The romance of Surgeon Lawless, the friend of John Sheares, and Miss Evans does not, strictly speaking, belong to ’98. But it is connected with it by sufficiently close ties to justify its inclusion here.
William Lawless, a distinguished Dublin surgeon, and a relative of Lord Cloncurry’s, was a close friend of Lord Edward’s, and like the Sheareses, whose neighbour and intimate he was, became very active in the Cause after the arrest of the leaders at Bond’s on March 12th. On the Saturday on which Lord Edward was arrested (May 19) Surgeon Lawless received information at the College of Surgeons from his colleague, Surgeon Dease, that he was about to be taken up. He accordingly made arrangements to escape to France. He is said to have made his way on board a vessel in the disguise of a butcher’s man carrying a side of beef, and in this capacity met Major Sirr himself on the quays!
Arrived in France, he entered the Army and made a great career for himself in the Napoleonic campaigns. Miles Byrne makes frequent mention of him, and it is to Byrne we owe our knowledge of the pretty romance of his marriage.
Among the Irish exiles then resident in Paris the family of Hampden Evans[[103]] was very prominent. As Mr. Evans had a large fortune, and was hospitality itself, he loved to gather his fellow-countrymen around him; and among those who visited his house frequently was William Lawless. With him Mary Evans fell in love; but so well did she keep her secret that neither he nor any of her family suspected it, and he marched away with his regiment without a word of affection on either side. Shortly after came the news of the siege of Flushing by the English, with the destruction of the Irish battalion defending it, and the death of its Commander, William Lawless. “Mary Evans fell ill, and for more than six weeks her life was despaired of.... Mrs. Tone being in the habit of going to Mr. Hampden Evans’s house, and being on the most intimate terms with his daughters, might have suspected something of Miss Evans’s secret, but this secret was only divulged when she heard the man she loved was no more. She then told her mother, saying life to her now was not worth preserving, and wondering how Mrs. Tone could have survived the death of her heroic husband....”
[103]. Hampden Evans was an exile of ’98.
But Commandant Lawless was not dead; and one day the gallant tale of how he had saved, at Walcheren, the French colours and the Eagle entrusted by the Emperor to the Irish Brigade, reached Paris. He had wrapped the flag round his body, plunged into the waves, and swam to an open boat a considerable distance from the shore; “then proudly exhibiting the standard of France amid a shower of bullets from the beach he bore it off in triumph.” For this exploit Lawless was named by the Emperor, knight of the Legion of Honour, and Lieutenant-Colonel of the Irish regiment, and the year after, full Colonel of it.
On receipt of the news, “Mr. Evans begged his friend, John Sweetman, to come to the house to prepare his daughter by degrees to learn the joyful news, lest a sudden communication of it might be injurious to her.... That evening at tea, Mr. Sweetman, as usual, was asked the news of the day, Miss Evans lying on the sofa, and listening to the conversation. He said that it was reported in some of the newspapers that officers believed to have been killed at Flushing had escaped to Antwerp, their names not being given. On the following day he was more explicit, and then the conversation was turned to some other topic. The next evening Sweetman came to tell them that a Lieutenant O’Reilly, of the Irish regiment, was one of those who had arrived at Antwerp. ‘Then,’ said Miss Evans, ‘perhaps Mr. Lawless is not dead.’ The whole family expressed their opinion that as he and Lieutenant O’Reilly were great friends, they probably escaped together.”
The rest of the charming story is soon told. The following day Mr. Hampden Evans learned from John Sweetman that Commandant Lawless had arrived in Paris, but was confined to bed with an attack of Flushing fever. Mr. Evans lost no time in calling on him, and making him acquainted with his daughter’s sentiments. Matters were soon arranged for a speedy marriage, “and then Miss Evans was allowed to read all the newspapers containing the orders of the day of the army at Antwerp, giving an account of Commandant Lawless’s arrival there, with the colours and eagle of the Irish regiment; of his brilliant conduct during the siege of Flushing, his miraculous escape from thence, etc., etc.”
In those days among the Irish in France it was difficult to think of Lawless without thinking of his bosom friend, John Tennant. These two were true brothers-in-arms. “They were named captains the same day in 1803 at the organisation of the Irish Legion. In 1813, at Sonenberg, in Silesia, when Lawless was colonel, commanding the Irish regiment, Tennant was chef de bataillon. On August the 19th, 1813, Tennant was killed in our hollow square, literally cut in two by a cannon ball, and on August 21st, the second day after, Colonel Lawless, at the passage of the Bober, at the town of Sonenberg, and in the presence of Napoleon, had his leg shot off by a cannon ball. “It was my painful and melancholy duty,” writes Miles Byrne, “to get the grenadiers to dig a grave for poor Tennant, after we had retaken our position and beaten the enemy off the field of battle.... Whilst the men were preparing the grave, Colonel Lawless never ceased weeping, and indeed both the officers and men who were present were much affected, and shed tears of sorrow over poor Tennant’s grave.”
Poor Tennant’s romance had been of a less happy character than his friend’s. In the early days of the United Irishmen he had become devotedly attached to the beautiful Miss Hazlett, the story of whose early death has been already narrated in the chapter on the Sisters of ’Ninety-Eight. Writing of her thirty years after, Charles Teeling feels the tears starting to his eyes at the memory of the “youth, innocence, beauty” consigned thus untimely to the tomb.... Never shall I forget the impression which this mournful event [i.e. the death of Miss Hazlett] caused in the circle of our little commonwealth. The lovely subject of our distress had been endeared to us all, not less by the sweetness of her disposition than the fascinating powers of a cultivated mind. Her brother’s happiness was the object of her most anxious concern, but the benevolent feelings of her heart extended to every soul in distress.”