Part 7
We would fain know something of the training and education which, fostering her innate charm, made the mother of Bartholomew and Charles Teeling such an exquisite type of the Irish Catholic gentlewoman. “A nation is what its women make its men”; and if we want boys in the Ireland of the future like the gallant boy, who on his noble grey charger galloped alone against the cannon of Park’s Hill, and saved the fortunes of the day at Carricknagat, or like that other gallant boy, his younger brother, who rode forth—a lad of seventeen—on a yet more perilous quest: to slay unaided the dragon of Orangeism, we must take care to provide “mothers of men” like her who bore these young heroes. And not alone for the men they will make, will Ireland need such women. She will want them for their own dear selves; and she will want them, whatever be her destiny—whether she is to enter at last on the reward of her long sorrows, or whether she must tread the roadway of thorns yet a little longer. If the future of our land is to be one of peace and prosperity she will need in her homes women to “look well to the paths of their house,” as Mary Teeling did in the days of her prosperity amid the elegance and comforts of the home in Lisburn which her husband’s wealth had enabled him to provide for his family, exercising the sweet and lovely rule of the mistress of a Catholic home, training her children to the noblest ideals of life and conduct, directing her servants with gentle authority, practising a gracious hospitality, “opening her hands to the needy, and stretching out her hands to the poor.” And if, on the other hand, the whole price is not paid yet, and the era of persecution is to open again—ah! then it is that Ireland will need her Mary Teelings to stand by their husbands’ side while “they suffer persecution for justice’ sake,” as she did by Luke Teeling’s during the long years of his martyrdom; keeping in the midst of all misfortunes, loss of home and children, of wealth and ease, the same exquisite sweetness of nature and charm of manner which made her in happier days the delight of her friends, “the pride and idol of her family.”
* * * * *
It has seemed worth while to go to some pains to discover, if possible, the details of an education which “in the dead vast and middle” of the Penal night, produced a type of womanhood, presenting nothing less than the “fine flower” of Catholic culture. “Who shall find a valiant woman?” Have we not found her—with every exquisite trait of her immortal prototype reproduced—in this dear Irish lady, whose radiant personality, and high-bred grace, no less than her sweetness, and saintliness, and charity, survive, through her grandson’s portrait of her, even the destruction of the tomb? “Far and from the uttermost coast would be the price of her,” whatever land produced her. If it were France during the age when the education of girls was considered a subject of sufficient importance for the grave debates of a King’s Council Chamber, or a brilliant treatise from a learned and saintly prelate’s pen;[32] or Italy, in the days when wealthy and powerful princes like those of Mantua co-operated with great teachers and scholars like Vittorino da Feltre in the foundation of the schools, where the Cecilia Gonzagas won their culture; or Germany in the years when illustrious humanists like Celtes and Reuchlin were proud of the share they had taken in forming the minds of women like Caritas Pirckheimer—if it were any of these lands or these ages that claimed the “price of her” it would be a matter of small wonder. But let us try to realise that it was Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century, when education was, for Catholics, a thing banned and barred by statute. In other countries little Catholic boys and girls were enticed to their books by every loving and ingenious device. Great statesmen, great churchmen, great scholars gave their best thought to the subject of their education. In the Ireland into which little Mary Taaffe was born about 1753, “statesmen” also _had_ given their thought to the subject of education for Catholic children—but the legislation which was the result amounted simply in Lecky’s famous phrase, to “universal, unqualified and unlimited proscription.”
Footnote 32:
Witness the interest of Louis XIV in Madame de Maintenon’s foundation of St. Cyr, and Fénélon’s treatise on “L’Education des Filles.”
Nevertheless Catholic parents managed to get their children educated, and the nation which its lawgivers doomed to ignorance and degradation produced, by some miracle, scholars like Charles O’Connor of Belanagare and high-bred, charming women like her whose life-story we are now studying. How was it accomplished? What a stirring and splendid chapter the full answer to that question would add to the history of human endeavour! How one longs for the coming of the long-delayed historian of the Irish people who shall tell, in all its fullness, the story of how they educated their children during the Penal Days.
For the boys we know in part how it was done. They were smuggled off to the Continent with other forbidden “cargoes,” and at the great colleges in Spain, and France and the Low Countries found “bourses” provided by the pious generosity of their wealthier countrymen, or were supported by remittances from home which no threatened penalty could prevent their devoted parents from sending.[33] Or a tutor was provided for them in some hunted bishop, perhaps, or friar, who found safety in the lowly disguise of a gardener or farm-servant working on their father’s place,[34] or who came there for a time, as one of the Bishops of Clogher is recorded to have made the rounds of his diocese, in the character of a wandering harper. Or they would get a course of lessons from some of the numerous scribes, who perambulated the country, stopping for a season at the houses of the gentry of the old race, and copying out manuscripts for them—Keating’s History of Ireland,[35] tales of the Red Branch and the Fenians, pseudo-historical accounts of the old families—as Sean MaGauran did for Brian Maguire.[36]
Footnote 33:
The statute dealing with their case runs thus: “In case any of his Majesty’s subjects of Ireland shall _go_ or send any person to any public or private Popish school, in parts beyond the seas, in order to be educated in the Popish religion, and there be trained in the Popish religion, or shall send money or other thing towards the maintenance of such person gone or sent, and trained as aforesaid, or as a charity for relief of a religious house, every person so going, sending or sent, shall, on conviction, be disabled to sue, in law or in equity, or to be guardian, executor, or administrator, or take a legacy or deed of gift, or bear any office, and shall forfeit goods and chattels for ever, and lands for life.”—7th William III, ch. 4, s.), 1694.
Footnote 34:
See “Religious Songs of Connacht,” _passim_.
Footnote 35:
It is instructive to note the dates of the MSS. of Keating in the British Museum. The larger number were written during the Penal Days.
Footnote 36:
See “Maguires of Fermanagh,” edited by Fr. Dinneen, p. 140.
The girls in some instances shared the lessons of their brothers. Dr. Costello of Tuam tells me that his great-grandmother was taught Latin by a man working on her father’s farm—a disguised friar. The scribes put aside their copying for a time to form the little maidens’ hands to the delicate Italian script which was the admiration of the time. The wandering harper, who honoured their father’s house with a visit, could sometimes be induced to give the daughters of the family a course of lessons on his sweet instrument. Arthur O’Neill tells us of teaching the harp to two young ladies in Longford, Miss Farrell and Miss Plunkett. “Miss Farrell played handsomely; Miss Plunkett middling.”[37] Most of the old Catholic families had members settled abroad, and intercourse with the Continent was therefore so close and intimate that the outlook of the Irish at home was far less insular than it is at present. Occasionally uncles and cousins, who had won fame as soldiers in foreign services, came home to visit their people, and as they liked to have their nephews and nieces able to converse with them in French, or Spanish, or German, as the case might be, the little ones were stimulated to learn as much as they could in expectation of their kinsmen’s coming. Little Mary Ann McCracken had to learn her French from an old weaver, but little Mary Taaffe and her sisters had all around them priests, who had studied abroad, and were only too anxious to keep up their practice of foreign languages by speaking them with their little parishioners. And so when the Taaffe uncle who had fought at Fontenoy, or his son, who witnessed the dispersal of the Brigade, came home to Ireland, their fastidious ears were not tortured by the halting French or vile accents of their young kinswomen. In many a country house, as in that of the O’Connors of Belanagare, were living ladies, like Madame O’Rorke, Charles O’Connor’s grandmother, widows of distinguished Irish officers in the French, or Spanish or Imperial service, who had spent their youth in the most brilliant circle in Europe, had been the friends and _confidantes_ of Queens, and who now took delight in forming their little grandchildren and nieces to the exquisite manners and gracious bearing which, in their own case, had won the admiration of the most polished society on the Continent. In other houses were other ladies who under the secular garb which the necessities of the time imposed on them, carried out as well as they could, in their kinsmen’s homes, the religious rule of life to which they had bound themselves in their suppressed convents. When the convents were closed, and the nuns scattered, those who, instead of going abroad, found refuge with their relatives and friends, devoted themselves largely to the education of the little girls of the household. They trained them to their own exquisite skill in needlework, they taught them something of the art of healing, and above all they filled their minds with sweet and lovely images through their stories of the girl saints who had been their own unseen but constant companions in cell, and garden, and church; they turned them steadily to the imitation of the virtues by which the Elizabeths, the Cecilias, the Catherines, the Agneses had won their place as hand-maidens of the Heavenly Queen.
Footnote 37:
“Annals of Irish Harpers,” p. 179.
There is no story more beautiful in our national annals than the story—yet untold in its completeness—of the Irish nuns during the ages of persecution. We see them avail themselves of the slightest lull in the storm to found their convents, and carry out the _Magnum Opus_ to which they had vowed their life. The days of the Confederation of Kilkenny saw the foundation of the Dominican Convent at Galway,[38] the days of James II saw its restoration, and the establishment of the Benedictines in Dublin. To such institutions the Catholic gentry sent their daughters to be educated, and we have only to turn to the pages of O’Heyne[39] to learn what manner of women these were who had the training of their young compatriots.
Footnote 38:
O’Heyne states that the convent was established at the end of the reign of James I. but it was only in 1644 that the church was built and a house arranged in conventural style. The foundation was confirmed by Rinuccini in 1647.
Footnote 39:
Admirably edited by Rev. Ambrose Coleman, O.P., who has contributed an Appendix full of the most valuable historical information (Dundalk, 1902).
We see the heroic and saintly Prioress of the Dominican Nuns in Galway, Juliana Nolan, “a woman of heroic fortitude in bearing every kind of adversity, and very firm in observance and the gaining of virtues”; her successor, Mary Lynch, who taught school in Spain before her return to Galway, “a most religious woman and of great capacity for ruling and instructing”; and above all Mary O’Halloran, than whom, O’Heyne declares, he had never known a woman of stronger intellect. “She had a more accurate acquaintance with the Spanish tongue than the Spaniards themselves, and was well versed in sacred and profane history.”
It was not alone the young girls of the “Tribes” or the chieftainly families of the West who were sent to the Convent in Galway to be trained by the women we have described. Even right across the country from Drogheda pupils came to them. One of these, Catherine Plunkett, daughter of Thomas Plunkett, of Drogheda, and a relation of the martyred Archbishop, Oliver Plunkett, passed from the school room, at an early age, to the novitiate and received her religious training under Mary Lynch. “She shared in all the vicissitudes of that Community, who were several times compelled by religious persecution to quit their convent. Some sought shelter in the homes of their relations or friends, whilst not a few experienced the utmost vigours of poverty. Father Hugh O’Callaghan, who was Prior Provincial of the Dominicans from 1709 to 1718, having during the course of his Visitation, found the Sisters in this lamentable condition, and without any hope of their being permitted to return to their Convent, obtained for them from the Archbishop of Dublin, Most Rev. Dr. Edmund Byrne, permission to settle in his diocese; accordingly in March, 1717, eight of them (of whom Catherine Plunkett was one) arrived in the Metropolis and took up their abode first in Fisher’s Lane, from which they soon afterwards removed to the ancient Benedictine Convent, Chancel Row (now North Brunswick Street).”[40]
Footnote 40:
Memoir of Mother M. Catherine Plunkett, compiled from the Archives of Sienna Convent, Drogheda, very kindly furnished me by Mother Prioress and Community.
After a little time, Catherine Plunkett obtained the permission of her Superiors to go to Belgium, where she was received into the Convent of the English Dominican Sisters, called the _Spillikens_, from its proximity to a pin factory. Here she remained about three years until at the urgent request of the Primate Hugh MacMahon, she was recalled in 1721, by the Provincial, Dr. Stephen MacEgan, to found a convent in her native town of Drogheda.
It reads like a chapter of the _Fioretti_—the record of the early days of Catherine Plunkett’s foundation in Drogheda. The first home of the nuns was a little mud cabin on the Meath side of the Boyne. Long before day broke over the shining sands and thin line of Eastern sea, the Dominican Father who ministered to their spiritual wants, used to row himself over in a little boat to say Mass and give them holy Communion. Dressed in secular garb, with their real character known only to a few discreet friends, the ladies from Brussels obtained, without much difficulty, leave from the Protestant Primate to open a school, and the Drogheda merchants were very glad to send their daughters to them. Later, they moved to a house in Dyer Street, and opened a boarding school, and an establishment for lady boarders. All the _noblesse_ of the Pale, the Plunketts, the Bellews, the Balfes, the Dillons, the O’Reillys, the Drakes, the Fortescues, the Taaffes are represented among the first pupils—and it is not at all unlikely that our heroine, Mary Taaffe, received her education in this Dyer Street Convent, which welcomed so many of her kinswomen. The nuns of Sienna very kindly searched their old account books for her name, but unfortunately the books were missing for the years 1762 to 1765, which are the very years when we might expect to find her there—if we are right in assuming that she was born about 1753.[41]
Footnote 41:
The date has only been arrived at by inference. She was married in 1771, and we know from her grandson’s narrative that she was considered to have married early, say about eighteen. Her mother died in 1753, which set a posterior limit to her conjectured birth year.
So while it is not improbable that Catherine Plunkett’s Convent in Drogheda had the credit of the education which produced so charming a result, we cannot attain any certainty in the matter. Nor do we know much about Mary Taaffe’s childhood. Her father, Mr. George Taaffe, representative of that branch of the Taaffes who held the Earldom of Carlingford under the Stuarts, lived in Ardee on the remnant of the ancestral estates which was all the family’s devotion to the “Lost Cause” of the Stuarts had left them, and within sight of the ancestral castle of Smarmore, which his son was to purchase back for the family. His young wife, Elizabeth Keappock, died in 1753 at the early age of thirty, leaving him with one son, John, and four daughters. Of these, one married Terence Kiernan; another, a member of the Scurly family, a third, Alice, James Lynch of Drogheda. John, the only son, was twice married, first to Anne Plunkett of Portmarnock, and after her death in 1786 to Catherine Taaffe.
The ease with which Mr. George Taaffe got his girls married (an ease which anxious parents of the present day might well envy) to young men who in respect of fortune and family were among the most eligible _partis_ in the Pale, suggests that the Taaffe girls were very attractive. Doubtless their father’s house, when his four charming daughters still graced it, was an extremely pleasant place; and it is not to be wondered at that the girls’ clever young kinsman, Mr. Luke Teeling, found himself often taking in Ardee[42] on his journeys between his father’s place near Balbriggan and the establishment of the linen merchant in Lisburn with whom he was serving his apprenticeship.
Footnote 42:
It would be quite in his way if we are justified in assuming that the route taken by Thomas Molyneux in 1707 was the ordinary one.
As is so often the case with serious-minded young men, there was a strong, if hidden, vein of romance in Luke Teeling’s nature, and he soon discovered that he had lost his heart irrevocably, to his pretty cousin, Mary. She was young, hardly more than a child at the time, and her father was loth to part with his little maid so soon; but he recognised the sterling qualities of her suitor and gave his consent to an engagement, which terminated in the marriage of the young couple at Ardee on April 6th, 1771.
There had been an old connection between the Taaffes and the Teelings, and we learn from Bartholomew Teeling’s Memoir of his uncle that Luke Teeling’s mother was of the house of Taaffe. After the record of the marriage of Luke and Mary (still kept at Smarmore Castle) the words are inserted, “obtenta dispensatione in consanguinitate.”
Like the Taaffes, the Teelings had suffered much during the long wars which devastated Ireland in the seventeenth century, and of the broad acres which their forefathers had held in Meath for over five hundred years there remained after the “Third Breaking” of Aughrim, in the pathetic phrase of one of the family’s present-day representatives, little more than “the semi-circular arched vault in the churchyard of Rathkenny.” But even before Father Teeling, who came back from his College on the Continent about the beginning of the eighteenth century, to endure the life of suffering, and labour, and peril of a missionary priest in Ireland under the Penal Régime, was gathered to his fathers in that vault, the fortunes of the family were already in the ascent. In truth there was something in the Teelings which forced them to the front in whatever walk of life they might choose for themselves, whether as soldiers, like the old knightly Teelings of the Middle Ages, whose names survive in many an ancient deed of gift to religious houses; or churchmen, like Father Ignatius Teeling, S. J., or scholars like Theobald Teeling, the correspondent of Justus Lipsius, and that other Teeling, who has been described by Archbishop Peter Talbot as “_urbis et orbis miraculum_.”[43] And this something—call it personality, force of character, or what you will—was peculiarly evident in Bartholomew Teeling whom we find settled in the neighbourhood of Balbriggan about the middle of the eighteenth century.
Footnote 43:
These particulars concerning the Teeling family are taken from an excellent article in _The Gentleman’s Magazine_ (October, 1905), by a writer signing himself “Albi Norman.”
It was in the days when Balbriggan, under the fostering care of its landlord, Baron Hamilton, of Hampton Hall,[44] was developing from a miserable little fishing hamlet into a prosperous trading town. With the assistance of a small grant from the Irish Parliament, the Baron built the pier, in the sixties of the eighteenth century, and thus fostered a lively carrying trade with Wales. Ships of two hundred tons could unload in the new harbour, and such craft crowded the quay, unloading cargoes of slates, coal and culm, as well as rock salt and bark, and carrying back corn and cattle. In 1780 the Baron established extensive cotton works here, for the promotion of which parliament granted the sum of £1,250, but this manufacture was subsequently almost abandoned for that of hosiery.[45] When Arthur Young visited Ireland in 1776, he spent a few days with the Baron, and we learn from him[46] much of the latter’s improvements; of the one hundred and fifty acres of mountain land he reclaimed; of the agricultural methods he adopted, and of their financial results; of the local fishing industry and how he worked it. It seems the Baron had boat-building works, and out of these came his fleet of “23 boats each carrying seven men, who were not paid wages, but divided the produce of the fishery. The vessel took one share, and the hands one each, which amounts on an average to 16s. a week. A boat costs from £130 to £200, fitted out ready for the fishery; they make their own nets.”
Footnote 44:
He was M.P. for Belfast, Solicitor General and Baron of the Exchequer (D’Alton’s “History of County Dublin,” p. 477).
Footnote 45:
D’Alton, _op. cit._, p. 468.
Footnote 46:
“Tour in Ireland,” Vol. I.
With the agricultural experiments of the Baron, and his industrial and trading enterprises, Bartholomew Teeling was closely identified. He held the lands in Walshetown, Gardiner’s Hill, Kilbrickstown, etc., and some family documents, which I have been privileged to examine, have reference to business transactions with Baron Hamilton, which would seem to indicate that Bartholomew Teeling helped to finance the Baron’s schemes.
At all events Bartholomew prospered, and when he died the provisions he was able to make for his sons and the education he gave them, show that he had accumulated a comfortable fortune. He was married twice, it would appear, his first wife being of the Taaffe family, and his second a Miss Grace. By these he had a numerous family of sons. In addition to Luke, the eldest son, we find mention in the family papers of Christopher, a well-known doctor in Dublin; James, who seems to have remained in his father’s place near Balbriggan and combined manufacturing and farming; Joseph, and Robert, afterwards merchants in Dublin; and Bartholomew. There was also a Patrick, but if he was one of these brothers, he must have died soon, as his name early falls out of the family record.
Luke had been early apprenticed to the linen trade—and that fact in itself indicates that his father was a man of means. For in the endeavour to keep the trade “exclusive,” a high fee was charged, and a fairly long apprenticeship insisted on.