“A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love.”—Yeats.
“LOVE and pain and death”—these, in the final analysis, are the substructure of life, and when some great force tears apart the concealing surface, the revelation which makes plain one of them, discovers the inevitable comradeship of the others. So when the mighty cataclysm of ’Ninety-Eight revealed the Pain and Death which are two of the foundations of life, there was revealed also, with a clearness which ordinary times know not, the third foundation, Love.
When we think of Betsy Grey, it is as the heroine of a very tender and sorrowful love-story. She was the daughter of a well-to-do farmer called Hans Grey, and was born near Granshaw, a few miles from Bangor, Co. Down. Her mother died when she was young, and her father, anxious to make up the loss as far as in him lay, sent his beautiful girl to one of the best boarding schools of the time. She returned, a lovely, high-spirited, clever, thoughtful girl, extremely well-educated and accomplished, and ardently interested in the burning questions of the day. Willie Boal, a young farmer of the district, speedily lost his heart to his charming neighbour, and when he found that his patriotic dreams for Ireland were shared by her, his love quickened and deepened. Willie Boal and Betsy’s brother, George Grey, were sworn United Men, and it is believed that Betsy, like so many other women of those times, had also taken the test.
When the men of Down took the field in June, ’98, Betsy sought a place in their embattled ranks. Father and brother and lover set themselves to oppose her, and, as the best means of escaping her importunities, George and Willie stole away to the muster at Ballynahinch, without letting her know of their departure. When she discovered it, she went out into the yard, yoked her mare to a cart, filled the latter, with bread, butter and cheese, and gallantly set off unaccompanied. She arrived at the hill of Ednavady on the night of June the 12th, and the next day took part in the battle. The popular memory has preserved a vision of her, a bright-faced, beautiful girl, dressed in green silk, mounted on her gallant mare, and brandishing her burnished sword above her head, while side by side with Munroe she led one victorious charge after another.
Unfortunately the success attained by the contingents on her side of the field was not general, and the close of the battle saw the patriots routed from the field.
Betsy, in company with her brother, and her sweetheart, gained a rough tract of country, all broken with rocks and furze. Here they were overtaken by a party of Annahilt yeomen, and all three ruthlessly butchered.
The bodies lay there all day, but at nightfall, the wife of the farmer on whose land the tragedy had occurred, stole out with her little son—and kind and reverent hands laid Betsy with her brother and lover in their grave “in the vale of Ballycreen,” which even to-day is a place of patriotic pilgrimage.