The croppy : a tale

Front matter

Sis ie Sey

Sey,

A Tale.

Chapter I. Introductory

Intropuctory and historical, and not comprising a word of the Tale to which it leads; so that some readers will probably pass it by; and yet we intreat all who wish really to understand even the more fictitious parts of our story, to give it an indulgent and careful perusal,

Few can forget that, in the year 1798, a wide-spread conspiracy, which partially exploded, existed amongst Irishmen of every rank and sect,—having in view a separation from England, and the establishing, upon the ruins of British dominion, an Irish Republic.

The name adopted by the conspirators was that of United Irishmen; but as this name was inherited by them, the necessary task of explaining its nature and import cannot be accomplished without tracing it from its source.

In 1777, Britain was engaged in the war with her Colonies. France; entering into alliance with America, had sent the soldiers of her despotic monarchy to fight for republicanism. England, in want of troops, withdrew her garrisons from Ireland, in order to transport them over the Atlantic. Ireland then remained without an army to protect her against a threatened French invasion. She demanded succour from England, and understood that she must defend herself.

The Irish flew to arms. Ina short time, a great national force, self-raised, self-armed, self-equipped, and well-disciplined, stood forward to meet the expected foe. None appeared; but had the contrary been the case, such was the steady though chivalrous spirit of military ardour, pervading the country from north to south, that, in any struggle with an invading enemy, Ireland must have triumphed. The Irish Volunteers were acknowledged by the legislature as ‘the saviours of their country.”

In order to become a volunteer, certain outlays, requiring considerable means, were to be incurred; hence, the volunteer ranks were composed of those classes who, by habits or education, are raised above the mere headlong zeal of the multitude:—they were reflecting citizens, as well as chivalrous soldiers.

Church of England Protestants, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics, stood side by side in this national band. Under the old penal code, then in almost full force, persons of the last-mentioned persuasion could not, indeed, legally bear arms;—nay, in some instances in the North, their offers of service were coldly or offensively repulsed: but this disrelish to fight for country or home by their side, was by no means general; the terrors of the Statute-book by no means damped their own ardour; and now, forgetting the clank of their chains in the rattling of arms, they appeared members of almost every corps in the kingdom.

Having scared away from their shores England’s most formidable enemy, the Volunteers continued to be the only army of their country: and, in the absence of opportunity for the exercise of their military character, they began to contemplate, as politicians, the position of that country. Her legislature and her trade first fixed their attention. The one they found destitute of the power of real enactment; the other they found grievously restricted; and they petitioned for the emancipation of both. England, still without troops to support a refusal, acceded to their demands. In 1782, Treland owed to her armed citizens of every sect, an independent Parliament anda free trade. The steady union of her children made her a nation.

The independence of their legislature thus sceured, the Volunteers turned their eyes to the construction of that legislature itself.

Presbyterian Ulster had set the example of uniting the deliberative and military characters. The first imposing assemblage, in which the soldier, leaning on his musket, debated the politics of his country, consisted exclusively of volunteer delegates from that province. It was followed up, in Dublin, by a meeting of representatives of all the corps of Ireland, who, in imitation of the American Assembly, called themselves a Congress; and from this body emanated a petition for reform in Parliament.

But England could now more safely refuse. Her transatlantic warfare was ended; she had troops at command; and the prayer of the Irish “*Congress”” was promptly and disdainfully rejected.

The Reformers, boasting of their physical power to enforce compliance, renewed and increased their clamour. They were firmly answered. A war of words ensued; they branding the legislature as corrupt and odious; and the legislature, in return, attributing to them disloyal principles, and classing them with the French anarchists, whose first sanguinary acts then began, unluckily for the cause of legitimate freedom, to disgust the world.

Omitting the details of this struggle of the two parties, it will be convenient for our purpose to pass from 1784 to 1792, and examine the position and state of the Volunteers at the latter mentioned. period. And, at a glance, we find them, from many causes, decreased in numbers, influence, and importance.

In the first petition for an independent Parliament and a free trade, every Volunteer, from the landed proprietor to the mechanic, had felt a common interest; but in that for Parliamentary reform, many aristocratic members of the national army, who held seats in the Lower House, did not conceive that their interests were regarded; and in consequence, they ceased to be Volunteers. Other moderate men, fearful of being classed by Government amongst those whom it denounced as enemies, seceded, with a prudent foresight, to save themselves from future results: some rallying, heart and hand, round King and Constitution; some forming themselves into an aristocratic body, called the Whig Club, which, as it too professed reforming views, though of a limited kind, could not have failed to divide their own ranks against the Volunteers. But the chief cause for the breaking up of the old Volunteer spirit remains to be noticed.

Although Roman Catholics had generally been admitted into the national band, a very considerable portion of their fellow-soldiers,— almost all, in fact, professing the established religion,—never contemplated making them the better for any political ad vantages which they were to assist in attaining. ‘They might aid, for instance, in securing an independent Parliament, but should not be permitted to vote at the election of its members; much less to aspire to the honour of being members of it themselves. In 1792, the Presbyterian portion of the diminished body of Volunteers, (diminished by causes glanced at above,)—were willing, perhaps out of policy to recruit their ranks, as well as from higher motives, to join to their demand for Parliamentary reform, a prayer for Catholic relief. The defection instantly followed of all who regarded such a measure with inherited prejudice, or who conscientiously deemed its success incompatible with the existence of Church and State; or who merely felt it opposed to their individual interests; and, joining together, they formed a body, styled ‘Protestant Ascendancy,”’ of which the principles, put forward in the shape of a manifesto, by the consistent corporate monopolists of the capital, breathed against Roman Catholics utter exclusion from civil and political privileges.

Government did not fail to take advantage of their disunion more effectually to suppress the Volunteers. A force, called Fencibles, was raised expressly for the purpose of overawing them; and this manifest wish to get rid of the Volunteers, deprived them of the last peaceable adherents who considered implicit obedience as a duty. Through many parts of the South of Ireland, too, corps threw up their arms in disgust. The legislature had called them ‘the saviours of their country;” it now called them incendiaries;

and personal, if not national pride could not brook the change of opinion, And from these different causes we behold, in 1792, but a skeleton of the national body which, with spirit to wield its strength, and with mind to direct that spirit, had, a few years before, been so imposing. We behold, in fact, a people whom union had made formidable to others, and of service to their country, grown, by disunion, contemptible to the world, and party with party, as they stand, a curse to their country. Forsaking their national standard, we see them once more ranged, in almost rabble groups, under the old tattered banners which, during her miserable contentions of six hundred years, had fluttered, like scarecrows, over Ireland, to put to flight all national peace, all collective, and much of individual importance, and to ‘fright the isle from her prosperity.”

But, generally speaking, the corps of the Ulster Presbyterians, together with some corps in Dublin, retained their muskets and field-pieces, and attended to military exercise at the same time that they formed themselves into new combinations.

Belfast, the capital of the Protestant North, first gave birth to political clubs, which, in imitation of similar ones in France and England, sought, by means of correspondence, publication, and otherwise, to disseminate beyond their own circle, opinions upon the Government under which they lived. One of similar character followed them in Dublin; and, long after the year 1792, to this city, and to Belfast such associations were almost exclusively limited.

Their members, in both places, may emphatically be termed the last of the Volunteers. The declared objects of all were, a full Reform in Parliament, and a full emancipation of Roman Catholies. And the title adopted by them, in 1792, and now first fixed, was that of Unirep IrisHMen.

It can scarce be doubted that their leaders contemplated, even in the outset, a separation from England. Many of them were republicans in principle; and late treatises serve to show that their alleged objects were advanced but as a false flag, under which to marshal the timid or wavering of their own sect, and, if possible, the neutral Catholies, who even then formed three-fourths of the population of Ireland, until events, contrived or expected, might gradually adapt all to views of a more extended nature.

The expected events rapidly occurred. Republican France triumphed over the combined armies of Europe; and her success served at once to indicate, and to propose to others for adoption, the principle for which she fought and conquered. Along with conviction, it inspired boldness, too; and hence, no doubt, the United Irish Clubs imbibed their confirmed hostility to English dominion in Ireland, as well as the audacious tone of denunciation and defiance which breathed through their published sentiments, whether put forth in the shape of resolutions or pamphlets, both eloquently penned, against the existing order of things.

At length matters came for the present to a crisis. Under the very eye of ‘the Castle,” appeared in Dublin an armed band, styling themselves, in almost avowedly republican phrase, Irish National Guards. They wore green uniform, the national colour; and their standard was a harp, without a crown. Upon a particular day they were to muster, as if to show their strength. ‘Ihe Lord Lieutenant issued his proclamation against such a meeting; the garrison of Dublin prepared to support his manifesto; and the National Guards had no review-day.

A previous identity between this band and the United Irish Clubs is not proved; but such identification seems to have soon taken place. Against the Lord Lieutenant’s proclamation, the Dublin Club issued a counter proclamation, approving and encouraging the National Guards. The secretary, who signed the paper, was convicted of sedition. After the publication of another philippic against Government, a meeting of the United Irish of Dublin was dismissed by the sheriff, as persons holding seditious and republican views;* and thus, in 1794, terminated the legal existence of the last of the Volunteers of 1782; convened, under their new name, two years and a half previously.

But though the Republican clubs were thus legally suppressed, their spirit was not wholly extinguished. In Dublin, indeed, no trace of them existed; but in Belfast, to which we must still refer for a persevering adherence to the cause, one club of United Irish, which from its insignificance had not attracted notice, continued clandestinely to meet: and by it, consisting exclusively of persons below the middle ranks of life, was first organized, and brought to a pitch of subtle perfection, that able and instructed men, its subsequent adherents, could not improve, the more regular conspiracy against English connexion, which, in the year 1798, partially broke forth in different districts of Ireland.

Not till two years after their new constitution were the members of this confederacy joined in Dublin by the influential persons who had composed the former and more open Clubs; and not til] the close of 1797 did the conspiracy make any considerable progress in the South of Ireland. In other words, the Roman Catholic force of the country did not become United Irishmen, before that period.

But many of their superiors, of the same religious persuasion,

* Nor was the charge made on light grounds. A Protestant clergyman, the Rev. Wm. Jackson, had, through the treacherous agency of a London attorney, Cockaigne, (a good name for a London attorney,) been detected, in Dublin, in the character of a French emissary to the discontented Irish. 1* had, some time previously, joined, from various causes, the councils of the Protestant revolutionists.

Before the upraising of the national voice, by the old Volunteers in 1782, the Catholics had considered themselves, as on all hands they were considered, an unimportant portion, though by far the greater portion, of the Irish people. A century of degradation, under the overwhelming pressure of the penal code, naturally imparted to them this instinct of insignificance. Shackles sink the slave in his own estimation, as well as in that of his master. Even for their rights, they had not dared to speak out, as a body. Any murmur that escaped them was but the unheard whisper of a fear. But inspired, doubtless, by the manful appeals of their Protestant fellow-countrymen, they began, after the year 1792, more boldly to approach the legislature. A petition for relief appeared from their body, which now became newly and formidably organized; and, although it was indignantly rejected, still, nearly at the same time, Government introduced a bill repealing some of the most odious of the penal statutes. Their junction with the Reformers was apprehended; and, while nothing would be granted to their presumptuous request, something was voluntarily vouchsafed to keep them quiet.

The courage of the Catholics, and most of all its partial success, after centuries of terrified inaction and passive slavery, caused a great ferment among the ‘Protestant Ascendancy:”’ and never, perhaps, even in Ireland, did ferment more vigorously manifest itself. At city and county meetings convened by sheriffs, at grand-jury sittings, and corporation meetings and guilds, not only were manifestoes against Catholic freedom agreed to, but vituperation of Catholic tenets was indulged in. All that could offend and goad, as well as all that could defeat, marked the clamour of the interested monopolists. The Catholics, to the increased astonishment of their hitherto colonial masters, retorted in publications which paid abuse with abuse, and absolutely attacked, in turn, the theology of their political anathematists. ‘*Ascendancy”’ rejoinders followed, in which some individuals connected with Government took a part; and the Catholic saw, that from the dominant party of the land, they had no chance of favour.

Still, however, they remained unconnected, as a body, with the other party; and, in 1793, made a grand effort to rise beyond the clamour and intrigues of their domestic enemies, by carrying their petitions to the very foot of the throne. Their success, considering it as a first attempt in diplomacy, was surprising. At first refused the ear even of the secretary, in London, they ultimately wrought their way, by perseverance and cleverness, to the presence of the Sovereign himself; were most graciously received; obtained the royal promise that their prayer should be recommended; and, at

THE CROPPY. ll the close of the year, additional concessions—much short of their hopes, however—were granted to them.

Louder than ever arose the angry voice of the Ascendancy men; all means of defeat were set to work; and the exclusionists at last seemed to triumph. ‘The determination to limit relief to the concessions already made, was authoritatively promulgated: and, all future hope thus shut out, under the existing order of things, the Catholics began to turn their eyes towards the friends who, though also differing from them in creed, promised, under a proposed change, to grant them full and equal privileges.

Whilst, with a few exceptions, Catholics of intellect and consideration still, however, held back, a well-known event precipitated them into a junction with the United Irish. In 1795, Earl Fitzwilliam became chief governor of Ireland, upon the understanding that, while going certain lengths to satisfy the Protestant Reformers, he was to grant complete relief to Catholics. The Irish people were allowed to believe that the day of grace was now indeed at hand. But, so soon as the war supplies had been voted, Lord Fitzwilliam received a summons to return to England; the promises he had been allowed to hold out were broken; the vivid hopes of the Catholic leaders changed into blank despair; and while the triumphant shouts of the “Ascendancy” rang in their ears, many of them became, through mixed feelings of wrath and self-assertion, sworn enemies of the national connexion which seemed to doom them to perpetual insult and inferiority.

The previous policy of the United Irish Clubs must have produced, to a certain extent, this final result. Their very name was an invitation to Catholics to join them. ‘Their published sentiments, as well as declared objects, graced and strengthened the invitation. Privately, socially, and upon every possible occasion, they farther held out to the people, whose physical strength they knew how to value, the hand of fellowship. The celebrated Wolfe Tone admits, in his autobiography, this system of conciliation. Perhaps it may even be deduced, from his curious statements, that his own appointment, as secretary to the Catholics, was not exclusively the result of Catholic admiration of his talents, and of his zeal in their cause. Catholic leaders were invited to Belfast, to witness a display of Protestant liberality towards them; and the following year, their deputations to the King were induced to make Belfast their route to England, and the Protestant population of that town drew them in their carriages through the streets.

But whilst from the year 1795 may be dated the junction of influential Catholics with the Republicans, the lower orders of their religion did not, as was before remarked, conspire against English connexion till the end of the year 1797. Hence, it will at once be suggested, that the Catholic gentleman and the Catholic peasant were not urged into the conspiracy by the same causes, or with the same views and feelings; and we proceed to close our very slight historical sketch by showing that they were not. In the ranks of the Volunteers, Protestant hatred of Catholics experienced much alleviation; but amongst the lower orders of Protestants, of whom those ranks comprised few or none, the old spirit of the admirers of Oliver Cromwell or of George Walker continued, nothing the worse for the wear, to manifest itself, in loathing and abhorrence, against the few Catholic peasants left in the thricecolonized province of Ulster. Between reasoning men of the rival persuasions a philosophical feeling of brotherhood rapidly went on;—their inferiors were, meantime, cutting each others’ throats.

In 1785, the county of Armagh became the arena of a petty though cruel warfare. Under the title of ‘*Peep-o’-day-boys,”’ the lower orders of Protestants scoured, in bands, the Catholic districts, and, sanctioned by the penal law, still unrepealed, appropriated all descriptions of Catholic fire-arms. Nor was their zeal always confined to a discharge of this self-conferred, though legal surveillance. Insult and outrage were, on such occasions, generally experienced by the proscribed people.

After some years of trembling passiveness, the Catholics formed themselves into counter-associations, of which the very name— ‘‘Defenders”—indicates the spirit and nature. Both combinations gradually spread into Connaught and Leinster, and, in 1793, De- Senderism reached the scene of our tale, the County of Wexford.

But in the provinces mentioned, so far from the point of its origination, and amid a population almost exclusively Catholic, Defenderism diverged from its primary character. Amongst district bodies, in different districts, were vague notions of self-assertion, each provoked by some local grievance, or by exactions deemed to be such. One band of Defenders opposed the payment of tithes, whether legally demanded in the name of the parson, or dictated in the shape of christening and marriage fees, by priests of their own persuasion; other bands rose against the militia ballot, to which the lower orders were not used, and of which they could not understand the justice.

In 1795 the Defenders proceeded to open and ferocious insurrection. They were summarily dealt with. Without trial of any kind, military commanders sent hundreds of them to the fleets. About fourteen hundred were, indeed, thus disposed of, notwithstanding all provisions of British law to the contrary; and an indermnity bill soon sereened the law breakers. But the Irish peasant felt that he had been illegally as well as cruelly dealt with; and now was first blended with the wild habits of combination, taught him by the Peep-o’-day-boys, a sentiment of hatred towards that

Government which seemed to depart from its own fixed principles of justice, solely in order to crush him.

During the operation of this system of prompt chastisement, the soldiery had been let loose among the people; and to such an extent was their disorderly violence carried, that the veteran Abercrombie, after a tour of inspection, subsequently described them as ‘in a state of licentiousness which must render them formidable to every one but the enemy.”’ Again, the southern peasant hated the power which used instruments so sanguinary; revenge upon both became the wish of his heart; and when agents of the United Irish conspiracy found it convenient to make the parish Defender a national revolutionist, he rushed madly into the field, rejoicing in any cause that proposed an opportunity for retaliation, and but too well prepared, by the examples he had been set, to brutalize the name even of civil warfare.

Nor have we yet ascribed all the excitements to the wild outbreak of the Irish peasant in 1798.

Besides the illegal despotism adopted to put down the Defenders of 1795, numbers of them had been executed according to the usual process. Hence it appeared that Defenderism was deemed, by authority, near akin to high treason. The old Peep-o’-day-boys, as professed supporters of Government,—boasting indeed, we know not how truly, of its countenance,—acted upon the hint. With freshened zeal and energy they re-opened the campaign against their fellow countrymen; and now, anxious to profess their loyalty in the very telling of their name, they changed their original title into that of Orangemen—the appellation retained, to the present day, by them, or by their successors.

Having achieved, in a kind of pitched battle, a brilliant victory over the objects of their hate, they professed the intention of banishing from Ulster every professor of the odious creed. Upon the dwellings of such they posted the following notice,—‘*To hell or Connaught you Papist! if you are not gone by (a specified day), we will come back and reckon with you; we hate all Papists here!”” And if the command was not obeyed, they kept their word; returned; burnt the house or cabin of the disobedient party; compelled him and his family to fly; and thus were hundreds driven from their homes to spread, amongst millions of their own persuasion, the story and the warning, at once, of their individual suffering.

However unfounded might have been the boast of the Orangeman that he acted under high authority, it remained uncontradicted, and the southern as well as the northern peasant took its truth for granted. In common, therefore, wiih the terror and abhorrence of their old persecutors, now felt by the lower classes of Catholics, arose a confirmed sentiment of hatred towards those who, it was believed, had set them on. Farther, it became credited that the

Orange oath was a horrid covenant, horribly worded, to exterminate Catholics all over Ireland: and the Government, which was supposed to countenance such an oath, as well as the detested party who were supposed to take it, stood forth as joint objects of the mad revenge, and of the frightful mode of conflict, (ere their final rising, again and again inculcated by Orangemen,) of the insurgent peasants of Leinster.

Many were the differences between the inauguration, upon the very eve of warfare, of the Catholic Republican of the South, and that of the original framers of the conspiracy in the North; many were the differences between their views and feelings in the common struggle: but no difference between them is so remarkable, or so melancholy, as the fact that the effort, which had been planned in a spirit of sectarian unanimity, should thus change into a mere religious contest throughout the southern and western parts of Ireland. Previous to the insurrection, almost every Protestant, whether sworn or not, chose to be considered as an Orangeman; by skilful management, in able hands, the badge of that party became a necessary symbol of loyalty; few of the established religion, therefore, from motives of choice or of prudence, as the case might be, appeared abroad without it. The Catholic peasant confounded all the late adherents of his abhorred enemies with the first and worst who had persecuted him; Protestant and Orangeman became, in his mind, synonymous words; and in this delusion he caught up his rude and formidable pike, when, without time being afforded him to reflect, he was precipitated, by United Irish emissaries on the one hand, and by monstrous and wanton outrage on the other, into the melée of civil strife.

Chapter II

Tue summer sun was slanting his evening rays over the meandering Slaney, and casting along the smooth greensward, that sloped to its edge, the lengthened shadow of as faira form as, that day, in his journey, he had shone upon. She stood looking vaguely and pensively at the water, that dimpled with the curling breeze, like her cheek, and that laughed amid reflected light and azure, like her blue eyes. And it was notto watch the trout-fly disporting in circlets on the surface of the clear river that she looked; nor to catch through crystal depths the bright-eyed trout himself, glaneing up like a silver arrow to strike his little prey; nor yet to admire the inverted landscape, softened by the translucent medium, or quivering into magic confusion by the action of the faint breeze. Remembrance, at one time agitated, at another touched with tenderness; hope, fear, and self-dissatisfaction, might be traced, alternately, on her arched brow; and as she at length sat down on a little knoll, chiefly formed by the bulbing roots of a fine old ash-tree, picking up scraps of crumbled clay, and, as all fair hands are wont to do, throwing them awkwardly into the water, an experienced eye would have pronounced that at such an age, so happy under the paternal roof, and hitherto as noted for innocent vivacity as for grace and beauty, Eliza Hartley, the heiress of Hartley Court, could have had but one cause for her grave abstraction; and that our supposed critic would have been in the right, is shown by the following transcript of her thoughts at the moment. ‘Do I indeed prefer this stranger? If Ido not, 1 fearI may. Feart— why should I fear??? She strove to smother a sensation before admitted. ‘Hold, though; it would very nearly be love at first sight—and can I pretend to inspire thal?” Doubtfully, as it were, her eyes fell on the water; in the natural mirror, now uncurled by a breeze, they beheld themselves bewitchingly laughing in answer; she looked again; they told her she was beautiful, and she believed the story.

‘But hold still””—a shade of seriousness overcast her sparkling face, as Eliza continued her soliloquy: ‘‘may I not mistake my sentiments for the young Baronet? Did I not once—and very recently too, imagine that I preferred another?’’ It must be remarked that she did not now start at the thought, as in the first instance she had done.—**Yes; I zmagined, indeed:—it was only a cold conceit;—my feelings now convince me it was. Poor Harry! many happy hours have we spent together; and had I not met this all-engrossing person—Poor Harry, poor Harry!—I fear you will be a sufferer. And must not I suffer too at the thought of having allowed you to suppose you had touched my heart, when you but interested my friendly feelings? My only consolation will be, that I never directly deceived you; that, by words at least, I never gave you a right to believe your own strong preference retuned. And yet, here is but a poor extenuation, after all;—for, shall I disguise from myself, that my general manner and general conversation, the tone of the voice, the glance of the eye, often conveyed such assurances as you could not mistake, and such as, working upon your generous nature, may henceforth poison the happiness of your lifet—Poor Harry Talbot!”

And after dwelling upon this picture, the eye which Eliza again caucht in her primitive mirror, was dimmed with a tear.

“T will write directly to my early and best friend, Belinda,” continued Eliza; ‘‘and as she was aware, from the outset, of my childish prepossession for Harry—indeed, as she approved and encouraged it—her usually superior mind may give me some direction. I wish she would now keep her old promise of coming to see me: yet, no, no! much as we esteem each other, I dread, until I receive her answer at least, to encounter, personally, Belinda’s strong and overpowering suggestions, whatever they may prove to be.”

And Eliza continued to ruminate, surrounded by sunshine, and the songs and airy curvettings of the little birds, indifferent, for the first day of her life, to the joy-giving presence of both.

Another person of her own sex had for some time sat unobserved at a little distance, not so insensible, though little of youth’s smiling sympathy was in her heart, to the cheering sun-beam. ‘This person relished the genial glow in something of the taste of the domestic cat, when, purring excessively, with half-shut eyes, puss elevates her furry coat to admit the warmth of the winter fire.