Military technique in Ulster had not been confined to the burning of houses and the periodical slaughter of guilty and innocent. It also included torture, though the methods were more or less the standard military punishments of the day. These involved picketing, or the suspension of a man by one arm with one pointed stake below his feet on which alone he could rest his weight, and, much more commonly, flogging, both applied as inducements to the victims to supply information. A clergyman living near Ballymena in County Antrim reported to his patron as early as May 1797 that the soldiers were not hesitating to strip men, tie them to a tree and flog them with bits and bridles.1 In June 1797 he himself saw ‘a country fellow’ given seventy lashes, which was all he could take without fainting, and which would have rendered him useless for further information. A few days later, he watched an old man of over seventy stripped naked and given forty lashes while being held down by two soldiers.2 A Belfast doctor confirmed that this sort of procedure was general when he wrote in October 1797: ‘Many are the military outrages which have been committed in the north, such as inflictions of military punishment on poor people in no way subject to martial law.’3
But what had happened in the North was nothing to the severity with which the military – regulars, yeomanry and militia – soon applied their systems of punishments to suspects in Leinster, particularly after the arrests of the leading United Irish conspirators at Bond’s house. The advanced state of the conspiracy was now openly revealed and the government set out to break it by the harshest methods possible.
The army’s official view of what constituted harsh methods can be gauged from its own standard of punishment at the time. Thus, in the previous year, when a number of militia and dragoons in a camp at Bandon near Cork were found to have taken the local Defender oath, they were given sentences which, when other than death, consisted of from 500 to 999 lashes. Only between 200 and 425 of these were in fact administered – the remainder being remitted on the culprit’s agreement to serve abroad for the rest of his life. General Coote, no sentimentalist, who witnessed this particular flogging, described it in a letter to the lord lieutenant as ‘a dreadful business’.4 A man who as a boy of ten witnessed floggings of his neighbours by the army in 1798 described how one of them had begged to be shot while his flesh was being torn to shreds and how another, before he had received a hundred lashes, had cried out: ‘I’m a-cutting through.’ There had been a very heavy shower of rain at the time, he remembered.5 Numerous accounts of such floggings which were now to play a most important part in Irish history confirm their bestiality with descriptions of flesh torn in lumps from the body by the cat o’ nine tails, and the baring of bones and even internal organs.
On 30 March 1798, many districts in Leinster were officially proclaimed as areas in which the military could thenceforth live at free quarters and search for arms. Discipline among the militia and the yeomanry was poor at the best of times. General Sir John Moore had already noted in his diary in January 1798 that the system of proclaiming areas simply meant ‘to let loose the military, who were encouraged in acts of great violence against all who were supposed to be disaffected’.6 Now, in April and the first weeks of May 1798, there were virtually no restraints at all on the troops living at free quarters in the proclaimed districts. Their one task was to obtain the surrender of arms and procure information as to the identities of local sergeants, captains and colonels of the United Irishmen.
Other forms of torture besides flogging were introduced. All were applied fairly indiscriminately to both guilty and innocent since torture itself was the speediest method of distinguishing between the two. So-called ‘half-hanging’ became common: the pulling of a rope tight round the victim’s neck from which it was slackened every time he lost consciousness. A fiercely loyal Protestant of New Ross in County Wexford described with some disapproval how about this time he began to hear of ‘very many punishments put in execution in the barracks yard to exort confessions of guilt’.7 One man, named Driscol, a hermit-like figure who was taken in a wood outside the town with two Roman Catholic prayer-books in his pocket on which he was suspected of swearing United Irishmen, was half-strangled three times and flogged four times during confinement ‘but to no purpose’.8 In other districts, the torment of the pitch-cap was introduced. This was a brown paper cap filled with molten pitch which was jammed on to the head of the victim and, after it had been allowed to set a little, was then set fire to. As the frantic wearer tried to tear it off, burning pitch fell into his eyes and down his face and the cap itself could usually only be removed with the accompaniment of much hair and scalp as well. The practice was inspired by a recent fashion of cropping the hair short adopted in imitation of the French republicans. A song, ‘Croppies Lie Down’, popular among the Orange yeomanry, acquired a sinister ring for all who either rashly or just unwittingly adopted the fashion.
Oh, Croppies ye’d better be quiet and still
Ye shan’t have your liberty, do what ye will,
As long as salt water is found in the deep
Our foot on the neck of the Croppy we’ll keep.
Remember the steel of Sir Phelim O’Neill
Who slaughtered our fathers in Catholic zeal
And down, down, Croppies, lie down …
But it was the floggings which inspired the greatest terror and which proved the most effective method of obtaining quick information and a surrender of arms. After the proclamation of 30 March, the wooden triangle, on which the victim was spreadeagled, seems first to have been set up in the town of Athy in County Kildare. A captain of the United Irishmen wrote many years later an account of the terror which first-hand news of this immediately inspired in his own town of Carlow, some ten miles away.
There was no ceremony used in choosing victims, the first to hand done well enough …. They were stripped naked, tied to the triangle and their flesh cut without mercy and though some men stood the torture to the last gasp sooner than become informers, others did not, and to make matters worse, one single informer in the town was sufficient to destroy all the United Irishmen in it.9
General Sir John Moore came across one of these routine flogging sessions a few weeks later. The High Sheriff of Tipperary, a man named Fitzgerald, was at work. Already, by his severity he had most effectively broken the United Irish movement altogether in that county.
We found a great stir in Clogheen, [wrote Moore, who arrived there about ten o’clock on a hot fine morning]. A man tied up and being flogged, the sides of the streets filled with country people on their knees and hats off …. The rule was to flog each person till he told the truth and gave the names of other rebels. These were then sent for and underwent a similar operation. Undoubtedly several persons were thus punished who richly deserved it. The number flogged was considerable. It lasted all forenoon. That some were innocent is I fear equally certain.10
A loyalist Quaker lady, a schoolteacher, already experiencing the ‘unchecked robbery’ which free quarters meant in her village of Ballitore, in County Kildare, now heard her once peaceful village street ring with the shrieks of those who were being flogged and the cries of their loved ones looking on. Guards were placed at every entrance to the village to prevent people entering or leaving. ‘The torture,’ she wrote later, ‘was excessive, and the victims were long in recovering.’11
It is, however, necessary to remember that this whole system of torture was being carried out on the Irish population largely by Irish soldiers, a great proportion of them Catholics of the poorest class in the militia, who were ready enough to do their duty against their fellow-countrymen as unworthy rebels. Of all the troops available for the government in Ireland before and during the coming rebellion, over four-fifths were Irish.**
Soon the terror of the floggings, the burning of houses, of pitch-capping, half-hanging and indiscriminate shooting was so great that all over Leinster people started sleeping out in the fields at night for safety. ‘No one slept in his own house,’ wrote a man who himself soon became a rebel though he had never been a United Irishman. ‘The very whistling of the birds seemed to report the approach of an enemy.’12 And although he was then writing some thirty years after the event he added that the memory of the wailings of the women and the cries of the children still awoke in his mind, even at that distance of time, feelings of deep horror.
On 29 May 1798 a Lady Sunderlin living in Sackville Street, Dublin, wrote to her friend, Mrs Roper, in Berkhamsted: ‘Our long threatened rebellion has at length broken out in various parts about Dublin.’13
She made no mention of any other part of Ireland. She was safe, she said, and the rebellion appeared to be premature. The rebels were out in very great numbers, but wherever they had been engaged they had been defeated with great loss. The Lord Mayor’s butler had been arrested as a United Irishman and the servants in the country were said to be letting the Defenders into their masters’ houses.
Lady Sunderlin’s account was fairly accurate. The rebellion which had now indeed erupted was to prove a haphazard, desperate and pathetically uncoordinated affair.
After the arrests at Bond’s house on 12 March the United Irishmen claimed that they had filled the vacancies on the Leinster Committee immediately and, five days later, on St Patrick’s Day, they confidently announced in a handbill that the organization of the capital was ‘perfect’.14 A new National Directory had in fact been set up under the leadership of a young Protestant barrister of some brilliance, named John Sheares. Though born into the Establishment (his father had been a member of the Irish House of Commons) he had been deeply impressed by the French Revolution and had become a member of the Society of United Irishmen in its open and legal days. His respectability in fact was to prove a source of distress and embarrassment to the judge who was eventually to sentence him and his brother Henry to death for high treason, for he knew their parents well.15
The Sheares brothers were arrested only five weeks after the arrest of the previous Directory at Bond’s, and two days after Lord Edward Fitzgerald himself had been caught. They had been working together with Fitzgerald and with Samuel Neilson on details of a plan to take Dublin, which involved the capture of the military barracks at Loughlinstown, theoretically undermined from within by the swearing in of many of the troops there as United Irishmen. The government had been watching them all the time. A young captain of the King’s County militia, whom they had mistakenly and most rashly assumed to be sympathetic to their plans, simply because in earlier times he had expressed himself as a radical, was daily giving in a detailed report of all their preparations. This captain, whose name was Armstrong, has gone down in legend among the execrable informers of Irish history, but he was hardly an informer in any dishonourable sense and his first utterance on cross-examination at the Sheares’ trial was the proud statement that he was an Irishman.16 He made just as sincere though less flamboyant a claim to patriotic motives as the Sheares themselves, in whose house was found a premature address to the people, beginning: ‘The National Flag, the Sacred Green, is at this moment flying over the Ruins of Despotism …’17
The control of the original Directory over the United Irishmen’s unwieldy component parts had been inadequate enough. That of the Sheares brothers was even more so. Whatever powerful mystique Fitzgerald himself might have been able to substitute for effective organization disappeared with his arrest on 19 May. By 21 May the Sheares brothers were in gaol. Whoever replaced them must have been going blindly through the motions of setting off the rebellion planned for 23 May. Matters had gone too far to be stopped. Among the peasantry the tension could hardly be contained any longer. The basic sense of injustice which had first driven them into the Defender organizations was now inflamed to desperation by the military terror. At the same time, this had very nearly broken their spirit. They were at a point where the alternatives of total despair or a desperate gesture were perilously close together.
William Farrel, a United Irish captain from Carlow, gives a vivid account of the way in which the local attempt at rebellion in that town finally came about. It may serve as an individual representative example of the experience of many localities in and about the Irish midlands at this time. Everything was expected from the great men in Dublin, but when it came to fighting ‘everyone wished most earnestly to see it done but none cared to do the job himself’.18 Government posters had been up in Carlow town for several days, demanding the surrender of arms and threatening the full rigour of martial law at free quarters if they were not forthcoming. Only ten miles from Athy and its flogging triangle everyone now knew what that meant. In the absence of any word from ‘the great men behind the curtain in Dublin’ the United Irishmen of Carlow themselves debated as to whether to surrender the arms or not. Farrel himself was in favour of doing so, but the majority were not, and on 24 May orders came down from Dublin to rise.
The United Irishmen’s military organizer in the district was a man named Heydon, actually a member of a local yeomanry corps. After alerting as many sympathizers in the town as he could, he rode off to raise the countryside. He found the country people reluctant to move, saying that they were ‘heart-sick of the business and would much rather give it up and have peace’.19 They implored him not to lead them into the town unless he could guarantee that he could take it with the support he had there anyway. With a wild optimism which was often typical of future Irish conspiracies, Heydon replied that he had nearly all the yeomanry with him, nearly all the militia and a considerable number of the Ninth Dragoons who were stationed in the town. All the country people would have to do would be to march into the town at a given signal, raise a great shout and all would be over.
As evening came on it began to be whispered in Carlow town that the country people were coming in and that boats were ready on the River Barrow to ferry other contingents of rebels over from the neighbouring Queen’s County. Farrel himself stole out of the town to check on this last report, but finding it to be false became even more determined to have nothing to do with what he was now convinced must be a disastrous rising. In the darkness, though, about a thousand of the Carlow men were already gathering. A famous ballad written many years later immortalizes another Farrel of this time, a man of at least more ballad-worthy mettle:
‘Oh, then, tell me Sean O’Farrel, tell me where you hurry so?’
‘Hush my boucal, hush and listen’ – and his cheeks were all aglow –
‘I bear orders from the Captain; get you ready quick and soon
For the pikes must be together by the rising of the Moon.’
‘Oh then, tell me Sean O’Farrel, where the gathering is to be?’
‘In the old spot, by the river, right well known to you and me.
One word more: for token signal whistle up the marching tune
With your pike upon your shoulder by the rising of the Moon.’
Out from many a mud-walled cabin, eyes were watching through the night:
Many a manly heart was throbbing for that blessed warning light;
Murmurs passed along the valley, like the banshee’s lonely croon;
And a thousand pikes were flashing by the rising of the Moon.
Down along yon singing river, that dark mass of men was seen;
High about their shining weapons floats their own beloved green
Death to every foe and traitor! Forward strike the marching tune,
And hurrah, my boys, for Freedom! ’Tis the Rising of the Moon.
The rebels started moving towards Carlow at two o’clock in the morning of 25 May. A Catholic parish priest called O’Neill whose house they passed came out and went on his knees imploring them to turn back. They pressed on. But a little later doubts seem to have beset them and they were only rallied by a man called Murray with a blunderbuss who threatened to blow out the brains of the first man to turn back. One contemporary says that a man was shot as an example, thus giving timely warning to the garrison of their approach.20 Heydon repeated his assurances that the town was as good as won. They marched into Carlow through one of the four main gates without opposition and halted when they came to the potato market. There they raised the great shout which was to deliver the town into their hands. It died away into the silence of the night.
They had hardly time to sense panic before the first shot rang out. The yeomanry, the militia and the Ninth Dragoons had indeed been waiting for them and now opened a murderous fire. They flew, wrote Farrel long afterwards, ‘like frightened birds’.21 But there was virtually nowhere to fly to for they had been neatly trapped. Those who escaped the firing from the ends of the streets and from the windows of the houses managed to force their way into a cluster of poor peasant cabins on the edge of the town. The soldiers poured volley after volley into the cabins, setting them alight. Those who tried to escape the flames were bayonetted or shot or immediately hanged from signposts and gateways. Between four and five hundred people may have died altogether. The government troops had no losses at all. It was a massacre. Many bodies were thrown, when daylight came, into a sand-pit called ‘the croppy hole’.
Heydon, who had vainly tried to rally his panic-stricken followers for a time, had eventually decided to escape as best he could. He succeeded in doing this by putting on his yeomanry uniform and mingling with his former comrades. He made his way out into the country but was caught three miles from Carlow and hanged the next day from a lamp-iron, going to his death, as Farrel who witnessed it declared, ‘seemingly as unconcerned as if he was going to some place of amusement’. The rope broke, and after lying insensible on the ground for a few moments he had to go through the business of mounting the ladder and being ‘turned off’ all over again. This time the rope held.
Retribution was only just beginning. The triangle was now set up in the barrack square at Carlow and scenes of incredible brutality took place as men were stripped and flogged and their flesh cut to shreds by the cat o’ nine tails in attempts to extract information from them. Some who refused to talk were finally hanged, naked, bleeding and insensible as they were. Gordon, the loyalist historian, reckons that some two hundred people were executed in Carlow by hanging or shooting, as a result of courts-martial alone.22
A dozen or more such ‘risings’ of ill-organized groups of peasantry armed with many pikes and some firearms took place in the counties round Dublin between 23 and 25 May. Sometimes these amounted to little more than demonstrations. Mary Leadbeater, the Quaker lady who had heard her village street ringing with the cries of those flogged by the soldiers, was now to have experience of the rebels.23 After the withdrawal of the military to deal with the situation nearer Dublin, certain people in the village who had been lying low suddenly appeared in the streets dressed in green, and in the afternoon about two or three hundred men came in from the surrounding country armed with pikes, knives and pitchforks and carrying poles with green flags flying. They were accompanied by young girls wearing green ribbons and carrying pikes and were headed by a man riding a white horse. A number of the rebels crowded into her kitchen demanding food and drink, but otherwise behaved quite respectfully. She was cutting bread for them a little apprehensively when a small elderly man relieved her of the task telling her not to worry and that they would be ‘out in a shot’. She told them that she felt unable to wear anything green since as a Quaker she could not join any party.
‘What?’ they asked her, ‘not the strongest?’
‘None at all,’ she replied.
Among them she noticed a young farmer named Horan whom she had seen unhappily getting a ‘protection’ slip from an officer only a few days before. His whole face was now quite changed and radiant with excitement.
The man on the white horse did what he could to prevent bloodshed and ‘showed as much courage as humility’. But at least one yeoman who had been taken prisoner by the rebels was piked and shot. They took a number of horses which they galloped about unmercifully, making her feel glad that she had lent hers to a yeomanry officer and thus could not give it to a rebel who demanded it from her with a drawn sword. Her other bad moment was when one rebel, brandishing a pistol, demanded her husband, though another persuaded him to leave her alone.
The real horror of these Quakers’ experience only took place when the loyalist military descended on the village a few days later. The rebels had by then wisely fled, leaving only peaceable loyalists behind. Nevertheless, for two hours the village was delivered over to what Mary Leadbeater called ‘the unbridled licence of a furious soldiery’. Houses were burned, windows smashed, and one soldier on learning that she had given food and drink to the rebels placed a musket against her breast and seemed about to shoot her when he changed his mind and simply swept pans and jugs off the kitchen table with his musket and broke the kitchen window. Another soldier lolling in one of her chairs boasted of having just burned a man in a barrel. She saw the grisly remains in the village a little later.
Outside, terrible scenes were being enacted. The village blacksmith, who had actually been acquitted of the charge of making pikes by a court-martial a few days before, was taken out and shot. The village carpenter who had hidden himself in terror with his family in the graveyard was unearthed there and quickly done to death. The widow of a yeoman who had actually been killed fighting on the loyalist side in a battle against rebels at Kilcullen had her house sacked while her brother, her son, and her servant were all murdered. The local doctor, himself a yeoman, a much loved man who had taken control of the village when the army left, and had had his horse and all his instruments taken by undisciplined rebels with whom he finally made terms, was now given a peremptory court-martial in the course of which he was several times slashed by dragoons’ sabres and finally clumsily shot. ‘Such’, wrote the Quaker lady, ‘are the horrors of civil war.’
It was the sort of pattern that was repeating itself in these days in many of the counties round Dublin. Only at. one point, at Prosperous in County Kildare, where some twenty-eight men of the Cork militia were trapped in a burning barracks and slaughtered either in the flames or on the ends of pikes as they jumped from the blazing windows, did the rebels have anything that might be called a victory. The leader of the rebels on this occasion was a Catholic lieutenant of yeomanry named Esmond, who after his victory went back to his unit and nonchalantly reappeared there, as if nothing had happened, to take part on the loyalist side in the defence of Naas. He was recognized by a soldier who had escaped from Prosperous, sent to Dublin and hanged.
At all the other points the rebels were finally routed with great slaughter, though at a few points they first inflicted some casualties on the troops, and the scale of the rebel movements in Kildare caused Dublin Castle considerable anxiety for a time. The rebels’ own casualties were said to be enormous, running, so the army claimed, into several hundred after each battle. It seems likely that the majority of these rebel casualties took place after the battle itself was over. William Farrel, the United Irishman of Carlow, described how, after the events there, ‘any person seen flying through the country could be shot on the spot, without any ceremony, and no more thought of it than shooting a sparrow’.24 Lord Cornwallis, who became both viceroy, replacing Camden, and commander-in-chief after some weeks of rebellion, wrote to the British Prime Minister that the numbers of enemy given as destroyed were ‘greatly exaggerated’, adding that he was sure anyone found in a brown coat (i.e. civilian clothes) within miles of the action was ‘butchered without discrimination’.25 Though this was perhaps to be expected in the circumstances from the loosely disciplined units of yeomanry, particularly where they were composed of Orangemen, it is clear that the same barbaric ferocity was displayed by the Catholic militia itself, of whom Cornwallis indeed wrote that they were ‘ferocious and cruel in the extreme when any poor wretches either with or without arms came within their power’.26 ‘In short,’ he added, ‘murder appears to be their favourite pastime.’ Burnings of houses, floggings and summary executions now began to take place on a far greater and more violent scale even than before.
Even before the inevitable retribution had made itself felt in its full horror, such desperate heart as the local rebel leaders had managed to put into their disordered bands in Kildare and the neighbouring counties was showing signs of disappearing. An assembly of some two thousand rebels, under the leadership of a man named Perkins, surrendered their arms on the Curragh of Kildare on condition that Perkins himself should be delivered up and the rest of them be allowed to return home unmolested, which they did, ‘dispersing homewards in all directions with shouts of joy, and leaving thirteen cart-loads of pikes behind’.27 A few days later an attempt by another large collection of rebels to repeat this performance foundered when somebody discharged his firearm by mistake and the military seized the excuse to massacre several hundred of them.
A fight on the hill of Tara, ancient seat of the High Kings of Ireland, which resulted in the death of some 350 rebels for the loss of relatively few loyalist troops, was remarkable for the effective part played in the action on the loyalist side by the Catholic Lord Fingall and his Catholic yeomanry.28 Not that there was any real fear of Catholics, simply as Catholics, being favourable to the rebels. A few days after the desultory rebellion had erupted a loyal address, signed by the entire Roman Catholic college of Maynooth, four Catholic peers and some two thousand other members of the gentry, was presented to the lord lieutenant. This ran:
We, the undersigned, his Majesty’s most loyal subjects, the Roman Catholics of Ireland, think it necessary at this moment publicly to declare our firm attachment to His Majesty’s person, and to the constitution under which we have the happiness to live …. We cannot avoid expressing to Your Excellency our regret at seeing, amid the general delusion, many, particularly of the lower orders, of our own religious persuasion engaged in unlawful associations and practices.29
Nevertheless, some doubts about the possible delusion of the Catholic militia were understandable, for they themselves were drawn from the lower orders. The Defenders had made a good deal of nominal progress in seducing the militia from their allegiance the previous year. Courts-martial in the summer of 1797 alone had shown that soldiers from at least eleven different county militias had taken the Defender oath and that the 2nd Fencible Dragoons stationed near Cork were also seriously tainted.30 And though the deterrent effect of the savage punishments meted out to the culprits can hardly have been nil, it was natural for the government to be apprehensive when rebellion finally broke out.** However, from the start the militia showed remarkable loyalty, earning rebuke only for the very ferocity they displayed against those of their own class they met as rebels.
‘You will have observed,’ a correspondent wrote to the Chief Secretary, Pelham, after a week of the ’98 rebellion, ‘that our militia, even the King’s County regiment, have all behaved very well,’ though he added that there had been ‘instances of disaffection among the yeomanry’.31
Lord Castlereagh, who substituted for Pelham during the latter’s ill-health, and was eventually to replace him as Chief Secretary, wrote, referring to the militia’s regrettable excesses among the civilian population, that they were ‘in many instances defective in subordination, but in none have they shown the smallest disposition to fraternize, but on the contrary, pursue the insurgents with the rancour unfortunately connected with the nature of the struggle’.32
It might of course have been argued that the real test of the militia’s loyalty could not be made until the French had landed. But there was no sign whatsoever of the French. Tone, who had spent most of the month before the outbreak of the rebellion ‘deliciously with my family at Paris’,33 was now back with the Army of England at Le Havre, but he was soon doing his best to get sent to India to join his brother Will, recognizing, as he said, ‘that there is no more question or appearance here of an attempt on England than of one on the Moon’.34 On that same day about three o’clock in the morning Lady Louisa Connolly, sister of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, watched about two hundred rebels force their way through her gates at Castletown in County Kildare and pass quietly across her front lawn.35 Writing about it soon afterwards she said they did not seem to know what they were fighting for. To the North, South and West, she reported, everything was perfectly quiet. Yet to the South, unknown to her as yet, the most serious threat the rebels were to mount was already under way.