Queen Read Free Page A

QUEEN
     
        Hamilton was the major English presence in the county of Monaghan, and
        served as sheriff. He was a strict Protestant, with no sympathy for
        Catholics. He took pleasure in rigidly enforcing all the penal laws
        against the peasants, whom he regarded as illiterate idolaters. These
        laws, instituted after the British victory at the Battle of the Boyne,
        were used to keep the defeated Catholics out of money, land, and power.
        The laws encouraged religious conversion and informing on neighbors-and
        even families, for only a Protestant in a Catholic family could inherit
        the land.
        James expected his children to attend these functions, which they did
        unwillingly, for Dacre Hamilton was not loved by any of them. He had once
        briefly imprisoned their brother and sister, John and Eleanor, for some
        youthful high jinks. John had defended a hedge-school teacher against an
        irate landlord, and Eleanor had announced in public that she thought the
        religious persecution of the Catholics was obscene. Dacre Hamilton also
        protested to James Jackson, and warned him to exercise greater control
        over his children's opinions and actions. James had taken a riding crop
        to John, and locked Eieanor in her room for three days. It was this that
        persuaded John to emigrate to America and Eleanor to move to Dublin. The
        other Jackson children were wary of Hamilton, and while they enjoyed the
        sport of the hunt, they disliked the overweening sycophancy to England
        of the hunters. Encouraged by Sean, Jamie began to believe that most of
        the club would rather be in pursuit of Irish peasants than foxes or
        hares.
     
    Nothing was more indicative of the social gap that existed between Jamie
    and Sean than the manner of their formal education. A tutor was engaged
    for Jamie: Jimmy Hanna, an impoverished young man of good leaming, from
    Dublin, who had recently graduated from Trinity College and was looking
    to make his way in an unfair world. The classroom was the music room of
    the Jackson house, and they would sit together in isolate splendor, the
    teacher and his only student, and Jamie was introduced to the classical
    world of Latin and Greek, of mathematics and history. As he got to know
    his student better, and trusted him more, Jimmy introduced him to the
    glories of Irish literature. Jamie loved the beautiful words, and the
        BLOODLINES 11
     
    worlds they evoked of rain-washed fields and white-walled cottages, of
    lowering skies and breaking sunlight. Of heroes and rainbows.
        With poetry as a foundation, Jimmy gently led his student to Ireland's
        present troubles, gave him a clear appreciation of the battle that lay
        ahead to rid their country of foreign rule, and taught him that freedom
        was the most precious word in any language.
        Sean's school was behind a hedge. The British authorities were fearful
        of education for the peasants. History, presented in the wrong light,
        could lead to sedition, and many of the hedge-school teachers were deeply
        involved in the liberation movements. The teachers taught where they
        could, in ditches and behind hedgerows, with some lucky few having access
        to a shed or shack. They were paid in kind, with peat for their fires,
        or food for their stomachs-small stabs of bacon, or some potatoes, a bag
        of meal, a pound of butter or a few eggs. Textbooks were few, and those
        the teachers did have they had usually copied themselves, from printed
        books they could not afford to buy. Often a young man of the village
        would be posted as lookout, for many landlords kicked teachers off their
        properties, and burned their precious books, or charged them with
        sedition.
        Sean's