Secret Service Under Pitt

Huband Smith's letter runs: —

I deferred replying to your note and queries till I could lay my hands on some documents which I had preserved respecting the Commission for inclosing Waste Lands and Commons in Tallaght, Killsillaghan, &c. The Act was passed in the 2nd of George IV. session of 1821. The original Commissioners were Morgan Crofton, James Clancy, and Francis Magan, all barristers. The lands to be inclosed were: – In Tallaght, 783 acres; Killsillaghan, 150 acres; Luske, 320 acres exclusive of the racecourse. The Act recited the owners of the adjoining lands, lords of manors, and also the General Inclosure Act of 43 George III. The earlier meetings of the Commissioners were held in the Royal Exchange, and the later ones at the house of William Duffield Rooke, an eminent solicitor, in Molesworth Street, well known also in the musical world as an accomplished violinist, and member of the 'Beef-Steak Club.' Mr. Morgan Crofton having died in 1830, it became necessary for the surviving Commissioners under the Act to appoint a third in his place, and in February 1831 I was sworn in as a Commissioner at the meeting held on March 11, 1831, and this was the first time I met Magan. Mr. James Clancy was a barrister of some eminence well known to the profession by able legal treatises, amongst them one of considerable authority on the law of husband and wife.

In regard to your query, what was the average amount of the fees which constituted Magan's salary – he was entitled to receive three guineas per diem for every day on which the Commissioners sat in furtherance of the Act. Magan and his brother Commissioners were armed with large powers, such as examining witnesses on oath, awarding costs, and enforcing payment by distress warrant, &c. In point of fact they held a sort of court, and constituted a tribunal from which the appeal lay to the Superior Courts by action at law, under certain restrictions. The Commissioners were directed to hold perambulations, and authorised to sell such parts of the lands as, in their opinion, were necessary to defray the expenses of passing the Act and of carrying it into execution, and to execute conveyances of the fee-simple.

It is on the commons at Lusk that the admirable Irish convict system, which has worked so well, has been fully carried into operation.

With regard to Magan's manner, it appeared to me very unobtrusive, and, as one would say, undemonstrative. He was then an elderly man sufficiently gentlemanlike in appearance, tall, yet rather of plain, and even coarse exterior; perhaps a little moody and reserved at times, and something may have been pressing on him of which he said little.357 As to his private income, there were no data for coming to any conclusion… He resided at Usher's Island, near the Four Courts, a neighbourhood at that time inhabited by a better class than now, and it formed no part of the Commission to inquire more minutely into his affairs.

Mr. Magan was socially described as a person who 'held his head high,' and with a nice sense of honour. In later years he seemed unduly sensitive and, at times, retiring. Possessing few friends through life, he continued staunch to these few, beginning with Francis Higgins and ending with 'Master' Clancy. 'I hold Magan in such esteem,' the latter said, 'that only for his advanced age I should like to appoint him my executor.' Some other men who remembered '98, its horrors, and its gossip, rather recoiled from Magan without knowing well why. There was something of a 'Dr. Fell' about him. He occasionally went the home circuit, but got no briefs. When hailed by juniors with a deference which put to flight all misgivings on his part as to whether acquaintanceship was likely to be valued, his hauteur softened into a dignified affability, and this relaxation was often taken as a gracious condescension. His white locks made him venerable, and by some he was regarded as a father of the Bar.358

Another man who viewed him with respect was the late Judge Corballis, who in reply to a letter wrote: —

I never, directly or indirectly, heard anything of the alleged charge against Frank Magan during his life. I was on habits of intimacy with him to the day of his death, and was with him on his death-bed. He always bore a high character, as far as I could ever learn, either at the bar or in society.

Mr. Corballis lived in the country and knew not what Magan's neighbours said. In their eyes a black cloud seemed to hover over his house.

For forty long years, as the neighbours declared,His abode had ne'er once been cleaned or repaired.359

But in personal appearance he was neat enough, and might be daily seen, in the stiff high cravat of the Regency, emerging from its precincts. Dr. Atkinson and Charles Kernan say that, though Magan was a familiar object to them all the year round, they never saw him accompanied by mortal in his walks. He never married, would sit in solitude, or stalk from room to room like Marlay's ghost. Perhaps the voice of conscience muttered, 'You are said to have sought the confidence of men in order to betray it; show the world by your frigid attitude that such is not likely to be true.' He was reported to have wealth: how he acquired it seemed a mystery.

In 1842, Dr. Madden, when engaged on his 'Lives of the United Irishmen,' had interviews, as he tells us, with Mrs. Macready, who, as Miss Moore, had been with Lord Edward the day before his arrest;360 but her son informed me that as Magan was then alive and residing near at hand, she did not mention his name to Dr. Madden. Magan, however, cannot fail to have heard of the inquiries being instituted around him by Madden, and his nervous temperament was not calmed by that knowledge. He died in 1843, during a period of great popular excitement and when fears prevailed that the events of '98 were about to be renewed.

'Magan's remains lie in our vaults' writes a local priest.361

'By his will he requires a perpetual yearly mass to be celebrated by all priests of this church for the repose of his soul, so that I have been praying for him once each year since I became attached to this parish, without knowing anything of his antecedents.'

Dr. Dirham had been residing within a few doors of Magan's house, and on the death of that gentleman it occurred to him to move to the more ample accommodation it afforded. His account, though wholly unimportant, is curious in its way. For years Miss Magan kept constantly promising to vacate in his favour, stating that some small cottage in some rural spot would be much more suitable to her lonely life; but an irresistible fascination bound her to the dingy rooms in which she had vegetated since the dark days of '98. Francis Magan, by a will of ten lines, had left all his property to Elizabeth, his sister, and directed that his funeral might be private. The rooms were now all shut up, and Miss Magan herself ate, drank, and slept upon the landing. For twenty years the drawing-room had not been opened, owing to the fact that a younger sister had died there; and the other apartments of the house were locked up for reasons equally odd. A strange indisposition to permit the humblest visitor to enter the place, was shown in various ways. A quarter of a century seemed to have elapsed since the dust-pit had been emptied, and boards were erected round it which enabled the Magans to add daily débris, until at last they became dust themselves. When Dr. Dirham came into possession of the place362 he found the garden covered from end to end with some feet deep of cinders, through which rank nettles struggled like the stings of the self-consciousness that made life with Magan the reverse of roseate. In a retired nook stood a bottle drainer, the wooden bars of which had fallen in from decay, smashing in its descent the emblems of conviviality it once enshrined, and through the aid of which profitable secrets may erst have been gained. The sewers and gratings had become choked; and the deep area at the rear of the house was filled with eight feet of stagnant water. A subterranean cell, adjoining this fosse, and by courtesy styled the 'coal-vault,' opened on another dark chamber; and a feeling of awe crept over the Doctor when, impelled by curiosity to gauge its depth, he cast a stone into the pit, and listened until its descent terminated in the sound of splashing water below. The hinges of the hall door were so stiff during Miss Magan's tenancy, that Dr. Fleming, who as a cousin once ventured to visit the moneyed recluse, had to call at a neighbouring chemist's for sweet oil ere he felt safe in crying 'Open Sesame.' Seated on the cold landing, in the midst of chests of mysterious treasure, this 'unprotected female,' trembling in every nerve lest friends should wrest it from her grasp, gloomily passed the closing years of a hidden life. Once, on a false alarm of fire, her anguish was pitiable, and, to the surprise of everybody, she relinquished the custody of some chests to a neighbour,363 Mr. Cotton, who, however, detained them only a few hours. At another neighbour's, Miss Flanagan's, who kept an old established bakery, Miss Magan always got her bank-notes changed; but, fearful of being waylaid between the covered car she occupied, and the door at which it stopped, Miss Flanagan was always obliged to get into the vehicle and place in the hands of its shrinking occupant the metallic equivalent for the crisp new note. Some arrears of rent had accumulated at the time of Miss Magan's death, and a term of years in the lease remained unexpired; but her property was so left that the landlord's claim could not be satisfied. The house was in such a ruined state that the landlord, Colonel King, was glad to accept half the former rent. Although an extremely old house, only one tenant, Archbishop Carpenter,364 occupied it before Magan. In its back parlour had been ordained Dean Lube and many other old priests well known in Dublin during the struggle for Catholic Emancipation; and so searchingly severe was the operation of penal law, that students for ordination had to be smuggled into the Archbishop's house by the stable in Island Street, afterwards turned to ignoble purposes. An altar stood in a recess of this parlour, which the Magans changed into a cupboard.

William Allingham would seem to have had the house in his eye when, some years later, he wrote: —

Outside, the old plaster, all spatter and stain,Looked spotty in sunshine and streaky in rain;The window-sills sprouted with mildewy grass,And the panes from being broken were known to be glass.Within there were carpets and cushions of dust;The wood was half rot, and the metal half rust;Old curtains – half cobwebs – hung grimly aloof:'Twas a spider's Elysium from cellar to roof.But they pried not upstairs, through the dust and the gloom,Nor peeped at the door of the wonderful roomThat gossips made much of, in accents subdued,But whose inside no mortal might brag to have viewed.Full forty years since turned the key in that door:'Tis a room deaf and dumb 'mid the city's uproar.The guests, for whose joyance that table was spread,365May now enter as ghosts, for they're every one dead.

On consulting the records of the Probate Court early in this inquiry, I was puzzled to find that the sum which Miss Magan appeared to have died worth was quite nominal. This discovery disturbed, and for some time retarded, the completion of the chain of evidence. On inquiry, however, it was stated that, in order to save the legacy duty, she transferred, when almost in extremis, a considerable sum to the late Very Rev. Dr. Taylor and a respected physician366 still living; and she made a will ratifying that act. Orally, she expressed a wish as to its bestowal for some useful purpose, but leaving details entirely to their discretion. With the bulk of this money a refuge for penitent females and an asylum for the insane were built.367 Miss Magan died worth 14,000l., not to speak of a fee-farm property known as Hartstown, held under Lord Carhampton, and not far from the Devil's Mills, near Dublin, which, local tradition states, his lordship built in one night by demoniac aid.368

It seems strange that Magan, who was insolvent before the rebellion, could amass so much money. His secret pension was merely for 200l. a year369 (a sum insufficient to pay the rent of his house), give good donations to the Catholic Board, pay off Fetherston's bond, and support himself, his sisters and his horse – for in early life Mr. Magan did indulge in that luxury. His pension, there is reason to think, from the letter of Sir William Gossett in 1834, ceased to be paid about that time. His fees as a Commissioner for enclosing commons were enjoyed by him for a few years only; and as the 'S.S. Money Book' records but three payments to him – namely, on September 11, 1800, April 2, 1802, and December 15, 1802 – it is evident that he must have derived income from other sources. There are payments of secret service money to the informers of '98 and their representatives which obtain no record in the book ostensibly devoted to that purpose. Captain Armstrong, who betrayed the Sheares's, is known to have received, throughout sixty years, about 29,000l. in recognition of that act; and yet no trace of his name appears in the book of Secret Service Money expenditure. Money was also obtainable under a clause in the Act of 39 George III. cap. 65, by which a sum of 2,910l. was allocated to the Under-Secretary in the Civil department (Dublin Castle) for the time being, in trust for payment of secret annuities. A letter from Dr. Ferris suggests another source. He states, on the authority of a clerk in Gleadowe Newcomen's Bank, then dead, that an annuity had been paid from that house to Francis Magan, and that the clerk had seen Magan's receipts. Dr. Ferris suggests that the books of the bank might be still accessible for examination.370

An Act of Parliament provided that the Secret Service Money placed at the Viceroy's disposal should pass confidentially through the hands of the Chief Secretary; but this arrangement has not always been adhered to, as is evident from the fact that the 1,000l. reward for the discovery of Emmet was lodged to the credit of the informer in Finlay's bank. The hint of Dr. Ferris is not uninteresting, but the books of Newcomen's bank do not seem to have been preserved. Barrington states that Sir W. Gleadowe Newcomen, who voted for the Union, received a reward of 20,000l. with a peerage, and the patronage of his county. It is a strange irony of fate that Lord Newcomen died poor. For years he lived alone in the bank, gloating, it was wildly whispered, over ingots of treasure, with no lamp to guide him but the luminous diamonds which had been left for safe keeping in his hands. Moore would have compared him to 'the gloomy gnome that dwells in the dark gold mine.' Wrapped in a sullen misanthropy, he was sometimes seen emerging at twilight from his iron clamped abode. La Touche's bank stood on the opposite side of Castle Street, and Dublin wags compared the street to a river because it ran between two banks. Jokes soon gave way to sobs. One day Newcomen's bank broke,371 and prosperous men perished in the collapse. Lord Newcomen had previously retired to Killester, where he died by his own hand. No claimant appeared for his coronet, and the line became extinct. This was the twenty-seventh Irish peerage which had failed since the Union. Gleadowe had been M.P. for Longford when he voted for the extinction of the Irish Parliament. Richard Lovel Edgeworth, a betrayed constituent, regarded this vote as an act of treason, and in anger shot forth the following bolt: —

With a name that is borrowed – a title that's bought,Sir William would fain be a gentleman thought;His wit is but cunning, his courage but vapour,His pride is but money – his money but paper!

What was a pointless sarcasm in 1800 became a stubborn fact in 1825 – Newcomen's notes were waste paper. The Hibernian Banking Company soon after began business within the walls.

CHAPTER XII

WILLIAM TODD JONES. EMMET'S REBELLION

Todd Jones, Wolfe Tone, and Hon. Simon Butler were three Protestants to whom, Mr. Froude says, the Catholic Committee voted 1,500l. each, as a reward for their cordially rendered aid. This was in 1793, and we hear no more of Todd Jones from Froude. His subsequent history is not without interest, and seems interwoven with that of Francis Magan.

John Philpot Curran's writing-desk remains exactly as he left it when quitting Ireland in 1817 to die. A long and cautiously written letter,372 without signature, dated August 13, 1803, but known to be from Lady Moira, reposes in this desk. It was written three weeks after Emmet's rebellion, and a month prior to his execution. The letter begins mysteriously, 'Read, reflect, but do not answer. Time will unfold the intentions.' She complains of information which had been sent to the Government, regarding a trunk, assumed to be full of papers, reaching Moira House, Usher's Island, and presumably from Todd Jones. She declares that her rooms were ransacked, under a warrant from the Secretary of State, and how letters addressed to Todd Jones at Moira House had been carried to Dublin Castle. In writing to Curran, whom she wishes to be her counsel if the matter should come to trial, she makes light of these letters, and prudentially describes her correspondence with Jones as mainly of an antiquarian and picturesque interest.

Magan, who resided within a few doors of Moira House, possessed peculiar facilities for 'setting'373 the movements of its habitués.374 It must have been in 1802 when he was found by Mathias O'Kelly375 associating with Todd Jones, and that date merits attention. 'I had been absent from Ireland for ten years, from the year 1792,' writes Jones in his petition to the king, 'during the whole of which period I was uninterruptedly a resident in England, and in May 1802 I was indispensably compelled to return to Dublin, by an affair of honour.'376 Soon after he proceeded to Munster, 'which I had never beheld, and had long entertained an inclination to see.'377

At what date can we trace the first arrival of Jones on his mysterious mission to Clonakilty, where with several of his friends he was arrested on a charge of high treason in July 1803? To that question the answer is, December 1802. The 'Account of Secret Service Money, applied in detecting Treasonable Conspiracies,' contains the following entry: – '1802, December 15th, Francis Magan, by direction of Mr. Orpen, 500l.'

There is but one family named 'Orpen' in Ireland; and the only Orpen who could possibly be authorised to direct the payment of 500l. to Magan at this time was the High Sheriff of Cork, in whose bailiwick Jones was tracked and caught.378

Emmet, in his speech from the dock, denied that he was the life and soul of the conspiracy, as alleged by Mr. Solicitor-General Plunket; declared that men of greater mark than he were deep in it; that on his return to Ireland he found the organisation formed; he was asked to join it; he requested time to consider; they invited him again, and he embarked in the enterprise. And yet, so carefully was the secret kept, that nothing transpired to show that he had any colleagues of good position. Lord Norbury, who tried the case, and the Attorney-General stigmatised the plan as contemptible from the fact that Emmet's allies were of no higher rank than 'ostlers, bakers, carpenters, and old clothes men,' and, notwithstanding the solemnity of Emmet's dying words, history has since given him the exclusive credit, or discredit, of the rising of 1803.

Among others to whom suspicion attaches, although there is no absolute evidence to show his guilt, may be mentioned William Todd Jones, a Protestant of good family and some means, a barrister and writer, and a member of the late Irish Parliament. The Viceregal organ, the 'Dublin Journal,' in its issue of August 6, 1803, after noticing the arrest of Jones, adds: 'This gentleman has been many months on a tour through the provinces of Leinster and Munster, making speculations on the state of the country through which he passed.' He remained eight months in Cork, and it is a question whether, during that prolonged stay, he may not have sought to foment revolution. All memoirs of Emmet have hitherto been silent as regards the complicity of Cork in his designs. Kildare is the county of which mention is chiefly made. The following from the 'Courier' (London) of August 5, 1803, furnishes a glimpse into the then state of Cork: —

A Dublin mail arrived this evening, and brought us letters and papers of Monday last… Though there has been no rising in Cork, yet very unfavourable symptoms of disaffection have appeared there, and to the south of that city we are sorry to hear that the malignancy of the former rebellion is by no means extinguished.

The same journal, of August 16, 1803, contains a letter 'written by a gentleman of distinction in the county of Cork,' possibly Mr. Orpen himself, who commanded a corps of Yeomanry. The writer, after stating that he had spread yeomen in all directions to prevent the embarkation of persons charged with treason, goes on to say: —

Todd Jones has been at Dr. Callanan's, Clonakilty, the last eight months: H.,379 by order of Government, arrested him for high treason, as also the Doctor and his son… These measures have been attended with alarm; but I think we are at present quite safe; and a strong fleet at Beerhaven relieves me from all apprehension of an enemy.

The entire of the Yeomanry of this kingdom is now on the permanent establishment. Our corps is strong, and without vanity a good one. I have applied for an addition of infantry: with this augmentation, I shall feel very little apprehension for any attack made upon us without the aid of foreign force.

It appears from this letter, dated August, 1803, that Jones had been then eight months at Clonakilty in the county Cork: therefore his arrival would have been in December 1802 – the very date of the payment of 500l. to Magan by direction of Mr. Orpen, high sheriff for the county. Meanwhile the locality in which Jones pitched his camp became, from some cause, decidedly heated. A letter in the London 'Courier,' dated 'Cork, August 21,' after recording the arrest of Todd Jones, Donovan, and Dr. Callanan, states, 'The peasantry in the neighbourhood of Ross, near Clonakilty, go armed to their chapels, and mount a regular guard over their arms while they perform their devotions.'

We have seen that Magan – traditionally described as an unsociable person, possessing few friends – maintained most intimate relations with James Dickson of Kilmainham, in whose house Jones was also a constant guest. About the same time as the arrest of Jones in Cork, the 'Courier' of August 30, 1803, announces in its Dublin news: 'Yesterday Mr. James Dickson, of Kilmainham, was arrested at his house by Messrs. Atkinson380 and Carleton, chief peace-officers, and his papers searched. The superintendent magistrate had him conveyed to the Castle, where he underwent examination, and was afterwards committed to Kilmainham Gaol.'381

Todd Jones, writing at the time, warmly details the circumstances of his arrest (the italics are his own): —

My person has been assaulted in my bed at daybreak, in the respectable mansion of a venerable friend, Doctor Callanan, near Clonakilty, and I have been conveyed, very strongly guarded by Troops, to an ignominious common Gaol: in reaching which, at the moderate distance of twenty-two miles, I have been wantonly exhibited, like an already convicted Felon, for two long summer days, the first and second of August, in Orange Triumph, to the gaze of a very crowded Bandon rabble; and thence paraded, with like ostentation, through all the streets of Cork, as if in progress to Execution. – My venerable friend and hospitable entertainer, Doctor Calanan, a Physician of the age of seventy, with his only son, on my account, have been dragged from the same mansion to Prison, after a similar triumphant exposure of two days, to gazing multitudes, in the short distance of twenty-two miles: a Man eminent for a long professional life, dedicated to the Poor, and to the Peasants, whose tears kept pace with his progress.

He then goes on to request that all concerned in his detainer, including the Sheriff of Cork, may be summoned to the Bar of Parliament. An account of his shattered health is sent to the Secretary of State – 'It is my liberty which I pray for – a trial – liberation – or death! I have been a close prisoner for eleven weeks, without even having been shown my indictment, or been told the names of my accusers.'382