The Fall of the House of Wilde Read Free

Connaught magistrates hung Michael’s body in the market square as an example to Roscommoners, with the word Ribbonman affixed to a placard on his head. Determined to press home their warnings to the populace, the magistrates then paraded the dead Michael through the district now thronged with onlookers. Some twenty or thirty thousand silent and sullen witnesses lined the streets to watch Michael’s body, made to sit erect in a cart with his arms extended and tied to pitchforks in a Christ-like pose. ‘Even neighbours,’ William said, ‘scarcely exchanged a greeting’ as ‘savage revenge brooded over the mass’. Michael’s cart led a procession of horses and carts; tied to each was a Ribbonman stripped to the waist, ready to be flogged at each town through which the cavalcade passed. Military drums kept beat with the floggings in a public display honoured with the presence of ‘the Major’, who from atop his ‘open chariot’ ordered and directed this primitive ritual. By his side, as William put it, ‘lolled a large, unwieldy person, with bloated face and slavering lip – the ruler of Connaught . . . the great gauger-maker [
sic
] of the west – The Right Honourable. Let us drop the curtain. If this was not Connaught, it was Hell.’ 4 So wrote William, whose disdain for the law lingered in his children. Having witnessed other such unrestrained exhibitions, William for ever after breathed an air bitter with gunpowder. The very sight of the military, ‘the Redcoats’, as he called them, drew from him tart remarks.
    Unlike other children of privilege, William was exposed from the first to life’s crueller dispensations. Reared in a home where family and medical life merged, William was party to an ambient world of decrepitude. The one-eyed and the lame, the dying and the dead were familiar to William, who sometimes accompanied his father on medical rounds. Did he peer, awestruck, through the windows at treatment or surgery in progress? Even had his eyes stayed shut, his ears would have been open to the moans from the house or cabin. Death was common during the 1820s and 1830s, decades marked by plague, cyclical famine and casualties of sectarian and land strife. In addition, life expectancy was low, even among the aristocracy. Every birth brought a woman to a liminal state, poised between this world and the next. No matter the elaborate theoretical edifice Dr Thomas Wilde would have built, it often did not shield the woman from fatal disaster. Sudden death could whisk an Irishwoman before God for eternal punishment. Hell gaped, its agonies graphically illustrated on the walls of the parish church or recounted by storytellers in edifying detail.
    All this was rich pasture for an imaginative boy. The feverish excitement which William in his twenties brought to archaeology can be better understood if we put ourselves in the mind of the young child roaming the west of Ireland, a land strewn with the ruins of racial and religious battles – a Gothic, Romantic playground. There was nourishment to be found all over the land where ancient cairns and stone circles stood saturated with legend and lore. As a child, William had an unfailing informant on ruins and relics in an elderly Catholic priest, known as ‘the Lord Abbot’ of Cong, a Father Patrick Prendergast, who lived on land owned by his grandparents at Ballymagibbon. As members of the Order of St Augustine, the canons of Cong had been forced to flee their monastery, and survived thanks to the shelter afforded them by William’s ancestors. Fr Pendergast was the last Abbot of Cong, as Rome decided not to appoint a successor. 5 The ‘very fine, courteous, white-haired old man’ opened William’s mind to ancient Ireland for the best part of thirteen years. There were endless relics to show the proprietor’s grandson, and endless yarns attached. There was the