only, but every one who knows her, will agree as to that. Truth is truth! She is my first object. But would I sacrifice the interests of Ireland to her elevation? No, that I would not, and if I would, she would despise me, and if she were to despise me, I would go hang myself like Judas. Well there is no regulator for the human heart like the certainty of possessing the affections of an amiable woman, and, if so, what unspeakable good fortune is mine.”

He compares French women and English women in point of charm and attractiveness—and awards the palm to the French. But both of them must yield to Irish women. “Give me Ireland for women to make wives and mothers of.... The more I see of this wide world, the more I prize the inestimable blessing I possess in my wife’s affection, her virtues, her courage, her goodness of heart, her sweetness of temper, and besides she is very pretty, a circumstance which does not lessen her value in my eyes. What is she doing just now, and what would I give to be with her, and the little _fanfans_ for half-an-hour.” But one would need a whole book for Tone’s charming love-making to his wife.

In May, 1796, Tone wrote to Matilda desiring her to come to France. She sold out their little property in America, turned the proceeds into _louis d’or_, and set off with Mary and the children. On the voyage they met two men who were to be intimately connected with their fate. One was a Scotchman, Mr. Wilson, of Dullatur; the other, a young Swiss merchant called Giacque. M. Giacque fell deeply in love with Mary Tone, and his love being returned, the first letter Theobald received from his wife, announcing their safe arrival in Hamburg, contained also a request for his consent to Mary’s marriage.

Tone received that letter after his return from the unfortunate expedition to Bantry Bay. The prospect of seeing his dear ones again consoled him for the terrible disappointment of the expedition. But alas! There was news in the letter which disturbed him deeply. Mrs. Tone’s health had suffered gravely from all she had undergone. For this reason her husband considered it unwise for her to undertake the journey from Hamburg in the depth of winter. He, therefore, instructed her to stay in Hamburg for the present, more especially as Mary and her husband were likely to set up house there, pending the arrangements he would be able to make for her.

To some of Matilda Tone’s letters written from Hamburg while her husband was serving under Hoche in the Army of _Sambre et Meuse_ were attached postscripts from Maria. The first line he had ever seen of his little daughter’s writing moved Tone strangely, and there were tears in his eyes as he sat down to write her the following answer:

“Dearest Baby,—You are a darling little thing for writing to me, and I doat upon you, and when I read your pretty letter, it brought the tears into my eyes, I was so glad. I am delighted with the account you give me of your brothers; I think it is high time that William should begin to cultivate his understanding,[67] and therefore I beg you may teach him his letters, if he does not know them already, that he may be able to write to me by and by. I am not surprised that Frank is a bully, and I suppose he and I will have fifty battles when we meet. Has he got into a jacket and trousers yet? Tell your mamma from me, ‘_we do defer it most shamefully, Mr. Shandy_.’[68] I hope you will take great care of your poor mamma, who, I am afraid, is not well; but I need not say that, for I am sure you do, because you are a darling good child, and I love you more than all the world. Kiss your mamma and your two little brothers, for me, ten thousand times, and love me, as you promise, as long as you live.

“Your affectionate _Fadoff_, J. Smith.”[69]

Footnote 67:

William had then reached the mature age of six, and Frank was a year younger.

Footnote 68:

One of the favourite games in the family circle was matching and identifying quotations. Tone’s Journal is full of them.

Footnote 69:

This was the name under which Tone served in the French army.

It was not until May 7th, 1797, that Tone and his family were re-united. He got leave of absence from his regiment, and wrote to them to meet him at Gröningen. He arrived here on May the 2nd and for the next five days he haunted the canal—“tormented with the most terrible apprehensions on account of the absence of my dearest love, about whom I hear nothing; walked out every day to the canal, two or three times a day to meet the boats coming from Nieuschans when she will arrive. No love! No love! I never was so unhappy in my life.... At last, this day (May 7th), in the evening, as I was taking my usual walk along the canal, I had the unspeakable satisfaction to see my dearest love and our little babies, my sister and her husband, all arrive safe and well; it is impossible to describe the pleasure I felt.”

A fortnight was spent very delightfully travelling through Holland and Belgium. After that Tone went to Germany, and Matilda and her charge proceeded to Paris under the escort of M. Giacque.

In the new home in Paris, to which Theobald returned as often as his military duties permitted, Matilda Tone devoted herself to the education of her children while the fateful months from the end of May, 1797, to the beginning of September, 1798, sped by. During that “crowded hour” of her husband’s glorious life much history was a-making; and now, as always, his wife performed her woman’s part: to watch and wait, and suffer and sacrifice herself to her husband’s—a splendidly tragic destiny—with incomparable and heroic devotion.

She had need of all her woman’s resources to comfort him as one after another his dearest hopes were blighted. There was first the death of Hoche; then the defeat of the Dutch fleet at Camperdown, and the consequent abandonment of the Dutch expedition to Ireland. Then there was the rise to supreme military power in France of Bonaparte, whom Thomas Addis Emmet later pronounced to be “the greatest enemy the Irish people ever had.”

When Bonaparte, on the eve of the Irish Insurrection, sailed to Egypt with the army which had been ostensibly collected for an attack on England through Ireland, Tone gave up all hope. It was in this frame of mind he joined Hardy’s expedition which sailed (in the wake of Humbert’s failure, and the fiasco of Napper Tandy’s descent on Rutland Island) from the Bay of Cameret on September 20th, 1798. William Tone relates that “at the period of this expedition he was hopeless of its success, and in the deepest despondency at the prospect of Irish affairs. Such was the wretched indiscretion of the [French] Government, that before his departure he read himself, in the _Bien Informé_, a Paris newspaper, a detailed account of the whole armament, where his own name was mentioned in full letters with the circumstance of his being on board the _Hoche_. There was therefore no hope of secrecy. He had all along deprecated the idea of these attempts on a small scale. But he had also declared repeatedly that if the Government sent only a corporal’s guard, he felt it his duty to go along with them.... His resolution was, however, deliberately and inflexibly taken, in case he fell into the hands of the enemy, never to suffer the indignity of a public execution.” Of this resolution of her husband’s, Matilda Tone was fully informed. For he spoke of it quite plainly in her presence on the occasion of a dinner-party given at their house in Paris a few days before the departure of the expedition.

And so she let him go from her—knowing full well that she would never see him again. How truly had he judged of her—and of himself—when he wrote the words: “She is my first object. But would I sacrifice the interest of Ireland to her elevation? No that I would not, and if I would, she would despise me, and if she were to despise me I would go hang myself like Judas.”

* * * * *

His body was lying under the green sod in Bodenstown Churchyard when his last message to her was delivered. How did she ever bear to read the lines he penned in his prison cell, when even now at this distance of time, we who knew him not at all can hardly see them for our tears?

“Provost Prison—Dublin Barracks, “_Le 20 Brumaire, an 7_ (10 Nov.’98).

“Dearest Love,—The hour is at last come when we must part. As no words can express what I feel for you and our children, I shall not attempt it; complaint of any kind would be beneath your courage and mine; be assured I will die as I have lived, and that you will have no cause to blush for me.”

“I have written on your behalf to the French Government, to the Minister of Marine, to General Kilmaine and to Mr. Shee. With the latter I wish you especially to advise. In Ireland I have written to your brother Harry, and to those of my friends who are about to go into exile, and who, I am sure, will not abandon you.

“Adieu, dearest love: I find it impossible to finish this letter. Give my love to Mary; and above all things, remember that you are now the only parent of our dearest children, and that the best proof you can give of your affection for me will be to preserve yourself for their education. God Almighty bless you all.

“Yours ever, “T. W. TONE.”

“P.S.—I think you have found a friend in Wilson who will not desert you.”

SECOND LETTER