Chapter 9

49.The first Orange lodge was formed on September 21, 1795, at the house of a man called Sloan, in the village of Loughgall, Co. Armagh.

50.James Hope says that in reality what the Orangemen aimed at was to get the farms of the Catholics who had recently, by their industry in the linen trade, acquired the means of renting desirable farms.

Parliament—the famous Irish Parliament, Grattan’s Parliament, came to the rescue of the oppressed by passing the Insurrection Acts and the Indemnity Acts—the objects of which were to give the magistrates a freehand to commit the most illegal outrages against the people without fear of any unpleasant consequences for themselves. It is true that Grattan fought gallantly against these measures, and to his splendid speech in opposition to them we owe much of our information concerning the outrages perpetrated by the “banditti of persecution.”

It was felt by the most far-seeing and patriotic of the Irishmen who deplored this appalling state of affairs that the one hope of the country lay in the system of the United Irishmen, which aimed at a real union of Irishmen of all denominations in the bonds of love and loyalty to their common country. In the North, especially, the urgency of this union of hearts was keenly felt, and hence we find the younger men of the advanced party like Henry Joy MacCracken and Lowry, working strenuously with Charles H. Teeling and his brother-in-law, John Magennis, to get “the Defenders” into the ranks of the United Irishmen.

Government showed its appreciation of their labours by an unexpectedcoup. The most active protagonists of the policy were suddenly arrested on a charge of high treason and clapped into prison in Dublin.

On a delightful September morning of the year 1796, Mary Teeling stood on the doorstep of her beautiful home in Lisburn waving a farewell greeting to her husband and her son Charles ere they rode off together on one of those business expeditions—of which the extraordinary affection uniting this father and son always made a pleasure excursion. As she gazed on her stately husband, now in the pride of his years and his honourable prosperity, making a superbly gallant figure, as he always did on horseback, and saw how fine a pendant Charles’s dashing youth and fresh good looks, offered to his father’s, can we wonder if her heart swelled with wifely and maternalpride, and she turned to her home duties with a prayer of thankfulness to God for all the good things that were hers.

Alas! Alas! Sorrows and crosses beyond all telling were to follow that radiant moment, and ere the day was over, the fair structure of her life’s peace was to be laid in ruins.

Not very long afterwards she was startled by seeing the old groom who had ridden out with Luke and Charles return with Charles’s riderless horse. What dreadful thing had happened?

It was notthe worstat all events. No fatal accident had taken her boy from her—but what really had happened it was difficult enough to make out from the servant’s narrative. She could hardly believe that Lord Castlereagh, an old friend of the Teeling family, who was under the most real obligations to Mr. Teeling for his help and support on many occasions, could really have her boy now under arrest in the house of his father-in-law, the Marquis of Hertford. Lord Castlereagh, according to the groom, had with his usual appearance of cordiality and friendship joined the master and Master Charles as they rode up the main street of the town, but when they came to the Marquis’s gates, Master Charles had been asked by his lordship to accompany him. As soon as he had entered the gates, these were closed and an armed guard had suddenly appeared. The master had demanded admission, and this, after a time, was granted. He was only allowed a few minutes with his son. Then he had come out, and leaving orders with the groom to lead home Master Charles’s horse, he had continued his journey alone.

She was not left long in doubt of the truth of the old servant’s extraordinary tale. Very shortly afterwards she saw Lord Castlereagh himself enter her house, accompanied by a military guard. Her youngest son, John,a boy of fourteen, daring to demand by what authority the house was thus forcibly entered, saw a pistol presented at his breast, and himself compelled to accompany Castlereagh and his minions in their search through the house for treasonable (?) papers. “My brother,” Charles tells us in his “Narrative,” “conducted himself on this occasion with a firmness and composure that could hardly have been expected from a lad of his years.” It is regrettable that he does not mention the name of the sister “who evinced the most heroic courage; she was my junior, and, with the gentlest, possessed the noblest soul; she has been the solace of her family in all subsequent afflictions, and seemed to have been given as a blessing by Heaven, to counterpoise the ills they were doomed to suffer.” One guesses, however, from the deep affection entertained for her by Charles all through the after years, that this heroic sister was her mother’s namesake, Mary.

As for the mother herself, she was “totally overpowered by the scene. She had just been informed of my arrest, and now saw our peaceful home in possession of a military force. Maternal affection created imaginary dangers, and in the most energetic language she prayed Lord Castlereagh to permit her to visit my prison, and to grant even a momentary interview with her son. This he had the good sense and firmness to decline, and in communicating the matter to me in the course of our evening’s conversation, I expressed my approval of his decision. But my mother felt otherwise; the afflicted state of her mind precluded that reflection which should have rendered her sensible of the propriety of Lord Castlereagh’s refusal. Agitated and disappointed, her gentle but lofty spirit was roused, and burying maternal grief in the indignant feeling of her soul, ‘I was wrong,’ she exclaimed, ‘to appeal to a heart that never felt the tie of parental affection—your Lordshipis not a father.’She pronounced these words with a tone and an emphasis so feeling and so powerful, that even the mind of Castlereagh was not insensible to its force, and he immediately retired with his guard.” That night, Charles and the other prisoners, arrested on the same day in Belfast, (including Neilson and Russell) were taken in coaches, under an armed escort, to Dublin, and thrown into prison, where he remained for about two years, without trial, until the breakdown of his health procured his release.

In the meantime all sorts of misfortunes had befallen the happy household on Church Hill. Some months after the arrest of Charles, the Orangemen, in broad daylight, had entered Mr. Teeling’s premises, wrecked his bleach-yard, looted his house, and in the course of a few hours’ deliberate devastation left the entire establishment “a desolate ruin.” And all this, as Charles points out in his narrative, “in the blush of open day, within the immediate vicinity of two garrisoned towns, an active magistrate, and an armed police.” It is quite clear that the Orangemen were the agents of vengeance of the Government, who thus designed to punish Mr. Teeling’s temerity in acting as Secretary of a meeting of the Freeholders of Co. Antrim, convened by public notice at Ballymena on May 8th, 1797, from which had gone forth a Petition to the King setting forth the intolerable grievances under which the Irish people were suffering, and praying his Majesty to dismiss the ministers responsible for them.

As their lives were no longer safe in Lisburn, Mr. Teeling moved his family to Union Lodge, near Dundalk, which had been previously used by Bartle as his headquarters, But even here they were not safe. He got private notice from a well-wisher that he was about to be arrested. He, therefore, found an asylum for Mrs. Teeling and the girls with her brother, Mr. John Taaffe, at SmarmoreCastle, Ardee, while he looked around him to make fresh provision for them.

It is not very clear at what date Bartle began to identify himself with the United Irishmen; but it seems to have been about the same time as Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Arthur O’Connor joined them, that is to say early in 1796. He became the fast friend of Lord Edward, and before Charles’s arrest on September 16th, 1796, the two brothers were frequent guests at Kildare Lodge. It was here that Bartle met and loved the fair Lady Lucy Fitzgerald, Lord Edward’s favourite sister, and who shall say that he loved Ireland the less, because his vision of Kathleen Ni Houlihan borrowed the lovely ardent face, and the bright eyes, veiled with long dark drooping lashes of “Lucia.” While Lord Edward and O’Connor were on the Continent negotiating with the French Government, Bartle Teeling, under a plausible plea of a business journey, made a complete tour of Ireland on foot. His object, according to his nephew, was to make himself “perfectly acquainted with Ireland’s resources, with her capabilities of entering upon, and maintaining an internal war, with the intellectual and physical qualities, the habits and the manners of her people, with their wants and their endurance, their hopes and their resolves; as well as with the natural features of the country—her rivers, her coasts, and her harbours.” The fact shows that Bartle Teeling, for all his youth, was amongst the most far-sighted of the leaders.

After his return from this journey he took up his residence in Union Lodge, with his friend, John Byrne, of Worcester, who having served his apprenticeship to the linen trade in Lisburn had established extensive bleaching mills on the banks of the river at Dundalk.

It is from the evidence of the informers, John Hughes and Samuel Turner, that we gather our scanty information as to Bartle’s activities about this period. Hughes,a Belfast bookseller, arrested in October, 1797, turned king’s evidence in order to secure liberation. Being brought before the Lords’ Committee in 1798, he stated amongst other things, that in November, 1796, he had been sent by Bartle Teeling (then settled as a linen merchant in Dundalk) to Dublin to extend the United Irishmen societies there. Hughes seems to have been a sort of organiser for the Society, for again in June, 1797, he was sent for to come to Dublin. Before he left the north, John Magennis (Betty Teeling’s husband) administered an oath to him that he would not communicate the names of those to whom he should be introduced. In Dublin he was present at a breakfast given by Bartle Teeling, at his lodgings in Aungier Street, where the other guests were John Magennis, Anthony MacCann, of Dundalk; Samuel Turner; Messrs. John and Patrick Byrne, of Dundalk; Colonel James Plunkett; A. Lowry; Mr. Cumming, of Galway; and Dr. MacNevin. The object of the conference was to discuss the fitness of the country for an immediate rising. Teeling, Lowry and MacCann were in favour of an immediate effort; the others were afraid the people were not sufficiently prepared for it.

Shortly afterwards, before the month of June was up, Bartle Teeling, Turner, MacCann, Tennant, Lowry, etc., seeing the “Rising” postponed, fled to Hamburg; and some of the others, including John Magennis, found refuge in Scotland.

Bartle Teeling must have remained in Hamburg a very short time, for his brother states that he joined the French army under the name of Biron[51]and served a campaign under Hoche, whose death occurred on September 8th of that year. He may have returned to Hamburg after the death of Hoche, for in October of1797 Turner reports to his friend, Lord Downshire, a letter Teeling was sending from that place to Arthur O’Connor. In November, Turner’s information shows Bartle in Paris. At a date of the same year which it is difficult to determine, he paid a stolen visit to Ireland, bearing messages from the Irish leaders on the Continent to those at home. It is said that on this occasion Lady Lucy gave him the ring which is still treasured in the Teeling family—and which he wore until the eve of his execution, when he sent it to his brother “as the dearest pledge he had to leave, of fraternal love.”

51.In the Castlereagh papers the assumed name of B. Teeling is stated to have been Byrne.

All this time Mary Teeling was without news of him, and to the burden which she already had to bear was added that of intolerable anxiety for her eldest son, and great uneasiness about Charles, of whose health his father brought back discouraging reports from his visits to Kilmainham. The kindness of her brother John and his wife Catherine, and the hospitality they so gladly offered her and her girls, could not make her forget the wreck of her own beautiful home, and the irreparable damage done to her husband’s fortune. Moreover, his health was much affected by the condition of his affairs, and the fatigues he had undergone to re-establish them. A trip to a Donegal Spa, followed by a horseback journey to Connacht (where he hoped to establish a new bleach-green) had exhausted him, and in the spring of ’98, he had been sent by his doctor to Cushendall for sea-bathing. His frequent changes of abode were represented to Government as connected with treasonable activities, and accordingly on June 16th, 1798, he was arrested, and committed to prison in Belfast, no charge being made against him.

For four years Luke Teeling was kept in prison, and was only liberated in 1802. And during all that time no charge was brought against him, nor did his repeated requests to be brought to trial bring any result. Fromthe provost prison in Belfast, he was moved to thePostlethwaitetender, lying in Belfast Lough, one of the prison ships which were among the horrors of the day; from that to Carrickfergus Castle, and finally back to the prison in Belfast. It has been my privilege to read many of the letters addressed by Luke Teeling from his various prisons to members of his family, and truly it was with a great stirring of the heart that one held them in one’s hands, and read the story they tell of sufferings heroically borne; of a devotion to honour and principle which counted no cost too great; of a Faith and Hope, and love of God and God’s Church intense enough to make the writer free of the ardent and heroic company of the saints. There is one letter written from thePostlethwaite, where the firm hand trembles, and the strong heart shows nigh to breaking—which it is impossible to read without tears. It is the letter in which the father writes to Bartle’s old friend, Sam Wall, the news of Bartle’s execution.

For in the days when Luke Teeling was enduring the horrors of the prison ship in the sweltering summer heat,[52]Bartle’s brief but glorious day had come to its heroic close on the “martyr’s mound” at Arbour Hill, Dublin. It is not here that may be fully told the gallant story of Bartle Teeling and the part he played in the HumbertExpedition. On his white charger he rides for ever amid the “fair chivalry” of the boy-heroes of Ireland amid the

“White horsemen with Christ their Captain—forever he.”

52.“ThePostlethwaite Tender, on which my father was confined, contained within the limits of one small apartment, thirty-four gentlemen, of respectable rank in life and independent circumstances. In this miserable prison-house, its inmates could never stand erect, and crowded together in a circumscribed space not fourteen feet square, they could only enjoy a partial and unrefreshing slumber in succession. Here, entombed on the ocean, during the sultry heat of a summer the most oppressive that has been remembered for thirty years, they inhaled the pestiferous atmosphere of a tender; in the depth of winter, when their numbers were reduced to a few, they were exposed with open port-holes to all the inclemency of the chilling blast. Nor were they permitted to receive a supply of wholesome food from their friends; nothing was allowed them beyond what the parsimonious bounty of Government afforded. At four o’clock in the evening the hatches were locked down, and the prisoners remained in darkness until nine on the following morning. Sometimes, forgetful of his situation, the prisoner would raise his form to stand erect ... when the hard repelling beam, in contact with his head, reminded him that the hand of man had prescribed his limits. My father, whose fine-formed head and silver locks are still present to my imagination, presented on his removal from this prison, a perfect encrustment of festered wounds from forehead to nape.”—C. H. Teeling’s “Narrative.”

And the day shall come, please God, when no Irish boy shall be ignorant of the lines he wrote in the Golden Annals of their knightly company.

Was it given to his mother to see her idolised son once more before he mounted the scaffold on Arbour Hill on September the 24th, 1798? To this question we can find no answer. We know, from her husband’s letter to Sam Wall, that for a time it was feared Mary Teeling would die, so completely did she break down under the agonising load of her conjugal and maternal sorrows. Bartle was not the only son whom Ireland claimed from her. Charles and John were now on their keeping. A few months after the consummation of Bartle’s sacrifice, John, her youngest son, her Benjamin, was taken from her—and of him, as truly as of Bartle, she might say, he gave his life for Ireland.

During her husband’s continued imprisonment, she tried to keep as close to him as she could, and for a time, it would appear she was permitted to share it in Carrickfergus Castle. Stifling her own sorrows she found strength to comfort him, and to lend him courage. His affairs had been reduced to ruin, by the vindictive action ofGovernment, and to all his other woes was now added that which must have been of a peculiarly galling character to a man of his fastidious sense of honour: his inability to pay his creditors in full.

In 1802 Mr. Teeling was liberated, and after a time spent with Charles, now married to Catherine Carolan, and settled at the Naul, near Balbriggan, he made a home for his wife and girls in Belfast. Though an elderly man—older than his years, indeed, from the hardships of his imprisonment—he made a characteristically gallant effort to make a new start in life. His sons, George and Charles and Luke, helped as far as they could to re-establish the family fortunes, but the times were against them. George and Luke went finally to America and died there.

On a certain day in 1822 a letter arrived, re-directed from Belfast to Castlecomer, where Mr. and Mrs. Teeling and their unmarried daughters, Mary and Milly, had gone on a visit to Charles and his family. It was in an unknown hand-writing, and was signed by an unknown correspondent, William Cullen, from the City of Natchez, State of Mississippi. It contained the sad tidings of the death of George, and enclosed a ring which had been given to Bartle by Hoche, and to George by Bartle on the eve of his execution. It was Mary Teeling’s destiny to read the letter containing the news of her son’s death, by the coffin which contained the mortal remains of her husband. In the bitterness of her grief her wifely devotion could find comfort in the knowledge that this last earthly sorrow had been spared her beloved Luke—and that from the heavenly vantage ground whence he now looked, it was turned for him into a joy.

The few remaining years of Mary Teeling’s life were spent with Charles and his wife and little ones. And it is to the loving memories of these years, cherished by her grandson Bartholomew, that we owe the vivid portrait of her which I have borrowed to adorn my pages.

THE WIVES OF ’NINETY-EIGHT

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