Father John Murphy at Boolavogue

A rising is rarely begun by the men who have spent the winter preparing it. More often it is begun, against every sermon he has preached, by a man who has counselled patience until the hour patience itself becomes a kind of treason against his own people. The priest who has told the parish to lay down its pikes is, in the end, the priest who will pick one up.

THE CURATE OF BOOLAVOGUE

He is forty-five years old, born at Tincurry on the twenty-fifth of January 1753, schooled at the Irish College in Seville between 1779 and 1784 because the Penal Laws of 1695-1829 had made the teaching of Catholic priests on Irish soil a crime. Since 1785 he has been curate of the Boolavogue chapel of ease, eight miles north-west of Gorey, in a parish of cottiers and small tenant farmers who speak Irish among themselves and English to the gentry. The Penal code has been loosening, by slow concession, through his lifetime: a Catholic may now hold a long lease, may say Mass in a thatched chapel, may not sit in Parliament nor bear a commission nor carry a sword. The priest is a conservative man. He has read his Burke. He has watched the news from France with the dread of a man whose order was the first thing the Jacobins set fire to. Through the spring of 1798, from the pulpit, he has told his people in plain Irish to surrender their pikes and their fowling-pieces to the Yeomanry at the Wexford courthouse, and about seventy-five of them have done so on his word. He has signed the loyalty oath. He believes, until this evening, that obedience is the last instrument left to a disarmed people.

THE BURNING

The light is long and soft over the ash-and-hawthorn hedges. It is a Saturday in late May, the meadows of Shelmalier bright with the year's first warmth, and the Yeomanry come up the lane at six o'clock in the evening. Twenty horsemen of the North Cork Militia under Lieutenant Bookey of Rockspring, a local landlord's son with a clean coat and a clean conscience, acting under General Lake's county-wide disarmament order of the twenty-second. They search the priest-house. They find no pikes, because the priest has already had the pikes surrendered. They burn the priest-house anyway. They burn the chapel. They shoot a cottier and the cottier's nineteen-year-old son in the yard, and they ride out through the smoke at a walk, as men who have done a day's work. By eight o'clock the priest is standing on the village green with the ash falling on his coat and about thirty of his parishioners standing in the door of the public-house behind him, waiting to see what he will say.

A SECOND OF TIME AT BOOLAVOGUE

On the village green at Boolavogue, in the twenty minutes between the burning and the rising, the curate reflects, and that reflection decides his own fate and the fate of the county. He has, for six months, told these men from the pulpit that the Yeomanry will keep its side of a bargain. The bargain lies in cinders behind him. The cottier in the yard is dead because he had no pike, because the priest had told him to give the pike up. The arithmetic is simple enough that a country priest can do it without a desk. If he counsels patience again, the parish will rise without him and the rising will be a jacquerie, a leaderless slaughter of small farmers by trained troops, with the priest of the parish standing on the Yeomanry side of the road; if he leads, the rising has some chance of order, of a discipline that might force a political settlement before the Crown brings its full weight down. He has no illusion that it will be won. He knows what Lake's men did at Carnew and at Dunlavin Green in the past fortnight. He knows the Wexford United leadership at Oulart and Camolin have been waiting on a spark, and that the burning behind him is the spark whether he wills it or not. The priest's office is not to choose the rising but to choose whether the parish goes into it shepherded or abandoned. He picks up a cavalry pistol the Yeomanry dropped at the burning. He weighs it. It is heavier than a missal and lighter than a plough. He walks across the green to the door of the public-house. He speaks in Irish, because the men in the door speak Irish. Fearaibh, tánaig an lá. Tóg na pící. Men, the day has come. Take up the pikes.

THE FORTY-EIGHT HOURS

By dawn on the twenty-seventh the parish is in arms, and by the afternoon a column under Murphy meets the North Cork Militia at Oulart Hill and breaks it. The Militia lose over a hundred men; four escape. On the twenty-eighth, Enniscorthy falls. On the thirtieth, Wexford town. For four weeks the county is held by its own pikemen and its own farmers, organised in baronial divisions, fed from the houses of women who have sent their husbands and their sons. There is no jacquerie. There are atrocities, at Scullabogue and on Wexford bridge, that Murphy does not order and cannot prevent. The discipline he had hoped to give the rising is thinner than he had thought; the rising he had hoped to refuse is larger than any single priest can shape. On the twenty-first of June, on Vinegar Hill above Enniscorthy, fifteen thousand rebels with pikes and a handful of captured cannon meet thirteen thousand Crown troops with artillery, and the line breaks. By the end of that day the rising is done.

TULLOW MARKET-SQUARE

He runs for eleven days through the Wicklow Mountains with about forty-five men, in country he does not know, on bog roads where every farmhouse is a coin toss. On the second of July he is taken at Tullow in County Carlow. A military court sits the same afternoon. The sentence is recorded; the trial is not. He is hanged that evening on the gallows in the market-square, and by the army's standing practice that summer for rebel priests, the body is taken down, decapitated, and burnt in a tar-barrel of pitch set in the square. The head is set on a spike on the courthouse roof, where it stays through six weeks of summer until the Crown amnesty of mid-August takes it down. The townspeople, who are Catholic and afraid, bury what is left of him in an unmarked plot in the Tullow churchyard, by night. Thirty thousand people, most of them Catholic countrymen of Wexford, die in the five weeks of the rising, the heaviest civilian loss in any month of Irish history before the Famine of 1845-52.

THE BALLAD

A hundred years later, in 1898, for the centenary commemoration, the Dublin journalist P. J. McCall writes a ballad that begins at Boolavogue, as the sun was setting, o'er the bright May meadows of Shelmalier. It is sung at every commemoration of the rising from that day to this, and is, by the careful judgment of every editor of the Irish ballad tradition, the most-sung public song of the Irish commemorative calendar. The chapel at Boolavogue is rebuilt on the burned ground in 1856. A memorial cross is set on the village green in June 1898 by the Wexford Centenary Committee. The annual Wexford march, since the bicentenary in 1998, ends at the cross.

RETURN

A man given the parish to keep had been given, without warning, the county to lose. The hour at Boolavogue did not ask the curate whether he was equal to it; it asked only what he would do in the twenty minutes between the chapel burning and the dark. The settlement he had hoped a disciplined rising might force did not come; the Union of 1801 came instead, and Catholic Emancipation waited another twenty-eight years. What remains in the parish is not the political settlement but the song, and the stone, and the line in Irish that he is supposed to have spoken in the door of a Boolavogue public-house at twenty past nine on the evening of the twenty-sixth of May 1798. The pistol he picked up off the green at Boolavogue was a Yeomanry cavalry piece of British manufacture, heavier than a missal and lighter than a plough, and it is the closing image of the legend: the priest's hand closing on a soldier's weapon in the soft light of a Wexford May.