Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 15. John Mitchel

Detail from “John Mitchel – the first martyr of Ireland in her revolution of 1848” a lithograph by N. Currier of New York, after Mitchel’s escape to America in 1853. Mitchel holds a copy of his 1848 newspaper the United Irishman. Photo: Library of Congress

John Mitchel has the most complex legacy of all the Young Irelanders. Mitchel was one of the most powerful polemicists of the 19th century who did more than most to foment the Young Ireland rebellion. As Sinn Fein founder Arthur Griffith wrote, one reason that the 1848 rebellion was a failure was “because there was no second Mitchel in Ireland when the first Mitchel was hurried off on a British gunboat”. Mitchel’s writings on British imperialism and the supposed genocide of the Famine had profound impact on Griffith and other Irish revolutionaries of the early 20th century. Even non-revolutionary William Butler Yeats admired the violence and passion of his work, especially his great Jail Journal, saying Mitchel was the only Young Irelander with “music and personality”.

However ,Yeats also thought him “devil-possessed” and Mitchel’s hatred of England, an “almost psychotic Anglophobia,” as Roy Foster put it, has become distasteful in modern independent Ireland. Even more troubling is Mitchel’s vehement support for American slavery which have led to calls in 2020 to pull down a statue of him in his Newry hometown and rename John Mitchel Place to Black Lives Matters Place. While Newry City Council refused the requests saying 19th century figures could not be held to 21st century views, Mitchel was extreme even in his own day. In America Mitchel admitted to William Smith O’Brien that many people “don’t wonder that the British Government found it necessary to get rid of me.” Smith O’Brien knew the truth of the charge but acknowledged Mitchel’s complexity when he wrote to his wife saying, “while you nor I agree with the political views of Mr Mitchel, there are few persons more beloved by his private friends and family than this formidable monster”.

Whatever of the monster, Mitchel got many of his formidable qualities from his parents. His mother Mary Haslett was the daughter of a 1789 United Irishman from a prominent Derry family and known as an “intelligent and forceful woman”. Her husband John Mitchel was a Unitarian minister who split from the Orange wing of the Presbyterians and supported Catholics in their quest for civil and political rights. Their son John was born in Derry in 1815 but they moved to Newry where Rev Mitchel got behind the Catholic candidate in the 1829 election, earning him the nickname “Papist Mitchel.” John inherited his father’s religious tolerance and his belief in the sanctity of personal conscience. He also learned how to stand unwaveringly on principle even while fighting a losing battle, something that remained throughout his life. An asthmatic, Mitchel junior had the “toughness and fixity of purpose that often characterises those who habitually struggle for breath”, as Thomas Keneally put it.

At school in Newry and later at Trinity College Dublin, Mitchel’s closest friend was fellow Protestant John Martin, a farmer’s son. Martin was another asthmatic and he was one of the few people whose advice Mitchel valued. They would share a lifetime of adventures together in Young Ireland and later exile. After Mitchel graduated from Trinity, he studied under a solicitor in Newry where he was entranced by a 16-year-old neighbouring beauty named Jane (Jenny) Verner. When her father arranged to take Jenny away to France, she and Mitchel eloped to Chester where they sought a marriage licence. They were discovered by her parents and police. Mitchel was arrested and spent 16 days in Kilmainham prison, the first of many times behind bars. A judge dismissed abduction charges and though the Verners took Jenny away to a secret location, Mitchel tracked her down and successfully wooed her again, marrying in February 1837 with John Martin his best man. Over the next 38 years the remarkable Jenny bore Mitchel six children and followed him uncomplainingly across three continents and nine cities, caring for his family while he fought for his beloved causes.

As a young barrister in Banbridge Co Down, Mitchel represented poor Catholics who were victims of the discriminatory Ulster legal system and had a reputation as a Protestant advocate Catholics could trust. Mitchel and Martin became supporters of Repeal after O’Connell visited Newry in 1839 and they joined the Repeal Association in 1843. Mitchel first met Gavan Duffy, then editor of the Belfast Vindicator, in 1841. Oddly, Duffy described him in a similar way to his first impression of Meagher, “rather above the middle size and well made”. When the Nation started up, Mitchel offered his contributions. He was particularly enchanted with the ideas of fellow Protestant Thomas Davis and visited him on trips to Dublin. The pair collaborated on an editorial called the “Anti Irish Catholics”, a title which raised O’Connell’s ire, even though it said Irish Catholics had flourished once before and could do so again. Duffy also got Mitchel to write a biography of 16-17th century Irish hero Hugh O’Neill for the Nation‘s Library of Ireland which was serialised in the paper.

After Davis’s death in September 1845 Duffy hired Mitchel to become editor of the Nation and he moved to Dublin with his family. He soon ran into trouble in an article about how Repealers should deal with the spread of railways in Ireland. If railways were used to move troops, said Mitchel, Repealers could sabotafe them, breaking down an embankment or lifting rails while rails and sleepers could be turned into pikes and barricades. Mitchel claimed he was only suggesting what “a railway may and may not do,” but instructions on violent revolution were anathema to O’Connell who protested this call for his wardens to destroy property. What O’Connell didn’t say was that it was partially his property – he was one of the first shareholders in the Dublin and Cashel railway. Dublin Castle was also alarmed at the article and charged publisher Duffy with sedition, though his counsel successfully argued in court it was merely a hypothetical argument.

Mitchel likely first met Thomas Francis Meagher at a Dublin meeting of the ’82 Club, a social club named for the Volunteers who successfully demanded a semi independent but Protestant Irish parliament in 1782. Club members wore a military-style tailored green and gold uniform and talked of independence in a cosy club setting without the rancour of Repeal meetings. Here Mitchel heard Meagher make a speech about Davis. As he warmed to his subject, Meagher’s Stonyhurst College accent subsided “under the genuine roll of the melodious Munster tongue”.

The married northern Irish Protestant minister’s son and the single southern Irish Catholic merchant’s son were an odd match, Mitchel as intense as Meagher was playful. Yet they became firm friends that day. The following morning Meagher and Mitchel met again at the Nation’s new editorial office on D’Olier St. They walked towards Donnybrook in non-stop conversation. “What eloquence of talk was his!” Mitchel enthused. Meagher did not speak about politics but about his women problems and his college days. They walked back to Mitchel’s house where Meagher met Jenny and stayed for dinner. “Before he left he was a favourite with all our household and so remained until the last,” Mitchel wrote. As the year ended, they would be on the same political wavelength, united in opposition to another likely political alliance between O’Connell and the Whigs. Meagher became the mouthpiece for Young Ireland in Conciliation Hall just as Mitchel became its wordsmith in the Nation. While never as close as Mitchel and Martin’s, it was a friendship that would inspire a national flag as well as survive rebellion, transportation, escape to America and even a war that put them on opposite sides. But as 1845 ended a new challenge emerged with disturbing news of the failure of Ireland’s main food crop – the potato.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 14. Thomas Davis

The Thomas Davis statue in Dame Street, Dublin, was created by Edward Delaney in 1966. Photo: Author’s collection.

“And then I prayed I might yet see / our fetters rent in twain / and Ireland long a province be / a nation once again.” Thomas Davis, A Nation Once Again (1844)

In 1847 Thomas Francis Meagher edited a series of articles called Letters of a Protestant on Repeal, five letters giving Protestant arguments in favor of an independent Ireland. The letters were initially published in the Nation in 1842-43 and were the work of its founder Thomas Davis. Meagher said the letters intended to bring together diverse elements from Irish society into “one firm mass, and give them one direct aim.” Republishing them in the middle of the famine two years after Davis’s untimely death, Meagher said that had he lived, his voice would have given hope and strength. “Yet when such men die, they leave behind them their instructions for the country,” Meagher wrote.

Thomas Davis’s instructions for Ireland were not followed by many fellow Protestants. Most were either bitterly hostile to repeal or held scornfully aloof from it. The emancipation campaign received support among Ulster liberals but it had also inflamed sectarian feeling. In the minds of most Protestants, Irish nationalism was identified with “popery.” Davis, however, understood nationality as a union of the whole people of Ireland saying it “must not be Celtic, it must not be Saxon – it must be Irish.” According to historian T.W. Moody, Davis believed that a nation was a community of people joined together “by mutual affection, by devotion to a common country, by a common inheritance of traditions, values and patterns of living, and by the conscious will to share a common future.” He developed his sense of nationalism at Trinity College where he met Dillon and Duffy and together they started the Nation in 1842, though it became most identified with Davis. As O’Leary wrote, “Davis was the Nation and the Nation was Davis.”

In the Letters Davis said many Protestants supported repeal but were concerned it would lead to a Catholic Ascendancy. A liberated Ireland needed Protestant help, Davis reasoned. “If you would win the Protestants, you must address their reason, their interest, their hopes, and their pride,” he wrote. But he believed Protestants were worried about the Catholic domination of O’Connell’s organization. “They think that an Irish Government would be in the hands of men of loose principles – men either bigots themselves, or panders to the bigotry of others; and they foresee that such a government would, before twenty years, lead to a civil war, and either to the ruin of the Protestants, or the re-conquest of the country.” 

Davis inspired the Nation not just with his political writing, but also his poetry, particularly A Nation Once Again published in 1844, now famous as a Republican ballad. Along with other Nation writers he was also working on a “Library of Ireland,” a series of cheap, pocket volumes of Irish history, poetry and fiction, intended to be published monthly. Before he died he was working on a life of Wolfe Tone. “The nationalization of every institution in the country,” Meagher would later write, “was the passionate labor of his life.” Though Meagher had never met Davis, he was inspired and even “possessed” by his work and idealized his love of non-denominational Irish culture.

Meagher had read Carlyle’s The French Revolution and was eager to believe Irish sovereignty would irresistibly assert itself. He also read the signs that the Young Irelanders were distancing themselves from O’Connell. While the Liberator waited for release from prison in 1844, Davis noted correctly he would run no more risks. “From the day of his release, the cause will be going back and going down.

A key flashpoint was the 1845 Colleges Bill. Peel offered to establish ecumenical university colleges in Belfast, Cork and Galway to facilitate private funding of religious instruction. Davis supported the idea in the Nation saying mixed education was “favorable to the union of all Irishmen of different sects” and would help the poor escape their “rags and chains.” However, bishops who wanted a fully Catholic university were outraged, calling the idea “dangerous to faith and morals.” Although the university idea had come from his former Waterford lieutenant Thomas Wyse, O’Connell came out against it, calling the universities “godless” while the bill was “fraught with a host of evils.” He suggested the Cork and Galway universities should be Catholic and the Belfast one Presbyterian.

The Repeal Association met to discuss the proposal on May 26, 1845. Conciliation Hall did not live up to its name, witnessing bitter debate. Limerick MP William Smith O’Brien supported the Bill but O’Connell spoke against it for two hours calling it “a nefarious attempt at profligacy and corruption.” Davis then spoke in support of mixed education but when he called an O’Connell acolyte “my very Catholic friend,” the Liberator took offense suggesting Davis was sneering at Catholics in general. When Davis then claimed the Catholic bishops were on his side, O’Connell said the Nation was not the “organ of the Roman Catholic people of this country” and directly attacked the younger branch of his party. “‘Young Ireland’ may play what pranks they please. I do not envy them the name they rejoice in. I shall stand by Old Ireland; and I have some slight notion that Old Ireland will stand by me,” he thundered. O’Brien asked O’Connell to withdraw the “slighting nickname” Young Ireland, and O’Connell, unwilling to challenge his fellow MP, did so. A weeping Davis rose to applaud the Liberator forcing a shocked and chastened O’Connell to say, “Davis, I love you.” It was an uneasy theatrical reconciliation and once stated, the enmities between Young and Old Ireland would not easily be glossed over.

The American annexation of Texas in 1845 was the next issue to expose underlying differences. O’Connell spoke out strongly against the admission of another slave state to the American Union, prophetically noting that “the greediness of the slave power will not be satisfied with the annexation of Texas.” The Nation said this was none of Ireland’s business. “Ireland cannot grow ungrateful for the care and zeal of America,” the paper said. “No man is pledged to anything save repeal…and the discussion of topics on which its members differ cannot serve the cause they have joined in adopting.” It would take another decade for Meagher to take sides on slavery but for now he leaned towards the Nation. He preferred to think that Ireland was enslaved, saying that that definition of slavery was “to depend upon the will of another country.”

In 1845 Davis became editor of the Nation as Duffy moved into advertising and management and Dillon concentrated on his law practice. The extra workload took a toll on Davis’s health. Though he seemed at “the height of his powers” that summer, he was overwrought as his reaction to O’Connell’s attack showed. In September he fell ill. He told Duffy he had an attack of cholera and “perhaps a slight scarlatina.” Jokes about Davis unpatriotically acquiring “English cholera” turned sour a week later. On September 16, Thomas Davis died, aged 30. His death was mourned across Ireland and beyond. New York Repealers wore a badge of mourning for 30 days.

Meagher was devastated at the loss of his political mentor and called it an unspeakable calamity. “Never did a heavier one fall upon a doomed nation,” Meagher wrote. In the grief that followed, Meagher made his first public speech at Conciliation Hall lamenting Davis’s death and hailing his ecumenism. “We saw how much he had done to break down the old factions, that excited by vicious memories, have been so long, and so infuriately (sic), and so senselessly in war against each other,” He also wrote to Duffy asking if he could help preserve Davis’s memory. Duffy said Meagher had only written “one feeble copy of verses” for the Nation to that point but the young man had a certain something, especially when he spoke. “There was a mesmerism in his language which touched me,” Duffy wrote. They soon became friends.

Duffy described Meagher as “middle-sized and well made”. His voice was not rich or flexible, but “the genuine feeling with which he moved rendered it an instrument fit to express a wide range of emotion and passion with astonishing power”. O’Brien had also appointed Meagher to the parliamentary committee of the Repeal Association, which liaised with Irish politicians in the House of Commons. O’Brien wanted to spread the workload and also send a message to the government that the Association depended “not only on one or two men, but that in the worst emergency – even in the absence of its leaders – it can be conducted, and will be supported by the young intelligence of the country.”

But the Association had lost its greatest young leader when Davis died. Though Davis had bickered with O’Connell, he was, like him, a constitutional reformer dedicated to “a better future for all his countrymen” as Helen Mulvey put it. Davis’s early death was a disaster for the Irish nationalist movement, depriving them of the one leader who might have held them together and directed their energies effectively during the appalling crisis of the famine. His death brought other extremist leaders to the fore. It allowed John O’Connell to present himself as his father’s political heir though he lacked the Liberator’s talent and charisma. At the Nation, Northern Irish lawyer John Mitchel became the new editor after Davis’s death. Mitchel would quickly mark himself out as a talented writer and brilliant polemicist but one with an uncanny ability to rub most people up the wrong way. Thomas Francis Meagher was one of the few exceptions and he and Mitchel struck up a remarkable friendship that lasted 20 years across three continents.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 13. Dublin

Dublin architect James Gandon built the Liffey-side Four Courts building, home of the Irish legal system, from 1786-1802. Though it now houses the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the High Court and the Dublin Circuit Court, it was named for four earlier superior courts: Chancery, King’s Bench, Exchequer and Common Pleas. Photo: author’s collection

After Daniel O’Connell was released on bail from the Clontarf arrest in late 1843, he hinted he was ready to work with the British government. His implication that he never really expected to win Repeal and only used the agitation to extort concessions from British politicians, shocked many young Repealers, though they were not yet ready to break with him. As the Nation put it: “We must follow the only general who can muster an effective army though his plan of battle did not tally with ours.”

But when O’Connell surrendered to Peel’s ultimatum he removed the most effective weapon from the arsenal of constitutional agitation-the implied threat of revolution. His failure first not to call the meeting and then not to resist arrest, was the beginning of the end for the Repeal movement which would split in the following years. Historian T.W. Moody said the Repeal Association’s permanent significance came not in O’Connell’s own activities but in the group the split inspired – Young Ireland. Emerging from the young intellectual writers associated with the Nation, the term Young Ireland was first used in print in 1844 when Davis’s friend Daniel Owen Madden wrote that the newspaper had injected new life into the Repeal agitation and Young Ireland “aspires after the speculative and ideal.” Their speculation and idealism eventually drew Thomas Francis Meagher to Young Ireland.

For now Meagher agreed with O’Connell that Repeal should only be gained by non-violent means. At a meeting in Waterford Meagher urged Repealers not to “dig up the broken pikes of ’98”. He said their new weapon of choice was public opinion which in “modern times” had dismembered governments and shaken thrones. Thomas Meagher would have been well pleased with his son’s words and he was re-elected city mayor in November 1843.

Meagher may have wanted to follow his father into politics but he had no intention of following him into commerce. He decided to become a lawyer, like O’Connell, and in early 1844 enrolled in the Inns of Court in Dublin. Meagher took rooms around fashionable Lincoln Place behind Trinity College and with his “splendid coats and elegantly cut trousers” quickly acquired a reputation as a dandy. Meagher’s lifestyle was far removed from the poverty-stricken norm of Dublin life. In 1842 German traveller Johann Georg Kohl called Dublin an entirely English city except for “its miserable poor, filthy suburbs and its lanes so thickly peopled with beggars.” Like Waterford, Dublin was a Viking city conquered by the Normans and its strategic position on the east coast was used by English military rulers to control Ireland. Dublin thrived as a Protestant capital city in the late 18th century but declined in the 19th century with the loss of its parliament.

Meagher was determined to help solve that problem and was already active in the Repeal Association. At the weekly meeting in Dublin of November 20, 1843 attended by O’Connell, the president of the day was introduced as “Thomas Francis Meagher Esq son of the patriotic mayor of Waterford.” In January 1844 he was one of many notable signatories including fellow Waterford men Richard Sheil and Thomas Wyse to sign a newspaper letter from “the Catholics of Ireland” complaining about Catholics struck off the jury register ahead of the Traversers trials. Packed juries was a common British tactic of the era and would be used against Meagher himself.

Meagher attended law lectures at Queen’s Inn and applied himself at his studies with a wide range of reading including Petrarch, Shelley and Schlegel. He also read naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt, whose travel book Cosmos stimulated an interest in Latin America that Meagher would explore in his American years. But there were too many exciting diversions to study properly.

Meagher was an attentive attendee at the trial of O’Connell and the other Traversers which started in February. O’Connell defended himself while his old hero Sheil defended O’Connell’s son but all seven defenders were found guilty of sedition and sentenced to prison on May 30. In June Meagher protested the sentence and lauded the Liberator as an “illustrious man” who had toiled all his life for Irish freedom.

While O’Connell was in prison, another Irish Westminster MP William Smith O’Brien stepped forward to lead the Repeal movement. Meagher first heard Smith O’Brien speak on January 15, 1844 at a meeting at Repeal’s Conciliation Hall headquarters. Smith O’Brien and O’Connell hadn’t always seen eye-to-eye but here O’Brien told the meeting that though “not ambitious of martyrdom” he was prepared to be arrested like O’Connell. “Shall Ireland be the only country in which nationality is forbidden?” he exclaimed. Smith O’Brien wanted to offer his services. “Abilities I have not. But I have some experience in public affairs, a patient and persevering industry, and a resolute Irish heart.” Meagher said Smith O’Brien brought the house down.

The Traversers spent three months in Dublin’s Richmond prison in considerable comfort, though the sentence was condemned in European newspapers and questions were asked in parliament. The verdict was overturned in the House of Lords on September 4, and afterwards Meagher took great pleasure in telling a meeting O’Connell was once again “free, triumphant, invincible”. But though the movement continued to rake in large amounts of repeal rent in 1844, O’Connell did not know what to do next, and divisions broke out among those who impatiently wanted action. Prime Minister Peel exploited the division, introducing a package of reforms to get the Irish Catholic middle class onside. In 1844 a Charitable Bequests Act gave Catholics a greater say in bequests and donations though O’Connell opposed it saying it would interfere with the Church’s autonomy in fund-raising. Meagher took O’Connell’s side calling the bill an “atrocity” but the bill passed with the support of moderate Catholic bishops.

By year’s end Meagher had given up his studies to work full time for the Repeal movement. Smith O’Brien was determined to bring younger members into the fold and brought Meagher onto many of its committees. Meagher wrote a letter to a Waterford friend saying how busy he was. “Every day from twelve to five, I am sitting with the parliamentary committee – schooling myself in the practical branches of the National movement,” he wrote. But he remained loyal to O’Connell. The biographer of Thomas Meagher said that during 1844 father and son shared the same political opinions on the Liberator, repeal and rejection of violence. It was not until 1845 that Thomas Francis would fall under the influence of Young Ireland.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 12. The Nation

Detail from Henry McManus’s 1903 painting “Reading the Nation.” Starting in 1842, the Nation almost immediately became the most popular and influential newspaper in Ireland. Photo: National Gallery of Ireland.

Old maxims these – yet stout and true
They speak in trumpet tone
To do at once what is to do
And trust OURSELVES ALONE
The Nation (1842)

In 1843 Thomas Francis Meagher would have eagerly read a new and wildly popular newspaper. Founded the year before, the Nation was already Ireland’s best selling newspaper. It was passionately pro-Repeal, and like Meagher, pro-Daniel O’Connell. Perhaps even more than O’Connell, the Nation stimulated Irish political awareness in the early 1840s.

Ireland had long had an active public sphere, despite the penal laws. Nationalist ideas were promoted in print since the founding of the Freeman’s Journal in 1763. O’Connell understood the value of publicity and propaganda and helped found the Pilot during the Emancipation debate in 1828. Under editor Richard Barrett, the Pilot was a faithful if dull mouthpiece, publicizing O’Connell’s speeches and letters to a relatively low circulation. Some repealers felt they needed another publication less closely aligned to the Liberator to articulate fresh ideas. 

Three young men, Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Blake Dillon, met in Dublin in 1842 to articulate a new vision. The trio had diverse backgrounds; Davis was a Protestant lawyer from County Cork, Duffy was a Catholic journalist from County Monaghan, and Dillon a Catholic lawyer from County Mayo. They admired O’Connell but were concerned by the way he treated those who did not uncritically support him, especially Irish Protestants. All three men were founding figures in what would become the Young Ireland movement and all three would play major roles in Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in the coming years.

Thomas Davis articulated a sense of Irishness regardless of creed or origin. Davis had a Welsh father of English background and a mother claiming Irish and Cromwellian ancestors, so was well credentialed as a non-partisan. While studying at Trinity College Dublin, Davis befriended Dillon and they served their apprenticeship in journalism together before joining O’Connell’s Repeal Association in 1841. They gained an experienced ally in Charles Gavan Duffy, who wanted to found a national weekly after running the Pro-Repeal Vindicator newspaper in Belfast. 

It was a good meeting of minds. Davis wanted to give cultural and intellectual inspiration to a new nation while Dillon was an early promoter of land reform. Duffy’s ideas of how a disciplined Irish party should function in parliament would influence all subsequent party leaders in Westminster, including himself. Their new paper, the Nation, was inspired by the American and French revolutions of the 18th century and was also influenced by romantic nationalism in vogue throughout Europe and nationalist movements in Prussia, Italy, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland and the Balkans. The publication’s choice of name was simple, Duffy said. “We desired to make Ireland a nation and the name was a fitting prelude in the attempt.”

Davis wrote a prospectus for the paper which drew on Ireland’s multiple religious strands. It announced nationality as a first object, not just with “the blessings of a domestic legislature” but also “a lofty and heroic love of country” which would embrace “Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter” alike. The Nation‘s motto was “to foster a public opinion and make it racy of the soil.” Racy of the soil meant “earthy”, and the memorable phrase was originally used a few years earlier by politician Stephen Woulfe to describe the Irish new corporation laws that O’Connell and Thomas Meagher would exploit as mayors of Dublin and Waterford. Duffy and Davis also saw the phrase a year earlier in a short lived monthly publication the Citizen (1839-41), which they both wrote for, ironically when used to describe Robert Peel. From 1842, “racy of the soil” would be indelibly connected with the Nation. This earthy desire to forge a deep-rooted national consciousness drew strength from Ireland’s past and a rewriting of Irish history.

All three founders contributed to its first edition on October 15, 1842. Duffy wrote an editorial complaining of Ireland’s mendicant spirit while Dillon attacked Irish landlords. Davis found parallels between the Irish situation and Britain’s recent invasion of Afghanistan. Almost immediately the Nation became immensely popular and influential, easily outselling the Pilot, with one commentator comparing the contest as “a Damascus sword against a billhook.” The Nation’s 12,000 copies sold out on the first day. The paper had an estimated readership of over a million with copies passed hand-to-hand. It was read aloud at public meetings and Repeal Rooms across the country as the German Kohl saw in Waterford. Given its powerful reach and its support of the Year of Repeal, it was no surprise that its editor Duffy was among the “Traversers” arrested after the failure of O’Connell’s Clontarf meeting.

Like O’Connell, the Nation was committed to achieving Irish independence through constitutional means. It carried news of the repeal movement’s activities, but also provided nationalist ideas and propaganda showcasing the poetry of James Clarence Mangan, Denis Florence MacCarthy and Davis himself. The poetry was so popular that in May 1843 a collection was published as “The Spirit of the Nation”. It too sold like hotcakes. The success of the Nation showed the power of what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community.” Nineteenth century print capitalism allowed people to share common experiences with others whom they would never meet. Its success spawned imitators across the world including La Nation in France, La Nazione in Italy and La Nación, in Buenos Aires.

Ardent reader Meagher had not yet met any of the Nation‘s principals, despite his best efforts. Duffy noted that after he was released from prison in 1844 he went to Waterford on a pilgrimage to places in Richard Sheil’s life. Duffy noted that the “son of the Mayor” was looking for them, “but we exulted in escaping his pursuit.” Duffy said it was another two years before they got to know Meagher “who will be longer remembered in Waterford and Ireland than the orator [Sheil] whose birth-place was an object of such interest to us that day.” 

The Nation quickly attracted talented young writers like Thomas MacNevin, Daniel Owen Madden, Jane Elgee, Eva Kelly and Ellen Downing. An English journalist dubbed them Young Irelanders in hostile reference to Giuseppe Mazzini’s anti-clerical and insurrectionary Young Italy movement. Like O’Connell’s “monster meetings,” the Young Irelanders eventually embraced the slur. But the Young Irelanders gradually moved apart from the Liberator after Clontarf. There was a big generational difference —O’Connell nearly 70, most Young Irelanders 30 or younger. O’Connell and the Nation also held opposing views on the Chartists, corn law repeal, and tariff protections. Chartism was a working-class movement for political reform in the United Kingdom which the British government feared almost as much as O’Connell’s movement. Though the Young Irelanders were of a different class, they viewed the Chartists as British democrats and oppressed natural allies of Irish nationalists while O’Connell condemned the Chartists, particularly its Irish-born leader Feargus O’Connor, for agitation which encouraged violence. The free trader O’Connell also supported the repeal of the corn laws which protected British farmers from overseas competition, while the Nation argued the Irish agrarian economy needed tariff protections. O’Connell was outspoken in support of the abolition of slavery, despite its negative effect on repeal money flowing from Irish America. On his 1845 visit to Ireland, black American anti-slavery advocate Frederick Douglass would not forget O’Connell description of slavery’s “natural, inevitable tendency to brutalize every noble faculty of man.” It was a lesson Meagher and the Nation took a lot longer to absorb, believing that the American slavery question was an unnecessary distraction to their Irish aims.

Duffy, Davis, Dillon and their associates also attempted to divorce Irish nationalism from its close association with Catholicism, which O’Connell’s Repeal Association was financially dependent on. With Duffy taking on more of the business aspects of running a successful paper, Davis became editor, though it played havoc on his health. After Davis’s untimely death in 1845, the fiery and uncompromising northern Unitarian lawyer John Mitchel replaced him. Mitchel was the first to explicitly make the case for complete separation from England. Along with spoken words of Thomas Francis Meagher, Mitchel would set much of the 1848 rebellion drama in motion by his strident support for physical force to support Irish aims. Meagher and Mitchel would also become unlikely friends across three continents over the next two decades. However as 1843 ended Meagher was still in Waterford, a peripheral figure in search of a cause. His move to Dublin in the new year would bring him closer to the action.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 11. The Year of Repeal

Ireland’s Palladian-style parliament house (1727-1800) at College Green, Dublin. After the 1801 Act of Union, the building became the property of the Bank of Ireland. Photo: Author’s collection

Opinion sometimes comes foaming and surging like a tide; sometimes it steals into new channels, as silently as health returning to the cheeks of an invalid – Charles Gavan Duffy “Four Years of Irish History” (1883)

Newly home from Stonyhurst College in April 1843, Thomas Francis Meagher did not stay long in Waterford. In May he headed overseas again to take a grand tour of Europe with young friends. The tour’s lasting significance came from a boat trip up the Rhine to visit the new nation of Belgium. A decade earlier Belgium had successfully broken away from the Netherlands and now, as Meagher’s friend Pat Smyth wrote, “Belgium became in his mind a model of what Ireland should be.” Meagher would weave the 1832 siege of Antwerp into his famous Sword speech in 1846, though he glossed over the fact that the British helped defeat the Dutch invaders. After the tour Meagher remained a young man of leisure in Waterford, exploring rivers by boat, down the Suir to Duncannon and Passage, up the Barrow to New Ross, or picnicking on Lady’s Island and Dunbrody Abbey. Occasionally with friend Thomas Condon he would sail beyond the harbor to Tramore bay.  However politics were simmering away behind Meagher’s carefree days.

Meagher’s lifestyle was an anomaly in Ireland in 1843. The country was predominantly agrarian and poor and its explosive rise in population from five to eight million from 1800 to the 1840s was almost exclusively rural. Supposedly an integral part of the United Kingdom, the largest empire in the world and the center of the Industrial Revolution, Ireland was a second class citizen, a source of cheap labor and food for Britain. Irish cotton and wool industries could not compete with more advanced English competition and collapsed when the Act of Union removed protective duties. A recession following the Napoleonic wars caused agricultural prices and land values to plummet causing grave hardships to millions of small farmers.

While the British government denied mechanization and urbanization to Ireland, they simultaneously blamed the Irish for their own backwardness. Since improvement initiatives tended to increase rents, tenants persisted with subsistence farming, creating no surplus capital. Meanwhile absentee landlords plowed their rents into more profitable English markets. German historian Friedrich Von Raumer called Irish tenant farmers “expellable serfs” who could be evicted if they fell behind with rent. Peel’s 1843 Devon Commission, which looked into the problem of Irish land leases, found that superior prosperity in the north was due to tenant rights, the “Ulster custom” of fixity of tenure, but the government ignored its findings.

There were also laws mandating tithes, which were one tenth of the produce of agricultural land levied for the support of the state-established Church of Ireland and its clergymen. Catholics, who also supported their own priests, bitterly resented tithe payments and many refused to pay them. The tithes also offended protestants like Methodists and Unitarians which did not belong to the established church. The injustices inspired a long guerrilla-style “land and tithe” war lasting from 1815 to the 1840s. Illegal gangs such as Ribbonmen and Whiteboys waged terror on landowners and many members were transported to Australia for their crimes.

A small but growing Irish middle class believed that only a parliament in Dublin could solve these intractable problems. In 1843 Daniel O’Connell, free from his Dublin mayoral duties, harnessed a mass movement for Repeal, similar to the Catholic Association that helped him win Emancipation in 1829. In parliament O’Connell led a loose alliance of Irish MPs. These were no threat to his old enemy, Tory prime minister Robert Peel, who gained a huge majority in the 1841 election. Although the 1840 reforms had given Catholics control of municipal councils, franchise restrictions still gave Protestants influence beyond the proportion of their population. Aided by nationalist newspapers, especially the Nation which started in 1842, O’Connell now declared 1843 would be the “Year of Repeal”. O’Connell wanted to recruit three million Repealers and held large-scale meetings to demonstrate to Peel the size of his support in Ireland.

When German travel writer Johann Georg Kohl visited Waterford in 1842 he was struck by repeal fever in the city. At a city hotel he noted a Repeal Room where “the friends of repeal are always to be found, perusing the opposition papers of England and Ireland, which are taken for their use.” A day later Kohl took a passage to New Ross on a steamboat called the Repealer. “What is there to be found in Ireland that has not some connexion with repeal?” Kohl asked. “I was informed that the repealers go almost exclusively by this boat, and hence it was also called the People’s Steamer. On the flag which waved from the quarter-deck were the words ‘Hurrah for the Repeal of the Union!’ O’Connell can now, at his meetings, truly boast that the repeal cause is progressing with the rapidity of steam.”

Thomas Meagher was a senior member of O’Connell’s Waterford organization. As mayor he declared Ireland would be “plundered, degraded and impoverished” until the Repeal of the Union was granted. Both he and his son Thomas Francis served on committees, acted as stewards at repeal dinners, and supervised the collection of the repeal rent. In April 1843 the mayor chaired a city trades meeting to petition parliament for Repeal which Thomas Francis also attended. There Thomas Francis heard the speech of a “Sheil in the rough,” local schoolmaster James Nash, who said the Union “had not left us a pewter spoon to run a railroad with through a plate of stirabout.” Nash was untroubled by British threats of coercion to stop Repealers. “Let them come on; let them draw the sword; and then woe to the conquered.” Meagher drew on Nash’s potent imagery in his Sword speech three years later.

O’Connell held spectacular events across the country each Sunday throughout 1843, often in places of great historical importance. These stage-managed processions combined politics with theater and mass audience participation. Half pilgrimage and half summer fair, they attracted hundreds of thousands supporters. A million people reportedly attended the meeting on the Hill of Tara in August. Nationalist newspapers exaggerated the numbers to prove the mass support behind Repeal, while Unionist newspapers did the same to put pressure on the government to suppress the Repeal agitation. The Times sarcastically called them “monster meetings” and O’Connell gladly appropriated the term.

On Saturday night the roads leading to the meeting place were aflame with the torches of people walking long distances. Then as dawn broke the hillsides were thronged with those hearing Mass at outdoor altars or eating breakfasts of bread and potatoes cooked over turf fires. Late in the morning local leaders arrived on coaches or on horseback accompanied by temperance bands. When O’Connell’s coach appeared the horses were detached, and amid great cheers Repealers pulled the carriage by hand to the meeting place. These parades were often five miles long and took hours to complete. O’Connell often combined themes of Repeal with his crusade against slavery. A float in the Cork procession featured two boys; one painted black bearing the label “free” representing Africa where Britain had abolished slavery, while the second boy representing Ireland was painted white, wore chains and his label read “A Slave Still!”  When the float came before O’Connell, “Africa” thanked O’Connell for helping him to gain his freedom but reminded him his companion was still in bondage. Then “Ireland” knelt before O’Connell and, at the Liberator’s command, broke his chains. As the float trundled off through the city, the boy triumphantly displayed his free arms to cheering onlookers.

On June 11, O’Connell used the abolition metaphor at the monster meeting in Mallow, County Cork. He asked whether the Irish would live as slaves or die as freemen. “Have we not the ordinary courage of Englishmen? Are we to be trampled on?” he asked. “It will be my dead body they will trample on.” The Freeman’s Journal noted the “countless thousands who formed the body guard of the Liberator” and banners with provocative slogans such as “See the conquering hero comes” and “We submit to no Saxon superiority.” The Mallow Defiance, as the speech was called, posed a serious challenge to the Peel administration. O’Connell believed that a large demonstration of Irish will would be enough of a signal for the British to concede to their demands. “The parliament will naturally yield to the wishes and prayers of an entire nation,” he said.

Waterford held its monster meeting on July 9. That morning Thomas Francis Meagher collected O’Connell in the mayor’s carriage from the village of Kilmacthomas and drove him 15 miles to Waterford. According to the Nation, there was another enormous procession, “led by a temperance band and headed by the trades of Waterford – Carpenters, Farriers, Shoemakers, Tobacco Spinners, Coopers, Housesmiths, Shipsmiths, Coach-builders, Bakers, Tailors, Ropemakers, Pipemakers, Chandlers, Shipwrights, Nailers, Wicker-workers, Butchers etc.” The Suir was “black with arrays of boats” and 300,000 people crammed Ballybricken Hill, where young Meagher had another job, this time introducing O’Connell. The Liberator slammed local Tory politicians and noted there were only 800 electors in Waterford where the rateable qualification to vote was £10 compared to one shilling in Bristol. Afterwards O’Connell attended a paying dinner for 450 supporters at City Hall presided by Meagher’s father where toasts were proposed as well as the “most tremendous cheering” and “handkerchief-waving.” 

The attitude to O’Connell’s campaign was markedly different across the channel with the Times calling Repeal a “hopeless and miserable delusion.” Unlike in 1829 where there was solid British support for emancipation, Westminster was firmly opposed to the end of union. Both Whigs and Tories considered Ireland necessary to British defense and the preservation of the Empire and the one time parliament voted on Repeal in 1834, the major parties combined to deny it by 523 votes to 38. The government also had a moral commitment to protect Irish Protestants who feared a Catholic ascendancy in an independent Ireland. On May 9, 1843 Peel told parliament he would stop at nothing to defend the Union. Even civil war, he said, was preferable to “the dismemberment of the Union.” With parliamentary support, Peel had the freedom to employ any tactic he believed necessary to preserve the Union, canceling out O’Connell’s vague threats of defiance.

Despite his outbursts, O’Connell did not support a no-rent campaign which started in Carlow. At the 30th monster meeting in Lismore, County Waterford on September 24, O’Connell said “the state coach of the constitution was going downhill too rapidly” and he needed to act as “a drag upon the wheels.” He urged the crowd to leave Repeal management to him and hinted he might be willing to strike a deal with the government. The now 20-year-old Thomas Francis Meagher represented his father at Lismore and gave a speech at dinner that evening. According to the Nation, Meagher referred to the 1826 election when “Waterford released itself from the tyranny of the Beresfords, and prepared the way for emancipation” and he prophesied that Repeal would now follow after which O’Connell replied, “well done, young Ireland!” O’Connell would not always remain as supportive of young Ireland or of Meagher himself.

A week after Lismore on October 1, O’Connell held his 31st monster meeting at Mullaghmast Co Kildare, the reputed site of a summary execution of Irish gentry by the English army during the time of Elizabeth I. Stewards wore a hat badge bearing the inscription “O’Connell’s Police”, perhaps to needle the prime minister whose brilliantly blue jacketed Irish Peace Preservation Force he founded in 1814 were called Peelers long before the London Metropolitan police he founded as Home Secretary in 1829 were called Bobbies. O’Connell arrived at Mullaghmast dressed in the scarlet robes of a Dublin City alderman and wearing a cap of green velvet with gold in the form of an Irish crown. He said Mullaghmast was where English treachery “consummated the massacre of the Irish people” and handed out a document entitled “A full and true account of the dreadful slaughter and murder at Mullaghmast on the bodies of 400 Roman Catholics”. The document would later be used in evidence against him. 

The meetings were expected to climax a week later at Clontarf on October 8, the scene of the famous battle where Munster king Brian Boruma and his Limerick and Waterford men defeated Dublin Vikings in 1014. Attendees were coming from across Ireland and beyond. Irish-born Liverpool woolbroker Terence Bellew MacManus chartered four steamers to take thousands across from Merseyside and Manchester. But Peel was determined the meeting would not happen. His trigger was unauthorized notices around Dublin which referred to “mounted Repeal volunteers” parading at the event. O’Connell disowned the notices but the reference to an Irish cavalry and other military terms gave Peel the excuse to act.

On Saturday October 7, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland declared the meeting illegal. He pasted proclamation notices on walls that afternoon while British warships patrolled Dublin Bay. That evening O’Connell hosted a meeting which heard calls to defy the ban. Despite the Mallow Defiance, O’Connell did not want to send unarmed followers to slaughter. He sent messengers across the country to say the meeting was off. Despite the late hour of the ban, Dublin remained quiet on Sunday. A day later O’Connell condemned the government but warned against violence saying his followers must remain true to constitutional agitation and the British Government had used the rebellion of 1798 to justify the Act of Union. Another futile rebellion might leave Ireland even worse off.

The cancellation did not appease Peel. Within a week his government sent more soldiers and ships to Ireland and arrested Repeal leaders, including O’Connell, his favorite son John O’Connell, and two newspaper editors Charles Gavan Duffy of the Nation and Pilot founder Richard Barrett. Seven accused, quickly nicknamed the Traversers, were charged with “attempting to undermine the Constitution and to alienate the loyalty of Her Majesty’s forces in Ireland.” Younger Repealers expected this to be a signal for resistance but O’Connell insisted on no opposition. Repeal would be achieved peacefully, he claimed, and the old Irish parliament would reopen in College Green within six months. Few believed him. Peel had called O’Connell’s bluff and the seeds were planted for a fatal split in the Repeal movement.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 10. Thomas Meagher the ‘forgotten father’

Detail from the portrait of Thomas Meagher in mayor’s robes at the Waterford Treasures Museum, Bishop’s Palace. Photo of the painting: Author’s collection

Nature’s not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it.
Ivan Turgenev “Fathers and Sons” (1862)

The subtitle of Eugene Broderick’s excellent 2022 biography of Thomas Meagher is “Forgotten father of Thomas Francis Meagher.” Thomas Meagher deserves to be better remembered in Waterford though arguably Thomas Francis’s mother Alicia was the more forgotten parent, dying when her oldest surviving son was just four years old and leaving no portrait in her honor. Her husband, by contrast, had great fame locally, not just as the son of wealthy businessman who made his money in Newfoundland, but as a long standing civic leader in Waterford, a key figure in the famous 1826 election that ultimately led to him being the city’s MP for ten years, and perhaps most memorably, Waterford’s first Catholic mayor in over 150 years. His Catholic faith was integral to his motivations, inspiring the principled political cause he believed in all his life and his many acts of charity. Meagher was an ardent O’Connellite even naming his house in Waterford for the Liberator’s own Kerry home. Perhaps his greatest regret was that his time in parliament between 1847 and 1857 never overlapped with the Liberator.

The reserved and somber Meagher spoke just 12 times in his decade in parliament. Young Ireland leader Charles Gavan Duffy, who served with him in Westminster, called him “a silent steadfast man held in general respect.” Though he was far more forceful in public in Waterford, this wider reputation for silence helped earn Broderick’s subtitle. Meagher disappeared into the shadow of his more famous son, mentioned only once in passing in the first biography of the latter and achieving only a “walk on part” in subsequent treatments of Thomas Francis’s life. Yet the father was a huge influence on the son, whom he clearly loved and supported financially even when their political paths diverged as he became a respected MP in the House of Commons while his son languished as a convicted felon in Van Diemen’s Land.

Thomas Francis rarely discussed his father or family, though grief and loss was a huge part of his upbringing. His description of his return home in 1843 after finishing his education at Stonyhurst College, coming up Waterford Harbour aboard the William Penn, descriptively reflects on local history. “A bright sun was lighting up the dingy walls of Duncannon Fort as we paddled under them” before passing Cheekpoint and Faithlegg. Yet it is more revealing about what is left out. Meagher must surely have reflected on Faithlegg church cemetery, the site of the family tomb where his mother was laid to rest 16 years earlier. Meagher’s paternal grandparents and his dead brothers and sisters were also buried here and more Meaghers would be added in the years to come, including Thomas Francis’s first wife.

Nor does Meagher mention nearby Ballycanvan House where his grandparents lived, though it was easily visible from the river. Perhaps not wanting to recall family tragedies, Meagher brooded on other buildings as he continued his reminiscence. “At the confluence of the Barrow and the Suir, were the ruins of Dunbrody Abbey…further on were the grounds and stately mansion of Snow Hill”, the birthplace of his hero Sheil. On he went past Little Island, “with its fragments of Norman castle and its broad cornfields and kingly trees” and finally the city itself with Reginald’s Tower as well as “Broad Street, the cathedral, the barracks, the great chapel, the jail [and] Ballybricken Hill with its circular stone steps and bull-post.” Ballybricken was Waterford’s marketplace and its center of radical nationalism where all great political meetings were held including Waterford’s monster repeal meeting later that year. Meagher’s supporters would also rally here five years later to defend his cause after his arrest in the city.

At first glance Meagher thought Waterford was exactly the same as before. “For a century at least, it has not gained a wrinkle nor lost a smile,” Meagher wrote. But a big change had occurred since his last visit. Prior to the 1840s, Irish councils and corporations were corrupt bodies with voting confined to a freeman’s roll tightly controlled by Protestant authorities. As a Waterford election meeting in 1826 heard, such patronage meant being “excluded even from the humblest situation in the corporation to make way for pig-jobbers and men whose qualifications in any other way were almost wholly overlooked, provided they were not Catholic.” Meagher called it “an irresponsible, self-elected, self-conceited, bigoted body”.

But Protestant control of the councils was swept away after Westminster passed the 1840 Municipal Corporations Act of Ireland. The Act gave the the vote to all men of property worth £1000. Daniel O’Connell took advantage of this to become mayor of Dublin in 1841 and again in 1842. Towards the end of that second year it was Waterford’s turn, electing a mainly Catholic council with a Catholic mayor. “It was a glorious thing, the people thought,” Meagher wrote, “to see some of their own sort in possession of the Town Hall and to see the Mayor going to Mass.” The man sitting in the “curule chair” presiding over council meetings as “chief Magistrate for the city” was none other than Meagher’s own father.

The election to mayor was a natural progression for the elder Meagher. He was a key figure in the Catholic Association’s Waterford victory in 1826 along with Thomas Wyse and was widely known for his acts of charity to civic and religious organizations. He was a leader of Waterford’s chamber of commerce from the early 1820s and was elected to the board of guardians of Waterford’s Poor Law Union in 1839, which opened the city’s first workhouse at John’s Hill two years later. In the 1842 election, he was one of 35 Catholic councilors elected out of 40 in the city, and those councilors appointed him mayor after another candidate pulled out. Meagher was vocal at the exclusion of the Catholic middle class from municipal government and in his first speech as mayor said his election was the first time there was “a chosen officer of the people to fill the high office.”

The new council immediately set about distinguishing itself from its corrupt predecessor, deciding applications for jobs would be made in open council, reforming corporation finances, and embarking on civic improvements. But the main focus would be on supporting O’Connell‘s fight for repeal of the Act of Union, passing a motion in its first meeting to invite the Liberator to Waterford. On November 10, 1842 O’Connell attended a public meeting of 50,000 people where the new mayor declared that under Repeal, Ireland would enjoy “the fostering protection of a domestic legislature.” A month before Thomas Francis returned to Waterford, his father’s council passed a resolution to petition parliament to repeal the union. Mayor Meagher told the meeting Ireland’s prosperity depended on “being legislated for by men who understand her wants and feel for her people.”

Learning politics around the family table, young Thomas Francis was an avid Repealer. He claims his earliest memory was Villiers Stuart’s victory in the 1826 Waterford election when Meagher was just three years old. “In one huge mass the country rose against the Beresfords, and drove them from the haughty domination they had so long,” Meagher wrote. The younger Meagher also mixed with the “Old Tory fashionables” at Waterford’s exclusive County and City Club where politics were not allowed. He was one of a handful of Repealers at the club yet the loyalists there respected him for his promotion of “tolerant, genial, generous brotherhood amongst Irishmen.” As Broderick writes, this was evidence of his father’s influence promoting equality between Catholics and Protestants. While father and son would eventually drift apart, for now they were in agreement. Both fully supported O’Connell, who had proclaimed 1843 as the Year of Repeal.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 9. Stonyhurst College

The west front of Stonyhurst College after 1843. Photo: courtesy Stonyhurst College

While Clongowes Woods‘ historian mirthfully recalled Thomas Francis Meagher’s escapade with the Gallant Seven, a more serious incident may have ended his stay at the Co Kildare boarding school. In a memoir written 60 years later, Meagher contemporary Denis McVeagh said that on Michaelmas Day, September 29, 1839, the school supplied a roast goose to each table. The goose offered to Meagher’s table was very lean and the indignant Meagher demanded a fatter goose. A priest refused so the boys all put down their knives and forks and sulked, eating no dinner. Sometime later many panes of glass in the great window were smashed by stones. Authorities sent the senior boys to the tower, and an inquiry was held. “As no one would peach they got solitary confinement for a week,” McVeagh said. He said four rebels were expelled though Meagher was not one of them. Instead, “Tom Meagher was transferred to Stonyhurst through the interest of his uncle, Father Meagher.”

Father Meagher was Thomas Meagher’s youngest brother Patrick, and Stonyhurst was the English school he was educated at before becoming a Jesuit priest. Trinity College Dublin was then Ireland’s only university, but it was mainly Protestant institution and like most Irish Catholics the Meaghers believed it was “a hotbed of bigotry and intolerance”. Instead young Thomas Francis would spend the next four years finishing his education at England’s premier Jesuit college, Stonyhurst College, set in the rural Ribble Valley, 15km north of Blackburn, Lancashire. Sixteenth century Jesuit priest Robert Parsons (sometimes Persons) first recognised a need for a lay school for English Catholics denied a home education by penal laws. In 1593 he chose a site at Saint-Omer strategically located near Calais. When the French expelled the Jesuits in 1762 the school moved to Bruges and then to Liège.

Coincidently at the same time as Parsons was starting in Saint-Omer, another Catholic Englishman, Richard Shireburn, was building Stonyhurst Hall. Through marriage the property was handed down to the Weld family of Ludlow Castle who left Stonyhurst empty and dilapidated. Thomas Weld had been educated at Saint-Omer and had three sons at Liège but in 1794 when Liège school authorities could no longer guarantee the safety of the school from French Revolutionary troops, Weld invited the college to move to Stonyhurst for a modest rent. The Jesuits converted the stately home into a school and inherited the property on Weld’s death.

Over the following century, student numbers rose substantially from the original twelve migrants from Liège. Arthur Conan Doyle studied here 30 years after Meagher and and may have got his names Sherlock and Moriarty from students he knew at school while his fictional Baskerville Hall had similarities to Stonyhurst. J.R.R. Tolkien was a regular visitor in the Second World War years and wrote several chapters of Lord of the Rings at the school while visiting eldest son, John, who was studying for the priesthood.

Meagher’s schoolboy hero Richard Lalor Sheil was one of the earliest students, studying at Stonyhurst from 1804 to 1807. Sheil wrote Stonyhurst was surrounded by scenery of “a solemn and almost dreary character.” There was a great entrance with two large towers, which opened into a large square while a forbidding avenue rose between two large basins of artificial water, “whose stagnant tranquillity gives the approach a dismal aspect”. Stonyhurst was near the foot of Pendle Hill where 10 women were hanged for witchcraft in 1612. Sheil said the former “favourite resort of sorcerers” was now home “to the mysterious ecclesiastics who are adept in the witchcraft of Ignatius.” Meagher also found Stonyhurst bewitching. Arriving at the great entrance on October 17, 1839 he noticed the towers rising out of a deep, black valley, as well as old trees and “high hills, once the haunt of witches, girdling it in gaunt and desolate sterility.”

According to former Stonyhurst College archivist David Knight, the college archives refer to him by his full name: Thomas Francis Constanting Meagher. There is no other known reference to this strange third name. It may be a confirmation name, probably a mispelling of Constantine. Whatever about the name, Meagher would have plenty of time to get to know the neighbourhood which was his home for the next four years. The school day was long and arduous from 5.20am to 9pm with most of that time outside meal and prayers spent in the classroom. There was only one short break each summer and students could not to go home for Christmas or Easter. No women were allowed at Stonyhurst except for a few female servants, whom the boys unkindly referred to as “the hags”.

According to his friend Pat Smyth one of his early tasks at Stonyhurst was to write a history of the Clongowes Debating Society. The history impressed Daniel O’Connell who reportedly said “the genius that could produce such a work is not destined to remain long in obscurity.” Meagher, then aged 16, would prove O’Connell right though not in a way the Liberator would enjoy. Sadly the Clongowes history O’Connell so admired was destroyed in a school fire in 1886.

As at Clongowes, Meagher met influential lifelong friends at Stonyhurst. These included Ramón Páez, son of Jose Antonio Páez, chief of cavalry to Simon Bolívar and later first president of Venezuela. Meagher and Páez Jr would meet again in New York. When Meagher went to Costa Rica in 1858 to study the route of a possible interoceanic canal, Páez accompanied him as an artist. At Stonyhurst they were among a group of young men of university age called “Philosophers”, some of whom were studying for a degree. Though Meagher never received a third level qualification, he was listed as a “Philosopher” by April 1842 as his fees had been doubled from 50 to 100 guineas a year, with separate fees for music and drawing. His six month pocket money, paid by his father but rationed by the school, was increased from twenty-six shillings to two pounds.

Despite his monied background, his teachers considered Meagher as a bog Irishman, if his “Personal Recollections” of 1856 are to be believed. Meagher auditioned for the part of the Earl of Kent in the school play King Lear but the rehearsal did not go well. His English teacher Rev William Johnson struck him on the back of the head and cried out in disgust: “that frightful brogue of yours will never do for Shakespeare.” Meagher laughed off the insult and continued the lines to merriment, “thus Kent, o princes, bids you all adieu; he’ll shape his old course in a country new”. Prophetic as Meagher’s words were about his own fate, the unimpressed Johnson gave Kent to a student with a more palatable accent. Meagher was reduced to the bit part. Still laying it on thick in the public performance, Meagher entered as a messenger in Act 4 scene 4 and saluted Cordelia. In his thickest Irish accent he announced to loud applause, “The British powers were marching hitherward”. Meagher ruefully recalled that “it wasn’t the first time the brogue entailed the forfeiture of title and estate”. Nor was it the last time British powers would march hitherward in his direction.

His own small rebellions continued when as first clarinettist in the school band he refused to play, when called to perform at an 1840 ceremony celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. According to his friend Richard O’Gorman, Meagher said he would never sound a note of praise for England’s victory, and “despite entreaties and threats he adhered to his determination, and eventually compelled the band to disperse without having delivering the music”.

Nevertheless Meagher did enjoy the fruits of Stonyhurst’s classic Jesuit education. He studied the great orators and won a prize for an essay on the evils of American slavery, a topic that would later send him to war. And Rev Johnson had success changing the way Meagher spoke. His four years at Stonyhurst left him with an English accent that fellow Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy found mincing on first impression. Duffy admitted this impression was false. Nature may had made him a great orator, said Duffy, but it took his English education to make him an “accomplished gentlemen”.

Meagher later looked back fondly on his school years. He said all Jesuit schools were alike with the same grand belief in “a code of moral excellence, gentleness, and beauty.” Meagher would be delighted to meet Jesuit priests in travels to the remotest parts of Montana and would regale them with schoolboy tales over the campfire. He left Stonyhurst for good in April 1843, aged 19 having graduated with “distinguished honours“. The ambitious young man was ready to return to Ireland where major political changes were afoot with his own father playing an important role. Meagher dreamed he too had something to offer.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 8. Clongowes Wood College

Clongowes Wood College, Clane Co Kildare. Photo: Author’s collection

Nothing worthy of God can be done without earth being set in uproar and hell’s legions roused – St Ignatius of Loyola

Wealthy young Catholic gentlemen needed a proper education and there was only one place to get that in Ireland. In 1833 Thomas Meagher packed his two sons, Thomas Francis, aged 10 and Henry, aged eight to the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College. Thomas Meagher’s brother Patrick entered the Jesuit order four years earlier, and had recommended the County Kildare school. Meagher’s political idol Daniel O’Connell had also sent all his four sons to Clongowes. Meagher paid fees of just over £45 for each boy, a discount from the usual 60 guineas because they were brothers, though it still represented more than a year’s wages for most of Meagher’s workmen. According to Clongowes teacher and academic Tony Pierce, the school’s location 25 miles from Dublin was deliberately dictated by the political conditions of the day. Any nearer to the capital it would have attracted the unwelcome attentions of a government still nervous about such institutions while any further away it might not have attracted the “sons of the Catholic gentry” who were its main target.

The Society of Jesus had been educating the sons of Catholic gentry across Europe since its first school opened in Rome in 1551. With teachers trained in classical studies and theology, Jesuit schools became important centers for the education of future lawyers and public officials.

Jesuits were long banned in anti-Catholic England, but the newly united Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland reconstituted Jesuit provinces in 1803 under the patronage of Russian priests. The order wanted grand buildings to house schools to educate Catholics in their tradition and in Ireland they found an estate near Clane, County Kildare at Clongowes Wood, one of a chain of castles built to defend the Dublin Pale. Under English Catholic owner James Eustace, it was the scene of a massacre during the 1640s revolutionary wars where women and children on the estate were slaughtered. Eustace’s own 90-year-old mother died when her jaw was smashed. Later Clongowes student James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus could still note the “marks of the soldiers’ slugs in the wood of the door.” In 1677 the demesne passed to the Dublin Catholic Browne family and the estate was known as Castle Browne. In 1788 Castle Browne was inherited by Whig politician Thomas Wogan Browne who enlarged the castle and decorated it in the gothic style. When he died in 1812, it was inherited by his brother Michael Wogan Browne, a general in the army of Saxony who commanded a division in Napoleon’s march on Moscow. Preferring military adventures, Wogan-Browne sold the rambling estate to the Society of Jesus in 1813 and the order restored the name Clongowes Wood. Their intention was to turn it into a Catholic school for lay students with Irish priests trained in Sicily as teachers. The plan was challenging to Ireland’s Protestant elite. The Hibernian Magazine warned the move would put Ireland in imminent danger. “If Popery succeeds,” the magazine fretted, “our fairest plains will once more witness days worthy to rank with those of Bloody Mary, and the walls of Derry shall again become the lamentable bulwarks against Popish treachery and massacre.”

Then Irish chief secretary Robert Peel, hauled in the school’s first rector, Father Peter Kenney for a meeting. “Are you not aware we can confiscate that property?” Peel asked Father Kenney. The Jesuit coolly replied he was not concerned. “Money confided to the keeping of the English government must be safe from confiscation,” he said and reminded Peel of a quote of another English prime minister, Pitt the Elder: “if the devil had money in the English funds, it should be held safe for him”.

With Pitt’s words ringing in his ears, Peel did not intervene. Clongowes Wood College opened for its first student in 1814 and had over 200 students enrolled by 1818. Kenney’s priests kept strict discipline. Students rose at 5am in summer and 6am in winter for morning prayers and Mass. Breakfast was preceded by one hour of study, dinner was at noon and bedtime was nine. The usual drink in the afternoon was beer, which was a health measure because the water was too dangerous to drink and had caused typhus. They played handball and football, with older students “privileged to keep greyhounds” and they wore a uniform of “a cap made of rabbit-skin, blue cloth coat with brass buttons, yellow cassimere waistcoat, and corduroy trousers.” The curriculum was governed by the Ratio Studiorum, the rules and regulations used by Jesuit schools across the world since the 17th century. The Ratio was revised in 1832 to give more attention to the study of native languages, but was still built upon the classical subjects.

When Thomas Francis Meagher arrived a year later, he hated his new rural Kildare surroundings, far from familiar Waterford comforts. Foreshadowing a similar description of Campbell Town, his first home in Tasmanian exile, Meagher said Clane was “just one street” and “every second house was a shebeen”. As in most Irish towns there was a police barracks but Meagher saw its occupant like Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman, a half-man, half-inanimate object, “perpetually chewing straw outside the door-step, rubbing his shoulders against the whitewash of the door-post, and winking and spitting all day long.”

Clane was unforgivably dull but Meagher’s imagination was excited by the fast-flowing “exquisite wild” River Liffey that ran south of the compound. In lines echoing a later tribute to the Liffey from another of Joyce’s works Finnegans Wake, Meagher sang the river’s praises in 1856: “How it tumbles; glides away, buries itself darkly in pools of fabulous depth, leaps over rocks; deepens, as it were, thoughtfully, under ruins and raths; plunges into valleys; ripples and whispers under willows; the close leaves of the strawberry, and the purple-ivied basement of church-tower, country-mansion and castle; running the wildest, most ruinous and grandest frolic imaginable until it frowns and grows sulky a little above King’s Bridge of Dublin, and in a turbid thick stream washes the granite walls of the quays over which the Four Courts and Custom House rear their stately porticoes and domes.” One Joycean scholar, Jim LeBlanc thinks the Finnegans Wake links go further. Joyce was aware Meagher was a famous Clongowes alumnus and in his book he speaks of “the last of the Meaghers” while three pages later there are the “missus, seepy and sewery” (Mississippi and Missouri, the latter where Meagher died). “Inebriated falls, as well as Meagher’s drowning in a river,” LeBlanc said, “reflect major themes of the Wake and of this particular chapter.”

Like Joyce, Meagher excelled in English and was conversant in several European languages, thanks to the Ratio Studiorum. While he also learned geography, mathematics, the natural sciences, and history, Meagher claimed Ireland’s own troubled history was a forbidden topic. In flowery prose Meagher complained about the gaping hole in the curriculum. “They birched us into a flippant acquaintance with the disreputable Gods and Goddesses of the golden heroic ages; they entangled us in Euclid; turned our brain with the terrestrial globe; chilled our blood in dizzy excursions through the Milky Way…pitched us precipitately into England, amongst the impetuous Normans and stupid Saxons; gave us a look through an interminable telescope, at what was doing in the New World; but as far as Ireland was concerned, they left us like blind and crippled children, in the dark.”

Tony Pierce thinks Meagher was exaggerating, as Clongowes taught Irish history 1835 and 1837. However others noted similar English influences. Daniel O’Connell’s youngest son Danny (nine years older than Meagher) said they played football in the winter and “a very primitive cricket” in spring while Joyce’s schoolboy Dedalus was “leader of the Yorkists.” The Hibernian Magazine need not have worried. The Jesuits survived in British-controlled Ireland by ignoring local political realities. Their duty was Christian care of the boys, not their political development.

Typhus was a genuine concern and college physician Dr. O’Flannigan visited each week to check the health of the students. Meagher said O’Flannigan’s prescription for all ills was senna and salts. “The boys called it ‘black draught’. It made no difference what ailed you, the dose was prescribed,” Meagher recalled. The school nurse mixed it and stirred with a teaspoon, before forcing “it inexorably on the patient, piously exclaiming ‘Take it now for the poor souls in Purgatory!’”

Purgatory or not, Clongowes worked its magic on the young Meagher and he ended up calling a “dear old spot”. Meagher was “distinguished for the heartiness with which he joined in all the freaks of student life.” He played the clarinet and rose to become band leader before he left college. He made influential school friends, including Enoch Lowe, who later became governor of Maryland and was among the first to welcome Meagher to America. Another lifelong Clongowes friend and fellow Young Irelander, Patrick James Smyth, said Meagher was a diligent student and loved by students and teachers alike though did not care for the regard of the latter. “I have known him in a foot-ball match to let fly deliberately at a master’s shins,” he wrote. Smyth said he remained a teachers’ favorite because of his “frankness, candor and courage.”

The school opened a new library in 1836, and here Meagher found a tattered volume of the speeches of Daniel O’Connell and Richard Lalor Sheil from 1825 to 1829 – the period before Catholic Emancipation. It became his favorite book. “A ricketty casket, full of bruises, and threatening every minute to fall to pieces, it contained for me a heap of the rarest emeralds (which) made my eyes melt and water,” Meagher wrote. The first speech in the book was given by O’Connell in Waterford a year after the city’s famous 1826 election. In it O’Connell said America was “extending the principles of civil and religious liberty” and prophetically for Meagher America’s voice reached across the Atlantic “like magic music in the heavens, gladdens the ear of seven million Irishmen.”

Meagher would later embrace O’Connell’s American vision but it was the 12 speeches by Richard Lalor Sheil that initially resonated more. Born a generation earlier in 1791, Shiel had even more similarities to Meagher than O’Connell: he was from a wealthy Waterford Catholic merchant family (the grand family home Bellevue at Slieverue, Co Kilkenny was directly across the river from Meagher’s family home, and like Ballycanvan is now a ruin), educated in Stonyhurst and trained as a lawyer before being attracted to the nationalist cause where he was a noted orator and playwright. As with Meagher, the river Suir etched deeply into the conscience of schoolboy Sheil. “How often I have stood upon its banks, when the bells in the city, the smoke of which was turned into a cloud of gold by a Claude Lorrain sunset, tolled the death of the departing day,” Sheil wrote.

Sheil’s views on Ireland also motivated Meagher. In his “prayer for emancipation” for seven million Irish Catholics, Sheil said “their wealth, their intelligence, their public spirit, their union, their community of purpose, and their unalterable determination to prosecute their political rights are every day on the increase.” Sheil helped O’Connell found the Catholic Association in 1823 and when Britain suppressed it two years later Sheil accompanied O’Connell to London to protest in vain. Sheil was one of the first to benefit from Emancipation, elected as MP for Louth in 1830 and like the Liberator, supported the Whigs in parliament. Meagher thought Sheil’s speeches were “brilliant and exciting to excess, drove the blood burning through my veins and filled my mind, as if by violent enchantment, with the visions that were the inspiration of whatever strong words fell from me in later years.”

Clongowes library led to another lifelong passion which dovetailed neatly with Meagher’s nationalism. There, he became the first secretary of the Clongowes Academical Debating Society. Smyth, who was the same age as Meagher but did not come to Clongowes until 1839, noted the school had “many more fluent speakers” than Meagher, but the Debating Society honed his craft and established his reputation as an orator.

By 1839 Meagher was a senior student of six years with more latitude to get away with pranks. In a story that school historian Fr Timothy Corcoran ascribes to “tradition,” Meagher was one of “the gallant seven” students who went on a forbidden escapade across the Liffey towards Dublin. Father John MacDonald gave chase and found the seven at a travelers’ stop where they were enjoying a fine dinner. “Meagher, en grand seigneur, ordered a chair to be set for him at the right hand, and then the proceedings commenced amid the utmost good humor,” Corcoran wrote. Father MacDonald may have been phlegmatic about the antics of the young grand seigneur but others took a dim view of the escapade. He was about to sent to the bottom of the heap again at a new school in a new country.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 7. The Granville Hotel

The Granville Hotel, the Quay, Waterford. Photo: Author’s collection

With my country, then, I leave my memory – my sentiments – my acts – proudly feeling that they require no vindication from me this day – Thomas Francis Meagher “speech from the dock” (1848)

Facing the Suir on The Quay, near where long-gone Turgesius Tower once marked the northern apex of the Viking triangle is one of Waterford’s finest hostelries. The Granville Hotel is an imposing four-storey Georgian building with an illustrious history. Built in the 18th century as the home of the Newport merchant banking family, the building was sublet to Catholic merchant Philip Long before Thomas Quan and family occupied it in the 1780s. The six surviving children of Quan and his second wife Christina Forstall were born here, including daughter Alicia in 1798. Alicia Quan married Thomas Meagher here in 1820 and in 1823 Thomas Meagher Senior paid £2000 for the Quan holdings as part of the settlement of his son Thomas’s marriage to Alicia Quan.

Before that settlement concluded, the newly married couple initially lived at 51 North King St (now O’Connell St). Eldest son Thomas was born there on August 1, 1821 but died in infancy. Eldest daughter Christina Mary Meagher was also born there in August 1822. Christina later became a nun and served in a convent in Taunton, England. 

Thomas and Alicia moved into Alicia’s family home on the Quay after the settlement concluded and their eldest surviving son was born there the same year. Thomas Francis Meagher’s birthdate is occasionally misrepresented as August 23, 1823, a mistake made by Meagher’s Young Ireland compatriot Duffy in his Four Years of Irish History (1883) and by 1892 biographer Michael Cavanagh. The error has continued into the 20th century in Thomas Keneally’s book The Great Shame and even appears on Meagher’s monument at Antietam battlefield. The correct date is noted on a plaque next to the door of the Granville Hotel erected on the 100 year anniversary of the 1848 rebellion which quotes Meagher’s speech from the dock as he was sentenced to death. It reads “Thomas Francis Meagher: The illustrious ’48 patriot was born in this house on 3rd August 1823 ‘With my country I leave my memory’.” The Waterford Mirror of August 4, 1823 confirms the birthdate with the announcement, “BIRTH, yesterday morning, the lady of Thomas Meagher, jun. Esq. of a son”.

The baby was baptized around the corner in Waterford’s Catholic Cathedral on August 14, 1823, sponsored by his father Thomas Meagher and his aunt Christiana (Christina) Quan. The rising status of Thomas Meagher was delighted by a healthy son and his rising status in the community was confirmed with his election as treasurer of the chamber of commerce and his appointment to Waterford’s grand jury. Thomas Francis’s brother, Henry, was born on January 23, 1825, followed by another daughter, Mary Josephine, who also died in infancy, sometime in 1826. Alicia then gave birth to twin daughters Alicia Catherine and Christianna on February 3, 1827. Christianna died shortly after birth.

An even bigger tragedy befell the Meaghers at the end of that month. Alicia Meagher died on February 28, barely 28 years old, likely from complications of the birth of the twins. Newspapers gave no cause of death but noted her worth and goodness. She was an “amiable and excellent lady” warmly regarded by all who knew her, “being as much and as justly admired for her numerous and sterling virtues, as she was universally loved for her kind, benevolent and truly charitable disposition.” The Mirror praised her “constant and generous” charity for the poor and noted the grief of her “tenderly attached partner” for whom her “premature dissolution is a source of the most poignant affliction”.

The afflicted father enlisted the help of his parents and Alicia’s sister Johana Quan to rear the four young surviving children: eldest daughter Christina, 6, sons Thomas Francis, 4 and Henry, 2 and the surviving newborn twin Alicia. The elder Meaghers sold Ballycanvan House estate in 1829 and Thomas and Mary lived on the Quay with their son Thomas until Mary died in 1831. The deaths continued – surviving twin Alicia, died on July 28, 1834, aged seven. Retired from active trade, Meagher Sr made a will leaving all his property to his son Thomas in trust for Thomas’s children. He died in 1837.

The Meaghers ended their involvement in maritime trade and after Mary Meagher’s death, they moved to fashionable William St. Later still they moved again to number 19, The Mall, next door to the Quan sisters, with Meagher naming his house “Derrynane” in honour of the Kerry home of the Liberator O’Connell. According to Cavanagh, the young boy Thomas Francis received a “rudimentary education” under the “affectionate care of Miss Quan”. This was likely his aunt Christina who later became a nun at Mary Aikenhead’s Sisters of Charity convent on the Mall, established in 1842 with the financial support of Meagher’s father.

The absence of a mother left plenty of time for rambling around the countryside with Mount Misery a favorite haunt, according to Cavanagh. Mount Misery, supposedly named from an unhappy camp in Cromwell’s siege days, overlooked Waterford from the County Kilkenny side and to get there Meagher had to cross the “Old Timbertoes” toll bridge built by Bostonian Lemuel Cox in the late 18th century. The wealthy young Meagher could well afford the halfpenny toll but others could not. Poverty was everywhere in the city and another wealthy Waterford man Edmund Rice (who sold his business interests to Meagher’s grandfather Thomas Quan and like Meagher has a Waterford bridge named for him) had established the Christian Brothers order at Mount Sion school for “the large number of boys who spent their days on the streets, with nowhere to go, no work to sustain them (and who) were a nuisance in most peoples’ eyes.” The young Meagher went to wealthier schools but after Rice died in 1844 he hailed his influence. “There is not a soul instructed, purified, ennobled in those schools of which he has been the Founder that will not be his monument,” Meagher said.

Emigration was high even before the famine. In later years Meagher told the Irish Immigrant Society in Minnesota that he recalled as a young boy seeing an emigrant ship leave Waterford’s Quay. “On the deck of the ship were huddled hundreds of men, women and children… sorrow-stricken and yet hopeful and heroic fugitives from the island that gave them birth.” The scene affected him deeply. “I had heard enough of the cruelty that had for years, been done to Ireland, to know that her people were leaving her, not from choice, but from compulsion… the malignant hostility of laws and practices, devised and enforced for the political subjugation of the country, which compelled them to leave.” That same malignant hostility would eventually compel Thomas Francis Meagher to leave Ireland.

When the Meaghers left their great house on the Quay, they rented it out to Clonmel-based carriage entrepreneur Charles Bianconi. The Italian-Irishman Bianconi converted it to a stagecoach station and adjoining hotel run by a woman named Cummins in the 1830s while her husband Edward acted as Bianconi’s agent. Waterford became the most important outstation for his famous “bian” stagecoaches, Ireland’s most popular public transport before the arrival of the trains. The Cummins’ son Father George Cummins recalled how every day crowds of commercial men and servants bearing cases watched as huge vehicles drew out in front of his mother’s hotel, before the coachman arrived with the horses. “In a second the reins were passed by two attending grooms up to the box and the eager horse rearing with impatience started off amid the plaudits of the crowd. ‘Now for Kilkenny!’ cries out the agent.”

Around the turn of the century Dublin hoteliers, the Granville Company, put up a new building on the site of Cummins Hotel. It was destroyed alongside next door department store Hearne and Co by “devastating fire” in 1915 though all 20 residents were unharmed. The hotel closed down in 1973 for “economic reasons” and remained severely rundown until late 1978 when local hoteliers Liam and Ann Cusack purchased it.

Recognising its history and strategic location, the Cusacks restored the hotel to its former grandeur and reopened it in 1980. Ann Cusack forged relationships with the state of Montana where Meagher died and also helped fund a gravestone for him at the Brooklyn grave of his second wife Elizabeth. In 2021 Ann said recognising and celebrating Meagher’s connection to the building had been “a huge thing” for them and had forged many great friendships with people in Montana. “For so long, nobody outside of historians really knew about Thomas Francis Meagher,” she said. “He was really written out of history despite being the originator of the Irish tricolour and it’s been so important to recognise his contribution to Irish history right here in Waterford.”

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 6. Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator

Detail from a portrait of Daniel O’Connell at Waterford Treasures Museum, Bishop’s Palace. Photo of the painting from the Author’s collection.

British prime minister William Pitt had promised the 1801 Act of Union between Britain and Ireland would lead to Catholic Emancipation. But King George III and Pitt’s ministers vetoed that outcome and two decades later Catholics still could not sit at Westminster. Catholic men could vote since the Relief Act of 1793 (Irish women did not get suffrage until 1918 and even then it was restricted to those 30 years and over) but it was restricted to those who rented land worth over two pounds a year and these “forty shilling freeholders” were considered the political property of their landlords who controlled the seats.

In 1823, the year of Thomas Francis Meagher’s birth, a new organisation called the Catholic Association was founded to assist the struggle of emancipation. The force behind the movement was Daniel O’Connell, the shrewd and pragmatic political leader of Ireland’s Catholics whose influence in the first half of the 19th century was immense. Historian J.H. Whyte called Ireland from 1800-1847 “the age of Daniel O’Connell”. No other half century of Irish history was so dominated by the personality of one man, according to Whyte.

Though born a half century earlier than Meagher in 1775, the two men had many similarities. Both were men of honor from wealthy Catholic families, educated by the Jesuits, and trained to be lawyers before dazzling nationalist politics with the force of their oratory. Unlike the Meaghers, the O’Connells were minor gentry who tenaciously hung on to their land, money and religion during the penal laws era, shielded by the remoteness of their home in south-west Kerry. O’Connell’s father was a modest landowner, grazier, and businessman but within the Iveragh peninsula the family were the leading surviving catholic gentry of old Gaelic stock. O’Connell grew up in Derrynane Abbey, the household of the wealthiest of his father’s brothers, his bachelor uncle Maurice “Hunting Cap” O’Connell. Like Waterford’s “Bullocks” Wyse, Maurice got his colourful nickname for defying absurd penal laws, in his case wearing a huntsman’s velvet cap because he would not pay a tax imposed on beaver hats worn by Irish gentry.

Such unorthodox tactics helped Hunting Cap amass considerable wealth and although he harboured grievances at the misfortunes of Irish Catholics, he was a realist who believed in operating cautiously within the system, a quality his talented nephew inherited. Young Daniel O’Connell was studying at the Jesuit English school at Douai when the French revolution caused Hunting Cap to recall him to London. He left France on January 21, 1793, the same day Louis XVI was beheaded. “I was always in terror lest the scoundrels cut our throats,” O’Connell recalled.

His Jesuit teachers and the violence of the French Revolution made him a permanent enemy of physical force as a method of political action but his time in France also made him a liberal who abhorred slavery and anti-semitism. He studied law and was called to the bar in 1798. He opposed the United Irishmen uprising that year, believing that if Ireland was to achieve self-government, it must do so by legal means. Although O’Connell would become one of the most successful barristers in Ireland, Catholics were still debarred from being judges, high ranking military officers or upper rank civil servants.

In July 1802 he secretly married his distant cousin Mary O’Connell, daughter of a Tralee doctor. Mary was without a dowry and Hunting Cap did not approve of the marriage punishing his nephew in his will leading to lifelong worries about finance. But they loved each other deeply and raised seven children that survived into adulthood. Of these Daniel, John and Maurice followed their father into politics, one of them, John O’Connell, with disastrous consequences.

Daniel O’Connell became increasingly outspoken against the Orange ascendancy in Dublin Castle and in law enforcement throughout the country. O’Connell’s violent language expressed the anger of the Catholic population but it made many enemies, notably Sir Robert Peel, Chief Secretary of Ireland from 1812 to 1818. Peel had strong anti-Catholic attitudes and opposed emancipation. He insisted that Ireland needed a resolute government but his efforts to reform the inefficient Irish administration were frustrated by the venality and nepotism of the Protestant ascendancy. O’Connell had no sympathy, calling him derisively “Orange Peel”. In 1815 O’Connell’s fiery tongue provoked Peel to challenge him to a duel. O’Connell’s distaste for violence did not spread to matters of his own honour and he had already killed a man in another duel in Dublin earlier that year. O’Connell and Peel were scheduled to meet at Ostend but O’Connell was detained by authorities. A second attempt in Kildare was also frustrated by magistrates and the duel did not proceed. 

O’Connell was part of a middle class committee to deal with Catholic grievances but they had little success in their lobbying of political figures. O’Connell transformed the political situation by broadening the base of support for involvement in 1823. O’Connell’s new Catholic Association was a mass movement with the support of local clerics. The movement had a subscription of a penny a month, the “Catholic rent”, a sum so low even the poorest could pay. It soon grew a large financial war-chest and had many thousands of Catholics with a vested financial interest in its success. Protestant authorities feared such bodies and had prescribed them but O’Connell used his broad knowledge of Irish law to get around the bans. In 1825 authorities banned the Association but O’Connell simply founded the New Catholic Association.

The Association’s first success was to convince Catholics to defy their landlords and support sympathetic Protestants in four electorates -including Waterford – in the 1826 general election. Waterford’s MP was conservative George Beresford, whose powerful Ascendancy family held the seat for generations and whose “tentacles, like those of a giant octopus, were everywhere”. In 1826 a Waterford committee led by Thomas Meagher and lawyer Thomas Wyse (descendent of Bullocks Wyse and distant relation to the Meaghers) convinced liberal Protestant Henry Villiers Stuart to stand against Beresford.

The campaign was well organised and disciplined. Wyse and Meagher put together the first Irish political machine dispatching Catholic Association cash and benefits for electoral support and breaking down the electorate into baronies to report on local concerns, methods impressed Tammany Hall Democrats would later copy in New York. Tenants openly defied their landlords with a petition saying they were “electors of a free state, entrusted with the Franchise not for the exclusive benefit of the landlord but for our own benefit and that of our fellow Countrymen.” Wyse’s Italian-born wife, Laetitia Bonaparte-Wyse, a reputed favourite niece of Napoleon, did her bit by deliberately allowing her orange footwear go through the mud in a calculated insult to the Tory Beresford. The meaning of her gesture was not lost on delighted Waterford ladies. Stuart won the Waterford election but with voting done in public, the vindictive Beresford evicted the tenants who voted against him. As secretary of the local Catholic Association, Thomas Meagher used Waterford funds to compensate them. 

Encouraged by this success, O’Connell was persuaded to put his own name forward for a 1828 by-election in Clare. As a Catholic he could not sit in parliament but there was no law preventing him from standing. He was duly elected presenting a problem for prime minister the Duke of Wellington and O’Connell’s old enemy Robert Peel, who was now home secretary. Neither Wellington nor Peel wanted emancipation but neither wanted a fight with O’Connell’s formidable organisation. They were also unsure if they could count on the support of the large number of Catholics in the police and army. With a slight majority in the House of Commons for emancipation, Wellington and Peel pushed the act through parliament in 1829. To placate grumbling conservatives, the government had a sting in the tail, raising the property qualification to vote to ten pounds, disenfranchising an angry class of forty-shilling freeholders who achieved it and reducing the Irish electorate from 60,000 to 20,000. Nevertheless, the act enabled Catholics to become MPs, cabinet ministers, judges, generals and admirals. The “Liberator” O’Connell took his place in Westminster as an Irish hero, widely admired across Europe and America.

Though O’Connell immediately began a new campaign to repeal the 1801 Act of Union, this was always a harder hill to climb. Unlike in Emancipation O’Connell faced resolute opponents and a House of Commons almost unanimously against it. Moreover, the cause was rejected by most Irish Protestants who believed the Act of Union was their safeguard in a country where they were a minority of the population. O’Connell wanted good relations with Protestants, but he was “above all a Catholic leader, playing the Catholic card”, as Roy Foster put it. 

O’Connell never defined Repeal with precision, describing it merely as “an Irish parliament, British connection, one king, two legislatures” and he often abandoned or deferred the cause if some other preferment was available. The Whigs won the 1830 election, partly in response to Tory infighting over emancipation and O’Connell threw his support behind the new government, believing they were more sympathetic to Irish reforms. O’Connell helped force through the 1832 Great Reform Act to extend voting rights and remove rotten boroughs. In 1835 he signed the informal Lichfield House Compact with Whig leader Lord John Russell in which O’Connell promised to stop repeal agitation in favour of further parliamentary and municipal reforms. That same year he helped force through a compromise that changed hated tithe laws (where Catholic farmers were forced to support Protestant Church ministers) into a more palatable, though still expensive, rent-charge.

O’Connell and his MPs enjoyed the patronage of high office though he could see it was slowly alienating him from the people. By the end of the decade he could also see the Whigs were about to lose power and he swung back towards Repeal creating the Precursor Society, later called the Loyal National Repeal Association. In 1841 the Conservatives won the election under Peel. With his arch-enemy now prime minister, O’Connell said an Irish parliament was needed because only Irishmen could solve the political, religious, and economic problems which prevented their country from keeping up with the rest of western Europe. While the Famine would eventually prove him right, O’Connell was dead by then and so was the idea of repeal. Nevertheless in the early 1840s he collected a repeal rent which realised even larger sums than the old “Catholic rent” with the help of Catholic clergy, many of whom became his organisers. Thomas Meagher and his newly returned son from England, Thomas Francis, were eager supporters of the campaign.