Free The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan

Relief, Catholics were permitted to take the oath of allegiance to George III and to hold land under long leases. As he sat through the Mediterranean evenings on the terrace of his white, flat-roofed house, looking past almond trees and orange trees towards the Bay of Alicante, he remembered brown Mayo moorlands and rain-soaked fields. He had thought of Mayo as he stood on the weathered planks of Spanish wharves, watching his ships sail out to Connaught with wine and back from Connaught with the green and yellow brown kelp of Connemara. And when he had amassed his fortune, some £250,000 according to Mayo legend, he sold all his Spanish property save for the vineyards and the house in the palm-shaded street, and he returned home.
    He had intended to build near Ashbrook, the house of his birth, but on his journey of inspection there he passed the low, solitary hill of Muckloon. He halted his carriage, climbed the hill, and saw Lough Carra spread before him. Here he built, having first acquired the hill and eight hundred acres by outright purchase, as a more recent law now permitted him to do. An architect named Aitken was summoned from London and built, to his specifications, a house severely proportioned but light of line, drawn upon its thickly timbered background with the exact delicacy of an engraver’s pen. Three flights of limestone steps marched like regiments to a massive door which swung open to reveal a hall above which arched an Adam ceiling, blue as the Mayo sky, with oval medallions of white plasterwork. Long before the house was finished, he placed his motto above the door: FORTIS CADERE, CEDERE NON POTEST . Mayo gave it a loose translation: “Scratch a Moore and you yourself will bleed.” Above the four-pillared portico was a balcony, upon which the summer room opened, and here he sat in the evening, looking out towards Lough Carra, as the hammers of the stonemasons echoed below him.
    He had fought his own kind of war and he had won it. The Moores had returned to Mayo wealthier and more powerful than they had been before Catholic Ireland was shattered by James’s defeat at the Boyne. Lacking all sympathy for dead causes, he was a faithful if cynical subject of King George and a scrupulous though not a devout Catholic. He had built a chapel in Moore Hall, furnishing it with an altar, altar cloths which splashed crimson and gold on their surrounding whiteness, and a massive gold crucifix from Spain. He had lived to see the withering of many of the penal laws by which his youth had been oppressed, and he assumed that the others would wither. He contributed generously to the several Catholic political organizations, but took no part in their affairs. That he was forbidden by law to sit in the Dublin Parliament did not trouble him, for he had no wish to do so. It mattered far more to him that he had a voice in naming the men who did sit for Mayo, and, with the other gentlemen of Mayo, he had the satisfaction of knowing that Dennis Browne was solicitous of their interests. The Brownes and the Moores came from the same world, and if the Brownes had changed faiths to hold their property, he was not inclined to criticise a choice which he had refused to make. There were other families of the Catholic gentry scattered thinly across Mayo: Blakes and Dillons, O’Dowds and Treacys and MacDonnells. He had intended that his sons should marry into them, but there he had not reckoned with the temperament of George, the older.
    One night in the summer of 1795, the elder Moore sat in his chair on the balcony of Moore Hall hours past his custom, and a servant, coming to rouse him, discovered that he had died. George Moore set to work at once to dispose of his small villa on the Thames, and then shipped his papers and his considerable library to Mayo. He could give no explanation to his English friends, not because he lacked one, but because he feared they would not understand it. What Moores had, Moores held, and what they held