The Fall of the House of Wilde by Emer O'Sullivan Page B

Jane got more involved with the
Nation’
s circle of writers. One memoirist described the journal’s offices as ‘a sort of bureau of national affairs, political, literary, industrial, and artistic’. 15 Jane found herself at home with their passion and their poetry, telling Hilson, ‘there is an earnestness almost amounting to fanaticism in the Patriotism of all the Young Ireland Party combined with great genius and a glowing poetical transcendentalism. They are all poets and I know of no genius outside their circle in Ireland.’ She was particularly drawn to Meagher for his energy and daring – traits most glorified by Jane. She described him as ‘handsome, daring, reckless of consequences, wild, bright, flashing eyes, glowing colour and the most beautiful mouth, teeth and smile I ever beheld’. 16 Born in 1823, Meagher was the son of a wealthy Waterford merchant, who also sat in Parliament from 1847 to 1857. Educated by the Jesuits, first at Clongowes Wood, Kildare and then at Stonyhurst, Meagher was a remarkable orator, and won notoriety for fiery speeches, leading Thackeray to dub him ‘Meagher of the Sword’. William Smith O’Brien was older, born 1803. He was the second son of Sir Edward O’Brien, and had been educated at Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge. He was MP for Limerick and leader of Young Ireland. Charles Trevelyan, treasurer of the Whig government during the famine, compared the Young Irelanders to the ‘
jeunes gens de Paris
’. ‘They were public-spirited, enthusiastic men, possessed . . . of that crude information on political subjects which induced several of the Whig and Conservative leaders to be Radicals in their youth. They supplied all the good writing, the history, the poetry, and the political philosophy, such as it was, of the party.’ 17 Indeed, Smith O’Brien and Meagher spent time in Paris discussing revolutionary tactics.
    Britain’s 1848 revolution occurred in Ireland. Government hesitation over what, if any, action to take on the famine infuriated those who thought that a government closer to the ground would not sacrifice people for profit. But the real spur to action was the outbreak of insurrection across Europe. Westminster reacted by moving gunboats down the Liffey and preparing the military for mutiny. The Irish viceroy, Lord Clarendon, pre-emptively arrested some of the leading Young Irelanders for sedition: on 15 May 1848 Smith O’Brien and Meagher were tried but not sentenced, and John Mitchel was tried under the new 1848 Treason Felony Act and declared guilty. When his sentence was announced – fourteen years’ deportation – Mitchel turned to the stunned court, and called upon those gathered to take up the baton. ‘The Roman who saw his hand burning to ashes before the tyrant promised that three hundred should follow out his enterprise,’ said Mitchel, knowing how to cast himself as part of history. 18 Mitchel’s move, calculated to stir the live embers of insurrection, intoxicated or alarmed – depending on one’s persuasion – the crowd. The shock of seeing the Trinity-educated Mitchel, son of an Ulster Unitarian minister, dragged to his cell by the police, heavily manacled, with chains passing from his wrists to his ankles, won Jane’s sympathy for the man she had hitherto dubbed Robespierre. ‘Even though I shudder at Mitchel’s savage [act?] of revenge,’ she told Hilson, ‘yet he was brave, and his conduct at the Bar had something of the old heroic Roman in it and the coldest blood must have glowed to see that man insulted in every way, chained so heavily that he fell from their weight and all because he resisted foreign oppression. I should not wonder if that man comes back some day a Sylla or a Cataline.’ 19 The disproportionate sentence given to Mitchel by the government radicalised Young Ireland.
    Smith