“Why, the Prince of Inismore, to be sure, jewel, whose great forefathers once owned the half of the barony, from the Red Bog to the sea-coast. Och! it is a long story, but I heard my grandfather tell it a thousand times, how a great Prince of Inismore in the wars of Queen Elizabeth, had here a castle and a great tract of land on the borders, of which he was deprived, as the story runs, becaise he would neither cut his glibbs, shave his upper lip, nor shorten his shirt; * and so he was driven, with the rest of us beyond the pale. The family, however, after a while, flourished greater nor ever. Och, and it is themselves that might, for they were true Milesians bread and born, every mother’s soul of them. O not a drop of Strongbonean flowed in their Irish veins, agrah!
* From the earliest settlement of the English in this
country, an inquisitorial persecution had been carried on
against the national costume. In the reign of Henry V. there
was an act passed against even the English colonists wearing
a whisker on the upper lip, like the Irish; and in 1616, the
Lord Deputy, in his instructions to the Lord President and
Council, directed, that such as appeared in the Irish robes
or mantles, should be punished by fine and imprisonment.
“Well, as I was after telling your Honour, the family flourished, and beat all before them, for they had an army of galloglasses at their back, * until the Cromwellian wars broke out, and those same cold-hearted Presbyterians, battered the fine old ancient castle of Inismore, and left in the condition it now stands; and what was worse nor that, the poor old Prince was put to death in the arms of his fine young son, who tried to save him, and that by one of Cromwell’s English Generals, who received the town lands of Inismore, which lie near Bally————, as his reward. Now this English General who murdered the Prince, was no other than the ancestor of my Lord, to whom these estates descended from father to son. Ay, you may well start, Sir, it was a woful piece of business; for of all their fine estates, nothing was left to the Princes of Inismore, but the ruins of their old castle, and the rocks that surround it; except this tight little bit of an estate here, on which the father of the present Prince built this house; becaise his Lady, with whom he got a handsome fortune, and who was descended from the Kings of Connaught, took a dislike to the castle; the story going that it was haunted by the murdered Prince; and what with building of this house, and living like an Irish Prince, as he was every inch of him, and spending 3000 l. a year out of 300 l., when he died (and the sun never shone on such a funeral; the whiskey ran about like ditch water, and the country was stocked with pipes and tobacco for many a long year after. For the present Prince, his son, would not be a bit behind his father in any thing, and so signs on him, for he is not worth one guinea this blessed day, Christ save him;)—well, as I was saying, when he died, he left things in a sad way, which his son is not the man to mend, for he was the spirit of a king, and lives in as much state as one to this day.”
* The second order of military in Ireland.
“But where, where does he live?” interrupted I, with breathless impatience.
“Why,” continued this living chronicle, in the true spirit of Irish replication, “he did live there in that Lodge, as they call it now, and in that room where my Lord keeps his books, was our young Princess born; her father never had but her, and loves her better than his own heart’s blood, and well he may, the blessing of the Virgin Mary and the Twelve Apostles light on her sweet head. Well, the Prince would never let it come near him, that things were not going on well, and continued to take at great rents, farms that brought him in little; for being a Prince and a Milesian, it did not become him to look after such matters, and every thing was left to stewards and the like, until things coming to the worst, a rich English gentleman, as it was said, come over here and offered the Prince, through his steward, a good round sum of money on this place, which the Prince, being harrassed by his spalpeen creditors, and wanting a little ready money more than any other earthly thing, consented to receive; the gentleman sending him word he should have his own time; but scarcely was the mortgage a year old, when this same Englishman, (Oh, my curse lie about him, Christ pardon me,) foreclosed it, and the fine old Prince not having as much as a shed to shelter his gray hairs under, was forced to fit up part of the old ruined castle, and open those rooms which it had been said were haunted. Discharging many of his old servants, he was accompanied to the castle by the family steward, the fosterers, the nurse * the harper, and Father John, the chaplain.
* The custom of retaining the nurse who reared the
children, has ever been, and is still in force among the
most respectable families in Ireland, as it is still in
modern, and was formerly in ancient Greece, and they are
probably both derived from the same origin. We read, that
when Rebecca left her father’s house to marry Isaac at
Beersheba, the nurse was sent to accompany her. But in
Ireland, not only the nurse herself, but her husband and
children are objects of peculiar regard and attention, and
are called fosterers. The claims of these fosterers
frequently descend from generation to generation, and the
tie which unite? them is indissoluble.
“Och, it was a piteous sight the day he left this: he was leaning on the Lady Glorvina’s arm as he walked out to the chaise, ‘James Tyral,’ says he to me in Irish, for I caught his eye; ‘James Tyral,’ but he could say no more, for the old tenants kept crying about him, and he put his mantle to his eyes and hurried into the chaise; the Lady Glorvina kissing her hand to us all, and crying bitterly till she was out of sight. But then, Sir, what would you have of it; the Prince shortly after found out that this same Mr. Mortgagee, was no other than a spalpeen steward of Lord M————‘s. It was thought he would have run mad when he found that almost the last acre of his hereditary lands was in the possession of the servant of his hereditary enemy; for so deadly is the hatred he bears to my Lord, that upon my conscience, I believe the young Prince who held the bleeding body of his murdered father in his arms, felt not greater for the murderer, than our Prince does for that murder’s descendant.
“Now my Lord is just such a man as God never made better, and wishing with all the veins in his heart to serve the old Prince, and do away all difference between them, what does he do, jewel, but writes him a mighty pretty letter, offering this house and a part of the lands a present. O! divil a word of lie I’m after telling you; but what would you have of it, but this offer sets the Prince madder than all; for you know that this was an insult on his honour, which warmed every drop of Milesian blood in his body for he would rather starve to death all his life, than have it thought he would be obligated to any body at all at all for wherewithal to support him; so with that the Prince writes him a letter: it was brought by the old steward, who knew every line of the contents of it, though divil a line in it but two, and that same was but one and a half, as one may say, and this it was, as the old steward told me:
“The son of the son of the son’s son of Bryan, Prince of Inismore, can receive no favour from the descendant of his ancestor’s murderer.”