Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

Two or three concluding pages of this history rapidly mention a few illustrious Irish names-Marshals Browne and Lacy, &c., appropriately crowning this commemoration of Ireland's glorious sons, with a tribute to her greatest warrior. "Nor need England," our author proudly adds, "complain of the services of Ireland to her enemies. Throughout the last war, from Assaye to Vittoria, from Vimiera to Waterloo, the Irish battalions maintained their fame and her flag; and high in service and renown, above all the generals who ever drew sword in her name, was the Irishman, ARTHUR WELLESLEY."

An appendix containing a "Memoir concerning the Irish troops, from their arrival in France till the present time," copied from an official document furnished by the Duke of Feltre, (Clarke,) Minister of War to Colonel de Montmorency, Morres,* (Hervé,) on the first of September 1813, terminates the volume. This report of the state and organisation of the respective regiments of the Brigade, as successively modified by

* Colonel de Montmorency, whom we had the pleasure of personally knowing, was of the Irish branch of that illustrious family, of which branch the head is the Viscount Francfort de Montmorency. On being informed that the Duke of that name in France, had expressed himself rather slightingly of the Colonel's pretensions to a congenital origin, he offered to produce the sustaining proofs, as indeed he did to ourselves and to our conviction; but the Duke declined the proposal, when our over-sensitive friend dispatched an Irish officer, Captain O'Byrne, who had been in the French service, (and our informant of the circumstance,) to demand recognition, or satisfaction. The nobleman, though surprised at the peremptory alternative, hesitated not to accept the pacific one, and, like Sganarelle in Molière's "Mariage Forcé," rationally acquiescing in the transfusion of a little foreign blood into the family veins, rather than spill his own, professed himself honoured by the newly-discovered consanguinity; nor will this scion disparage the parent stock to which, after so long a severance, it has been reunited. The reference to Molière in the above, induces us to correct an error of the article devoted to him, the Edinburgh Review, No. CLXV., at page 171, where we find it

the French government, descends only to 1750. It is curious and instructive for its object, but limited in general interest. The work which Mr. O'Conor must have found most communicative of necessary information, and which he consequently most copiously quotes, is the Marquis de Quiney's "Histoire Militaire du Règne de Louis le Grand."-Paris, 1726-in eight volumes 4to. But it cannot be uninteresting to continue the narrative to a later period; and as the subject is one on which few authentic details are deducible from easily accessible sources, the writer aided by some modern biographies, may be permitted to draw upon his personal recollection for some additional circumstances, supplementary and kindred to our purpose.

For several years previous to the French Revolution, few of the privates comprising the Brigade were Irish, as we had occasion to observe on the spot, and at the time. There was imminent danger in recruiting them, and little success in the attempt, as for some years, the penal laws while still even unrepealed, were no longer in rigorous execution; and the gentlemen who used to send their children, and urged their tenants or dependants to solicit foreign service, had become either indifferent, or averse to its further pursuit. Liege, the banks of the Rhine, Piedmont, and,

asserted "that actresses in Molière's time retained the title of Mademoiselle, as well after as before marriage." So certainly the great dramatist's worthless wife and widow was uniformly named, not, however, because she was an actress, but because she was not noble. Bayle's letters are all addressed to his mother, surely no actress, as Mademoiselle Bayle. Other proofs we could equally adduce; but the fact is certain, while, like our masculine title of Esquire, that of Madame is indiscriminately lavished at present.

* In 1749, Denis Dunn was executed at Cork for this enlistment, as were Thomas Herlihy and Denis M'Carthy in 1751, although England was then at Peace with France. The recruits were called Wild Geese.

VOL. II.

H

in short, every Catholic country contributed to fill up the subordinate ranks; certainly not with the flower of each people, who are seldom found in such positions; but the officers, though by no means emulously pressing forward as before, continued always respectable in connexion and conduct, while it could hardly escape observation, that their original English, and acquired French language-the one of deepest brogue-the other of high polish-exhibited a contrast of no favourable inference to their home education or society. Their families, in fact, however ancient, had by successive spoliations, been reduced to comparative poverty; and even had they been able to afford the cost, the laws precluded them from the benefits of early culti vation.* Up to the American war, the expectant officers continued more or less numerous; but though so far removed from the formation of the Brigade as

* Long previously the exterminating wars of Elizabeth had driven many' very many respectable families into exile, as refugees, on the humanity or charity of the catholic regions of Europe. And that, to use a familiar phrase, they soon wore out their welcome, like the Poles at present, we may infer from the following extract, furnished by the old chronicler, De l'Etoile's "Journal de Henri IV.,” (tome iii., page 364, edition 1761,) under date of 1606. "Le samedi 20 May furent mis hors de Paris tous les Irlandois, qui étoient en grand nombre, gens experts en fait de gueuserie, et excellens en cette science par dessus tous ceux de cette profession, qui est de ne rien faire et vivre aux dépens du peuple, et aux enseignes du bonhomme Péto d'Orléans. Au reste habiles, de la main, et à faire des enfans, de la maignée desquels Paris est tout peuplé." (Maignée, now obsolete, means progeny.) See also on the fate of fallen gentlemen, Mr. O'Conor's observation at the antecedent page 19.

This Péto, (or Pétau,) was an advocate of Orleans, who had patronised the Irish refugees, then so miserably reduced, until forced by his own diminished means, to transmit them to Paris, where they soon exhausted the inhabitants' benevolence, as we have just seen. The kind old man (bon-homme) Péto was author of a curious work, "Antiq uaria Suppelectilis Portiuncula," (Paris, 1614, in 4to.) and who, in consonance with his pursuit and name, assumed as a motto, "Nova quærant alii, nil nisi prisca peto; as his colleague at the bar, Pierre Pithou of Paris, a much more celebrated man, had, for the

1740, almost fifty years, a near relative of our illustrious Liberator, Captain Maurice O'Connell, whose company the writer enjoyed as a welcome guest for some years, assured him that in offering himself at that time, under the best recommendations of birth and connexions, for an officer's commission, he found seventeen similarly aspiring Cadets preceding him, and had consequently to wait until his turn in rotation came round, which exactly occupied an equal number of years; so much, in the phrase of political economists, did the supply overpass the demand. At that period too, contemporaneous with the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy, where Captain O'Connell successively fought, the Irish was so generally spoken in the regiments, that Mr. Richard Henessy, who entered the service at the same time, and whom Edmond Burke, his friend and cousin, in a letter to his (Burke's) uncle, Mr. Nagle, dated the 14th October, 1765, familiarly calls Dick Henessy, (see Prior's Life of Burke, vol. i., p. 139,) affirmed to us, that it was there he learned the language. And we perfectly remember, that on an unexpected meeting of these old brothers in arms after a long separation, their effusion of joy was impulsively expressed in the racy

same reason, adopted-"Tõis vóμorg wɛílov." Another Petau, (the same, and pronounced, as Péto,) or Petavius, of Orleans also, a Jesuit, was one of the most learned men of the age, and author, with other works, of the profound "Doctrina Temporum," (Lugd. Batav. 1724, 2 vols. 8vo.) and of the "Dogmata Theologica." (Antw. 1700, 3 vols. folio.) See Gibbon, Chap. xlvii. Both works are mines of chronological and theological erudition. To Pierre Pithou, and his brother Francis, we owe the discovery of Phædrus, first published in 1596, 12mo., at Troyes, (en Champagne.)

* This was the last occasion on which the royal Standard of England, attesting the sovereign's presence, was unfurled, now above a century past; (1743,) and the last, we trust, it will be.

heartiness of the Irish idiom; nor were the long unheard sounds, his own earliest essays of speech, unproductive of emotion on the writer. Mr. Henessy's son James, more on a level of years with ourselves, and our friend from early youth, had also entered the Brigade as an "Enfant du Regiment," but soon exchanged the military for a commercial pursuit, and established a distillery with his father and a Mr. Turner, at Cognac, in the department of the "Charente Inférieure," which he represented on the restoration of the Bourbons, in the Chamber of Deputies, and continued to do so until a short time before his death, which occurred in April 1843. He entered the legislative body, he told us, as a conservative or decided royalist; but the indiscretions of the Polignac ministry, made a necessary proselyte of him to more liberal principles, and he formed one of the 221, whom the ill-advised "Ordonnances" called to Paris in 1830, when we had frequent interviews with him on the occurring events; for we happened to be witness of the two Revolutions, though separated by an interval of forty-one years, 1789-1830.

In this enumeration of the distinguished officers of the Brigade, we cannot omit the name of Patrick D'Arcy, eminent alike in military and scientific merit. The fourth son of Hyacinth D'Arcy, of Kiltula, in the county of Galway, where he was born in 1725; he was sent in 1739 to France, for the advantages of education, denied him, as a Catholic, at home. Evincing an early disposition for mathematics, he had, when not above seventeen, solved various intricate problems, under the guidance of the celebrated Clairault, whose friendship he had acquired. But the

« AnteriorContinuar »