The Great Shame by Keneally Thomas

Author:Keneally Thomas [Keneally Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307764393
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-21T14:00:00+00:00

During September’s mid-recruiting, MacManus’s body arrived in New York in its lead-lined coffin and under the care of two San Francisco Fenians. An obsequies committee was put in place to organise the body’s New York stay, and the three members were John O’Mahony, Colonel Meagher and Colonel of Militia Michael Doheny, himself a devout Fenian but in less than good health. On the committee’s behalf, Meagher was pleased to go up Madison Avenue to Archbishop Hughes’s residence to suggest that the remains of his friend be admitted to St Patrick’s Cathedral for a Requiem Mass. After all, Meagher pointed out, Hughes came from the same town as MacManus, Temo in County Fermanagh. The body would lie at first in a militia armoury and then, Meagher suggested, be taken to St Patrick’s in solemn procession. Hughes agreed, even though he was wary of Fenianism. MacManus was a Young Ireland hero, and Young Irelanders—Meagher, O’Gorman, Doheny—were powerful figures in the archbishop’s flock. The Mass was celebrated in St Patrick’s on 18 September, and the archbishop acknowledged the holiness of MacManus’s sacrifice, ‘upholding the right of an oppressed people to struggle for their liberation.’ Libby Meagher, if she wondered at the company the accidents of marriage had brought her into, was still fascinated both by the Irish question and by the solemnities of Catholicism.

After the Mass, thousands accompanied MacManus’s coffin downtown to the steamer Glasgow. The Catholic hierarchy of Ireland were for the most part determined not to admit to their churches the body that a secret, oath-bound society was using for its own purpose. In Cork, Meagher read, MacManus lay in state at a chapel under the jurisdiction of the Carmelite Order. In late October, it was accompanied by a crowd, estimated by some at 300,000, through the streets of Cork to the railway station. The American delegation had been enlarged by Doheny, Meagher’s friend and fellow recruit Michael Cavanagh, and John O’Mahony. On its way to Dublin, wherever the train paused, solemn crowds, rosary beads in hand, stood hatless to pay their respects.

Since Archbishop Cullen had flatly refused to admit the body to the procathedral of Dublin, it lay until 10 November in the Lecture Hall of the Mechanics’ Institute. As thousands visited it, the question revived as to who owned poor MacManus’s bones. At the Shelbourne Hotel, Terence’s sister met the American delegation in a reception room, but some of the non-Fenian men of ’48, James Cantwell, Father Kenyon, and John Martin who had shared the same exile as MacManus, were there too. They wanted to argue Miss MacManus out of letting the Fenians manage the remains.

The veterans of Young Ireland were considered to have been unduly chastened by their ’48 adventures and were looked upon by Fenians as laggards now. Miss MacManus told them that the men who had disinterred her brother in San Francisco and brought the remains ‘such a great distance with much labor and expense, were the only ones entitled.’ At a meeting of the Irish

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