Part 20
It is to Mary McCracken that we owe the record of Russell’s most noble and touching “Speech from the Dock.” For she and her sister sent Hughes, a clerk of their brother John’s, to take notes in court of his address. And when the scaffold had done its work, and the gallant form lay mangled in its shadow, it was she who gave it, in the sacred soil of Downpatrick, the tomb, where with the “Three Wonder Working Saints of Erin,” Patrick, Brigid and Columcille, it awaits the Resurrection:
“The grave of Russell.”
* * * * *
Among the witnesses at the Russell trial there figured prominently a certain Patrick Lynch, and the mention of his name will serve as an introduction to our account of some of the various interests with which Mary McCracken filled her life. There still remained the long span of sixty-three years, before she was summoned to join the dear ones, to whose love the years of her youth had been dedicated. These sixty-three years were full of service to the country for which _they_ had given their lives.
We have already mentioned that Edward Bunting was, for some forty years, an inmate of the McCracken household. It was under their roof that his celebrated collections of “Ancient Irish Music” were made, and all the McCrackens, but especially Mary, took the very keenest interest in the work. In 1802, Patrick Lynch, a native Irish speaker (who had given lessons in the language to Russell during the latter’s sojourn in Belfast in the early ’Nineties), was sent by Bunting on a tour to Connacht to collect airs. Of his progress he writes (during Bunting’s absence in London) detailed reports to John McCracken and “Miss Mary”—and it is clear from these letters that they were as much interested in the mission as Bunting himself.[88]
Footnote 88:
See “Annals of the Irish Harpers,” _passim_.
In 1803, John McCracken, Senior, died, and in 1814 Mrs. McCracken and her son, William, were both called to their reward. Shortly after their mother’s death the McCracken sisters gave up business and went to live with their brother Frank (who had remained a bachelor) in Donegal Street. The talent of Miss Margaret McCracken for housekeeping left Mary with a great many free hours on her hands—and these she devoted to active works of charity. The picture her grandniece has left us of her avocations is a true one for many years of her life. Her mornings were spent in out-of-door occupations—collecting for some charity, attending meetings, or visiting the poor in their homes, or the poor children in the Lancastrian School. Of the charitable institutions in which she took an active interest her grandniece mentions an industrial school for girls, established in the Famine year; the Belfast Ladies’ Clothing Society; the Destitute Sick Society; an anti-slavery society, and an association to prevent the employment of climbing-boys in chimney sweeping. In the afternoon she rested, and her evenings were largely devoted to letter-writing (for she had a large correspondence) or to that social intercourse in which, even to extreme old age, her genial spirit delighted.
Of her personality her grandniece gives some very attractive glimpses:
“In personal habits she was scrupulously clean, but indifferent about her dress, unwilling to spend money on it, and giving it little thought.
“She liked to read the newspapers, and always spent some time in doing so, but for other reading she had little leisure. When she did read a novel or hear one read, it was to others as great a treat as the book to hear her comments, how she entered into the story, and discussed the characters with such thorough enjoyment, such child-like feeling of reality. In her later years she used to relate anecdotes of family and local incidents, and reminiscences of her youthful days; these told in her lively and pleasant manner, were listened to with pleasure. Sometimes, but more rarely, and usually when she had only one hearer, she would speak of the graver and sadder events in which she had been concerned, but evidently with such sorrowful remembrance that a listener had not the heart to urge her to continue the theme, intensely interesting though it might be.
“She was accustomed to say that people ought not to pride themselves on their ancestors, and should not be valued for what their forefathers had been or done, but only for what they themselves are, and would quote the lines on the moon—
‘I with borrowed lustre shine, What you see is none of mine.’
Nevertheless, she took most unmistakable pride and pleasure in some of the doings of her ancestors. The way in which she used to relate anything which gave evidence of a generous and unselfish description was not to be forgotten by those who heard her.
“She had naturally a quick and hasty temper, though evidence of this was rarely seen; but even when at an advanced age, if a helpless person were wronged, or an animal cruelly treated, it was startling to see how her eye would flash, and to hear her hot, indignant words.
“Her decay was very gradual. She was compelled by degrees to give up her accustomed occupations, till at last she was confined to the house. Walk for walking’s sake she would not. As she became unable for other work she took up the occupation of knitting. Her sight was wonderfully good; her hearing was so much impaired as to prevent her taking part in ordinary conversation; but she was always able to converse with one person comfortably for both. She delighted in seeing a large party round the table, and when a laugh went round, she with beaming face and happy smile would join in the mirth, and sometimes say—‘Well, I don’t know what you are laughing at, but I like to see you enjoying yourselves.’
“In the autumn of 1865 she had an attack of bronchitis from which she recovered, but mind and body had become weak. She faded peacefully and gently away, apparently contented and happy, without weariness or pain, until, after some hours of unconsciousness, she breathed her last on July the 26th (the feast of her own namesake, Saint Ann), 1866, having completed her ninety-sixth year on the 8th of the month.”
* * * * *
Within our own time pious and reverent hands have laid the remains of Henry Joy McCracken in the grave of his devoted sister. And what Mary McCracken did for Russell, has been done in turn for herself by a patriotic townsman.[89] Beneath the slab he has laid upon the grave in Old Clifton Cemetery brother and sister, once more re-united, await the Resurrection. “In death they are not divided.”
Footnote 89:
F. J. Bigger, Esq.
SOME OTHER SISTERS OF ’NINETY-EIGHT
Some Other Sisters of ’Ninety-Eight
“O fair-haired Donough, dear little brother, Well do I know what has taken you from me.” —_Lament for Fair-Haired Donough._
MARY MCCRACKEN is not the only sister whose name is coupled with her brother’s in “the glorious pride and sorrow” of ’Ninety-Eight. We have already, in the preceding memoirs, met other heroic sisters and we shall now give a somewhat further account of some of these.
MARY ANNE EMMET
Mary Anne Emmet, sister of Thomas Addis and Robert, was worthy, both in character and brains, of her family. Born in 1773 she showed herself from her earliest years dowered with her full share of the remarkable Emmet intellect. She was carefully educated, mostly by her father, and acquired a knowledge of Classics of which many a University Don might well be vain. She was a vigorous writer; and her grand-nephew, Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, tells us that he has in his possession several political pamphlets from her pen. “These clearly show that she must have possessed a profound knowledge of political economy, a familiarity with history and the body politic, gained only after careful reading and to an extent few public men of her day possessed.” Her most celebrated pamphlet was “An Address to the People of Ireland, showing them why they ought to submit to an Union.” Its method of _advocating_ an Union is, as Dr. Madden points out, sufficiently indicated by its title:
“Of comfort no man speak; Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.” —_Shakespeare._
Such scorn as is poured from it in the new-born “patriotism” of the Beresfords, the Fosters, the Whaleys, the Saurins, the Verekers, who had already alienated every right through which an Irishman could call himself a free man! “You are called on to oppose this Union, to preserve your rights. Now I ask the men who call on you what rights you have to support? I ask parliament what right _they_ have not wrested from you? They adjure you to support the constitution. Alas! for that constitution, originally a shadow, now embodied a substance of corruption. You are called on to resist—_what_? Not _oppression_, it has been _protected_. Not _injustice_, it has been _legalised_. Not _cruelty_, it has been _indemnified_.... Is it for the _Convention_, the _Insurrection_, the _Indemnity Acts_, that you are to resist the annihilation of the parliament that passed them? While these Bills stand recorded on their Journals parliament ought to know that the country cannot dread their extinction. And if the minister of England wishes to use any argument but military force for the accomplishment of this measure, let him present that statute-book to the people, and ask them—‘Why should you wish the duration of this parliament? do you not feel that I am omnipotent in it? are not my mandates written here in blood?...’
“I shall not dwell more on the advantages than I have done on the justice of this measure. I do not believe that one advantage will result from it, or from any other convention between Ireland and Great Britain which the English minister proposes, and which the English mercantile interest approves of: no convention or community of interests ever will be equitably conducted where both parties are not equally able to assert their own rights, and to resist the innovations or injustice of the other.... _I know that our part of the treaty will be signed and most strictly performed, and that the English part of it will be filled up how and when it suits the interests of the minister._”
When the order came from the Castle to the State prisoners in Kilmainham on March 18th, 1799, instructing them to be ready for embarkation the following morning, Mary Anne Emmet, “at a late hour the same evening, on hearing of the order, proceeded immediately to the Castle, and demanded an interview with the viceroy for the purpose of ascertaining the fate that was destined for her brother. She presented herself to the viceroy with the spirit that seemed to be characteristic of her race. Lord Cornwallis was moved even to tears at the earnestness of her supplication, the anxiety exhibited in her looks, the strength of feeling, the energy of character displayed in the effort she had made. He treated her with kindness, and assured her that ‘no harm should occur to her brother.’... Miss Emmet returned to her family, and the intelligence she brought, little as it was, relieved the minds of her parents of much of their alarm.”[90]
Footnote 90:
Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Third Series (Second Edition). p. 91.
Sometime in 1799 she married Robert Holmes, a rising barrister. The young couple took up their residence with old Dr. and Mrs. Emmet, first in Stephen’s Green, and later in Casino; and the correspondence of her mother with Thomas Addis in Fort George, makes frequent mention of Mary Anne. In a letter dated April 10th, Elizabeth Emmet informs her son of the comfort she and her husband found in “Mary Anne’s happiness in consequence of having married a very worthy man, of whom she is very fond, and he equally so of her. She has grown so stout that scarcely a day passes without her walking to town, about town, and out again. The pleasure of her husband’s company has, I believe, wrought this change, and her health is greatly benefitted by the exertion.” In July, 1800, her first baby, a little boy, was born, but the many and great anxieties its mother had undergone before its birth told on it, and it only lived one week. Poor Mary Anne was long in recovering, and perhaps her mother did not make sufficient allowance for the drain made on her delicate constitution by the intensity of her feelings. The indolence, the disinclination to make any exertion except on a great occasion of which her mother frequently complained, were due to physical weakness, and of this her mother did not seem to take account. “Mary Anne is very much better, but you know of old that she has one complaint of which I have no hope she will be cured: indolence has still, and always will have, domination over her, except when exertion becomes necessary; then, indeed, no person can exceed her in efforts. I wish, however, for her own sake that her exertions were brought more into the practice of every day, and not reserved for great occasions. She has a very strong mind, and I think it would operate more upon the body if more frequently called forth.”
* * * * *
Six days after the outbreak of Robert Emmet’s Insurrection, Robert Holmes, who had been in England on business, and knew nothing of his brother-in-law’s plans, was arrested in the streets of Dublin, on his way home. About the same time John Patten, Jane Emmet’s brother, was arrested, and the wildest rumours of Robert’s fate were brought to the ladies of the Emmet family, who were now in residence at Donnybrook. The anxiety proved too much for Elizabeth Emmet, and while her youngest son lay in prison awaiting his tragic destiny, she died in her daughter’s arms.
Think of what Mary Anne Holmes had to endure during those terrible weeks. One brother was in exile, another in the prison from which the only egress was up the steps to the scaffold; her husband a prisoner with an uncertain fate. Truly “the strong mind” had heavy drains on it when she followed her mother’s coffin to the churchyard of St. Peter’s in Aungier Street, whither Dr. Emmet’s had only a little time preceded it. Small wonder that the end of her sad story came with tragic swiftness, and in tragic circumstances.
Mr. Holmes was kept for a whole year a prisoner in Dublin Castle, and then suddenly released. He walked directly home. “In response to his ring his wife unfortunately opened the door, only to drop dead into his arms from the suddenness of the shock and the excess of her joy at seeing him. It is said that Mr. Holmes never recovered from the shock he thus received, and to the day of his death he was seldom seen to smile.”[91] He lived to be a very old man—to see the men of ’48 stand in the same dock as the men of ’98 and ’03—and for the same crime. In his eightieth year he acted as counsel for Duffy in the _Nation_ prosecution of 1846; in his eighty-second year he defended John Mitchel. “We thought we heard the blood of Emmet crying aloud from the ground,” said Mitchel, of the great speech made by Holmes on the former occasion. But in the ears of the old man, himself, as he made his immortal indictment of England, there was ringing the voice of his dead love—the woman whom England’s cruelty had murdered in his very arms two-and-forty years before!
Footnote 91:
“The Emmet Family,” p. 54. The circumstances of Mary Anne Holmes’s death were communicated to Dr. T. A. Emmet by Sir Bernard Burke.
MARY TONE
Of Mary Tone, the sister of Theobald Wolfe Tone, we have already spoken at some length in the Memoir of her sister-in-law. Her brother has described her for us in his _Autobiography_: “My sister, whose name is Mary, is a fine young woman; she has all the peculiarity of our disposition with all the delicacy of her own sex. If she were a man, she would be exactly like one of us [_i.e._ her brothers, whose ‘portraits’ he has just sketched], and, as it is, being brought up amongst boys, for we never had but one more sister, who died a child, she has contracted a masculine habit of thinking, without, however, in any degree, derogating from that feminine softness of manner which is suited to her sex and age.”
When Tone and his wife and family were obliged to leave Ireland for America, Mary Tone accompanied them, sharing the dangers and hardships of the journey, and the anxieties and deprivations of life in an unknown land. When the summons came for Theobald to leave them, and start off on his hazardous mission to France, Mary Tone joined her sister-in-law in urging him to answer the call. When the moment of parting came her firmness and courage were as great as Matilda’s: “We had neither tears nor lamentations, but on the contrary, the most ardent hope and the most steady resolution.”
On the voyage across the Atlantic which she made with Matilda Tone and her children towards the end of 1796, in order to rejoin Theobald, Mary Tone made the acquaintance of a young Swiss merchant named Giacque, who, though “just beginning the world with little or no property, thought proper to fall in love with her.” The first letter Tone received from his wife after their arrival in Hamburg, was accompanied, we learn from the _Autobiography_, by one from Giacque “informing me of his situation and circumstances, of his love for my sister, and hers for him, and praying my consent. There was an air of candour and honesty in his letter which gave me a good opinion of him, nor did I consider myself at liberty to stand in the way of her happiness, which my wife mentioned to me was deeply interested. I wrote therefore, giving my full consent to the marriage, and trust in God they may be as happy as I wish them. It is certainly a hazardous step in favour of a man whom I do not know; but, as she is passionately fond of him, and he of her, as he perfectly knows her situation, and has by no means endeavoured to disguise or exaggerate his own, I am in hopes they may do well.”
After their marriage, the Giacques appear to have continued to live with Mrs. Tone and her children, first at Hamburg, and afterwards at Paris. After the death of Theobald, Mary and her husband went to St. Domingo; and, according to her nephew, she met her death there, of yellow fever, contracted through nursing a sick friend, who had been abandoned by her family and servants. Another account, quoted by Madden, states that she and her husband were killed by the negroes in the insurrection of that island, about the year 1799. At all events she shared the tragic fate of her immediate family—Theobald, William, Matthew, and Arthur—none of whom reached thirty-six years of age.
LADY LUCY FITZGERALD
One of Lord Edward’s sisters, Lady Lucy Fitzgerald, was deep in the plans of the United Irishmen. Mr. Gerald Campbell describes her as “just Lord Edward dressed in woman’s clothes. She was to the full as patriotic as her brother, perhaps even more so—for she loved the cause because he loved it, whom she loved above all things: she was possessed like him of a strong sense of humour, so that she shared with him the family epithet ‘comical,’ she had a warm, loving susceptible Irish heart, and, in short, both in character and aims, was as like him as possible.”
She spent much time with Lord Edward and Pamela at Kildare Lodge, and her Journal, from which Mr. Campbell has published some extracts, gives us vivid glimpses of the habitués of that hospitable home. Among these, Arthur O’Connor figures prominently, and one cannot help feeling that Lady Lucy had a romantic interest in that most aristocratic of all “democrats.” The winter days were devoted to long walks on the Curragh, or if the weather prevented out-door excursions, to sticking pocket-books with emblems, or hearing Arthur O’Connor read “Julius Cæsar,” or Volney’s “Ruins”; the winter evenings were delightfully divided between dancing and singing patriotic songs. Once she records “a large patriotic dinner,” at which were present, “Dr. MacNevin, Connolly, Mr. Hughes (a Northern, and Edward says a very sensible man), a Mr. Jackson, an iron manufacturer, a Mr. Bond, a great merchant, one of the handsomest and most delightful men to all appearance that ever was, and a Presbyterian clergyman, called Barber, a venerable old man who had been forced by persecution to fly his Diocese where he had lived 30 years.”
Lady Lucy little suspected that the Northern Mr. Hughes, whom Edward considered so “sensible,” was a Government spy—any more than she suspected that all her own correspondence after her return to London was carefully watched by Government. The mysterious “friend” of her cousin, Lord Downshire (whom Fitzpatrick finally succeeded in identifying with Samuel Turner, of Lurgan), told his patron that the communications of the Irish in Hamburg (who were negotiating there for French aid), with their friends at home were established through the medium of Mme. Matthiesen (Pamela’s cousin, Henriette de Sercey), Lady Sarah and Pamela. The letters were sent by Madame Matthiesen from Hamburg, to Lady Lucy in London—and by Lady Lucy conveyed to Pamela. “All letters to or from Lady Lucy Fitzgerald,” wrote the spy to Lord Downshire, “ought to be inspected.” No doubt this advice was acted upon, and poor unsuspecting Lady Lucy’s correspondence received due attention.
One of the items of “Lucia’s” diary, quoted by Mr. Campbell, makes brief reference to “Two Northern gentlemen who dined with us.” One wonders if one of these could be Bartle Teeling. We know from his nephew’s memoir that in Lady Lucy that gallant and knightly heart had found its ideal. Once she gave him a ring with the words, “_Erin go Bragh_” inscribed on it, and this ring is still treasured in the Teeling family.
Some letters of Lady Lucy published by Mr. Campbell will give a more vivid idea of her ardent and impulsive nature than any elaborate description of her. The first is addressed to “The Irish Nation,” and the occasion seems to have been the threatening advent of the Union:
“Irishmen, Countrymen, it is Edward Fitzgerald’s sister who addresses you: it is a woman, but that woman is his sister: she would therefore die for you as he did. I don’t mean to remind you of what he did for you. ’Twas no more than his duty. Without ambition he resigned every blessing this world could afford, to be of use to you, his countrymen whom he loved better than himself, but in this he did no more than his _duty_; he was _a Paddy and no more_; he desired no other title than this. He never deserted you—will you desert yourselves? This was his only ambition, and will you ever forget yourselves? Will _you_ forget this title, which it is still in your power to ennoble? Will you disgrace it? Will you make it the scoff of your triumphant Enemies, while ’tis in your power to raise it beyond all other glory to immortality? Yes, this is the moment, the precious moment which must either stamp with Infamy the name of Irishmen and denote you for ever wretched, enslaved to the power of England, or raise the Paddies to the consequence which they deserve and which England shall no longer withhold, to _happiness_, _freedom_, _glory_. These are but names as yet to you, my Countrymen. As yet you are strangers to the _reality_ with the power in your hands to realise them. One noble struggle, and you will gain, you will enjoy them for ever.—Your devoted Country-woman—L. F.”
A second to Lady Bute, deals largely with Moore’s “Life of Lord Edward”: