CHAPTER VII
The Peace of Paris—Agrarian Warfare in Ireland—Judicial Murder of Father Sheehy—All who Swore Against Him Die Violent Deaths—Societies
THE Peace of Paris, 1763, brought the Seven Years’ War to a conclusion on the Continent of Europe. Frederick the Great retained Silesia, formerly an Austrian province, to which he had no just title; and there were other territorial changes of less importance. England had triumphed over the French interest in America; for Wolfe’s victory of the Plains of Abraham, at Quebec, in September, 1759, decided the game of war in favor of the British, although other battles were fought by the opposing forces after that event.
Agrarian oppression in Ireland, particularly in the South, had caused the peasantry to organize themselves into secret societies for mutual protection. It was thus that the famous “White Boys” of the last century—so-called from wearing linen shirts, or white woolen jackets, over their other clothes, so as to give them a uniform appearance—came into existence. Their methods were crude, wild, often fierce and sometimes cruel. They defied the law because they had found no element of protection in it. Rather had they found it, as administered by the landlord oligarchy, in whose hands it was placed by the evil genius of England, an instrument of intolerable oppression. No justice was to be obtained by any appeal they might make to their tyrants, and so they resorted to what an Irish orator has called “the wild justice of revenge.” As usual, some naturally bad men found their way into these organizations, and often vented their malice on individuals in the name of the trampled people. The landlords took advantage of the commission of crime to get up another “Popish plot” scare, and succeeded in making shallow and timid people accept the slander as truth. The real object of the “White Boys” was to secure low rentals on tillage land, and to preserve “commonage rights”—that is, grazing lands in common at a nominal cost, or else free, something that had long been the usage—for their stock. The landlords, not satisfied with levying exorbitant rents, and grown, if possible, harder and more greedy than ever, finally abolished and fenced in “the commons.” This action aroused the fury of the peasantry, particularly in the Munster counties, and they collected in large bodies and demolished the landlords’ fences. This gave the tyrants an excuse to call for military aid—the argument being that the people were in arms against “the crown,” which, of course, was false. The poor peasantry struck at their nearest and most visible oppressors, and never thought about “the crown.” The king was, to them, very like a myth. It would seem that many of the poorer Protestants joined with the Catholics in the demonstration against the inclosures, which, of course, showed the absurdity of the “Popish plot” story. Still, the affair was not to terminate until it begot a cruel tragedy. The parish priest of Clogheen, County Tipperary, in 1765, was the Rev. Nicholas Sheehy, a high-minded and saintly man, whose heart was deeply touched by the sufferings of the poor tenants, whose ardent and eloquent champion he became. The Cromwellian “aristocracy” of the county, headed by the Bagnals, the Maudes, the Bagwells, the Tolers, and a parson named Hewitson, resolved to get rid of Father Sheehy, and only waited for a good chance to insnare him in their toils. Two years previous to the date already given, they had had the young priest arrested on a charge of swearing in “White Boys,” but, because of insufficient evidence, he was acquitted. Soon after he was released, one Bridge, who had been a principal witness against him, mysteriously disappeared. The oligarchs had the priest arrested immediately on a charge of murder. The witnesses employed to appear against him were a horse-stealer, named Toohey, a vagrant youth named Lonergan, and an immoral woman, named Dunlea. He had lain in Clonmel jail, heavily ironed, for several months before he was brought to trial. The prosecution did not have their witnesses fully instructed. At last, March 12, 1765, Father Sheehy was brought up for trial. He succeeded in proving an alibi, but that was of no avail. His destruction was determined upon, and, on March 15, he suffered execution by hanging and subsequent decapitation. This atrocious murder aroused the anger of the country. Protestants and Catholics alike joined in execrating the crime. Yet, he was not the only victim. In May of the same year, Edward Sheehy, a cousin, and two other young farmers, were convicted and hanged on the same testimony that had sent Father Sheehy to his untimely grave. McGee says: “The fate of their enemies is notorious; with a single exception, they met deaths violent, loathsome, and terrible. Maude died insane, Bagwell in idiocy; one of the jury committed suicide, another was found dead in a privy, a third was killed by his horse, a fourth was drowned, a fifth shot, and so through the entire list. Toohey was hanged for felony, the prostitute, Dunlea, fell into a cellar and was killed, and the lad, Lonergan, after enlisting as a soldier, died of a loathsome disease in a Dublin infirmary.”
Another attempt at persecution of the priests was made in 1767, but Edmund Burke, the illustrious statesman, and other liberal Protestants, came to the rescue with funds for the defence of the accused, and the oligarchy were unable to secure the conviction of their intended victims. The fate of the perjured informers, who swore away the lives of Father Sheehy and his fellow-sufferers, was well known throughout the country, and, no doubt, had a wholesome effect on other wretches who might have been bribed into following their example.
The “White Boys” were not the only secret organization formed in Ireland at that period. Some were composed of Protestants, mostly of the Presbyterian sect, who combated in Ulster the exactions of the landlords. They bore such names as “Hearts of Steel,” because they were supposed to show no mercy to “the petty tyrants of their fields”; “Oak Boys,” because they carried oaken boughs, or wore oak leaves in their hats. The “Peep o’ Day Boys” were political rather than agrarian, and professed the peculiar principles afterward adopted by the Orange Association. They confined themselves mainly to keeping up the anniversary of the Boyne and making occasional brutal attacks on defenceless Catholics. The respectable Protestant element kept scrupulously away from association with these rude fanatics. The successors of the “White Boys” in Munster were the equally dreaded “Terry Alts,” who existed down to a very recent period, and belonged, mainly, to the County Tipperary. Like the “White Boys,” they raided the houses of “the gentry” and their retainers for arms, and severe, often fatal, conflicts resulted from their midnight visitations. They also killed, from time to time, obnoxious landlords and their agents, and were hanged by the score in retaliation. The government was not over-particular regarding their guilt or innocence. The object was to avenge the slain land-grabbers, and also to “strike terror.” As usual, many base informers were found to betray their fellows, but, in justice to the “White Boys” and “Terry Alts,” it may be stated that the betrayers of their secrets were mostly Castle spies, or detectives, employed for the purpose of entrapping the unwary. Very few of the regular members, who lived among their own relatives, accepted blood money. In many cases, the peasantry committed unnecessary acts of violence, but, in general, they only visited with severe punishment landlords or their agents who were notorious evictors, or farmers who “took the land” over the heads of the evicted tenants.
The Catholic Church was the consistent opponent of the agrarian organizations, because of the mutual bloodshed between them and the landlord element, but, much as the Catholic peasants held their bishops and priests in reverence, the admonitions of the latter had small effect on the young men of their flocks while wholesale evictions were in progress. The “boys,” with rough logic, would say, among themselves: “The clergy mean well, but we had better be hanged than starved to death, and, besides, revenge on our tyrants is sweet.” There is hardly anything in Old World history more ghastly than the long, desultory, and deadly war of tenant against landlord in Ireland, from the days of George II to the latter part of Victoria’s reign. It is a chapter we gladly turn away from, with the remark that the cruel oligarchy, who wantonly provoked a naturally humane people to crime, were infinitely more criminal than the poor, oppressed peasants they made desperate.