seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Exile


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The Break of Dromore

The Break of Dromore takes place on March 14, 1689, near Dromore, County Down in the early stages of the Williamite War in Ireland. It features Catholic Jacobite troops under Richard Hamilton and Protestant Williamite militia led by Hugh Montgomery and Arthur Rawdon.

The Protestant forces are taken by surprise and there is little fighting, reflected in the term “Break,” a Scottish word for rout. Victory secures eastern Ulster for the Jacobites but they fail to fully exploit their success.

While much of the Protestant population of east Ulster supports the claim of William III to thrones of Ireland, England and Scotland, the rest of Ireland, including the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, and the army, support James II. As a result, war breaks out in Ireland after James is deposed in the Glorious Revolution. At the start of the conflict, the Jacobites are left in control of two fortified positions at Carrickfergus and Charlemont in territory which is predominantly Williamite in sympathy. The local Williamites raise a militia and meet in a council at Hillsborough. They make an ineffective assault on Carrickfergus. However, this is easily beaten off and a local Catholic cleric named O’Hegarty reports that the Williamite are badly armed and trained.

The Jacobite commander in the north is Richard Hamilton, an experienced soldier who serves with the French military from 1671 to 1685, when he is appointed a colonel in the Irish Army. In September 1688, he and his regiment are transferred to England. When James flees into exile, he is held in the Tower of London. Released on parole by William in February, he is sent to negotiate with Talbot but drops this mission once back in Ireland. Alexander Osbourne, a Presbyterian clergyman, is sent to offer the Hillsborough council a pardon in return for surrender but they refuse, reportedly encouraged by Osbourne. On March 8, Hamilton marches north from Drogheda with 2,500 men to subdue the Williamites by force.

On March 14 Hamilton crosses the River Lagan and attacks a 3,000 strong Williamite force under Lord Mount Alexander at Dromore. Alexander’s cavalry falls back in disorder following a charge by the Jacobite dragoons. Seeing this, Hamilton orders a general advance of his infantry and the Williamite foot flee toward Dromore itself. They are overtaken in the village by the Jacobite cavalry and slaughtered, roughly 400 being killed and the rest fleeing for their lives.

Lord Mount Alexander rides to Donaghadee and takes a ship to England, while many other Protestants leave for Northern England or Scotland. Hamilton’s men capture Hillsborough, along with £1,000 and large stocks of food but fail to pursue their opponents. This allows the bulk of the militia under Rawdon and Henry Baker to reach Coleraine, then make their way to Derry, where they take part in the successful defence of the city.


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Execution of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence

George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, an English nobleman who engages in several major conspiracies against his brother, King Edward IV, is executed for high treason in the Tower of London on February 18, 1478, allegedly by drowning in a butt of malmsey wine.

Plantagenet is born in Dublin Castle on October 21, 1449, the sixth child and third surviving son of Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, and the brother of English kings Edward IV and Richard III. His father’s struggle to gain power precipitates the Wars of the Roses (1455–85) between the houses of York and Lancaster.

Soon after Edward IV becomes king in March 1461, Plantagenet is made Duke of Clarence, and in 1462 he is appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. However, around 1468, he falls under the influence of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, who is losing the control that he had formerly exercised over the King. In defiance of Edward IV, he marries Neville’s daughter Isabel in Église Notre-Dame de Calais in July 1469. Then, in March 1470, he and Neville secretly support an armed uprising in northern England. When Edward IV discovers their treachery, they flee to France but return in September.

After Edward IV goes into exile, Plantagenet and Neville put the ineffectual Lancastrian monarch Henry VI, deposed in 1461, back on the throne. But Plantagenet soon becomes disenchanted with Neville’s management of the government. When Edward IV returns from exile in March 1471, the brothers become reconciled, and Plantagenet, who fights in the battles that lead to Edward’s restoration, is created, by right of his wife, first Earl of Warwick on March 25, 1472, and first Earl of Salisbury in a new creation.

After his wife dies on December 22, 1476, Plantagenet seeks to wed Mary, Duchess of Burgundy. But when Edward IV objects to that match also, the embittered Plantagenet once more begins scheming against his brother. Edward IV becomes convinced that his brother is aiming at his throne. Plantagenet is thrown into prison, and in January 1478 the King unfolds the charges against his brother to Parliament. He had slandered the King, had received oaths of allegiance to himself and his heirs, and had prepared for a new rebellion. Both houses of Parliament pass the bill of attainder, he is “privately executed” at the Tower of London on February 18, 1478, by tradition in the Bowyer Tower, and soon after the event, a rumour spreads that he had been drowned in a butt of malmsey wine.

Two of Plantagenet’s children survive their father: Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury (1473–1541), and Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick (1475–99), who passes the greater part of his life in prison and is beheaded in November 1499.

Plantagenet is a principal character in two of William Shakespeare‘s history plays: Henry VI, Part 3 and The Tragedy of Richard the Third. Shakespeare portrays him as weak-willed and changeable.


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Eamonn Casey, Former Bishop of Galway & Kilmacduagh, Returns from Exile

Eamonn Casey, Irish Catholic prelate who serves as bishop of Galway and Kilmacduagh from 1976 until his resignation 1992, returns to Ireland on February 5, 2006, following fourteen years in exile. He fled Ireland after he admitted to fathering his son, Peter.

Casey is born on April 24, 1927, in Firies, County Kerry. He is educated in Limerick before training for the priesthood at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth. He is ordained a priest for the Diocese of Limerick on June 17, 1951, and appointed Bishop of Kerry on July 17, 1969.

Casey holds this position until 1976, when he is appointed Bishop of Galway and Kilmacduagh and apostolic administrator of Kilfenora. While in Galway, he is seen as a progressive. It is a significant change in a diocese that had been led for nearly forty years by the very conservative Michael Browne, bishop from 1937 to 1976. He is highly influential in the Irish Catholic hierarchy and a friend and colleague of another highly prominent Irish priest, Father Michael Cleary.

Casey works aiding Irish emigrants in Britain. In addition, he supports the Dunnes Stores‘ staff who are locked out from 1982 to 1986 for refusing to sell goods from apartheid South Africa.

Casey attends the funeral of the murdered Archbishop of San Salvador, Monsignor Óscar Romero. He witnesses first-hand the massacre of those attending the funeral by government forces. He then becomes a vocal opponent of United States foreign policy in Central America, and, as a result, opposes the 1984 visit of United States President Ronald Reagan to Ireland, refusing to meet him when he comes to Galway.

In 1992 it is reported that, despite the vow of chastity undertaken by Catholic clergy, Casey has a sexual relationship in the early 1970s with American woman Annie Murphy. When Murphy becomes pregnant, he is determined that the child should be given up for adoption in order to avoid any scandal for himself or the Catholic church. By contrast, Murphy is determined to accept responsibility for her child, and she returns to the United States with their son, Peter, who is born in 1974 in Dublin. He makes covert payments for the boy’s maintenance, fraudulently made from diocesan funds and channeled through intermediaries. In order to continue the cover up of his affair with Murphy and his fraudulent activities, he refuses to develop a relationship with his son, or acknowledge him. Murphy is very disappointed by this, and in the early 1990s contacts The Irish Times to tell the truth about Casey’s hypocrisy and deception. Having been exposed, he reluctantly admits that he had “sinned” and wronged the boy, his mother and “God, his church and the clergy and people of the dioceses of Galway and Kerry,” and his embezzlement of church funds. He is forced to resign as bishop and flees the country under a cloud of scandal. He is succeeded by his secretary, James McLoughlin, who serves in the post until his own retirement on July 3, 2005.

Murphy publishes a book, Forbidden Fruit, in 1993 revealing the truth of their relationship and the son she bore by Casey, exposing the institutional level of hypocrisy, moral corruption and misogyny within the Irish Catholic Church.

Casey is ordered by the Vatican to leave Ireland and become a missionary alongside members of the Missionary Society of St. James in a rural parish in Ecuador, whose language, Spanish, he does not speak. During this time, he travels long distances to reach the widely scattered members of his parish but does not travel to meet his own son. After his missionary position is completed, he takes a position in the parish of St. Pauls, Haywards Heath, West Sussex, England.

In 2005, Casey is investigated in conjunction with the sexual abuse scandal in Galway, Kilmacduagh and Kilfenora diocese, and cleared of any wrongdoing. In 2019, it emerges that he had faced at least three accusations of sexual abuse before his death, with two High Court cases being settled. The Kerry diocese confirms that it had received allegations against him, that Gardaí and health authorities had been informed and that the person concerned was offered support by the diocese.

Casey returns to Ireland on February 5, 2006, with his reputation in tatters, and is not permitted to say Mass in public.

In August 2011, Casey, in poor health, is admitted to a nursing home in County Clare. He dies on March 13, 2017, a month before his 90th birthday. He is interred in Galway cathedral’s crypt.

Casey is the subject of Martin Egan’s song “Casey,” sung by Christy Moore. He is also the subject of The Saw Doctors‘ song “Howya Julia.”


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William of Orange Arrives in Brixham, England

On November 5, 1688, William of Orange, King of the Netherlands and son-in-law of King James II of England, arrives in Brixham, England, with 40,000 soldiers, sailors and volunteers, prior to marching on London to be crowned King William III as part of the Glorious Revolution.

He has been invited by the Protestant noblemen of the country to come and usurp the English throne. Led by Lord Monmouth, a group of Protestant nobles have unsuccessfully attempted to prevent the Catholic James from ascending to the throne on the death of Charles II in 1685. Since then, James has been disturbing the Protestant noblemen who have remained loyal to him in 1685 by giving Catholics more and more freedoms in both England and Ireland.

On May 7, 1688, James II issues a “Declaration of Indulgence” pledging religious toleration. Still the Protestant nobles are comforted by the fact that all the possible heirs to James are Protestant. Thus the country will be safely returned to a Protestant monarch in time and many of James’ reforms will be reversed. All that changes on June 10, 1688, when the Queen gives birth to a male heir, one who is to be raised as a Catholic.

Soon thereafter, an invitation is sent across to William, who is married to James’ sister Mary, to come and save England for Protestantism. This, William is more than happy to do, for Louis XIV of France is threatening to invade the Netherlands and what better way to ensure the support of England in that coming war than to become the King of that country.

The “Glorious Revolution,” as the British would come to call it, is now underway. In less than two months, James II flees for his life and goes into exile in France, never to return. For the native population of Ireland, the eventual results of this revolution are far from “glorious.” The results are death, destruction, poverty, hundreds of years of second-class citizenship in their own land, and a legacy of hatred between Protestant and Catholic in the north of Ireland that persists to this day.

(Pictured: “William III Landing at Brixham, Torbay, 5 November 1688” by Jan Wyck, National Maritime Museum)


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Birth of Josephine Bracken, Common-law wife of José Rizal

Marie Josephine Leopoldine Bracken, the common-law wife of Philippine national hero José Rizal, is born in Victoria Barracks in Victoria, British Hong Kong, on August 9, 1876.

Bracken is born to Irish parents James Bracken, a corporal in the British Army, and Elizabeth Jane McBride, of Belfast. After her mother dies shortly after childbirth, her father gives her up for adoption. She is taken in by her godfather, the American George Taufer, a blind, and fairly well-to-do engineer of the pumping plant of the Hong Kong Fire Department, and his late Portuguese wife. He later remarries another Portuguese woman from Macau, Francesca Spencer, with whom he has another daughter.

After the second Mrs. Taufer dies in 1891, Taufer decides to remarry again but the new wife turns out to be difficult to deal with for Bracken. She spends two months in the Convent of the Canossian Sisters, where she previously attended early years of school. She decides to go back only after Taufer calls at the convent’s door pleading with her to come back home as his third wife turned out to be a bad housekeeper. A few months later she has trouble again with the third Mrs. Taufer and haunts her out of the house.

Bracken later recommends that her blind adoptive father see José Rizal, who is a respected ophthalmologist who had practiced at Rednaxela Terrace in Hong Kong. By this time, he is a political exile in Dapitan, Zamboanga del Norte in southern Philippines. The family sails to the Philippines and arrives in Manila on February 5, 1895, and later that month Bracken and Taufer sail to Dapitan.

Taufer’s double cataract is beyond Rizal’s help, but he falls in love with Bracken. Taufer vehemently opposes the union but finally listens to reason. She accompanies Taufer to Manila on his way back to Hong Kong, together with Rizal’s sister, Narcisa, on March 14, 1895. Rizal applies for marriage but because of his writings and political stance, the local priest Father Obach, will only agree to the ceremony if Rizal obtains permission from the Bishop of Cebu. Either the Bishop does not write him back or Rizal is not able to mail the letter because of Taufer’s sudden departure.

Before heading back to Dapitan to live with Rizal, Bracken introduces herself to members of his family in Manila. His mother suggests a civil marriage, which she believes to be a lesser “sacrament” but free from hypocrisy — and thus less a burden to Rizal’s conscience — than making any sort of political retraction. Nevertheless, Bracken and Rizal live together as husband and wife in Barangay Talisay, Dapitan, beginning in July 1895. The couple has a son, Francísco Rizal y Bracken, who is born prematurely and dies within a few hours of birth.

On the evening before his execution on December 30, 1896, on charges of treason, rebellion and sedition by the Spanish colonial government, the Catholic Church claims that Rizal returned to the faith and is married to Bracken in a religious ceremony officiated by Father Vicente Balaguer, S.J. sometime between 5:00 AM and 6:00 AM, an hour before his scheduled execution at 7:00 AM. Despite claims by Father Balaguer and Bracken herself, some sectors, including members of Rizal’s family, dispute that the wedding had occurred because no records are found attesting to the union.

Following Rizal’s death, Bracken joins revolutionary forces in Cavite province, where she takes care of sick and wounded soldiers, boosting their morale, and helping operate reloading jigs for Mauser cartridges at the Imus Arsenal under revolutionary general Pantaleón García. Imus is under threat of recapture, so Bracken, making her way through the thicket and mud, moves with the operation to the Cavite mountain redoubt of Maragondon. She witnesses the Tejeros Convention on March 22, 1897, before returning to Manila, and is later summoned by the Spanish Governor-General, who threatens her with torture and imprisonment if she does not leave the colony. Owing however to her adoptive father’s American citizenship, she cannot be forcibly deported, but she voluntarily returns to Hong Kong upon the advice of the American consul in Manila.

Upon returning to Hong Kong, Bracken once more lives in her father’s house. After his death, she marries Vicente Abad, a Cebuano mestizo, who represents his father’s tabacalera company in the British territory. A daughter, Dolores Abad y Braken, is born to the couple on April 17, 1900. A later testimony of Abad affirms that her mother “was already suffering from tuberculosis of the larynx” at the time of the wedding.

Bracken dies of tuberculosis on March 15, 1902, in Hong Kong and is interred at the Happy Valley Cemetery.


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Passage of the First Penal Laws

penal-laws

Penal Laws are passed on September 7, 1695, which restrict the rights of Irish Catholics to have an education, to bear arms, or to possess a horse worth more than five pounds. This is the price the Irish have to pay for their support of King James II in his war against William of Orange.

The Catholic James flees to Ireland and raises an army after he is deposed during England’s Glorious Revolution. His successor, William of Orange, wages war in Ireland from 1689 to 1691, eventually defeating James’s armies and causing the ex-monarch to flee to France. It is Ireland’s last great episode of resistance to British rule until the Society of United Irishmen emerges in the 1790s.

Originally it looks as though the terms will be rather lenient. The draft of the Treaty of Limerick, which ends the war between William and James, contains generous terms for the latter’s defeated supporters in Ireland. Soldiers who fought in James’s army are offered free passage to France to join James in exile. James’s supporters in Ireland are to be allowed to keep their lands and to practice their trades and professions. Finally, Catholics are promised freedom of religion.

William supports these lenient terms because he wants to end the struggle in Ireland. It is costing a great deal of money and diverting military resources he wants to use in his ongoing war against France. Irish Protestants, however, bitterly oppose the treaty’s concessions to Catholics, and successfully water down or remove key provisions from the final draft of the Treaty. They also successfully push for a series of anti-Catholic measures known as the Penal Laws.

The first of the Penal Laws are passed on September 7, 1695. Many more follow over the next 30 years. These “popery laws,” as they are popularly known, sharply curtail the civil, religious, and economic rights of Catholics in Ireland. The most important ones make it illegal for Catholics to marry Protestants, inherit land from Protestants, buy land, carry weapons, teach school, practice law, vote in parliamentary elections, hold public office, practice their religion, own a horse worth more than 5 pounds, and hold a commission in the army or navy.

One particularly devastating law forces Catholic landowners to divide their estates among all their sons, in contrast to the preferred practice of handing most or all of the land to the eldest, unless they convert to the Church of Ireland. This leaves them with a choice between two evils: abandon their Catholic faith in order to save their holdings or allow them to be successively subdivided into oblivion.

It is this law, along with continued land forfeitures, that over the next century and a half push Ireland’s people onto smaller and smaller plots of land. Smaller holdings force Irish peasants to turn to the potato, a high yield crop, for the bulk of their daily diet. By the eve of the Great Famine, more than 60 percent of the Irish people depend on the potato for the main source of food. Thus, the Penal Laws create the conditions that turn an accident of nature — the fungus that ravages Ireland’s potato crop between 1845 and 1850 — into a monumental human tragedy.

Some Penal Laws are either repealed or simply ignored in the course of the eighteenth century. By the late-1700s, for example, Catholics are allowed to buy land and practice their religion. But the most debilitating laws, those that deny Irish Catholics basic political, economic, and civil rights, are kept in full force until Daniel O’Connell launches his successful campaign for Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s.

(Source: The Irish Echo, oldest Irish American newspaper in the United States, February 16, 2011)


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Death of Samuel Nielson, Society of United Irishmen Founder Member

Samuel Neilson, one of the founder members of the Society of United Irishmen and the founder of its newspaper the Northern Star, dies in Poughkeepsie, New York on August 29, 1803.

Neilson is born in Ballyroney, County Down, the son of Presbyterian minister Alexander, and Agnes Neilson. He is educated locally. He is the second son in a family of eight sons and five daughters. At the age of 16, he is apprenticed to his elder brother, John, in the business of woolen drapery in Belfast. Eight years later he establishes his own business.

Despite his commercial success, Neilson is naturally drawn to politics and is early on a member of the reformist Irish Volunteers movement. In 1791, inspired by the French Revolution, he suggests to Henry Joy McCracken the idea of a political society of Irishmen of every religious persuasion. He establishes the Society of United Irishmen in Belfast. The following year he launches the newspaper of the United Irishmen, the Northern Star, which effectively throws away his fortune. As its editor he is a high-profile target for the authorities and is prosecuted for libel several times, being twice imprisoned between 1796 and 1798.

Along with several other state prisoners, Neilson is released in February 1798 following several petitions by influential friends, on grounds of bad health. Upon release he immediately involves himself in the United Irishmen aligning with the radicals among the leadership who are pressing for immediate rebellion and oppose the moderates who wish to wait for French assistance before acting.

The United Irishmen are however, severely penetrated by informants who keep Dublin Castle abreast of their plans and discussions. In March 1798, information of a meeting of the United Irish executive at the house of Oliver Bond leads to the arrest of most of the leadership, leaving Neilson and Lord Edward FitzGerald as the only figures of national importance still at liberty. They decide to press ahead as soon as possible and settled on May 23 as the date for the rebellion to begin.

As the date looms closer, the authorities go into overdrive to sweep up the rump leadership and on May 18 Lord Edward is betrayed in his hiding place and critically wounded while resisting capture. Neilson, now with responsibility for finalising plans for the looming rebellion, decides that Fitzgerald is too valuable to do without, and decides to try and rescue him from Newgate Prison in Dublin. Wary of confiding his plans too early for fear of betrayal, Neilson goes on a reconnaissance of the prison but is spotted by chance by one of his former jailers and after a fierce struggle, he is overpowered and dragged into the prison.

Neilson is indicted for high treason and held in Kilmainham Gaol with other state prisoners for the duration of the doomed rebellion outside. After the execution of Oliver Bond, and the brothers John and Henry Sheares, Neilson and the remaining prisoners agree to provide the authorities with details of the organisation of the United Irishmen, plans for the rebellion, etc. in return for exile.

Following the suppression of the rebellion, Neilson is transferred to Fort George in Inverness-shire, Scotland, and in 1802 he is deported to the Netherlands. From there he makes his way to the United States, arriving in December 1802, and settling in Poughkeepsie, New York.  He has little time to enjoy his liberty before his sudden death on August 29, 1803, of yellow fever, or possibly a stroke.

Nielson is not idle during his short life in America as he completes plans to start a new evening newspaper in Poughkeepsie and also has plans in the works to establish a version of the Society of United Irishmen in the United States. Since his death, his remains have been moved to three different cemeteries before coming to rest in the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery in 1880.

(Photograph: (c) National Museums Northern Ireland; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation)