The foot soldiers of the pope’s Irish battalion

Much existing material on Irish Papal soldiers (see Robert Doyle’s article in the September/October issue) derives from officers – voices from the ranks are rare.   An exception is the brief autobiography of Thomas O’Malley Baines My Life in Two Hemispheres (3rd ed., San Francisco, 1889).  Baines was born in 1844 near Louisburgh, Co. Mayo.  His family were evicted during the Famine; he equates the attack on the Papal States with this eviction.   
  Baines describes travelling clandestinely with other recruits to Dublin, meeting a Papal agent at Liverpool, going by rail to Hull and by sea to Antwerp.  The recruits gathered in Malines, where they were formally enlisted, then travelled to the Papal States via Vienna.
  Baines was stationed in Ancona.  He thought the Brigade should have been commanded by Major Fitzgerald, a veteran Irish Austrian officer who oversaw their training, rather than Major Myles O’Reilly whose military experience was “peaceable militia periodical drills”.   Baines claims the English consul at Ancona encouraged Irish soldiers to desert; a discontented Brigade member called George Clark alleged the British Government paid him to promote mutiny.   (Clark joined the IRB and was shot as an informer in February 1866.)
  Baines acknowledges discontent was not solely due to British intrigue.  Besides “the severity of the drills and the preparation for war” Irish volunteers received insufficient food “consisting in a great part of macaroni, with which the race was not very familiar, as well as the total absence of potatoes”.    Italian surgeons relied on starvation and bleeding; Irish invalids survived because an Irish interpreter “the only one of us, barring the sergeant-major, who had a smattering of Italian” surreptitiously increased their prescribed diet - “they must not expect Irish boys to live on soap suds and pipe-stoppers like themselves”.
  After the fall of Ancona the rank-and-file were kept in a field for three days, marched to Genoa in “thirteen days, on only one of which we were allowed any rest” then deported to Marseilles.   Baines returned to Rome and joined the Company of St. Patrick.   Over the following two years he fought several skirmishes against Garibaldians.  He recalls how on Christmas morning 1860 Pius IX personally administered communion to the troops in the Sistine Chapel.   After each kissed the Papal ring they “marched to the Royal Salon of the Vatican, where we were supplied with .... chocolate, coffee, and ice cream... waited upon, not by the household servants, but by... the cardinals and bishops, who vied with each other ... to show us the most marked attentions and courtesies”.
  Baines returned to Ireland in November 1862.  Like other Papal veterans he joined the new Dublin fire brigade.  Two years later he became a full-time IRB recruiter.  He was arrested in Liverpool on 16 August 1866 (his Papal medal was confiscated) sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude, then deported to Western Australia.   After release in 1871 he settled in San Francisco, remaining politically active until his death in 1899.
   In the late 1880s Baines and two other Irish Papal veterans in San Francisco protested against condemnation of Irish land agitation by Pope Leo XIII.   “The hand of British power was behind the conspirators who were instrumental in the destruction of the temporal power of the Pope... the Irish have ever been faithful to the Holy See and came to its rescue when attacked by a combination of royal robbers by furnishing men and money for its defence”.   
For more on Thomas O’Malley Baines see Dictionary of Irish Biography.