On This Day

Irish Histories from Drivetime in RTÉ Radio 1

Myles Dungan

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781848404854
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

In this entertaining and engaging book, based on the popular 'On This Day' segment from Drivetime on RTÉ Radio 1, Myles Dungan delivers little-known episodes from the history of Ireland, and Irish people at home and abroad, bringing fresh perspectives on the lives of both the renowned and the notorious. The book features a diverse mix of Irish luminaries, from giants of Irish history such as Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Collins and Grace O'Malley, to literary legends Brendan Behan, W. B. Yeats, Francis Ledwidge and Maria Edgeworth to Cork-born champion of the working man, Mary Harris, a.k.a. 'Mother Jones', as well as an array of rebels, courtesans, composers and bandits. Featuring pieces from as early as the thirteenth century and from as late as the mid twentieth century, this distinctive work is an original and accessible account of the trivial and tremendous moments from Irish history.

October

"I say old man would you mind ? Hand it over"

23 October 1641
The Beginning of the
1641 Rebellion

It was a co-ordinated attempt at a coup d’état – designed to use the element of surprise and gain a bloodless victory, but bloodless it certainly wasn’t. The 1641 Rebellion has gone down as one of the most horrifying in the long history of Irish rebellions.

The idea was to seize Dublin Castle while taking military action elsewhere around the country. A plan was formulated by the Leinster chieftain Rory O’Moore and executed by the Ulster warlord Phelim O’Neill. It just didn’t work. The rebels failed to take the Castle because their plan had been betrayed to the authorities by one of the many informers in that same long history of Irish rebellion, in this instance one Owen O’Connolly, a Catholic convert to Protestantism.

Why did the Catholic Irish stage a rebellion in 1641? As usual there was a multitude of reasons, including political, social, economic and cultural.

The political situation in England, where King Charles I was at loggerheads with his parliament and the Scots over issues of religion and sovereignty, impacted on Ireland as well. Scotland was defying the monarchy and the English parliament was refusing to grant money to the King to raise an army to put down the stroppy northerners. A proposal to raise an Irish Catholic army to put manners on Scotland instead gave rise to anxiety in England, as well as to suggestions that it was time the English put manners on the uppity Irish again.

Allied to that was resentment on the part of those dispossessed in the plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many Irish Catholic landowners had been displaced by English Protestants. They, not unnaturally, wanted their lands returned, by fair means or foul. Many also wanted their language and religion back – rebels in Co. Cavan, for example, rose, as they put it, in the name of religion and banned the use of the English language in the county.

Even the Little Ice Age played a part. This period of global cooling was especially severe in the seventeenth century and had an impact on Irish harvests. Irish Catholic grandees who had actually managed to retain their lands were on the verge of bankruptcy. With interest rates as high as thirty per cent, many were in a state worse than debt. Phelim O’Neill and Rory O’Moore were amongst those who were liable to lose their lands to their creditors.

Failure to take Dublin Castle was counteracted to some extent by success across Ulster, the scene of the most successful and disruptive plantation in the early 1600s. That initial success, however, led to one of the most distressing and counter-productive pogroms ever unleashed in this country as settlers were violently dispossessed by the prior owners of their lands. The 1641 massacres in Ulster, recounted ex post facto and recorded in hundreds of depositions now stored in Trinity College, Dublin, were predictable and horrendous, and were used to justify the subsequent merciless revenge of Cromwell’s forces in Ireland and an Ulster Protestant siege mentality.

No one knows exactly how many Ulster Protestants were slaughtered in 1641. English Cromwellian propagandists came up with the ludicrous but provocative figure of two hundred thousand. In the mid seventeenth century that figure would have been greater than the entire Protestant population of Ulster. More considered estimates put direct killings at around four thousand with a total of ten to twelve thousand deaths attributable to murder, disease and hypothermia. The actual figures are probably less important than the profound psychological impact of the slaughter in places like Portadown. There, more than one hundred Protestants were forced into the River Bann where they drowned, were shot or died of exposure. This was, in part at least, in retaliation for the massacre of Catholics by settlers after the defeat of the rebel forces at Lisnagarvey in Co. Antrim.

In 1662 the Irish parliament decreed that 23 October was to be observed as a day of thanksgiving for the deliverance of Protestant Ulster from the hands of their murderous Catholic neighbours. Annual church services would remind Protestants of the 1641 massacres for another century and more.

The 1641 Rebellion, in which the status of non-combatant appears not to have existed, began three hundred and seventy-four years ago, on this day.

Broadcast 23 October 2015

17 October 1738
The Loathsome Aristocrat,
Arthur Rochfort, Fights a Duel

In eighteenth-century Ireland, if you considered yourself to be a gentleman and you were insulted by someone of similar status you didn’t a) take it lying down or, b) bring them to court and sue them – you challenged them to a duel and tried to shoot or stab them to death.

One of the more quarrelsome gentlemen of the first half of the 1700s was Arthur Rochfort, a Westmeath grandee whose family had occupied land around Mullingar since the thirteenth century. The town of Rochfortbridge is called after the Rochforts.

Arthur Rochfort was a Justice of the Peace, a man who exercised considerable power over the lesser orders from the bench. In 1737 he was challenged to a duel by one Thomas Nugent. Nugent’s beef was that Rochfort had jailed one of his servants for poaching and carrying arms. Proper order really. Nothing came of that particular challenge because the authorities got wind of it and prosecuted Nugent before he could do any damage. They weren’t having one of their magistrates shot up by an argumentative aristocrat.

Rochfort, however, did make it into the ‘lists’ (a form of medieval hand-to-hand combat) the following year when he had another quarrel, this one with an influential member of the Freemasons, Dillon Hampson Pollard. In the shoot-out that followed the challenge, Rochfort came off better, hitting his opponent in the stomach. Fortunately for him, J. P. Pollard recovered. He died of natural causes two years later.

Rochfort’s own end was quite ignominious. As it happened he was the proud owner of two irascible, litigious and obnoxious brothers, Robert and George. Robert would go on to become the 1st Earl of Belvedere and build Belvedere House, located outside Mullingar.

Robert had married a beautiful young Dublin heiress, Mary Molesworth. They didn’t get on – few people did see eye to eye with the arrogant future Lord Belvedere – but Mary produced three children for him before he became bored with her and arbitrarily accused her of having an affair with Arthur. Arthur denied all carnal knowledge of the alleged relationship. However, either cowed or convinced by friends that an admission of guilt would get her a divorce, Mary admitted adultery. For her supposed sins she was incarcerated for most of the rest of her life in one of the houses on the Belvedere estate while Arthur was forced to flee the country. When he came back, Robert sued him for criminal conversation anyway, won a massive judgment of two thousand pounds and when that was not forthcoming had his brother committed to the Marshalsea Debtors prison in Dublin, where he died. They took their sibling rivalries very seriously in the eighteenth century.

Later on, the charming Robert fell out with his other brother George. The latter had the effrontery to build a bigger and finer mansion within sight of Belvedere House. Robert erected a folly – looking something like a ruined monastery – to cut off his view of George’s new manor. It became known, and still is known as, ‘the Jealous Wall’. Neither Robert nor George, two utterly disagreeable gentlemen, were ever heard to express any regret at the passing of their brother Arthur.

Incidentally, among the apparent descendants of the Rochforts is a certain former Kerry TD, the late, and extremely agreeable, Jackie Healy Rae.

Arthur Rochfort almost killed Dillon Hampson Pollard in a duel, two hundred and seventy-six years ago, on this day.

Broadcast 17 October 2014

3 October 1750
The Hanging of James McLaine, Gentleman Highwayman

He’s had the privilege of being played on-screen by Johnny Lee Miller, but the bad fortune to have had a losing encounter with the hangman in order to earn that distinction.

The eighteenth-century ‘gentleman’ James McLaine was born in Monaghan in 1724. His father was from a God-fearing Scottish Presbyterian family. His brother was a churchman. But James was neither God-fearing nor churchy. He was a talented and celebrated eighteenth-century mugger – a toff, but a glorified robber nonetheless.

He was known as ‘the gentleman highwayman’, though much of his best work was actually done in Hyde Park, which was a lot more lawless in the 1740s than it is today. His accomplice in crime was William Plunkett, an impecunious apothecary – that’s a chemist in eighteenth-century language. Both became the anti-heroes of a 1999 movie, Plunkett and Macleane, starring Miller and Robert Carlyle as the eponymous outlaws.

McLaine moved from Monaghan to Dublin as a young man and succeeded in spending whatever money he had been given by his father to set up as a merchant. It all went on wine, women and song. Mostly wine and women, actually. Having rapidly worn out his welcome and line of credit in Dublin he made for London and quickly fell into his new line of work with his equally felonious business partner.

The two were known as the ‘gentlemen highwaymen’ because of the good manners with which they went about the business of taking other people’s money and valuables, right down to their often elaborate waistcoats. Noblesse oblige was the order of the day when they robbed people like the writer and Whig politician Horace Walpole, son of a prime minister, and Alexander Montgomerie, 10th Earl of Eglinton, a Scottish peer who introduced James Boswell to London.

So anxious was McLaine to preserve the image of fastidiously courteous conduct that when a pistol was discharged in the robbery of Walpole he actually wrote a letter to the owner of the magnificent Strawberry Hill mansion, insisting that it had been an accident and offering to return all the goods stolen for forty pounds.

The money raised in the numerous robberies conducted by the two highwaymen was quickly spent in maintaining the opulent lifestyle to which they became accustomed.

The pair’s final robbery, however, turned out to be a waistcoat too far. When McLaine tried to pawn the richly appointed garment stolen from the occupant of a stage coach, it was recognised and the potential purchaser shopped the genteel outlaw to claim the price on his head.

McLaine’s trial – he was found guilty without the jury leaving the courtroom – caused something of sensation and he was reported to have been visited by up to three thousand people while awaiting execution. The latter figure is highly unlikely, as is the suggestion that he was the basis for the character of MacHeath in the Beggar’s Opera. In the latter instance, he would have been only four years of age when John Gay wrote the piece.

For the record, William Plunkett escaped scot free for his part in McLaine’s crimes and is reported to have fled to the USA and died there at the age of one hundred.

The Irish-born, London-based highwayman James McLaine was twenty-six years old when he was hanged by the neck until dead, two hundred and sixty-four years ago, on this day.

Broadcast 3 October 2014

30 October 1751
The Birth of Playwright and Politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan

He was one of the most outstanding English ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Foreword
• January
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December