The Immortal Irishman

  The English were much more successful at displacing people from the land. Sons and grandsons of Cromwell’s soldiers passed on to their heirs the fields they had taken. Ireland became a nation of tenant farmers, of large families paying rent to live on ground once owned by their ancestors. From the Peruvian Andes, the potato found its way across the Atlantic in the 1500s. No one can say with certainty how it came to Ireland, though one consistent story has it that potatoes washed ashore after the wreck of the Spanish fleet in 1588. Scholars have disproven a long-held English version: that Sir Walter Raleigh first planted this miracle of starch and nutrition on his estate near Cork in 1589. And it likely didn’t come from Scotland, where clerics banned the potato because it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. No matter. The potato did take to Ireland. It required little more than an acre of soil for a family of five to feed themselves with this one crop for a year, the diet supplemented by buttermilk and bacon and the greens of dandelion leaves, chives and cabbage.

  By the late eighteenth century, the potato was the national food, with more than two million acres devoted to tillage of the tuber. The large estates were given over to grazing for cattle and sheep, and growing oats and barley. Those were the money crops for landlords who were gone much of the year. The small potato farms, worked by the peasant class, were not idyllic in any sense. In the rural areas, half the families of Ireland lived in single-room, windowless hovels. Huts were of thatched roofs over sod, the walls made of dried mud that liquefied in the rain, with beds of straw, floors of packed dirt, a table serving as the one piece of furniture, a hearth smoky from smoldering peat—and a pig in one corner, a family’s prized possession.

  “I have seen the Indian in the forest, and the negro in his chains and thought that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness, but did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland,” Beaumont wrote after two long reporting tours in 1835 and 1837. “An entire nation of paupers is what never was seen until it was shown in Ireland.”

  Thomas Meagher’s family had money—see here, their very appearance proclaimed, we’re not all shoeless and hollow-eyed—but only because they had fled. English rule had produced the poorest country in Europe, and also a nation whose most ambitious people left for better lives. From a tenant farm in County Tipperary, a young man in a family with 700-year-old ties to the land had picked up in the 1780s and sailed for Newfoundland. The big island of broken rock and blistering winds off the east coast of the North American mainland was England’s oldest colony, but it offered the Irish a degree of respect unknown to them at home. They gave their adopted land a Gaelic name that meant “land of the fish.” In 1788, Newfoundland was host to the first recorded game of hurling in the New World.

  Thomas Meagher Sr., grandfather to the Waterford lad, started as a tailor in St. John’s, where two thirds of the residents were Irish. He mended sails and suits, and jumped at the opportunity to move up in the merchant trade. The sea around him was a garden of cod, the fish that built empires and became almost its own currency. Meagher bought a sixty-ton brig in 1808, the first of his own fleet. He shipped salted cod to Waterford and returned with bacon, flour, oats and immigrants. He expanded the trade: sealskins, salmon and timber going one way; beer, linen and crystal coming back the other. He brought his son, Thomas Meagher Jr., into the business as a full partner in 1815. When he moved home to Ireland, he returned with an immense fortune of £20,000. By then, the Penal Laws had eroded: Catholics were now allowed to buy property in the cities and to attend their own schools, provided no Gaelic was taught. Still, they could not hold office.

  In Waterford, shadowed by bareback hills of stone and grass, the elder Meagher moved into a Georgian villa once owned by descendants of Cromwell’s army. It closed a loop, dating to when his people had been dispossessed in Tipperary by the Cursed One. His son joined the family three years later, and they all moved into an even larger house. The Meaghers took over much of the waterfront, their wealth further enhanced by marriage into another merchant family.

  By 1825, when two-year-old Thomas Francis toddled around the mansion in Waterford, the high-ceilinged rooms draped in tapestries and furnished with oil portraits, the Meaghers were Irish aristocracy. They not only made more money than anyone in town, but they gave it away—to societies for the poor in Newfoundland and Ireland, to a refuge for orphans that offered trade skills for the boys and to a campaign to liberate Catholics at home. Had they discarded their religion, the family could have had full privileges of the estate-owning elite. At a time when life expectancy was not yet forty years, they could also expect additional decades, for the Meagher men were of a hardy stock, living into advanced old age. The women were not so fortunate. In 1827, Thomas lost his mother, Alicia, and ten years later his sister died. That left a girl and two boys—Thomas being the oldest—to be raised by grandparents, aunts and the stout, intelligent, lordly father. Thomas Francis was taught to love words and their power to change minds. But he must work within the system, his father told him. Respect the Crown. Honor the rule of law. Yes, he could sing the ballads of Hugh O’Neill or wear his Wolfe Tone cap around town, but he should not act on the ardor aroused by the summoning of those dead patriots.

  Thomas challenged his father at every turn. He watched boats sail from Waterford, down the estuary of the Suir and out to sea, loaded with human cargo from the villages of Ireland. He caught glimpses of those faces turning for a last look. Why was there no future for them at home, he wondered in a later recollection, “compelled to surrender the land of their love and pride?”

  At the Jesuit boarding school in Clongowes Wood, north of Waterford in County Kildare, young Thomas saw gray-staked evidence of the Pale’s outer reach, not far from the fields where he kicked a soccer ball. Finding a ditch and the remnants of a wall, he could not fathom why people had been fenced out of their own country. Between clarinet recitals and lessons in Latin, Thomas pestered the Jesuits in the same way he had bothered his father. Why are we not allowed to govern ourselves? Why can’t we speak our language? (Gaelic was still the primary tongue for one and a half million Irish.) And what future is there for a nation whose landowners live in another country, collecting rents from the native inhabitants? To these queries, the priests told the boy to mind his mouth. The Jesuits spoke a half-dozen languages, but Irish nationalism was not one of them.

  “In that grand castle of theirs, they lived and taught rather as hostages and aliens than as freemen and citizens,” Thomas recalled. He learned about the world’s great powers and their wars, the clash of empires and the march of monarchs. But nothing of his own land. “As far as Ireland was concerned, they left us like blind and crippled children, in the dark,” he said. “They never spoke of Ireland. Never gave us, even what is left of it, her history to read.” He should consider himself fortunate to be among the lads at Clongowes, where it cost the equivalent of a full year’s wages to attend. When he saw his father, the elder Thomas Francis reinforced the message of the educators: Change will come to Ireland slowly, by peaceful means. Look what your family made of itself in Waterford. And consider the life that awaits you.

  But a day’s sail away, those who held Ireland’s future in their hands had another view. The stack of centuries since the Norman landing had taught the English there was only one way to rule these people. In Parliament, the question of the troublesome island came up once again. It was always on the agenda, one way or the other, like a roof with a perpetual leak. “How do you govern it?” asked Thomas Babington Macaulay, the historian and politician. “Not by love but by fear.”

  And yet something other than fear was in the air just then, the young sensing a hinge moment. The American Revolution had produced a raft of stirring thought—Jefferson and Paine, Franklin and Adams. They had whipped the British Empire! Expelled the occupiers! The words of these excitable New World rebels jumped off the page to someone reading them in a captive nation. The king has “plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our houses, and destroy
ed the lives of our people,” the Americans asserted in their Declaration of Independence. What Irishman was this Thomas Jefferson? That’s us! Countries all over Europe were threatening to throw off their monarchies. Old ideas were buried. New ideas took wing.

  To complete his schooling, it was decided that Thomas Meagher would be sent away to a prestigious school in the heart of England. His father hoped that this quarrelsome boy, too much the prankster, would return as a gentleman on a leash. In England, he could read Francis Bacon, John Locke and Voltaire. In England, he could memorize the Rights of Man from France and the Bill of Rights from the United States. On the eve of his departure, he vowed never to hold his tongue, and with the courage of someone yet to shave his first whisker, he laughed when warned that such a trait would buy him a death sentence in Ireland. He dashed off an ode to seizing life’s moments, concluding that “no one should be secure of reaching a happy old age.”

  2

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  The Becoming

  The boy sailed for England in October of 1839, his life compressed into a bundle of trunks, the wooden clarinet wrapped in layers. The Irish Sea coiled and cupped, passage seldom smooth. In Liverpool, the Empire’s exotica spilled onto the docks, smells from the Caribbean, birds from the South Seas, dark-skinned, newly freed deckhands singing something that could not have come from Great Britain, and hundreds of Irish families looking to take the first steps toward a new life. He caught a coach to Manchester, changed for another to Whalley, and after a journey that had lasted five days in all he arrived in Lancashire, at Stonyhurst College. Home for the next four years was one of the largest buildings under a single roof in all of Europe. The pile impressed him—for its enormity, for its brooding setting in a valley of old sycamores and chestnuts, for the stone eagles perched atop twin cupolas towering over the rest of the manor. The tree branches were like wrinkled arms, he thought, holding the college in mystery. Years later, the deep-shadowed forests beyond the moats of Stonyhurst would make a similar impression on the imagination of another temporary resident, J.R.R. Tolkien. In its age and posture, its stained-glass windows and arched entrances, the shell of the college was a match for its mission: to educate the most influential Catholics of Europe.

  He was taken to his room, cold and dimly lit, gas lamps in the hallways to find the way. Biting winds swept down from the Pendle Hills, a nag for all but the summer months. Heat came from the glow of burning coal behind grates in the common rooms. He traded his silks for a uniform of a blue swallowtail coat, gold buttons, a waistcoat and gray pants. He could wear only one pair of shoes from Sunday through Wednesday, and then change into a second pair for the remainder of the week. Two pairs, no more. Get rid of the accent, he was told immediately—it won’t do you any good here. These were English Jesuits giving 200 boys an English education. Exploring the warrens of the old estate, he came to a high table, prominently displayed in the refectory: Cromwell’s bed for one night. The hated Lord Protector had slept there during the English Civil War, placing the makeshift bed in the center of the room as a way to keep an eye out for assassins.

  Thomas was sixteen, with sweet lips, an aquiline nose, eyes the color of the Lancashire sky when it cleared. His upper body was solid and sinewy, his dark hair curled just at the ears. The schedule at Stonyhurst was as follows: rise at 5:30 a.m., then off to the chapel for prayers and Mass. Breakfast in a drafty room. A full day of Latin, Greek, French, geography, history, literature, mathematics, algebra, science. Testosterone raged on the green lawn of the pitch, football year-round. Late afternoon was given over to study at long community desks under the gaze of a black-robed enforcer. Evening meal with his masters—“bug soup” and “dog stew,” as the boys called the fare. In bed by 9 p.m. Students stayed at the college through Christmas and Easter, the only vacation being a month at the end of summer. Don’t even think of chasing girls in the village, he was informed. At Stonyhurst, no women, not the mothers or sisters of students, were allowed. The one exception: the school allowed a few female cooks and cleaners inside, beauty being a disqualifier. The penalty for sneaking out, or any number of enumerated infractions, was painful: a thick leather strap-whacking to the open palm, nine lashes per hand. The beatings left blisters but seldom broke the skin.

  For all of that, Thomas was lucky to be one of the young scholars of Stonyhurst. He’d been kicked out of Clongowes, a dark day for his long-suffering father, after running afoul of the priests. It began over a holiday goose, which Thomas had been called upon to carve for fellow seniors. He complained of the bird’s size. The scrawny carcass was not fit for his tablemates, he protested—it would leave them all hungry. Eat it, he was told. In protest, the boys stormed out. They threw rocks at the main window of the frescoed dining hall. One of the stones broke the glass. Then they disappeared to Dublin for a night in the pubs. The students had learned to drink from the priests, who regularly served beer with lunch, champagne and port with dinner—alcohol considered a safe alternative to nonpotable water. Thomas had been punished many a time at Clongowes; “isolation,” when he was required to sharpen the priests’ razors against a granite wall, was the usual sentence. But this infraction was serious. For organizing the rebellion, he was expelled. He could save himself if he turned in the boy who broke the window at Clongowes. Thomas would not give up his mate.

  His college choices were limited. Trinity, the Protestant hold founded by Queen Elizabeth in the days when her soldiers were hunting harpers, was the only university in Ireland. For just a few years now, the school had opened its doors to select Catholics, but families like the Meaghers distrusted the university. Using the pull of an uncle who was a Jesuit, the elder Thomas got his son into Stonyhurst, one of the best colleges in Europe. The school had wandered, an exile in Europe, before a wealthy alumnus offered his estate, Stonyhurst, beginning in 1794. The new home was made possible by a series of reform acts that allowed Catholics in England to acquire property, to practice their religion without fear of civil penalties and to attend their own schools.

  From the start, one thing was clear about this Irish student Meagher: the lad could talk. He enrolled in the School of Rhetoric, and dominated the debate society. He studied the great orators, learning how to build his case without letting sarcasm sink it. His memory of epic poems was startling—he could spring through the marathon, not missing a stanza. When the words weren’t coming out of his mouth, they poured forth on paper. He won a medal for a crisp essay on the evils of slavery in America. He compiled a history of the debate society at Clongowes Wood—later published by the school. His letters to girls were cheeky and flirty. “Next to seeing you is the pleasure of seeing your handwriting,” he wrote to one. He signed his letters “Nimrod” in self-deprecation. He was popular, full of mischief, liked a joke and a prank, a smoke and a drink in one of many hidden pockets in the forty-four-acre expanse of Stonyhurst. Alas, at the largest regular gathering of the school day, his voice was rendered mute. Speaking at dinner was not allowed at Stonyhurst. The boys ate their unpalatable English suppers in silence, priests at their elbows.

  On June 15, 1840, the college band assembled for a performance in commemoration of the Battle of Waterloo—the Duke of Wellington’s triumph over Napoleon. When it came time to strike up the music, the first clarinet was a big hole in the presentation. Thomas sat with his instrument in his lap. The maestro was furious. Thomas refused to perform: no breath of his would sound a note for an English victory, he explained. Lashes followed.

  In the years that Thomas was becoming a man, Great Britain was growing into the world’s foremost power. Backed by the ferocious guns of the Royal Navy, the globe’s biggest merchant marine fleet and deft diplomacy, a small island nation of eleven million people ruled a network of colonies, territories, protectorates and dominions that would eventually cover nearly one fourth of the world’s land area. A third of all trade moved in and out of England. Getting a jump on the Industrial Revolution, with steam power and telegraph communication, Britai
n went on a tear of economic expansion; by the 1840s, per capita income was nearly twice that of Germany or France. The loss of the American colonies had been a blow, but the English never looked back. The continent of Australia was added to the Empire’s fold in 1788, and the subcontinent of India had been tamed a few decades earlier. South Africa in 1815, Singapore in 1824, New Zealand in 1840, Hong Kong in 1841. The huge landmass of Canada was well ordered, filled with loyalists who had fled the United States after the Revolutionary War, while the French-speaking provinces were given a degree of home rule. Great Britain considered itself a benign imperial power—civilized men overseeing a mostly barbaric world. Legal human bondage was ended with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

  The greatest empire the world had yet seen got its start with the conquest of Ireland back in 1171. And tiny Ireland was still the most troublesome turf under the Union Jack. China, India, entire subcontinents, could be subdued with less firepower than it took to keep the Irish in place. While loosening the Penal Laws, one final attempt was made by the government to snuff out the last pulse of Gaelic nationalism. At the stroke of midnight, New Year’s Day, 1801, the Irish Parliament was abolished and shuttered in Dublin. It had never been representative—the majority of the people had no voice. And any law passed by the body in Dublin could be overruled in London. The failed rebellion of 1798 was one of many violent expressions of frustration with a legislature that excluded at least 80 percent of the residents. But the Irish Parliament gave the illusion of self-government for Anglo and Protestant gentry suffering through their tenancy as minority rulers of the island.