The Wildest Geese – Frank McNally on the Russian O’Rourkes

Most of the Wild Geese who left Ireland after the Williamite Wars went to France and Spain. Some ended up Austria or Italy too. But at least one family of Gaelic nobility made it as far as Russia, and stayed there.

Which is why, when Napoleon embarked on his disastrous invasion in 1812, those leading the local defence included a Count Joseph Cornelius O'Rourke, who for his part in the French defeat at Leipzig a year later added the Order of Alexander Nevsky to his long list of military honours.

Born in what is now Estonia in 1772, O'Rourke was descended from the former rulers of Breifne, whose ancestral seat was at Dromahair, Co Leitrim. His own stronghold was to be near Minsk, in Belarus, where he owned an estate with a thousand serfs.

But in keeping with the traditions of his class, he had been enrolled from birth in the Russian Imperial Guard. And as a young man, he finished officer training just in time to play a prominent part in the Napoleonic wars, serving with the famous Gen Kutuzov at the Battle of Austerlitz (1805), and winning Russia’s highest military honour – the Order of St George – there, even in defeat.

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O'Rourke is also a hero in Serbia, having raised his own regiment for the war against the Ottoman Empire in 1809, which ended with a decisive victory at Varvarin (1810), where he is now commemorated with a statue.

Soldiering aside, the exiled Leitrim clan also made a mark on the other profession to which the Wild Geese were prone: priesthood. When the “Free city of Danzig” was making news in the 1920s, Irish newspapers were fascinated to learn that the Bishop of Danzig was a Russian named Edward O’Rourke.

He later ran foul of the Nazis and had to resign but was a much-fêted visitor to Ireland during the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, when he took the time to visit Dromahair. He is said to have spoken Irish as well as English, French, and his native Russian.

Female members of the Wild Geese did not have anything like the same career opportunities, of course. But in the early years of the 20th century, one of their Russian number did become briefly famous, if only because of a sensational murder trial, daily coverage of which even featured in The Irish Times for several days in 1907.

At its centre was a Countess Tarnowska, unhappily married at 17 to a Russian aristocrat and since then romantically involved with a series of other men, one of whom had now died violently and another of whom was up for the murder.

The countess, meanwhile, was charged with instigation. She was arrested in Vienna, but the trial took place in Venice, where it became known as “the Russian Affair”. In a detail that seems to have escaped The Irish Times coverage (no doubt acquired via international news agencies), however, the Countess Tarnowska had been born with the very un-Russian name of Maria O’Rourke.

The case may have had echoes of ancient Irish history. Students of the 800 Years of Oppression will recall that it had a prequel involving one Dervorgilla O’Rourke, unhappily married into the Leitrim clan, who eloped with (or was kidnapped by) Diarmait McMurrough, precipitating a war from which one thing led to another and then the Normans.

“The Russian affair” did not have such far-reaching effects. But it did feature a succession of men who appeared to have lost their heads – and in one case his life – over the beautiful Maria. That was part of the murderer’s defence case. A friendly witness declared that “an enormous change” had overtaken the accused after meeting Countess Tarnowska, since when “he was no longer master of his actions”.

In one court report, it was noted that even a prosecution lawyer, while attempting an aggressive cross-examination of her, suddenly lost his thread, as if falling under “some unaccountable spell”. There were suggestions this had been cast by a cigarette the countess had been smoking and then threw on the floor.

The women of Venice were less impressed, shouting threats and shaking fists at the gondola that conveyed her to court each day, followed by “hundreds” of other boats.

Lucho Visconti once considered making a film called “The Trial of Maria Tarkowska”, as well he might, but that never came to pass. As for the real-life Maria, although found guilty, she escaped with a light sentence and, after a few years in Italian jail, emigrated to America in the company of a US diplomat. She was later known to be living with a Frenchman, as “Madame de Villemer”, in Buenos Aires, where by some accounts she ran a fashion store.