The name of Rosie Hope reminds us of her friend, Miss Biddy Palmer, who with Rosie and Anne Devlin, were associated in what we of to-day should call Cumann na mBan work in the Rising of 1803. Madden says of her: “Miss Biddy Palmer, daughter of old John Palmer of Cutpurse Row, was a confidential agent both of Emmet and Russell. She was a sister of young Palmer who took a prominent part in the affairs of 1798. Biddy Palmer was a sort of Irish Madame Roland; she went about when it was dangerous for others to be seen abroad, conveying messages from Emmet, Long, Hevey, Russell, and Fitzgerald to different parties.”
One half suspects, from the way Miles Byrne speaks of Miss Palmer, that he was in love with her. Having mentioned Emmet’s “implicit confidence” in her, he adds, “and indeed no one was ever more worthy of such trust than this young lady, who had suffered severely in 1798 by her father’s imprisonment and the ruin of his affairs, her brother’s exile and death on the Continent. Still she bore up under all her misfortunes like a heroine of the olden times, and was a comfort and a consolation to her family and friends.” On the eve of Miles Byrne’s romantic escape to France he called to take farewell of Miss Palmer and her father, and she gave him a present of some French money for his viaticum.
Poor Biddy Palmer had a sad old age. Dr. Madden discovered her (she was then a Mrs. Horan) “in very reduced circumstances, far advanced in years, in the neighbourhood of Finsbury Square, London, earning a miserable livelihood by keeping a little school for the female children of the poor, in a neighbourhood where indigence and want abounds.”
For some reason (perhaps it was in part the long life and faithful heart of Mary McCracken and the influence she radiated around her) the North has kept a richer record of the sufferings and heroism of its obscurer women in ’98 and ’03, than other parts of the country. Some very precious reliques have been gathered up in the pages of the Shan Van Vocht, and make of them a most valuable repository of patriotic memories.
One of these tells of a sister, whose brother, with another lad, had undertaken the dangerous office of posting up Robert Emmet’s proclamation around Carnmoney, a few miles to the north of Belfast. For this they were subsequently hanged, drawn and quartered on the Gallow’s Green at Carrickfergus. At dead of night the sister, who had walked all the way from Carnmoney, was led by pitying friends to the spot where the poor mangled bodies lay. “She knelt down and with stifled sobs and much difficulty removed the clay that had been hastily piled above them. Her hand first came upon a head which by the feel of the features she thought was that of her brother. She wrapped it in her apron and carried it back to her home, so absorbed in her grief that she felt not the miles her speeding feet covered. When she arrived home, she discovered that the head she had borne on that sorrowful journey was not her brother’s, but that of the other poor lad. She retraced her steps, running between the hedgerows in her anxiety to reach the Gallow’s Green before the people should be afoot, stumbling on the uneven stones, and praying with all her tortured heart that her strength might last until her purpose should be accomplished.... She arrived at the grave, reverentially deposited the head back in its place, and taking up the one she had come to seek departed again for Carnmoney.”
It is to Mary McCracken that we owe our knowledge of the story of young Willie Neilson, of Ballycarry, and his poor mother. Willie, who was only fifteen years of age, had on the eve of the Antrim Rising formed one of a party which made a prisoner of a Carrickfergus pensioner called Cuthbert, and conveyed him to the Insurgent’s place of muster at Donegore Hill. For this he was arrested, court-martialled and sent to prison, where his two elder brothers were already lodged. But on account of his extreme youth neither he nor his friends anticipated any danger to his life.
At midnight he was taken from prison, and offered his freedom on condition that he should give information against the leaders at Antrim. He refused; and no amount of pressure could make him yield one inch. They told him he must die; his only request was that he might see his minister, and be allowed to say farewell to his brother, Sam. Sam Neilson expected to share Willie’s fate, but that fact did not prevent him from encouraging Willie to die rather than “inform.” Soon after daybreak the boy was taken to his native village of Ballycarry, there to die. On the way he met his poor mother, who had set out to visit the prison. When she saw him in the midst of the soldiery, she rushed towards him, and while the soldiers tried to separate them he caught her hand, and exclaimed “Oh! my mother!” But they dragged him from her arms. She threw herself at her landlord’s feet, as he rode past, in the midst of the cavalry, begging him to intercede for her boy. His only answer was, “Get out of my way, or I’ll ride over you.” They brought Willie to his mother’s door to execute him there. But, brutes as they were, they saw this would be too iniquitous, and they yielded to the boy’s prayer and took him away to the end of the village. Even then the undaunted boy had leisure of heart to think of his dear ones. He begged that the sacrifice of his life might expiate the offences of his brothers, and that his body should be given to his mother. The soldiers tried to make him use the bandage for his eyes. But he refused with the proud word “that he had done nothing to make him screen his face.” Then, looking as his mother always remembered him afterwards, “very handsome and fair and blooming, with his light hair tossing in the wind, and the open shirt-neck, emphasising the youth of him,” Willie Neilson went forth to his death—for Ireland.
Even in the most tragic moments of our history, a certain sense of humour has never deserted us Irish. It has helped, perhaps, to keep us sane in the midst of our woes; and it has certainly saved us from the deplorable sentimentality, which we find so trying in our Teutonic neighbours (including the Anglo-Saxon) and the emphatic bombast which tinges with insincerity our Latin cousins. We may be sure there was many a ludicrous incident in ’98, as in ’16—and the men and women of ’98 had the same faculty as their descendants of to-day of seeing the humour of the situation. Some of the jokes of ’98 are current to-day—and since laughter is as characteristic of life as weeping, I will end my book with one of them. It comes from the village of Ballyclare, and was first told in print in the Shan Van Vocht.
On the morning of the fight in Antrim the wife of Billy Morrison rose early and spread the table with the best in the house for her man’s breakfast. There were fine home-cured bacon, and eggs, and tea, and potato cake and oaten bread. When Billy had done justice to these good things, and had his wife’s assurance that his pockets were full of more of them, for the day’s provisions, he grasped his pike, and rose to go. Then did his guid wife, “in lieu of sentimental, or patriotic, or pious admonition,” thus address him in valediction: