After the repeal of the Edict of Nantes many French Protestant refugees settled in Ireland. Some of these were highly skilled in the linen manufacture and a settlement of them under Louis Crommelin in Lisburn, a town on the Marquis of Hertford’s estate, made that place a thriving centre of the industry. After Luke Teeling had completed his apprenticeship, he stayed on in Lisburn, got a lease from the Marquis of Hertford, and started a bleachyard of his own; and he was so successful, that Mr. George Taaffe needed to have no misgiving about the future when he gave his beloved daughter to him.
The early years of the married life of Luke and Mary Teeling were years of unclouded happiness. A little Elizabeth, called perhaps after the mother Mary Teeling had never known, came to them the following year. She was followed by a goodly train of brothers and sisters: Bartholomew, George, Charles, Luke and John were the boys. The girls, in addition to Elizabeth, were Mary, Alice (called after Alice Taaffe who had married James Lynch, of Drogheda), and Millicent.
Fortunate families, like fortunate nations, “have no history,” and there is little to record of Mary Teeling during the years when her boys and girls were growing up. In 1782 her husband acquired the lease of some building ground on Church Hill and built a residence for his family in keeping with his wealth and position; and a decade and a half of happy years passed swiftly under its dignified roof. The large family party which gathered permanently round the Teelings’ board was seldom without a reinforcement of guests: business correspondents like Mr. Sam Wall, of Worcester, or merchants from Dublin and Belfast, were sure of a hearty welcome there. Old Mr. George Taaffe loved to come from Ardee, and spend a month or two with his beloved grandchildren. Aunt “Ally” Lynch from Drogheda, and kind Uncle James were frequent visitors. The elder boys, Bartle and George and Charles, who were attending Mr. Saumarez Dubourdieu’s famous classical school in the town, had frequent permission to bring home their schoolfellows to dinner or supper, and Mrs. Teeling’s “parties” were voted the most delightful in Lisburn. As the boys grew older other guests were much in evidence—young officers from the camp at Blaris-Moor with whom the Teeling lads fenced, or went fishing or shooting, or rode to hounds, liked to be asked when the day’s sport was over to accompany them to the hospitable mansion on Church Hill, where a pleasant supper and a dance would wind up many a delightful evening. The Teelings were noted horsemen—an hereditary trait. The writer in The Gentlemen’s Magazine, having quoted the younger Bartholomew Teeling’s description of his father and uncles as “the best horsemen and the most accomplished swordsmen in the province,” tells us that the Teelings “were proverbial for their love of small, perfectly shaped, high-bred horses,” and refers to stories, still current in the County of Meath, of the incredibly short time in which they used to ride from their home to Dublin, on their beautiful little horses.
“White with green facings their retainers did wear
And the young cavaliers were beloved of the fair.”[[47]]
[47]. Luke Teeling was looked on as a remarkably good judge of a horse, and I find among the family papers not a few in which his friends seek his advice on that all important subject.
The young men were born soldiers, and more than one effort was made by officers and others of the highest rank to induce them to enter the English army. The Marquis of Hertford, dining one day with Mr. Teeling, promised his influence to get Charles into the Guards, and pledged his powerful support towards his advancement. Luke Teeling replied that, as far as he was concerned, his son was free to accept the flattering offer—but to the surprise of the Marquis, it was declined by Charles himself.
In truth, the boy, who though younger in years than Bartholomew or George, had ripened earlier than they, had turned his thoughts in a direction not very likely to end in a Commission in the English Army. While Bartle still dallied in the pleasant ways of youth, and George was away in Dublin,[[48]] Charles was thrown largely into his father’s company, and imbibed the political views which the circumstances of the time forced on a man of Mr. Teeling’s logical and just mind. Though it is not said in so many words, we gather that Bartle and his father did not quite understand each other. The younger Bartle tells us that his namesake “scarcely brooked the restraint which the stoical and somewhat severe principles of his father imposed upon him; but to his mother, whose idol he was, and to his sisters, he was warmly and tenderly attached. There was no youthful adventure too daring or even extravagant for him; but nothing which inflicted pain, or which trifled with human misery ever had his countenance.” He was fond of books, too, a diligent student of the Classics, and a devotee of Shakespeare and perhaps these tastes helped to keep him for a longer time than his brother a sojourner in those regions of the Ideal where the call of the Real resoundeth not. The day was to come, indeed, and speedily, too, when the cry of his suffering country was to ring as loudly in Bartle’s ear as it had long rung in that of Charles. And how he was to answer it all men know.
[48]. They were both apprenticed in the linen trade. Bartle with his father, and George with the MacDonnells in Dublin.
In 1790 Mr. Teeling gave very active support to the parliamentary candidature of Hon. Robert Stewart—afterwards Lord Castlereagh—who stood in the Reform interest against the Downshire clique. Being a Catholic, Mr. Teeling had no vote himself, but he spared neither his money nor his personal exertions in favour of one who advocated so eloquently the causes dear to Mr. Teeling’s heart: Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform. The Teeling boys were enthusiastic admirers of the young candidate, who indeed had been the idol of every patriotic heart in the north since the day he rode—a lad of thirteen—at the head of a company of boy Volunteers in the Review in Belfast, and made men think of Cuchullin and the boy troop of Emain Macha, by the martial skill and daring of their exploits. We know from Charles’s own assurance that the tenderest ties bound him to his father: “He was to me,” he says, in one of the most moving passages of his narrative, “not only the affectionate parent, but also the companion and friend.” And doubtless, in the long rides which father and son delighted to take in each other’s company, Charles imbibed his father’s political opinions and learned to feel the wrongs which the Catholics of Ireland were suffering as intolerable.