Betsy Gray

Elizabeth "Betsy" Gray (c. 1778 - 1798), is a folkloric figure in the annals of 1798 Rebellion in Ireland. Ballads, poems and popular histories celebrate her presence in the ranks of the United Irishmen, and her death, on 12 June 1798 at the Battle of Ballynahinch. Contemporary records are unable to confirm the tale that has been told in all its detail, but they do point to role of woman in supporting the insurrection, including as combatants in the field. Contesting ownership of her memory, in 1898 local unionists disrupted Irish nationalist centenary commemorations and destroyed her grave marker.

Elizabeth "Betsy" Gray
Miniature attributed to Edward John Newell
Bornc 1778
Gransha at Comber, or Killinchy, County Down, Ireland
Died12 June 1798
Battle of Ballynahinch
Cause of deathSummarily executed by government Yeomanry
Nationality Kingdom of Ireland, Irish
Movement Society of United Irishmen

The legend of the rebel heroine

The sacrifice of Betsy Gray was not memorialised in print until a generation or more after the rebellion. The most frequently cited source today is Wesley Guard Lyttle’s Betsy Gray or Hearts of Down: a Tale of Ninety-Eight which appeared in 1888 and was last reprinted in 2008.[1] It includes the "Ballad of Betsy Gray" commemorating "the pride of Down" who, following her appearance amidst the "gory fray" at Ballynahinch, is cut down (with "freedom's dreams") alongside "her sweetheart, Willie Boal" and her brother by government "Yeos" (Yeomanry). Lyttle claims that the "ballad was still familiar in thousands of homes", but he gives no information on the ballad itself in terms of composer or from what source he received it.

Lyttle was a newspaper editor (the North Down Herald) but also a writer: his Hearts of Down in which Betsy, "possessed of wondrous beauty ... enriched and enhanced by a warm heart, an ardent temperament", rides into battle in a green silk dress and brandishing a sword, is his "third novel".[2] But the bones of his "classic" tale[3] were already in print. M'Comb's Guide to Belfast... and Adjoining Districts published in 1861 draws on McSimin's sketches of the rebellion (1849)[4] and on a New and Popular History of Ireland (1857) to render a broadly comparable account.[5]

Betsy, the daughter of Presbyterian farmer from north Down goes into battle "with a brother and lover, determined to share their fate, mounted on a pony, and bearing a green flag". After the rebel rout, the three are overtaken by a detachment of the Hillsborough Yeomanry Infantry. The two men are killed pleading for her liberty, and Betsy, after having her gloved hand severed by a sword, is shot through the head. The wife of one of the Yeoman, James Little, is afterwards seen wearing the girl's ear rings and green petticoat. In a divided community, parishioners in their Annahilt Church would refuse to sit with the Littles in the same pew. While loyalists made "Bessie" the subject of "rude ballads", in "many a cottage" there was to seen hanging "a rough map representing the battle scene with our heroine mounted on a pony and bearing a green flag".[5]

Contemporary sources

In addition to MacSkimin, M'Comb's cites at least two other references to Betsy Gray by those who were her contemporaries. There is a recollection of "fair Elizabeth Gray" by Charles Teeling, a leader of the Catholic Defenders (Certain of a rout, on the eve of battle the Defenders were led out of the rebel camp by Teeling’s brother-in-law, their county "Grand Master", John Magennis. Declining to take an "ungenerous advantage", the commander of the otherwise Presbyterian host, Henry Monro, had refused Magennis' suggestion of night attack upon the soldiery carousing in the plundered town).[6] M'Comb's also reproduces a poem commemorating the loss of the "poor maiden" on "Erin's ruined plain" by a Miss Balfour published just twelve years after the battle in 1810.[5]

Richard Robert Madden, another early historian of the United Irishmen, had a description from Mary Ann McCracken of the County Down heroine at Ballynahinch riding a white pony and "carrying a stand of colours".[7][8] McCracken, in turn, had a report from her brother, Henry Joy McCracken, on the run having commanded rebel forces at the Battle of Antrim, of receiving "a half guinea and trifles" from "G. Gray". This, it has been suggested, is the George Gray, United Irishman of Gransha at Comber, that Lyttle (in conflict with Teeling, who has Betsy as "the pride of a widowed mother", and with McCracken who has her hailing from Killinchy) identifies as Betsy's father.[2]

Without identifying Betsy, other contemporary sources, closer to the action, lend plausibility to her story. After the Battle of Ballynahinch the Freeman's Journal reported that two women (described by the then loyalist paper as prostitutes) had been killed after bearing the rebel standards in the field.[9] Writing in 1825 James Thomson (the father of Lord Kelvin), recalls as a twelve year-old accompanying women folk of his own family with provisions to the insurgents and hearing reports that two or three women "remained on the field during the battle, submitting to their share of its labours and dangers and performing as valiant deeds as the men".[10]

A booklet, "Out in '98", published in the 1920s, reproduced a miniature of Betsy Gray attributed (possibly apocryphally)[11] to "Newell of Downpatrick".[10] The portrait artist Edward John Newell, according his own Life and Confessions of Newell, the Informer, was a United Irishman who betrayed over two hundred members and sympathisers to the government.[12][13] No direct connection, however, appears to be drawn between Gray's fate and the artist's treachery.

Contested memory
"Elizabeth Gray, George Gray, William Boal, 13th June 1798". "Erected by James Gray, grandnephew of Elizabeth and George Gray, 1896".

Gray was reputedly buried with her companions near to where they were killed at Ballycreen (townland of Magheradrool) near Ballynahinch. A tradition developed that each year locals would visit the grave and lay flowers. The site of the grave was a field, owned a century later in the 1890s by a farmer called Samuel Armstrong, that had been “preserved and not put under cultivation”.[14]

In 1896, following a proposal to the Henry J McCracken Literary Society in Belfast, a formal memorial stone was installed on the site. It was paid for from London by James Gray, "grandnephew of Elizabeth and George Gray". Mr Armstrong was thanked "for his goodness and that of his family in guarding the grave so well for 98 years, and for his kindness in permitting decorations”. He replied that “any man, no matter what his politics might be, who could not honour such heroism and unsullied patriotism as that displayed by the victims who fell and were buried on his farm would be dead to all sense of humanity and nobility”.[15][14]

The new landmark attracted wider attention to the site but at a time when, in the approach the 1798 centenary, the "unsullied patriotism" of the United Irishmen was increasingly contentious.[16] After the 1800 Acts of Union Ulster Presbyterians had transferred their loyalty from a parliament in Dublin they had hoped to reform to a reforming "imperial parliament" at Westminster. Following Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill in 1886, as unionists they resisted the efforts of largely Catholic-supported nationalists to invoke the memory of "'98" in support of their campaign to restore Ireland's legislative independence.

James Mills of Ballynahinch, born in 1882, was present when a number of local men destroyed the memorial: "there was to have been a special ceremony at the grave on that Sunday to mark the centenary of the '98 Rising, and local Protestants were inflamed because it was being organised by Roman Catholics and other Home Rulers".[10] When the parties, mainly from Belfast, began to arrive in horse drawn carriages for the centenary ceremony scuffles took place, the reins of the horses were cut by the locals, and the visitors put to flight.[17][18]

William Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party asked questions in the House of Commons about the incident, which was widely reported in newspapers across Ireland.[14]

Betsy Gray in recent fiction

Betsy is featured in an historic novel called The Star Man by Conor O'Clery, published in 2016 by Somerville Press.

References
  1. Lyttle, W. G. (1968). Betsy Gray or, Hearts of Down: a Tale of Ninety-Eight (PDF). Newcastle, Northern Ireland: Mourne Observer Limited. Retrieved 6 November 2020.
  2. Macartney, Hugh (1998). "The Betsy Gray Legend Revisted". North Irish Roots. 9 (1): 21–25. Retrieved 6 November 2020.
  3. "Rebellious times in County Down - a new version of an old favourite". The Ulster-Scots Language Society. Retrieved 8 November 2020.
  4. M'Skimin, Samuel (1849). Annals of Ulster, or, Ireland fifty years ago. Belfast: J. Henderson.
  5. M'Comb's Guide to Belfast. The Giant's Causeway and Adjoining Districts of The Counties of Antrim and Down with A Map of Belfast [Fist Published 1861] (PDF). Belfast: SR Publishers Limited. 1970. pp. 129–132. Retrieved 7 November 2020.
  6. Proudfoot L. (ed.) Down History and Society (Dublin 1997) chapter by Nancy Curtin at p.289. ISBN 0-906602-80-7
  7. Correspondence Mary McCracken to R. R. Madden, Madden Papers, MS163
  8. Priscilla, Metscher (1989). "Mary Ann McCracken : A Critical Ulsterwoman within the Context of her Times". Études irlandaises. 14 (2): 147. Retrieved 7 November 2020.
  9. Richardson, Sally. "Enlightened Feminism... 1798". Irish Democrat. Retrieved 6 November 2020.
  10. "Betsey Gray or Hearts of Down Other Stories and Pictures of '98. as collected by and published in The "Mourne Observer"". Lisburn.com. Retrieved 6 November 2020.
  11. "Betsy Gray miniature, Mourne Observer, 5 July 1968, p. 9; originally published in an obscure publication in the 1920s and attributed apocryphally to the notorious informer Edward Newell". HistoryHub. University College Dublin School of History & Archives. Retrieved 9 November 2020.
  12. Leslie, Stephen (1894). Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900. Vol 40 Myllar–Nicholls. London: Elder Smith & Co.
  13. Sirr, Henry Charles; Reynolds, Thomas; Newell, Edward John; O'Brien, J (1846). The Mercenary Informers of '98: Containing the History of E. Newell, Major Sirr, J. O'Brien, and T. Reynolds. With the Secret List of the Blood Money Paid by the English Government from 1797 to 1801. MS. Notes.
  14. Thompson, Mark. "Remembering Betsy: the short-lived memorial to Betsy Gray, the Heroine of the 1798 Rebellion (13 September 2017)". Bloggin fae the 'Burn: Ulster-Scots thoughts. Mark Thompson. Retrieved 9 November 2020.
  15. Newry Telegraph, 4 July 1896
  16. Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 369-384
  17. Thomas Bartlett, Kevin Dawson, Daire Keogh, The 1798 Rebellion: An Illustrated History, Roberts Rinehart, 1998, p.172
  18. Collins, Peter (2004). Who Fears to Speak of '98: Commoration and the Continuing Impact of the United Irishmen. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation. p. 43.
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