Almost every civil war, rebellion, insurrection and disturbance in Ireland, from the time of the Tudors downwards, arose more or less directly from questions connected with the possession of lands.
—Philip H. Bagenal
Nonviolent movements for social change in Ireland have a long history of turning bloody in the face of repression. The United Irish reformers of the early 1790s, suppressed in 1794, became the United Irish revolutionaries of 1798. And in the late 1960s, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, in combating institutional discrimination against Catholics, triggered a hard-line Protestant backlash that led to the Troubles. Much the same thing happened in the two decades leading up to the famine, when peaceful campaigns for Catholic rights and the repeal of the union between Britain and Ireland had a dire effect on landlord–tenant relations.
The effort by Daniel “The Liberator” O’Connell, a Dublin lawyer and Kerry landlord, to emancipate Catholics from the last of the Penal Laws—to allow them the full right to hold civil offices and have political representation—was launched with the formation of the Catholic Association in 1823. Its mobilization of the Irish masses, supported by the clergy, stood as the most viable challenge to the established order since the Rebellion of 1798.
O’Connell, who opposed violence, secret societies, and trade unions, would seem an unlikely impetus for the land war that ensued. But even with the aid of the Catholic Church and a disciplined organization that reached down to the parish level, he could not completely control the forces he had helped unleash. Protestant landlords who had long rewarded the political deference of Catholic tenants with fair dealing were angered by the flexing of Catholic political muscle. Many retaliated with evictions.
In County Cavan, for example, Sir George Hodson ejected large numbers of his Catholic tenants in the 1820s, and Rev. Marcus Beresford, a prominent member of the Orange Order, did the same in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Both relet the holding to Protestant tenants they considered politically reliable.1
In adjacent County Leitrim, politics played a similar role in the decay of landlord–tenant relations. That much was made clear by the almost comical testimony of Thomas Kingston Little, agent for Sir Morgan Crofton, in Mohill on July 17, 1844, before the Devon Commission, which was examining the state of the Irish countryside:
Q. Have any tenants been removed from the estate and had land taken from them, from causes not arising out of their incapacity to pay rent, such as political and religious grounds?
A. Oh, no! We know nothing of that kind; I never knew any case of that kind . . .
Q. You have already stated that there were no ejectments of tenants on account of political or religious differences; have there been any ejectments, or unusual proceedings, on account of any voting for the election of the board of guardians?
A. There was, prior to my being appointed as agent [in September 1842]. The tenants upon the townland of Drumnalt behaved very badly. They had an abatement [of rent], and the abatement was withdrawn.
Q. What do you mean by “behaving badly”?
A. They voted contrary to Sir Morgan Crofton’s wishes.2
Even when tenants were not evicted for supporting O’Connell, his campaign for Catholic rights (and his later effort to repeal the union between Britain and Ireland) undermined their tenure on the land. An observer in Leitrim in 1845 noted that “since the great political struggle” for Catholic emancipation, “when the landlords were beaten throughout Ireland at the general election, and their tenants polled almost to a man against them,” the landlords had generally refused to offer tenants the security of leases. The trend was particularly clear in Leitrim, he noted, and the Devon Commission made the same point about Cavan.3
In essence, O’Connell’s campaigns helped to upend the grand bargain of the Irish countryside—many Catholic tenants were no longer willing to acquiesce to an unequal relationship with their Protestant landlords, and many of those landlords no longer felt any obligation to rent the tenants the land they needed in order to live. All of this had little direct impact on O’Connell and his middle-class supporters in towns and cities. But it was a disaster for peasants.
There were other powerful reasons for evictions, the shortening or elimination of leases, and the general decay of protections for the peasantry. At the same time that the political situation was dividing landlords and tenants, economic and demographic conditions were changing drastically. The effect was to undermine Ulster custom, the unwritten rules of the countryside that had long defined landlord–tenant relations in the Ulster borderlands. Ulster custom, or tenant right as it was sometimes called, varied from place to place, but to a certain degree it served as a sort of social safety net for tenants. Originally it aided the Protestants who settled the north after the flight of the earls, but its extension to Catholic tenants demonstrated the degree to which Ulster custom benefited landlords as well.
In overwhelmingly Catholic parts of County Monaghan, for example, outgoing tenant farmers had the right to “sell” improvements they had made to a successor, but the profits from the sale were used to pay off any remaining debt to the landlord before the tenant could claim his share.4 Elsewhere, tenant right meant that rents were kept below market levels.5 This informal system depended on a paternalistic relationship between landlord and tenant, and as long as the custom was upheld there was little need for gunmen in women’s clothing to uphold traditional rights. The Ribbonmen could largely confine their activities to the sectarian struggle.
But by the latter half of the 1820s, economic, social, and political changes had begun to transform rural Ulster into a place where the traditional social order no longer worked to the benefit of landlords. The changes had begun by the late 1700s as landlords raised rents and consolidated their estates, a reflection of their increasing integration into the British market system. Transportation improvements allowed farmers to meet the growing demand for foodstuffs from an industrializing England.6
What this meant for farmers and agricultural laborers was explored by the historian Kevin O’Neill in his study of the pre-famine economic and social conditions in Killeshandra, a County Cavan parish on the border with Leitrim that he described as typical of south Ulster. It was also an early stronghold of the Molly Maguires.
O’Neill pointed out that it took decades after the arrival of market forces in the late 1700s for them to become central to the economy of the region—decades in which those affected protested violently against changes that threatened their livelihoods and their way of life.7
As the consolidation of farms dried up the supply of small rental holdings, longtime tenants found themselves turned out of their fields. The alternatives were daywork on larger farms, seasonal migration for work to other parts of the British Isles, the production of illegal whiskey, or emigration. By the 1830s the number of the landless had risen markedly in rural Cavan, and by 1841 they constituted a majority.8
All this was happening as a market-driven increase in productivity led to a rise in the population of rural Cavan—it is estimated that the number of young adults seeking farms peaked immediately before the famine. In families that still held land, the traditional subdivision of the fields among children had all but disappeared by 1841. That forced younger siblings to fend for themselves, and the eldest son who would inherit the farm to undergo a prolonged adolescence—an ideal condition for the growth of festive groups like the mummers, composed largely of unmarried young adults.
The rising population had exceeded the demand for labor as early as the 1820s, resulting in falling living standards for farm workers. Competition for fields triggered increased tension between Catholics and Protestants, as did rising rents from 1826 until the famine, for the landlords were largely Protestant. This was accompanied by a dramatic decline in the linen industry that further hurt those laborers who depended on weaving to supplement their income. South Ulster counties such as Cavan and Monaghan were transformed, in the words of one historian, into “rural slums,” with many inhabitants too poorly clothed to attend church on Sunday.9
These economic conditions had a profound affect on Ulster custom. Competition for land sent tenant-right payments soaring through most of the 1830s, but poor market and crop conditions had the reverse effect in the years 1839–41. On the brink of the famine, the collapse of tenant-right payments effectively made the safety net of Ulster custom worthless.
As politics, demographics, and economics wreaked havoc on the traditional structure of rural Ireland, the issue of electoral retaliation was pointedly raised by Maria Edgeworth, the Longford novelist whose most famous work, Castle Rackrent, dealt with a brutal landlord. “Landlords, if you begin this recriminatory system on or after elections, where will it end?” she asked in 1835.10 The question was rhetorical, but the answer leads us back to Ballinamuck, the battlefield that Edgeworth had toured with her father in 1798.
It was there, just months after Edgeworth posed her question, that a new battle erupted in the spring of 1835. With evictions mounting as the land issue became entwined with the politics, the secret societies began to weigh in, violently, in defense of tenants who had defied their landlords at the polls. Their stand at Ballinamuck made it the symbolic if not the actual birthplace of Molly Maguire.
Molly was a character as elusive as she was dangerous, and the false trails about her origins are legion. But let us follow the path to Ballinamuck, and to another locale long linked to the rise of the Mollies, the barony of Farney in Monaghan, for the journey reveals much about the conditions that gave birth to the last of Ireland’s great peasant conspiracies against the landlords, and of the propaganda that both sides employed in that struggle.
The story that Ballinamuck was the birthplace of the Mollies seems to have been spread by the Mollies themselves; the notion that the movement was born in Farney was spread by one of the nineteenth century’s greatest propagandists for the landlords of Ireland. The stories have much in common, but their greatest similarity is that not one shred of evidence can be found in the contemporary records to support the idea that outbreaks in either place were the work of a group calling itself the Molly Maguires.
Thomas Campbell Foster, a Times of London reporter who traveled the Ulster borderlands in 1845, reported that, “in this neighborhood [Cavan], the commencement of ‘Molly Maguireism’ is traced to Ballynamuck in the County of Longford . . . a whole village was destroyed, and the population ejected . . . the tenants who replaced them were all either shot, or they fled from fear.”11 Foster, writing a decade after the Ballinamuck disturbances, was not alone in linking the secret society to the village. Local folklore, too, drew a connection between the troubles there and the Mollies.12
The conflict had its roots in the crisis over Catholic liberation that first erupted in Waterford in 1826, when tenants defied their landlords to vote for an O’Connell candidate. From 1830 to 1837, six elections in Longford were contested by the Conservatives on the one side and O’Connell supporters and their allies on the other. John Barnes, a relatively evenhanded magistrate assigned to the area around Ballinamuck, blamed agrarian violence there on the frequent elections, with “the priests taking one side, and the landlords taking another, each party pulling the tenantry according to their wishes.”13
After their party suffered a loss in the 1832 election, Conservative Longford landlords decided they needed to enlarge their electoral base by increasing the number of Protestant tenants on their estates. Lord Lorton, who owned a heavily subdivided estate in Ballinamuck, was among the most active in this effort. Through his land agent, Thomas Courtenay, Lorton began a policy of consolidating holdings, dispossessing the Catholic tenants, and replacing them with Protestants.
The process was well under way by the spring of 1834, and culminated in May 1835, when, with leases expiring, Lorton launched what he described as a “pretty general clearance of the miserable people.” While keeping some Catholic tenants, he brought in eight Protestant families as well.
The move, Magistrate Barnes reported, created a “general impression among the people and the priests that Lorton wished to Protestantize his estate—the fact that all who were ejected were Catholics and all new tenants were Protestants confirmed this impression.”14 Barnes concluded that a number of the evictions were politically motivated.
The results were grimly predictable, given Irish history. In 1793, the perception that the Militia Act was being used to punish Catholics for their political gains had triggered widespread violence by the Defenders. Forty years later, the politically inspired evictions in Longford had the same effect with their descendants, the Ribbonmen.
In May 1835, a Catholic, Peter Hart, was killed for voting Conservative. The next month, John Brock, one of the first of the new Protestant tenants, was shot and killed in a field behind his home.
Brock’s replacement, James Diamond, suffered a series of attacks; eight Ribbonmen were convicted and banished for seven years in one of them. In all, four of the new Protestant tenants were killed, two were severely beaten, and three had their cattle killed. “Nothing can equal the outrages which are both daily and nightly being committed in the county,” a local newspaper reported.15
The entry of secret societies also added a new level of volatility to polling places, which became notoriously violent carnivals throughout the country during the 1830s and 1840s. In a typical Irish election, thousands of people would turn out for days of balloting, with crowds of nonvoters often intimidating those who did have the franchise. Threatening letters and violence were used to sway voters before elections and to punish them afterward.16
During an election in County Longford in December 1836, groups of armed Ribbonmen appeared at the homes of voters, warning them not to cast ballots for the Tory candidate, Charles Fox. The violence was so common that it became unremarkable. In the 1836 Longford election, an official in Ballymahon reported to Dublin Castle on the day of the vote that “there has been a great deal of rioting today, but nothing of importance has occurred.” After the Liberal candidate won the election, warning letters signed “Capt. Rock” were used to enforce a boycott on those who had voted Conservative.17
The continuing campaign of terror and the difficulty in prosecuting those responsible led Lorton to take a desperate step. In 1837 he told his agent, Courtenay, that unless convictions were forthcoming, he was to clear “all the ground that has fallen out of lease” and rent it to “new tenants, for whom good houses are to be built.” Still not satisfied when the leases for Ballinamuck and the land around it expired in February of the following year, Lorton instituted eviction proceedings. “My feelings had been very much wounded and excited by the determined manner in which they picked off every Protestant they could,” he said of the Catholics tenantry.
Barnes reported in April of that year that “47 notices were served upon the tenants of Lord Lorton, in and near they village of Ballynamuck . . . It is much to be feared that turning out so many persons (all Roman Catholics) will sooner or later have an effect on the peace of that district.”18
Over the next year, Ribbonmen conducted nocturnal raids on homes, posted warning letters across the county, and fired warning shots. In January 1839, Bernard Higgins was killed near Ballinamuck after he had seized a cow for overdue rent.
But the destruction of the village, when it finally came that spring, was almost anticlimactic. Lorton had offered the tenants cash payments and the use of any timber from their homes if they demolished the structures themselves, and more than forty grudgingly accepted. When Courtenay, accompanied by 100 policemen and 260 soldiers, arrived in Ballinamuck to complete the work in April, they tore down just five homes.19
By that time, thousands of people had been ejected by Lorton and other Conservative landlords in the county. The repercussions did indeed “have an effect on the peace” of that district, as Barnes had predicted. In June, a man and his son were beaten near Ballinamuck because they worked for a Protestant. In July, the home of James Grimes near Ballinamuck was robbed by two men, one with his face blackened. Elsewhere in the county, gunmen were turning up in odd disguises. Less than three weeks after the evictions, a man dressed as a woman fired a shot on the farm of John Reilly, who had recently purchased two acres of land near Granard.20 If the copies of reward notices forwarded to Dublin Castle are any indication, the walls of Longford town, Drumlish, and Granard were covered with broadsheets offering money for information during this period.
The blackened faces and women’s clothing signaled that the struggle was over land—a point underlined by the proximity of some attacks to holidays. Brock was killed on June 24, 1835—suspiciously close to the Midsummer night celebrations, which were traditionally held on June 23 and June 28 in Longford. Another Protestant tenant, Arthur Cathcart, was fired at on December 29, 1835. On January 2, 1838, a gunman with a blackened cape and another wearing a straw cape entered a home near Drumlish, just south of Ballinamuck.21
Though they were in some cases dressing as women, the peasant guerrillas of Longford were not, at this point, fighting under the auspices of “Molly Maguire.” Not a single mention of that name shows up in the extensive County Longford files of agrarian crimes reported to Dublin Castle for the years 1835–39. Instead, the mythical character whose signature appeared on the warning notices of that period was “Captain Rock.”
It is true that folklore later attributed the murder of Brock and others to the “Molly Maguires,” and that the word in Cavan about a decade later was that the Ballinamuck land war was the commencement of “Molly Maguireism.” But those references are best understood in a symbolic sense, denoting Ballinamuck as the birthplace of a new departure for the Ribbonmen—a land war fought by men in the guise of mummers. Only in retrospect was the site of the last great battle of the 1798 insurrection—and the first great battle of a new land war—designated as the birthplace of the Molly Maguires. As a symbol and as propaganda, Ballinamuck was simply too perfect for the Mollies to pass up.
Another location long associated with the birth of the Molly Maguires is that of the Shirley estate in the barony of Farney in south Monaghan. There, as in Ballinamuck, a land war was fought on two levels—in streets and fields, and in hearts and minds. In some ways, the picture in Farney was similar to that of Ballinamuck, with O’Connell’s movement undermining the traditional structure of landlord–tenant relations. There is much more information on the struggle that finally erupted in south Monaghan in 1843, thanks to the detailed though far from reliable memoir of the agent on the Shirley estate, W. Steuart Trench. He was the era’s prime propagandist for the landlords, and there are strong reasons to doubt that anyone at the time called the peasant guerrillas he faced in Farney “Molly Maguires.”
Of one thing we can be sure—Farney had long been a battleground. It was there, in the fourth century, that the men of Connacht were said to have routed the forces of Ulster in a seven-day battle to avenge the slaying of Conn of the Hundred Battles by fifty men disguised as women. Hugh Roe MacMahon led cattle raids in the barony in the late 1500s, Mountjoy “spoiled all of Farney” in 1600, and Defenders battled troops at Carrickmacross, Farney’s main town, in 1793.22
By the early 1800s, Farney was a center of two symbiotic trends—Ribbon activity and sectarian conflict. The barony’s overwhelming Catholic majority was reported to be boycotting Protestant merchants in 1813, and in the following year the campaign escalated with threatening notes and attacks on individuals and property. Protestants feared a secret society was trying to drive them from the area.23
In 1816, as we have seen, delegates from across Ulster met at Carrickmacross to reconstitute the old Defender network, and that same year, Ribbonmen burned Wildgoose Lodge, just a few miles from the town. This, then, was the sectarian thatch into which O’Connell’s civil rights movement dropped like a firebrand in the 1826 election, making Monaghan a national sensation. Four candidates were vying for the county’s two seats in Parliament—Charles Powell Leslie, an incumbent who served as colonel of the Monaghan Militia and opposed Catholic emancipation; Henry R. Westenra, an incumbent and the son-in-law of Lord Rossmore, a staunch supporter of emancipation; Evelyn J. Shirley, an English Liberal and largely absentee landlord; and Walter Tyler, who was not considered viable.
Branding Leslie a bigot, O’Connell decided to intervene in the election, and the Catholic Association and the clergy urged voters to cast their two ballots for Westenra and Shirley—a position complicated by a pact between Shirley and Leslie that they would ask their supporters to cast their second ballot for each other. Westenra could win only if those who voted for Shirley also defied him by voting against his ally, Leslie. And, indeed, voters from the Shirley estate said they would “give one vote for their landlord, and the other they would give for their religion and their country.”24
The campaign was heated, and O’Connell sent an aide to campaign for Westenra. A daylong riot during the balloting left three dead and several injured. And when it was over, the voters had turned out Leslie for Westenra, infuriating Shirley, despite his own victory.
As in Longford a decade later, Monaghan landlords began evicting Catholic tenants who had defied them at the ballot box. Among the leaders of the eviction campaign was Shirley, who also raised rents by a third, ruining a favorable reputation among his tenants. “Up to this time, Mr. Shirley was a good landlord, and admitted tenant-right to the fullest extent on the property,” recalled the local Catholic priest, Rev. Thomas Smollen. “But after that election he never showed the same friendly feelings to the people.”25
Trench, the estate manager for Shirley in the 1840s, described the divisive effect of elections in terms remarkably similar to those of Barnes, the Ballinamuck magistrate, though Trench’s sympathies were clearly with the landlords. “I know of nothing more detrimental to the peace and prosperity of a district, than an election of members of Parliament, conducted as such elections generally are in Ireland,” Trench wrote in his memoirs. “The priest on the one side urges vehemently the constitutional rights of the tenant; and the landlord on the other is indignant that all the influence he might naturally expect from his position, education and wealth should, from this difference in creed, be rudely forced from his hands under the sanction of what he must admit is the tenant’s constitutional right.”26
The eviction campaign by landlords indignant at their loss of influence set the stage for the next act of the drama. In the fall of 1828, one O’Connell’s chief supporters in the north, the Belfast journalist Jack Lawless, arrived in Carrickmacross to announce a nonviolent “invasion of Ulster” by supporters of emancipation. His plan for a march by fifty thousand supporters was designed to drum up support for the “Catholic rent,” a defense fund for tenants who had voted against the landlords. One of the towns on Lawless’s route was the largely Presbyterian Ballybay. As thousands of armed Orangemen gathered there to counter the march, infantry, lancers, and the entire county police force were dispatched to Carrickmacross to prevent a collision between the two sides. The show of force persuaded Lawless to take a different route, but clashes occurred nonetheless; at least one Catholic was killed, and several were wounded.
The “invasion” proceeded on its way, to Armagh and to Omagh, leading Protestants there to form one of the two hundred Brunswick Clubs that had sprung up in opposition to O’Connell by 1828. With aristocratic leaders and a heavy leavening of clergymen and lawyers, the anti-Catholic Brunswick clubs attracted many who had shied away from the Orange Society. One more poisonous sectarian plant had evolved in the hothouse of Ulster politics.27
Religious controversies continued in Farney throughout the next decade, as Catholics campaigned against the tithes they were required to pay to support the Anglican Church of Ireland. A riot left several injured in Magheracloone in February 1832 when magistrates and dragoons tried to collect the money. Protestant proselytizing by Shirley’s estate agent, Sandy Mitchell, and another employee, Capt. Richard Bowden, only added to the suspicions of the Catholic tenants and their clergy. Shirley, an Anglican, found himself embroiled in a bitter dispute with the local Catholic hierarchy in the mid-1830s, after he insisted that the Bible be read at a school he had opened for children on his estate. One tenant who aided in the founding of an alternative school was reportedly evicted, though he was not in arrears. After a conservative Monaghan newspaper, the Northern Standard, ran an editorial by Bowden that accused the local priest of “ignorant bigotry,” it was successfully sued.28
By the late 1830s, the constant drumbeat of sectarian troubles had made Farney perhaps the most important Ribbon center in Ireland. The leaders of the movement’s two main factions were, as we have seen, John Rice, a Carrickmacross farmer, and Richard Jones, a Dublin haymarket clerk and native of Farney.29
Given the level of bitterness on the Shirley estate, it should come as no surprise that when Mitchell, the estate agent, died of a heart attack in the spring of 1843, the tenants celebrated with bonfires on the hilltops. Mitchell had been a magistrate as well as a land agent—a common combination that placed the law firmly in the hands of the landlord. He was remembered as a man who maintained a network of spies among the tenants and who leveraged marriages with the threat of eviction—the sort of interference sure to enrage festive groups like the strawboys, who were deeply concerned with the issue of marriage.30
Mitchell’s replacement was Trench, an Anglo-Irishmen who had some experience with Ribbonmen in Tipperary. Upon arrival in March, the new estate agent perceived a wild, Irish-speaking peasantry that was either at his feet or at his throat. “The Celt in all his purity had been allowed to increase and multiply. Irish was the language at the time chiefly spoken by the people,” he wrote in his memoirs decades later. “Though the people were most docile and easily led, and generally obedient to their superiors, yet when once assembled in masses or roused by any common cause, their old national temperament seemed suddenly to rise to the surface, and they became capable of the most frenzied excitement.”31
The bonfires that accompanied Mitchell’s death hinted at the old connection between festive custom and disorder. The local authorities had some limited success in the 1830s when they tried to suppress the Midsummer’s Eve fires, which, it was believed, “tended to create riots in the country.” Mummers, too, were known to march the streets of Carrickmacross, with the Prince George character killing his rival combatant, the Turkey Champion, in their age-old duel.32
The barony was a crowded one. Subdivision of land had so flourished that the 44,107 inhabitants of Farney were crowded onto 67,333 acres. The version of tenant right they practiced proved highly favorable to the landlord. “It was then the common practice on the estate, when a tenant became insolvent,” Trench recalled, “that he should come to the office of the estate and consent to his interest in the farm as yearly tenant being sold to some other tenant, approved by the landlord or his agent, and that the proceeds should be applied to clear his rent and pay his numerous debts.” The purchase money frequently amounted to ten or twelve pounds per acre, and creditors would show up on the day of the defaulter’s goodwill sale, a schedule of debts would be drawn up, and the landlord would be paid first.33
Trench’s employer was precisely the sort most feared by peasants. Shirley was a transplanted English Protestant determined to improve his estate by consolidating it, and to improve his tenants by educating them, and if possible converting them. His efforts typified the attempts by many south Ulster landlords to integrate their estates into the British market economy. He showed little sympathy to those tenants squeezed by the process and consistently voted with the Conservatives in Parliament.34
As Trench emerged from a meeting with his new employer and chief clerk in Carrickmacross to discuss the situation on Friday, March 31, 1843, they were confronted by a crowd of tenants complaining that “we are pressed and ground down, and we must have a removal of our grievances.” The peasants said they would pay no rent until the rates were reduced, and Shirley replied that they would have their answer on Monday. The vast gulf between what the landlord said and what the tenants heard—a split that mirrored so many others—became apparent as word spread that on Monday the tenants’ grievances would be resolved and the amount of their rent reduction announced.
The next day, an alarmed Shirley had a placard posted that proclaimed “his opinion that the present distress has not been caused, so far as the Shirley tenantry are concerned, by high rents; and that, therefore . . . he does not feel bound to make, at present, either a temporary or permanent reduction in the rent.” He would not attend any meeting on Monday, the placard said, and the tenants were admonished to stay at home.
The placard went up on Saturday and was torn down on Sunday. On Monday a crowd that Trench estimated at ten thousand gathered in Carrickmacross as Shirley held a council of war with the agent for the neighboring estate of the Marquis of Bath. They agreed to stand firm against any reduction and sent the hapless Trench to announce the news to the swarming crowd. He was promptly mobbed, beaten, dragged through the streets, and nearly strangled before being deposited on the front step of the landlord’s manor, minus most of his clothes and all of his dignity.
Thus began the affair soon to be a cause célèbre throughout Ireland. The day that Trench was humiliated, Shirley requested a company of infantry and a troop of dragoons. The soldiers were dispatched and paraded through Carrickmacross in a show of force. O’Connell arrived on April 25, telling a crowd of twenty thousand that though tyranny flourished in Farney “to a lamentable excess,” Ribbonism was not the answer.35
Amid all the street theatrics, both military and political, another drama was unfolding in the countryside, where Trench’s rent collectors were running into extreme difficulty. Men, women, and children dogged their steps, hurling stones. After the arrest of fourteen tenants, warning notices went up threatening bailiffs, and the tenants began keeping watch on their movements. In May, a group of men dressed in women’s clothing, with their faces blackened, assaulted a man serving a legal notice on a tenant in default. The costumes they wore were those of the Whiteboys and mummers, but Trench tells us that they had adopted a new name.
“They established a system of what they called ‘Molly Maguires,’ ” Trench wrote. “These ‘Molly Maguires’ were generally stout, active young men dressed up in women’s clothes, with faces blackened, or otherwise disguised; sometimes they wore crape over their countenances, sometimes smeared themselves in the most fantastic manner with burnt cork about their eyes, mouths and cheeks.” These Mollies, he wrote, “carried pistols under their petticoats,” and waged such a remorseless war against the landlord’s employees that soon none were willing to serve legal papers or round up the cattle of tenants delinquent in their rent.
Trench recalled that it was decided at a council of war that the Molly Maguires must be put down. The climax came when a magistrate, accompanied by a Shirley bailiff and eighteen soldiers, attempted to post a blanket notice of eviction at a church. A stone-throwing mob confronted the troop, which opened fire, killing one man and wounding several others. The landlord’s party retreated, and while the inquest that followed raised doubts about the decision to open fire, no criminal charges were brought.36 In the wake of what became known as the Battle of Magheracloone, Trench convinced his employer to take a more conciliatory approach, which he says defused the situation.
For all of Trench’s references to “Molly Maguires” in the memoir he wrote decades later, the term appears in not a single one of the contemporary reports forwarded to Dublin Castle on the agrarian agitation in Farney in 1843. There are descriptions of “Rockite notices” and of men with blackened faces in the thick file of Monaghan Outrage Papers for that year, but Mollies don’t add to the bulk—they are never mentioned. And in extensive testimony given just a year later to the Devon Commission, which was investigating conditions in the Irish countryside, Trench went into some detail about the events of 1843 but never once mentioned “Molly Maguires.” Indeed, in two days of testimony before the Devon Commission in Carrickmacross in April 1844, not a single witness spoke the name.37 For that matter, no contemporary mention of “Molly Maguires” has been found in connection with agrarian crime anywhere before late 1844.
When his memoir, Realities of Irish Life, was published decades later in 1868, Trench was criticized for his gross exaggerations, which included illustrations of the peasantry as “gorillas, always flourishing shillelaghs, and grinning horribly.” The landlords, meanwhile, were portrayed as demigods, “formed by nature to be the masters and guides and managers of such a silly, helpless people.” Indeed, one critic called Trench’s work, “one the most misleading books on Ireland published in many years.” The New York Times called it “semi-sensational,” and mocked the author’s portrayal of himself as “a man of unflinching nerve, of great physical endurance, unfailing in resource, generous to a fault, prompt in action and always doing just the right thing at just the right time.” The local Catholic priest, Rev. Smollen, pointed out that while Trench was saved from the mob by another priest, Fr. Keelaghan, “Mr. Trench gives him no place in his Realities.”38
Given the harsh contemporary criticism of the book’s accuracy, and absent any mention of the Mollies elsewhere before 1844, it seems likely that in writing more than two decades after the events in question Trench committed a bit of literary and historical fraud, embroidering his account with a name that had grown infamous by the 1860s, but which was still unheard of in 1843.
Even local landlords contradicted Trench on the nature of the conspiracy he faced. Trench acknowledged that Ribbonmen were active on the Shirley estate, but claimed “that the Ribbon Confederacy . . . had nothing whatever to do” with the outrages in the spring of 1843, which he viewed as isolated and spontaneous, “a sudden rising of the people, by no means previously planned or premeditated.”39
Lord Rossmore, a Monaghan estate owner with a bit more knowledge of the county than Trench, took a starkly different view. “A similar event having taken place last autumn upon a neighboring estates in the adjacent county seems to lead to the inference that this has not been an isolated movement, taken up at the instant; neither is it connected with any sectarian feeling,” Rossmore wrote to Dublin Castle on April 4, 1843. Instead, he pointed to other factors—falling farm prices, “a superabounding population,” and the “introduction of a fresh agent to the Shirley property” who lacked his predecessor’s influence: Trench.
In May of 1843, another writer informed Dublin Castle that “a regular conspiracy had been organized on the Farney estate”—hardly the spontaneous uprising that Trench saw.40 The agent’s notion that there were two vast yet unrelated peasant movements at work on the Shirley estate—an isolated uprising of Mollies on the one hand, and long-standing Ribbon activity on the other—stretches credibility. Sectarianism and political divisions had laid the groundwork for discontent, but the appearance of armed men disguised as mummers clearly indicated that, in south Monaghan, land had become the main issue on the eve of the famine.
If Trench’s hindsight was suspect, his foresight was undeniable. In the summer of 1844, as the Devon Commission was wrapping up its fact-finding, he offered the following prediction: “I strongly feel that matters are not likely to continue as they are. I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that, though the people are being educated, they are suffering severe want. They are growing in intelligence and in numbers, and in a knowledge of their strength, as well as of their wretchedness . . . I think there is a danger, if the humbler classes continue much longer to acquire knowledge and to want food, that a long-threatened convulsion may be the consequence.”41
Summer had barely ended before the first pangs of that convulsion were felt, not in Monaghan but along the Cavan–Leitrim border. There, “the humbler classes” were giving birth to Molly Maguire, though she would not be named for months.