The plunderer knows that nothing kills the wrath of the Irishman so much as trust in his honor. The Cromwellian landlord has an heir born to him, and he goes to the tenant O’Donovan and tells him Lady Carberry is in very delicate health, and would take it as an everlasting favor if Mrs. O’Donovan would take the baby from her for a short time. Mrs. O’Donovan has had a baby of her own about the same time that Lady Carberry had her baby. Mrs. O’Donovan takes the lord’s baby, and brings it up with her own. The two grow up as “foster brothers.” The lord had heard that O’Donovan had been plotting to kill him for being in possession of the lands of the O’Donovans. But now the lord sleeps soundly at night, for he feels O’Donovan’s wrath is paralyzed by this confidence in his honor that the lord has shown in entrusting to his keeping the life of his son and heir. The young lord and the young O’Donovan grow up to be men. They are foster-brothers, “dearer to each other than full brothers,” as those Anglo-Irish story-writers say, who have no conception of Irish manhood or Irish spirit, and who write as if the Irishman and his wife felt it an honor to suckle the Sassenach robber’s child. No Irishman of the old stock feels such a thing as that an honor to his house, though the conditions of slavery may compel him to suffer it. That great-grandfather of mine that I have spoken of had six sons. I have named the six families into which they married. The mother of one of these families had one time nursed the young landlord of their land, and it was held to be a stain upon the name of a Rossa to make a matrimonial connection with any one who had an English landlord for a foster-brother.
How is it that you never read of the foster-brother’s coming into existence by his being the Irish boy who got from the English mother the suck that did not naturally belong to him. It is—that it is the Irishman who is in the condition of slavery, and that the English breed in Ireland would consider themselves degraded and disgraced at nursing an Irishman.
The second trick of the two tricks I have spoken of is the trick of sponsorship. The lands of the Maguires are confiscated, and are made over to an English surveyor who gets the title of Lord Leitrim. Young Andy Maguire has the name of being a Rapparee; he is out on the hills at night. Leitrim is afraid of him, and can’t sleep the nights well. Mrs. Maguire has given birth to a daughter, and the lord asks that he may be allowed the honor of standing god-father for the child. Then, he makes the child a present of some of the old Maguire lands that lie around the town of Tempo.
This is making a little restitution to the Maguires, and it appeases their wrath a little. Andrew Maguire of Tempo, living at No. 242 East 14th Street, is one of the most decent Irishman living in New York City, to day. He will not say I am far astray in what I an telling you. I said Lord Carberry was not our landlord direct in Ross. No, the mother of Dr. Daniel Donovan was our landlord; it was for her Garrett Barry used to collect the rent, and the story I brought from childhood with me about how she became landlord is that Lord Carberry stood sponsor for one of the O’Donovan-Island children, and made it a birthday present of the town and townland of Ross. That’s the childhood story that got into my head. It is, perhaps, possible to reconcile it in some shape with the following book story that I read in “Sketches in Carberry, by Dr. Daniel Donovan, Jr., published by McGlashin & Gill, Dublin, 1876.”
“In 1642 MacCarthy, of Benduff, captured the town of Ross, and laid siege to Rathbarry Castle (the ancient seat of the Barrys in Carberry), now Castle Freke.… Ross was garrisoned in the time of James II. by the Irish forces under General McCarthy, and was reconnoitered by a detachment of William III.’s army.”
“Large military barracks were formerly erected at Ross in close proximity to the site of St. Fachtna’s simonastery. These barracks, where so many warlike garrisons had been stationed from time to time during the stirring events of the last two centuries and which changed occupants as often as the fortunes of war veered from one side to the other, are now in a semi-ruinous condition. Here lived formerly, after the military had evacuated the place, a branch of the O’Donovan family (the Island branch), to which the town of Ross Carberry belonged, under a lease, from the end of the 18th century, up to within the last ten years; and here also was born in December, 1807, Dr. Donovan, Senior, of Skibbereen.” My childhood history is, that Lord Carberry stood god-father for that Dr. Donovan’s mother and made her a present of the town and townlands of Ross, and it is very likely there was a compromise otherwise of some kind, wherein my people came in for shelter, for, whereas they were hunted from place to place, since Rossmore was confiscated on them, the six sons of my great-grandfather now came into possession of about half the town and townland of Ross. And they must have been respected people, too, because those six brothers got six women to marry them who belonged to six of the best families in the barony. That is one thing that stood to me in my battle through life—my family record. I never was rich; I never will be rich; but I got some of the best and handsomest girls in the country to marry me—simply on account of myself and of my name.
One little story more will end this genealogy business of mine.
When I was in Cork city, in June, 1894, I was staying at the Victoria Hotel. Crowds of people were calling to see me. Councilor Dick Cronin spoke to me on a Monday morning and said: “Rossa, I have to take you away from these people, or they will talk you to death, and you won’t be able to give your lecture to-morrow night. Here, I have a carriage at the door, and we’ll drive down to Fort Camden.” I went with him. Passing by Ringaskiddy I told him I had some cousins living around there, and I’d like he would inquire for them. “Ask the oldest inhabitant,” said I, “where is a Miss Nagle who taught school here forty or fifty years ago.” He made the inquiry, and we found her living under the name of Mrs. Murphy, the mother of the present schoolmaster. I made myself known to her. I was her mother’s sister’s grandson. I asked her if there was any one around living belonging to another sister of her mother, that was married near Cork to a man named Hawkes. She said there was a grandson of hers, named McDonald, who kept chinaware stores, on the Coal Quay, Cork. I went to McDonnell next day. He was at his home in Sunday’s Well. I did not go further to see him. His bookkeeper gave me this business card. “John McDonnell (late T. & P. McDonnell), earthenware, china and glass merchants, Nos. 58 and 59 Cornmarket Street, Cork. Established over 50 years. (127 Sunday’s Well.)”
Mr. James Scanlan, the wholesale meat-merchant of No. 614 West 40th Street New York, is reading these “Recollections.” His grandfather was one of that O’Donovan-Baaid family to whom my grandmother belonged. This is his letter: