[52]. “The Postlethwaite Tender, on which my father was confined, contained within the limits of one small apartment, thirty-four gentlemen, of respectable rank in life and independent circumstances. In this miserable prison-house, its inmates could never stand erect, and crowded together in a circumscribed space not fourteen feet square, they could only enjoy a partial and unrefreshing slumber in succession. Here, entombed on the ocean, during the sultry heat of a summer the most oppressive that has been remembered for thirty years, they inhaled the pestiferous atmosphere of a tender; in the depth of winter, when their numbers were reduced to a few, they were exposed with open port-holes to all the inclemency of the chilling blast. Nor were they permitted to receive a supply of wholesome food from their friends; nothing was allowed them beyond what the parsimonious bounty of Government afforded. At four o’clock in the evening the hatches were locked down, and the prisoners remained in darkness until nine on the following morning. Sometimes, forgetful of his situation, the prisoner would raise his form to stand erect ... when the hard repelling beam, in contact with his head, reminded him that the hand of man had prescribed his limits. My father, whose fine-formed head and silver locks are still present to my imagination, presented on his removal from this prison, a perfect encrustment of festered wounds from forehead to nape.”—C. H. Teeling’s “Narrative.”
And the day shall come, please God, when no Irish boy shall be ignorant of the lines he wrote in the Golden Annals of their knightly company.
Was it given to his mother to see her idolised son once more before he mounted the scaffold on Arbour Hill on September the 24th, 1798? To this question we can find no answer. We know, from her husband’s letter to Sam Wall, that for a time it was feared Mary Teeling would die, so completely did she break down under the agonising load of her conjugal and maternal sorrows. Bartle was not the only son whom Ireland claimed from her. Charles and John were now on their keeping. A few months after the consummation of Bartle’s sacrifice, John, her youngest son, her Benjamin, was taken from her—and of him, as truly as of Bartle, she might say, he gave his life for Ireland.
During her husband’s continued imprisonment, she tried to keep as close to him as she could, and for a time, it would appear she was permitted to share it in Carrickfergus Castle. Stifling her own sorrows she found strength to comfort him, and to lend him courage. His affairs had been reduced to ruin, by the vindictive action of Government, and to all his other woes was now added that which must have been of a peculiarly galling character to a man of his fastidious sense of honour: his inability to pay his creditors in full.
In 1802 Mr. Teeling was liberated, and after a time spent with Charles, now married to Catherine Carolan, and settled at the Naul, near Balbriggan, he made a home for his wife and girls in Belfast. Though an elderly man—older than his years, indeed, from the hardships of his imprisonment—he made a characteristically gallant effort to make a new start in life. His sons, George and Charles and Luke, helped as far as they could to re-establish the family fortunes, but the times were against them. George and Luke went finally to America and died there.
On a certain day in 1822 a letter arrived, re-directed from Belfast to Castlecomer, where Mr. and Mrs. Teeling and their unmarried daughters, Mary and Milly, had gone on a visit to Charles and his family. It was in an unknown hand-writing, and was signed by an unknown correspondent, William Cullen, from the City of Natchez, State of Mississippi. It contained the sad tidings of the death of George, and enclosed a ring which had been given to Bartle by Hoche, and to George by Bartle on the eve of his execution. It was Mary Teeling’s destiny to read the letter containing the news of her son’s death, by the coffin which contained the mortal remains of her husband. In the bitterness of her grief her wifely devotion could find comfort in the knowledge that this last earthly sorrow had been spared her beloved Luke—and that from the heavenly vantage ground whence he now looked, it was turned for him into a joy.
The few remaining years of Mary Teeling’s life were spent with Charles and his wife and little ones. And it is to the loving memories of these years, cherished by her grandson Bartholomew, that we owe the vivid portrait of her which I have borrowed to adorn my pages.
THE WIVES OF ’NINETY-EIGHT