Rossa's Recollections, 1838 to 1898. Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa
courage scarcely ever known,
Led on by brave Maria,
Each stood, like David with a stone,
To face the great Goliah.
The Flavian corps commenced the fray,
And fired a sudden volley;
The women, strangers to dismay,
Made a most vigorous sally.
The fight grew hot along the van,
Both stones and bullets rattle.
And many a brave young Orangeman
Lay on the field of battle.
Now here, now there, Maria flies,
Nothing can stop her courses.
All instruments of death she plies
Against the Orange forces.
Such is her speed upon the plain,
No mortal can outpace her,
And such her valor—’tis in vain
For any man to face her,
Great Major Hewitt, for tactics famed,
Renewed the fierce alarms,
Celestial rays of lightning gleamed
From his refulgent arms.
His father was of earthly race,
His mother—once the fairest
Of rural nymphs—the stolen embrace
Of Jove upon a “Papist.”
He rushed into the virgin throng
And put them in commotion,
But brave Maria quickly ran
And stopped his rapid motion.
With his own pistol, on his head,
She gave him such a wherrit
As laid him with the vulgar dead,
Devoid of sense and spirit.
Barclay, the second in command,
Renowned for killing number
Was by Margretta’s daring band,
Knocked into deadly slumbers;
With a sharp saw upon his crown
She cut so deep a chasm,
He fell, and bit the bloody ground,
In a most frightful spasm.
The Orange banner was displayed
By youthful Ensign Legoe,
Who was by war’s sad chance soon laid
Low as the other hero:
In this predicament he found
Himself in no small hazard,
When a rude bullet of ten pound
Rebounded from his mazzard
He fell upon his brawny back
To the cold marble pavement;
The victors beat him like a sack,
By way of entertainment.
She said, “Go, vagrant, to the shades,
And tell Sir John the story,
How a small band of Carbery maids
Pulled down the Orange glory.”
Sir Parker, seeing his banner fall,
His warlike troops defeated,
Under the cover of a wall
To a small fort retreated,
Where he and all his Garde de Corps
Lay for some time securely,
And braved the clamor and uproar
Of th’ Amazonian fury.
But while the hero from within
Fired on a brave virago,
Who then pursued four of his men
With vengeance and bravado,
A rocky fragment from without
Made a most grievous rattle
Upon his cheek, his eye knocked out—
Which finished all the battle.
Some of his men in ditches lay
To shun their near extinction;
Some from their helmets tore away
The badges of distinction;
Some in the public streets declared
Against the name and Order.
And thus our Orange heroes fared
The day they crossed the border.
I print the “Battle of Ross” not to foster the feuds it represents, but to show the agencies that create them; I print it because the battle occurred in my native town; because my people were in the battle; because it was a fireside story in every house around me when I was a boy, and because my “Recollections” would not be complete without it. I have through life done as much as one Irishman could do to checkmate the common enemy’s work of fostering those feuds; I am growing into the mood of mind of thinking that I have done more than I would care to do again could I live my life over, because the gain of a few Protestants or Orangemen here and there to the side of the cause of their country’s independence, is not worth the time and trouble that it takes to convince them you want that independence for some purpose other than that of killing all the Protestants and all the Orangemen of Ireland.
The poem is published in Dr. Campion’s Life of Michael Dwyer. It is from that book, sold by P. J. Kenedy, of 5 Barclay street, New York, that I copy it now. My childhood story of the battle is, that the men of Ross did not engage in it at all; that martial law was in force at the time; that the parade of the Orangemen was only a provocation to make the Irishmen show themselves and put them in the power of the law, and have them either shot down or put to prison; but, that the women of the town sallied out, and with sticks and stones put the Orangemen to flight. Their leader, Parker Roche, lost an eye from the stroke of a stone hurled at him by “brave Maria,” Mary O’Mahony (Baan), or “Mauria Vhaan,” as the people familiarly called her.
The leaders of those Orangemen were the people who led the North Cork Militia into Wexford in ’98, and sixteen years before that, they were some of the people that were leaders of the volunteers of ’82, about whom I think a little too much has been said in praise and plaumaus. I look at the names and titles of the Cork delegates to the convention of Dungannon in 1782, and I find them much the same as the names and titles of those who commanded the Irish volunteers of Cork, and the North Cork Militia, who were fighting for England in Wexford in ’98. Just look at these names as I take them from the history of the volunteers of 1782; by Thomas McNevin and Thornton MacMahon. “Delegates to the Convention of Dungannon, County of Cork, Right Hon. Lord Kingsborough, Francis Bernard, Esq., Col. Roche, Sir John Conway Colthurst, Major Thomas Fitzgerald.”
Names of the Irish Volunteers, County of Cork—Bandon Independent Company, Col. Francis Bernard.
Carbery Independent Company, Capt. John Townsend.
Duhallow Rangers, Lieut.-Col. William Wrixon.
Imokilly Horse, Col. Roche.
Kanturk Volunteers, the Earl of Egmont.
Mitchelstown Light Dragoons,