LITMIR.BIZ

      THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1848: FORGING PIKES.

      atheism. The Nation retorted that O’Connell betrayed Ireland by abandoning the “divine right of Revolution” for Whig alliances. In 1845 Davis died, and the leadership of the Party passed into the hands of William Smith O’Brien, his lieutenants being John Mitchel and John Martin. All three were Protestants. Mr. Smith O’Brien was descended from King Brian Borhoimè—who played the part of Alfred the Great in Irish history. A brother of Lord Inchiquin, he was an aristocrat and a Tory, with frigid manners, and a high and chivalrous sense of honour. He had drifted into the “Young Ireland” Party, firstly, because fourteen years’ experience of the Imperial Parliament convinced him that it could not legislate wisely for Ireland, and, secondly, because he despaired of any other Party obtaining for Ireland the only Government that could lift her to her place among the nations. As a speaker he was cold, logical, and stilted. But he had a severe and ascetic sense of public duty, and his fidelity and truthfulness secured for him the unswerving loyalty of his followers.

      It was in 1847 that “Young Ireland” first came into collision with the authorities. John Mitchel, whose violent teaching was abhorred by O’Brien, virtually seceded from the Party represented by the Nation. He had started the United Irishman, and he made it a venomous advocate of Revolution. The outbreak in Paris, in 1848, put the game in Mitchel’s hands. The populace imagined that no government could stand against a mob. “Confederate” Clubs sprang up like mushrooms, and Mitchel became so reckless in his appeals to force that the Government were compelled to “gag” him. He was arrested and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation for treason-felony, on the 20th of May, 1848. O’Brien and Meagher, who had been prosecuted in March, escaped because the juries disagreed.

      Dr. Kevin Izod O’Doherty and Mr. D’Alton Williams, a fortnight after Mitchel’s condemnation, brought out a new organ, the Irish Tribune, and Martin, “honest John Martin,” as he was called, followed up with the Felon, a paper whose teachings were so abominably bloodthirsty that Albany Fonblanque, in the Examiner, suggested it ought to be called the Fiend.105 The sole defence for a truculence, which can be paralleled only by the ravings of Marat, is that the “Young Irelanders” had been goaded to madness by the terrible scenes of the famine, and the apparent impotence of the English Government either to prevent or cope with that hideous calamity. Five weeks after the Felon appeared, Martin, Williams, O’Doherty, and Duffy were arrested. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, and warrants were out against Mr. Smith O’Brien and Meagher (pronounced Maär), the latter the fiercest and most eloquent of their orators. They felt they had now gone too far to draw back, though it would have been easy for them to do so by simply letting themselves be arrested. They considered it their duty to offer to head a rebellion before they were captured; but when they appealed to the people to rise, they found that the peasants hardly knew who they were. They were looked on askance as the men who had quarrelled with O’Connell, and were denounced by the priests. Even if the peasants had been willing, famine had left them physically unfit for battle. Why dwell on the story of the wretched fiasco that was called the “rebellion” of ’48? The small band of patriots who joined the standards of the insurgents had few arms—pikes, old guns, and scythes were their chief weapons. They had no commissariat, no generals, and no plan of campaign. A barricade, commanded by Dillon, was “rushed” at Killenaule. At Ballingarry a party under Mr. Smith O’Brien, hailed by his followers as “King of Munster,” on the 26th of July besieged six policemen, who had taken refuge in a farmhouse belonging to a widow called Cormack. The police refused to surrender, and on the 29th Mr. O’Brien, with reinforcements, again appeared. Another party of policemen came on the scene. A few shots were exchanged, and then the insurgents tried to fire the building. “The widow Cormack, whose five children were in the house,” writes Mr. A. M. Sullivan,106 “rushed to the rebel chief, flung herself on her knees, and asked him if he was going to stain his name and cause by an act so barbarous as the destruction of her little ones.” Mr. O’Brien ordered the combustibles to be flung aside, and his followers, galled by the fire from the improvised fortalice, and disgusted by his soft-heartedness, beat a hasty retreat. The leader of the insurrection, like Scott’s Highland Chieftain, “took to the hills, and became a broken man.” On the 5th of August he walked from his mountain refuge to Thurles Railway Station. When taking a ticket for Limerick, a guard named Hulme recognised and arrested him. With Meagher, Leine, and O’Donoghue, who were captured in the same locality, he was lodged in Kilmainham Gaol. O’Brien and his comrades were tried at Clonmel on the 21st of September, and sentenced to death. This was subsequently commuted to transportation for life, whereupon the condemned men protested that the commutation was ultra vires on the part of the Queen, and that they had a legal right to be “hanged, drawn, and quartered,” or set free! The protest was of no avail, for Parliament quickly passed a special Act, empowering the Crown to commute sentences of high treason. Dillon, O’Gorman, and O’Doherty escaped to America. Duffy was thrice brought to trial, but his advocate, Mr. Butt, thrice baffled his prosecutors. Mr. Smith O’Brien and his companions were set free in Van Diemen’s Land, on parole. Subsequently they were allowed to return home, but Mr. O’Brien died in retirement, never again taking part in public life. Hundreds of able and promising young men fled from the country, and Ireland suffered not only by the exile, enforced or voluntary, of the most public-spirited men in her governing middle class, but from the reaction and the prostration that always follow an abortive revolution.

      Though the progress of the Revolutionary movement in England, Ireland, and France engrossed the interests of the Queen and Prince Albert, it was impossible for them to be indifferent to its progress in other countries, notably in Germany, where it took the form of a movement in favour of National Unity. Ferdinand I., a monarch weak alike in body and mind, at this time sat on the throne of Austria. He was, however, little better than the tool of Prince Metternich, the energetic and unscrupulous Minister in whom Absolutism was incarnate. After the fall of Louis Philippe, turbulent Viennese mobs demanded constitutional reforms in Austria. On the 13th of March, the populace sacked Metternich’s Palace, in Vienna, and the

Скачать книгу