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  Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

  189 Unusual Irish Lives

  David Slattery

  Orpen Press

  Lonsdale House

  Avoca Ave

  Blackrock

  Co. Dublin

  Ireland

  e-mail: [email protected]

  www.orpenpress.com

  © David Slattery, 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-871305-70-8

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-871305-96-8

  Kindle ISBN: 978-1-871305-97-5

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior, written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Acknowledgements

  Our libraries remain a constant valuable national resource while everything else changes around them. I want to thank the several fabulous libraries that gave me essential help with the research for this book. Thanks to Dr Jason McElligott, keeper of Archbishop Marsh’s Library, which, along with being a source of historic treasure, was founded in 1701 and is itself an historical institution. Some of the books still bear bullet holes from the Easter Rising of 1916. Jason was a great help in pointing me towards interesting Cromwellians, rebels and scandalous law cases.

  Thanks are also due to the helpful staff at the Royal Irish Academy who gave me access to their vast collection, including the definitive guide to who currently counts in Irish history – The Dictionary of Irish Biography from the Earliest Times to the Year 2002. This vast tome is edited by James McGuire and James Quinn, and is published by the Royal Irish Academy and Cambridge University Press. It is the principal source for the lives I have included in this book. My thanks to those hundreds of expert contributors to the dictionary who provided the biographical details for the thousands of historical figures. The Royal Irish Academy has also the best reading and writing space in Ireland. I also thank the National Library, which continues to provide the entire population with a fabulous free historical resource and a glorious reading room.

  Thanks also to Piotr Sadowski for his suggestions and to Tomás Clancy for sharing with me both his legal erudition and extraordinary grasp of the history of Irish law.

  Special thanks to my editor Elizabeth Brennan for the original ideas, predictably good advice and constant support.

  Contents

  Preface

  1. The Rebellious Irish: It’ll Be All Right on the Night

  2. Saints and Sinners of the Irish Tradition

  3. Glorious Irish Men and Women of the Battlefield: When It’s Not Good to Talk

  4. The Sporting Irish: From Wrestling to Chess

  5. The Unsinkable Irish: Explorers and Mariners on the Green Oceans

  6. Irish Writers: The Chicken-Leg Effect and Other Forms of Inspiration

  7. Irish Science and Thought: Life In (and Out of) the Laboratory

  Postscript: Giants of Irish History

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Book

  Preface

  When I told friends that I was writing an Irish history, most of them shuddered with the memories of school history that had emerged from the murky depths of their unconscious. I persisted by explaining that, in order to write a fun history of Irish people, I had decided to forget, or repress, what I learned in school, and that my Irish history wasn’t intended to be traumatising. In fact, it was actually intended to be enjoyable because it would be a history of unusual Irish people, as opposed to the usual suspects who populate Irish school history.

  So be reassured that this book is about only interesting Irish people. If you’ve never read any Irish history, I assure you that we are all interesting.

  Poet, Madman, Scoundrel is a chronicle of how 189 unusual Irish individuals chose to live – the professions they followed, their interests and passions, and the risks they took for their ambitions. I haven’t embellished the documented details of their lives in any way. I have merely interpreted that information, which anyone writing history should try to do, and I’ve tried to present it in an entertaining way. While it was often tempting to change the ending of many lives to make them happier, nastier, more miserable or even more successful, I have stuck rigidly to the facts. I say this because I am sure that, like me, you will ask yourself, “Is this really true?” at certain points in the stories. Suffice to say at this point that, yes, it is all true.

  Have I covered exactly 189 lives in this book? Have I counted them accurately? The answer is not simple – it depends on the way you count. If you are a mathematical genius like some of those in Chapter 7, you will know – even if I don’t – what is meant by 189 being a complex number, part real and part imaginary, because who decides what counts as one life anyway? I can also imagine you asking, “Why 189?” The answer would be easy if there were only 189 unusual people in the whole of Irish history, but that is definitely not the case. My 189 are just the tip of a human iceberg. To help you count them I have included birth and death dates only for the Irish lives portrayed in this book. I don’t intend for those people omitted from the book to be viewed as dull. I chose the most interesting histories that caught my attention in our national archives during one particular period of research. I recommend searching out others for yourself.

  Irish history is like a well-trodden path through an overgrown wood with who knows what scary monsters hiding in the gloom. Where the path is worn, it’s very worn. Just off the path the darkness increases quickly. I have chosen to explore the less travelled areas of this vast forest of Irish lives. Some of those I include in this book lie partially on the well-worn path so that their names will be familiar to many of us. Others lived far from the limelight and some, while famous or notorious in their own time, have since fallen out of focus.

  I have concentrated on those who might have been interesting or even dangerous to know, especially if they were experimenting with the law, chemicals, bombs or quack cures. I have chosen to include the following: a selection of our less successful rebels because we have so many; some saints because we are famous for them, but I have also included sinners for moral balance; soldiers of both sexes because, while the Irish started very few wars in history, once a good conflict was under way, anywhere involving anyone, we were happy to join in and take our chances; a variety of sporting heroes of a range of shapes and sizes because so many of us enjoy watching and playing sport; sailors and explorers because we live on an island and love the sea; and writers and their inspirations because we write almost as much as we talk. I finish with our scientists and thinkers of varying degrees of rigour. Though we do not have an international reputation for our scientific achievements, we have had interesting experimenters and several people who were good at sums.

  *

  My interest in former times is anthropological rather than historical in the traditional sense. I am interested in our social history, much of it involving individual tragedies and triumphs, rather than the history of our well-established national heroes who, when they do feature in this book, tend to be spear carriers in someone else’s play. L.P. Hartley famously tells us in the opening line of his novel, The Go-Between
, that, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Who am I to judge these foreigners from our past? Where we have presidents, they had kings. Where we have the internet, they had pamphleteers. Where we have hygiene, they had prayers. Where we have television they had – actually – nothing. But we do have much in common with these foreigners. Like us, people in the past hoped for the best. They had ambitions for themselves and their families. They lay awake at night worrying, probably about fleas.

  If people from 200 or 300 years ago could travel forward in time they would be astonished to see us driving around in our horseless carriages while apparently talking to our own hands (on our mobile phones). But it is just as amazing and challenging for us to imagine what life was like in the past because so much changes over time. There are fashions in cars, horseless or otherwise, clothes, diseases and careers. For example, the Black Death, gangrene, leprosy, tuberculosis, smallpox, melancholia and syncope were once highly fashionable diseases. Syncope is itself an historical term for fainting, which ladies used to do frequently in the past, especially when there were wealthy gentlemen on hand to catch them.

  Similarly, in the area of careers, the professions of saint, quack, eccentric, physiognomist and pamphleteer are now out of vogue. Unfortunately, nowadays, fancy professions such as highwayman or pirate, or being the proprietor of a laboratory in a castle basement (where you dissected the brains of just-dead criminals) are obsolete.

  Many forms of entertainment have also declined in popularity from earlier times, such as fantastic free public entertainments like hangings, beheadings and dissections. Before cinema ruined it, the travelling Waxwork Show was popular in Ireland. With a simple change of clothes, hair added or taken away, or a nose lengthened or squashed, the museum proprietor could keep up with contemporary celebrities without fuss or expense. A wax figure that started out as Napoleon could become Robert Emmet with a simple change of uniform, or Enrico Caruso with the addition of hair. If a blaze melted your exhibits they could simply become other celebrities. This once happened in Skibbereen, Co. Cork, where a melted Mayor of Cork became a circus clown. Technology has killed this form of entertainment. But such constant change makes all travel through time exciting.

  People tell me that I am living in the past. That is not true. I would like to live in the past, which is a completely different matter. Oh, for a time machine! I am currently building one in my garden shed. But until I have perfected my technology, I have history.

  To the memory of Adele Farrell

  1

  The Rebellious Irish: It’ll Be All Right on the Night

  We know from George Orwell’s Animal Farm that all victorious revolutionaries end up looking and acting exactly like those they have overthrown. Therefore, there is nothing implicitly tragic about a failed revolution. However, revolutionary protocol demands that we morally support the underdogs, just so long as they remain losers. Fortunately, since Irish history has many examples of failed rebellions, we have a comprehensive range of revolutionary failures that we can root for. Irish political rebels tended to leave much to chance, and few were motivated by an attention to detail. They were often more interested in the justification for their cause than the pragmatics of successful organisation. It seems that things were almost guaranteed to go wrong on the actual night.

  One of our most famous revolutionaries, Wolfe Tone (1763–1798), even missed his own rebellion when it eventually happened. But we can forgive him because he was a gentleman and a dilettante rebel. Any self-respecting dilettante must be fashionably late.

  A Missing Revolutionary

  Tone’s life acts as a template for the typical Irish would-be revolutionary because it has all the insurrectionist components, including pamphleteering,1 public executions, fancy uniforms, dissections, poor punctuality, the to-be-expected untimely storms at sea and, of course, failure.

  Wolfe Tone was the eldest of eighteen children. His father had entered a lengthy litigation with his own brother, resulting in the inevitable near-ruin of both families. Wherever there is a reference to attorneys2 in Irish history, it usually occurs in the context of “lengthy litigation” because any worthwhile application of the law should be protracted. Lengthy litigation usually precedes the litigants “being left penniless” and “ending their days in the poorhouse” because of the legal fees incurred. Such fees are the reason why being an attorney has remained a fashionable career throughout Irish history. Lengthy litigation was also known by the expression “thrown into chancery”. If property was thrown into chancery (that’s a pun) there was no hope of benefit to the “interested parties”, also known as the victims.

  In 1781, to keep his father happy, Tone entered Trinners,3 where he was a talented but lazy student. He was suspended for a year for his involvement in a duel in which a student was killed. Unfortunately, the student duel has now passed into obsolescence. He finally graduated in 1786, having established a scenic route through the college that was popular with many who came after him. He won three medals from the debating society, the College Historical Society, which had been founded in 1747 by Edmund Burke (1729–1797). Burke was a notable statesman, author, orator, political theorist, philosopher and, importantly, a Trinity alumnus who wasn’t hanged. He was such a model of traditional propriety that a statue of him was erected in front of the college. He was a critic of the French Revolution and argued against abstractions, such as the rights of men; instead he advocated the virtues of tradition. In other words, the kind of ideas that merit a statue in front of Trinners.

  From his diaries we learn that Tone loved Shakespeare, liked irony and self-deprecation, and disliked humbug, though, while many promoted it, it is hard to find people in history who admit to actually liking the latter. He had an embarrassing relationship with a married woman, Eliza Martin. So embarrassing was it that he was determined not to embarrass himself with Martha Witherington, aged fifteen. He did the proper thing by running away to marry her against her parents’ wishes. They had four children together. Being married disqualified Tone from a fellowship at Trinners, so he decided to become an attorney at Middle Temple in London.

  It tells us much about Tone’s well-balanced mind that he was bored stiff studying the law. While supposed to be studying, he dabbled in or day-dreamed about journalism, non-embarrassing adventures with women and a military colony in the Sandwich Islands.4 He even day-dreamed about joining the East India Company’s army because he fancied himself in uniform. He also wrote a novel that appeared as Belmont Castle, published in 1790. However, he stuck it out at Middle Temple before returning to Ireland in 1788.

  He was called to the Bar in 1789 where he could have remained as just another historically anonymous villain, but he didn’t. From 1790 to 1791 he became a pamphleteer, which was a fashionable pastime. He described his own first pamphlet scribblings as mediocre. In his pamphlets he advocated Irish non-participation in the war effort against revolutionary France. This political position gave him some notoriety, while ruining his chances of a respectable law practice and a seat in Parliament. But his writing improved with practice because, by 1791, he wrote what would become the most famous pamphlet in Irish history – An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland. This circular sold well.

  In 1791, on the strength of his new fame as a pamphleteer, he travelled to Belfast to meet Thomas Russell (1767–1803). From Tone’s diary we learn that the two spent most of their time drinking or treating their hangovers. Tone loved debate fuelled by alcohol. So did Russell. Tone supported the principles of the French Revolution. So did Russell. Together they formed the United Irishmen,5 which they modeled on the new French republicanism. The ironically named United Irishmen provide us with an extensive cast of rebellious dramatis personae. Unlike the French, they never experienced the inconvenience of success.

  Most of the leadership of the United Irishmen became fascinated as teenagers with the American Revolution, which had ra
dicalised them. The most prominent of the United Irishmen travelled to Paris once the French Revolution was under way, either to work together to bring about a French invasion of Ireland or to work on creating splits within their own ranks. The sense of excitement and possibility in Paris in 1792 would have been similar to that in Berlin in 1990 following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  Some of the first United Irishmen, who were Protestant, had reservations as to whether or not Catholics were capable of managing their own liberty, so the cracks began to appear from the beginning. Furthermore, Irish Catholics were suspicious of the Irish Presbyterians, and instead looked to all religions in England for support. From both a pragmatic point of view and for the sake of precision, Tone could have named this society the Disunited Irishmen, but, happily, the United Irishmen were anything but pragmatic.

  Back in Dublin, Tone was bored again after the high life in Belfast. But the boredom ended when his revolution began to get under way – with the arrest for treason in 1794 of the Reverend William Jackson, a French agent in Ireland. Following this capture, the United Irishmen were outlawed because England was then at war with France. In return for his co-operation with the authorities, it was agreed that Tone could leave Ireland for America, the traditional solution for Irish troublemakers. He sold up and, with £796,6 he and his wife, children, and younger brother and sister sailed for Philadelphia.

  Tone hated life and politics in America. He particularly hated George Washington. However, he bought a farm for his family near Princeton, New Jersey. In 1796 the French agreed for Tone to travel to Paris to argue his plan for a French invasion of Ireland. He sailed under the name “James Smith”, leaving the authorities in Dublin Castle believing that he was still in America. While away, Tone was tormented by the fear that his daughter, Maria, might marry an American. However, he quickly grew to love France so much that he arranged for his family to join him there. Finally, in 1796, Tone was appointed chef de brigade in General Louis Lazare Hoche’s army, thereby achieving his boyhood ambition of becoming a soldier with access to fancy uniforms.