Dublin itself, which had remained firmly under government control, assumed proudly for a time something of a siege mentality. A United Irish attempt to undermine the city from within by getting the lamplighters to withhold their services was summarily countered by sending them to work with, as the Bishop of Dromore wrote gleefully to his wife in England, ‘a bayonet in the breach’.1 Men of sixty and seventy put on uniforms and joined any corps that would have them.2 A young yeomanry captain arriving in the capital on 4 June, the day after Fitzgerald’s death from his wounds in prison, found ‘every man in the city a soldier’.3 The law courts were shut and all business was at a standstill. The Castle was barricaded and gunners stood on the alert outside it with lighted matches ready beside their guns. The same was true of St Stephen’s Green – then on the outermost limits of the city. Express messengers were arriving every moment with accounts of what was happening to the rebels and the army. Communication with Cork and Limerick had been cut off for several days and had only just been re-opened.
The next day, this particular captain was to join his yeomanry unit in the Queen’s County, where 11,500 men were said to have been sworn into the United Irishmen, although, as he wrote in his letter, ‘by flogging and co. such information had been gained as to enable the officers and magistrates of the county to get possession of many of the Captains and to break in upon their organization’.4 However, news from the South was bad. Wexford Town and most of that county were in rebel hands and ‘matters seemed to wear a serious aspect’.
An organization of the Defenders had existed in County Wexford for many years. In 1793 they had fought the celebrated battle outside the town of Wexford itself over the raising of the new militia.** But since then they had not been particularly active. In 1797 some United Irish emissaries had been in the county, circulating what seemed increasingly plausible rumours among the peasantry that the Orangemen were about to rise and murder all Papists. But beyond strengthening an already natural sense of Catholic peasant solidarity, they do not seem to have created anything like a really active conspiracy. Wexford was in no sense the county where anyone expecting rebellion in this year would have expected it to appear particularly menacing. The number of sworn United Irishmen in the county – as distinct from Defenders – was only around three hundred.5 And yet it was only in Wexford, so feebly organized, that the rebellion in fact took on any menacing proportions at all.
The explanation of this lies partly in accident – the cause of much important history – and partly in a number of special factors local to the county. One such local factor was this very absence of serious rebellious organization, and the consequent lack of concern on the part of the government until almost the last moment. The number of militia or regular troops garrisoning the county was small. As a result, when the government happened to find a note of Fitzgerald’s which mentioned the port of Wexford as possibly suitable for French disembarkation, a last-minute alarm was raised about the state of the county. The task of searching for arms was left to the local yeomanry, who were mainly Protestants, and by their amateur nature less concerned with the niceties of disciplined behaviour even than other troops. Here another special local factor operated. For the Protestants of Wexford had long been more sectarian in their outlook than those of most other counties of Leinster. In the days of the original Volunteers it had been the one county in Ireland not to permit Catholics to enrol in the corps.6 And in 1798 itself a private attempt to raise a yeomanry corps composed largely of Catholics had collapsed because of official disapproval.7 Thus when the Protestant yeomanry now began their forays round the country in a last-minute search for arms they employed a sectarian viciousness which much aggravated the sense of apprehension and terror already there. In 1797 only 16 out of 142 parishes had been ‘proclaimed’ as Defender-tainted areas subject to special military regulations. As late as 9 April 1798 Lord Mountnorris, one of the most influential Protestant landowners of the county, who for some time had been successfully exhorting the people to give up arms and make declarations of allegiance to the government, forwarded one such declaration to the government signed by a local priest and 757 of his flock from the small Wexford parish of Boulavogue.8
The chief signatory of this declaration of 9 April was a curate named Father John Murphy. Since he was soon to take a prominent part in the insurrection, there has been an assumption by some commentators, chiefly Protestant, that the declaration represented merely deception on the part of a cunning priesthood and peasantry. But other commentators, usually Catholic, maintain that this and other similar declarations were genuine and made in good faith at the time; and this in fact seems more probable. The completely haphazard nature of the insurrection in Wexford when it did break out, with its lack of considered strategy or design, and its precarious and largely aimless gyrations round the country as it gathered force, suggests not artifice and cunning but an act of desperation undertaken at the last moment in the belief that neither declarations of allegiance nor written ‘protections’ were any longer of use against the burnings, floggings, shootings and general depredations of the military. Certainly a Protestant clergyman, the Reverend James Gordon, who lived in the heart of the affected area at the time and afterwards wrote an intelligent and balanced history of the whole rebellion, thought that but for the floggings and half-hangings and other ‘acts of severity’ the rebellion there might possibly never have broken out at all.9
To supplement the yeomanry and make matters worse, the troops the government sent to Wexford were the North Cork militia who, though predominantly Catholic, were the very troops popularly credited with the invention of the pitch-cap method of torture. One of their sergeants named Heppenstal had acquired the nickname of ‘the walking gallows’ for his peculiar skill in half-hanging men over his shoulder. And the Reverend James Gordon, emphasizing the fear which gripped the people of Wexford in these last days of May 1798, tells of a man who having subscribed for a pike which he had not yet received and which he was therefore unable to surrender, actually dropped dead from fright.10
The yeomanry and the North Cork militia were already at work in Wexford when the rebellion broke out in the counties round Dublin. The sense of terror naturally rose accordingly. News of the sadistic slaughter at Carlow must have travelled fast to the adjoining county. Certainly news of the shooting of twenty-eight prisoners at Carnew in Wicklow and the killing of others at Dunlavin in the same county reached Wexford, where the country people were already sleeping out in the fields at night in fear, on 26 May.
The day before, a party of men had been cutting turf near Boulavogue, the very parish which had sent in its massive declaration of allegiance to the Crown six weeks before. The curate, Father John Murphy, was with the men on the top of a bank when a troop of yeoman cavalry came galloping up to them. After wheeling round they came galloping back again and again drew up in front of them in menacing fashion.11 Murphy, who had been playing an important part in getting the people to surrender their arms in return for ‘protections’, decided that the situation was too menacing for them to remain at work and recommended them to return home.
The Arms Proclamation in Wexford had allowed a period of fourteen days for the surrender of arms. But the local magistrates and troops had shown no inclination to wait that long but had begun floggings and other tortures immediately.
An eye-witness of the Boulavogue incident said of the mood of the time: ‘A portion of the men in this district had now become spiritless. They saw that a Proclamation issued with all the formality and apparent binding of an Act of Parliament was despised and made no account of … Their arms in a great measure surrendered, they became silent, sullen and resolved to meet their fate with such arms as they were in possession of.’12 He adds that even now such thoughts were not generally entertained but were only being put forward as far as he knew by individuals in this one locality.
Murphy, who was constantly being asked for advice, was himself becoming more and more desperate. On the evening of the next day, 26 May, accompanied by a number of men in similar mood, some of whom were carrying arms, he had just visited the house of a neighbouring farmer when he encountered a troop of cavalry similar to that on the day before. The cavalry either fired a volley and demanded the surrender of the group’s arms, or simply made the demand. In either case they were met with shots and a shower of stones. While the main body of the cavalry then withdrew with some circumspection, the lieutenant in charge, named Bookey, and one other man pressed through the crowd and set fire to the farm. The thatch caught alight easily, for Ireland was experiencing an unusually long period of hot dry weather that summer.
About ten minutes later, attempting to rejoin the main body of his men, Bookey and his companion found themselves surrounded by Murphy’s group. Someone stabbed Bookey with a pike on the side of his neck. He fell from his horse and was grimly finished off on the ground. His horse, which had also received a pike thrust in the flank, plunged so violently in its agony that it wrenched the pike from the pikeman’s hand and galloped all the way into the nearest village, trailing the ugly weapon behind it.** In the words of an eye-witness of this event: ‘The first blow of the insurrection in Wexford was now struck and they immediately proceeded to rouse their neighbours – a thing easily done, as scarcely any of them had slept in their houses on that, or the preceding night.’13
The next day, as a reprisal, houses were in flames all over the countryside. Bookey’s cavalry unit burned over 170 on that day by their own admission, including Father Murphy’s chapel at Boulavogue.14 They also slaughtered a number of people who seemed as if they were collecting in a rebel body on Kiltomas Hill. The group with Father Murphy, gathering strength to about a thousand men, camped on Oulart Hill. They had only about forty to fifty firearms among them and virtually no commander. Father Murphy and the only other man with any sense of leadership, a sergeant of the local yeomanry named Roache who had joined them, were principally occupied in trying to decide what to do next and in preventing desertion. However, when they were attacked by a detachment of about 110 men of the North Cork militia, the rebels courageously held their ground and finally drove the troops from the hill, killing many of them for the loss of only about six of their own men.
As when the situation was reversed, most of the slaughter seems to have taken place after the battle was over. The defeated men of the North Cork militia, being Catholics, presented Catholic prayer books to prove it and called out for mercy but received none, or none at least from the rebel pikes. One of the last to die, when asked his name, replied in Irish: ‘Thady Illutha’. But since the Wexford rebels did not understand Irish they had to have this translated for them as Thady, the Unfortunate. Whereupon they appropriately ran the man through with a pike. He did not die immediately but struggled helplessly, calling for mercy for some time.15
Flushed with this victory at Oulart Hill, and equipped now with a valuable addition of arms from the slaughtered militia, the rebels went on a roundabout march through the countryside and finally attacked the town of Enniscorthy. A clergyman who watched their assault through a telescope noticed a man on a bright bay horse who seemed to be some sort of leader. He was wearing a scarlet coat which glittered in the sun and had probably been taken from one of the officers of the North Cork killed the day before, but he was without boots. ‘Yet,’ noted the clergyman, ‘he rode along the rising ground with some address, and the mass of the people moved in whatever direction he waved or pointed a drawn sword by the gleam of which I could observe with my glass that it was a long sabre.’ He could also discern two or three white standards and one green flag.16 After a three-hour fight the rebels took Enniscorthy, virtually burning it to the ground in the process. They then set up what was to be their most permanent base camp in the rebellion on a prominence beside the town called Vinegar Hill.
On the Sunday morning on which Enniscorthy was taken the young Catholic farmer, Thomas Cloney, who had found even the whistling of the birds so sinister** and who had himself never been either a United Irishman or a Defender, still knew nothing of this startling course of events though he a Defender, still knew nothing of this startling course of events though he lived not far away. He and his neighbours were simply filled with gloomy forebodings for their own safety in anticipation of the fury of the soldiers then known to be rampaging round the countryside. They had been listening for some time to the sounds of battle from Enniscorthy when a roughly-dressed horseman galloped up crying ‘Victory! Victory!’ His neighbours immediately recovered sufficient spirit at least to search the houses of the neighbouring yeomanry and commit a certain number of ‘excesses’.
Two days later, large bodies of rebels rode up to Cloney’s house on two separate occasions to urge him to join them. He finally agreed to do so on the principle that this part of the country was now a prey to the military whether it resisted or not, so he might as well resist. He rode off to Vinegar Hill. There he found some thousands of people in a state of total disorder and confusion, relating their sufferings at the hands of the military to each other and calling blood-thirstily for revenge. The only concept of future strategy seemed to be that they should march off towards whichever place seemed most likely next to find itself at the mercy of the troops. But there was such difficulty in determining which this would be, each man putting forward the claims of his own district as paramount, that no final decision could be reached. Revenge was more easily come by, and had indeed already begun.
Vinegar Hill was topped by the remains of a windmill on which a green flag had been planted. Inside this mill some thirty-five Protestants from Enniscorthy, suspected in the most general and haphazard way of Orange sympathies, had been collected and on the very Tuesday of Cloney’s arrival some fourteen or fifteen of them were clumsily put to death by an execution squad of rebels armed with pikes and guns, lined up in front of the windmill door and commanded by a man with a drawn sword named Martin.17 One of their victims, severely wounded, was found next morning insensible but still alive by his wife, just as an old man with a scythe was going round the silent forms finishing off those that showed any signs of life.18
Another man, a glazier of Enniscorthy called Davies, had even greater luck. The Protestant clergyman, Gordon, relates how, after hiding in a privy for four days ‘during which he had no other sustenance than the raw body of a cock, which had by accident alighted on the seat, he fled from this loathesome abode’, but was found, taken to Vinegar Hill, shot through the body, piked in the head and thrown into a grave where he remained covered with earth and stones for twelve hours.19 His faithful dog discovered him, scraped away the earth and revived him by licking his face. The man came to, dreaming that pikemen were about to stab him again and moaning the name of a local Catholic priest whom he hoped might save him. This priest, one Father Roche, happened to have become one of the rebel leaders, and the pikemen, who were indeed in the offing, were so impressed by what seemed their victim’s conversion to Catholicism in near-miraculous circumstances that they took him to a house where he recovered.
A Protestant lady, a Mrs White, who bravely came to Vinegar Hill in search of a ‘protection’ from this same Father Roche for herself and her family, also described the scene there. The camp
… presented a dreadful scene of confusion and uproar …. Great numbers of women were in the camp. Some men were employed in killing cattle, and boiling them in pieces in large copper brewing-pans; others were drinking, cursing and swearing; many of them were playing on various musical instruments, which they had acquired by plunder in the adjacent Protestant houses …20
Besides musical instruments the rebels also brought Wilton carpets and fine sheets to Vinegar Hill, and to other such hill camps which became a standard feature of their movements round the Wexford countryside during the next few weeks.21 However, they had few tents and mostly lay out in the open at nights in the astonishingly fine weather which they took as a favourable omen, saying that it would not rain again until final victory was theirs.22
Mrs White got her protection. ‘No man to molest this house, or its inhabitants, on pain of death.’ However, while she was still on the hill trying to obtain it ‘… the pikemen would often show us their pikes all stained with blood, and boast of having murdered our friends and neighbours’.23 Though there is plenty of evidence that such vengeance – which was to be repeated elsewhere – was deplored by all the more intelligent and sensitive rebels like Cloney himself, it was difficult to restrain because it was the one form of positive action easily available to the mob in the general frustration. The discipline which the senior officers were able to maintain among the rebels was always tenuous. Otherwise, quite apart from humanitarian considerations, it would clearly have been in their interest to have employed the energies wasted on such brutalities in some more strictly military design.
The lack of almost any coherent strategic plan, or indeed of any true leadership, was to be the rebels’ undoing. Their determination and bravery in the field, already displayed effectively enough at their first two victories at Oulart Hill and Enniscorthy, was to prove remarkable on many subsequent occasions, stemming as it did from the sense of desperation with which they had finally taken up arms. But their discipline even in battle was poor. The Reverend James Gordon wrote: ‘As they were not, like regular troops, under any real command of officers, but acted spontaneously, each according to the impulse of his own mind, they were watched in battle one of another, each fearing to be left behind in case of retreat, which was generally swift and sudden.’24 For the same reason, they were reluctant to take part in actions at night when it was less easy to tell what was going on and who was doing what. Cloney, the young farmer, although he had no previous military or organizational experience, soon found himself in a position of authority among the rebels. He described them as often ‘ungovernable’. Since it was everyone’s ambition to get hold of a firearm, in which few in fact had any experience, and since there was a good deal of drunkenness, they were constantly letting off their guns and exposing themselves and their comrades to danger.25
The rebels’ clothes were usually those of the ordinary Wexford farmer or labourer of the day: felt flowerpot hats, swallow-tailed coats, corduroy knee-breeches, stockings and shoes with a buckle. Sometimes they carried raw wheat in their pockets as an iron ration. This, it is said, was often to be seen in the following year sprouting from the crude and nameless graves.26 Some of the captains, colonels and generals wore a sort of uniform; Roache, the yeomanry sergeant who went over to the rebels before the battle of Enniscorthy, and became a general, is described by an eye-witness as wearing ordinary clothes except for ‘two most enormous epaulettes and a silk sash and a belt in which he carried a large pair of horse pistols’.27 He carried a sword by his side. The same witness says that the only proper uniform he ever saw was worn by a shoe-black named Monk who was a United Irish captain. This consisted of a light horse-man’s jacket of green, with silver lace cross banded in front; pantaloons to match with silver seams; and a green helmet cap, with a white ostrich feather on top. The lower ranks wore white bands round their hats, while those with some authority had a green ribbon either with a gold harp surrounded by the words Erin Go Bragh (‘Ireland for Ever’), or the words Liberty and Equality. Whenever they could, they decorated themselves with green feathers and green handkerchiefs. They carried flags and standards in profusion – generally green, but where enough green material could not be found any colour except orange did service. Their total numbers always seem to have been exaggerated by the loyalists, partly probably through natural apprehension, and partly because in military reports exaggeration of the enemy’s numbers is equally convenient both in victory and defeat. Probably the total number of rebels who took arms in the entire Wexford insurrection did not exceed thirty thousand men, and may have been much less.28
The confusion and indecision to which the rebels on Vinegar Hill had immediately succumbed was temporarily resolved by the arrival there of emissaries from the loyalists in the town of Wexford. These were two Catholic gentlemen who had been imprisoned by the authorities for suspected United Irish sympathies, but had now been sent on parole to entreat the rebels to disperse. The entreaty had no other effect than to put the idea of capturing Wexford into the rebels’ heads.
If there had been any sort of overall coordinated rebel plan, it would undoubtedly have involved an attempt to link up with the rebels in Kildare and the other counties near Dublin. In this case, the Wexford rebels would have marched north, rather than southwards to Wexford town, for already the town of Gorey on the northern route had been abandoned in anticipatory panic by the loyalists. In preparation indeed for the rebels’ arrival, the middle-class Catholics of Gorey had been apprehensively forming themselves into guard companies to protect the houses of their Protestant neighbours. If the rebels had marched straight to Gorey, Arklow still further north would have been threatened and possibly also abandoned, whereupon the road into Wicklow and Dublin itself would have lain open. But this was no strategically designed rebellion. In fact, several days later, after further victories in the south, the rebels did eventually move northwards with some of their forces, but by that time the loyalist troops had had time to make their dispositions.
Before that, however, the rebels drawn quixotically towards Wexford had established another camp on a hill called Three Rocks just outside the town itself. There they spent the night, and in the stillness of the summer darkness the calls of rebel stragglers trying to find the men of their own locality could be heard clearly by the loyalists’ outposts down below.29 The next morning, on this site of Three Rocks, the rebels defeated and killed or captured some seventy men of the Meath militia and shortly afterwards entered Wexford itself from which the garrison had hastily withdrawn.
A genteel Protestant lady, a Mrs Brownrigg, who in panic had just taken passage with her family for Wales on a ship in the harbour, watched them pouring down in great hordes into the town. The captain of her ship promptly declared himself a United Irishman and prepared to land her again. Coming ashore, she was filled with terror to find the streets crowded with rebels shouting and firing their guns. She and her family took refuge in a Catholic friend’s house where, however, they expected to be murdered hourly. The rebels held a sort of parade twice a day outside the house with fifes, fiddles and drums. ‘It was,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘a kind of regular tumult, and everyone was giving his opinion.’30
A Quaker family, the Goffs, who lived in the country just outside Wexford, had heard the morning thunder of the cannon from Three Rocks and soon afterwards had their first contact with the rebels. These came in search of two Goff cousins who had been with the defeated militia in the battle and had taken refuge in the house. But the cousins managed to escape and the worst that happened to the Goffs that day was that two of their Catholic servants were made to join the rebel force and given pikes – ‘the first we had seen’.31 Mrs Goff, on hearing of this, was deeply shocked and insisted that ‘she could not allow anything of the kind to be brought into the house’. Whereupon the offensive weapons were always left outside the door at nights when the servants returned home from their work with the rebel army. Some 250 other Protestants, however – men, women and children – were taken from all over the neighbourhood and confined as prisoners in a barn at Scullabogue House, about a mile and a half away, where a grisly fate awaited them.
The Goffs, who were respected by the country people like most of the Quakers in Ireland, suffered only from a continual massing of rebels on their lawn, asking for food. Large tubs of butter-milk and water were placed outside the door and the servants frequently had to stay up all night baking bread while the women of the house made their hands bleed cutting up bread and cheese.32 The men were so impatient that they sometimes carried away whole loaves of bread and cheeses on the ends of their pikes. And though some of the pikemen had such savage tales to tell of their prowess that one of the girls wept as she was handing round the food, there were always others who rebuked such manners and won the Goff family’s admiration and respect.
The absence of resolute stratagem and decision, which had so far marked the triumphant progress of the rebels round County Wexford, was now theoretically remedied by the appointment of a most curious commander-in-chief. This was Beauchamp Bagenal Harvey, a Protestant land-owner with the then considerable income of some £3,000 a year. A sophisticated radical by temperament, he had been a United Irishman in the early days of the society, while it was still open and legal, but seems to have had no connection with it in its later clandestine phase, though his radical sympathies clearly remained unchanged. He had made no secret of them and had been arrested as a precaution by the authorities in Wexford on the outbreak of the rebellion. He was immediately released by the insurgents when they entered the town, and accepted the post of commander-in-chief, hoping, it seems, that he might at least be able to bring some sort of order into their confused ranks, though he had no military experience whatsoever. Another Protestant gentleman of radical political inclinations, Matthew Keogh, who had at one time been a captain in the British Army, was put in charge of the town of Wexford itself by the rebels. Whether or not as a result of these appointments, some signs of stratagem now appeared in the rebel army – numbering by this time perhaps some sixteen thousand men. It split into three columns, one moving westwards under its new commander-in-chief to the important town of New Ross, whose capture would open the way to the large bodies of Defenders known to exist in Kilkenny and Waterford. Another column moved north to the town of Bunclody (or Newtownbarry) in an attempt to penetrate into County Wicklow. A third moved north-west towards Gorey and Arklow and the road to Dublin.
On 5 June one of the three decisive battles of the rebellion in Wexford took place at New Ross. The rebel army of about three thousand men, under Bagenal Harvey, had already delayed in camp for three days on the nearby hill of Carrickburne, behind which it had spent some time trying out artillery captured from the military at Three Rocks and elsewhere. Now, on the 5th it finally attacked in force, driving before it, in antique Irish military style, herds of cattle which most successfully overran the loyal outposts and enabled the rebels themselves to penetrate into the heart of the town. There the battle raged backwards and forwards through the streets for thirteen hours. An officer of the garrison, writing next day, said the rebel attack was as severe as could possibly have been made by men fighting with such primitive weapons, and that they gave proofs of ‘very extraordinary courage and enthusiasm’.33 Thomas Cloney, who now held a position of command over some five hundred men, described it as a battle fought entirely without tactics on both sides: ‘… two confused masses of men, struggling alternately to drive the other back by force alone’.34
The rebels, who suffered from some desertions before the assault, were, as Cloney admits, unamenable to discipline throughout, and the initial attack, which had been intended simply to be a shock assault, turned into a tumultuous uncontrolled advance of everyone who felt like joining in. Once in the town the rebels displayed a fatal tendency to be distracted by liquor. Cloney has a particular rebuke for one small group who made a cask of port their base in an entrenched position just outside the town, from which they occasionally sallied forth to inquire, ‘How goes the day, boys?’ before safely retreating again to their source of courage. He singles out for praise a woodcutter’s daughter named Doyle, who was always in the thick of the fight, distinguishing herself particularly by cutting off with a small billhook the cross belts of twenty-eight fallen dragoons and distributing their cartridge boxes to her friends. Cloney also pays tribute to the fighting qualities of his enemies in the Clare militia, almost all of whom must have been Catholics and who held their positions against him throughout the day. A young United Irish colonel, who led the first rebel assault, was John Kelly, a blacksmith from Killan. He was to become the hero of a popular ballad in later times when these bloody events acquired the rather fusty veneer appropriate to the drawing-room heroics of purely political warfare.
After thirteen hours, in which they had more than once looked like gaining the town, the rebels withdrew. Their losses were heavy, though probably nowhere near the figure of two thousand which some loyalist writers suggest. Among those killed on the rebel side was a Mr John Boxwell, a Protestant gentleman of some property. Among the hundred or so loyalist troops killed was Lord Mountjoy who, as Luke Gardiner twenty years before, had carried through the Irish House of Commons the first Catholic Relief Bill, permitting Catholics once again to own land.
On the same day as the battle of New Ross a massacre of Protestant prisoners took place in the barn at Scullabogue. It is thought that rebels flying from the battle with news of slaughter and defeat helped to work up a hysterical frenzy against them. The barn was set on fire and men, women and children inside it burned to death while others were executed on the lawn with pikes. Dinah Goff, the fourteen-year-old daughter of the local Quaker family, heard the screams and smelled the appalling stench a mile and a half away. The number said to have perished varies in different accounts but was possibly around two hundred.
Again, given the crude simplicity of the average Irish peasant of the day, it is not difficult to see how such atrocities came about. For weeks they had either experienced at first hand, or heard from those who had, examples of the most brutal physical cruelty on the part of the military. These were quite enough to sustain all the wild rumours of Orange atrocities and plots to annihilate all Catholics. What was surprising was not that such massacres occurred but that they did not occur more often. The crude state of mind of the average rebel is well illustrated by evidence from the various trials which eventually followed massacres such as that at Scullabogue. One of those responsible for the murders there, on hearing the cries and lamentations of the bereaved in a nearby village, came up to one of the women and threatened her that if he heard any more they would all go the way of their husbands. A few days later he solemnly gave the same woman a pass to have herself baptized a Catholic, for, he said, ‘they must all be of one religion, it was that they were fighting for’.35
The other two rebel columns met with no more final success than the one which, under Harvey, had tried to take New Ross. But the Arklow column rambling in the general direction of Dublin gave the government at least one fright, at Tuberneering, before it was turned back. Here, as whenever they fought at all, the rebels fought with courage and tenacity, and, though displaying a typical characteristic of inexperienced troops in frequently firing too high, they made good tactical use of hedges and other natural cover. They decisively defeated a body of the king’s troops, killing or taking prisoner over a hundred of them, largely through the skilful exploitation of a good ambush position. What, however, was even more typical of the rebels was their delay after their victory of several days spent looting and drinking before pressing on to attack the key town of Arklow on 9 June.
Yet when they did finally attack, they not only disposed themselves skilfully but fought with almost absurd dash and bravado. One young Irish loyalist who fought at Arklow thus described them:
… about 4 o’clock all of us at our posts I first saw in a moment thousands appear on the top of ditches forming one great and regular circular line from the Gorey road through the fields quite round to the Sand Banks near the sea as thick as they could stand. They all put their hats on their pikes and gave most dreadful yells. I could clearly distinguish their leaders riding through their ranks with flags flying …36
Among these leaders was Father Michael Murphy, who two months before, like his namesake Father John from Boulogne had been prepared to swear allegiance to the Crown.
Grape shot among the rebels ‘tumbled them by twenties’. But the gaps in their ranks were immediately re-filled and they came on like madmen.
Another of the king’s soldiers at Arklow also describes the rebels coming at him with green flags flying and how one of their officers galloped ahead waving his hat and shouting: ‘Blood and wounds, my boys! Come on, the town is ours!’37 until, turning a corner into the mouth of a cannon, he and his horse were sent sprawling into the dust by a volley of muskets and bayonets and a final bullet in the head finished him off. The priest, Michael Murphy, was killed within thirty yards of the loyalist lines.
Bravery was not enough. The rebel tactics in anything like an open battle were unsubtle, their marksmanship inaccurate and their weapons inferior. Though they had some cannon of their own at Arklow, captured from the North Antrim militia at Tuberneering, it seems to have fired too high for much of the time, since the rebels had no artillerymen of their own and had to force prisoners taken with the guns to operate them, which they seem to have done to minimum effect. By eight o’clock in the evening the loyalist army still stood their ground, though there had already been some talk of their retreat. But the rebels, now short of ammunition, themselves withdrew, with what one of them afterwards described as ‘a sulky reluctance’.38 The battle, regarded by the contemporary historian Gordon as the most important in the whole rebellion, was over.
A third strong rebel column, consisting of about 2,500 men, had set out for Bunclody (Newtownbarry) in County Wicklow under the command of another redoubtable priest, called Father Kearns. He was a man so physically enormous that when, years before, in the course of a visit to France during the Terror he had been hanged from a lamp-post, the lamp-iron had bent under his weight and he had been saved from strangulation by his toes touching the pavement. His strength was, however, of little avail at Newtownbarry. There his followers drove the King’s County militia from the town, then abandoned themselves to plunder and drunkenness on such a scale that they proved an easy prey to the counter-attack which expelled them with much slaughter.
Meanwhile, such coherent leadership as Beauchamp Bagenal Harvey had temporarily represented had collapsed. His bizarre command had only lasted a few days. Returning to his camp on Carrickbyrne Hill after the battle of New Ross he was appalled to hear the news of what had happened at Scullabogue. He immediately issued an edict from his headquarters which reveals the true state of that army over which he was trying to exercise discipline. After laying down that all ‘loiterers’ found still at home should be brought to join the army on pain of death, and equally threatening death to all officers who deserted their men, all who left their respective quarters when ‘halted by their commander-in-chief … unless they shall have leave from their officers for doing so’ and all who did not turn in plunder to headquarters, he finally dealt with the appalling event that had taken place that day, declaring that ‘any person or persons who shall take upon them to kill or murder any person or prisoner, burn any house, or commit any plunder, without special written orders from the commander-in-chief, shall suffer death’.39 Though it could be maintained that this order came late in the day and that the event at Scullabogue might have been foreseen, at least one body of Protestant prisoners had reason to be grateful for it. It seems certain that twenty-one Protestants would have been massacred at Gorey after the battle of Arklow but for the arrival in time there of the order from Carrickbyrne. Since there was, however, nothing in the order about applying the torture of the pitch-cap to prisoners, this was proceeded with – a significant enough comment in itself on the motive of revenge behind such atrocities. Even at this simple level, however, the lust for vengeance was by no means always indulged. On one occasion, when a Quaker found a group of rebels about to flog a man suspected of being an informer they agreed to desist, declaring that ‘though they had received very grievous treatment they ought not to return evil for evil’.40 And the clergyman who had watched the battle for Enniscorthy through his spy-glass later commented: ‘In justice I must allow that the rebels often displayed humanity and generosity deserving of praise and admiration.’41
Whether on account of the excessive humanitarianism of his edict or simply because he had lost the battle of New Ross the day before, the rebels now deposed Harvey from his rank of military commander-in-chief, and his place was taken by Father Roche, who had been the victor at Tuberneering. Harvey continued to head the rather tenuous apparatus of rebel civic government which had its seat in Wexford town, but he was becoming a desperate man. Only two days after his deposition, when a fellow-Protestant wrote to him beseeching a ‘protection’, Harvey replied:
I from my heart wish to protect all property; I can scarce protect myself …. I took my present situation in hopes of doing good and preventing mischief and had my advice been taken by those in power the present mischief would never have arisen …. God knows where the business will end, but end how it will the good men of both parties will inevitably be ruined.42
And according to Mrs Brownrigg, the genteel Protestant lady who had failed to escape from Wexford town, he told her that ‘he had no real command and that they were a set of savages exceeding all descriptions’.43
In the short run, there could now only be one end to the rebellion: inexorable destruction of the rebel forces by loyalist troops. This took place in the course of a few weeks. After one particularly frightful scene of last-minute massacre on the wooden bridge at Wexford, in the course of which perhaps a hundred Protestants were either shot or piked and tossed writhing from the ends of pikes into the waters of the River Slaney below, the rebels withdrew from the town to face a concerted government attack on their main camp at Vinegar Hill on 21 June. It was a strong position, with what a loyalist eye-witness described as the rebels’ ‘green flag of defiance’ flying from the remains of the old windmill.44 Another witness recounts how the rebels themselves began the battle while the Crown forces under General Lake were still waiting for reinforcements. Lake then fired eighty or ninety ‘bomb-shells’ into their ranks, carrying ‘death in a variety of awful forms to the terrified and wondering multitude’ who, according to this witness, were soon crying out, ‘We can stand anything but those guns which fire twice.’45 An assault was then ordered and after a two-hour climb, during which the rebels kept up a smart but irregular fire on the attackers, the summit was stormed with shouts of ‘Long Live King George!’ and ‘Down with Republicanism!’ The rebel standard was seized and trampled underfoot. The cannon were drawn up and brought into action and as the rebels retreated down the hill they ‘fell like mown grass’.46 A considerable number of rebels escaped owing to a gap in the Crown forces’ ring of encirclement, but it was the beginning of the end.