The Times Great Irish Lives: Obituaries of Ireland’s Finest
The Times Great Irish Lives: Obituaries of Ireland’s Finest
Charles Lysaght
Discover the fascinating lives of the figures that have shaped Ireland from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Explore the rich history of the island’s cultural, social and political landscape, with more than 100 obituaries carefully curated from The Times archive.The Irish have contributed richly to the world, most notably in literature, but also in the arts, law, politics, religion, scholarship, science, soldiering and sport. In this volume, The Times brings together a unique and fascinating collection of obituaries. The list includes people who have made the greatest impact in their fields, others who have led particularly interesting or influential lives, and a selection of notable Irish figures in the history of The Times.The obituaries have been compiled and edited by Dubliner Charles Lysaght. A lawyer, biographer and reviewer, Charles is a long-time writer of obituaries for The Times. In his introduction, he discusses the nature of Times obituaries and how they have reflected the sometimes troubled and controversial relationship of the newspaper with Ireland.This book features the major Irish figures of influence from the last 200 years and includes a diverse range of people, from Daniel O’Connell to Ian Paisley, James Joyce to Maureen Potter. This updated second edition builds on the first by adding some of Ireland’s most notable characters from the modern era, such as Maeve Binchy, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Terry Wogan.
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Cover Image:
“From Everywhere and Nowhere (Seamus Heaney)”
Colin Davidson b. 1968 © Colin Davidson. 2013 Collection Ulster Museum
CONTENTS
Cover (#u7749f797-88b6-5edd-aa3b-293973a36123)
Title Page (#u7401c290-08de-5f66-8221-f2812a8b0152)
Copyright (#ulink_8c5c23a8-6ba3-5941-a220-9b1a38b7fc61)
Introduction (#ulink_c3140ba4-9ac9-5261-af5c-777e12e8511b)
Henry Grattan (#ulink_5ab9325a-25f1-5af6-9b38-8c636296c58b)
Daniel O’Connell (#ulink_62eaa097-e879-5a48-ac5a-c16364986421)
Maria Edgeworth (#ulink_caa5bd33-bea9-51a9-8b0b-9778b97e14aa)
Tom Moore (#ulink_8ddf8a21-242b-51b9-a8a3-443953760aca)
Father Mathew (#ulink_c973b467-f9f8-59af-b010-eb43bb352ce6)
William Dargan (#ulink_ac770b7e-5ab0-5a61-ae67-a7d0f7fd17ac)
Earl of Rosse (#ulink_8b69e984-3f9e-5416-9c5f-54a20e1653cd)
Cardinal Cullen (#ulink_047b11a9-3161-5efc-9a2e-b528c6ef1d12)
Charles Stewart Parnell (#ulink_4c894b63-178a-5947-94a9-fa0250b0f178)
Sir John Pope Hennessy (#ulink_66edead0-433c-56e3-b895-3fd58d368b6b)
Mrs Cecil Alexander (#ulink_95ddcb34-02c0-58b2-a7e2-8632627b5b50)
Oscar Wilde (#ulink_f0635d08-f784-50ab-9d3d-5558cb3b423d)
Lord Morris of Spiddal (#ulink_b7dba2da-0e94-55ad-9573-74c362e04724)
Archbishop Croke (#ulink_aef1a001-ee97-5f35-91cf-a1fead93efd6)
Michael Davitt (#ulink_2551dfba-d3f3-5bdf-9286-830716243264)
The O’Conor Don (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir W. H. Russell (#litres_trial_promo)
John Millington Synge (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Luke O’Connor (#litres_trial_promo)
John Redmond (#litres_trial_promo)
Cardinal Gibbons (#litres_trial_promo)
Michael Collins (#litres_trial_promo)
Erskine Childers (#litres_trial_promo)
Thomas Crean V. C. (#litres_trial_promo)
Lord Pirrie (#litres_trial_promo)
Lord MacDonnell (#litres_trial_promo)
Kevin O’Higgins (#litres_trial_promo)
Countess Markievicz (#litres_trial_promo)
John Devoy (#litres_trial_promo)
John Woulfe Flanagan (#litres_trial_promo)
T. P. O’Connor (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Horace Plunkett (#litres_trial_promo)
Lady Gregory (#litres_trial_promo)
George Moore (#litres_trial_promo)
Edward Carson (#litres_trial_promo)
William Butler Yeats (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir John Lavery (#litres_trial_promo)
James Joyce (#litres_trial_promo)
Sarah Purser (#litres_trial_promo)
John McCormack (#litres_trial_promo)
Douglas Hyde (#litres_trial_promo)
Edith Somerville (#litres_trial_promo)
John Dulanty (#litres_trial_promo)
Evie Hone (#litres_trial_promo)
William Francis Casey (#litres_trial_promo)
Margaret Burke Sheridan (#litres_trial_promo)
Archbishop Gregg (#litres_trial_promo)
Sean O’Casey (#litres_trial_promo)
Jimmy O’Dea (#litres_trial_promo)
William T. Cosgrave (#litres_trial_promo)
Frank O’Connor (#litres_trial_promo)
Lady Hanson (#litres_trial_promo)
Sean Lemass (#litres_trial_promo)
Lord Brookeborough (#litres_trial_promo)
George O’Brien (#litres_trial_promo)
Kate O’Brien (#litres_trial_promo)
Eamon de Valera (#litres_trial_promo)
John A. Costello (#litres_trial_promo)
Brian Faulkner (#litres_trial_promo)
Professor Frances Moran (#litres_trial_promo)
Micheál Mac Liammóir (#litres_trial_promo)
Professor F. S. L. Lyons (#litres_trial_promo)
Anita Leslie (#litres_trial_promo)
Frederick H. Boland (#litres_trial_promo)
Siobhan McKenna (#litres_trial_promo)
Eamonn Andrews (#litres_trial_promo)
Sean MacBride (#litres_trial_promo)
Samuel Beckett (#litres_trial_promo)
Cardinal O Fiaich (#litres_trial_promo)
Ernest Walton (#litres_trial_promo)
Molly Keane (#litres_trial_promo)
Michael O’Hehir (#litres_trial_promo)
Dermot Morgan (#litres_trial_promo)
Jack Lynch (#litres_trial_promo)
Rev. F. X. Martin (#litres_trial_promo)
Sister Genevieve O’Farrell (#litres_trial_promo)
Maureen Potter (#litres_trial_promo)
Mary Holland (#litres_trial_promo)
Joe Cahill (#litres_trial_promo)
Bob Tisdall (#litres_trial_promo)
George Best (#litres_trial_promo)
John McGahern (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles Haughey (#litres_trial_promo)
Sam Stephenson (#litres_trial_promo)
David Ervine (#litres_trial_promo)
Tommy Makem (#litres_trial_promo)
Conor Cruise O’Brien (#litres_trial_promo)
Vincent O’Brien (#litres_trial_promo)
Alex “Hurricane” Higgins (#litres_trial_promo)
Dr Garret FitzGerald (#litres_trial_promo)
Declan Costello (#litres_trial_promo)
The Knight of Glin (#litres_trial_promo)
Mary Raftery (#litres_trial_promo)
Aengus Fanning (#litres_trial_promo)
Louis Le Brocquy (#litres_trial_promo)
Maire MacSwiney Brugha (#litres_trial_promo)
Maeve Binchy (#litres_trial_promo)
Seamus Heaney (#litres_trial_promo)
Albert Reynolds (#litres_trial_promo)
The Rev. Ian Paisley (#litres_trial_promo)
Jack Kyle (#litres_trial_promo)
Brian Friel (#litres_trial_promo)
Maureen O’Hara (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Terry Wogan (#litres_trial_promo)
Searchable Terms (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_e313cae2-2c3f-5822-9eee-6e2245115754)
Charles Lysaght
WHEN DR JOHNSON proclaimed the Irish an honest race because they seldom spoke well of one another, he should have made it clear that it was the reputations of the living that he had in mind. In Ireland, speaking of the dead in the aftermath of their demise, the adage nihil nisi bonum applies not only among friends and acquaintances but in the media. Readers of Irish newspapers, national and especially local, are treated to accounts of the unprecedented gloom that settled over the district where the deceased lived, the largest and most representative gathering at a funeral within living memory, accompanied by eulogies reciting how the dear departed thought only of others and never of themselves, were never known to say an unkind word about anybody, were devoted to their family, were exemplary in their piety and charity and were universally loved and respected. Such undiscriminating eulogies lack credibility and do their subjects no favours.
It has been a signal service rendered by The Times to provide accounts of deceased Irish persons that aspire to more realism and more balance in their assessments while bringing out the exceptional achievements and positive qualities that make the deceased worthy of notice in a newspaper outside their own country. In the absence of a comprehensive dictionary of Irish biography they have sometimes been the best accounts of a person’s life, at least for a period, and, as such, a valuable reference for historians.
It has been helpful to this process that many of these obituaries are prepared in advance and so allow for checking facts and for reflection unaffected by the immediate surge of sympathy surrounding a death.
It is conducive to frankness that obituaries are published anonymously and that the identity of the authors will not be disclosed by the paper in their lifetime, so keeping faith with the nineteenth century description of The Times as ‘the most obstinately anonymous newspaper in the World’. It may add to the authority of a piece that it seems to represent the views of a great newspaper rather than an individual author. It probably puts some pressure on the individual authors to reflect a general view of a person rather than to indulge a personal experience or assessment.
Obituaries (especially major ones) may first be prepared when their subjects are relatively young and so need revision many times before publication. Apart from new facts, what is interesting about a person’s life can change quite rapidly. In the nature of things, the subject sometimes outlives the original author and what emerges on the final day is a composite work.
Historically, Irish obituaries in The Times reflected somewhat the troubled relationship that the paper had with Ireland from the days of Daniel O’Connell up to the creation of the independent Irish state. The difficulties in the relationship might even be traced back further to the incident when Irishman Barry O’Meara, who had been removed by the British Government from his role as physician to the captive Napoleon on St Helena, horse-whipped William Walter, mistaking him for his brother John who was one of the proprietors and the responsible editor of the paper. O’Meara had been affronted because The Times had dismissed as a lie a statement in his memoirs that he had been told by the deposed Emperor that The Times was in the pay of the exiled Bourbons. It ended up in court with O’Meara getting away with a fulsome apology.
The Times, under the editorship of Thomas Barnes (1817–41) supported O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic Emancipation. But their relationship with O’Connell went sour not long after he entered parliament in 1830 when he accused the paper of misreporting him. As he espoused the repeal of the Union and brought the ‘Romish clergy’ into politics, they denounced him as an unredeemed and unredeemable scoundrel and declared ‘war to the political extinction of one of us.’ One of the first assignments of the celebrated Irish-born reporter William Howard Russell was to report on O’Connell’s monster meetings in 1843 and on his subsequent trial and conviction in Dublin – it took over 24 hours to get the news of the verdict to London.
After O’Connell’s conviction had been set aside on appeal by the House of Lords, The Times returned to the fray, setting up what they called a commission in the form of a journalist sent to report on O’Connell’s treatment of his own tenants in Kerry. They were found to be living in poverty without a pane of glass in any of their windows. Russell was sent to Ireland again and, despite being on friendly terms with O’Connell, confirmed that this was indeed the case. O’Connell, for his part, denounced The Times as ‘a vile journal’ which had falsely, foully and wickedly calumniated him every day and on every subject. Against this background it is not surprising that his obituary in 1847 is critical and reflects a hostile political viewpoint. But its recognition of the positive qualities of what it called an ‘extraordinary man’ shows admirable balance. It claimed to have shown a forebearance of which O’Connell himself was incapable and to have treated indulgently the memory of a man who in a long lifetime seldom spared a fallen adversary.
The confrontation between nationalist Ireland and The Times reached its apotheosis in the late 1880s when The Times published a series of articles entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime’ that were, in fact, largely written by a young Irish Catholic barrister and journalist, educated under Jowett at Balliol, called John Woulfe Flanagan – although anonymously as was still customary for all articles. Parnell was accused of having been complicit with terrorism and the organized intimidation of the Land War. The allegations were subsequently supported by letters said to have been written by Parnell that were proved before a judicial commission to have been forged by one Richard Pigott. The unmasking of Pigott before the commission by Sir Charles Russell, a former Irish solicitor who was then the leader of the English Bar, was an historic set-piece much recalled in the annals of the law as well as politics. Less remembered is that the commission, on the strength of evidence given by the Fenian informer Henri Le Caron, upheld the substance of most of the charges made in the articles. The events cast a long shadow, well beyond the obituary published on Parnell’s death written by The Times’ leader writer E. D. J. Wilson where this was pointed out. An account of the episode in a volume of the History of The Times covering the years 1884 to 1912, published in 1947, led to corrigenda in an appendix in the next volume credited to Parnell’s surviving colleague and biographer Captain Henry Harrison MC. Attention was drawn to the role of Captain William O’Shea, the first husband of Mrs Parnell, as a witness before the commission and an admission made that the paper’s association with O’Shea proved by Captain Harrison ‘is not creditable’ and should not have been ignored in the History of The Times.
In his main address to the commission Sir Charles Russell had admitted the terrorism associated with the Land League but claimed that the root cause of it was English oppression and that the fomentor of discord between the two peoples through several generations had been The Times. Sir Henry James, who appeared for The Times, answered by citing a long list of critical occasions in Irish history when the paper had supported the Irish popular cause often at the risk of alienating dominant opinion in England. It had helped to secure Catholic emancipation; it had argued for the endowment of the Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth and the disestablishment of the Irish Church; it had taken a leading part in the relief of distress during the Irish famine and advocated the extension of the Irish franchise; it had highlighted evictions and supported legislation giving greater protection to tenants.
Because of its opposition to nationalist aspirations The Times was berated in nationalist Ireland as the enemy of all things Irish. In fact, this was not so. The unionism of The Times was an inclusive unionism and did not spill over into a general antipathy to the Irish or even the Catholic Irish. Tom Moore, the poet, had been a regular and valued contributor. Edmund O’Donovan, the son of the great Gaelic scholar John O’Donovan and old Clongownian Frank Power were two Times journalists who perished with General Gordon reporting the Egyptian campaign of the 1880s.
In the obituaries columns, as elsewhere, the Irish of all backgrounds got a good show. Just occasionally there was some stereotyping, although it was not unfriendly. In 1891, remarking that in his qualities and talents as in his defects Sir John Pope Hennessy was a typical Irishman, his obituary depicted him as ‘quick of wit, ready in repartee, a fluent speaker, and an able debater but the enthusiasm and emotion which lent force and fire to his speeches led him into the adoption of extreme and impracticable views.’ A few years later the obituary of the colourful Irish judge Lord Morris of Spiddal contained the observation that ‘though an Irishman he was not given to verbosity.’ Of Michael Davitt, the Land Leaguer, it was remarked that ‘he was an Irishman of a somewhat unusual type dark and dour.’ A more extensive indulgence in stereotyping is to be found in the obituary of Charles Villiers Stanford, the composer (not included in this collection), who was, it was stated, ‘though an Irishman of the English occupation, every inch an Irishman; the quick acquisitive mind, the readiness of tongue, the appreciation of a good story and the power of telling it well, the ability to charm, and the love of a fight were qualities which endeared him to his friends but never left him in want of an enemy.’ It must be said that this kind of thing was relatively rare, whether because many Irish obituaries were written by fellow Irishmen or because of a fastidiousness among those responsible in the paper itself.
The pattern of supporting beneficial reforms for the Irish majority, while defending the Union and the maintenance of law and order, remained the policy of The Times into the twentieth century. It was predictable that the paper should support the executions of the leaders of the 1916 rebellion and of Roger Casement, who was not even accorded an obituary, which could have recorded the achievements that had led to his being knighted. The treatment of Casement was a formidable challenge to the impartiality of a number of British institutions.
Whatever about the reaction to the 1916 rebellion, The Times tended to reflect the general acceptance even among unionists in the wake of the temporarily suspended Home Rule Act of 1914 that there would have to be some form of self-government for Ireland after the War. Significantly, after the peace in 1918 and the replacement of Geoffrey Dawson as editor by Wickham Steed, The Times originated the scheme that eventually found expression in the Government of Ireland Act, 1920 with its home rule parliaments for Northern Ireland and what was called Southern Ireland. Prior to that, the Ulster unionist demand was to remain fully integrated in the United Kingdom and they were slow to see the opportunities the Government of Ireland Act was to offer for establishing a protestant state for a protestant people. The latter history of the Act as the charter for that state has tended to obscure the fact that it explicitly envisaged a future date of Irish union and created overarching institutions such as a Council of Ireland and an All-Ireland Court of Appeal out of which it was hoped that this union would grow. It was the rejection of it by nationalist leaders now bent on achieving a totally independent republic that deprived the Act of its unifying possibilities.
The rejection of the Government of Ireland Act by the Sinn Fein leadership and the ongoing assassinations of policemen led the Government to allow free rein to their security forces, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliary cadets. The Times joined in a crescendo of criticism of their disgraceful behaviour and was also highly critical of the hardline reaction of the Lloyd George government to the 74-day hunger strike to death in November 1920 of Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork. Editorials argued for a settlement along the lines of that eventually agreed in December 1921 granting dominion status to Southern Ireland.
Significantly, when the leading Irish negotiators of that settlement, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, died in the early months of independence the obituaries were uncritical. In the case of Collins there was virtually no reference to his part in the campaign of assassination from 1919 to 1921 that had led to his being demonised in Britain before the settlement. The Times had a special reason for being grateful to him as he had applied his ruthless efficiency to securing the safe return of their special correspondent A. B. Kay, who was kidnapped by the IRA in January 1922.
An important influence on the editorial policy of The Times in these years was Captain Herbert Shaw, a Dubliner who had served in the Irish administration and was one of the secretaries to the Irish Convention of 1917–18 where the moderate elements of unionism and nationalism had tried to broker a settlement. It was Shaw who penned The Times editorial entitled ‘Playing the Game’ on the occasion of the opening of the Northern Ireland Parliament in 1921 by King George V that was influential in pushing the Government towards negotiations with the Sinn Fein leaders. He was the author of a number of notable obituaries on Irish figures of that period, some of which, such as that on William T. Cosgrave, did not appear until well after his own death in 1946. Others were written by Michael MacDonagh, the journalist champion and historian of the Irish Party, and the unionist John Healy, editor of the Irish Times, and Dublin correspondent of The Times from 1894 until 1934.
The creation of an independent state covering most of the island of Ireland did not diminish the coverage of Irish affairs in The Times. The Irish were still regarded as part of the broader British family, albeit that their political leaders seemed to want to loosen their ties with it. Even the neutrality in the Second World War did not alter this, perhaps because the Irish of every tradition were such a presence in the British war effort. Churchill spoke for many in Britain when at the end of the war, having criticised Irish neutrality and paid tribute to ‘the thousands of southern Irishmen who hastened to the battle-front to prove their ancient valour’, he expressed the hope that the two peoples would walk together in mutual comprehension and forgiveness.
However, in the quarter of a century after the Second World War Irish political life, both north and south of the border, ceased to command attention in the British media. Even then, a fair coverage of Irish subjects was maintained in The Times obituaries columns. There may have been a bias towards individuals and institutions that retained to some extent a broader British identity or made an impact in Britain and might be presumed to be of more interest to the readership but it did not preclude coverage of significant figures from other strands of Irish life, especially those from the literary and artistic community. The outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland around 1970 brought Ireland centre stage once more and this has been reflected in an even more comprehensive coverage of Irish subjects in the obituaries columns.
Meanwhile, in the course of the twentieth century, there had been significant developments in the paper in the organisation of obituaries loosening the connection of that part of the paper with those who formulated editorial policy. From 1920 there was a separate obituaries department with its own editor. While obituaries had been prepared in advance since the editorship of John Delane (1841–1877), Colin Watson, who was obituaries editor from 1956 to 1981, embarked on a policy of commissioning advance pieces on a wider variety of living subjects than had been the case previously. Very often, those commissioned to write them were not journalists or even professional writers. In general, they were recruited having regard to their knowledge of the subject rather than with an eye to providing a particular viewpoint. In the case of Irish subjects the authors were generally found in Ireland. So it is that more recent Irish obituaries have often not reflected an English viewpoint, let alone that inside The Times – although the authors, if they were doing their job, have been conscious, when writing, that their readership would be largely English.
Despite this general trend, unexpected deaths of notable figures have, on occasion, still thrown the obituaries department back on its own resources. So, when Brian Faulkner died unexpectedly in 1978, Colin Watson ran up a superb obituary that reflected the paper’s sympathy for Faulkner’s brave effort to lead a cross-community executive. Three years earlier in 1975 the death at an advanced age of Eamon de Valera, which cannot have been unexpected, was marked by a much praised obituary involving substantial insider input by the celebrated leader writer Owen Hickey into a piece prepared originally by the former editor of the Irish Times Alec Newman. Hickey, born in Ireland and, incidentally, a grandson of the novelist Canon Hanney (George Bermingham), was an invaluable source of knowledge and understanding about matters Irish for The Times throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century.
The lack of total identification between the editorial policy of the paper and the obituaries that evolved through the twentieth century was never better illustrated than in the case of Sean MacBride, who died in 1988. He had been commander-in-chief of the IRA in post-independence Ireland before becoming a government minister and finally a human rights activist honoured by being awarded both the Nobel and Lenin peace prizes. An obituary prepared by the present writer that was quite laudatory but not uncritical, was followed a couple of days later by an editorial headed ‘His infamous career’ berating him as a man who was to the end of his days a cosmopolitan high priest of the cult of violence directed at British victims.
It is a problem in compiling a volume of Irish obituaries to decide who ranks as sufficiently Irish to be considered for inclusion. One thinks of the remark attributed, probably unfairly, to the Irish-born Duke of Wellington that a horse is not an ass because he is born in an ass’s stable. Obviously, birth outside Ireland, as in the case of Eamon de Valera, would be an inappropriate reason for exclusion. On the other hand, some persons of immense distinction born in Ireland have little meaningful connection with the country. I have been disinclined to include them. In the case of others, of which William Orpen and George Bernard Shaw are examples, omission is referable to the failure of the obituary to do justice to the Irish dimension of the subject’s life.
At the same time I have been concerned not to confine the selection to those who have spent their lives in Ireland or done their significant work there. In particular, it seemed to me important to represent those generally identified as Irish who made an impact not only in Britain but in the Empire and in the United States.
In choosing from a vast store of Irish obituaries over the years, I have sought to strike a balance between the significance of the subject and the quality of the piece. Clearly, any person opening a volume such as this would expect that there would be obituaries of Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell or Eamon de Valera in the political sphere or of William Butler Yeats or James Joyce among the writers. After persons of that calibre, the choices I have made have been affected by the quality of the obituary as well as the significance of the subject. Is it comprehensive or entertaining? Is it the best thing that has been written on a particular person? Is it too long? I have tended to favour those obituaries that give a picture of the person as well as an account of their life’s work. I have also favoured those that paint the subject ‘warts and all’ over less discriminating eulogies. In older pieces I confess to having been attracted by those that betray contemporary attitudes and prejudices. In omitting certain obituaries I have had some regard to their being included in other anthologies of Times obituaries.* (#litres_trial_promo)
I have sought to achieve a better gender balance than, for understandable reasons, was achieved in the actual obituaries in previous generations. I have also tried to represent a variety of spheres of Irish life, including in particular the arts, literature, business, sport, entertainment, science as well as the politicians, churchmen, lawyers, military men, public servants and academics that were preponderant in The Times obituaries of older vintage. In an earlier period other obituaries were often skimpy. In the case of the arts, literature and even science they were sometimes marred by an excessive preoccupation with the subject’s work to the exclusion of their life and personality and not couched in terms readily understood by the general reader.
I have included a number of largely forgotten figures who have never been the subject of a full biography or have not made it even into the Dictionary of National Biography, which is sketchy in its recent Irish coverage. In one or two cases I have felt inspired by the observation of Brendan Bracken in the tribute he contributed anonymously to The Times in 1928 about his mother that ‘one of the best services performed by The Times are the notices it publishes of gentle quiet lives which add much to the common stock but whose quality makes no appeal to the busy art of modern publicity.’
As the book celebrates links between The Times and Ireland, I have included a number of Irish persons who have worked for The Times beginning with William Howard Russell and culminating with William Casey, the editor from 1948 to 1952. In their different ways, their lives are illustrative of the infinite complexity of the British-Irish relationship.
I have felt deeply honoured by Ian Brunskill’s invitation to edit this volume. It is the culmination of a happy association with the obituaries department dating back to 1969, when I was a young law lecturer and barrister in London. I have prepared more than a century of obituaries over the years. From the early days when Colin Watson, Peter Davies and Juliet Lygon were in charge to more recent times when Peter Strafford, Tony Howard and Ian Brunskill were the obituaries editors, I have been the recipient of much encouragement and unfailing courtesy from those working in the obituaries department. For that I am truly grateful. I am also grateful to the librarians and archivists in the paper for sourcing obituaries. I like to think that coverage of deceased Irish persons by The Times contributes to the mutual comprehension between the people of our two islands which is much to be desired.
HENRY GRATTAN (#ulink_e3066371-8d01-5f54-8024-b8897a792790)
6 JUNE 1820
WITH UNFEIGNED CONCERN we announce … the much-to-belamented death of the Right Hon. Henry Grattan. The dissolution of this intrepid patriot would have been a subject of deep regret to the empire at large, had not the decline of his intellectual as well as vital powers been more recently observed. To his own immediate countrymen it is a source of profound and even filial sorrow …
Mr Grattan came into Parliament about the year 1773. Towards the close of the American war he carried against both the English and Irish Government the repeal of those statutes which had given the British Parliament, and in some respects the Privy Council of England, an absolute control over the legislature of his native country. He has been since the year 1790 the strenuous, persevering, and powerful advocate for an entire abolition of the penal laws against the Catholics. This measure, in the separate Parliament of Ireland, he repeatedly declared to be essential to the complete deliverance of that country from the yoke of the British ministers, as, since the Union, he has, in the language of Mr Pitt, described Catholic emancipation to be a necessary step towards giving both countries the full benefit of that important measure. Mr Grattan has long laboured under dropsy of the chest. It is well known that he was conscious of his approaching dissolution; and that, when he devoted “his last breath to his country,” he was sensible that his appearance in Parliament, for the pious purpose of recommending to the House of Commons the cause so near his heart, must tend to accelerate that mournful sacrifice. His enfeebled frame did not second the aspirings of his bold and fervent spirit: he was doomed to bequeath emancipation as a legacy – not to bestow it as a gift.
Mr Grattan’s eloquence was peculiar and original. It resembled that of no speaker that we have ever heard. His voice was naturally feeble, but practice made it audible; and laborious effort, combined with a careful and studied articulation, rendered his high tones so piercing that none of them were lost. Mr Grattan had no wit, or rather, in Parliament, he did not exhibit any. He seldom discussed the details of any question, but fastened on a few of the leading principles, which he developed and illustrated with singular strength of language, and copious felicity of imagination. His sentences were full of antithesis; and, rather than lose that favourite structure of expression, he would build it up occasionally of common-place or even puerile matter. His arguments were frequently a string of epigrams. His retorts and personal invectives were distinguished by a keen and pithy sarcasm, which told upon every nerve of his ill-starred opponent. There was, nevertheless, an earnestness and solemnity, an innate and manifest consciousness of his own rectitude, about the man, which taught his hearers to respect and admire him when he most failed to convert them to the opinions of which he was the advocate. Mr Grattan, in society, was playful and simple as a child: irritable, perhaps, in a public assembly, he was elsewhere the very soul of courtesy, complacency, and cheerfulness.
Mr Grattan’s property consisted for the most part of the sum of 50,000l, which had been tendered to him by his country, and it was honourably earned. He died at his house in Baker-street, Portman-square.
DANIEL O’CONNELL (#ulink_3ec85df9-34f0-5682-b047-7d7d56979427)
24 MAY 1847
WE BELIEVE THERE is no doubt that Mr O’Connell expired on Saturday, the 15th of this month, at Genoa. He yielded up his latest breath at the distance of many hundred miles from the remains of the humble dwelling which became remarkable as his birthplace. In a remote part of the county of Kerry is a village called Cahirciveen, and within one mile of that obscure locality may be found a place bearing the name of Carhen. The latter was for many years the residence of Morgan O’Connell, father of the extraordinary man to an account of whose life and character these columns are assigned. In that most desolate region was Daniel O’Connell born, on the 6th of August, 1775 – a date which he was accustomed to notice with no small complacency, for he took much pleasure in reminding the world that he was born in the year during which our American colonies began to assert their independence, and he sometimes succeeded in persuading his admirers that that incident, taken in connexion with others, shadowed forth his destiny as a champion of freedom. Antecedently to his thirteenth year he received little instruction beyond what pedagogues of the humblest order are capable of imparting; but that class in Kerry are considerably superior to their brethren in other parts of Ireland, and upon the whole it could not be said that even his early education was by any means neglected. About this time his father’s pecuniary circumstances began evidently to improve; his uncle, the owner of Darrynane, though long married, had no issue; he declared Daniel O’Connell to be his favourite nephew, and therefore the friends of “the fortunate youth” thought that no expense should be spared upon the intellectual culture of one whose acknowledged talents and brightening prospects rendered him what is called “the hope of the family.” In those days the Irish members of the Church of Rome were just beginning to exercise a few of the privileges which they now most amply enjoy; and at a place called Redington, in Long Island, one of their priests, a Mr Harrington, had opened a school. Thither young Daniel O’Connell was sent in the year 1788, and there he remained for about 12 months, when he and his brother Maurice took leave of Mr Harrington, with the view of proceeding to one of the Roman Catholic seminaries on the continent. Their first destination was Louvain, but immediately on their reaching that place it was found that Daniel had passed the admissible age; he, however, attended the classes as a volunteer, till fresh instructions could arrive from Kerry. At the end of six weeks the O’Connells proceeded from Louvain to St Omer, and finally to the English College at Douay, where the subject of this memoir pursued his studies with much distinction. Before he quitted St Omer the President of that College, in a letter still preserved, ventured to foretell that his pupil was “destined to make a remarkable figure in society.” On the 21st of December, 1793, Mr O’Connell, being then in the 18th year of his age, quitted Douay, and reached England, without encountering any adventures, save those which sprang from the insults that the revolutionary party were accustomed to inflict upon every one whom they supposed to be an Englishman, or an ecclesiastic, or even a student of divinity. The scenes which he witnessed in France caused Mr O’Connell frequently to declare that in those days he was almost a Tory. He certainly was not then a revolutionist, for the moment he reached the English packet-boat he and his brother tore the tricolour cockades from their hats, and trampled them on the deck. Those sentiments, however, he did not long continue to cherish, for a year had not quite passed away when he exchanged them for doctrines which strongly savoured of Liberalism. It is understood that at a very early age he was intended for the priesthood. Those Irish Roman Catholics who evinced any aptitude for a learned profession found none other open to them in the days of O’Connell’s boyhood. But it is difficult to imagine any one more incapable than he was of maintaining even those outward signs of holiness which are generally observed by the ecclesiastics of his persuasion. An overflow of animal spirits rendered him, not merely a gay, but an obstreperous member of society, and his riotous jocularity acknowledged no limits. All idea, therefore, of his becoming a priest, if ever seriously entertained, must have been abandoned before he reached the age of 19, for he was then devoted to anything rather than the service of the altar. Hare hunting and fishing were amongst his darling pastimes; and these means of relaxation continued to fill his leisure hours, even when his years had approximated to three score and ten. From 17 to 70 the energy of his intellect and the ardour of his passions seemed to suffer no abatement. A large and well used law library, numerous liaisons, a pack of beagles, and a good collection of fishing tackle, attested the variety of his tastes and the vigour of his constitution. Before he had completed his 20th year he became a student of Lincoln’s-inn, into which society he was received on the 30th of January, 1794. Previous to the year 1793 Roman Catholics were not admitted to the bar, and Mr O’Connell was amongst the earliest members of that Church who became candidates for legal advancement. His entrance upon the profession of the law, as a barrister, took place on the 19th of May, 1798, and it must be acknowledged that he spared no pains to qualify himself for that arduous pursuit. Though of a joyous temperament, self-indulgent, and in some respects sensual, he still was not indisposed to hard labour, so that he became almost learned in the law before he ever held a brief. Conformably with the custom of the Irish bar, Mr O’Connell prepared himself for any sort of business that might come within his reach, whether civil or criminal – whether at common law or in equity. There are men in the Temple who would laugh to scorn the best specimens of his special pleading; and conveyancers in Lincoln’s-inn who hold very cheap his skill in their branch of the profession; but in 1798 there was no man of the same standing on the Munster circuit, or at the Irish bar, who knew more of his profession than young Mr O’Connell; and in a short time he became a very efficient lawyer of all-work. The sanguinary rebellion of that period was then at its height, and he probably cherished in his heart as much of the jacobinical principle as was consistent with the character of a thorough Roman Catholic. But he was a lawyer, and being also a shrewd politician, he foresaw that of those United Irishmen who escaped from the field many would be likely to perish on the scaffold; with great prudence, therefore, and most loyal valour, he joined the yeomanry and supported the Government. Again, when it became necessary to reorganize a yeomanry force in 1803, he once more took his place in “the Lawyers’ Corps.” Many anecdotes have been at various times retailed, showing the pains which he took to mitigate the atrocities of that period; and, however indifferent he might be as to the remote tendency of his political proceedings, he certainly manifested throughout his life a strong aversion to actual deeds of blood.
Mr O’Connell had been four years at the bar, and had entered upon the 28th year of his age, before he contracted matrimony. His father and his uncle pointed out more than one young lady of good fortune whose alliance with him in marriage they earnestly desired; but he felt bound in honour not to violate the vows which he had interchanged with his cousin, Mary, the daughter of Dr O’Connell of Tralee. Her father was esteemed in his profession, but her marriage portion was next to nothing; and great therefore was the displeasure which this union occasioned. It took place privately on the 23d of June, 1802, at the lodgings of Mr James Connor, the brother-in-law of the bride, in Dame-street, Dublin. This occurrence for some months remained a secret, but eventually all parties became reconciled. Mrs O’Connell was deservedly esteemed by her family and friends, while she enjoyed a large share of her husband’s affection.
Having now reached that period when Mr O’Connell embarked in a profession and assumed the responsibilities of domestic life, we may arrest for a moment the current of his biography, in order to advert briefly to his family and connexions. Nothing is more frequent in society than a demand for “the real history of these O’Connells.” It is often asked have they been “jobbers, hucksters, pedlars, smugglers, and everything base and beggarly? or are they the lineal descendants of the Sovereign Lords of Iveragh, and have they, through successive generations, preserved the purity of gentle blood and the reputation of honourable men?” Alas! who can tell? If there be one thing in this world less worthy of credence than another it is an Irish pedigree. In England the “visitations” are carefully preserved; the records of the Herald’s College in this country, and the business of that office, are conducted quite in the manner of other public departments. Here all proceedings are so much according to law, that every family which preserves its land can prove its pedigree. But, amidst confiscations, burnings, rebellions, and massacres, the regularity of official records can never be maintained, and the evidences of succession degenerate into oral tradition. The ancient Greek, who happened to distinguish himself, usually traced his origin to a deified ancestor; the modern Irishman who makes a noise in the world, always avers that he is descended from a Sovereign Prince; while the world looks on, and with contemptuous impartiality pronounces both genealogies to be equally fabulous. Dismissing, therefore, all idle speculation respecting the early history of the O’Connells, it may be shortly stated that this family originally established itself in Limerick; that about the beginning of the seventeenth century they transferred their residence to the barony of Iveragh, in the western extremity of Kerry; but, being deeply implicated in the rebellion of 1641, they found it convenient to seek shelter in Clare. To this migration Daniel O’Connell, of Aghgore, formed an exception, and he contrived to keep his little modicum of land by not yielding to that appetite for insurrection. His son, John O’Connell of Aghgore and Darrynane, took the field in 1689 at the head of a company of Foot, which he raised for the service of James II., and having served at the siege of Derry, as well as at the battles of the Boyne and Aughrim, was included in the capitulation of Limerick. His eldest son died without issue, but his second son, Daniel, having married a Miss Donoghue, became the father of 22 children. The second of this gentleman’s sons was Morgan, who married Catherine, the daughter of Mr John O’Mullane, of Whitechurch, in the county of Cork; and the eldest son of this Morgan was the extraordinary individual whose death we have now to record. Although nothing can be more absurd than to claim for him an illustrious descent, yet several of his relatives and connexions were respectable, and some of the number have served with distinction in the French and Austrian armies. But, sooth to say, his father was a most undignified person:- a very painstaking, industrious man, whose thoughts never wandered from the main chance; who held a good farm and kept a large shop, or rather a sort of miscellaneous store, which ministered to the limited wants of Cahirciveen and its rude neighbourhood; who is said to have been most adroit in the arts by which money may be acquired, not only in those of the fair dealer, but in those of the free trader. Almost every one who lived on the western coast of Ireland was, in those days, more or less of a smuggler; therefore Maurice of Darrynane and Morgan of Carhen were not much worse than their neighbours in carrying on the contraband or the wrecking trade; and thus did the elder brother keep his acres free from incumbrance, while the younger scraped together pence and pounds, till he was able to acquire a few additional acres at low rents and under long leases, by which means he ascended into that detested class known by the designation of Irish middlemen. He lived to see his son a prosperous barrister, and the acknowledged heir to Maurice of Darrynane; old Morgan therefore left at his death, which took place in 1809, a very considerable portion, if not the greater part, of all that he possessed to his second son, Mr John O’Connell, of Grena.
In the year 1802 Mr O’Connell found himself under the displeasure of his relatives, and obliged to contend with the difficulties which are inseparable from a growing family and a narrow income. The legislative union had then been only just consummated; his first popular harangue, however, was delivered at a meeting of the citizens of Dublin, assembled on the 13th of January, 1800, to petition against the proposed incorporation of the Irish with the British Parliament. The public have long been familiar with the grounds upon which Mr O’Connell was accustomed to urge the claims of his native country to the possession of an independent legislature. It is believed that he never urged those claims with more effect than in his earlier speeches; the very first of which has been extolled as a model of eloquence. It is a generally received opinion that, from the very starting point of his career, he displayed every quality, good and evil, of a perfect demagogue; and, those pernicious accomplishments being once known to the public of Ireland, his success at the bar ceased to be problematical. The great body of the Roman Catholics were only too happy to patronize an aspiring barrister of their own persuasion; the attorneys on the Munster circuit found that his pleadings were much more worthy of being relied on than those of almost any other junior member of the bar; and soon this description of business poured into his hands so abundantly, that he employed first one, and then a second amanuensis. At nisi prius his manner alone was enough to persuade an Irish jury that his client must be right. His anticipation of victory always seemed so unfeigned that, aided by that and other arts, he seldom failed to create in the minds of every jury a prejudice in favour of whichever party had the good fortune to have hired his services. His astonishing skill in cross-examination; the caution, dexterity, and judgment which he displayed in conducting a cause; the clearness and precision with which he disentangled the most intricate mass of evidence, especially in matters of account, procured for him the entire confidence of all those who had legal patronage to dispense. But his not being a Protestant excluded him from much valuable business. A Roman Catholic in those days was never heard in the courts of justice with that gracious approbation which encourages a youthful advocate; before a common jury, however, no man could be more successful than the subject of the present memoir, for this, among other reasons, that a large fund of the broadest humour usually enabled him to have the laugh on his side. In the Rolls Court also, where Mr Curran at that time presided, Mr O’Connell was in the highest favour.
During the few years which elapsed between 1800 and the death of Mr Pitt, two or three demonstrations were made in Dublin against the legislative union, in all of which Mr O’Connell continued to gain reputation as a popular leader; but he had not yet been recognized as the great agent of what was called “Catholic Emancipation.” For some time after the extinction of the Irish Parliament it was believed that the expectations excited by Mr Pitt respecting a repeal of the penal laws would be realized. But three successive Ministries occupied the Cabinet without possessing ability, or perhaps inclination, to effect that object when at length Mr Perceval was annnounced as the head of the Government amidst all the triumph of a grand No Popery agitation. Antecedently to this period, feeble efforts were occasionally made by the Roman Catholics, in which Mr O’Connell more or less participated, but it was not until the year 1809 that the struggles of that party became consolidated into a system and raised to the importance of a popular movement. The Orange party, of course, became alarmed; the measures of Government began to assume a definite and forcible character, obsolete statutes were called into activity, and fresh powers obtained from the Legislature. Some Roman Catholics of high rank, and others of good station, were prosecuted in the Court of King’s Bench. Numerous ex officio informations were filed; and the Irish Attorney-General made war upon the newspapers of Dublin with unexampled vigour and pertinacity. It happened, however, that during the prosecutions of that period Mr O’Connell appeared more frequently as an advocate than in any other capacity. Amongst the most remarkable of his speeches, and probably the ablest that he ever delivered at the bar, was his defence of Mr Magee, the proprietor and publisher of the Dublin Evening Post, a gentleman whom Mr Saurin, the Attorney-General of that day, conceived it to be his duty to prosecute for a libel on the Government. It need scarcely be stated that in almost all the political trials which took place in Ireland during the early part of the present century, Mr O’Connell was counsel for the accused; and, although proceedings of that nature in Dublin are usually marked by extreme intemperance on both sides, yet this characteristic of Irish litigation was never carried beyond the height which it attained while Mr Saurin was first law officer of the Crown. His mode of conducting prosecutions betrayed feelings of such bitter animosity, that Mr O’Connell could never hope to attain the objects of his ambition if he allowed any opportunity to escape of vituperating the Attorney-General; and the public of the present age will readily believe that his modes of attack were such as would, in England, excite universal disapprobation. Almost every one recollects that these proceedings on the part of the Irish Government proved wholly unsuccessful. Roman Catholic delegates might be dispersed under the Convention Act, a committee of the Roman Catholics might be suppressed under some other statute, a new bill might be introduced to declare a certain mode of associating illegal; but Mr O’Connell made it his boast that “so long as the right of petition existed he should be able to manufacture some device” by means of which the war of agitation could still be successfully waged. Whether his followers were called Pacificators in Conciliation-hall, or Repealers on Mullaghmast; whether they went by the name of delegates or committee-men, associators or liberators; patriots or precursors; no matter what the name or the pretence might be, the purpose never was anything else than to carry on in Dublin a sort of sham Parliament, which in the first place was used to obtain a repeal of the penal laws; in the second, to collect and administer that annual tribute called “the rent;” and in the third, to cajole and amuse the ignorant portion of the Irish people with that pestilent dream – an independent legislature. Of this machinery Mr O’Connell was at all times the moving agent. Whoever could consent to become a puppet and permit the chief showman to pull the wires, might assure himself of occupation for all his leisure time, and flattery enough to satiate the grossest appetite; but woe be unto him that dared to have an opinion of his own; for the colossal agitator in ascending his “bad eminence” seemed to derive especial pleasure from trampling under foot his rash and luckless rivals. The history of the years which elapsed between the development of Roman Catholic agitation in 1809 and its signal victory in 1829 discloses just this much respecting Daniel O’Connell; that he was sometimes the mere mouthpiece, and occasionally the ruler, guide, and champion of the Romish priesthood; that he maintained a “pressure from without,” which caused not only the Irish but the Imperial Government to betray apprehension as well as to breathe vengeance; and that he found or created opportunities, during this period of his life, to display in his own person every attribute of a democratic idol; and few readers require to be reminded that the history of all the men who form this class but too plainly shows in what a high degree the vices of their character predominate over the virtues. To sustain himself in the position which O’Connell held throughout the meridian of his career required great animal energy and unwearied activity of mind. He possessed both. Long before he reached middle life he had become the most industrious man in Ireland. As early as 5 o’clock in the morning his matins were concluded, his toilet finished, his morning meal discussed, and his amanuensis at full work; by 11 he was in court; at three or half-past attending a board or a committee; later in the evening presiding at a dinner, but generally retiring to rest at an early hour, and not only abstaining from the free use of wine, but to some extent denying himself the national beverage of his country.
He was often heard to say, “I am the best abused man in all Ireland, or perhaps in all Europe.” Amongst those who delighted to pour upon him the vials of their wrath, the municipal authorities of Dublin were perhaps the most prominent. The old corporation of that city was so corrupt, so feeble, and so thoroughly Orange in its politics, that Mr O’Connell reckoned confidently upon “winning golden opinions” from his party, while he indulged his own personal vengeance, by making the civic government of Dublin an object of his fiercest hostility. In the year 1815 this feud had attained to its utmost height, and various modes of overwhelming their tremendous adversary were suggested to the corporators; but at length shooting him was deemed the most eligible. This manner of dealing with an enemy is so perfectly Hibernian, that in Dublin it could not fail to meet with entire and cordial acceptance. At that time a Mr D’Esterre, who had been an officer of marines, was one of those members of the Dublin corporation who struggled the hardest for lucrative office. The more knowing members of that body hinted to him that an affair of honour with O’Connell would make his fortune. To such advisers the death of either party would be a boon, for the one was a rival and the other an enemy. O’Connell had publicly designated the municipality of Dublin as a “beggarly corporation,” and upon this a quarrel was founded by their champion, Mr D’Esterre, who walked about armed with a bludgeon, threatening to inflict personal chastisement on his adversary. The habits of thinking which then prevailed in Ireland admitted of no other course than that Mr O’Connell should demand satisfaction. Both parties, attended by their friends, met on the 31st of January, 1815, at a place called Bishop’s Court, in the county of Kildare. It sometimes happens that a man displays unusual gaiety when he is sick at heart; and never did the jocularity of O’Connell appear more exuberant than on the morning of that day when he went forth to destroy the life of his adversary or to sacrifice his own. Sir Edward Stanley attended Mr D’Esterre, and Major Macnamara was the friend of Mr O’Connell. At the first fire D’Esterre fell mortally wounded. A gamester would have betted five to one in his favour. Familiarized with scenes of danger from early youth, his courage was of the highest order; practised in the use of the pistol, it was said that he could “snuff a candle at twelve paces,” while Mr O’Connell’s peaceful profession caused him to seem – as opposed to a military man – a safe antagonist, and this, added to D’Esterre’s supposed skill as a shot, promised assured success to the champion whom the Orange corporation “sent forth to do battle” with the popish Goliah. But the lifeless corpse of the real aggressor bore its silent and impressive testimony to the imperfect nature of all human calculations. Mr O’Connell, though less culpable than his victim, still seemed conscious of having committed a great crime; and, influenced by a keen but imperfect remorse, he expressed the deepest contrition. It is, however, not the fact that he at that time “registered” his celebrated “vow” against the use of duelling pistols. On the contrary, he engaged in another affair of honour before finally abandoning the dernier resort of bullets and gunpowder. Mankind with one voice applauded his peaceful resolution the moment it was announced, but they were equally unanimous in condemning the license with which he scattered insult when he had previously sworn to refuse satisfaction. In a few months after the fatal event just recorded Mr O’Connell received a communication tending towards hostility from Sir Robert (then Mr) Peel, who at that time filled the office of Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Sir Charles Saxton, on the part of Mr Peel, had an interview first with Mr O’Connell, and afterwards with the friend of that gentleman, Mr Lidwell. The business of exchanging protocols went on between the parties for three days, when at length Mr O’Connell was taken into custody and bound over to keep the peace towards all his fellow subjects in Ireland; thereupon Mr Peel and his friend came to this country and eventually proceeded to the continent. Mr O’Connell followed them to London, but the metropolitan police, then called “Bow-street officers,” were active enough to bring him before the Chief-Justice of England, when he entered into recognizances to keep the peace towards all His Majesty’s subjects; and so ended an affair which might have compromised the safety of two men who since that time have filled no small space in the public mind.
The period which this narrative has now reached was still many years antecedent to the introduction of the Roman Catholic Relief Bill. Down to that moment Mr O’Connell prosecuted with unabated vigour his peculiar system of warfare against the supporters of Orange ascendancy, while he pursued his avocations as a lawyer with increasing and eminent success. As early as the year 1816 his professional position quite entitled him to a silk gown, but his creed kept him on the outside of the bar, where he continued to enjoy the largest and most lucrative business that ever rewarded the labours of a junior barrister. Meanwhile that body, called the Catholic Association, with O’Connell at its head, carried on the trade of agitating the Irish populace. The latter years of the Regency were marked by a new and more soothing policy towards Ireland. Upon the accession of George IV. he visited that country; in the early part of his reign the principle of conciliating the O’Connell party was maintained and extended; the Liberalism of the Canning policy began to prevail; “Emancipation” was made an “open question,” and even in 1825 the demand for religious equality seemed nearly established. Mr O’Connell declared himself willing to give up the forty-shilling freeholders – willing to sacrifice the lowest of his countrymen for the sake of the highest – to limit the democratic power in order that the aristocracy of the Roman Catholics should have seats in Parliament and silk gowns at the bar. The Parliamentary career of him – the “member for all Ireland” – now more immediately claims our attention; and it naturally takes its commencement from the first occasion upon which he was returned for Clare. A vacancy having occurred in the representation of that county, a gentleman called O’Gorman Mahon, seized by a sudden freak, posted off to Dublin, entered the Roman Catholic Association, and proposed a resolution calling on O’Connell to become a candidate, which was unanimously carried. Though legal success was impossible the scheme just suited the Irish character. It afforded the prospect of “a row,” and – more acceptable still – a piece of whimsical agitation. The long continued labours of O’Connell, extending even then over a period of more than twenty years, had rendered a maintenance of the penal laws a matter which the Government of that day considered to be, if not unjust, at least exceedingly unsafe; but it is believed that the great Clare election was the first event that awakened them to a full sense of danger. Mr O’Connell had been so often engaged on the wrong side of a legal controversy that he did not, upon this occasion, hesitate to promise his adherents an easy triumph. He averred that he could sit without taking the oaths; and his legal doctrines were supported by Mr Butler – a member of the English bar – while his pretensions as a candidate were sustained by the influence of the priesthood and the agency of the mob. Mr (afterwards Lord) Fitzgerald had represented Clare for many years, he was one of the resident gentry in a land where not to be an absentee is a virtue; his ancestors had long been settled in that county: he had faithfully maintained the interests, and spoken the sentiments of the popular party, and he was the firm friend of Roman Catholic emancipation; though only a tenth-rate man in Parliament, he was a first-rate man on the hustings, but his exertions at the Clare election were wholly and signally unsuccessful. The combined influence of the Government, of his own connexions, of the squirearchy, were scattered and set at nought by the power of the priesthood; and Mr O’Connell was, on the 6th of July, 1828, returned to Parliament by a large majority of the Clare electors. He lost no time in presenting himself at the table of the House of Commons, and expressed his willingness to take the oath of allegiance, but refusing the other oaths he was ordered to withdraw. Discussions in the house and arguments at the bar ensued; the speedy close of the session, however, precluded any practical result. Agitation throughout every part of Ireland now assumed so formidable a character that Ministers said they apprehended a civil war, and early in the next session the Roman Catholic Relief Bill was introduced and carried: Mr O’Connell was, therefore, in the month of April, 1829, enabled to sit for Clare without taking the objectionable oaths; but it was necessary that a new writ should issue, under which he was immediately re-elected.
His return for Clare was amongst the proximate causes of “emancipation,” but the “rent” was another source of still more active influence. Whether the scheme for raising that annual tribute originated in the fertile brain of Daniel O’Connell, or sprang from the perverted ingenuity of some less conspicuous person, certain it is that he was ultimately the great gainer. One of the earliest effects, however, of this financial project was most materially to aggravate that threatening aspect of public affairs which coerced the Duke of Wellington into proposing the Roman Catholic Relief Bill. A due regard to the precise succession of events makes it necessary here to notice an occurrence in itself of no great amount. On the 12th of February 1831, Messrs. O’Connell, Steel, and Barrett, were brought to trial, under an indictment, which charged them with holding political meetings contrary to the proclamation of the Lord Lieutenant; they pleaded guilty, but the act of Parliament under which they had been prosecuted expired pending the general election, and before they were brought up for judgment; they therefore escaped punishment, and the partizans of Mr O’Connell pointed to this negative victory as one of the proudest proofs that could be furnished of his infallibility as a lawyer. The death of George IV. of course led to a new Parliament, when Mr O’Connell withdrew from the representation of Clare and was returned for the county of Waterford. In the House of Commons, elected in 1831, he sat for his native county (Kerry). Dublin, the city in which the greater part of his life was spent, enjoyed his services as its representative from 1832 till 1836, when he was petitioned against and unseated, after a long contest, before a committee of the House of Commons. He then for some time took refuge in the representation of Kilkenny; but, at the general election in 1837, he was once more returned for the city of Dublin, and in 1841 for the county of Cork. Mr O’Connell had a seat in the House of Commons for 18 years, under the rule of three successive Sovereigns, during six distinct Administrations and in seven several Parliaments.
Every reader is aware that he took an active part in all the legislation of the period, as well as in the various struggles for power and place in which the political parties of this country have been engaged during the last 20 years; and right vigorously did he bear himself throughout those changing scenes … His position as mouth piece of the priesthood and populace of Ireland usually made it necessary that the tone of his speeches should harmonize with the feelings of a rude and passionate multitude; but on subjects distinct from the party squabbles of his countrymen scarcely any one addressed the house more effectively than did Mr O’Connell; and it is generally acknowledged that in his speeches upon the great question of Parliamentary Reform he was surpassed by very few members of either house. Although it cannot be denied that the faults of his character were numerous, and the amount of his political offences most grievous in the sight of the public, yet he enjoyed some popularity even in this country, for many elements of greatness entered into the constitution of his mind. Had he not belonged to a prescribed race, been born in a semi-barbarous state of society, been blinded by the fallacies of an educational system which was based upon Popish theology; had not his intellect been subsequently narrowed by the influence of legal practice, and the original coarseness of his feelings been aggravated by the habits of a criminal lawyer and a mob-orator, he might have attained to enviable eminence, legitimate power, and enduring fame. But he “lived and moved and had his being” among wild enthusiasts and factious priests. Who then can marvel that his great faculties were perverted to sordid uses? Apparently indifferent to nobler objects of ambition, he devoted herculean energies to the acquisition of tribute from his starving countrymen, and bestowed upon his descendants the remnants of a mendicant revenue, when he might have bequeathed them an honourable name. His Parliamentary speeches are numerous; but the events of his Parliamentary life have been few in number; for it can scarcely be said that by his personal efforts any series of measures were either carried or defeated; yet several propositions have been brought forward in the House of Commons by Mr O’Connell. Amongst the most remarkable of these was his motion for a repeal of the Irish union, submitted to Parliament on the 22nd of April, 1834. Upon that occasion he addressed the house with his usual ability for upwards of six hours; and Mr Rice (now Lord Monteagle) occupied an equal length of time in delivering a reply which might advantageously have been reduced within half its dimensions. After a protracted debate the house divided, only one English member voting with Mr O’Connell, the numbers being 523 to 38. Those who supported him on that remarkable occasion consisted of persons returned to Parliament by the Irish priests, at his recommendation, and pledged to vote as he directed; they were therefore called “the O’Connell tail,” and no doubt, when political parties were nicely balanced, the 30 or 40 members whom he commanded could easily create a preponderating influence. Thus it was his power which from 1835 to 1841 kept the Melbourne Ministry in office. To reward such important aid, the greater portion of the Irish patronage was placed at his disposal; and, to a great degree, the Irish policy of the Melbourne Government took its tone and character from the known sentiments of the demagogue upon whose fiat their existence depended.
The return of the party called Conservatives to power in 1841 was the signal for renewed agitation in Ireland, and this led to a lengthened interruption of Mr O’Connell’s Parliamentary labours; here, therefore, a fitting opportunity presents itself to state one or two circumstances which were not immediately connected with that portion of his career. In 1834 he received a patent of precedence next after the King’s second Serjeant. When the Dublin corporation was reformed he was elected Alderman, and filled the office of Lord Mayor in 1841–2. Mr O’Connell was appointed a magistrate of Kerry in 1835, but during the violent excitement which prevailed in 1843 the Lord Chancellor thought it necessary to remove him from the commission of the peace. He had controversies with all sorts of people, and was charged with sundry crimes, public and private; with having taken bribes from the millowners of Lancashire to speak against all short time bills; with having, even in his old age, seduced and abandoned more than one frail member of the fair sex; with having neglected and oppressed his tenantry to an extent which justified his being described as one of the most culpable individuals belonging to the vilest class in all Europe – the middlemen of Ireland. The evidence on which the other two accusations rest is rather doubtful; but the clearest possible proofs of his misconduct as a landlord were, in the year 1845, given to the public by The Times Commissioner. His expectations of office, of patronage, of power, and even of titular distinction are understood to have been quite as ardent as those of men who made no pretension to the liberal or the patriotic. It has been said, and generally believed, that he aimed at a baronetcy, and even hoped for a seat on the bench. The present age may well felicitate itself on the fact that O’Connell was not raised to judicial authority; for, instead of displaying any quality approaching to the calm impartiality of a judge, it had always been his practice to place himself in a position of hostility to every class, or at least to the representatives of every class in the community except the lowest. If the reader will only take the trouble to cast a glance over the index of any periodical publication which records the events of these times, he will find in letter 0, under the head “O’Connell,” – “Abuse of the Wesleyan Methodists; abuse of the Freemasons (by whom he was expelled in April, 1838); abuse of the Chartists; abuse of the English Radicals,” nay, even of the English women; “abuse of the King of Hanover, of the late Duke of York, of George III., of George IV., of the English aristocracy, of the Irish aristocracy, of the French Government, and especially of the French King;” to say nothing of his onslaughts upon Perceval, Liverpool, Wellington, Peel, and the head of every Tory Ministry; upon the established church, on the Dublin University, on the judges of the land, – upon every class and institution except the Irish populace and the church of Rome; thus labouring, day and night, to maintain the spirit of agitation just short of the point at which men are accustomed to burst forth into open rebellion. This peculiar system of his reached its culminating point in 1843. It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader that, to some extent, the subject of this memoir belonged to a political party, and, though at times he would call his political friends “base, bloody, and brutal Whigs,” yet, usually, when the Liberals occupied the Cabinet, he endeavoured to keep Ireland in a state favourable to Ministerial interests; but on all occasions when the Tories were in the ascendant, the full might of democratic agitation was brought into the field. In the autumn of 1841 Sir R. Peel became First Lord of the Treasury. Early in the spring of the following year a repeal of the union was demanded by every parish, village, and hamlet, from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear, while a fierce activity pervaded the Repeal Association. In the course of the next year (1843) “monster meetings” were held on the royal hill of Tara, on the Curragh of Kildare, on the Rath of Mullaghmast, and in a score of other wild localities; the Irish populace were drilled, and marshalled, and marched under appointed leaders, whose commands they obeyed with military precision, while the master-spirit who evoked and ruled this vast movement announced to all Europe that he was “at the head of 500,000 loyal subjects, but fighting men.” The Irish press enjoined “Young Ireland” to imitate the example of 1798, and open rebellion was hourly apprehended. At length the crisis arrived; the great Clontarf meeting was summoned; a Government proclamation to prohibit that assemblage went forth, the military were called out, and the grand repeal agitation shrank into nothingness at the mere sight of artillery and Dragoons. The intended meeting at Clontarf was fixed for the 8th of October, 1843; on the 14th of that month O’Connell received notice to put in bail; on the 2nd of November proceedings commenced in the Court of Queen’s Bench; the whole of Michaelmas Term was consumed by preliminary proceedings, and the actual trial did not begin until the 16th of January, 1844. Twelve gentlemen of the bar appeared on behalf of the Crown, and sixteen defended the traversers; who then can wonder that this remarkable trial did not close till the 12th of February? At length Mr O’Connell was sentenced to pay a fine of 2,000l. and be imprisoned for a year. He immediately appealed to the House of Lords by writ of error, but pending the proceedings on the question thus raised, he was sent to the Richmond Penitentiary, near Dublin, where for about three months he seemed to spend his days and nights most joyously. On the 4th of September the House of Lords reversed the judgment against O’Connell and his associates, Lords Lyndhurst and Brougham being favourable to affirming the proceedings in the Irish Queen’s Bench, while Lords Denman, Campbell, and Cottenham were of an opposite opinion. Mr O’Connell was therefore immediately liberated, and a vast procession attended him from prison to his residence in Merrion-square. From the moment that proceedings were commenced against him in the preceding year he became considerably crest-fallen. By the result of those proceedings his supposed infallibility as a lawyer ceased to be one of the dogmas of his party; the utter failure of the repeal movement greatly impaired his credit as a politician; the enormous costs of his defence nearly exhausted the funds of the repeal association; and in the altered state of his fortunes it became no easy matter for him to devise new modes of agitation. In 1845 he expressed his determination to repair to London during the ensuing session, to support a repeal of the Corn Laws. When he re-entered the House of Commons in 1846 it became evident to every observer that he had not only suffered in purse and popularity, but very materially also in health; that though his mind was still unclouded, his physical energy had disappeared, and that he could never again hope to be the hero of a “monster meeting.” Still a considerable portion of his ancient influence had not yet passed out of his hands, and when the Whigs once more came into office he was restored to the commission of the peace, and exercised no small authority over the Irish patronage of the Crown, of course giving Lord John Russell, in return, the full benefit of his support, to the great dismay of the “Young Ireland” party, who regarded his adhesion to any British Ministry as a traitorous “surrender of repeal.” Long and loud was the controversy between those belligerents; but the reader may well be spared the trouble of perusing even an abstract of the gross invectives poured on his head by a swarm of indignant followers, or a detail of the concessions wrung from him by a hard necessity. Unfortunately for O’Connell’s posthumous fame, he now betrayed “a broken spirit,” though not “a contrite heart;” and the popular influence, as well as the moral courage, of the old agitator sank under the pressure of his youthful and vigorous assailants; then came the famine, the falling off of “the rent,” thin audiences at Conciliation-hall, and the indefinite postponement of repeal. Successfully to contend with these disasters would have demanded the energy of O’Connell’s early days; but old, infirm, and broken-hearted, he was alike incapable of a manly struggle or a dignified retreat; and when once more he attempted to take his seat in Parliament, he seemed to be only the débris of an extinuished demagogue. To amplify the tale of his decline and fall would be inconsistent with the general tone of a narrative which has treated indulgently the memory of one who in his long life-time seldom spared a fallen adversary. In thus closing his history it may be well to avoid the contagion of his example, and to practise a forbearance of which he was incapable; for though to the crowd of his adherents he always seemed a munificent patron, yet small is the number of those who could sincerely say he had ever been a true friend or a generous enemy.
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MARIA EDGEWORTH (#ulink_8b92a15a-30b3-54c3-9e8a-6f05451b3b9a)
28 MAY 1849
OF MARIA EDGEWORTH it may be said – even more emphatically than of her sister-novelist, Miss Burney – that she lived to become a classic. Her decease in her 83rd or 84th year can hardly be felt as a shock in the world of letters though it bereaves her home-circle of one whose many days were but so many graces – so actively unimpaired did her powers of giving and of receiving pleasure and instruction remain till a very late period of her existence. The story of Miss Edgeworth’s life was some years since told by herself in her memoir of her father. She was born in England – the daughter of Mr Richard Lovell Edgeworth, by the first of that gentleman’s four wives – and had reached the age of 13 ere she became an Irish resident. Fifty years or more have elapsed since her Castle Rackrent – the precursor of a copious series of tales, national, moral, and fashionable (never romantic) – at once established her in the first class of novelists, as a shrewd observer of manners, a warm-hearted gatherer of national humours, and a resolute upholder of good morals in fiction. Before her Irish stories appeared, nothing of their kind – so complete, so relishing, so familiar yet never vulgar, so humorous yet not without pathos – had been tendered to the public. Their effect was great not merely on the world of readers, but on the world of writers and politicians also. Sir Walter Scott assures us that when he began his Scottish novels it was with the thought of emulating Miss Edgeworth; while Mr O’Connell at a later period (if we are to credit Mr O’Neill Daunt) expressed substantial dissatisfaction because one having so much influence had not served her country as he thought poor Ireland could alone be served – by agitation. Prudence will allay, rarely raise, storms; and Prudence was ever at hand when Maria Edgeworth (to use Scott’s phrase) “pulled out the conjuring wand with which she worked so many marvels.” Herein lay her strength and herein also some argument for cavil and reservation on the part of those who love nothing which is not romantic. “Her extraordinary merit,” happily says Sir James Mackintosh, “both as a moralist and as a woman of genius, consists in her having selected a class of virtues far more difficult to treat as the subject of fiction than others, and which had therefore been left by former writers to her.”
To offer a complete list of Miss Edgeworth’s fictions – closed, in 1834, by her charming and carefully wrought Helen – would be superfluous; but we may single out as three masterpieces, evincing the great variety of her powers, Vivian, Tomorrow, and The Absentee. Generally, Miss Edgeworth was happier in the short than in the long story. She managed satire with a delicate and firm hand, as her Modern Griselda attests. She was reserved rather than exuberant in her pathos. She could give her characters play and brilliancy when these were demanded as in “Lady Delacour;” she could work out the rise, progress, and consequences of a foible (as in Almeria) with unflinching consistency. Her dialogue is excellent; her style is in places too solicitously laboured, but it is always characteristic, yielding specimens of that pure and terse language which so many contemporary novelists seem to avoid on the maidservant’s idea that “plain English” is ungenteel. Her tales are singularly rich in allusion and anecdote. In short, they indicate intellectual mastery and cultivation of no common order. Miss Edgeworth has herself confessed the care with which they were wrought. They owed much to her father’s supervision; but this we are assured by her, was confined to the pruning of redundancies. In connexion with Mr Edgeworth the Essay on Irish Bulls was written; also the treatise on Practical Education … This brings us to speak of that large and important section of Maria Edgeworth’s writings – her stories for children. Here as elsewhere, she was “nothing if not prudential;” and yet who has ever suceeeded in captivating the fancy and attention of the young as her Rosamonds and Lucys have done? In her hands the smallest incident rivetted the eye and heart, – the driest truth gained a certain grace and freshness …
If Miss Edgeworth’s long literary life was usefully employed, so also were her claims and services adequately acknowledged during her lifetime. Her friendships were many; her place in the world of English and Irish society was distinguished. Byron (little given to commending the women whom he did not make love to, or who did not make love to him) approved her. Scott, addressed her like an old friend and a sister. There is hardly a tourist of worth or note who has visited Ireland for the last 50 years without bearing testimony to her value and vivacity as one of a large and united home circle. She was small in stature, lively of address, and diffuse as a letter-writer. To sum up it may be said that the changes and developments which have convulsed the world of imagination since Miss Edgeworth’s career of authorship began have not shaken her from her pedestal nor blotted out her name from the honourable place which it must always keep in the records of European fiction.
TOM MOORE (#ulink_35ac3790-a3c3-5859-8df2-3ea2ed23695b)
1 MARCH 1852
THE ELEGY OF TOM MOORE should not contain one mournful or distressing note! Flourishing in an age of poets – of men who have stamped their characters upon the literature of their country and earned undying fame – he takes his ground as fairly as the best of them. Within his sphere he is unapproachable. He has little in common with the stormy passion of Byron; the philosophical grandeur of Coleridge is unknown to him; the muse of Scott and his own are scarcely kindred cousins; his productions have as little of the dreamy and mystical splendour of Shelley as they are allied to the elaborate and fatiguing epics of Southey; but within the circle of his own uncontested dominion he has poured forth strains as exquisite as any fancy ever clothed in sparkling verse to delight the jocund heart of man. The mind of Moore, from the moment that he took pen in hand, may be said to have been always in a state of pleasure. He has written satires as well as songs, and dealt with themes both sacred and profane: he has described the loves of angels and the holy piety of erring mortals; but, whatever the employment, one condition of feeling is always manifest. Most musical, most happy was his genius, and music and joyousness are careering in almost every syllable that he spoke …
Thomas Moore was born in Dublin on the 30th of May, 1780, the son of a small tradesman, who afterwards became a quartermaster in the army. It is not easy to decide when he first attempted verse. Upon looking back he could not discover when he was not a scribbler. In his thirteenth year he was already a contributor to a magazine; in his fourteenth he had addressed a sonnet to his school-master; and some three years before he sent his productions to the Irish periodical he had distinguished himself in another branch of art by undertaking principal characters in amateur theatricals. Moore was privileged to be precocious without paying the penalty of precocity. When he was 12 years old he accompanied his father, a Roman Catholic, to a patriotic dinner held in honour of the French Revolution, then a recent event, and regarded, as he himself tells us, as a signal to the slave, wherever suffering, that “the day of his deliverance was near at hand.” Men’s hearts, it has been written, are cradled into poetry by wrong. The early genius of Moore was, no doubt, nurtured by the sufferings of his race, and maintained in vigour and freshness until the decaying music of his native land came to claim him wholly as her own. The act of Parliament having opened the University to Roman Catholics in 1793, the young poet immediately availed himself of his opportunity. The year following his admission, while still a child, he wrote and published a paraphrase of Anacreon’s fifth ode, and then proceeded to the translation of other odes by the same poet, for which he vainly hoped the university board might deem him “deserving of some honour or reward.” Disappointed in his expectation he nevertheless continued his task, and occupied himself in improving his verses and illustrating them by learned annotations, until he reached his 19th year, when he quitted Ireland for the first time, and set out for London “with the two not very congenial objects of keeping his terms in the Middle Temple and publishing by subscription his translation of Anacreon.” The translation duly appeared in 1800. It was dedicated to George IV., then Prince of Wales, who, we may remark, received no further honour at the poet’s hands.
In 1803 Moore had the misfortune to obtain worldly advancement. He was promoted to an official situation in Bermuda. The duties of the office were performed by a deputy, and the consequence, was great personal anxiety and heavy pecuniary loss to the poetical principal …
Moore’s birth and origin made him a Liberal and something more. He came into the world one of a then oppressed race. He was the contemporary and schoolfellow of an ardent band who believed all things lawful to the struggler for liberty, and his spirit went with them in their most daring aspirations. The hapless victims of their own rash, ill conceived, and unwarrantable projects for national emancipation were his chosen and beloved associates, and when he saw them sacrificed to their wild enthusiasm he cherished the passion that had consumed them and embalmed their memory in matchless melody and verse. In middle life Moore, favoured by the friendship of the great Whig chiefs, soothed by the concessions that had been made to his country and his creed, and warned by sober experience of the vanity of egregious expectation, settled down into a constitutional Whig; but at the starting point of his career he had as little affection for Whigs as for Tories. In the preface to one of a series of solemn satires, he speaks of both “factions” as “having been equally cruel to Ireland, and perhaps equally insincere in their efforts for the liberties of England.”
Moore had no cause to remember with pleasure either the prose or the poetry of these satirical exercises. Serious satire was at no time his forte – his lively and delicate hand could hardly wield the heavy weaponry of Dryden and Pope. Greater success attended his efforts when at a later period of his life he divested himself of his sombre attire, and became as joyous in hate as he had been in love. The Fudge Family, written in 1817, The Twopenny Postbag, and similar productions full of point, wit, and polish, are unrivalled as political lampoons, and preserve to this hour, their first exquisite relish. The generous fancy of the Irish poet could not be happy steeped in bitterness, and to affect sternness was to languish and die. The objects of Moore’s squib warfare were no doubt sufficiently conscious of the sharpness of an airy weapon, never otherwise than most dexterously handled by their foe; but we question whether they suffered half as much pain as they enjoyed pleasure from his lively feats. How could men be seriously angry with an adversary who simply tickled when he pretended to strike?
The apprenticeship of Moore was served when he commenced The Irish Melodies which have rendered his name famous wherever music is cherished. From that hour his genius triumphed, and most deservedly. Moore attributes all his poetical success to his strong and inborn feeling for music. There can be no doubt that his obligations to nature in this respect were very great. Music and poetry were wedded in his heart, and were inseparable. So intimately, indeed, were they united, that the sight of The Irish Melodies crowded together in one volume, unaccompanied by the notes with which they were always associated in his own mind, inflicted upon him positive pain. It was as if he saw the skeletons of his children ranged before him, deprived of the warm flesh and breathing form. To the reader the verses have beauty of their own, and charm irrespective of the strains by which they were suggested. Moore could no more unbind melody and language than he could gaze on female beauty and separate the notions of body and soul.
The publication of The Irish Melodies commenced in 1807, and, continued at intervals, was concluded in 1834. They have been translated into Latin, Italian, French, and Russian, and are familiar as proverbs amongst the fellow-countrymen of the poet, and indeed wherever English is understood and music loved. It is difficult for the critic to refer to them in too high a tone of panegyric. It may be true that force and dignity are wanting to some of those lyrics, that occasionally fancy labours until art becomes too evident in strained and frigid similes, that ornament at times overlays sentiment until nature pants beneath the glittering encumbrance; but it is equally certain that universal literature does not present a lovelier and more affecting tribute to a nation’s minstrelsy than is found in The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore. The love of country that pervades and inspires his theme, his simple tenderness of feeling, that at once strikes the heart as instantly to melt it, his facility of creation, linked vith the glad appreciation of all that is beautiful in nature – the grace, the elegance, the sensibility, the ingenuity, that are never absent – the astonishing and thoroughly successful adaptation of sense to sound, of sweetest poetry to thrilling music, – are claims to admiration which the most prosaic of his species will find it impossible to resist or gainsay.
The year 1812 found Moore, in his 32nd year, enjoying well-earned fame, but on circumscribed ground. He had not as yet given to the world a long and continuous work, and shown how well he could sustain the brilliancy that seemed too keenly elaborate for a protracted effort. In that year, however, the poet resolved to take the field against his most favoured competitors, and to attempt a poem upon an Oriental subject. In 1817 Lalla Rookh appeared … The poem was hailed with a burst of admiration from sceptics as well as believers.
And no wonder! It was a triple triumph of industry, learning, and genius. The broad canvas exhibited a gorgeous painting; from beginning to end the same lavish ornament, the same overpowering sweetness, the same variegated and delicate tracery, the same revelling of a spirit happy in its intense enjoyment of beauty that characterized the miniatures and gems that heretofore had proceeded from the artist’s pencil. So far from betraying a diminution of power, or an inability to maintain his high-pitched note, the poet pursued his strain until he fairly left his reader languishing with a surfeit of luscious song, and faint from its oppressive odours. We peruse the romance, and marvel at the miraculous facility of a writer who has but to open his lips to drop emeralds and pearls, like the good princess in the fairy tale. Nor does astonishment cease when we learn, that eager and all but involuntary as the verse appears to issue from its source, the apparently effortless composition is actually a labour performed with all the diligence of the mechanic and all the forethought of science. In his life of Sheridan, Moore informs us that many of the impromptu jokes of Richard Brinsley owed much of their point and off-hand brilliancy to the time and pains previously bestowed upon their manufacture. His own seemingly spontaneous and easy cadences were wrought most patiently at the anvil. But the time spent in the composition of Lalla Rookh, though it extended over years, was as nothing compared with the time given to preparation for the subject. For months Moore saturated his mind with Oriental reading, in order to familiarize himself with Oriental illustration, and with the view especially of educating his fancy for its essential and peculiar work. The research and industry of the poet were immense. He tells us himself that “it was amidst the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters, in a lone cottage amongst the fields, that he found himself enabled by that concentration of thought, which retirement alone gives, to call up around him some of the sunniest of his eastern scenes.” He had devoured every book he could get relating to the East, and did not rise from his occupation until he positively knew more of Persia than of his own country, and until his acclimated genius found it as easy to draw inspiration from the influences of a land he had never seen as from the living and silent forms by which, in his own country, he had been from his childhood surrounded. Eastern travellers and Oriental scholars have borne testimony to the singular accuracy of Moore’s descriptive pen … The poem, translated into Persian, has found its way to Ispalian, and is thoroughly appreciated on the shores of the Caspian. In London the poem looks like an exotic; there it is racy of the soil.
In the autumn of 1817, and in the fulness of his triumph, Moore visited Paris with Mr Rogers, and picked up, as we have already noted, the materials of his Fudge Family, a satire written on the plan of the New Bath Guide, and intended to help the political friends of the satirist at the expense of their opponents. Time has taken away from much of the interest that attaches to these squibs of the hour, but age can never blunt the point of their polished wit or dull its brilliancy. The popularity of the Fudge Family kept pace with that of Lalla Rookh. ln 1819 the poet went abroad again, this time with Lord John Russell. The travellers proceeded in company by the Simplon into Italy, but soon parted company, Lord John Russell to proceed to Genoa, Moore to visit Lord Byron in Venice. Moore had made the acquaintance of Byron in 1812, when the latter, then in his 20th year, had just taken the world by surprise with his publication of the earlier cantos of Childe Harolde. The poets took to each other as soon as they met, and their friendship continued unimpaired until death divided them. This tour yielded Rhymes on the Road, a volume of sketches which in no way added to the writer’s reputation, since it lacks all that is chiefly characteristic of his genius. Nature in Italy charmed Moore much more than art. At Rome he visited the great collections with Chantrey and Jackson, but was a stranger to the lively impressions received by his companions. The glorious sunset witnessed in ascending the Simplon lingered on his spirit long after the united glories of Rome, Florence, Turin, and Milan were obliterated from his memory.
Returning from Rome, Moore took up his abode in Paris, in which capital he resided until the year 1822. The conduct of the deputy in Bermuda had thrown the poet into difficulties, and until he could struggle out of them a return to England was incompatible with safety. There were not wanting friends to run to the rescue, but Moore honourably undertook to provide for his own misfortunes. Declining all offers of help, he took heart, and resolutely set to work for his deliverance. After much negotiation, the claims of the American merchants against him were brought down from 6,000 guineas to 1,000. Towards this reduced amount the friends of the offending deputy subscribed 300l. The balance (750l.) was deposited “by a dear and distinguished friend” of the principal in the hands of a banker, to be in readiness for the final “settlement of the demand.” A few months after the settlement was effected Moore received 1,000l. for his Loves of the Angels and 500l. for the Fables of the Holy Alliance. With half of these united sums he discharged his obligation to his benefactor …
In 1825 Moore wrote a Life of Sheridan, in 1830 he issued his Notices of the Life of Lord Byron, and in the following year the Memoirs of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, in all the biographies maintaining his well-earned position. In his Life of Sheridan he did not shrink from the difficulties of history. To borrow the language of a critic of the time, “he did not hide the truth under too deep a veil, neither did he blazon it forth.” Of Byron, Moore thought more tenderly than the majority of his contemporaries. The character of the staunch ally, old associate, and brother bard, is finely painted in the Notices, and, to the honour of Moore be it said, he knew how to stand by his departed friend while fulfilling his obligations to the public, whom it was his business to instruct. The life of the amiable, but weak-minded and luckless Lord Edward Fitzgerald, is the least noteworthy of Moore’s efforts of this kind. The History of Ireland, published from time to time in Lardner’s Cyclopedia, we believe to be the latest, as it is the most elaborate and serious, of our author’s compositions.
For many years in the enjoyment of a pension conferred upon him by his political friends, Moore quietly resided in his cottage near Devizes, in Wiltshire, from which he occasionally emerged to find a glad and hearty welcome among the best-born and most highly-gifted of his countrymen. During such separations from home it was the habit of the poet to correspond daily with his wife. The letters written at these times, are preserved, to be incorporated, we trust, in the diary of his life, upon which Moore was busily engaged. Mrs Moore survives her husband, but his four children have preceded him to the grave.
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FATHER MATHEW (#ulink_3434f680-1164-508b-a5a2-ad028fcbfc91)
12 DECEMBER 1856
THE DEPARTURE OF a great and good man from among us, and the loss of one whose charity and good deeds were of more than European reputation, seem to call for a more extended notice than that which appeared in the columns of our Irish intelligence yesterday. The history of “Father Mathew” is strange and striking, and almost partakes of the character of romance. It has often been said, by way of reproach against Ireland, that her clergy are almost all chosen, not from the nobles or the landed gentry and middle classes of Ireland, but from “the lowest of the people,” and that her priests have been chosen from the plough-tail and the pigstye. However this may be it was not the case with the subject of our memoir. Theobald Mathew was descended from a very ancient Welsh family, whose pedigree is carried in the records of the principality to Gwaythooed, King of Cardigan, in direct descent from whom was Sir David Mathew, standard-bearer to Edward IV., whose monument is to be seen in the cathedral of Llandaff. Edmund Mathew, his descendant in the sixth generation, High-Sheriff of Glamorgan in 1592, had two sons, who went to Ireland in the reign of James I. The elder son, George, married Lady Thurles, mother of “the great” Duke of Ormonde …
We believe that Theobald Mathew, son of James Mathew, of Thomastown, county Tipperary, was born at that place on the 10th of October, 1790 … At the age of 13 he was sent to the lay academy of Kilkenny, whence he was removed in his 20th year to Maynooth to pursue his ecclesiastical studies, having shown signs of a clerical vocation. On Easter Sunday, 1814, he was ordained in Dublin by the late Archbishop Murray. After some time he returned to Kilkenny with the intention of joining the mission of two Capuchin friars there; but before long he removed to Cork. By a rescript from the late Pope Gregory XVI. he received the degree of Doctor in Divinity, together with a dispensation allowing him to possess property. From the moment of entering upon his missionary duties at Cork he began to show the sterling worth of his character. Ever diligent in his work of the pulpit, the confessional, and the sick man’s bedside, he devoted all his spare time, not to violent agitation like Dr Cahill and other ecclesiastical firebrands, but to the temporal and spiritual wants of the poor, to whom he acted as counsellor, friend, treasurer, and executor. He acted as a magistrate as well as a minister, and thus composed feuds, secured justice to the oppressed, and healed the broken peace of many a family. His charities kept pace with his exertions, and were only limited by his means. Among other good deeds, Father Mathew himself purchased the Botanic Gardens of that city, and, allowing them to retain their former agreeable walks and statuary (the best specimens of Hogan’s native genius), he converted them into a cemetery, not for Catholics alone, but for members of every other denomination. To the poor burial was allowed gratuitously, and the fees derived from all other interments were devoted to charity. About the same time he commenced building a beautiful Gothic church at the cost of about 15,000l.
Thus, by the force of his well-known character as a genuine Christian patriot, even before the commencement of the Temperance movement in the south of Ireland, Father Mathew had risen to the highest estimation among his people. The affability of his manners, his readiness to listen to every grief and care, and, if possible, to remove it, the pure and self-sacrificing spirit of his entire career, were eminently calculated to seize upon the quick, warm impulses of the Irish heart, and to make his word law. Some 20 years ago there was no country in which the vice of intoxication had spread more devastation than in Ireland. All efforts to restrain it were in vain. The late Sir Michael O’Loghlen’s Act for the Suppression of Drunkenness was a dead letter; many even of the wise and good deemed it hopeless and incurable, and it was said that the Irish would abandon their nature before they abandoned their whisky.
There were those who thought otherwise. Some members of the Society of Friends and a few other individuals at Cork had bound themselves into an association for the suppression of drunkenness, but were unable to make head against the torrent. In their despair these gentlemen, though Protestants, applied to Father Mathew. Father Mathew responded to the call; with what success ultimately we suppose that our readers are all well aware. The work, however, was not the work of a day. For a year and a half he toiled and laboured against the deep-rooted degradation of the “Boys” of Cork, the ridicule and detraction of many doubtful friends, and the discountenance of many others from whom he had expected support. At length he had the satisfaction of seeing the mighty mass of obdurate indifference begin to move; some of the most obdurate drunkards in Cork enrolled their names in his “Total Abstinence Association.” His fame began to travel along the banks of the Shannon. First, the men of Kilrush came in to be received, then some hundreds from Kerry and Limerick; until, early in the month of August, 1839, the movement burst out into one universal flame. The first great outbreak was at Limerick, where Father Mathew had engaged to preach at the request of the bishop; and the mayor of which city declared that within 10 months no less than 150 inquests had been held in the county, one half of which were on persons whose deaths had been occasioned by intoxication. As soon as the country people heard that Father Mathew was in Limerick they rushed into the city in thousands. So great was the crush, that though no violence was used the iron railings which surrounded the residence of “the Apostle of Temperance” were torn down, and some scores of people precipitated into the Shannon … We have not the time or the space to follow Father Mathew in his Temperance progresses. Some idea of their results may be formed when we state that at Nenagh 20,000 persons are said to have taken the pledge in one day; 100,000 at Galway in two days; in Loughrea, 80,000 in two days; between that and Portumna from 180,000 to 200,000; and in Dublin about 70,000 during five days. There are few towns in Ireland which Father Mathew did not visit with like success. In 1844 he visited Liverpool, Manchester, and London; and the enthusiasm with which he was received there and in other English cities testified equally to the need and to the progress of the remedy.
It only remains to add, that in Father Mathew the ecclesiastic was completely absorbed in the Christian, the man of goodwill towards all his fellow men. To him the Protestant and the Catholic were of equal interest and of equal value. Again, no man ever displayed a more disinterested zeal. He spent upon the poor all that he had of his own and reduced to bankruptcy his brother, a distiller in the South of Ireland, whose death followed shortly upon the losses resulting from the “Temperance” crusade. Yet this man, and other branches of the family, though extensively connected with the wine and spirit trade, not only bore their losses without a murmur, but even supplied Father Mathew with large sums of money for the prosecution of his work. A few years since, Her Majesty was pleased to settle upon Father Mathew an annuity of 300l. in recognition of the services which he had rendered to the cause of morality and order; but even this we understand was almost entirely absorbed in heavy payments on policies of insurance upon his life, which he was bound to keep up to secure his creditors.
WILLIAM DARGAN (#ulink_00a2fc0f-5f33-5246-a3f7-6b6913bd3ed2)
8 FEBRUARY 1867
WILLIAM DARGAN, of whose death we have just been informed by telegraph, was the son of a farmer in the county of Carlow. Having received a fair English education, he was placed in a surveyor’s office. He obtained the appointment of surveyor for his native county, but soon after resigned, from a feeling that he could never in that position be able to advance himself as he thought he should do if he were free to do the best he could with his talents. The first important employment he obtained was under Mr Telford, in constructing the Holyhead road. He there learnt the art of road-making, then applied for the first time by his chief, the secret of which was raising the road in the middle that it might have something of the strength of the arch, and making provision for the effectual draining off of the surface water. When that work was finished Mr Dargan returned to Ireland and obtained several small contracts on his own account, the most important of which was the road from Dublin to Howth, which was then the principal harbour connected with Dublin. Soon after this he embarked in a career of enterprise which, owing to the state of the country at that time, and the nature of the works which he achieved, will cause him to stand alone as a leader of industrial progress in the history of Ireland. There was then on every hand a cry for “encouragement” and protection. In the name of patriotism people were invited to purchase certain articles, not because they were good, but because they were of Irish manufacture. To be personally engaged in business of any kind was considered vulgar. It was a thing to which no “born gentleman” would stoop, because if he did he would be put in Coventry by his class. The most wealthy manufacturer, no matter how well educated or gentlemanly, if he attended at his counting-house, or looked regularly after his business, would have been blackballed at any second or third rate club in Dublin. A gentleman might, indeed, amuse himself at some sort of work for the benefit of his health; but if it were for the benefit of his purse, and for so sordid a consideration as profit, he immediately lost caste. Trade might be a good thing in its way, but it should be left to men who were not born with gentle blood. Protestants of the middle classes, who had no pretensions to such blood, had imbibed from their “betters” much of the same contempt for industry and the same respect for idleness; while the Roman Catholics had not yet sufficiently recovered from the effects of the Penal Code to enter with self-reliance and persistent energy into any sort of industrial enterprise. It was under such circumstances that Mr Dargan applied himself to study the wants of his country, which, so far as the working classes were concerned, had derived so little benefit from political agitation. Such a man would naturally embrace any opportunity that opened for extending the benefits of the railway system to Ireland. Kingstown had superseded Howth as the Dublin harbour. It was increasing fast in population, and the traffic between it and the metropolis was immense. It was carried on chiefly on outside cars rattling away through stifling dust in summer and splashing mud in winter. Mr Dargan was then a young man comparatively unknown, except to a circle of appreciating friends. He inspired them with his own confidence; a company was formed, and he became the contractor of the first railway in Ireland – the Dublin and Kingstown line – a most prosperous undertaking, which has always paid better than any other line in the country. For several years it stood alone. People were afraid to venture much in railway speculation. Canal conveyance was still in the ascendant; a company was formed for opening up the line of communication between Lough Erne and Belfast and Mr Dargan became the contractor of the Ulster Canal, which was regarded as a signal triumph of engineering and constructive ability. Other great works followed in rapid succession; first the Dublin and Drogheda Railway, then the Great Southern and Western, and the Midland Great Western lines. At the time of the Irish Exhibition in 1853 Mr Dargan had constructed over 200 miles of railway, and he had then contracts for 200 miles more. All his lines have been admired for the excellence of the materials and workmanship.
Considering how completely untrained Irish workmen were at that time, and what perversity had been shown by some of the trades, it is a remarkable – indeed, a wonderful, fact that Mr Dargan in all his vast undertakings never had a formidable strike to contend with, and, though the ablest workmen flocked to him from all parts of the country, his gangs were never demoralized, as they have been under other contractors. Even the navvies looked up to him with gratitude as a public benefactor. He paid the highest wages, and paid punctually as the clock struck. So perfect was the organization he effected, so firmly were all his arrangements carried out, and so justly and kindly did he deal with the people, that he was enabled to fulfil to the letter every one of the numerous engagements with which he had entered. The result was that he was held in the highest respect by the whole nation, his credit was unbounded, and, as he once said at a public meeting, he “realized very fast.” At one time he was the largest railway proprietor in the country, and one of its greatest capitalists. The secret of his success, as he once said himself, consisted in the selection of agents on whose capacity and integrity he could rely, and in whom he took care not to weaken the sense of responsibility by interfering with the details of their business, while his own energies were reserved for comprehensive views and general operations. When his mind was occupied with the arrangements of the Exhibition of 1853 he had in his hands contracts to the aggregate amount of nearly two millions sterling. To his personal character and influence that Exhibition was mainly due, and, although many of the first men in the country, including the highest nobility, co-operated with alacrity, and aided with liberal contributions, he was the man who found the capital. After the Exhibition a public meeting was convened by the Lord Mayor, in compliance with a requisition signed by 40 peers, six Protestant Bishops, 15 Roman Catholic Bishops, 49 members of Parliament, and a host of magistrates and professional gentlemen, amounting to 2,200 names. From this meeting resulted a suitable monument to Mr Dargan – the Irish National Gallery, erected on Leinster Lawn, with a fine bronze statue in front looking out upon Merrionsquare. The Queen graciously honoured Irish industry in the person of its great chief. Her Majesty offered him a title, which he declined. She shook hands with him publicly at the opening of the Exhibition, and with the Prince Consort paid a visit to Mr and Mrs Dargan. Wishing to encourage the growth of flax, Mr Dargan took a tract of land in Clara or Kerry, which he devoted to its culture; but owing to some mismanagement the enterprise entailed a heavy loss. He also became a manufacturer, and set some mills working in the neighbourhood of Dublin. But that business did not prosper. About a year ago he had a fall from his horse by which his system was so badly shaken that his recovery was for some time doubtful. Since that he had another fall, but not so serious. Probably the ill state of his health brought on a confusion in his affairs, which recently resulted in his stopping payment and in an arrangement with his creditors, though his assets, it is confidently said, will pay much more than 20s. in the pound. His embarrassments, however, seem to have deeply affected his health and spirits, and brought on a disease to which his powerful constitution has succumbed.
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EARL OF ROSSE (#ulink_2817ec34-0a28-5c0b-8391-568277a92ddd)
2 NOVEMBER 1867
OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT in Dublin writes:-
The Earl of Rosse died yesterday, after a protracted illness, at his residence in Monkstown, County Dublin. In the world of science a death will leave a blank which the most distinguished of his associates will long view with painful concern. This was the sphere in which his great qualities could alone be appreciated, and where his genius shone amid the brightest of those who have adorned the age in which they lived. He was the eldest son of the second earl, and was born on the 17th of June, 1800, in the city of York. In 1818 he entered Trinity College, Dublin, and in the following year passed into residence in Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1822. The bent of his mind was shown at this early period by the distinction which he obtained as a first-class honour man in math-ematics. About this time he was induced to enter public life, and, as Lord Oxmantown, was elected representative of the King’s County, a position which he retained until the end of the first Reformed Parliament. He also sat for a while as a representative peer. His talents, however, had no congenial field in the Legislature, and his career was not marked by any brilliant feat of eloquence or statesmanship. Though he shrank from the prominence of a Parliamentary debater, he occasionally spoke on subjects on which he felt it due to his constituents to express his opinions. Among the more remarkable was Mr Whitmore’s motion for a committee of the whole House to consider the Corn Laws. He was opposed to the policy of repealing them, and showed the effect which it would have, especially as regards this country. He resisted Mr Hume’s motion for the abolition of the Lord Lieutenent on the ground that it would increase absenteeism. … After retiring from Parliament Lord Rosse applied himself with greater zeal and assiduity to the pursuit of astronomical science. He conceived the noble purpose of surmounting the difficulties which stood in the way of a more accurate observation of the heavenly bodies, and with unexampled patience and persistent energy applied himself to the self-imposed task. His wonderful mechanical skill and scientific knowledge enabled him ultimately to achieve his object. It was not until after repeated experiments and failures, which would have daunted a less determined or enthusiastic worker, that he at last succeeded in producing those magnificent instruments which have won for him European fame. The art of making reflecting telescopes of vast compass and power may be said to have originated with him, and has certainly been brought by his unwearied diligence and inventive sagacity to a perfection which before he undertook the task would have been pronounced impossible. No work can be imagined of more exquisite delicacy, and his success in overcoming the complicated difficulties which arose at every step is a marvel of patient ingenuity. The mirror of Lord Rosse’s largest telescope is a circular disc of metal weighing four tons, and measuring six feet in diameter; and a faint conception of the obstacles which he had to encounter may be formed when it is remembered that, in order to collect the utmost possible amount of light, which is the great object of reflectors, it must be slightly concave, about half an inch deeper in the centre than at the edge, and not exactly spherical, but varying from the spherical form only to the extent of the ten-thousandth part of an inch. The slightest variation of these conditions would produce a defective or distorted image. Lord Rosse not only succeeded in conforming to them, but attained to probably ten times greater precision. The shape, however, of the mirror is only one of the essentials. In adjusting the proportions of the copper and tin of which it is made, in guarding against the penetrating power of the molten mass which would make its way through the pores of cast iron – and wrought iron cannot be used, for the alloy would fuse with it – in the annealing, grinding, and polishing of the mirror, the latter process being performed by machinery, the resources of his inventive mind were displayed with marvellous effect. So completely did he master the minutest detail that those who desire to follow in his steps may pursue their course with perfect confidence. The value of the discoveries which his great instrument enabled him to make in the observation of nebuli, has been universally acknowledged. All the learned societies of Europe vied in doing him honour. In 1849 he was elected President of the Royal Society. He was elected a member of the Imperial Academy at St Petersburg, and was created a Knight of the Legion of Honour by the Emperor of the French, and a Knight of St Patrick by our most gracious Sovereign. He was Custos Rotulorum of the King’s County and Chancellor of the University of Dublin. He was also a President of the British Association. In politics he was a moderate Conservative, but held independent views on some leading questions. Though English in his birthplace and descent, he was strongly attached to this country by the ties of family, property, and sympathy.
CARDINAL CULLEN (#ulink_0401c9ff-735e-5c05-aa32-69f643933b81)
25 OCTOBER 1878
CARDINAL CULLEN, the Roman Catholic Primate of Ireland, died yesterday afternoon at his residence in Eccles-street, Dublin. It is supposed to have been caused by aneurism of the heart. His loss will give a severe shock to the Roman Catholic Church, of which he was the distinguished head in Ireland, and will be generally regretted, even by those who differed most widely from him on religious and political questions.
Of the early life of the Right Rev. Paul Cullen, D.D., but little is known beyond the fact that he was born about the year 1800, in the county of Meath, and was a member of a respectable family, engaged in agricultural pursuits. They are now among the most wealthy graziers in the country, and have considerable property in Meath and Kildare. His Christian name, which is not at all a common one in Ireland, would seem to denote an early dedication of his life to the priestly office to which especial honour is attached in a social as well as religious aspect by the Roman Catholic peasantry and industrial classes. Having been ordained for the ministry, he was sent to Rome, where he spent nearly 30 years of his life, and rose to a position of trust and eminence in the councils of the Vatican. He was officially connected with the management of the Irish College at Rome, but this was the only bond of connexion with his own country, and there can be no doubt that his ideas were deeply tinged by the impressions derived from foreign experience, and associated with the narrow circle in which he moved. In 1849 the death of Dr Crolly, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, created a vacancy in that important See, and, the Suffragan Bishops having been divided in opinion as to the choice of his successor, the Pope settled the dispute suo more by appointing Dr Cullen Primate of All Ireland. This exercise of Papal authority was regarded as an infringement of the elective rights or usage which had been previously recognized, and created much dissatisfaction at the time, though the supreme will of the Holy See was obeyed. To avoid scandal in the Church the bishops and clergy who had lived under a different regime suppressed their discontent, and the feeling gradually wore away. It was the first step, however, towards the enforcement of a despotic control which has since dominated the whole ecclesiastical system in Ireland. In pursuance of what seems to have been a deliberate purpose, the vindication of a principle which may be deemed essential to the preservation of unity and the concentration of power, the pre-existing plan of clerical government has been changed. The degree of independence which had been before enjoyed was taken away, and bishops and clergy were brought more into subjection to the direct authority of the Vatican. In furtherance of this policy, bishops were no longer elected by the clergy, and the old constitutional office of parish priest was superseded by that of administrator. The former possessed an independent parochial jurisdiction so long as he did not violate any canonical law, while the latter had no fixity of tenure, and might at any time be removed at the will of the diocesan, without being entitled to any compensation for even capricious disturbance. This change, which is being gradually and steadily worked out as opportunity offers, constitutes one of the most remarkable points of difference between the government of the Church of Rome in Ireland in the days of Cardinal Cullen and those of his predecessor. On the death of the late Dr Murray in 1851 Dr Cullen was transferred from the Primatial See of Armagh to the more important though less ancient and in an ecclesiastical sense, less dignified one of Dublin. No two characters could be more different than those of the mild and genial Archbishop Murray, whose liberal spirit conciliated many opponents of the Catholic claims and attracted the cordial esteem and friendship of the Protestant gentry, and the ascetic prelate who possessed no social sympathies, but looked, if not with suspicion and distrust, at least with cold and gloomy reserve, upon those of a heretical creed. He set up a new and strengthened by every means the old barrier of sectarian isolation and exclusiveness, and the result is the growth of a spirit in the country which may be more zealous and devotional but is also more narrow and illiberal than prevailed before his time. He was, as every one knows, an Ultramontane of the most uncompromising type, and though there were many, both of the clergy and laity, who dissented from his opinions, few had the courage to oppose them, enforced as they were by a systematic policy which made its influence felt and feared.
The name of Archbishop Cullen has been a foremost one in the history of Ireland for the last 28 years. No man in the kingdom has exercised a greater personal influence, or wielded more absolute power, by virtue of his high episcopal position as a Prince of the Church, Archbishop of the Metropolitan See, and legatee of the Pope. His authority, however, was not used for any selfish motive, or for the gratification of an arbitrary will, but in a conscientious and considerate spirit for the advancement of the interests of religion, according to his ideas of what was patriotic and right. It was not only implicitly obeyed, but was received with the respect and deference due to his office and his character … From the first the Cardinal has been unflinching and indefatigable in his advocacy of denominationalism, and there can be no doubt that the result of his persistent efforts has been to transform the national system into one, in fact, denominational. After a memorable struggle he succeeded in the famous Synod of Thurles by a majority of one vote in procuring the issue of an edict condemning the national schools. This has been a fruitful subject of contention ever since, and a severe embarrassment alike to the Church itself and to the State. This may be said to have been the only question of a political nature with which the Cardinal concerned himself, and it was only in consideration of the religious element that he took an active part in the agitation respecting it. He did not intermeddle in party strife or controversies, or countenance interference of his clergy in electioneering or other political movements. In this respect the Diocese of Dublin contrasted creditably with others in the country. All the thoughts and energies of his life were directed to the interests of religion, and he enforced, on the part of all who were subject to his authority, the strictest attention to their parochial duties. He was an earnest advocate and supporter of the temperance cause, and gave material help in promoting the Sunday Closing Act, and other social reforms. His loyal attachment to the Crown and constitution of England was shown with earnest and consistent firmness in trying times in spite of popular clamour and at the risk of personal odium. To none in Her Majesty’s Dominions was the British Government more indebted for co-operation in extinguishing the flames of insurrection during the Fenian excitement, and restoring tranquillity and order in the country. His great influence was thrown heartily into the scale of constitutional authority, and he spared no exertions to put down every form of secret societies, which he believed to be incompatible with the duty of a citizen and a Christian. In private life he was most estimable, and, under a cold and stern exterior, had a warm and generous heart. In 1866 he was proclaimed a Cardinal priest, being the first Irishman who was invested with the purple and raised to the rank of a Prince of his Church; in 1859 he served as director to the Holy See by organizing an Irish Brigade, who went to assist in restoring the temporal sovereignty of the Pope. He was not present at the election of Leo XIII., although he left Ireland to attend.
CHARLES STEWART PARNELL (#ulink_b001f4f9-8dd0-5a4e-9bab-7d9c804cdd8d)
8 OCTOBER 1891
MR CHARLES STEWART PARNELL died at half-past 11 on Tuesday night at his residence, 10, Walsingham-terrace, Aldrington, near Brighton. The event was not, however, known locally until yesterday morning, when the news rapidly spread, causing everywhere the greatest astonishment. It had not even been known that Mr Parnell had been ill, and the suddenness of the event led to the dissemination of sensational rumours, which, so far as could be ascertained, were altogether without foundation. Neither before nor after their marriage were Mr and Mrs Parnell much known in Brighton and Hove. Walsingham-terrace, where before the marriage they occupied adjoining houses, and where they had since resided, is a lonely row of houses near the sea some two miles westward of the town. It is not, therefore, surprising that Mr Parnell’s illness should have passed unnoticed. The facts, so far as they can be ascertained, appear to be as follows:- On Thursday Mr Parnell returned from Ireland to Walsingham-terrace suffering from a severe chill. As he was not unaccustomed to similar attacks little was thought of it at the time. The following day, however, he was so much worse that he did not leave his bed. On Saturday some improvement was visible in his condition, but on Sunday he suffered a severe relapse. A Brighton doctor was sent for, and found him, it is said, in the greatest agony, suffering from acute rheumatism. According to another account, however, death is ascribed to congestion of the lungs and bronchitis. Mr Parnell was nursed by his wife and one of her daughters, who happened to be staying at the time at the house next door, still kept up by Mr Parnell. In addition to the doctor already in attendance, two other medical men were called in. Mr Parnell remained, however, in the same condition until Tuesday afternoon, when a very rapid and startling change for the worse occurred, and after lingering for some hours in pain he died, as stated, at half-past 11. With the exception of Mrs Parnell and her daughter, no relatives or immediate friends of the deceased were present. Mrs Parnell is completely overcome by this sudden and heavy blow, and yesterday absolutely refused to see any one …
Charles Stewart Parnell, the eldest son of the late John Henry Parnell, high sheriff of Wicklow in 1836, was born at Avondale, in that county, in June, 1846. His mother was Delia Tudor, daughter of Admiral Charles Stewart, of the American Navy, who, as commodore, had been conspicuous in the naval struggle with England early in the century, when the United States struggled stoutly for the palm of naval supremacy. Mr Parnell’s family had long been settled in Cheshire, and from their seat there his great uncle, Sir Henry Parnell, whose motion on the Civil List turned out the Wellington Government in 1830, and who was afterwards Secretary for War and Paymaster of the Forces under the Whigs, took his title of Lord Congleton. The Parnells belonged to the “Englishry” of Ireland; one of them, Dr Thomas Parnell, an author now best known by his poem “The Hermit,” friend of Pope and Swift, and the subject of a sympathetic biography by Goldsmith, used to bewail his clerical exile among the Irish, and, indeed, consistently neglected his duties as Archdeacon of Clogher; others, later on, during the period of Protestant ascendency were Judges, officials, and members of Parliament; Sir John Parnell, who joined with Grattan and other patriots of that day in fighting for an independence that secured a monopoly of power to their own creed and caste, was Chancellor of the Exchequer just before the Union. Sir John Parnell’s grandson was Mr John Henry Parnell, of Avondale, the father of the future chief of the Separatists, who thus inherited on the paternal side an antipathy to the Union, and on the maternal side the traditions of a bitter conflict with England. Mr Parnell nevertheless received, like many scions of the Irish landlord class, an exclusively English education at various private schools, and afterwards at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where, however, he did not take a degree, and where, it is said, he was “sent down” for some rather gross breach of academic discipline. Some surprise was expressed in Ireland when, in 1874, Mr Parnell, then high sheriff of Wicklow, came forward to oppose in the county Dublin the re-election of Colonel Taylor, who had taken office as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Disraeli Government. He stood as an advocate of Home Rule, to which many of the Irish loyalists had temporarily attached themselves in their disgust at the success of Mr Gladstone’s disestablishment policy. But Mr Parnell’s “Nationalism” proved to be of another type. If it had a sentimental origin in his family traditions, it was qualified and dominated by the cold temper and the taste for political strategy which he seems to have inherited from his American kinsfolk. Defeated by a large majority in Dublin county, he was more successful a little more than a year later when a vacancy was created in the representation of Meath by the death of John Martin, one of the “Young Ireland” party and a convict of 1848, like his brother-in-law, John Mitchel. When Mr Parnell entered the House of Commons in April, 1875, the Liberal Opposition was disorganized, the Conservative Government was both positively and negatively strong, and the Home Rule party, under Mr Butt’s leadership, was of little account. Mr Parnell immediately allied himself with Mr Biggar, who had struck out a line of his own by defying decency and the rules of Parliament, and, with more or less regular aid from Mr F. H. O’Donnell and Mr O’Connor Power, they soon made themselves a political force. How far Mr Parnell saw ahead of him at this time, what his motives were, and what secret influences were acting upon him may, perhaps, never be revealed. He found, as he believed, a method of bringing an intolerable pressure to bear upon the Imperial Parliament and the Government of the day by creating incessant disturbances and delaying all business, and he persisted in this course in spite of the protests and the denunciations of Mr Butt and the more respectable among the Irish Nationalists. To quote the triumphant language of one of his own followers, writing, almost officially, long afterwards, whereas obstructive tactics had been previously directed against particular Bills, “the obstruction which now faced Parliament intervened in every single detail of its business and not merely in contentious business, but in business that up to this time had been considered formal.” The design was boastfully avowed that, unless the Imperial Legislature agreed to grant the Irish demands as formulated by Mr Biggar and Mr Parnell, its power would be paralyzed, its time wasted, its honour and dignity dragged through the dirt. In 1877, the whole scheme of obstructive policy was disclosed and exemplified in the debates on the Prisons Bill, the Army Bill, and the South Africa Bill. Speaking on the last measure, Mr Parnell said that “as an Irishman” and one detesting “English cruelty and tyranny” he felt “a special satisfaction in preventing and thwarting the intentions of the Government.” On one occasion the House was kept sitting for 26 hours by the small band of obstructionists. The rules of the House, even when cautiously strengthened at the instance of Sir Stafford Northcote, proved entirely inadequate to control men, like Mr Parnell, undeterred by any scruples and master of all the technicalities of Parliamentary practice. Motions of suspension produced as little effect as public censure, nor was Mr Butt, though he strongly condemned the policy of exasperation and lamented the degradation of Irish politics into a “vulgar brawl,” able to stem the tide. He was deposed in the winter of 1877 by the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, a body including most of the “advanced” wing of the Irish in England and Scotland; and though a modus vivendi was adopted in the Parliamentary party itself, and accepted by Mr Parnell, as he said, in Mr Butt’s presence, on the ground that he “was a young man and could wait,” it was felt that power had passed away from the moderates, of whom many were afraid to oppose the obstructives with a general election in sight, hoping, as the Parnellites said, to tide over the crisis and “survive till the advent of the blessed hour when the return of the Liberals to power would give them the long-desired chance of throwing off the temporary mask of national views to assume the permanent livery of English officials.” History sometimes repeats itself with curious irony, and these words are almost textually the same as those lately used by Mr Parnell of those most intimately associated with him in his campaign against Mr Butt. The Session of 1878 emphasized the cleavage; Mr Butt practically resigned the lead to the extreme faction, and both spoke and voted in favour of the foreign policy of the Government. Mr Parnell pursued his course of calculated Parliamentary violence. In 1879 Mr Butt died, a broken man, and Mr Shaw was chosen to fill his place as “Sessional Chairman” of the party. But events were playing to Mr Parnell’s hands. He had been associated with some of the Radical leaders in the attack on flogging in the Army, and he had been chosen as the first president of the Land League, which was started at Irishtown, in Mayo, a couple of weeks before Mr Butt’s death, and which embodied the ideas brought back from the United States by Mr Davitt after his provisional release from penal servitude, with three other Fenian prisoners, at the end of 1877. Mr Parnell was at the head of the “Reception Committee” which presented an address to these patriots, and the list of those associated with him contains, besides the names of Mr John Dillon and Mr Patrick Egan, those of James Carey, Daniel Curley, and J. Brady.
Up to this point there was nothing known to the public to show that Mr Parnell was not pursuing a Parliamentary agitation by irregular and censurable methods. How far he had previously allied himself with those who had other objects in view and who worked by other methods remains obscure. At any rate, he quickly entered into the policy that Mr Davitt had devised in America in co-operation with Devoy and others, and after taking counsel with the leaders of the Clan-na-Gael and of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. That policy had been originally sketched by Fintan Lalor, one of the ’48 men, and was intended to work upon the land hunger of the Irish peasantry in order to get rid of the British connexion. Davitt and Devoy brought over the revolutionary party to their views, including extremists like Ford of the Irish World, an open advocate of physical force, whether in the form of armed rebellion or of terrorist outrage. Proposals for co-operation with the Parnellites on the basis of dropping the pretence of federation and putting in its stead “a formal declaration in favour of self-government,” of giving the foremost place to the land agitation, and adopting an aggressive Parliamentary policy generally were transmitted to Ireland, and, though not formally accepted either by Mr Parnell, for the moment, or by the Irish Fenians became, in the opinion of the Special Commissioners, “the basis on which the American-Irish Nationalists afterwards lent their support to Mr Parnell and his policy.” This “new departure,” which Mr Davitt advocated as widening the field of revolutionary effort involved Mr Parnell’s adoption of a more decided line on the land question and the opening up of closer relations with his allies beyond the Atlantic. In June, 1879, therefore, a few weeks after the establishment of the Land League, and in the teeth of the denunciations of Archbishop MacHale, Mr Parnell, accompanied by Mr Davitt, addressed a League meeting at Westport, told the tenantry that they could not pay their rents in the presence of the agricultural crisis, but that they should let the landlords know they intended in any case to “hold a firm grip on their homesteads and lands.” He added that no concession obtained in Parliament would buy off his resolution to secure all, including, as Mr Davitt took care to say, the unqualified claim for national independence.
Mr Parnell’s advances to the Revolutionists in America had an immediate reward, not only in the removal of any remaining obstacles in the path of his ambition, but in the supply of the sinews of war for the work of agitation and electioneering. Mr Davitt started the Land League with money obtained out of the Skirmishing Fund, established by O’Donovan Rossa in order to strike England “anywhere she could be hurt” and then in the hands of the Clan-na-Gael chiefs. But much more was needed, and in October, 1879, Mr Parnell started with Mr Dillon for the United States. During the voyage he imparted his views to the correspondent of a New York paper, afterwards a witness before the Special Commission, and told him, among other things, that his idea of a true revolutionary movement in Ireland was that it should partake both of a constitutional and an illegal character, “using the Constitution for its own purposes, but also taking advantage of the secret combinations.” He was cordially welcomed by most of the extreme faction, and gratified them with declarations quite to their own mind. He told them that the land question must be acted upon in “some extraordinary and unusual way” to secure any good result and that “the great cause could not be won without shedding a drop of blood.” He went even beyond this point in the famous speech at Cincinnati, which he subsequently attempted to deny, but which was reported in the Irish World and was held to be proved by Sir James Hannen and his colleagues. He then said that the “ultimate goal” at which Irishmen aimed was “to destroy the last link which kept Ireland bound to England.” The American wing were perfectly satisfied, and Mr Parnell, when he was summoned back to Ireland by the news of the dissolution, felt that he could rely on their support, pecuniary and other. It was not, at first, so easy to convince the Irish Fenians – who had distrusted and abjured any form of Parliamentary action – that they ought to vote for Parnellite candidates; and one or two Parnellite meetings were disturbed by this element. But Mr Parnell’s speeches during the electoral campaign of 1880 showed them how far he was prepared to go in their direction, and how little inclined he was, to use his own phrase, “to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.” It was at the time that Mr Parnell told, with great applause, the story which became very popular on Land League platforms, of the American sympathizer who offered him “five dollars for bread and 20 dollars for lead.” The leading spokesmen and organizers of the League, Sheridan, Brennan, Boyton, and Redpath, were either known Fenians or used language going beyond that of Fenianism; and the same thing may be said of Mr Biggar, Mr O’Kelly, and Mr Matt Harris, members of Mr Parnell’s Parliamentary following. The policy which Mr Davitt, acting as the envoy of the Irish extremists, thus used Mr Parnell to carry through, was developed in the announcement of the boycotting system in the autumn of 1880. Meanwhile, the alliance had already borne fruit at the general election of that year, when Mr Parnell, aided somewhat irregularly by Mr Egan out of the exchequer of the League, was returned for three constituencies – Meath, Mayo, and the city of Cork. He decided to sit for the last, and as “the member for Cork” he has since been known. The overthrow of the Beaconsfield Government, which had appealed to the country to strengthen the Empire against Irish disorder and disloyalty, was an encouragement to the Parnellites, who had a narrow and shifting majority in the ranks of the Parliamentary party. Mr Shaw was supplanted as chairman by Mr Parnell, and an open separation between the two sections ensued. The Parnellites took their seats on the Opposition benches; the Moderate Home Rulers sat on the Ministerial side below the gangway. To the latter Mr Gladstone seemed to incline most favourably, as he showed afterwards when he proposed to make Mr Shaw one of the Chief Commissioners under the Land Act. The Liberals, though they took the opportunity of dropping the Peace Preservation Act, were not disposed to reopen the land question, and it was only under pressure that Mr Forster hastily introduced the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, which was rejected in the House of Lords, and appointed the Bessborough Commission.
Mr Parnell and his party seized the opportunities afforded by the distress in Ireland and the Parliamentary situation to push on the operations of the League. The policy of boycotting had been expounded and enforced early in the year in Mr Parnell’s speech at Ennis, a few days after Lord Mountmorres’s murder, when he urged the peasantry if any man among them took an evicted farm to put the offender “into a moral Coventry by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old.” This doctrine was rapidly propagated by Mr Dillon, Mr Biggar, and the organizers of the League, and in the autumn the persecution of Captain Boycott and many other persons became a public scandal. This system of acting upon those whom Mr Parnell had described as “weak and cowardly,” because they did not heartily join in the refusal to pay rent, has been pronounced on the highest judicial authority to amount to a criminal and illegal conspiracy, devised and carried out to lower the rental and selling price of land and to crush the landlords. Mr Parnell declared that he never incited to crime, but though he and his colleagues knew that boycotting and the unwritten law of the League led to outrages, wherever the organization spread, they took no effective measures to denounce and repress crime, and it is now plain that they could not do so without alienating the American support on which they were dependent. The ordinary law was shown to be powerless by the failure of the prosecution of Mr Parnell and others for conspiracy in Dublin in the opening days of 1881, when the jury disagreed, and Mr Parnell, in announcing the result to his American friends, telegraphed his thanks to the Irish World for “constant cooperation and successful support in our great cause.” But the progress of unpunished crime, in which the American-Irish brutally exulted, and the paralysis of the law compelled Mr Gladstone’s Government to act. Early in the Session of 1881 Mr Forster introduced his “Protection of Persons and Property Bill” and his “Arms Bill,” of which the former empowered the Executive to arrest and detain without trial persons reasonably suspected of crime. At the mere rumour of this Egan transferred the finances of the League to Paris. It was a part of Mr Parnell’s task, as he well knew, to fight the “coercion” measures tooth and nail, but, though he led the attack, the most critical conflicts were precipitated by the passion and imprudence of less cold-blooded politicians. We need not here recapitulate the history of that struggle, in which obstruction reached a height previously unknown, and in which the knot had to be cut for the moment by the enforcement of the inherent powers of the Chair. The Parnellite members were again and again suspended, and at length, after several weeks, both Bills were carried. Mr Parnell’s party had by this time assumed an attitude towards the Government of Mr Gladstone which was highly pleasing to the Irish World and the Nationalist organs in Ireland, but was ominous for the prospects of the Land Bill. They did not, however, venture to offer a direct and determined opposition to a measure securing great pecuniary advantages to the Irish tenants. They could not go beyond abstaining on the question of principle and denouncing the whole scheme as inadequate. Of course, if the Land Act had succeeded in accordance with Mr Gladstone’s sanguine hopes, it would have cut the ground from under Mr Parnell’s feet and deprived him of the basis of agitation on which his alliance with the Irish Extremists rested, and from which his party derived their pecuniary supplies. No sooner, therefore, had the Land Act become law than the word went forth from the offices of the League that the tenants were not to be allowed to avail themselves of it freely, but that only some “test cases” were to be put forward. The penalties of any infraction of this addition to the unwritten law were well understood, for all this while terrorism and outrage were rampant. Mr Gladstone was more indignant at the rejection of his message of peace than at the proofs, which had been long forthcoming, of the excesses of Irish lawlessness. He denounced Mr Parnell at Leeds, in impassioned language, and declared that “the resources of civilization against its enemies were not yet exhausted.” Mr Parnell replied defiantly that Mr Gladstone had before “eaten all his old words,” and predicted that these “brave words of this English Minister would be scattered as chaf f ” by the determination of the Irish to regain “their lost legislative independence.” A few days later he was arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham with Mr Sexton, Mr O’ Brien, the editor of his organ, United Ireland, and several others. Egan, on the suggestion of Ford, at once issued a “No-Rent” manifesto; the books of the Land League were spirited out of the jurisdiction of the Irish Executive, and as a natural consequence the Land League was suppressed. But the struggle was carried on, with little substantial change, during Mr Parnell’s imprisonment. The Ladies’ League nominally took the work in hand; American money was not wanting; boycotting was rigidly enforced, and was followed, as Mr Gladstone had shown, by crime. For this state of things the incendiary journalism subsidized and imported by the Parnellites was, and long after remained, responsible. The Irish World, with its advocacy of dynamite and dagger, was used to “spread the light” among the masses, and United Ireland was scarcely behindhand. The Freeman’s Journal, which had opposed Mr Parnell’s extreme views on the Land Act, was compelled to come to heel, and the priesthood, who never loved him, as a Protestant and as a suspected ally of the Fenians, found their influence waning in presence of the despotism of the League. The secret history of all that went on during Mr Parnell’s imprisonment in Kilmainham is not yet revealed, though some light has been thrown upon it by the recent split among the Nationalists. Mr Parnell, for instance, said the other day in the last speech he delivered that “the white flag had been first hung out from Kilmainham” by Mr William O’Brien. Be that as it may, it is evident that in the spring of 1882 both the Government and the Parnellites were anxious to compromise their quarrel. Mr Gladstone was pressed by the Radicals to get rid of coercion, and the patriots were eager to be again enjoying liberty and power. Negotiations were opened through Mr O’Shea; Mr Parnell was willing to promise that Ireland should be tranquilized for the moment and in appearance – through the agency of the League; Mr Forster refusing to become a party to this sort of bargain with those who had organized a system of lawless terrorism, resigned; Lord Spencer and Lord Frederick Cavendish went to Ireland as envoys of a policy of concession, including a Bill for wiping out arrears of rent. How long Mr Parnell would have continued to give a quid pro quo for this can only be guessed at. A few days after the ratification of what became known as the Kilmainham Treaty, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr Burke were murdered in the Phoenix Park by persons then unknown. Mr Parnell expressed his horror of the crime in the House of Commons, but refused to admit that it was a reason for the Coercion Bill immediately introduced by Sir William Harcourt. This change of policy was forced upon Mr Gladstone by the imperious demands of public opinion, which was exasperated by the defiant attitude of the Irish party. The forces of obstruction, however, were for the moment broken by the shock. The Coercion Act became law, and was at the outset vigorously administered by Lord Spencer and Mr Trevelyan, who were, in consequence, attacked with the most infamous calumnies by United Ireland and other Parnellite organs. The authors of several wicked crimes were brought to justice in Ireland in spite of the clamour of the Parnellites against Judges and jurymen, and early in 1883 the invincible conspiracy, which had compassed the deaths of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr Burke, was exposed by the evidence of the informer, James Carey. Mr Forster made this the occasion of a powerful attack on Mr Parnell in the House of Commons, telling the story of the Kilmainham negotiations in the light of later disclosures, and pointing out that the language used without rebuke in Mr Parnell’s organs and by his followers plainly sowed the seed of crime. Mr Parnell’s callous defiance of the voice of public opinion shocked even those inclined to make allowance for him. Radical sympathy was withdrawn from him, while there was about this time also a widening breach with the Irish-Americans, who did not wish to have outrage even condemned by implication, and who were entering upon the dynamite campaign. Nevertheless, Mr Parnell’s hold on his own party was unshaken; from time to time there were movements of revolt; he had to speak scornfully once of “Papist rats.” Mr Dwyer Gray, Mr O’Connor Power, Mr F. H. O’Donnell, and Mr Healy at different times tried to thwart him, but he swept all opposition away, and reduced his critics to subjection or drove them out of public life. The Land League was allowed to revive under the name of the National League, and, operating more cautiously on the old lines, secured Mr Parnell’s power. It was evident that the extension of the franchise would give Mr Parnell the power of nominating the representatives of three-fourths of Ireland. The priesthood, trembling for their influence, came round to him. But he was unable to induce the Government either to repeal the Coercion Act or to tamper with the land question. It was when the Franchise Bill was introduced that Mr Parnell’s influence over the Government was first manifested. He insisted that Ireland should be included in the Bill and that the number of the Irish representatives should not be diminished, and on both points he prevailed. Meanwhile the alliance with the American-Irish had been renewed. The Clan-na-Gael captured the Land League in the United States, and in view of the elections in Great Britain funds were provided, Egan being now a member of the organization. Simultaneously a more active policy was adopted at home. As soon as the passage of the Franchise Bill had been made sure the Parnellites joined with the Conservatives to defeat Mr Gladstone. Towards the weak Salisbury Administration that followed Mr Parnell showed, during the electoral period, a benevolent neutrality, acting on the principle he had laid down several years before in Cork – “Don’t be afraid to let in the Tory, but put out the Whig.” He judged that he would be thus more likely to hold the balance of power in the new Parliament, and Mr Gladstone held the same opinion when he asked for a Liberal majority strong enough to vote down Conservatives and Parnellites together. In an address to the Irish electors on the eve of the struggle the Parnellites fiercely denounced the Liberal party and its leader. Mr Parnell had even amused Lord Carnarvon at a critical time with a deceptive negotiation.
The issue of the contest left Mr Gladstone’s forces just balanced by those of the Conservatives and Parnellites combined. He at once resolved to secure the latter by an offer of Home Rule, though he had up to that time professed his devotion to the Union, and though nine-tenths of his followers had pledged themselves to it. His overtures were, of course, welcomed, though without a too trustful effusiveness, by Mr Parnell; the Conservative Government was overthrown on a side issue; Mr Gladstone came into power and introduced his Home Rule Bill. Much was made of Mr Parnell’s unqualified acceptance of that measure. It now appears that he objected to several points in it, being, no doubt, aware of the view taken of it by his American allies, but he did not press his objections, fearing, as he said since, that the insistence on further concessions would deprive Mr Gladstone of other colleagues and break up the Government. Mr Parnell’s temporary forbearance, which had no element of finality in it, did not save the Bill. In the Parliament of 1886 his numerical forces were nearly the same as those he previously commanded, but he was now allied with a greatly enfeebled Gladstonian Opposition. It was necessary to affect the most scrupulous constitutionalism, and for a time Mr Parnell played the part well. The Irish-Americans took the cue from him, and were willing to wait. Dynamite outrages had ceased. But the necessities of the case urged him to insist on reopening the Irish land question, and in Ireland the National League continued to work on the old system. Boycotting and its attendant incidents increased, and, during Mr Parnell’s temporary withdrawal from active politics, Mr Dillon and Mr O’Brien committed the party to the Plan of Campaign, which involved a pitched battle with the Executive and the law. The introduction of the Crimes Bill was the direct result of this policy, which Mr Parnell privately condemned. His opposition to the Bill was of the familiar kind. But the tactics of obstruction which were then pursued were overshadowed in the public eye by the controversy on “Parnellism and Crime” that arose in our own columns. Seeing that the alliance between Mr Parnell and the Gladstonian Opposition was growing closer and closer, that it was employed to obstruct the Executive Government and to set at naught the law, and that the success of Home Rule would deliver over Ireland to a faction tainted by association with Ford and Sheridan, we thought it right to call public attention to some salient episodes in Mr Parnell’s career and to draw certain inferences from them. We also conceived it to be our duty to publish some documentary evidence that came into our hands, of the authenticity of which we were honestly convinced, and which seemed to us perfectly consistent with what was proved and notorious. Mr Parnell gave a comprehensive denial to all our charges and inferences, including the alleged letter apologizing to some extremist ally for denouncing the Phoenix Park murders in the House of Commons. He did not, however, accept our challenge or bring an action against The Times, nor was it till more than a year later, after Mr O’Donnell had raised the question by some futile proceedings, that he demanded a Parliamentary inquiry into the statements made on our behalf by the Attorney-General. We need not here recite the story of the appointment of the Special Commission and its result. The evidence of Richard Pigott broke down, and with it the letters on which we had in part relied, and Mr Parnell’s political allies claimed for him a complete acquittal. But the Report of the Commissioners showed that, though some other charges against Mr Parnell were dismissed as unproved, the most important contentions of The Times were fully established. The origin and objects of the criminal conspiracy were placed beyond doubt; the association for the purposes of that conspiracy with the Irish-American revolutionists was most clearly made manifest, as well as the reckless persistence in boycotting and in the circulation of inflammatory writings after it was known in what those practices ended. Nor was it without significance that a confession was extorted from Mr Parnell that he might very possibly have made a deliberately false statement for the purpose of deceiving the House of Commons. Indeed, on more than one point where Mr Parnell’s sworn testimony had to be weighed against that of other witnesses – as in the case of Mr Ives and Major Le Caron – the Commissioners rejected it. Nevertheless, the Gladstonians went out of their way to affirm their unshaken belief in the stainless honour of Mr Parnell, to accept him as the model of a Constitutional statesman, and to base upon his assurances their confidence that a Home Rule settlement would be a safe and lasting one. Mr Parnell received the honorary freedom of the city of Edinburgh. He was entertained at dinner by the Eighty Club; Mr Gladstone appeared on the same platform with him; his speeches were welcomed at Gladstonian gatherings in the provinces as eagerly as those of the patriarchal leader himself; and, finally, he was the late Premier’s guest at Hawarden Castle, where the details of the revised Home Rule scheme, which has never been disclosed even to the National Liberal Federation, was discussed confidentially as between two potentates of co-equal authority.
But a cruel disappointment was in store for credulous souls. Mr O’Shea, whose intervention had brought about the Kilmainham Treaty, instituted proceedings against Mr Parnell in the Divorce Court. It was denied up to the last that there was any ground for these proceedings; it was predicted that they would never come to an issue. But when, after protracted and intentional delays, the case came on in November last, it was found that there was no defence. The adultery was formally proved and was not denied, nor was it possible to explain away its treachery and grossness. The public mind was shocked at the disclosure; but those who were best entitled to speak were strangely silent. Mr Gladstone said nothing; the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Ireland said nothing; Mr Justin M’Carthy, Mr Healy, and the rest of the Parliamentary party hastened to Dublin to proclaim, at the Leinster-hall, their unwavering fidelity to Mr Parnell. Mr Dillon and Mr O’Brien telegraphed their approval from America. On the opening day of the Session Mr Parnell was re-elected leader. Meanwhile the Nonconformist conscience had awakened, and Mr Gladstone responded to its remonstrances. His letter turned the majority round, and, after a violent conflict in Committee Room No. 15, Mr Parnell was deposed by the very men who had elected him. He refused to recognize his deposition, and has fought a daring, but a losing, battle in Ireland ever since. The declaration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy against him, however, sealed his doom. The clergy have worked against him as they never worked in politics before. Mr Dillon and Mr O’Brien have taken the same side. He has been defeated in North Kilkenny, North Sligo, and Carlow, and though he has been battling fiercely down to a few days ago, the ground has been visibly slipping away from him. Even his marriage with Mrs O’Shea, the only reparation for his sin, has been turned against him in a Roman Catholic country, and was the excuse for the defection of the Freeman’s Journal. It is not surprising that a feeble constitution should have broken down under such a load of obloquy and disappointment.
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SIR JOHN POPE HENNESSY (#ulink_ac671747-fefc-5576-b17a-8b721546b345)
8 OCTOBER 1891
SIR JOHN POPE HENNESSY, M.P. for North Kilkenny, died early yesterday morning at his residence, Rostellan Castle, from heart failure. Sir John, who was 59 years of age, had been suffering from anaemia, which may be traced to his long residence in tropical climates.
The death of Sir John Pope Hennessy removes a man who might have played a more important part in politics had he been differently or less brilliantly gifted. In his qualities and talents, as in his defects, he was a typical Irishman. He was quick of wit, ready in repartee, a fluent speaker, and an able debater; but the enthusiasm and the emotion which lent force and fire to his speeches led him into the adoption of extreme and impracticable views. He was one of the most independent of private members in the House of Commons. He might fairly be described as eccentric and crotchety; and the Colonial Office had reason to mistrust a subordinate who, as it might be charitably presumed, with the best intentions, was always stirring up troubles abroad and landing his chiefs in hot water. In short, we must believe that Sir John Hennessy, with a super-abundance of brain, had an unfortunate deficiency of ballast. The son of a Kerry landowner, he was born in 1834, educated at Queen’s College in his native city of Cork, and called to the Bar of the Inner Temple in 1861. His pursuit of the legal profession was somewhat perfunctory, for two years previously he had turned his attention to politics and taken his seat in the House of Commons. It must be confessed that he had the courage of his originality, for he had presented himself to the constituency of King’s County and carried the election in the novel character of a Catholic Conservative. We may presume that the clever young man was commissioned by the more worldly-wise members of his Church to prove there were possibilities of coming to an understanding with a party which had hitherto been antipathetical to them. From the first Sir John Hennessy took politics very seriously, and showed the ambition and resolution to get on. His Parliamentary record was an active one, and nowadays it would be difficult for a novice and a private member to achieve half so much. An Irish Catholic and a Conservative, he was at once patriotic and politic; and, moreover, he made sundry valuable contributions to the cause of practical philanthropy. The young member received a flattering compliment when he was formally thanked by the Roman Catholic Committee of England for his successful exertions in the Prison Ministers Act. He was thanked likewise by the Association of British Miners for useful amendments introduced in the Mines’ Regulation Bill, which showed he had carefully studied the subject. He was less practical when he urged upon the Government the propriety of making Irish paupers comfortable at home by reclaiming the swamps and the bottomless bogs. Generally he supported the Government on questions relating to the English Church Establishment; but, on the other hand, he took strong exception to the denominational system of education they had introduced in Ireland under what he declared to be the misnomer of a “national” system. Had he been content to go more quietly, and to be more amenable to party discipline, the Conservatives might have found him a useful ally, and, like the King of Moab with the recalcitrant prophet Balaam, they would willingly have promoted the protégé of the priests to great honour. As it was, they thought it prudent to give him the government of distant Labuan, the future of which seemed to be bound up with the existence of coalfields; and we suspect that it was his poverty rather than his will which reconciled him to that honourable exile. Few men have done more official travelling or seen more varied service in tropical climates. From Labuan he went to West Africa, to be transferred in the following year to the Bahamas; and after a short subsequent sojourn in the Windward Islands he governed cosmopolitan Hongkong and the semi-French island of Mauritius. We must add that Sir John Pope Hennessy’s colonial career says very little for the intelligence or discretion with which the Colonial Office exercises its patronage. He ought never to have been placed in charge of such colonies as Hongkong or the Mauritius, where the pretensions of the natives threatened to make trouble. The sympathizer with the down-trodden Catholics of West Ireland was an enthusiast with regard to the equal rights of men. And at the Mauritius, to make matters worse, that strong-willed martinet, Mr Clifford Lloyd, whose Irish antecedents associated themselves with peremptory suppression, was assigned to Sir John as Secretary and colleague. Of course, they quarrelled, like two jealous dogs, locked together in couples beyond the master’s sight and reach. The experience of Sir Hercules Robinson was called in to arbitrate. Sir John did not come very creditably out of the business, though the final decision was given in his favour. He returned to the colony, to be retired on a full pension when the term of his administration had expired. He had the satisfaction, however, of being formally congratulated by the Secretary of State on his successful administration. He might have been content to rest on his honours, and to interest his leisure with literature. But it was never in his nature to be idle. It is an affair of yesterday, and in everybody’s recollection, how he chanced to be put forward as a candidate for North Kilkenny in the very crisis of Mr Parnell’s career, and on the eve of Mr Parnell’s political collapse. When the choice was between the Protestant dictator and the priests, the choice of the devoted son of the Church could not be doubtful. With the whole influence of the Kilkenny clergy to back him, he carried the election by two to one. At that time he finally broke with the Conservative party by resigning his membership of the Carlton; but since then, owing probably to failing health, he had made no such figure in the House as formerly, and, indeed, had seldom been seen there. It only remains to say that he married a daughter of Sir H. Low, and that it was in 1880 he was created a Knight Commander of St Michael and St George. He showed his good taste by buying as his residence the picturesque and historical mansion in Youghal which had been given to Sir Walter Raleigh by his Gloriana; and, whether it were cause or effect, it was consequently appropriate that Sir John Hennessy should have published some years ago a volume on “Raleigh in Ireland, with his Letters on Irish Affairs and some Contemporary Documents.”
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MRS CECIL ALEXANDER (#ulink_61fbef08-59cd-5fd5-89b9-d0092d030667)
14 OCTOBER 1895
MRS CECIL FRANCES ALEXANDER, so well known as “C.F.A.,” died at the Palace, Londonderry, at 6 o’clock on Saturday evening after a few weeks’ illness. She was born in county Wicklow in 1818, and was the daughter of Major John Humphreys, who served with distinction at the battle of Copenhagen and was afterwards a landed proprietor and extensive land agent in Ireland. In 1847 she married the Rev. William Alexander, who became Bishop of Derry and Raphoe in 1867. In all religious and charitable works in Londonderry and the diocese she took a wise and energetic part. She possessed a simple and straightforward dignity of manner, which gave a peculiar distinction to her in social relations. Among the poor and aged she was loved with pathetic intensity. It is, however, upon her writings that Mrs Alexander’s extended fame is built. She had a natural bent for poetry, and her early intimacy with Keble and Hook stamped her mind with a lasting impression. Her “Hymns for Little Children” and “Moral Songs” have had an immense circulation. Her less widely known “Poems on Old Testament Subjects” reach a loftier practical standard, but it is by certain of her hymns especially that she will be remembered, not only within the Anglican Church, but by all Christian communities. Of several of these Gounod said that they seemed to set themselves to music. Six only need be indicated- “The roseate hues of early dawn,” “When wounded sore the stricken soul,” “His are the thousand sparkling rills,” “Jesus calls us o’er the tumult,” “All things bright and beautiful,” and “There is a green hill far away.” The “Burial of Moses” is her best known poem. Of this Tennyson observed that it was one of the poems by a living writer of which he would have been proud to be the author. The Rev. F. A. Wallis, of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, preaching in Londonderry Cathedral yesterday, mentioned that he had heard Mrs Alexander’s hymns sung by half-clad Africans in a language she had never known.
OSCAR WILDE (#ulink_fe3efa0c-3825-5752-8154-93bb71c87755)
1 DECEMBER 1900
A REUTER TELEGRAM from Paris states that Oscar Wilde died there yesterday afternoon from meningitis. The melancholy end to a career which once promised so well is stated to have come in an obscure hotel of the Latin Quarter. Here the once brilliant man of letters was living, exiled from his country and from the society of his countrymen. The verdict that a jury passed upon his conduct at the Old Bailey in May, 1895, destroyed for ever his reputation, and condemned him to ignoble obscurity for the remainder of his days. When he had served his sentence of two years’ imprisonment, he was broken in health as well as bankrupt in fame and fortune. Death has soon ended what must have been a life of wretchedness and unavailing regret. Wilde was the son of the late Sir William Wilde, an eminent Irish surgeon. His mother was a graceful writer, both in prose and verse. He had a brilliant career at Oxford, where he took a first-class both in classical moderations and in Lit. Hum., and also won the Newdigate Prize for English verse for a poem on Ravenna. Even before he left the University in 1878 Wilde had become known as one of the most affected of the professors of the aesthetic craze and for several years it was as the typical aesthete that he kept himself before the notice of the public. At the same time he was a man of far greater originality and power of mind than many of the apostles of aestheticism. As his Oxford career showed, he had undoubted talents in many directions, talents which might have been brought to fruition had it not been for his craving after notoriety. He was known as a poet of graceful diction; as an essayist of wit and distinction; later on as a playwright of skill and subtle humour. A novel of his, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” attracted much attention, and his sayings passed from mouth to mouth as those of one of the professed wits of the age. When he became a dramatist his plays had all the characteristics of his conversation. His first piece, Lady Windermere’s Fan, was produced in 1892. A Woman ofno Importance followed in 1893. An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest were both running at the time of their author’s disappearance from English life. All these pieces had the same qualities – a paradoxical humour and a perverted outlook on life being the most prominent. They were packed with witty sayings, and the author’s cleverness gave him at once a position in the dramatic world. The revelations of the criminal trial in 1895 naturally made them impossible for some years. Recently, however, one of them was revived, though not at a West-end theatre. After his release in 1897, Wilde published “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a poem of considerable but unequal power. He also appeared in print as a critic of our prison system, against the results of which he entered a passionate protest. For the last three years he has lived abroad. It is stated on the authority of the Dublin Evening Mail that he was recently received into the Roman Catholic Church. Mrs Oscar Wilde died not long ago, leaving two children.
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LORD MORRIS OF SPIDDAL (#ulink_909ca5e8-f44a-5acc-9b88-c1a8be663f93)
9 SEPTEMBER 1901
WE REGRET TO record the death of Lord Morris and Killanin, which occurred yesterday morning at 4 o’clock, at his residence, Spiddal, county Galway …
Irishmen have in considerable numbers made their mark in the profession of the law, but those with whom, on this side of the Channel, we are familiar have usually been members of the English Bar, like Baron Martin, Lord Cairns, Lord Macnaghten, and the late Lord Chief Justice. But in the last 30 years the two Irish Chancellors who have been peers, Lord O’Hagan and Lord Ashbourne, and the Irish Lords of Appeal, Lord Fitzgerald and the late Lord Morris, have served to bring more closely together lawyers of the two nationalities. Lord Morris and Killanin may be said to have had a singularly fortunate career, and up to the time of his resignation in the summer of 1900 he had filled judicial office for 33 years, a whole generation. Born on November 14, 1827, Michael Morris was a member of an old Irish family descended from one of the ancient 13 tribes of Galway, the city with which he was throughout his life associated. An ancestor, Richard Morris, was Bailiff of Galway in 1486. The family, it would appear, were always Catholics, and the father of the late peer was in 1841 the first of that faith who had been High Sheriff since 1690. He was a landed proprietor in the county. His distinguished son, whose career we have now to record, was always attached to his native place, and spent a great deal of his time at the family residence, Spiddal, about a dozen miles west of Galway, on the northern shore of the bay, a pleasant “oasis of civilization,” as its owner used to call it, amid some of the wildest tracts of Connaught. Educated at Erasmus Smith’s school in Galway, Michael Morris, like many other Catholics of that day, went up to the University of Dublin, despite its “Protestant atmosphere,” and it is right to say that he was always loyal to his Alma Mater. He entered Trinity College while still a mere boy and took his degree before he had completed his 20th year, graduating as Senior Moderator and gold medallist in Logic and Ethics in the summer of 1847 … He was called to the Irish Bar in 1849, and soon won a large practice on circuit and at nisi prius, especially in cases connected with his own province. His force of character and his racy wit, founded always on a strong basis of sterling common sense and an undisguised contempt for sentimentality and phrase-making, were rapidly recognized. He took silk in 1863, when he was a little over 35 years of age. In Galway, where he always enjoyed an extraordinary personal popularity, he attained to a position which enabled him to secure his return for that city, at the general election of 1865, at the top of the poll, obtaining the votes of over 90 per cent of the electors, though he issued no formal address and attached himself to no party. At no time, however, was it doubtful that Morris was a conservative in the broad sense of the word. He distrusted democratic institutions, particularly as applied to an imperfectly developed community like Ireland, and he scorned the sounding platitudes of professional patriots. No Irishman, however, had the best interests of his country more sincerely at heart, or worked more vigorously for them. Morris took up an independent attitude in the House of Commons. But on the change of Ministers in June, 1866, he was offered by Lord Derby and accepted the office of Solicitor-General for Ireland, being the first Roman Catholic who had received such promotion under a Conservative Administration. His acceptance was referred to in complimentary terms by the Prime Minister in the House of Lords. That it was not distasteful to his constituents in Galway was clearly shown when his seat was challenged on his seeking re-election after his appointment. He was returned by a majority of five to one, and when he became Attorney-General a few months later no one ventured to come forward against him.
In April, 1867, when he was little more than 39, he became a puisne Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, … On the retirement of Lord Chief Justice Monahan, in 1876, Mr Justice Morris succeeded him and was the last Chief of the Common Pleas. Eleven years later he was placed at the head of the Irish Common Law Bench as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Meanwhile he had done much public service of a non-judicial character. He was a leading member of the Royal Commission on Irish Primary Education in 1868–70; was one of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland from 1868 … In 1885 he was created a baronet. In 1889 he attained the culminating point of his professional success, becoming Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and entering the Upper House as a life peer with the title of Lord Morris of Spiddal. At the same time he was sworn of the Privy Council in England, and shortly afterwards became a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn. This was the first occasion – apart from the complimentary admission of Royal and princely personages – in which one who had never been called to the English Bar was placed upon the governing body of one of the Inns of Court.
As a puisne Judge, as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, Morris showed high judicial qualities. He was not, and he never professed to be, a lawyer deeply read in the reports and eager to associate his name with subtle developments of case law. But he was a most capable and careful Judge in nisi prius cases and on circuit, where his inborn sagacity, his scorn for shams, his rapidity in mastering facts, his knowledge of the national character, and his genial humour gave him a controlling power over all save the most incorrigible of juries. Yet it would be wrong to say that afterwards, when Lord Morris became a member of the Supreme Appellate Tribunal, he was not capable of dealing ably with judicial principles. Though he was an Irishman, he was not given to verbosity, and he was frequently content to record his concurrence with others of the legal members of the House of Lords. When he pronounced his judgments, however, he spoke always to the purpose, if briefly. Perhaps the public, and even his profession, cannot realize how valuable a check is the presence of incarnate common sense and good-humouredly cynical contempt for the extravagances of hair-splitting and logic-chopping on the part of some eminent lawyers. Of the House of Lords as an abode of liveliness, whether regarded from the political or from the legal point of view, Lord Morris had not a very high opinion. It is even whispered that he used to talk of the august Chamber, irreverently, as “the graveyard.” He sometimes could not resist the temptation to supply the quality that was lacking. The proceedings were occasionally diversified by a sally, delivered in the brogue which he never sought to modify, and which, indeed, he frankly declared had been his fortune. One of these interruptions to grave argument was in the prolonged appeal of “Allen v. Flood,” the trade union case decided in December, 1897, after a two years’ sojourn in the House of Lords. The late Lord Herschell had been frequent in rather petulant interruption of the counsel for the respondent. Lord Morris took the opportunity of saying, in a pretty loud voice and in a way which made laughter irresistible:- “I think we can all understand from the present proceedings what amounts to molesting a man in his business.” … The late Lord’s humour was not of the literary kind which finds its way into judgments, but it does bubble up now and again. In the decision of the Judicial Committee in “Cochrane v. Macnish” the question was of the lawful and unlawful use of the term “club soda,” and Lord Morris, who gave the decision of the tribunal, remarked:- “In the manufacture of soda-water there is no secret, and frequently no soda.” Perhaps his best judgment was the admirable one which he delivered in the Privy Council in “McLeod v. St Aubyn” in 1899. The decision was referred to in these columns in comment on the case in which grossly disrespectful language was used in a Birmingham newspaper of Mr Justice Darling, and the writer was subjected to a fine. Lord Morris, while affirming the existence, deprecated the exercise, of the jurisdiction to commit for contempt of Court on account of scandalous matter published with respect to the Court or Judge … On Lord Morris’s retirement in the summer of 1900 a hereditary peerage, the barony of Killanin, was bestowed upon him. He preferred, however, to be known by his old name.
Perhaps the most signal triumph, from a personal point of view, that Lord Morris had to boast of in his long and successful career was won shortly after his resignation of the Law Lordship in the early part of 1900. While he filled a judicial office, Lord Morris felt that it was not right for him to take an active share in party politics and political controversy. His eldest son contested the borough of Galway unsuccessfully in 1895, and, though he was chosen a member of the first county council of Galway under the Irish Local Government Act in 1899, the only Unionist elected west of the Shannon, it seemed that he had not much prospect of victory when he presented himself again as a candidate for the borough after the dissolution of last year. But, in the meantime, his father had been “unmuzzled.” Lord Morris had never lost touch with the people of Galway. He lived much among them, and enjoyed living among them. He knew them all, and rarely forgot a face. When the Local Government Bill was before the House of Lords, he fought manfully, and for the moment successfully, to preserve for Galway a privileged position as a county borough, and by his individual energy carried an amendment to this effect against the Government, in the Upper House, which was set aside in the House of Commons. Lord Morris, during the interval before the strict “electoral period,” when it was permissible for him as a peer to engage in political conflict, threw himself with characteristic energy and humour into the fray. It was largely due to his personal influence that Mr Martin Morris won his seat – the only one outside Ulster for which a Unionist was returned last autumn – by a satisfactory majority against a singular combination of adverse forces. All the sections of the Nationalists combined to work for the Separatist candidate, Mr Leamy, a popular and able man apart from politics. The Roman Catholic Bishop was Mr Leamy’s proposer, and, with hardly a single exception, the clergy, parish priests and curates alike, were active partisans on the same side. But Lord Morris appealed successfully to the memories and the kindly feeling of his old friends and neighbours, his former constituents. He reminded them that he had never severed his interests from theirs, and that he had always lived among them, dealt with them, knew almost every man by name, and was ardent for their welfare. He repelled in vigorous speeches the attacks upon him and his son as representatives of Toryism and landlordism. He roused the enthusiasm of the fishermen of “the Claddagh” by speaking to them in Irish, though he used to confess that he could no more read a line in that language than the majority of the professional patriots could understand it, whether spoken or written. Mr Martin Morris’s victory was creditable to himself; but it was even in a higher degree a personal triumph for his father and a tribute to the unique place he had won in the hearts of the people of Galway.
Perhaps Lord Morris’s social gifts were even more remarkable than his legal and political successes. What he enjoyed most of all things in the world was talk; and he talked admirably – not least because he chose to express himself in what he used to call “my broadest Doric” – whether he was strolling with a single companion through the rough moorland region behind Spiddal or was the life and soul of the company at a country house party or a London dinner. His humour was of a far higher quality than the fine-drawn subtleties of the professional wit. It was always rooted in a sturdy and fearless common sense. It may perhaps be said that in politics Lord Morris was a pessimist, like so many other brilliant humourists. He had not, at any rate, a very high opinion of either the intelligence or the straightforwardness of politicians. His reply to some one who asked him, somewhat inaptly, to explain “the Irish question” in a few words is well known. “It is the difficulty,” he said, “of a stupid and honest people trying to govern a quickwitted and dishonest one.” Yet he was by no means of opinion that the government of Ireland was impracticable, though he was full of scorn for the incurable optimism which professed to believe that Irish separatism would be weakened rather than strengthened by the extension of the franchise and, at a later date, the introduction of local government of the broadest democratic kind in Ireland. How the loyal minority could hope to win in an electoral fight he could not understand. “If it was to be fought out with fists,” he said, “I could understand it, but at the ballot-box, when the rebel party are ten to one, don’t ask me to believe that we can beat them.” When a distinguished Radical, begged to be informed how long the struggle against the law in Ireland would be maintained, after “resolute government” had been really instituted, Lord Morris’s answer was “one hour!” If the prediction has not been realized, it is because the condition precedent has never been fulfilled.
A whole chapter of legend has grown up about Lord Morris’s name and his reputation as a wit. Countless stories are told of his sharp sayings, some of them authentic and most of them characteristic. Perhaps none are more striking than some of the utterances attributed to him when he sat on the Bench in Ireland. During the earlier developments of Fenianism some Irish Judges expended a vast amount of rhetorical indignation on the puny traitors of that day. Morris dealt with them in a different fashion. He wasted no words upon them, but dismissed their futile folly with a moderate sentence and with cutting contempt. In a case where some young farmer’s sons were tried on a charge of illegal drilling and carrying arms by night, Morris said:- “There you go on with your marching and counter-marching, making fools of yourselves, when you ought to be out in the fields, turning dung.” On another occasion, when an eloquent advocate had extenuated some criminal act on the ground that “the people” were in sympathy with the offenders, the Chief Justice remarked, “I never knew a small town in Ireland that hadn’t a black-guard in it who called himself ‘the people.’” Of trial by jury in the sister island he had no very high opinion. “In the West,” he said, “the Court is generally packed with people whose names all begin with one letter, Michael Morris on the Bench, ten men of the name of Murphy and two men of the name of Moriarty in the jury-box, and two other Moriartys in the dock, and the two Moriartys on the jury going in fear of their lives of the ten Murphys if they don’t find against their own friends.”
As Chief Justice he had a high regard for the dignity and independence of his own Court, and especially resented any claim on the part of the Treasury to interfere. Once, it is said, a most distinguished official was sent over from Whitehall to Dublin, after a long correspondence on the side of the Department about the expenditure of fuel in the Courtrooms and Judge’s chamber, to obtain the answer that the vigilant guardians of the public purse had failed to extract in writing. He was received politely by the Chief Justice, who said that he would put him in communication with the proper person; and, ringing the bell, which was answered by the elderly female who acted as Court-keeper, he remarked, as he turned on his heel and left the room, “Mary, this is the man that’s come about the coals.” Shortly after the Land Act of 1881 became law a very important case was carried to the Court of Appeal, of which Morris, as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was an ex officio member. Morris was not summoned, and, meeting the Lord Chancellor in the street, he expressed his surprise. The Chancellor, with some embarrassment, explained that he had not wished to put the Chief Justice to inconvenience, that he had summoned a sufficient number of Judges to constitute the tribunal, and that, in fact, there were not chairs enough on the bench of the Court of Appeal to accommodate any more. “Oh!” (said Morris, according to this story). “That need make no difference. I’ll bring my own chair out of my own Court, and I’ll form my own opinion and deliver my own judgment, Lord Chancellor!” In the early days of the Home Rule policy the Chief Justice, it is said, was a guest at a great official banquet in Dublin, where a lady of high position, full of enthusiasm for Mr Gladstone’s latest transmigration, asked him whether the great majority of those present were not ardent Home Rulers. “Indeed, Lady,” said Morris, “I suppose that, with the exception of his Excellency and yourself, and, perhaps, half a dozen of the servants, there aren’t three in the room!”
Lord Morris and Killanin married, in 1860, Anna, daughter of the Hon. G. H. Hughes, Baron of the Court of Exchequer in Ireland. By her he had four sons and six daughters. The eldest son, Martin Henry FitzPatrick, a graduate of the University of Dublin, a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, succeeds, on his father’s death, to the Barony of Killanin and to the baronetcy. The life peerage of Lord Morris of Spiddal ceases, of course, to exist.
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ARCHBISHOP CROKE (#ulink_76cc28ec-07b1-535c-bae4-66432f6a5ebc)
23 JULY 1902
DR THOMAS WILLIAM CROKE, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cashel and Emly – perhaps the most remarkable Irish ecclesiastic since the death of Cardinal Cullen, though there was little in common between the two men – was born close to the town of Mallow, county Cork, on May 19, 1824. His people were well-to-do farmers. Though his mother was a Protestant, he was destined from an early age by his uncle, who took charge of his education, for the priesthood. He was never in Maynooth, the great training college of the Irish priesthood, but spent ten years in colleges on the Continent established during the operation of the Penal Laws for the education of priests intended for the mission in Ireland and Great Britain. At the age of 14, he entered the Irish College in Paris, and spent six years there; another year was passed in a college in Menin, in Belgium, and after an additional three years in the Irish College in Rome he obtained the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and was ordained priest in 1848. Then for brief periods he was Professor in the Diocesan College, Carlow, and in the Irish College, Paris, after which he returned to his native diocese of Cloyne, Cork, as a missionary priest. In 1858 he was appointed president of St Colman’s College, Fermoy; after seven years he returned to the mission as parish priest of Doneraile. In 1870, when he was 45 years of age, he was appointed by the Pope, on the nomination of Cardinal Cullen, to the bishopric of Auckland, New Zealand. In 1875 the bishopric of Cashel and Emly became vacant. The parish priests of the see met, as usual, to propose three names – dignissimus, dignior, dignus – from whom the Pope was to select the Archbishop. But on the recommendation of Cardinal Cullen the three names were set aside by the Holy See, and Dr Croke was recalled from New Zealand to take charge of the Archdiocese of Cashel and Emly. He was received with extreme coldness by the priests; but a patriotic oration he delivered at the O’Connell Centenary in August, 1875, made him extremely popular. He was thence known as “the patriot Archbishop.”
In the early fifties, while he was a curate in the diocese of Cloyne, Dr Croke took an active part in the land agitation for “the three F’s” – fixity of tenure, fair rents, and free sale – conducted by Gavan Duffy. The movement did not long survive. It was deserted by most of those who had created it. Gavan Duffy, describing Ireland as like “a corpse on the dissecting table,” resigned his seat in Parliament and emigrated to Victoria. Before his departure Dr Croke wrote him a letter, which thus concluded:- “For myself I have determined never to join any Irish agitation, never to sign any petition to Government, and never to trust to any one man or body of men, living in my time, for the recovery of Ireland’s independence. All hope with me in Irish affairs is dead and buried. I have ever esteemed you at once the honestest and most gifted of my country-men and your departure from Ireland leaves me no hope.” In 1879, clean on a quarter of a century after that despairing letter had been written, Mr Parnell went down to the little market town of Thurles, in Tipperary, where Dr Croke resided, to request the Archbishop to give his support to the Land League agitation which had just been inaugurated. Dr Croke stated some years afterwards that he was at first reluctant to join the movement and that he only yielded his consent when Mr Parnell actually went on his knees before him, saying, “I must have the Bishops at the head of this movement, else it will not succeed.” However, Dr Croke soon became the most active Land Leaguer among the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He supported the agitation in vigorous letters and speeches. But he thought the no- rent manifesto, issued on the proclamation of the Land League by Mr W. E. Forster, in 1881, was going too far. He wrote an address to the people of Ireland denouncing it, not, indeed, so much because it was immoral, as because it was illogical. He said that the trim reply to the proclamation of the Land League was to refuse to pay taxes rather than to repudiate debts due to a number of individuals, who had no responsibility for the action of the Government. Two years later he sent another letter to the Press advocating a national testimonial to Mr Parnell for his services to Ireland. Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical letter condemning the tribute, but this had the effect of increasing the subscription, and ultimately Mr Parnell was presented with a cheque for £40,000. Dr Croke and a number of other Bishops were summoned to Rome to explain their conduct to the Holy See. When he returned he received a most enthusiastic welcome, and in a speech at a public meeting declared he was “unchanged and unchangeable.”
In 1890 it fell to the lot of Dr Croke to draw up, on behalf of the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Ireland, an address to the Irish people declaring that Mr Parnell was not a fit man to be their leader, because of the disclosures of the O’Shea divorce case. This address was not issued until after the publication of Mr Gladstone’s letter stating that his efforts on behalf of Home Rule would be fruitless if Mr Parnell were retained as chairman of the Irish party. The charge was subsequently made against the hierarchy that they had postponed taking action until they saw how things were going decisively, but Dr Croke explained, five years later, that the delay was due entirely to the fact that the document had to be sent to Bishop after Bishop for signature. After the fall of Mr Parnell Dr Croke retired from public life. Appeals were frequently made to him to try to settle the differences between Parnellites and anti-Parnellites, O’Brienites and Healyites, but he refused absolutely to intervene.
Dr Croke, physically, was over 6ft. high and well made in proportion. In his youth and early manhood he had been a champion athlete in leaping and jumping, and was distinguished also in the hurling and football fields. All through life he took the keenest interest in the national sports and pastimes of the Irish people. On the foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1885 for the revival of Irish games he became its president. In his address on the subject he said:-
“Ball playing, hurling, football kicking, according to Irish rules, ‘casting’ (or throwing the stone), leaping in various ways, wrestling, handy-grips, top-pegging, leap-frog, rounders, tip-in-the-hat, and all such favourite exercises and amusements amongst men and boys may now be said to be not only dead and buried, but in several localities to be entirely forgotten and unknown. And what have we got in their stead? We have got such foreign and fantastic field sports as lawn tennis, polo, croquet, cricket and the like. Very excellent, I believe, and health-giving exercises in their way, still not racy of the soil, but rather alien to it.”
There might be, he added, “something rather pleasing to the eye in the get-up of the modern young man who, arrayed in light attire, with party-coloured cap on, and racket in hand, is making his way, with or without a companion, to the tennis ground,” but he preferred the youthful athletes of his early years – “bereft of shoes and coat and thus prepared to play at hand-ball, to fly over any number of horses, to throw the sledge of winding-stone, and to test each other’s mettle and activity by the trying ordeal of three leaps, or a hop, step, and jump.”
Dr Croke was of a genial and warm-hearted nature. He delighted in hospitality at his palace in Thurles, and after dinner was fond of regaling his guests with humorous Irish stories and Irish comic songs. He had a contempt for books, but especially abhorred collections of sermons. He did not hesitate to declare that Irish history was too cheerless a chronicle for him to study. It was infinitely better, he also said, to try to make history, even in a small way, than to write volumes about it.
* * *
MICHAEL DAVITT (#ulink_c83b2bf3-0d56-5614-8fe6-80c1fe6d303d)
31 MAY 1906
MR MICHAEL DAVITT died early this morning at a private hospital, in Lower Mount-street, Dublin, where he had been lying in a critical condition for some days. Michael Davitt, probably the most resolute and implacable enemy of the connexion between Great Britain and Ireland that has appeared in modern time, was born at Straid, a small village in county Mayo, in March, 1846, a few weeks before the birth of Charles Stewart Parnell, his associate in after life, though coming from a very different social stratum. Davitt’s father was a petty peasant farmer, who was evicted in 1851 for non-payment of rent, which, however, it is alleged, had not been raised during the period of his tenancy. The family then migrated to Lancashire, and settled in the small manufacturing town of Haslingden, where the boy found employment in a cotton mill, and, though a Roman Catholic, got his elementary education at a Wesleyan school. When he was 11 years old a machinery accident deprived him of his right arm, but he got casual occupation as a newsboy, as an assistant letter-carrier, and ultimately as an employé in a small printing office. Reading widely if not wisely, he drifted rapidly into the ranks of the Fenian Brotherhood, which became actively aggressive in 1865. When an abortive attempt was made by the Fenians to capture Chester Castle, early in 1867, Davitt, according to an admiring biographer, “though unable to shoulder a rifle with his single arm, carried a small store of cartridges in a bag made from a pocket-handkerchief.” When the baffled band of conspirators broke up, Davitt escaped detection and returned to Haslingden, where he immediately resumed “active operations,” arranging for the secret export of firearms to Ireland. This led to his arrest in 31 May, 1870, on a charge of “treason felony,” on which he was tried at the Old Bailey, with a confederate, before Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, and convicted, without hesitation, by the jury. A letter in Davitt’s handwriting was produced and sworn to, a passage in which, the Chief Justice said, in passing a sentence of 15 years’ penal servitude, showed that there was “some dark and dangerous design against the life of some man.” Towards the close of 1877, however, Davitt was released, after serving half of his sentence in Dartmoor Convict Prison, and a few months later he visited the United States, where his mother, herself of American birth, though of Irish blood, had settled with other members of the family. Before crossing the Atlantic he had rejoined the “Irish Republican Brotherhood,” the branch of the Fenian organization established in Ireland, and was elected a member of the “Supreme Council,” which practically admitted him to confidential relations, as the Special Commission found, with the Clan-na-Gael and the whole body of American-Irish Fenians. He told the Commissioners himself that he had “a well-defined purpose” in visiting the States, which, as his further evidence showed, was to “make the Land Question the stepping-stone to national independence.” With another Fenian and ex-convict, John Devoy, Davitt, during his stay in America, studied the methods of revolution through agrarian agitation devised 30 years before by Fintan Lalor, and on his return to Ireland the confederates launched the “new departure,” with the assent and co-operation of the emissaries of the Clan-na-Gael, the aim being to combine the physical force faction and the agrarian revolutionists in a common policy, embracing an attack on rents and the acquisition of complete control over local elected bodies. Into this policy Mr Parnell was gradually drawn, and the Land League, originally started at Irishtown, in Mayo, early in 1879, developed, half a year later, into a “national organization,” with its seat in Dublin, Parnell as president, and Davitt as one of the secretaries. In view of the anti-clerical developments of Davitt’s later career, it is worthy of notice that the Irishtown meeting was called to denounce a landlord who was also a parish priest, one Canon Burke. Parnell’s visit to America, his violent speeches there, the assurances given to the physical force party that their methods were not to be interfered with were among the first results of the foundation of the Land League. Davitt himself crossed the Atlantic in May, 1880, just after the general election, and for several months acted “as the link between the two wings of the Irish party,” explaining to the Fenians that the aims of the two sections did not clash and that they might be of mutual aid to one another.
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Charles Lysaght
Discover the fascinating lives of the figures that have shaped Ireland from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Explore the rich history of the island’s cultural, social and political landscape, with more than 100 obituaries carefully curated from The Times archive.The Irish have contributed richly to the world, most notably in literature, but also in the arts, law, politics, religion, scholarship, science, soldiering and sport. In this volume, The Times brings together a unique and fascinating collection of obituaries. The list includes people who have made the greatest impact in their fields, others who have led particularly interesting or influential lives, and a selection of notable Irish figures in the history of The Times.The obituaries have been compiled and edited by Dubliner Charles Lysaght. A lawyer, biographer and reviewer, Charles is a long-time writer of obituaries for The Times. In his introduction, he discusses the nature of Times obituaries and how they have reflected the sometimes troubled and controversial relationship of the newspaper with Ireland.This book features the major Irish figures of influence from the last 200 years and includes a diverse range of people, from Daniel O’Connell to Ian Paisley, James Joyce to Maureen Potter. This updated second edition builds on the first by adding some of Ireland’s most notable characters from the modern era, such as Maeve Binchy, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Terry Wogan.
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_0145b242-13d5-58ee-9c24-3b0f28268245)
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Cover Image:
“From Everywhere and Nowhere (Seamus Heaney)”
Colin Davidson b. 1968 © Colin Davidson. 2013 Collection Ulster Museum
CONTENTS
Cover (#u7749f797-88b6-5edd-aa3b-293973a36123)
Title Page (#u7401c290-08de-5f66-8221-f2812a8b0152)
Copyright (#ulink_8c5c23a8-6ba3-5941-a220-9b1a38b7fc61)
Introduction (#ulink_c3140ba4-9ac9-5261-af5c-777e12e8511b)
Henry Grattan (#ulink_5ab9325a-25f1-5af6-9b38-8c636296c58b)
Daniel O’Connell (#ulink_62eaa097-e879-5a48-ac5a-c16364986421)
Maria Edgeworth (#ulink_caa5bd33-bea9-51a9-8b0b-9778b97e14aa)
Tom Moore (#ulink_8ddf8a21-242b-51b9-a8a3-443953760aca)
Father Mathew (#ulink_c973b467-f9f8-59af-b010-eb43bb352ce6)
William Dargan (#ulink_ac770b7e-5ab0-5a61-ae67-a7d0f7fd17ac)
Earl of Rosse (#ulink_8b69e984-3f9e-5416-9c5f-54a20e1653cd)
Cardinal Cullen (#ulink_047b11a9-3161-5efc-9a2e-b528c6ef1d12)
Charles Stewart Parnell (#ulink_4c894b63-178a-5947-94a9-fa0250b0f178)
Sir John Pope Hennessy (#ulink_66edead0-433c-56e3-b895-3fd58d368b6b)
Mrs Cecil Alexander (#ulink_95ddcb34-02c0-58b2-a7e2-8632627b5b50)
Oscar Wilde (#ulink_f0635d08-f784-50ab-9d3d-5558cb3b423d)
Lord Morris of Spiddal (#ulink_b7dba2da-0e94-55ad-9573-74c362e04724)
Archbishop Croke (#ulink_aef1a001-ee97-5f35-91cf-a1fead93efd6)
Michael Davitt (#ulink_2551dfba-d3f3-5bdf-9286-830716243264)
The O’Conor Don (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir W. H. Russell (#litres_trial_promo)
John Millington Synge (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Luke O’Connor (#litres_trial_promo)
John Redmond (#litres_trial_promo)
Cardinal Gibbons (#litres_trial_promo)
Michael Collins (#litres_trial_promo)
Erskine Childers (#litres_trial_promo)
Thomas Crean V. C. (#litres_trial_promo)
Lord Pirrie (#litres_trial_promo)
Lord MacDonnell (#litres_trial_promo)
Kevin O’Higgins (#litres_trial_promo)
Countess Markievicz (#litres_trial_promo)
John Devoy (#litres_trial_promo)
John Woulfe Flanagan (#litres_trial_promo)
T. P. O’Connor (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Horace Plunkett (#litres_trial_promo)
Lady Gregory (#litres_trial_promo)
George Moore (#litres_trial_promo)
Edward Carson (#litres_trial_promo)
William Butler Yeats (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir John Lavery (#litres_trial_promo)
James Joyce (#litres_trial_promo)
Sarah Purser (#litres_trial_promo)
John McCormack (#litres_trial_promo)
Douglas Hyde (#litres_trial_promo)
Edith Somerville (#litres_trial_promo)
John Dulanty (#litres_trial_promo)
Evie Hone (#litres_trial_promo)
William Francis Casey (#litres_trial_promo)
Margaret Burke Sheridan (#litres_trial_promo)
Archbishop Gregg (#litres_trial_promo)
Sean O’Casey (#litres_trial_promo)
Jimmy O’Dea (#litres_trial_promo)
William T. Cosgrave (#litres_trial_promo)
Frank O’Connor (#litres_trial_promo)
Lady Hanson (#litres_trial_promo)
Sean Lemass (#litres_trial_promo)
Lord Brookeborough (#litres_trial_promo)
George O’Brien (#litres_trial_promo)
Kate O’Brien (#litres_trial_promo)
Eamon de Valera (#litres_trial_promo)
John A. Costello (#litres_trial_promo)
Brian Faulkner (#litres_trial_promo)
Professor Frances Moran (#litres_trial_promo)
Micheál Mac Liammóir (#litres_trial_promo)
Professor F. S. L. Lyons (#litres_trial_promo)
Anita Leslie (#litres_trial_promo)
Frederick H. Boland (#litres_trial_promo)
Siobhan McKenna (#litres_trial_promo)
Eamonn Andrews (#litres_trial_promo)
Sean MacBride (#litres_trial_promo)
Samuel Beckett (#litres_trial_promo)
Cardinal O Fiaich (#litres_trial_promo)
Ernest Walton (#litres_trial_promo)
Molly Keane (#litres_trial_promo)
Michael O’Hehir (#litres_trial_promo)
Dermot Morgan (#litres_trial_promo)
Jack Lynch (#litres_trial_promo)
Rev. F. X. Martin (#litres_trial_promo)
Sister Genevieve O’Farrell (#litres_trial_promo)
Maureen Potter (#litres_trial_promo)
Mary Holland (#litres_trial_promo)
Joe Cahill (#litres_trial_promo)
Bob Tisdall (#litres_trial_promo)
George Best (#litres_trial_promo)
John McGahern (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles Haughey (#litres_trial_promo)
Sam Stephenson (#litres_trial_promo)
David Ervine (#litres_trial_promo)
Tommy Makem (#litres_trial_promo)
Conor Cruise O’Brien (#litres_trial_promo)
Vincent O’Brien (#litres_trial_promo)
Alex “Hurricane” Higgins (#litres_trial_promo)
Dr Garret FitzGerald (#litres_trial_promo)
Declan Costello (#litres_trial_promo)
The Knight of Glin (#litres_trial_promo)
Mary Raftery (#litres_trial_promo)
Aengus Fanning (#litres_trial_promo)
Louis Le Brocquy (#litres_trial_promo)
Maire MacSwiney Brugha (#litres_trial_promo)
Maeve Binchy (#litres_trial_promo)
Seamus Heaney (#litres_trial_promo)
Albert Reynolds (#litres_trial_promo)
The Rev. Ian Paisley (#litres_trial_promo)
Jack Kyle (#litres_trial_promo)
Brian Friel (#litres_trial_promo)
Maureen O’Hara (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Terry Wogan (#litres_trial_promo)
Searchable Terms (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_e313cae2-2c3f-5822-9eee-6e2245115754)
Charles Lysaght
WHEN DR JOHNSON proclaimed the Irish an honest race because they seldom spoke well of one another, he should have made it clear that it was the reputations of the living that he had in mind. In Ireland, speaking of the dead in the aftermath of their demise, the adage nihil nisi bonum applies not only among friends and acquaintances but in the media. Readers of Irish newspapers, national and especially local, are treated to accounts of the unprecedented gloom that settled over the district where the deceased lived, the largest and most representative gathering at a funeral within living memory, accompanied by eulogies reciting how the dear departed thought only of others and never of themselves, were never known to say an unkind word about anybody, were devoted to their family, were exemplary in their piety and charity and were universally loved and respected. Such undiscriminating eulogies lack credibility and do their subjects no favours.
It has been a signal service rendered by The Times to provide accounts of deceased Irish persons that aspire to more realism and more balance in their assessments while bringing out the exceptional achievements and positive qualities that make the deceased worthy of notice in a newspaper outside their own country. In the absence of a comprehensive dictionary of Irish biography they have sometimes been the best accounts of a person’s life, at least for a period, and, as such, a valuable reference for historians.
It has been helpful to this process that many of these obituaries are prepared in advance and so allow for checking facts and for reflection unaffected by the immediate surge of sympathy surrounding a death.
It is conducive to frankness that obituaries are published anonymously and that the identity of the authors will not be disclosed by the paper in their lifetime, so keeping faith with the nineteenth century description of The Times as ‘the most obstinately anonymous newspaper in the World’. It may add to the authority of a piece that it seems to represent the views of a great newspaper rather than an individual author. It probably puts some pressure on the individual authors to reflect a general view of a person rather than to indulge a personal experience or assessment.
Obituaries (especially major ones) may first be prepared when their subjects are relatively young and so need revision many times before publication. Apart from new facts, what is interesting about a person’s life can change quite rapidly. In the nature of things, the subject sometimes outlives the original author and what emerges on the final day is a composite work.
Historically, Irish obituaries in The Times reflected somewhat the troubled relationship that the paper had with Ireland from the days of Daniel O’Connell up to the creation of the independent Irish state. The difficulties in the relationship might even be traced back further to the incident when Irishman Barry O’Meara, who had been removed by the British Government from his role as physician to the captive Napoleon on St Helena, horse-whipped William Walter, mistaking him for his brother John who was one of the proprietors and the responsible editor of the paper. O’Meara had been affronted because The Times had dismissed as a lie a statement in his memoirs that he had been told by the deposed Emperor that The Times was in the pay of the exiled Bourbons. It ended up in court with O’Meara getting away with a fulsome apology.
The Times, under the editorship of Thomas Barnes (1817–41) supported O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic Emancipation. But their relationship with O’Connell went sour not long after he entered parliament in 1830 when he accused the paper of misreporting him. As he espoused the repeal of the Union and brought the ‘Romish clergy’ into politics, they denounced him as an unredeemed and unredeemable scoundrel and declared ‘war to the political extinction of one of us.’ One of the first assignments of the celebrated Irish-born reporter William Howard Russell was to report on O’Connell’s monster meetings in 1843 and on his subsequent trial and conviction in Dublin – it took over 24 hours to get the news of the verdict to London.
After O’Connell’s conviction had been set aside on appeal by the House of Lords, The Times returned to the fray, setting up what they called a commission in the form of a journalist sent to report on O’Connell’s treatment of his own tenants in Kerry. They were found to be living in poverty without a pane of glass in any of their windows. Russell was sent to Ireland again and, despite being on friendly terms with O’Connell, confirmed that this was indeed the case. O’Connell, for his part, denounced The Times as ‘a vile journal’ which had falsely, foully and wickedly calumniated him every day and on every subject. Against this background it is not surprising that his obituary in 1847 is critical and reflects a hostile political viewpoint. But its recognition of the positive qualities of what it called an ‘extraordinary man’ shows admirable balance. It claimed to have shown a forebearance of which O’Connell himself was incapable and to have treated indulgently the memory of a man who in a long lifetime seldom spared a fallen adversary.
The confrontation between nationalist Ireland and The Times reached its apotheosis in the late 1880s when The Times published a series of articles entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime’ that were, in fact, largely written by a young Irish Catholic barrister and journalist, educated under Jowett at Balliol, called John Woulfe Flanagan – although anonymously as was still customary for all articles. Parnell was accused of having been complicit with terrorism and the organized intimidation of the Land War. The allegations were subsequently supported by letters said to have been written by Parnell that were proved before a judicial commission to have been forged by one Richard Pigott. The unmasking of Pigott before the commission by Sir Charles Russell, a former Irish solicitor who was then the leader of the English Bar, was an historic set-piece much recalled in the annals of the law as well as politics. Less remembered is that the commission, on the strength of evidence given by the Fenian informer Henri Le Caron, upheld the substance of most of the charges made in the articles. The events cast a long shadow, well beyond the obituary published on Parnell’s death written by The Times’ leader writer E. D. J. Wilson where this was pointed out. An account of the episode in a volume of the History of The Times covering the years 1884 to 1912, published in 1947, led to corrigenda in an appendix in the next volume credited to Parnell’s surviving colleague and biographer Captain Henry Harrison MC. Attention was drawn to the role of Captain William O’Shea, the first husband of Mrs Parnell, as a witness before the commission and an admission made that the paper’s association with O’Shea proved by Captain Harrison ‘is not creditable’ and should not have been ignored in the History of The Times.
In his main address to the commission Sir Charles Russell had admitted the terrorism associated with the Land League but claimed that the root cause of it was English oppression and that the fomentor of discord between the two peoples through several generations had been The Times. Sir Henry James, who appeared for The Times, answered by citing a long list of critical occasions in Irish history when the paper had supported the Irish popular cause often at the risk of alienating dominant opinion in England. It had helped to secure Catholic emancipation; it had argued for the endowment of the Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth and the disestablishment of the Irish Church; it had taken a leading part in the relief of distress during the Irish famine and advocated the extension of the Irish franchise; it had highlighted evictions and supported legislation giving greater protection to tenants.
Because of its opposition to nationalist aspirations The Times was berated in nationalist Ireland as the enemy of all things Irish. In fact, this was not so. The unionism of The Times was an inclusive unionism and did not spill over into a general antipathy to the Irish or even the Catholic Irish. Tom Moore, the poet, had been a regular and valued contributor. Edmund O’Donovan, the son of the great Gaelic scholar John O’Donovan and old Clongownian Frank Power were two Times journalists who perished with General Gordon reporting the Egyptian campaign of the 1880s.
In the obituaries columns, as elsewhere, the Irish of all backgrounds got a good show. Just occasionally there was some stereotyping, although it was not unfriendly. In 1891, remarking that in his qualities and talents as in his defects Sir John Pope Hennessy was a typical Irishman, his obituary depicted him as ‘quick of wit, ready in repartee, a fluent speaker, and an able debater but the enthusiasm and emotion which lent force and fire to his speeches led him into the adoption of extreme and impracticable views.’ A few years later the obituary of the colourful Irish judge Lord Morris of Spiddal contained the observation that ‘though an Irishman he was not given to verbosity.’ Of Michael Davitt, the Land Leaguer, it was remarked that ‘he was an Irishman of a somewhat unusual type dark and dour.’ A more extensive indulgence in stereotyping is to be found in the obituary of Charles Villiers Stanford, the composer (not included in this collection), who was, it was stated, ‘though an Irishman of the English occupation, every inch an Irishman; the quick acquisitive mind, the readiness of tongue, the appreciation of a good story and the power of telling it well, the ability to charm, and the love of a fight were qualities which endeared him to his friends but never left him in want of an enemy.’ It must be said that this kind of thing was relatively rare, whether because many Irish obituaries were written by fellow Irishmen or because of a fastidiousness among those responsible in the paper itself.
The pattern of supporting beneficial reforms for the Irish majority, while defending the Union and the maintenance of law and order, remained the policy of The Times into the twentieth century. It was predictable that the paper should support the executions of the leaders of the 1916 rebellion and of Roger Casement, who was not even accorded an obituary, which could have recorded the achievements that had led to his being knighted. The treatment of Casement was a formidable challenge to the impartiality of a number of British institutions.
Whatever about the reaction to the 1916 rebellion, The Times tended to reflect the general acceptance even among unionists in the wake of the temporarily suspended Home Rule Act of 1914 that there would have to be some form of self-government for Ireland after the War. Significantly, after the peace in 1918 and the replacement of Geoffrey Dawson as editor by Wickham Steed, The Times originated the scheme that eventually found expression in the Government of Ireland Act, 1920 with its home rule parliaments for Northern Ireland and what was called Southern Ireland. Prior to that, the Ulster unionist demand was to remain fully integrated in the United Kingdom and they were slow to see the opportunities the Government of Ireland Act was to offer for establishing a protestant state for a protestant people. The latter history of the Act as the charter for that state has tended to obscure the fact that it explicitly envisaged a future date of Irish union and created overarching institutions such as a Council of Ireland and an All-Ireland Court of Appeal out of which it was hoped that this union would grow. It was the rejection of it by nationalist leaders now bent on achieving a totally independent republic that deprived the Act of its unifying possibilities.
The rejection of the Government of Ireland Act by the Sinn Fein leadership and the ongoing assassinations of policemen led the Government to allow free rein to their security forces, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliary cadets. The Times joined in a crescendo of criticism of their disgraceful behaviour and was also highly critical of the hardline reaction of the Lloyd George government to the 74-day hunger strike to death in November 1920 of Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork. Editorials argued for a settlement along the lines of that eventually agreed in December 1921 granting dominion status to Southern Ireland.
Significantly, when the leading Irish negotiators of that settlement, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, died in the early months of independence the obituaries were uncritical. In the case of Collins there was virtually no reference to his part in the campaign of assassination from 1919 to 1921 that had led to his being demonised in Britain before the settlement. The Times had a special reason for being grateful to him as he had applied his ruthless efficiency to securing the safe return of their special correspondent A. B. Kay, who was kidnapped by the IRA in January 1922.
An important influence on the editorial policy of The Times in these years was Captain Herbert Shaw, a Dubliner who had served in the Irish administration and was one of the secretaries to the Irish Convention of 1917–18 where the moderate elements of unionism and nationalism had tried to broker a settlement. It was Shaw who penned The Times editorial entitled ‘Playing the Game’ on the occasion of the opening of the Northern Ireland Parliament in 1921 by King George V that was influential in pushing the Government towards negotiations with the Sinn Fein leaders. He was the author of a number of notable obituaries on Irish figures of that period, some of which, such as that on William T. Cosgrave, did not appear until well after his own death in 1946. Others were written by Michael MacDonagh, the journalist champion and historian of the Irish Party, and the unionist John Healy, editor of the Irish Times, and Dublin correspondent of The Times from 1894 until 1934.
The creation of an independent state covering most of the island of Ireland did not diminish the coverage of Irish affairs in The Times. The Irish were still regarded as part of the broader British family, albeit that their political leaders seemed to want to loosen their ties with it. Even the neutrality in the Second World War did not alter this, perhaps because the Irish of every tradition were such a presence in the British war effort. Churchill spoke for many in Britain when at the end of the war, having criticised Irish neutrality and paid tribute to ‘the thousands of southern Irishmen who hastened to the battle-front to prove their ancient valour’, he expressed the hope that the two peoples would walk together in mutual comprehension and forgiveness.
However, in the quarter of a century after the Second World War Irish political life, both north and south of the border, ceased to command attention in the British media. Even then, a fair coverage of Irish subjects was maintained in The Times obituaries columns. There may have been a bias towards individuals and institutions that retained to some extent a broader British identity or made an impact in Britain and might be presumed to be of more interest to the readership but it did not preclude coverage of significant figures from other strands of Irish life, especially those from the literary and artistic community. The outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland around 1970 brought Ireland centre stage once more and this has been reflected in an even more comprehensive coverage of Irish subjects in the obituaries columns.
Meanwhile, in the course of the twentieth century, there had been significant developments in the paper in the organisation of obituaries loosening the connection of that part of the paper with those who formulated editorial policy. From 1920 there was a separate obituaries department with its own editor. While obituaries had been prepared in advance since the editorship of John Delane (1841–1877), Colin Watson, who was obituaries editor from 1956 to 1981, embarked on a policy of commissioning advance pieces on a wider variety of living subjects than had been the case previously. Very often, those commissioned to write them were not journalists or even professional writers. In general, they were recruited having regard to their knowledge of the subject rather than with an eye to providing a particular viewpoint. In the case of Irish subjects the authors were generally found in Ireland. So it is that more recent Irish obituaries have often not reflected an English viewpoint, let alone that inside The Times – although the authors, if they were doing their job, have been conscious, when writing, that their readership would be largely English.
Despite this general trend, unexpected deaths of notable figures have, on occasion, still thrown the obituaries department back on its own resources. So, when Brian Faulkner died unexpectedly in 1978, Colin Watson ran up a superb obituary that reflected the paper’s sympathy for Faulkner’s brave effort to lead a cross-community executive. Three years earlier in 1975 the death at an advanced age of Eamon de Valera, which cannot have been unexpected, was marked by a much praised obituary involving substantial insider input by the celebrated leader writer Owen Hickey into a piece prepared originally by the former editor of the Irish Times Alec Newman. Hickey, born in Ireland and, incidentally, a grandson of the novelist Canon Hanney (George Bermingham), was an invaluable source of knowledge and understanding about matters Irish for The Times throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century.
The lack of total identification between the editorial policy of the paper and the obituaries that evolved through the twentieth century was never better illustrated than in the case of Sean MacBride, who died in 1988. He had been commander-in-chief of the IRA in post-independence Ireland before becoming a government minister and finally a human rights activist honoured by being awarded both the Nobel and Lenin peace prizes. An obituary prepared by the present writer that was quite laudatory but not uncritical, was followed a couple of days later by an editorial headed ‘His infamous career’ berating him as a man who was to the end of his days a cosmopolitan high priest of the cult of violence directed at British victims.
It is a problem in compiling a volume of Irish obituaries to decide who ranks as sufficiently Irish to be considered for inclusion. One thinks of the remark attributed, probably unfairly, to the Irish-born Duke of Wellington that a horse is not an ass because he is born in an ass’s stable. Obviously, birth outside Ireland, as in the case of Eamon de Valera, would be an inappropriate reason for exclusion. On the other hand, some persons of immense distinction born in Ireland have little meaningful connection with the country. I have been disinclined to include them. In the case of others, of which William Orpen and George Bernard Shaw are examples, omission is referable to the failure of the obituary to do justice to the Irish dimension of the subject’s life.
At the same time I have been concerned not to confine the selection to those who have spent their lives in Ireland or done their significant work there. In particular, it seemed to me important to represent those generally identified as Irish who made an impact not only in Britain but in the Empire and in the United States.
In choosing from a vast store of Irish obituaries over the years, I have sought to strike a balance between the significance of the subject and the quality of the piece. Clearly, any person opening a volume such as this would expect that there would be obituaries of Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell or Eamon de Valera in the political sphere or of William Butler Yeats or James Joyce among the writers. After persons of that calibre, the choices I have made have been affected by the quality of the obituary as well as the significance of the subject. Is it comprehensive or entertaining? Is it the best thing that has been written on a particular person? Is it too long? I have tended to favour those obituaries that give a picture of the person as well as an account of their life’s work. I have also favoured those that paint the subject ‘warts and all’ over less discriminating eulogies. In older pieces I confess to having been attracted by those that betray contemporary attitudes and prejudices. In omitting certain obituaries I have had some regard to their being included in other anthologies of Times obituaries.* (#litres_trial_promo)
I have sought to achieve a better gender balance than, for understandable reasons, was achieved in the actual obituaries in previous generations. I have also tried to represent a variety of spheres of Irish life, including in particular the arts, literature, business, sport, entertainment, science as well as the politicians, churchmen, lawyers, military men, public servants and academics that were preponderant in The Times obituaries of older vintage. In an earlier period other obituaries were often skimpy. In the case of the arts, literature and even science they were sometimes marred by an excessive preoccupation with the subject’s work to the exclusion of their life and personality and not couched in terms readily understood by the general reader.
I have included a number of largely forgotten figures who have never been the subject of a full biography or have not made it even into the Dictionary of National Biography, which is sketchy in its recent Irish coverage. In one or two cases I have felt inspired by the observation of Brendan Bracken in the tribute he contributed anonymously to The Times in 1928 about his mother that ‘one of the best services performed by The Times are the notices it publishes of gentle quiet lives which add much to the common stock but whose quality makes no appeal to the busy art of modern publicity.’
As the book celebrates links between The Times and Ireland, I have included a number of Irish persons who have worked for The Times beginning with William Howard Russell and culminating with William Casey, the editor from 1948 to 1952. In their different ways, their lives are illustrative of the infinite complexity of the British-Irish relationship.
I have felt deeply honoured by Ian Brunskill’s invitation to edit this volume. It is the culmination of a happy association with the obituaries department dating back to 1969, when I was a young law lecturer and barrister in London. I have prepared more than a century of obituaries over the years. From the early days when Colin Watson, Peter Davies and Juliet Lygon were in charge to more recent times when Peter Strafford, Tony Howard and Ian Brunskill were the obituaries editors, I have been the recipient of much encouragement and unfailing courtesy from those working in the obituaries department. For that I am truly grateful. I am also grateful to the librarians and archivists in the paper for sourcing obituaries. I like to think that coverage of deceased Irish persons by The Times contributes to the mutual comprehension between the people of our two islands which is much to be desired.
HENRY GRATTAN (#ulink_e3066371-8d01-5f54-8024-b8897a792790)
6 JUNE 1820
WITH UNFEIGNED CONCERN we announce … the much-to-belamented death of the Right Hon. Henry Grattan. The dissolution of this intrepid patriot would have been a subject of deep regret to the empire at large, had not the decline of his intellectual as well as vital powers been more recently observed. To his own immediate countrymen it is a source of profound and even filial sorrow …
Mr Grattan came into Parliament about the year 1773. Towards the close of the American war he carried against both the English and Irish Government the repeal of those statutes which had given the British Parliament, and in some respects the Privy Council of England, an absolute control over the legislature of his native country. He has been since the year 1790 the strenuous, persevering, and powerful advocate for an entire abolition of the penal laws against the Catholics. This measure, in the separate Parliament of Ireland, he repeatedly declared to be essential to the complete deliverance of that country from the yoke of the British ministers, as, since the Union, he has, in the language of Mr Pitt, described Catholic emancipation to be a necessary step towards giving both countries the full benefit of that important measure. Mr Grattan has long laboured under dropsy of the chest. It is well known that he was conscious of his approaching dissolution; and that, when he devoted “his last breath to his country,” he was sensible that his appearance in Parliament, for the pious purpose of recommending to the House of Commons the cause so near his heart, must tend to accelerate that mournful sacrifice. His enfeebled frame did not second the aspirings of his bold and fervent spirit: he was doomed to bequeath emancipation as a legacy – not to bestow it as a gift.
Mr Grattan’s eloquence was peculiar and original. It resembled that of no speaker that we have ever heard. His voice was naturally feeble, but practice made it audible; and laborious effort, combined with a careful and studied articulation, rendered his high tones so piercing that none of them were lost. Mr Grattan had no wit, or rather, in Parliament, he did not exhibit any. He seldom discussed the details of any question, but fastened on a few of the leading principles, which he developed and illustrated with singular strength of language, and copious felicity of imagination. His sentences were full of antithesis; and, rather than lose that favourite structure of expression, he would build it up occasionally of common-place or even puerile matter. His arguments were frequently a string of epigrams. His retorts and personal invectives were distinguished by a keen and pithy sarcasm, which told upon every nerve of his ill-starred opponent. There was, nevertheless, an earnestness and solemnity, an innate and manifest consciousness of his own rectitude, about the man, which taught his hearers to respect and admire him when he most failed to convert them to the opinions of which he was the advocate. Mr Grattan, in society, was playful and simple as a child: irritable, perhaps, in a public assembly, he was elsewhere the very soul of courtesy, complacency, and cheerfulness.
Mr Grattan’s property consisted for the most part of the sum of 50,000l, which had been tendered to him by his country, and it was honourably earned. He died at his house in Baker-street, Portman-square.
DANIEL O’CONNELL (#ulink_3ec85df9-34f0-5682-b047-7d7d56979427)
24 MAY 1847
WE BELIEVE THERE is no doubt that Mr O’Connell expired on Saturday, the 15th of this month, at Genoa. He yielded up his latest breath at the distance of many hundred miles from the remains of the humble dwelling which became remarkable as his birthplace. In a remote part of the county of Kerry is a village called Cahirciveen, and within one mile of that obscure locality may be found a place bearing the name of Carhen. The latter was for many years the residence of Morgan O’Connell, father of the extraordinary man to an account of whose life and character these columns are assigned. In that most desolate region was Daniel O’Connell born, on the 6th of August, 1775 – a date which he was accustomed to notice with no small complacency, for he took much pleasure in reminding the world that he was born in the year during which our American colonies began to assert their independence, and he sometimes succeeded in persuading his admirers that that incident, taken in connexion with others, shadowed forth his destiny as a champion of freedom. Antecedently to his thirteenth year he received little instruction beyond what pedagogues of the humblest order are capable of imparting; but that class in Kerry are considerably superior to their brethren in other parts of Ireland, and upon the whole it could not be said that even his early education was by any means neglected. About this time his father’s pecuniary circumstances began evidently to improve; his uncle, the owner of Darrynane, though long married, had no issue; he declared Daniel O’Connell to be his favourite nephew, and therefore the friends of “the fortunate youth” thought that no expense should be spared upon the intellectual culture of one whose acknowledged talents and brightening prospects rendered him what is called “the hope of the family.” In those days the Irish members of the Church of Rome were just beginning to exercise a few of the privileges which they now most amply enjoy; and at a place called Redington, in Long Island, one of their priests, a Mr Harrington, had opened a school. Thither young Daniel O’Connell was sent in the year 1788, and there he remained for about 12 months, when he and his brother Maurice took leave of Mr Harrington, with the view of proceeding to one of the Roman Catholic seminaries on the continent. Their first destination was Louvain, but immediately on their reaching that place it was found that Daniel had passed the admissible age; he, however, attended the classes as a volunteer, till fresh instructions could arrive from Kerry. At the end of six weeks the O’Connells proceeded from Louvain to St Omer, and finally to the English College at Douay, where the subject of this memoir pursued his studies with much distinction. Before he quitted St Omer the President of that College, in a letter still preserved, ventured to foretell that his pupil was “destined to make a remarkable figure in society.” On the 21st of December, 1793, Mr O’Connell, being then in the 18th year of his age, quitted Douay, and reached England, without encountering any adventures, save those which sprang from the insults that the revolutionary party were accustomed to inflict upon every one whom they supposed to be an Englishman, or an ecclesiastic, or even a student of divinity. The scenes which he witnessed in France caused Mr O’Connell frequently to declare that in those days he was almost a Tory. He certainly was not then a revolutionist, for the moment he reached the English packet-boat he and his brother tore the tricolour cockades from their hats, and trampled them on the deck. Those sentiments, however, he did not long continue to cherish, for a year had not quite passed away when he exchanged them for doctrines which strongly savoured of Liberalism. It is understood that at a very early age he was intended for the priesthood. Those Irish Roman Catholics who evinced any aptitude for a learned profession found none other open to them in the days of O’Connell’s boyhood. But it is difficult to imagine any one more incapable than he was of maintaining even those outward signs of holiness which are generally observed by the ecclesiastics of his persuasion. An overflow of animal spirits rendered him, not merely a gay, but an obstreperous member of society, and his riotous jocularity acknowledged no limits. All idea, therefore, of his becoming a priest, if ever seriously entertained, must have been abandoned before he reached the age of 19, for he was then devoted to anything rather than the service of the altar. Hare hunting and fishing were amongst his darling pastimes; and these means of relaxation continued to fill his leisure hours, even when his years had approximated to three score and ten. From 17 to 70 the energy of his intellect and the ardour of his passions seemed to suffer no abatement. A large and well used law library, numerous liaisons, a pack of beagles, and a good collection of fishing tackle, attested the variety of his tastes and the vigour of his constitution. Before he had completed his 20th year he became a student of Lincoln’s-inn, into which society he was received on the 30th of January, 1794. Previous to the year 1793 Roman Catholics were not admitted to the bar, and Mr O’Connell was amongst the earliest members of that Church who became candidates for legal advancement. His entrance upon the profession of the law, as a barrister, took place on the 19th of May, 1798, and it must be acknowledged that he spared no pains to qualify himself for that arduous pursuit. Though of a joyous temperament, self-indulgent, and in some respects sensual, he still was not indisposed to hard labour, so that he became almost learned in the law before he ever held a brief. Conformably with the custom of the Irish bar, Mr O’Connell prepared himself for any sort of business that might come within his reach, whether civil or criminal – whether at common law or in equity. There are men in the Temple who would laugh to scorn the best specimens of his special pleading; and conveyancers in Lincoln’s-inn who hold very cheap his skill in their branch of the profession; but in 1798 there was no man of the same standing on the Munster circuit, or at the Irish bar, who knew more of his profession than young Mr O’Connell; and in a short time he became a very efficient lawyer of all-work. The sanguinary rebellion of that period was then at its height, and he probably cherished in his heart as much of the jacobinical principle as was consistent with the character of a thorough Roman Catholic. But he was a lawyer, and being also a shrewd politician, he foresaw that of those United Irishmen who escaped from the field many would be likely to perish on the scaffold; with great prudence, therefore, and most loyal valour, he joined the yeomanry and supported the Government. Again, when it became necessary to reorganize a yeomanry force in 1803, he once more took his place in “the Lawyers’ Corps.” Many anecdotes have been at various times retailed, showing the pains which he took to mitigate the atrocities of that period; and, however indifferent he might be as to the remote tendency of his political proceedings, he certainly manifested throughout his life a strong aversion to actual deeds of blood.
Mr O’Connell had been four years at the bar, and had entered upon the 28th year of his age, before he contracted matrimony. His father and his uncle pointed out more than one young lady of good fortune whose alliance with him in marriage they earnestly desired; but he felt bound in honour not to violate the vows which he had interchanged with his cousin, Mary, the daughter of Dr O’Connell of Tralee. Her father was esteemed in his profession, but her marriage portion was next to nothing; and great therefore was the displeasure which this union occasioned. It took place privately on the 23d of June, 1802, at the lodgings of Mr James Connor, the brother-in-law of the bride, in Dame-street, Dublin. This occurrence for some months remained a secret, but eventually all parties became reconciled. Mrs O’Connell was deservedly esteemed by her family and friends, while she enjoyed a large share of her husband’s affection.
Having now reached that period when Mr O’Connell embarked in a profession and assumed the responsibilities of domestic life, we may arrest for a moment the current of his biography, in order to advert briefly to his family and connexions. Nothing is more frequent in society than a demand for “the real history of these O’Connells.” It is often asked have they been “jobbers, hucksters, pedlars, smugglers, and everything base and beggarly? or are they the lineal descendants of the Sovereign Lords of Iveragh, and have they, through successive generations, preserved the purity of gentle blood and the reputation of honourable men?” Alas! who can tell? If there be one thing in this world less worthy of credence than another it is an Irish pedigree. In England the “visitations” are carefully preserved; the records of the Herald’s College in this country, and the business of that office, are conducted quite in the manner of other public departments. Here all proceedings are so much according to law, that every family which preserves its land can prove its pedigree. But, amidst confiscations, burnings, rebellions, and massacres, the regularity of official records can never be maintained, and the evidences of succession degenerate into oral tradition. The ancient Greek, who happened to distinguish himself, usually traced his origin to a deified ancestor; the modern Irishman who makes a noise in the world, always avers that he is descended from a Sovereign Prince; while the world looks on, and with contemptuous impartiality pronounces both genealogies to be equally fabulous. Dismissing, therefore, all idle speculation respecting the early history of the O’Connells, it may be shortly stated that this family originally established itself in Limerick; that about the beginning of the seventeenth century they transferred their residence to the barony of Iveragh, in the western extremity of Kerry; but, being deeply implicated in the rebellion of 1641, they found it convenient to seek shelter in Clare. To this migration Daniel O’Connell, of Aghgore, formed an exception, and he contrived to keep his little modicum of land by not yielding to that appetite for insurrection. His son, John O’Connell of Aghgore and Darrynane, took the field in 1689 at the head of a company of Foot, which he raised for the service of James II., and having served at the siege of Derry, as well as at the battles of the Boyne and Aughrim, was included in the capitulation of Limerick. His eldest son died without issue, but his second son, Daniel, having married a Miss Donoghue, became the father of 22 children. The second of this gentleman’s sons was Morgan, who married Catherine, the daughter of Mr John O’Mullane, of Whitechurch, in the county of Cork; and the eldest son of this Morgan was the extraordinary individual whose death we have now to record. Although nothing can be more absurd than to claim for him an illustrious descent, yet several of his relatives and connexions were respectable, and some of the number have served with distinction in the French and Austrian armies. But, sooth to say, his father was a most undignified person:- a very painstaking, industrious man, whose thoughts never wandered from the main chance; who held a good farm and kept a large shop, or rather a sort of miscellaneous store, which ministered to the limited wants of Cahirciveen and its rude neighbourhood; who is said to have been most adroit in the arts by which money may be acquired, not only in those of the fair dealer, but in those of the free trader. Almost every one who lived on the western coast of Ireland was, in those days, more or less of a smuggler; therefore Maurice of Darrynane and Morgan of Carhen were not much worse than their neighbours in carrying on the contraband or the wrecking trade; and thus did the elder brother keep his acres free from incumbrance, while the younger scraped together pence and pounds, till he was able to acquire a few additional acres at low rents and under long leases, by which means he ascended into that detested class known by the designation of Irish middlemen. He lived to see his son a prosperous barrister, and the acknowledged heir to Maurice of Darrynane; old Morgan therefore left at his death, which took place in 1809, a very considerable portion, if not the greater part, of all that he possessed to his second son, Mr John O’Connell, of Grena.
In the year 1802 Mr O’Connell found himself under the displeasure of his relatives, and obliged to contend with the difficulties which are inseparable from a growing family and a narrow income. The legislative union had then been only just consummated; his first popular harangue, however, was delivered at a meeting of the citizens of Dublin, assembled on the 13th of January, 1800, to petition against the proposed incorporation of the Irish with the British Parliament. The public have long been familiar with the grounds upon which Mr O’Connell was accustomed to urge the claims of his native country to the possession of an independent legislature. It is believed that he never urged those claims with more effect than in his earlier speeches; the very first of which has been extolled as a model of eloquence. It is a generally received opinion that, from the very starting point of his career, he displayed every quality, good and evil, of a perfect demagogue; and, those pernicious accomplishments being once known to the public of Ireland, his success at the bar ceased to be problematical. The great body of the Roman Catholics were only too happy to patronize an aspiring barrister of their own persuasion; the attorneys on the Munster circuit found that his pleadings were much more worthy of being relied on than those of almost any other junior member of the bar; and soon this description of business poured into his hands so abundantly, that he employed first one, and then a second amanuensis. At nisi prius his manner alone was enough to persuade an Irish jury that his client must be right. His anticipation of victory always seemed so unfeigned that, aided by that and other arts, he seldom failed to create in the minds of every jury a prejudice in favour of whichever party had the good fortune to have hired his services. His astonishing skill in cross-examination; the caution, dexterity, and judgment which he displayed in conducting a cause; the clearness and precision with which he disentangled the most intricate mass of evidence, especially in matters of account, procured for him the entire confidence of all those who had legal patronage to dispense. But his not being a Protestant excluded him from much valuable business. A Roman Catholic in those days was never heard in the courts of justice with that gracious approbation which encourages a youthful advocate; before a common jury, however, no man could be more successful than the subject of the present memoir, for this, among other reasons, that a large fund of the broadest humour usually enabled him to have the laugh on his side. In the Rolls Court also, where Mr Curran at that time presided, Mr O’Connell was in the highest favour.
During the few years which elapsed between 1800 and the death of Mr Pitt, two or three demonstrations were made in Dublin against the legislative union, in all of which Mr O’Connell continued to gain reputation as a popular leader; but he had not yet been recognized as the great agent of what was called “Catholic Emancipation.” For some time after the extinction of the Irish Parliament it was believed that the expectations excited by Mr Pitt respecting a repeal of the penal laws would be realized. But three successive Ministries occupied the Cabinet without possessing ability, or perhaps inclination, to effect that object when at length Mr Perceval was annnounced as the head of the Government amidst all the triumph of a grand No Popery agitation. Antecedently to this period, feeble efforts were occasionally made by the Roman Catholics, in which Mr O’Connell more or less participated, but it was not until the year 1809 that the struggles of that party became consolidated into a system and raised to the importance of a popular movement. The Orange party, of course, became alarmed; the measures of Government began to assume a definite and forcible character, obsolete statutes were called into activity, and fresh powers obtained from the Legislature. Some Roman Catholics of high rank, and others of good station, were prosecuted in the Court of King’s Bench. Numerous ex officio informations were filed; and the Irish Attorney-General made war upon the newspapers of Dublin with unexampled vigour and pertinacity. It happened, however, that during the prosecutions of that period Mr O’Connell appeared more frequently as an advocate than in any other capacity. Amongst the most remarkable of his speeches, and probably the ablest that he ever delivered at the bar, was his defence of Mr Magee, the proprietor and publisher of the Dublin Evening Post, a gentleman whom Mr Saurin, the Attorney-General of that day, conceived it to be his duty to prosecute for a libel on the Government. It need scarcely be stated that in almost all the political trials which took place in Ireland during the early part of the present century, Mr O’Connell was counsel for the accused; and, although proceedings of that nature in Dublin are usually marked by extreme intemperance on both sides, yet this characteristic of Irish litigation was never carried beyond the height which it attained while Mr Saurin was first law officer of the Crown. His mode of conducting prosecutions betrayed feelings of such bitter animosity, that Mr O’Connell could never hope to attain the objects of his ambition if he allowed any opportunity to escape of vituperating the Attorney-General; and the public of the present age will readily believe that his modes of attack were such as would, in England, excite universal disapprobation. Almost every one recollects that these proceedings on the part of the Irish Government proved wholly unsuccessful. Roman Catholic delegates might be dispersed under the Convention Act, a committee of the Roman Catholics might be suppressed under some other statute, a new bill might be introduced to declare a certain mode of associating illegal; but Mr O’Connell made it his boast that “so long as the right of petition existed he should be able to manufacture some device” by means of which the war of agitation could still be successfully waged. Whether his followers were called Pacificators in Conciliation-hall, or Repealers on Mullaghmast; whether they went by the name of delegates or committee-men, associators or liberators; patriots or precursors; no matter what the name or the pretence might be, the purpose never was anything else than to carry on in Dublin a sort of sham Parliament, which in the first place was used to obtain a repeal of the penal laws; in the second, to collect and administer that annual tribute called “the rent;” and in the third, to cajole and amuse the ignorant portion of the Irish people with that pestilent dream – an independent legislature. Of this machinery Mr O’Connell was at all times the moving agent. Whoever could consent to become a puppet and permit the chief showman to pull the wires, might assure himself of occupation for all his leisure time, and flattery enough to satiate the grossest appetite; but woe be unto him that dared to have an opinion of his own; for the colossal agitator in ascending his “bad eminence” seemed to derive especial pleasure from trampling under foot his rash and luckless rivals. The history of the years which elapsed between the development of Roman Catholic agitation in 1809 and its signal victory in 1829 discloses just this much respecting Daniel O’Connell; that he was sometimes the mere mouthpiece, and occasionally the ruler, guide, and champion of the Romish priesthood; that he maintained a “pressure from without,” which caused not only the Irish but the Imperial Government to betray apprehension as well as to breathe vengeance; and that he found or created opportunities, during this period of his life, to display in his own person every attribute of a democratic idol; and few readers require to be reminded that the history of all the men who form this class but too plainly shows in what a high degree the vices of their character predominate over the virtues. To sustain himself in the position which O’Connell held throughout the meridian of his career required great animal energy and unwearied activity of mind. He possessed both. Long before he reached middle life he had become the most industrious man in Ireland. As early as 5 o’clock in the morning his matins were concluded, his toilet finished, his morning meal discussed, and his amanuensis at full work; by 11 he was in court; at three or half-past attending a board or a committee; later in the evening presiding at a dinner, but generally retiring to rest at an early hour, and not only abstaining from the free use of wine, but to some extent denying himself the national beverage of his country.
He was often heard to say, “I am the best abused man in all Ireland, or perhaps in all Europe.” Amongst those who delighted to pour upon him the vials of their wrath, the municipal authorities of Dublin were perhaps the most prominent. The old corporation of that city was so corrupt, so feeble, and so thoroughly Orange in its politics, that Mr O’Connell reckoned confidently upon “winning golden opinions” from his party, while he indulged his own personal vengeance, by making the civic government of Dublin an object of his fiercest hostility. In the year 1815 this feud had attained to its utmost height, and various modes of overwhelming their tremendous adversary were suggested to the corporators; but at length shooting him was deemed the most eligible. This manner of dealing with an enemy is so perfectly Hibernian, that in Dublin it could not fail to meet with entire and cordial acceptance. At that time a Mr D’Esterre, who had been an officer of marines, was one of those members of the Dublin corporation who struggled the hardest for lucrative office. The more knowing members of that body hinted to him that an affair of honour with O’Connell would make his fortune. To such advisers the death of either party would be a boon, for the one was a rival and the other an enemy. O’Connell had publicly designated the municipality of Dublin as a “beggarly corporation,” and upon this a quarrel was founded by their champion, Mr D’Esterre, who walked about armed with a bludgeon, threatening to inflict personal chastisement on his adversary. The habits of thinking which then prevailed in Ireland admitted of no other course than that Mr O’Connell should demand satisfaction. Both parties, attended by their friends, met on the 31st of January, 1815, at a place called Bishop’s Court, in the county of Kildare. It sometimes happens that a man displays unusual gaiety when he is sick at heart; and never did the jocularity of O’Connell appear more exuberant than on the morning of that day when he went forth to destroy the life of his adversary or to sacrifice his own. Sir Edward Stanley attended Mr D’Esterre, and Major Macnamara was the friend of Mr O’Connell. At the first fire D’Esterre fell mortally wounded. A gamester would have betted five to one in his favour. Familiarized with scenes of danger from early youth, his courage was of the highest order; practised in the use of the pistol, it was said that he could “snuff a candle at twelve paces,” while Mr O’Connell’s peaceful profession caused him to seem – as opposed to a military man – a safe antagonist, and this, added to D’Esterre’s supposed skill as a shot, promised assured success to the champion whom the Orange corporation “sent forth to do battle” with the popish Goliah. But the lifeless corpse of the real aggressor bore its silent and impressive testimony to the imperfect nature of all human calculations. Mr O’Connell, though less culpable than his victim, still seemed conscious of having committed a great crime; and, influenced by a keen but imperfect remorse, he expressed the deepest contrition. It is, however, not the fact that he at that time “registered” his celebrated “vow” against the use of duelling pistols. On the contrary, he engaged in another affair of honour before finally abandoning the dernier resort of bullets and gunpowder. Mankind with one voice applauded his peaceful resolution the moment it was announced, but they were equally unanimous in condemning the license with which he scattered insult when he had previously sworn to refuse satisfaction. In a few months after the fatal event just recorded Mr O’Connell received a communication tending towards hostility from Sir Robert (then Mr) Peel, who at that time filled the office of Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Sir Charles Saxton, on the part of Mr Peel, had an interview first with Mr O’Connell, and afterwards with the friend of that gentleman, Mr Lidwell. The business of exchanging protocols went on between the parties for three days, when at length Mr O’Connell was taken into custody and bound over to keep the peace towards all his fellow subjects in Ireland; thereupon Mr Peel and his friend came to this country and eventually proceeded to the continent. Mr O’Connell followed them to London, but the metropolitan police, then called “Bow-street officers,” were active enough to bring him before the Chief-Justice of England, when he entered into recognizances to keep the peace towards all His Majesty’s subjects; and so ended an affair which might have compromised the safety of two men who since that time have filled no small space in the public mind.
The period which this narrative has now reached was still many years antecedent to the introduction of the Roman Catholic Relief Bill. Down to that moment Mr O’Connell prosecuted with unabated vigour his peculiar system of warfare against the supporters of Orange ascendancy, while he pursued his avocations as a lawyer with increasing and eminent success. As early as the year 1816 his professional position quite entitled him to a silk gown, but his creed kept him on the outside of the bar, where he continued to enjoy the largest and most lucrative business that ever rewarded the labours of a junior barrister. Meanwhile that body, called the Catholic Association, with O’Connell at its head, carried on the trade of agitating the Irish populace. The latter years of the Regency were marked by a new and more soothing policy towards Ireland. Upon the accession of George IV. he visited that country; in the early part of his reign the principle of conciliating the O’Connell party was maintained and extended; the Liberalism of the Canning policy began to prevail; “Emancipation” was made an “open question,” and even in 1825 the demand for religious equality seemed nearly established. Mr O’Connell declared himself willing to give up the forty-shilling freeholders – willing to sacrifice the lowest of his countrymen for the sake of the highest – to limit the democratic power in order that the aristocracy of the Roman Catholics should have seats in Parliament and silk gowns at the bar. The Parliamentary career of him – the “member for all Ireland” – now more immediately claims our attention; and it naturally takes its commencement from the first occasion upon which he was returned for Clare. A vacancy having occurred in the representation of that county, a gentleman called O’Gorman Mahon, seized by a sudden freak, posted off to Dublin, entered the Roman Catholic Association, and proposed a resolution calling on O’Connell to become a candidate, which was unanimously carried. Though legal success was impossible the scheme just suited the Irish character. It afforded the prospect of “a row,” and – more acceptable still – a piece of whimsical agitation. The long continued labours of O’Connell, extending even then over a period of more than twenty years, had rendered a maintenance of the penal laws a matter which the Government of that day considered to be, if not unjust, at least exceedingly unsafe; but it is believed that the great Clare election was the first event that awakened them to a full sense of danger. Mr O’Connell had been so often engaged on the wrong side of a legal controversy that he did not, upon this occasion, hesitate to promise his adherents an easy triumph. He averred that he could sit without taking the oaths; and his legal doctrines were supported by Mr Butler – a member of the English bar – while his pretensions as a candidate were sustained by the influence of the priesthood and the agency of the mob. Mr (afterwards Lord) Fitzgerald had represented Clare for many years, he was one of the resident gentry in a land where not to be an absentee is a virtue; his ancestors had long been settled in that county: he had faithfully maintained the interests, and spoken the sentiments of the popular party, and he was the firm friend of Roman Catholic emancipation; though only a tenth-rate man in Parliament, he was a first-rate man on the hustings, but his exertions at the Clare election were wholly and signally unsuccessful. The combined influence of the Government, of his own connexions, of the squirearchy, were scattered and set at nought by the power of the priesthood; and Mr O’Connell was, on the 6th of July, 1828, returned to Parliament by a large majority of the Clare electors. He lost no time in presenting himself at the table of the House of Commons, and expressed his willingness to take the oath of allegiance, but refusing the other oaths he was ordered to withdraw. Discussions in the house and arguments at the bar ensued; the speedy close of the session, however, precluded any practical result. Agitation throughout every part of Ireland now assumed so formidable a character that Ministers said they apprehended a civil war, and early in the next session the Roman Catholic Relief Bill was introduced and carried: Mr O’Connell was, therefore, in the month of April, 1829, enabled to sit for Clare without taking the objectionable oaths; but it was necessary that a new writ should issue, under which he was immediately re-elected.
His return for Clare was amongst the proximate causes of “emancipation,” but the “rent” was another source of still more active influence. Whether the scheme for raising that annual tribute originated in the fertile brain of Daniel O’Connell, or sprang from the perverted ingenuity of some less conspicuous person, certain it is that he was ultimately the great gainer. One of the earliest effects, however, of this financial project was most materially to aggravate that threatening aspect of public affairs which coerced the Duke of Wellington into proposing the Roman Catholic Relief Bill. A due regard to the precise succession of events makes it necessary here to notice an occurrence in itself of no great amount. On the 12th of February 1831, Messrs. O’Connell, Steel, and Barrett, were brought to trial, under an indictment, which charged them with holding political meetings contrary to the proclamation of the Lord Lieutenant; they pleaded guilty, but the act of Parliament under which they had been prosecuted expired pending the general election, and before they were brought up for judgment; they therefore escaped punishment, and the partizans of Mr O’Connell pointed to this negative victory as one of the proudest proofs that could be furnished of his infallibility as a lawyer. The death of George IV. of course led to a new Parliament, when Mr O’Connell withdrew from the representation of Clare and was returned for the county of Waterford. In the House of Commons, elected in 1831, he sat for his native county (Kerry). Dublin, the city in which the greater part of his life was spent, enjoyed his services as its representative from 1832 till 1836, when he was petitioned against and unseated, after a long contest, before a committee of the House of Commons. He then for some time took refuge in the representation of Kilkenny; but, at the general election in 1837, he was once more returned for the city of Dublin, and in 1841 for the county of Cork. Mr O’Connell had a seat in the House of Commons for 18 years, under the rule of three successive Sovereigns, during six distinct Administrations and in seven several Parliaments.
Every reader is aware that he took an active part in all the legislation of the period, as well as in the various struggles for power and place in which the political parties of this country have been engaged during the last 20 years; and right vigorously did he bear himself throughout those changing scenes … His position as mouth piece of the priesthood and populace of Ireland usually made it necessary that the tone of his speeches should harmonize with the feelings of a rude and passionate multitude; but on subjects distinct from the party squabbles of his countrymen scarcely any one addressed the house more effectively than did Mr O’Connell; and it is generally acknowledged that in his speeches upon the great question of Parliamentary Reform he was surpassed by very few members of either house. Although it cannot be denied that the faults of his character were numerous, and the amount of his political offences most grievous in the sight of the public, yet he enjoyed some popularity even in this country, for many elements of greatness entered into the constitution of his mind. Had he not belonged to a prescribed race, been born in a semi-barbarous state of society, been blinded by the fallacies of an educational system which was based upon Popish theology; had not his intellect been subsequently narrowed by the influence of legal practice, and the original coarseness of his feelings been aggravated by the habits of a criminal lawyer and a mob-orator, he might have attained to enviable eminence, legitimate power, and enduring fame. But he “lived and moved and had his being” among wild enthusiasts and factious priests. Who then can marvel that his great faculties were perverted to sordid uses? Apparently indifferent to nobler objects of ambition, he devoted herculean energies to the acquisition of tribute from his starving countrymen, and bestowed upon his descendants the remnants of a mendicant revenue, when he might have bequeathed them an honourable name. His Parliamentary speeches are numerous; but the events of his Parliamentary life have been few in number; for it can scarcely be said that by his personal efforts any series of measures were either carried or defeated; yet several propositions have been brought forward in the House of Commons by Mr O’Connell. Amongst the most remarkable of these was his motion for a repeal of the Irish union, submitted to Parliament on the 22nd of April, 1834. Upon that occasion he addressed the house with his usual ability for upwards of six hours; and Mr Rice (now Lord Monteagle) occupied an equal length of time in delivering a reply which might advantageously have been reduced within half its dimensions. After a protracted debate the house divided, only one English member voting with Mr O’Connell, the numbers being 523 to 38. Those who supported him on that remarkable occasion consisted of persons returned to Parliament by the Irish priests, at his recommendation, and pledged to vote as he directed; they were therefore called “the O’Connell tail,” and no doubt, when political parties were nicely balanced, the 30 or 40 members whom he commanded could easily create a preponderating influence. Thus it was his power which from 1835 to 1841 kept the Melbourne Ministry in office. To reward such important aid, the greater portion of the Irish patronage was placed at his disposal; and, to a great degree, the Irish policy of the Melbourne Government took its tone and character from the known sentiments of the demagogue upon whose fiat their existence depended.
The return of the party called Conservatives to power in 1841 was the signal for renewed agitation in Ireland, and this led to a lengthened interruption of Mr O’Connell’s Parliamentary labours; here, therefore, a fitting opportunity presents itself to state one or two circumstances which were not immediately connected with that portion of his career. In 1834 he received a patent of precedence next after the King’s second Serjeant. When the Dublin corporation was reformed he was elected Alderman, and filled the office of Lord Mayor in 1841–2. Mr O’Connell was appointed a magistrate of Kerry in 1835, but during the violent excitement which prevailed in 1843 the Lord Chancellor thought it necessary to remove him from the commission of the peace. He had controversies with all sorts of people, and was charged with sundry crimes, public and private; with having taken bribes from the millowners of Lancashire to speak against all short time bills; with having, even in his old age, seduced and abandoned more than one frail member of the fair sex; with having neglected and oppressed his tenantry to an extent which justified his being described as one of the most culpable individuals belonging to the vilest class in all Europe – the middlemen of Ireland. The evidence on which the other two accusations rest is rather doubtful; but the clearest possible proofs of his misconduct as a landlord were, in the year 1845, given to the public by The Times Commissioner. His expectations of office, of patronage, of power, and even of titular distinction are understood to have been quite as ardent as those of men who made no pretension to the liberal or the patriotic. It has been said, and generally believed, that he aimed at a baronetcy, and even hoped for a seat on the bench. The present age may well felicitate itself on the fact that O’Connell was not raised to judicial authority; for, instead of displaying any quality approaching to the calm impartiality of a judge, it had always been his practice to place himself in a position of hostility to every class, or at least to the representatives of every class in the community except the lowest. If the reader will only take the trouble to cast a glance over the index of any periodical publication which records the events of these times, he will find in letter 0, under the head “O’Connell,” – “Abuse of the Wesleyan Methodists; abuse of the Freemasons (by whom he was expelled in April, 1838); abuse of the Chartists; abuse of the English Radicals,” nay, even of the English women; “abuse of the King of Hanover, of the late Duke of York, of George III., of George IV., of the English aristocracy, of the Irish aristocracy, of the French Government, and especially of the French King;” to say nothing of his onslaughts upon Perceval, Liverpool, Wellington, Peel, and the head of every Tory Ministry; upon the established church, on the Dublin University, on the judges of the land, – upon every class and institution except the Irish populace and the church of Rome; thus labouring, day and night, to maintain the spirit of agitation just short of the point at which men are accustomed to burst forth into open rebellion. This peculiar system of his reached its culminating point in 1843. It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader that, to some extent, the subject of this memoir belonged to a political party, and, though at times he would call his political friends “base, bloody, and brutal Whigs,” yet, usually, when the Liberals occupied the Cabinet, he endeavoured to keep Ireland in a state favourable to Ministerial interests; but on all occasions when the Tories were in the ascendant, the full might of democratic agitation was brought into the field. In the autumn of 1841 Sir R. Peel became First Lord of the Treasury. Early in the spring of the following year a repeal of the union was demanded by every parish, village, and hamlet, from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear, while a fierce activity pervaded the Repeal Association. In the course of the next year (1843) “monster meetings” were held on the royal hill of Tara, on the Curragh of Kildare, on the Rath of Mullaghmast, and in a score of other wild localities; the Irish populace were drilled, and marshalled, and marched under appointed leaders, whose commands they obeyed with military precision, while the master-spirit who evoked and ruled this vast movement announced to all Europe that he was “at the head of 500,000 loyal subjects, but fighting men.” The Irish press enjoined “Young Ireland” to imitate the example of 1798, and open rebellion was hourly apprehended. At length the crisis arrived; the great Clontarf meeting was summoned; a Government proclamation to prohibit that assemblage went forth, the military were called out, and the grand repeal agitation shrank into nothingness at the mere sight of artillery and Dragoons. The intended meeting at Clontarf was fixed for the 8th of October, 1843; on the 14th of that month O’Connell received notice to put in bail; on the 2nd of November proceedings commenced in the Court of Queen’s Bench; the whole of Michaelmas Term was consumed by preliminary proceedings, and the actual trial did not begin until the 16th of January, 1844. Twelve gentlemen of the bar appeared on behalf of the Crown, and sixteen defended the traversers; who then can wonder that this remarkable trial did not close till the 12th of February? At length Mr O’Connell was sentenced to pay a fine of 2,000l. and be imprisoned for a year. He immediately appealed to the House of Lords by writ of error, but pending the proceedings on the question thus raised, he was sent to the Richmond Penitentiary, near Dublin, where for about three months he seemed to spend his days and nights most joyously. On the 4th of September the House of Lords reversed the judgment against O’Connell and his associates, Lords Lyndhurst and Brougham being favourable to affirming the proceedings in the Irish Queen’s Bench, while Lords Denman, Campbell, and Cottenham were of an opposite opinion. Mr O’Connell was therefore immediately liberated, and a vast procession attended him from prison to his residence in Merrion-square. From the moment that proceedings were commenced against him in the preceding year he became considerably crest-fallen. By the result of those proceedings his supposed infallibility as a lawyer ceased to be one of the dogmas of his party; the utter failure of the repeal movement greatly impaired his credit as a politician; the enormous costs of his defence nearly exhausted the funds of the repeal association; and in the altered state of his fortunes it became no easy matter for him to devise new modes of agitation. In 1845 he expressed his determination to repair to London during the ensuing session, to support a repeal of the Corn Laws. When he re-entered the House of Commons in 1846 it became evident to every observer that he had not only suffered in purse and popularity, but very materially also in health; that though his mind was still unclouded, his physical energy had disappeared, and that he could never again hope to be the hero of a “monster meeting.” Still a considerable portion of his ancient influence had not yet passed out of his hands, and when the Whigs once more came into office he was restored to the commission of the peace, and exercised no small authority over the Irish patronage of the Crown, of course giving Lord John Russell, in return, the full benefit of his support, to the great dismay of the “Young Ireland” party, who regarded his adhesion to any British Ministry as a traitorous “surrender of repeal.” Long and loud was the controversy between those belligerents; but the reader may well be spared the trouble of perusing even an abstract of the gross invectives poured on his head by a swarm of indignant followers, or a detail of the concessions wrung from him by a hard necessity. Unfortunately for O’Connell’s posthumous fame, he now betrayed “a broken spirit,” though not “a contrite heart;” and the popular influence, as well as the moral courage, of the old agitator sank under the pressure of his youthful and vigorous assailants; then came the famine, the falling off of “the rent,” thin audiences at Conciliation-hall, and the indefinite postponement of repeal. Successfully to contend with these disasters would have demanded the energy of O’Connell’s early days; but old, infirm, and broken-hearted, he was alike incapable of a manly struggle or a dignified retreat; and when once more he attempted to take his seat in Parliament, he seemed to be only the débris of an extinuished demagogue. To amplify the tale of his decline and fall would be inconsistent with the general tone of a narrative which has treated indulgently the memory of one who in his long life-time seldom spared a fallen adversary. In thus closing his history it may be well to avoid the contagion of his example, and to practise a forbearance of which he was incapable; for though to the crowd of his adherents he always seemed a munificent patron, yet small is the number of those who could sincerely say he had ever been a true friend or a generous enemy.
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MARIA EDGEWORTH (#ulink_8b92a15a-30b3-54c3-9e8a-6f05451b3b9a)
28 MAY 1849
OF MARIA EDGEWORTH it may be said – even more emphatically than of her sister-novelist, Miss Burney – that she lived to become a classic. Her decease in her 83rd or 84th year can hardly be felt as a shock in the world of letters though it bereaves her home-circle of one whose many days were but so many graces – so actively unimpaired did her powers of giving and of receiving pleasure and instruction remain till a very late period of her existence. The story of Miss Edgeworth’s life was some years since told by herself in her memoir of her father. She was born in England – the daughter of Mr Richard Lovell Edgeworth, by the first of that gentleman’s four wives – and had reached the age of 13 ere she became an Irish resident. Fifty years or more have elapsed since her Castle Rackrent – the precursor of a copious series of tales, national, moral, and fashionable (never romantic) – at once established her in the first class of novelists, as a shrewd observer of manners, a warm-hearted gatherer of national humours, and a resolute upholder of good morals in fiction. Before her Irish stories appeared, nothing of their kind – so complete, so relishing, so familiar yet never vulgar, so humorous yet not without pathos – had been tendered to the public. Their effect was great not merely on the world of readers, but on the world of writers and politicians also. Sir Walter Scott assures us that when he began his Scottish novels it was with the thought of emulating Miss Edgeworth; while Mr O’Connell at a later period (if we are to credit Mr O’Neill Daunt) expressed substantial dissatisfaction because one having so much influence had not served her country as he thought poor Ireland could alone be served – by agitation. Prudence will allay, rarely raise, storms; and Prudence was ever at hand when Maria Edgeworth (to use Scott’s phrase) “pulled out the conjuring wand with which she worked so many marvels.” Herein lay her strength and herein also some argument for cavil and reservation on the part of those who love nothing which is not romantic. “Her extraordinary merit,” happily says Sir James Mackintosh, “both as a moralist and as a woman of genius, consists in her having selected a class of virtues far more difficult to treat as the subject of fiction than others, and which had therefore been left by former writers to her.”
To offer a complete list of Miss Edgeworth’s fictions – closed, in 1834, by her charming and carefully wrought Helen – would be superfluous; but we may single out as three masterpieces, evincing the great variety of her powers, Vivian, Tomorrow, and The Absentee. Generally, Miss Edgeworth was happier in the short than in the long story. She managed satire with a delicate and firm hand, as her Modern Griselda attests. She was reserved rather than exuberant in her pathos. She could give her characters play and brilliancy when these were demanded as in “Lady Delacour;” she could work out the rise, progress, and consequences of a foible (as in Almeria) with unflinching consistency. Her dialogue is excellent; her style is in places too solicitously laboured, but it is always characteristic, yielding specimens of that pure and terse language which so many contemporary novelists seem to avoid on the maidservant’s idea that “plain English” is ungenteel. Her tales are singularly rich in allusion and anecdote. In short, they indicate intellectual mastery and cultivation of no common order. Miss Edgeworth has herself confessed the care with which they were wrought. They owed much to her father’s supervision; but this we are assured by her, was confined to the pruning of redundancies. In connexion with Mr Edgeworth the Essay on Irish Bulls was written; also the treatise on Practical Education … This brings us to speak of that large and important section of Maria Edgeworth’s writings – her stories for children. Here as elsewhere, she was “nothing if not prudential;” and yet who has ever suceeeded in captivating the fancy and attention of the young as her Rosamonds and Lucys have done? In her hands the smallest incident rivetted the eye and heart, – the driest truth gained a certain grace and freshness …
If Miss Edgeworth’s long literary life was usefully employed, so also were her claims and services adequately acknowledged during her lifetime. Her friendships were many; her place in the world of English and Irish society was distinguished. Byron (little given to commending the women whom he did not make love to, or who did not make love to him) approved her. Scott, addressed her like an old friend and a sister. There is hardly a tourist of worth or note who has visited Ireland for the last 50 years without bearing testimony to her value and vivacity as one of a large and united home circle. She was small in stature, lively of address, and diffuse as a letter-writer. To sum up it may be said that the changes and developments which have convulsed the world of imagination since Miss Edgeworth’s career of authorship began have not shaken her from her pedestal nor blotted out her name from the honourable place which it must always keep in the records of European fiction.
TOM MOORE (#ulink_35ac3790-a3c3-5859-8df2-3ea2ed23695b)
1 MARCH 1852
THE ELEGY OF TOM MOORE should not contain one mournful or distressing note! Flourishing in an age of poets – of men who have stamped their characters upon the literature of their country and earned undying fame – he takes his ground as fairly as the best of them. Within his sphere he is unapproachable. He has little in common with the stormy passion of Byron; the philosophical grandeur of Coleridge is unknown to him; the muse of Scott and his own are scarcely kindred cousins; his productions have as little of the dreamy and mystical splendour of Shelley as they are allied to the elaborate and fatiguing epics of Southey; but within the circle of his own uncontested dominion he has poured forth strains as exquisite as any fancy ever clothed in sparkling verse to delight the jocund heart of man. The mind of Moore, from the moment that he took pen in hand, may be said to have been always in a state of pleasure. He has written satires as well as songs, and dealt with themes both sacred and profane: he has described the loves of angels and the holy piety of erring mortals; but, whatever the employment, one condition of feeling is always manifest. Most musical, most happy was his genius, and music and joyousness are careering in almost every syllable that he spoke …
Thomas Moore was born in Dublin on the 30th of May, 1780, the son of a small tradesman, who afterwards became a quartermaster in the army. It is not easy to decide when he first attempted verse. Upon looking back he could not discover when he was not a scribbler. In his thirteenth year he was already a contributor to a magazine; in his fourteenth he had addressed a sonnet to his school-master; and some three years before he sent his productions to the Irish periodical he had distinguished himself in another branch of art by undertaking principal characters in amateur theatricals. Moore was privileged to be precocious without paying the penalty of precocity. When he was 12 years old he accompanied his father, a Roman Catholic, to a patriotic dinner held in honour of the French Revolution, then a recent event, and regarded, as he himself tells us, as a signal to the slave, wherever suffering, that “the day of his deliverance was near at hand.” Men’s hearts, it has been written, are cradled into poetry by wrong. The early genius of Moore was, no doubt, nurtured by the sufferings of his race, and maintained in vigour and freshness until the decaying music of his native land came to claim him wholly as her own. The act of Parliament having opened the University to Roman Catholics in 1793, the young poet immediately availed himself of his opportunity. The year following his admission, while still a child, he wrote and published a paraphrase of Anacreon’s fifth ode, and then proceeded to the translation of other odes by the same poet, for which he vainly hoped the university board might deem him “deserving of some honour or reward.” Disappointed in his expectation he nevertheless continued his task, and occupied himself in improving his verses and illustrating them by learned annotations, until he reached his 19th year, when he quitted Ireland for the first time, and set out for London “with the two not very congenial objects of keeping his terms in the Middle Temple and publishing by subscription his translation of Anacreon.” The translation duly appeared in 1800. It was dedicated to George IV., then Prince of Wales, who, we may remark, received no further honour at the poet’s hands.
In 1803 Moore had the misfortune to obtain worldly advancement. He was promoted to an official situation in Bermuda. The duties of the office were performed by a deputy, and the consequence, was great personal anxiety and heavy pecuniary loss to the poetical principal …
Moore’s birth and origin made him a Liberal and something more. He came into the world one of a then oppressed race. He was the contemporary and schoolfellow of an ardent band who believed all things lawful to the struggler for liberty, and his spirit went with them in their most daring aspirations. The hapless victims of their own rash, ill conceived, and unwarrantable projects for national emancipation were his chosen and beloved associates, and when he saw them sacrificed to their wild enthusiasm he cherished the passion that had consumed them and embalmed their memory in matchless melody and verse. In middle life Moore, favoured by the friendship of the great Whig chiefs, soothed by the concessions that had been made to his country and his creed, and warned by sober experience of the vanity of egregious expectation, settled down into a constitutional Whig; but at the starting point of his career he had as little affection for Whigs as for Tories. In the preface to one of a series of solemn satires, he speaks of both “factions” as “having been equally cruel to Ireland, and perhaps equally insincere in their efforts for the liberties of England.”
Moore had no cause to remember with pleasure either the prose or the poetry of these satirical exercises. Serious satire was at no time his forte – his lively and delicate hand could hardly wield the heavy weaponry of Dryden and Pope. Greater success attended his efforts when at a later period of his life he divested himself of his sombre attire, and became as joyous in hate as he had been in love. The Fudge Family, written in 1817, The Twopenny Postbag, and similar productions full of point, wit, and polish, are unrivalled as political lampoons, and preserve to this hour, their first exquisite relish. The generous fancy of the Irish poet could not be happy steeped in bitterness, and to affect sternness was to languish and die. The objects of Moore’s squib warfare were no doubt sufficiently conscious of the sharpness of an airy weapon, never otherwise than most dexterously handled by their foe; but we question whether they suffered half as much pain as they enjoyed pleasure from his lively feats. How could men be seriously angry with an adversary who simply tickled when he pretended to strike?
The apprenticeship of Moore was served when he commenced The Irish Melodies which have rendered his name famous wherever music is cherished. From that hour his genius triumphed, and most deservedly. Moore attributes all his poetical success to his strong and inborn feeling for music. There can be no doubt that his obligations to nature in this respect were very great. Music and poetry were wedded in his heart, and were inseparable. So intimately, indeed, were they united, that the sight of The Irish Melodies crowded together in one volume, unaccompanied by the notes with which they were always associated in his own mind, inflicted upon him positive pain. It was as if he saw the skeletons of his children ranged before him, deprived of the warm flesh and breathing form. To the reader the verses have beauty of their own, and charm irrespective of the strains by which they were suggested. Moore could no more unbind melody and language than he could gaze on female beauty and separate the notions of body and soul.
The publication of The Irish Melodies commenced in 1807, and, continued at intervals, was concluded in 1834. They have been translated into Latin, Italian, French, and Russian, and are familiar as proverbs amongst the fellow-countrymen of the poet, and indeed wherever English is understood and music loved. It is difficult for the critic to refer to them in too high a tone of panegyric. It may be true that force and dignity are wanting to some of those lyrics, that occasionally fancy labours until art becomes too evident in strained and frigid similes, that ornament at times overlays sentiment until nature pants beneath the glittering encumbrance; but it is equally certain that universal literature does not present a lovelier and more affecting tribute to a nation’s minstrelsy than is found in The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore. The love of country that pervades and inspires his theme, his simple tenderness of feeling, that at once strikes the heart as instantly to melt it, his facility of creation, linked vith the glad appreciation of all that is beautiful in nature – the grace, the elegance, the sensibility, the ingenuity, that are never absent – the astonishing and thoroughly successful adaptation of sense to sound, of sweetest poetry to thrilling music, – are claims to admiration which the most prosaic of his species will find it impossible to resist or gainsay.
The year 1812 found Moore, in his 32nd year, enjoying well-earned fame, but on circumscribed ground. He had not as yet given to the world a long and continuous work, and shown how well he could sustain the brilliancy that seemed too keenly elaborate for a protracted effort. In that year, however, the poet resolved to take the field against his most favoured competitors, and to attempt a poem upon an Oriental subject. In 1817 Lalla Rookh appeared … The poem was hailed with a burst of admiration from sceptics as well as believers.
And no wonder! It was a triple triumph of industry, learning, and genius. The broad canvas exhibited a gorgeous painting; from beginning to end the same lavish ornament, the same overpowering sweetness, the same variegated and delicate tracery, the same revelling of a spirit happy in its intense enjoyment of beauty that characterized the miniatures and gems that heretofore had proceeded from the artist’s pencil. So far from betraying a diminution of power, or an inability to maintain his high-pitched note, the poet pursued his strain until he fairly left his reader languishing with a surfeit of luscious song, and faint from its oppressive odours. We peruse the romance, and marvel at the miraculous facility of a writer who has but to open his lips to drop emeralds and pearls, like the good princess in the fairy tale. Nor does astonishment cease when we learn, that eager and all but involuntary as the verse appears to issue from its source, the apparently effortless composition is actually a labour performed with all the diligence of the mechanic and all the forethought of science. In his life of Sheridan, Moore informs us that many of the impromptu jokes of Richard Brinsley owed much of their point and off-hand brilliancy to the time and pains previously bestowed upon their manufacture. His own seemingly spontaneous and easy cadences were wrought most patiently at the anvil. But the time spent in the composition of Lalla Rookh, though it extended over years, was as nothing compared with the time given to preparation for the subject. For months Moore saturated his mind with Oriental reading, in order to familiarize himself with Oriental illustration, and with the view especially of educating his fancy for its essential and peculiar work. The research and industry of the poet were immense. He tells us himself that “it was amidst the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters, in a lone cottage amongst the fields, that he found himself enabled by that concentration of thought, which retirement alone gives, to call up around him some of the sunniest of his eastern scenes.” He had devoured every book he could get relating to the East, and did not rise from his occupation until he positively knew more of Persia than of his own country, and until his acclimated genius found it as easy to draw inspiration from the influences of a land he had never seen as from the living and silent forms by which, in his own country, he had been from his childhood surrounded. Eastern travellers and Oriental scholars have borne testimony to the singular accuracy of Moore’s descriptive pen … The poem, translated into Persian, has found its way to Ispalian, and is thoroughly appreciated on the shores of the Caspian. In London the poem looks like an exotic; there it is racy of the soil.
In the autumn of 1817, and in the fulness of his triumph, Moore visited Paris with Mr Rogers, and picked up, as we have already noted, the materials of his Fudge Family, a satire written on the plan of the New Bath Guide, and intended to help the political friends of the satirist at the expense of their opponents. Time has taken away from much of the interest that attaches to these squibs of the hour, but age can never blunt the point of their polished wit or dull its brilliancy. The popularity of the Fudge Family kept pace with that of Lalla Rookh. ln 1819 the poet went abroad again, this time with Lord John Russell. The travellers proceeded in company by the Simplon into Italy, but soon parted company, Lord John Russell to proceed to Genoa, Moore to visit Lord Byron in Venice. Moore had made the acquaintance of Byron in 1812, when the latter, then in his 20th year, had just taken the world by surprise with his publication of the earlier cantos of Childe Harolde. The poets took to each other as soon as they met, and their friendship continued unimpaired until death divided them. This tour yielded Rhymes on the Road, a volume of sketches which in no way added to the writer’s reputation, since it lacks all that is chiefly characteristic of his genius. Nature in Italy charmed Moore much more than art. At Rome he visited the great collections with Chantrey and Jackson, but was a stranger to the lively impressions received by his companions. The glorious sunset witnessed in ascending the Simplon lingered on his spirit long after the united glories of Rome, Florence, Turin, and Milan were obliterated from his memory.
Returning from Rome, Moore took up his abode in Paris, in which capital he resided until the year 1822. The conduct of the deputy in Bermuda had thrown the poet into difficulties, and until he could struggle out of them a return to England was incompatible with safety. There were not wanting friends to run to the rescue, but Moore honourably undertook to provide for his own misfortunes. Declining all offers of help, he took heart, and resolutely set to work for his deliverance. After much negotiation, the claims of the American merchants against him were brought down from 6,000 guineas to 1,000. Towards this reduced amount the friends of the offending deputy subscribed 300l. The balance (750l.) was deposited “by a dear and distinguished friend” of the principal in the hands of a banker, to be in readiness for the final “settlement of the demand.” A few months after the settlement was effected Moore received 1,000l. for his Loves of the Angels and 500l. for the Fables of the Holy Alliance. With half of these united sums he discharged his obligation to his benefactor …
In 1825 Moore wrote a Life of Sheridan, in 1830 he issued his Notices of the Life of Lord Byron, and in the following year the Memoirs of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, in all the biographies maintaining his well-earned position. In his Life of Sheridan he did not shrink from the difficulties of history. To borrow the language of a critic of the time, “he did not hide the truth under too deep a veil, neither did he blazon it forth.” Of Byron, Moore thought more tenderly than the majority of his contemporaries. The character of the staunch ally, old associate, and brother bard, is finely painted in the Notices, and, to the honour of Moore be it said, he knew how to stand by his departed friend while fulfilling his obligations to the public, whom it was his business to instruct. The life of the amiable, but weak-minded and luckless Lord Edward Fitzgerald, is the least noteworthy of Moore’s efforts of this kind. The History of Ireland, published from time to time in Lardner’s Cyclopedia, we believe to be the latest, as it is the most elaborate and serious, of our author’s compositions.
For many years in the enjoyment of a pension conferred upon him by his political friends, Moore quietly resided in his cottage near Devizes, in Wiltshire, from which he occasionally emerged to find a glad and hearty welcome among the best-born and most highly-gifted of his countrymen. During such separations from home it was the habit of the poet to correspond daily with his wife. The letters written at these times, are preserved, to be incorporated, we trust, in the diary of his life, upon which Moore was busily engaged. Mrs Moore survives her husband, but his four children have preceded him to the grave.
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FATHER MATHEW (#ulink_3434f680-1164-508b-a5a2-ad028fcbfc91)
12 DECEMBER 1856
THE DEPARTURE OF a great and good man from among us, and the loss of one whose charity and good deeds were of more than European reputation, seem to call for a more extended notice than that which appeared in the columns of our Irish intelligence yesterday. The history of “Father Mathew” is strange and striking, and almost partakes of the character of romance. It has often been said, by way of reproach against Ireland, that her clergy are almost all chosen, not from the nobles or the landed gentry and middle classes of Ireland, but from “the lowest of the people,” and that her priests have been chosen from the plough-tail and the pigstye. However this may be it was not the case with the subject of our memoir. Theobald Mathew was descended from a very ancient Welsh family, whose pedigree is carried in the records of the principality to Gwaythooed, King of Cardigan, in direct descent from whom was Sir David Mathew, standard-bearer to Edward IV., whose monument is to be seen in the cathedral of Llandaff. Edmund Mathew, his descendant in the sixth generation, High-Sheriff of Glamorgan in 1592, had two sons, who went to Ireland in the reign of James I. The elder son, George, married Lady Thurles, mother of “the great” Duke of Ormonde …
We believe that Theobald Mathew, son of James Mathew, of Thomastown, county Tipperary, was born at that place on the 10th of October, 1790 … At the age of 13 he was sent to the lay academy of Kilkenny, whence he was removed in his 20th year to Maynooth to pursue his ecclesiastical studies, having shown signs of a clerical vocation. On Easter Sunday, 1814, he was ordained in Dublin by the late Archbishop Murray. After some time he returned to Kilkenny with the intention of joining the mission of two Capuchin friars there; but before long he removed to Cork. By a rescript from the late Pope Gregory XVI. he received the degree of Doctor in Divinity, together with a dispensation allowing him to possess property. From the moment of entering upon his missionary duties at Cork he began to show the sterling worth of his character. Ever diligent in his work of the pulpit, the confessional, and the sick man’s bedside, he devoted all his spare time, not to violent agitation like Dr Cahill and other ecclesiastical firebrands, but to the temporal and spiritual wants of the poor, to whom he acted as counsellor, friend, treasurer, and executor. He acted as a magistrate as well as a minister, and thus composed feuds, secured justice to the oppressed, and healed the broken peace of many a family. His charities kept pace with his exertions, and were only limited by his means. Among other good deeds, Father Mathew himself purchased the Botanic Gardens of that city, and, allowing them to retain their former agreeable walks and statuary (the best specimens of Hogan’s native genius), he converted them into a cemetery, not for Catholics alone, but for members of every other denomination. To the poor burial was allowed gratuitously, and the fees derived from all other interments were devoted to charity. About the same time he commenced building a beautiful Gothic church at the cost of about 15,000l.
Thus, by the force of his well-known character as a genuine Christian patriot, even before the commencement of the Temperance movement in the south of Ireland, Father Mathew had risen to the highest estimation among his people. The affability of his manners, his readiness to listen to every grief and care, and, if possible, to remove it, the pure and self-sacrificing spirit of his entire career, were eminently calculated to seize upon the quick, warm impulses of the Irish heart, and to make his word law. Some 20 years ago there was no country in which the vice of intoxication had spread more devastation than in Ireland. All efforts to restrain it were in vain. The late Sir Michael O’Loghlen’s Act for the Suppression of Drunkenness was a dead letter; many even of the wise and good deemed it hopeless and incurable, and it was said that the Irish would abandon their nature before they abandoned their whisky.
There were those who thought otherwise. Some members of the Society of Friends and a few other individuals at Cork had bound themselves into an association for the suppression of drunkenness, but were unable to make head against the torrent. In their despair these gentlemen, though Protestants, applied to Father Mathew. Father Mathew responded to the call; with what success ultimately we suppose that our readers are all well aware. The work, however, was not the work of a day. For a year and a half he toiled and laboured against the deep-rooted degradation of the “Boys” of Cork, the ridicule and detraction of many doubtful friends, and the discountenance of many others from whom he had expected support. At length he had the satisfaction of seeing the mighty mass of obdurate indifference begin to move; some of the most obdurate drunkards in Cork enrolled their names in his “Total Abstinence Association.” His fame began to travel along the banks of the Shannon. First, the men of Kilrush came in to be received, then some hundreds from Kerry and Limerick; until, early in the month of August, 1839, the movement burst out into one universal flame. The first great outbreak was at Limerick, where Father Mathew had engaged to preach at the request of the bishop; and the mayor of which city declared that within 10 months no less than 150 inquests had been held in the county, one half of which were on persons whose deaths had been occasioned by intoxication. As soon as the country people heard that Father Mathew was in Limerick they rushed into the city in thousands. So great was the crush, that though no violence was used the iron railings which surrounded the residence of “the Apostle of Temperance” were torn down, and some scores of people precipitated into the Shannon … We have not the time or the space to follow Father Mathew in his Temperance progresses. Some idea of their results may be formed when we state that at Nenagh 20,000 persons are said to have taken the pledge in one day; 100,000 at Galway in two days; in Loughrea, 80,000 in two days; between that and Portumna from 180,000 to 200,000; and in Dublin about 70,000 during five days. There are few towns in Ireland which Father Mathew did not visit with like success. In 1844 he visited Liverpool, Manchester, and London; and the enthusiasm with which he was received there and in other English cities testified equally to the need and to the progress of the remedy.
It only remains to add, that in Father Mathew the ecclesiastic was completely absorbed in the Christian, the man of goodwill towards all his fellow men. To him the Protestant and the Catholic were of equal interest and of equal value. Again, no man ever displayed a more disinterested zeal. He spent upon the poor all that he had of his own and reduced to bankruptcy his brother, a distiller in the South of Ireland, whose death followed shortly upon the losses resulting from the “Temperance” crusade. Yet this man, and other branches of the family, though extensively connected with the wine and spirit trade, not only bore their losses without a murmur, but even supplied Father Mathew with large sums of money for the prosecution of his work. A few years since, Her Majesty was pleased to settle upon Father Mathew an annuity of 300l. in recognition of the services which he had rendered to the cause of morality and order; but even this we understand was almost entirely absorbed in heavy payments on policies of insurance upon his life, which he was bound to keep up to secure his creditors.
WILLIAM DARGAN (#ulink_00a2fc0f-5f33-5246-a3f7-6b6913bd3ed2)
8 FEBRUARY 1867
WILLIAM DARGAN, of whose death we have just been informed by telegraph, was the son of a farmer in the county of Carlow. Having received a fair English education, he was placed in a surveyor’s office. He obtained the appointment of surveyor for his native county, but soon after resigned, from a feeling that he could never in that position be able to advance himself as he thought he should do if he were free to do the best he could with his talents. The first important employment he obtained was under Mr Telford, in constructing the Holyhead road. He there learnt the art of road-making, then applied for the first time by his chief, the secret of which was raising the road in the middle that it might have something of the strength of the arch, and making provision for the effectual draining off of the surface water. When that work was finished Mr Dargan returned to Ireland and obtained several small contracts on his own account, the most important of which was the road from Dublin to Howth, which was then the principal harbour connected with Dublin. Soon after this he embarked in a career of enterprise which, owing to the state of the country at that time, and the nature of the works which he achieved, will cause him to stand alone as a leader of industrial progress in the history of Ireland. There was then on every hand a cry for “encouragement” and protection. In the name of patriotism people were invited to purchase certain articles, not because they were good, but because they were of Irish manufacture. To be personally engaged in business of any kind was considered vulgar. It was a thing to which no “born gentleman” would stoop, because if he did he would be put in Coventry by his class. The most wealthy manufacturer, no matter how well educated or gentlemanly, if he attended at his counting-house, or looked regularly after his business, would have been blackballed at any second or third rate club in Dublin. A gentleman might, indeed, amuse himself at some sort of work for the benefit of his health; but if it were for the benefit of his purse, and for so sordid a consideration as profit, he immediately lost caste. Trade might be a good thing in its way, but it should be left to men who were not born with gentle blood. Protestants of the middle classes, who had no pretensions to such blood, had imbibed from their “betters” much of the same contempt for industry and the same respect for idleness; while the Roman Catholics had not yet sufficiently recovered from the effects of the Penal Code to enter with self-reliance and persistent energy into any sort of industrial enterprise. It was under such circumstances that Mr Dargan applied himself to study the wants of his country, which, so far as the working classes were concerned, had derived so little benefit from political agitation. Such a man would naturally embrace any opportunity that opened for extending the benefits of the railway system to Ireland. Kingstown had superseded Howth as the Dublin harbour. It was increasing fast in population, and the traffic between it and the metropolis was immense. It was carried on chiefly on outside cars rattling away through stifling dust in summer and splashing mud in winter. Mr Dargan was then a young man comparatively unknown, except to a circle of appreciating friends. He inspired them with his own confidence; a company was formed, and he became the contractor of the first railway in Ireland – the Dublin and Kingstown line – a most prosperous undertaking, which has always paid better than any other line in the country. For several years it stood alone. People were afraid to venture much in railway speculation. Canal conveyance was still in the ascendant; a company was formed for opening up the line of communication between Lough Erne and Belfast and Mr Dargan became the contractor of the Ulster Canal, which was regarded as a signal triumph of engineering and constructive ability. Other great works followed in rapid succession; first the Dublin and Drogheda Railway, then the Great Southern and Western, and the Midland Great Western lines. At the time of the Irish Exhibition in 1853 Mr Dargan had constructed over 200 miles of railway, and he had then contracts for 200 miles more. All his lines have been admired for the excellence of the materials and workmanship.
Considering how completely untrained Irish workmen were at that time, and what perversity had been shown by some of the trades, it is a remarkable – indeed, a wonderful, fact that Mr Dargan in all his vast undertakings never had a formidable strike to contend with, and, though the ablest workmen flocked to him from all parts of the country, his gangs were never demoralized, as they have been under other contractors. Even the navvies looked up to him with gratitude as a public benefactor. He paid the highest wages, and paid punctually as the clock struck. So perfect was the organization he effected, so firmly were all his arrangements carried out, and so justly and kindly did he deal with the people, that he was enabled to fulfil to the letter every one of the numerous engagements with which he had entered. The result was that he was held in the highest respect by the whole nation, his credit was unbounded, and, as he once said at a public meeting, he “realized very fast.” At one time he was the largest railway proprietor in the country, and one of its greatest capitalists. The secret of his success, as he once said himself, consisted in the selection of agents on whose capacity and integrity he could rely, and in whom he took care not to weaken the sense of responsibility by interfering with the details of their business, while his own energies were reserved for comprehensive views and general operations. When his mind was occupied with the arrangements of the Exhibition of 1853 he had in his hands contracts to the aggregate amount of nearly two millions sterling. To his personal character and influence that Exhibition was mainly due, and, although many of the first men in the country, including the highest nobility, co-operated with alacrity, and aided with liberal contributions, he was the man who found the capital. After the Exhibition a public meeting was convened by the Lord Mayor, in compliance with a requisition signed by 40 peers, six Protestant Bishops, 15 Roman Catholic Bishops, 49 members of Parliament, and a host of magistrates and professional gentlemen, amounting to 2,200 names. From this meeting resulted a suitable monument to Mr Dargan – the Irish National Gallery, erected on Leinster Lawn, with a fine bronze statue in front looking out upon Merrionsquare. The Queen graciously honoured Irish industry in the person of its great chief. Her Majesty offered him a title, which he declined. She shook hands with him publicly at the opening of the Exhibition, and with the Prince Consort paid a visit to Mr and Mrs Dargan. Wishing to encourage the growth of flax, Mr Dargan took a tract of land in Clara or Kerry, which he devoted to its culture; but owing to some mismanagement the enterprise entailed a heavy loss. He also became a manufacturer, and set some mills working in the neighbourhood of Dublin. But that business did not prosper. About a year ago he had a fall from his horse by which his system was so badly shaken that his recovery was for some time doubtful. Since that he had another fall, but not so serious. Probably the ill state of his health brought on a confusion in his affairs, which recently resulted in his stopping payment and in an arrangement with his creditors, though his assets, it is confidently said, will pay much more than 20s. in the pound. His embarrassments, however, seem to have deeply affected his health and spirits, and brought on a disease to which his powerful constitution has succumbed.
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EARL OF ROSSE (#ulink_2817ec34-0a28-5c0b-8391-568277a92ddd)
2 NOVEMBER 1867
OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT in Dublin writes:-
The Earl of Rosse died yesterday, after a protracted illness, at his residence in Monkstown, County Dublin. In the world of science a death will leave a blank which the most distinguished of his associates will long view with painful concern. This was the sphere in which his great qualities could alone be appreciated, and where his genius shone amid the brightest of those who have adorned the age in which they lived. He was the eldest son of the second earl, and was born on the 17th of June, 1800, in the city of York. In 1818 he entered Trinity College, Dublin, and in the following year passed into residence in Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1822. The bent of his mind was shown at this early period by the distinction which he obtained as a first-class honour man in math-ematics. About this time he was induced to enter public life, and, as Lord Oxmantown, was elected representative of the King’s County, a position which he retained until the end of the first Reformed Parliament. He also sat for a while as a representative peer. His talents, however, had no congenial field in the Legislature, and his career was not marked by any brilliant feat of eloquence or statesmanship. Though he shrank from the prominence of a Parliamentary debater, he occasionally spoke on subjects on which he felt it due to his constituents to express his opinions. Among the more remarkable was Mr Whitmore’s motion for a committee of the whole House to consider the Corn Laws. He was opposed to the policy of repealing them, and showed the effect which it would have, especially as regards this country. He resisted Mr Hume’s motion for the abolition of the Lord Lieutenent on the ground that it would increase absenteeism. … After retiring from Parliament Lord Rosse applied himself with greater zeal and assiduity to the pursuit of astronomical science. He conceived the noble purpose of surmounting the difficulties which stood in the way of a more accurate observation of the heavenly bodies, and with unexampled patience and persistent energy applied himself to the self-imposed task. His wonderful mechanical skill and scientific knowledge enabled him ultimately to achieve his object. It was not until after repeated experiments and failures, which would have daunted a less determined or enthusiastic worker, that he at last succeeded in producing those magnificent instruments which have won for him European fame. The art of making reflecting telescopes of vast compass and power may be said to have originated with him, and has certainly been brought by his unwearied diligence and inventive sagacity to a perfection which before he undertook the task would have been pronounced impossible. No work can be imagined of more exquisite delicacy, and his success in overcoming the complicated difficulties which arose at every step is a marvel of patient ingenuity. The mirror of Lord Rosse’s largest telescope is a circular disc of metal weighing four tons, and measuring six feet in diameter; and a faint conception of the obstacles which he had to encounter may be formed when it is remembered that, in order to collect the utmost possible amount of light, which is the great object of reflectors, it must be slightly concave, about half an inch deeper in the centre than at the edge, and not exactly spherical, but varying from the spherical form only to the extent of the ten-thousandth part of an inch. The slightest variation of these conditions would produce a defective or distorted image. Lord Rosse not only succeeded in conforming to them, but attained to probably ten times greater precision. The shape, however, of the mirror is only one of the essentials. In adjusting the proportions of the copper and tin of which it is made, in guarding against the penetrating power of the molten mass which would make its way through the pores of cast iron – and wrought iron cannot be used, for the alloy would fuse with it – in the annealing, grinding, and polishing of the mirror, the latter process being performed by machinery, the resources of his inventive mind were displayed with marvellous effect. So completely did he master the minutest detail that those who desire to follow in his steps may pursue their course with perfect confidence. The value of the discoveries which his great instrument enabled him to make in the observation of nebuli, has been universally acknowledged. All the learned societies of Europe vied in doing him honour. In 1849 he was elected President of the Royal Society. He was elected a member of the Imperial Academy at St Petersburg, and was created a Knight of the Legion of Honour by the Emperor of the French, and a Knight of St Patrick by our most gracious Sovereign. He was Custos Rotulorum of the King’s County and Chancellor of the University of Dublin. He was also a President of the British Association. In politics he was a moderate Conservative, but held independent views on some leading questions. Though English in his birthplace and descent, he was strongly attached to this country by the ties of family, property, and sympathy.
CARDINAL CULLEN (#ulink_0401c9ff-735e-5c05-aa32-69f643933b81)
25 OCTOBER 1878
CARDINAL CULLEN, the Roman Catholic Primate of Ireland, died yesterday afternoon at his residence in Eccles-street, Dublin. It is supposed to have been caused by aneurism of the heart. His loss will give a severe shock to the Roman Catholic Church, of which he was the distinguished head in Ireland, and will be generally regretted, even by those who differed most widely from him on religious and political questions.
Of the early life of the Right Rev. Paul Cullen, D.D., but little is known beyond the fact that he was born about the year 1800, in the county of Meath, and was a member of a respectable family, engaged in agricultural pursuits. They are now among the most wealthy graziers in the country, and have considerable property in Meath and Kildare. His Christian name, which is not at all a common one in Ireland, would seem to denote an early dedication of his life to the priestly office to which especial honour is attached in a social as well as religious aspect by the Roman Catholic peasantry and industrial classes. Having been ordained for the ministry, he was sent to Rome, where he spent nearly 30 years of his life, and rose to a position of trust and eminence in the councils of the Vatican. He was officially connected with the management of the Irish College at Rome, but this was the only bond of connexion with his own country, and there can be no doubt that his ideas were deeply tinged by the impressions derived from foreign experience, and associated with the narrow circle in which he moved. In 1849 the death of Dr Crolly, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, created a vacancy in that important See, and, the Suffragan Bishops having been divided in opinion as to the choice of his successor, the Pope settled the dispute suo more by appointing Dr Cullen Primate of All Ireland. This exercise of Papal authority was regarded as an infringement of the elective rights or usage which had been previously recognized, and created much dissatisfaction at the time, though the supreme will of the Holy See was obeyed. To avoid scandal in the Church the bishops and clergy who had lived under a different regime suppressed their discontent, and the feeling gradually wore away. It was the first step, however, towards the enforcement of a despotic control which has since dominated the whole ecclesiastical system in Ireland. In pursuance of what seems to have been a deliberate purpose, the vindication of a principle which may be deemed essential to the preservation of unity and the concentration of power, the pre-existing plan of clerical government has been changed. The degree of independence which had been before enjoyed was taken away, and bishops and clergy were brought more into subjection to the direct authority of the Vatican. In furtherance of this policy, bishops were no longer elected by the clergy, and the old constitutional office of parish priest was superseded by that of administrator. The former possessed an independent parochial jurisdiction so long as he did not violate any canonical law, while the latter had no fixity of tenure, and might at any time be removed at the will of the diocesan, without being entitled to any compensation for even capricious disturbance. This change, which is being gradually and steadily worked out as opportunity offers, constitutes one of the most remarkable points of difference between the government of the Church of Rome in Ireland in the days of Cardinal Cullen and those of his predecessor. On the death of the late Dr Murray in 1851 Dr Cullen was transferred from the Primatial See of Armagh to the more important though less ancient and in an ecclesiastical sense, less dignified one of Dublin. No two characters could be more different than those of the mild and genial Archbishop Murray, whose liberal spirit conciliated many opponents of the Catholic claims and attracted the cordial esteem and friendship of the Protestant gentry, and the ascetic prelate who possessed no social sympathies, but looked, if not with suspicion and distrust, at least with cold and gloomy reserve, upon those of a heretical creed. He set up a new and strengthened by every means the old barrier of sectarian isolation and exclusiveness, and the result is the growth of a spirit in the country which may be more zealous and devotional but is also more narrow and illiberal than prevailed before his time. He was, as every one knows, an Ultramontane of the most uncompromising type, and though there were many, both of the clergy and laity, who dissented from his opinions, few had the courage to oppose them, enforced as they were by a systematic policy which made its influence felt and feared.
The name of Archbishop Cullen has been a foremost one in the history of Ireland for the last 28 years. No man in the kingdom has exercised a greater personal influence, or wielded more absolute power, by virtue of his high episcopal position as a Prince of the Church, Archbishop of the Metropolitan See, and legatee of the Pope. His authority, however, was not used for any selfish motive, or for the gratification of an arbitrary will, but in a conscientious and considerate spirit for the advancement of the interests of religion, according to his ideas of what was patriotic and right. It was not only implicitly obeyed, but was received with the respect and deference due to his office and his character … From the first the Cardinal has been unflinching and indefatigable in his advocacy of denominationalism, and there can be no doubt that the result of his persistent efforts has been to transform the national system into one, in fact, denominational. After a memorable struggle he succeeded in the famous Synod of Thurles by a majority of one vote in procuring the issue of an edict condemning the national schools. This has been a fruitful subject of contention ever since, and a severe embarrassment alike to the Church itself and to the State. This may be said to have been the only question of a political nature with which the Cardinal concerned himself, and it was only in consideration of the religious element that he took an active part in the agitation respecting it. He did not intermeddle in party strife or controversies, or countenance interference of his clergy in electioneering or other political movements. In this respect the Diocese of Dublin contrasted creditably with others in the country. All the thoughts and energies of his life were directed to the interests of religion, and he enforced, on the part of all who were subject to his authority, the strictest attention to their parochial duties. He was an earnest advocate and supporter of the temperance cause, and gave material help in promoting the Sunday Closing Act, and other social reforms. His loyal attachment to the Crown and constitution of England was shown with earnest and consistent firmness in trying times in spite of popular clamour and at the risk of personal odium. To none in Her Majesty’s Dominions was the British Government more indebted for co-operation in extinguishing the flames of insurrection during the Fenian excitement, and restoring tranquillity and order in the country. His great influence was thrown heartily into the scale of constitutional authority, and he spared no exertions to put down every form of secret societies, which he believed to be incompatible with the duty of a citizen and a Christian. In private life he was most estimable, and, under a cold and stern exterior, had a warm and generous heart. In 1866 he was proclaimed a Cardinal priest, being the first Irishman who was invested with the purple and raised to the rank of a Prince of his Church; in 1859 he served as director to the Holy See by organizing an Irish Brigade, who went to assist in restoring the temporal sovereignty of the Pope. He was not present at the election of Leo XIII., although he left Ireland to attend.
CHARLES STEWART PARNELL (#ulink_b001f4f9-8dd0-5a4e-9bab-7d9c804cdd8d)
8 OCTOBER 1891
MR CHARLES STEWART PARNELL died at half-past 11 on Tuesday night at his residence, 10, Walsingham-terrace, Aldrington, near Brighton. The event was not, however, known locally until yesterday morning, when the news rapidly spread, causing everywhere the greatest astonishment. It had not even been known that Mr Parnell had been ill, and the suddenness of the event led to the dissemination of sensational rumours, which, so far as could be ascertained, were altogether without foundation. Neither before nor after their marriage were Mr and Mrs Parnell much known in Brighton and Hove. Walsingham-terrace, where before the marriage they occupied adjoining houses, and where they had since resided, is a lonely row of houses near the sea some two miles westward of the town. It is not, therefore, surprising that Mr Parnell’s illness should have passed unnoticed. The facts, so far as they can be ascertained, appear to be as follows:- On Thursday Mr Parnell returned from Ireland to Walsingham-terrace suffering from a severe chill. As he was not unaccustomed to similar attacks little was thought of it at the time. The following day, however, he was so much worse that he did not leave his bed. On Saturday some improvement was visible in his condition, but on Sunday he suffered a severe relapse. A Brighton doctor was sent for, and found him, it is said, in the greatest agony, suffering from acute rheumatism. According to another account, however, death is ascribed to congestion of the lungs and bronchitis. Mr Parnell was nursed by his wife and one of her daughters, who happened to be staying at the time at the house next door, still kept up by Mr Parnell. In addition to the doctor already in attendance, two other medical men were called in. Mr Parnell remained, however, in the same condition until Tuesday afternoon, when a very rapid and startling change for the worse occurred, and after lingering for some hours in pain he died, as stated, at half-past 11. With the exception of Mrs Parnell and her daughter, no relatives or immediate friends of the deceased were present. Mrs Parnell is completely overcome by this sudden and heavy blow, and yesterday absolutely refused to see any one …
Charles Stewart Parnell, the eldest son of the late John Henry Parnell, high sheriff of Wicklow in 1836, was born at Avondale, in that county, in June, 1846. His mother was Delia Tudor, daughter of Admiral Charles Stewart, of the American Navy, who, as commodore, had been conspicuous in the naval struggle with England early in the century, when the United States struggled stoutly for the palm of naval supremacy. Mr Parnell’s family had long been settled in Cheshire, and from their seat there his great uncle, Sir Henry Parnell, whose motion on the Civil List turned out the Wellington Government in 1830, and who was afterwards Secretary for War and Paymaster of the Forces under the Whigs, took his title of Lord Congleton. The Parnells belonged to the “Englishry” of Ireland; one of them, Dr Thomas Parnell, an author now best known by his poem “The Hermit,” friend of Pope and Swift, and the subject of a sympathetic biography by Goldsmith, used to bewail his clerical exile among the Irish, and, indeed, consistently neglected his duties as Archdeacon of Clogher; others, later on, during the period of Protestant ascendency were Judges, officials, and members of Parliament; Sir John Parnell, who joined with Grattan and other patriots of that day in fighting for an independence that secured a monopoly of power to their own creed and caste, was Chancellor of the Exchequer just before the Union. Sir John Parnell’s grandson was Mr John Henry Parnell, of Avondale, the father of the future chief of the Separatists, who thus inherited on the paternal side an antipathy to the Union, and on the maternal side the traditions of a bitter conflict with England. Mr Parnell nevertheless received, like many scions of the Irish landlord class, an exclusively English education at various private schools, and afterwards at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where, however, he did not take a degree, and where, it is said, he was “sent down” for some rather gross breach of academic discipline. Some surprise was expressed in Ireland when, in 1874, Mr Parnell, then high sheriff of Wicklow, came forward to oppose in the county Dublin the re-election of Colonel Taylor, who had taken office as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Disraeli Government. He stood as an advocate of Home Rule, to which many of the Irish loyalists had temporarily attached themselves in their disgust at the success of Mr Gladstone’s disestablishment policy. But Mr Parnell’s “Nationalism” proved to be of another type. If it had a sentimental origin in his family traditions, it was qualified and dominated by the cold temper and the taste for political strategy which he seems to have inherited from his American kinsfolk. Defeated by a large majority in Dublin county, he was more successful a little more than a year later when a vacancy was created in the representation of Meath by the death of John Martin, one of the “Young Ireland” party and a convict of 1848, like his brother-in-law, John Mitchel. When Mr Parnell entered the House of Commons in April, 1875, the Liberal Opposition was disorganized, the Conservative Government was both positively and negatively strong, and the Home Rule party, under Mr Butt’s leadership, was of little account. Mr Parnell immediately allied himself with Mr Biggar, who had struck out a line of his own by defying decency and the rules of Parliament, and, with more or less regular aid from Mr F. H. O’Donnell and Mr O’Connor Power, they soon made themselves a political force. How far Mr Parnell saw ahead of him at this time, what his motives were, and what secret influences were acting upon him may, perhaps, never be revealed. He found, as he believed, a method of bringing an intolerable pressure to bear upon the Imperial Parliament and the Government of the day by creating incessant disturbances and delaying all business, and he persisted in this course in spite of the protests and the denunciations of Mr Butt and the more respectable among the Irish Nationalists. To quote the triumphant language of one of his own followers, writing, almost officially, long afterwards, whereas obstructive tactics had been previously directed against particular Bills, “the obstruction which now faced Parliament intervened in every single detail of its business and not merely in contentious business, but in business that up to this time had been considered formal.” The design was boastfully avowed that, unless the Imperial Legislature agreed to grant the Irish demands as formulated by Mr Biggar and Mr Parnell, its power would be paralyzed, its time wasted, its honour and dignity dragged through the dirt. In 1877, the whole scheme of obstructive policy was disclosed and exemplified in the debates on the Prisons Bill, the Army Bill, and the South Africa Bill. Speaking on the last measure, Mr Parnell said that “as an Irishman” and one detesting “English cruelty and tyranny” he felt “a special satisfaction in preventing and thwarting the intentions of the Government.” On one occasion the House was kept sitting for 26 hours by the small band of obstructionists. The rules of the House, even when cautiously strengthened at the instance of Sir Stafford Northcote, proved entirely inadequate to control men, like Mr Parnell, undeterred by any scruples and master of all the technicalities of Parliamentary practice. Motions of suspension produced as little effect as public censure, nor was Mr Butt, though he strongly condemned the policy of exasperation and lamented the degradation of Irish politics into a “vulgar brawl,” able to stem the tide. He was deposed in the winter of 1877 by the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, a body including most of the “advanced” wing of the Irish in England and Scotland; and though a modus vivendi was adopted in the Parliamentary party itself, and accepted by Mr Parnell, as he said, in Mr Butt’s presence, on the ground that he “was a young man and could wait,” it was felt that power had passed away from the moderates, of whom many were afraid to oppose the obstructives with a general election in sight, hoping, as the Parnellites said, to tide over the crisis and “survive till the advent of the blessed hour when the return of the Liberals to power would give them the long-desired chance of throwing off the temporary mask of national views to assume the permanent livery of English officials.” History sometimes repeats itself with curious irony, and these words are almost textually the same as those lately used by Mr Parnell of those most intimately associated with him in his campaign against Mr Butt. The Session of 1878 emphasized the cleavage; Mr Butt practically resigned the lead to the extreme faction, and both spoke and voted in favour of the foreign policy of the Government. Mr Parnell pursued his course of calculated Parliamentary violence. In 1879 Mr Butt died, a broken man, and Mr Shaw was chosen to fill his place as “Sessional Chairman” of the party. But events were playing to Mr Parnell’s hands. He had been associated with some of the Radical leaders in the attack on flogging in the Army, and he had been chosen as the first president of the Land League, which was started at Irishtown, in Mayo, a couple of weeks before Mr Butt’s death, and which embodied the ideas brought back from the United States by Mr Davitt after his provisional release from penal servitude, with three other Fenian prisoners, at the end of 1877. Mr Parnell was at the head of the “Reception Committee” which presented an address to these patriots, and the list of those associated with him contains, besides the names of Mr John Dillon and Mr Patrick Egan, those of James Carey, Daniel Curley, and J. Brady.
Up to this point there was nothing known to the public to show that Mr Parnell was not pursuing a Parliamentary agitation by irregular and censurable methods. How far he had previously allied himself with those who had other objects in view and who worked by other methods remains obscure. At any rate, he quickly entered into the policy that Mr Davitt had devised in America in co-operation with Devoy and others, and after taking counsel with the leaders of the Clan-na-Gael and of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. That policy had been originally sketched by Fintan Lalor, one of the ’48 men, and was intended to work upon the land hunger of the Irish peasantry in order to get rid of the British connexion. Davitt and Devoy brought over the revolutionary party to their views, including extremists like Ford of the Irish World, an open advocate of physical force, whether in the form of armed rebellion or of terrorist outrage. Proposals for co-operation with the Parnellites on the basis of dropping the pretence of federation and putting in its stead “a formal declaration in favour of self-government,” of giving the foremost place to the land agitation, and adopting an aggressive Parliamentary policy generally were transmitted to Ireland, and, though not formally accepted either by Mr Parnell, for the moment, or by the Irish Fenians became, in the opinion of the Special Commissioners, “the basis on which the American-Irish Nationalists afterwards lent their support to Mr Parnell and his policy.” This “new departure,” which Mr Davitt advocated as widening the field of revolutionary effort involved Mr Parnell’s adoption of a more decided line on the land question and the opening up of closer relations with his allies beyond the Atlantic. In June, 1879, therefore, a few weeks after the establishment of the Land League, and in the teeth of the denunciations of Archbishop MacHale, Mr Parnell, accompanied by Mr Davitt, addressed a League meeting at Westport, told the tenantry that they could not pay their rents in the presence of the agricultural crisis, but that they should let the landlords know they intended in any case to “hold a firm grip on their homesteads and lands.” He added that no concession obtained in Parliament would buy off his resolution to secure all, including, as Mr Davitt took care to say, the unqualified claim for national independence.
Mr Parnell’s advances to the Revolutionists in America had an immediate reward, not only in the removal of any remaining obstacles in the path of his ambition, but in the supply of the sinews of war for the work of agitation and electioneering. Mr Davitt started the Land League with money obtained out of the Skirmishing Fund, established by O’Donovan Rossa in order to strike England “anywhere she could be hurt” and then in the hands of the Clan-na-Gael chiefs. But much more was needed, and in October, 1879, Mr Parnell started with Mr Dillon for the United States. During the voyage he imparted his views to the correspondent of a New York paper, afterwards a witness before the Special Commission, and told him, among other things, that his idea of a true revolutionary movement in Ireland was that it should partake both of a constitutional and an illegal character, “using the Constitution for its own purposes, but also taking advantage of the secret combinations.” He was cordially welcomed by most of the extreme faction, and gratified them with declarations quite to their own mind. He told them that the land question must be acted upon in “some extraordinary and unusual way” to secure any good result and that “the great cause could not be won without shedding a drop of blood.” He went even beyond this point in the famous speech at Cincinnati, which he subsequently attempted to deny, but which was reported in the Irish World and was held to be proved by Sir James Hannen and his colleagues. He then said that the “ultimate goal” at which Irishmen aimed was “to destroy the last link which kept Ireland bound to England.” The American wing were perfectly satisfied, and Mr Parnell, when he was summoned back to Ireland by the news of the dissolution, felt that he could rely on their support, pecuniary and other. It was not, at first, so easy to convince the Irish Fenians – who had distrusted and abjured any form of Parliamentary action – that they ought to vote for Parnellite candidates; and one or two Parnellite meetings were disturbed by this element. But Mr Parnell’s speeches during the electoral campaign of 1880 showed them how far he was prepared to go in their direction, and how little inclined he was, to use his own phrase, “to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.” It was at the time that Mr Parnell told, with great applause, the story which became very popular on Land League platforms, of the American sympathizer who offered him “five dollars for bread and 20 dollars for lead.” The leading spokesmen and organizers of the League, Sheridan, Brennan, Boyton, and Redpath, were either known Fenians or used language going beyond that of Fenianism; and the same thing may be said of Mr Biggar, Mr O’Kelly, and Mr Matt Harris, members of Mr Parnell’s Parliamentary following. The policy which Mr Davitt, acting as the envoy of the Irish extremists, thus used Mr Parnell to carry through, was developed in the announcement of the boycotting system in the autumn of 1880. Meanwhile, the alliance had already borne fruit at the general election of that year, when Mr Parnell, aided somewhat irregularly by Mr Egan out of the exchequer of the League, was returned for three constituencies – Meath, Mayo, and the city of Cork. He decided to sit for the last, and as “the member for Cork” he has since been known. The overthrow of the Beaconsfield Government, which had appealed to the country to strengthen the Empire against Irish disorder and disloyalty, was an encouragement to the Parnellites, who had a narrow and shifting majority in the ranks of the Parliamentary party. Mr Shaw was supplanted as chairman by Mr Parnell, and an open separation between the two sections ensued. The Parnellites took their seats on the Opposition benches; the Moderate Home Rulers sat on the Ministerial side below the gangway. To the latter Mr Gladstone seemed to incline most favourably, as he showed afterwards when he proposed to make Mr Shaw one of the Chief Commissioners under the Land Act. The Liberals, though they took the opportunity of dropping the Peace Preservation Act, were not disposed to reopen the land question, and it was only under pressure that Mr Forster hastily introduced the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, which was rejected in the House of Lords, and appointed the Bessborough Commission.
Mr Parnell and his party seized the opportunities afforded by the distress in Ireland and the Parliamentary situation to push on the operations of the League. The policy of boycotting had been expounded and enforced early in the year in Mr Parnell’s speech at Ennis, a few days after Lord Mountmorres’s murder, when he urged the peasantry if any man among them took an evicted farm to put the offender “into a moral Coventry by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old.” This doctrine was rapidly propagated by Mr Dillon, Mr Biggar, and the organizers of the League, and in the autumn the persecution of Captain Boycott and many other persons became a public scandal. This system of acting upon those whom Mr Parnell had described as “weak and cowardly,” because they did not heartily join in the refusal to pay rent, has been pronounced on the highest judicial authority to amount to a criminal and illegal conspiracy, devised and carried out to lower the rental and selling price of land and to crush the landlords. Mr Parnell declared that he never incited to crime, but though he and his colleagues knew that boycotting and the unwritten law of the League led to outrages, wherever the organization spread, they took no effective measures to denounce and repress crime, and it is now plain that they could not do so without alienating the American support on which they were dependent. The ordinary law was shown to be powerless by the failure of the prosecution of Mr Parnell and others for conspiracy in Dublin in the opening days of 1881, when the jury disagreed, and Mr Parnell, in announcing the result to his American friends, telegraphed his thanks to the Irish World for “constant cooperation and successful support in our great cause.” But the progress of unpunished crime, in which the American-Irish brutally exulted, and the paralysis of the law compelled Mr Gladstone’s Government to act. Early in the Session of 1881 Mr Forster introduced his “Protection of Persons and Property Bill” and his “Arms Bill,” of which the former empowered the Executive to arrest and detain without trial persons reasonably suspected of crime. At the mere rumour of this Egan transferred the finances of the League to Paris. It was a part of Mr Parnell’s task, as he well knew, to fight the “coercion” measures tooth and nail, but, though he led the attack, the most critical conflicts were precipitated by the passion and imprudence of less cold-blooded politicians. We need not here recapitulate the history of that struggle, in which obstruction reached a height previously unknown, and in which the knot had to be cut for the moment by the enforcement of the inherent powers of the Chair. The Parnellite members were again and again suspended, and at length, after several weeks, both Bills were carried. Mr Parnell’s party had by this time assumed an attitude towards the Government of Mr Gladstone which was highly pleasing to the Irish World and the Nationalist organs in Ireland, but was ominous for the prospects of the Land Bill. They did not, however, venture to offer a direct and determined opposition to a measure securing great pecuniary advantages to the Irish tenants. They could not go beyond abstaining on the question of principle and denouncing the whole scheme as inadequate. Of course, if the Land Act had succeeded in accordance with Mr Gladstone’s sanguine hopes, it would have cut the ground from under Mr Parnell’s feet and deprived him of the basis of agitation on which his alliance with the Irish Extremists rested, and from which his party derived their pecuniary supplies. No sooner, therefore, had the Land Act become law than the word went forth from the offices of the League that the tenants were not to be allowed to avail themselves of it freely, but that only some “test cases” were to be put forward. The penalties of any infraction of this addition to the unwritten law were well understood, for all this while terrorism and outrage were rampant. Mr Gladstone was more indignant at the rejection of his message of peace than at the proofs, which had been long forthcoming, of the excesses of Irish lawlessness. He denounced Mr Parnell at Leeds, in impassioned language, and declared that “the resources of civilization against its enemies were not yet exhausted.” Mr Parnell replied defiantly that Mr Gladstone had before “eaten all his old words,” and predicted that these “brave words of this English Minister would be scattered as chaf f ” by the determination of the Irish to regain “their lost legislative independence.” A few days later he was arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham with Mr Sexton, Mr O’ Brien, the editor of his organ, United Ireland, and several others. Egan, on the suggestion of Ford, at once issued a “No-Rent” manifesto; the books of the Land League were spirited out of the jurisdiction of the Irish Executive, and as a natural consequence the Land League was suppressed. But the struggle was carried on, with little substantial change, during Mr Parnell’s imprisonment. The Ladies’ League nominally took the work in hand; American money was not wanting; boycotting was rigidly enforced, and was followed, as Mr Gladstone had shown, by crime. For this state of things the incendiary journalism subsidized and imported by the Parnellites was, and long after remained, responsible. The Irish World, with its advocacy of dynamite and dagger, was used to “spread the light” among the masses, and United Ireland was scarcely behindhand. The Freeman’s Journal, which had opposed Mr Parnell’s extreme views on the Land Act, was compelled to come to heel, and the priesthood, who never loved him, as a Protestant and as a suspected ally of the Fenians, found their influence waning in presence of the despotism of the League. The secret history of all that went on during Mr Parnell’s imprisonment in Kilmainham is not yet revealed, though some light has been thrown upon it by the recent split among the Nationalists. Mr Parnell, for instance, said the other day in the last speech he delivered that “the white flag had been first hung out from Kilmainham” by Mr William O’Brien. Be that as it may, it is evident that in the spring of 1882 both the Government and the Parnellites were anxious to compromise their quarrel. Mr Gladstone was pressed by the Radicals to get rid of coercion, and the patriots were eager to be again enjoying liberty and power. Negotiations were opened through Mr O’Shea; Mr Parnell was willing to promise that Ireland should be tranquilized for the moment and in appearance – through the agency of the League; Mr Forster refusing to become a party to this sort of bargain with those who had organized a system of lawless terrorism, resigned; Lord Spencer and Lord Frederick Cavendish went to Ireland as envoys of a policy of concession, including a Bill for wiping out arrears of rent. How long Mr Parnell would have continued to give a quid pro quo for this can only be guessed at. A few days after the ratification of what became known as the Kilmainham Treaty, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr Burke were murdered in the Phoenix Park by persons then unknown. Mr Parnell expressed his horror of the crime in the House of Commons, but refused to admit that it was a reason for the Coercion Bill immediately introduced by Sir William Harcourt. This change of policy was forced upon Mr Gladstone by the imperious demands of public opinion, which was exasperated by the defiant attitude of the Irish party. The forces of obstruction, however, were for the moment broken by the shock. The Coercion Act became law, and was at the outset vigorously administered by Lord Spencer and Mr Trevelyan, who were, in consequence, attacked with the most infamous calumnies by United Ireland and other Parnellite organs. The authors of several wicked crimes were brought to justice in Ireland in spite of the clamour of the Parnellites against Judges and jurymen, and early in 1883 the invincible conspiracy, which had compassed the deaths of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr Burke, was exposed by the evidence of the informer, James Carey. Mr Forster made this the occasion of a powerful attack on Mr Parnell in the House of Commons, telling the story of the Kilmainham negotiations in the light of later disclosures, and pointing out that the language used without rebuke in Mr Parnell’s organs and by his followers plainly sowed the seed of crime. Mr Parnell’s callous defiance of the voice of public opinion shocked even those inclined to make allowance for him. Radical sympathy was withdrawn from him, while there was about this time also a widening breach with the Irish-Americans, who did not wish to have outrage even condemned by implication, and who were entering upon the dynamite campaign. Nevertheless, Mr Parnell’s hold on his own party was unshaken; from time to time there were movements of revolt; he had to speak scornfully once of “Papist rats.” Mr Dwyer Gray, Mr O’Connor Power, Mr F. H. O’Donnell, and Mr Healy at different times tried to thwart him, but he swept all opposition away, and reduced his critics to subjection or drove them out of public life. The Land League was allowed to revive under the name of the National League, and, operating more cautiously on the old lines, secured Mr Parnell’s power. It was evident that the extension of the franchise would give Mr Parnell the power of nominating the representatives of three-fourths of Ireland. The priesthood, trembling for their influence, came round to him. But he was unable to induce the Government either to repeal the Coercion Act or to tamper with the land question. It was when the Franchise Bill was introduced that Mr Parnell’s influence over the Government was first manifested. He insisted that Ireland should be included in the Bill and that the number of the Irish representatives should not be diminished, and on both points he prevailed. Meanwhile the alliance with the American-Irish had been renewed. The Clan-na-Gael captured the Land League in the United States, and in view of the elections in Great Britain funds were provided, Egan being now a member of the organization. Simultaneously a more active policy was adopted at home. As soon as the passage of the Franchise Bill had been made sure the Parnellites joined with the Conservatives to defeat Mr Gladstone. Towards the weak Salisbury Administration that followed Mr Parnell showed, during the electoral period, a benevolent neutrality, acting on the principle he had laid down several years before in Cork – “Don’t be afraid to let in the Tory, but put out the Whig.” He judged that he would be thus more likely to hold the balance of power in the new Parliament, and Mr Gladstone held the same opinion when he asked for a Liberal majority strong enough to vote down Conservatives and Parnellites together. In an address to the Irish electors on the eve of the struggle the Parnellites fiercely denounced the Liberal party and its leader. Mr Parnell had even amused Lord Carnarvon at a critical time with a deceptive negotiation.
The issue of the contest left Mr Gladstone’s forces just balanced by those of the Conservatives and Parnellites combined. He at once resolved to secure the latter by an offer of Home Rule, though he had up to that time professed his devotion to the Union, and though nine-tenths of his followers had pledged themselves to it. His overtures were, of course, welcomed, though without a too trustful effusiveness, by Mr Parnell; the Conservative Government was overthrown on a side issue; Mr Gladstone came into power and introduced his Home Rule Bill. Much was made of Mr Parnell’s unqualified acceptance of that measure. It now appears that he objected to several points in it, being, no doubt, aware of the view taken of it by his American allies, but he did not press his objections, fearing, as he said since, that the insistence on further concessions would deprive Mr Gladstone of other colleagues and break up the Government. Mr Parnell’s temporary forbearance, which had no element of finality in it, did not save the Bill. In the Parliament of 1886 his numerical forces were nearly the same as those he previously commanded, but he was now allied with a greatly enfeebled Gladstonian Opposition. It was necessary to affect the most scrupulous constitutionalism, and for a time Mr Parnell played the part well. The Irish-Americans took the cue from him, and were willing to wait. Dynamite outrages had ceased. But the necessities of the case urged him to insist on reopening the Irish land question, and in Ireland the National League continued to work on the old system. Boycotting and its attendant incidents increased, and, during Mr Parnell’s temporary withdrawal from active politics, Mr Dillon and Mr O’Brien committed the party to the Plan of Campaign, which involved a pitched battle with the Executive and the law. The introduction of the Crimes Bill was the direct result of this policy, which Mr Parnell privately condemned. His opposition to the Bill was of the familiar kind. But the tactics of obstruction which were then pursued were overshadowed in the public eye by the controversy on “Parnellism and Crime” that arose in our own columns. Seeing that the alliance between Mr Parnell and the Gladstonian Opposition was growing closer and closer, that it was employed to obstruct the Executive Government and to set at naught the law, and that the success of Home Rule would deliver over Ireland to a faction tainted by association with Ford and Sheridan, we thought it right to call public attention to some salient episodes in Mr Parnell’s career and to draw certain inferences from them. We also conceived it to be our duty to publish some documentary evidence that came into our hands, of the authenticity of which we were honestly convinced, and which seemed to us perfectly consistent with what was proved and notorious. Mr Parnell gave a comprehensive denial to all our charges and inferences, including the alleged letter apologizing to some extremist ally for denouncing the Phoenix Park murders in the House of Commons. He did not, however, accept our challenge or bring an action against The Times, nor was it till more than a year later, after Mr O’Donnell had raised the question by some futile proceedings, that he demanded a Parliamentary inquiry into the statements made on our behalf by the Attorney-General. We need not here recite the story of the appointment of the Special Commission and its result. The evidence of Richard Pigott broke down, and with it the letters on which we had in part relied, and Mr Parnell’s political allies claimed for him a complete acquittal. But the Report of the Commissioners showed that, though some other charges against Mr Parnell were dismissed as unproved, the most important contentions of The Times were fully established. The origin and objects of the criminal conspiracy were placed beyond doubt; the association for the purposes of that conspiracy with the Irish-American revolutionists was most clearly made manifest, as well as the reckless persistence in boycotting and in the circulation of inflammatory writings after it was known in what those practices ended. Nor was it without significance that a confession was extorted from Mr Parnell that he might very possibly have made a deliberately false statement for the purpose of deceiving the House of Commons. Indeed, on more than one point where Mr Parnell’s sworn testimony had to be weighed against that of other witnesses – as in the case of Mr Ives and Major Le Caron – the Commissioners rejected it. Nevertheless, the Gladstonians went out of their way to affirm their unshaken belief in the stainless honour of Mr Parnell, to accept him as the model of a Constitutional statesman, and to base upon his assurances their confidence that a Home Rule settlement would be a safe and lasting one. Mr Parnell received the honorary freedom of the city of Edinburgh. He was entertained at dinner by the Eighty Club; Mr Gladstone appeared on the same platform with him; his speeches were welcomed at Gladstonian gatherings in the provinces as eagerly as those of the patriarchal leader himself; and, finally, he was the late Premier’s guest at Hawarden Castle, where the details of the revised Home Rule scheme, which has never been disclosed even to the National Liberal Federation, was discussed confidentially as between two potentates of co-equal authority.
But a cruel disappointment was in store for credulous souls. Mr O’Shea, whose intervention had brought about the Kilmainham Treaty, instituted proceedings against Mr Parnell in the Divorce Court. It was denied up to the last that there was any ground for these proceedings; it was predicted that they would never come to an issue. But when, after protracted and intentional delays, the case came on in November last, it was found that there was no defence. The adultery was formally proved and was not denied, nor was it possible to explain away its treachery and grossness. The public mind was shocked at the disclosure; but those who were best entitled to speak were strangely silent. Mr Gladstone said nothing; the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Ireland said nothing; Mr Justin M’Carthy, Mr Healy, and the rest of the Parliamentary party hastened to Dublin to proclaim, at the Leinster-hall, their unwavering fidelity to Mr Parnell. Mr Dillon and Mr O’Brien telegraphed their approval from America. On the opening day of the Session Mr Parnell was re-elected leader. Meanwhile the Nonconformist conscience had awakened, and Mr Gladstone responded to its remonstrances. His letter turned the majority round, and, after a violent conflict in Committee Room No. 15, Mr Parnell was deposed by the very men who had elected him. He refused to recognize his deposition, and has fought a daring, but a losing, battle in Ireland ever since. The declaration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy against him, however, sealed his doom. The clergy have worked against him as they never worked in politics before. Mr Dillon and Mr O’Brien have taken the same side. He has been defeated in North Kilkenny, North Sligo, and Carlow, and though he has been battling fiercely down to a few days ago, the ground has been visibly slipping away from him. Even his marriage with Mrs O’Shea, the only reparation for his sin, has been turned against him in a Roman Catholic country, and was the excuse for the defection of the Freeman’s Journal. It is not surprising that a feeble constitution should have broken down under such a load of obloquy and disappointment.
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SIR JOHN POPE HENNESSY (#ulink_ac671747-fefc-5576-b17a-8b721546b345)
8 OCTOBER 1891
SIR JOHN POPE HENNESSY, M.P. for North Kilkenny, died early yesterday morning at his residence, Rostellan Castle, from heart failure. Sir John, who was 59 years of age, had been suffering from anaemia, which may be traced to his long residence in tropical climates.
The death of Sir John Pope Hennessy removes a man who might have played a more important part in politics had he been differently or less brilliantly gifted. In his qualities and talents, as in his defects, he was a typical Irishman. He was quick of wit, ready in repartee, a fluent speaker, and an able debater; but the enthusiasm and the emotion which lent force and fire to his speeches led him into the adoption of extreme and impracticable views. He was one of the most independent of private members in the House of Commons. He might fairly be described as eccentric and crotchety; and the Colonial Office had reason to mistrust a subordinate who, as it might be charitably presumed, with the best intentions, was always stirring up troubles abroad and landing his chiefs in hot water. In short, we must believe that Sir John Hennessy, with a super-abundance of brain, had an unfortunate deficiency of ballast. The son of a Kerry landowner, he was born in 1834, educated at Queen’s College in his native city of Cork, and called to the Bar of the Inner Temple in 1861. His pursuit of the legal profession was somewhat perfunctory, for two years previously he had turned his attention to politics and taken his seat in the House of Commons. It must be confessed that he had the courage of his originality, for he had presented himself to the constituency of King’s County and carried the election in the novel character of a Catholic Conservative. We may presume that the clever young man was commissioned by the more worldly-wise members of his Church to prove there were possibilities of coming to an understanding with a party which had hitherto been antipathetical to them. From the first Sir John Hennessy took politics very seriously, and showed the ambition and resolution to get on. His Parliamentary record was an active one, and nowadays it would be difficult for a novice and a private member to achieve half so much. An Irish Catholic and a Conservative, he was at once patriotic and politic; and, moreover, he made sundry valuable contributions to the cause of practical philanthropy. The young member received a flattering compliment when he was formally thanked by the Roman Catholic Committee of England for his successful exertions in the Prison Ministers Act. He was thanked likewise by the Association of British Miners for useful amendments introduced in the Mines’ Regulation Bill, which showed he had carefully studied the subject. He was less practical when he urged upon the Government the propriety of making Irish paupers comfortable at home by reclaiming the swamps and the bottomless bogs. Generally he supported the Government on questions relating to the English Church Establishment; but, on the other hand, he took strong exception to the denominational system of education they had introduced in Ireland under what he declared to be the misnomer of a “national” system. Had he been content to go more quietly, and to be more amenable to party discipline, the Conservatives might have found him a useful ally, and, like the King of Moab with the recalcitrant prophet Balaam, they would willingly have promoted the protégé of the priests to great honour. As it was, they thought it prudent to give him the government of distant Labuan, the future of which seemed to be bound up with the existence of coalfields; and we suspect that it was his poverty rather than his will which reconciled him to that honourable exile. Few men have done more official travelling or seen more varied service in tropical climates. From Labuan he went to West Africa, to be transferred in the following year to the Bahamas; and after a short subsequent sojourn in the Windward Islands he governed cosmopolitan Hongkong and the semi-French island of Mauritius. We must add that Sir John Pope Hennessy’s colonial career says very little for the intelligence or discretion with which the Colonial Office exercises its patronage. He ought never to have been placed in charge of such colonies as Hongkong or the Mauritius, where the pretensions of the natives threatened to make trouble. The sympathizer with the down-trodden Catholics of West Ireland was an enthusiast with regard to the equal rights of men. And at the Mauritius, to make matters worse, that strong-willed martinet, Mr Clifford Lloyd, whose Irish antecedents associated themselves with peremptory suppression, was assigned to Sir John as Secretary and colleague. Of course, they quarrelled, like two jealous dogs, locked together in couples beyond the master’s sight and reach. The experience of Sir Hercules Robinson was called in to arbitrate. Sir John did not come very creditably out of the business, though the final decision was given in his favour. He returned to the colony, to be retired on a full pension when the term of his administration had expired. He had the satisfaction, however, of being formally congratulated by the Secretary of State on his successful administration. He might have been content to rest on his honours, and to interest his leisure with literature. But it was never in his nature to be idle. It is an affair of yesterday, and in everybody’s recollection, how he chanced to be put forward as a candidate for North Kilkenny in the very crisis of Mr Parnell’s career, and on the eve of Mr Parnell’s political collapse. When the choice was between the Protestant dictator and the priests, the choice of the devoted son of the Church could not be doubtful. With the whole influence of the Kilkenny clergy to back him, he carried the election by two to one. At that time he finally broke with the Conservative party by resigning his membership of the Carlton; but since then, owing probably to failing health, he had made no such figure in the House as formerly, and, indeed, had seldom been seen there. It only remains to say that he married a daughter of Sir H. Low, and that it was in 1880 he was created a Knight Commander of St Michael and St George. He showed his good taste by buying as his residence the picturesque and historical mansion in Youghal which had been given to Sir Walter Raleigh by his Gloriana; and, whether it were cause or effect, it was consequently appropriate that Sir John Hennessy should have published some years ago a volume on “Raleigh in Ireland, with his Letters on Irish Affairs and some Contemporary Documents.”
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MRS CECIL ALEXANDER (#ulink_61fbef08-59cd-5fd5-89b9-d0092d030667)
14 OCTOBER 1895
MRS CECIL FRANCES ALEXANDER, so well known as “C.F.A.,” died at the Palace, Londonderry, at 6 o’clock on Saturday evening after a few weeks’ illness. She was born in county Wicklow in 1818, and was the daughter of Major John Humphreys, who served with distinction at the battle of Copenhagen and was afterwards a landed proprietor and extensive land agent in Ireland. In 1847 she married the Rev. William Alexander, who became Bishop of Derry and Raphoe in 1867. In all religious and charitable works in Londonderry and the diocese she took a wise and energetic part. She possessed a simple and straightforward dignity of manner, which gave a peculiar distinction to her in social relations. Among the poor and aged she was loved with pathetic intensity. It is, however, upon her writings that Mrs Alexander’s extended fame is built. She had a natural bent for poetry, and her early intimacy with Keble and Hook stamped her mind with a lasting impression. Her “Hymns for Little Children” and “Moral Songs” have had an immense circulation. Her less widely known “Poems on Old Testament Subjects” reach a loftier practical standard, but it is by certain of her hymns especially that she will be remembered, not only within the Anglican Church, but by all Christian communities. Of several of these Gounod said that they seemed to set themselves to music. Six only need be indicated- “The roseate hues of early dawn,” “When wounded sore the stricken soul,” “His are the thousand sparkling rills,” “Jesus calls us o’er the tumult,” “All things bright and beautiful,” and “There is a green hill far away.” The “Burial of Moses” is her best known poem. Of this Tennyson observed that it was one of the poems by a living writer of which he would have been proud to be the author. The Rev. F. A. Wallis, of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, preaching in Londonderry Cathedral yesterday, mentioned that he had heard Mrs Alexander’s hymns sung by half-clad Africans in a language she had never known.
OSCAR WILDE (#ulink_fe3efa0c-3825-5752-8154-93bb71c87755)
1 DECEMBER 1900
A REUTER TELEGRAM from Paris states that Oscar Wilde died there yesterday afternoon from meningitis. The melancholy end to a career which once promised so well is stated to have come in an obscure hotel of the Latin Quarter. Here the once brilliant man of letters was living, exiled from his country and from the society of his countrymen. The verdict that a jury passed upon his conduct at the Old Bailey in May, 1895, destroyed for ever his reputation, and condemned him to ignoble obscurity for the remainder of his days. When he had served his sentence of two years’ imprisonment, he was broken in health as well as bankrupt in fame and fortune. Death has soon ended what must have been a life of wretchedness and unavailing regret. Wilde was the son of the late Sir William Wilde, an eminent Irish surgeon. His mother was a graceful writer, both in prose and verse. He had a brilliant career at Oxford, where he took a first-class both in classical moderations and in Lit. Hum., and also won the Newdigate Prize for English verse for a poem on Ravenna. Even before he left the University in 1878 Wilde had become known as one of the most affected of the professors of the aesthetic craze and for several years it was as the typical aesthete that he kept himself before the notice of the public. At the same time he was a man of far greater originality and power of mind than many of the apostles of aestheticism. As his Oxford career showed, he had undoubted talents in many directions, talents which might have been brought to fruition had it not been for his craving after notoriety. He was known as a poet of graceful diction; as an essayist of wit and distinction; later on as a playwright of skill and subtle humour. A novel of his, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” attracted much attention, and his sayings passed from mouth to mouth as those of one of the professed wits of the age. When he became a dramatist his plays had all the characteristics of his conversation. His first piece, Lady Windermere’s Fan, was produced in 1892. A Woman ofno Importance followed in 1893. An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest were both running at the time of their author’s disappearance from English life. All these pieces had the same qualities – a paradoxical humour and a perverted outlook on life being the most prominent. They were packed with witty sayings, and the author’s cleverness gave him at once a position in the dramatic world. The revelations of the criminal trial in 1895 naturally made them impossible for some years. Recently, however, one of them was revived, though not at a West-end theatre. After his release in 1897, Wilde published “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a poem of considerable but unequal power. He also appeared in print as a critic of our prison system, against the results of which he entered a passionate protest. For the last three years he has lived abroad. It is stated on the authority of the Dublin Evening Mail that he was recently received into the Roman Catholic Church. Mrs Oscar Wilde died not long ago, leaving two children.
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LORD MORRIS OF SPIDDAL (#ulink_909ca5e8-f44a-5acc-9b88-c1a8be663f93)
9 SEPTEMBER 1901
WE REGRET TO record the death of Lord Morris and Killanin, which occurred yesterday morning at 4 o’clock, at his residence, Spiddal, county Galway …
Irishmen have in considerable numbers made their mark in the profession of the law, but those with whom, on this side of the Channel, we are familiar have usually been members of the English Bar, like Baron Martin, Lord Cairns, Lord Macnaghten, and the late Lord Chief Justice. But in the last 30 years the two Irish Chancellors who have been peers, Lord O’Hagan and Lord Ashbourne, and the Irish Lords of Appeal, Lord Fitzgerald and the late Lord Morris, have served to bring more closely together lawyers of the two nationalities. Lord Morris and Killanin may be said to have had a singularly fortunate career, and up to the time of his resignation in the summer of 1900 he had filled judicial office for 33 years, a whole generation. Born on November 14, 1827, Michael Morris was a member of an old Irish family descended from one of the ancient 13 tribes of Galway, the city with which he was throughout his life associated. An ancestor, Richard Morris, was Bailiff of Galway in 1486. The family, it would appear, were always Catholics, and the father of the late peer was in 1841 the first of that faith who had been High Sheriff since 1690. He was a landed proprietor in the county. His distinguished son, whose career we have now to record, was always attached to his native place, and spent a great deal of his time at the family residence, Spiddal, about a dozen miles west of Galway, on the northern shore of the bay, a pleasant “oasis of civilization,” as its owner used to call it, amid some of the wildest tracts of Connaught. Educated at Erasmus Smith’s school in Galway, Michael Morris, like many other Catholics of that day, went up to the University of Dublin, despite its “Protestant atmosphere,” and it is right to say that he was always loyal to his Alma Mater. He entered Trinity College while still a mere boy and took his degree before he had completed his 20th year, graduating as Senior Moderator and gold medallist in Logic and Ethics in the summer of 1847 … He was called to the Irish Bar in 1849, and soon won a large practice on circuit and at nisi prius, especially in cases connected with his own province. His force of character and his racy wit, founded always on a strong basis of sterling common sense and an undisguised contempt for sentimentality and phrase-making, were rapidly recognized. He took silk in 1863, when he was a little over 35 years of age. In Galway, where he always enjoyed an extraordinary personal popularity, he attained to a position which enabled him to secure his return for that city, at the general election of 1865, at the top of the poll, obtaining the votes of over 90 per cent of the electors, though he issued no formal address and attached himself to no party. At no time, however, was it doubtful that Morris was a conservative in the broad sense of the word. He distrusted democratic institutions, particularly as applied to an imperfectly developed community like Ireland, and he scorned the sounding platitudes of professional patriots. No Irishman, however, had the best interests of his country more sincerely at heart, or worked more vigorously for them. Morris took up an independent attitude in the House of Commons. But on the change of Ministers in June, 1866, he was offered by Lord Derby and accepted the office of Solicitor-General for Ireland, being the first Roman Catholic who had received such promotion under a Conservative Administration. His acceptance was referred to in complimentary terms by the Prime Minister in the House of Lords. That it was not distasteful to his constituents in Galway was clearly shown when his seat was challenged on his seeking re-election after his appointment. He was returned by a majority of five to one, and when he became Attorney-General a few months later no one ventured to come forward against him.
In April, 1867, when he was little more than 39, he became a puisne Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, … On the retirement of Lord Chief Justice Monahan, in 1876, Mr Justice Morris succeeded him and was the last Chief of the Common Pleas. Eleven years later he was placed at the head of the Irish Common Law Bench as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Meanwhile he had done much public service of a non-judicial character. He was a leading member of the Royal Commission on Irish Primary Education in 1868–70; was one of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland from 1868 … In 1885 he was created a baronet. In 1889 he attained the culminating point of his professional success, becoming Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and entering the Upper House as a life peer with the title of Lord Morris of Spiddal. At the same time he was sworn of the Privy Council in England, and shortly afterwards became a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn. This was the first occasion – apart from the complimentary admission of Royal and princely personages – in which one who had never been called to the English Bar was placed upon the governing body of one of the Inns of Court.
As a puisne Judge, as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, Morris showed high judicial qualities. He was not, and he never professed to be, a lawyer deeply read in the reports and eager to associate his name with subtle developments of case law. But he was a most capable and careful Judge in nisi prius cases and on circuit, where his inborn sagacity, his scorn for shams, his rapidity in mastering facts, his knowledge of the national character, and his genial humour gave him a controlling power over all save the most incorrigible of juries. Yet it would be wrong to say that afterwards, when Lord Morris became a member of the Supreme Appellate Tribunal, he was not capable of dealing ably with judicial principles. Though he was an Irishman, he was not given to verbosity, and he was frequently content to record his concurrence with others of the legal members of the House of Lords. When he pronounced his judgments, however, he spoke always to the purpose, if briefly. Perhaps the public, and even his profession, cannot realize how valuable a check is the presence of incarnate common sense and good-humouredly cynical contempt for the extravagances of hair-splitting and logic-chopping on the part of some eminent lawyers. Of the House of Lords as an abode of liveliness, whether regarded from the political or from the legal point of view, Lord Morris had not a very high opinion. It is even whispered that he used to talk of the august Chamber, irreverently, as “the graveyard.” He sometimes could not resist the temptation to supply the quality that was lacking. The proceedings were occasionally diversified by a sally, delivered in the brogue which he never sought to modify, and which, indeed, he frankly declared had been his fortune. One of these interruptions to grave argument was in the prolonged appeal of “Allen v. Flood,” the trade union case decided in December, 1897, after a two years’ sojourn in the House of Lords. The late Lord Herschell had been frequent in rather petulant interruption of the counsel for the respondent. Lord Morris took the opportunity of saying, in a pretty loud voice and in a way which made laughter irresistible:- “I think we can all understand from the present proceedings what amounts to molesting a man in his business.” … The late Lord’s humour was not of the literary kind which finds its way into judgments, but it does bubble up now and again. In the decision of the Judicial Committee in “Cochrane v. Macnish” the question was of the lawful and unlawful use of the term “club soda,” and Lord Morris, who gave the decision of the tribunal, remarked:- “In the manufacture of soda-water there is no secret, and frequently no soda.” Perhaps his best judgment was the admirable one which he delivered in the Privy Council in “McLeod v. St Aubyn” in 1899. The decision was referred to in these columns in comment on the case in which grossly disrespectful language was used in a Birmingham newspaper of Mr Justice Darling, and the writer was subjected to a fine. Lord Morris, while affirming the existence, deprecated the exercise, of the jurisdiction to commit for contempt of Court on account of scandalous matter published with respect to the Court or Judge … On Lord Morris’s retirement in the summer of 1900 a hereditary peerage, the barony of Killanin, was bestowed upon him. He preferred, however, to be known by his old name.
Perhaps the most signal triumph, from a personal point of view, that Lord Morris had to boast of in his long and successful career was won shortly after his resignation of the Law Lordship in the early part of 1900. While he filled a judicial office, Lord Morris felt that it was not right for him to take an active share in party politics and political controversy. His eldest son contested the borough of Galway unsuccessfully in 1895, and, though he was chosen a member of the first county council of Galway under the Irish Local Government Act in 1899, the only Unionist elected west of the Shannon, it seemed that he had not much prospect of victory when he presented himself again as a candidate for the borough after the dissolution of last year. But, in the meantime, his father had been “unmuzzled.” Lord Morris had never lost touch with the people of Galway. He lived much among them, and enjoyed living among them. He knew them all, and rarely forgot a face. When the Local Government Bill was before the House of Lords, he fought manfully, and for the moment successfully, to preserve for Galway a privileged position as a county borough, and by his individual energy carried an amendment to this effect against the Government, in the Upper House, which was set aside in the House of Commons. Lord Morris, during the interval before the strict “electoral period,” when it was permissible for him as a peer to engage in political conflict, threw himself with characteristic energy and humour into the fray. It was largely due to his personal influence that Mr Martin Morris won his seat – the only one outside Ulster for which a Unionist was returned last autumn – by a satisfactory majority against a singular combination of adverse forces. All the sections of the Nationalists combined to work for the Separatist candidate, Mr Leamy, a popular and able man apart from politics. The Roman Catholic Bishop was Mr Leamy’s proposer, and, with hardly a single exception, the clergy, parish priests and curates alike, were active partisans on the same side. But Lord Morris appealed successfully to the memories and the kindly feeling of his old friends and neighbours, his former constituents. He reminded them that he had never severed his interests from theirs, and that he had always lived among them, dealt with them, knew almost every man by name, and was ardent for their welfare. He repelled in vigorous speeches the attacks upon him and his son as representatives of Toryism and landlordism. He roused the enthusiasm of the fishermen of “the Claddagh” by speaking to them in Irish, though he used to confess that he could no more read a line in that language than the majority of the professional patriots could understand it, whether spoken or written. Mr Martin Morris’s victory was creditable to himself; but it was even in a higher degree a personal triumph for his father and a tribute to the unique place he had won in the hearts of the people of Galway.
Perhaps Lord Morris’s social gifts were even more remarkable than his legal and political successes. What he enjoyed most of all things in the world was talk; and he talked admirably – not least because he chose to express himself in what he used to call “my broadest Doric” – whether he was strolling with a single companion through the rough moorland region behind Spiddal or was the life and soul of the company at a country house party or a London dinner. His humour was of a far higher quality than the fine-drawn subtleties of the professional wit. It was always rooted in a sturdy and fearless common sense. It may perhaps be said that in politics Lord Morris was a pessimist, like so many other brilliant humourists. He had not, at any rate, a very high opinion of either the intelligence or the straightforwardness of politicians. His reply to some one who asked him, somewhat inaptly, to explain “the Irish question” in a few words is well known. “It is the difficulty,” he said, “of a stupid and honest people trying to govern a quickwitted and dishonest one.” Yet he was by no means of opinion that the government of Ireland was impracticable, though he was full of scorn for the incurable optimism which professed to believe that Irish separatism would be weakened rather than strengthened by the extension of the franchise and, at a later date, the introduction of local government of the broadest democratic kind in Ireland. How the loyal minority could hope to win in an electoral fight he could not understand. “If it was to be fought out with fists,” he said, “I could understand it, but at the ballot-box, when the rebel party are ten to one, don’t ask me to believe that we can beat them.” When a distinguished Radical, begged to be informed how long the struggle against the law in Ireland would be maintained, after “resolute government” had been really instituted, Lord Morris’s answer was “one hour!” If the prediction has not been realized, it is because the condition precedent has never been fulfilled.
A whole chapter of legend has grown up about Lord Morris’s name and his reputation as a wit. Countless stories are told of his sharp sayings, some of them authentic and most of them characteristic. Perhaps none are more striking than some of the utterances attributed to him when he sat on the Bench in Ireland. During the earlier developments of Fenianism some Irish Judges expended a vast amount of rhetorical indignation on the puny traitors of that day. Morris dealt with them in a different fashion. He wasted no words upon them, but dismissed their futile folly with a moderate sentence and with cutting contempt. In a case where some young farmer’s sons were tried on a charge of illegal drilling and carrying arms by night, Morris said:- “There you go on with your marching and counter-marching, making fools of yourselves, when you ought to be out in the fields, turning dung.” On another occasion, when an eloquent advocate had extenuated some criminal act on the ground that “the people” were in sympathy with the offenders, the Chief Justice remarked, “I never knew a small town in Ireland that hadn’t a black-guard in it who called himself ‘the people.’” Of trial by jury in the sister island he had no very high opinion. “In the West,” he said, “the Court is generally packed with people whose names all begin with one letter, Michael Morris on the Bench, ten men of the name of Murphy and two men of the name of Moriarty in the jury-box, and two other Moriartys in the dock, and the two Moriartys on the jury going in fear of their lives of the ten Murphys if they don’t find against their own friends.”
As Chief Justice he had a high regard for the dignity and independence of his own Court, and especially resented any claim on the part of the Treasury to interfere. Once, it is said, a most distinguished official was sent over from Whitehall to Dublin, after a long correspondence on the side of the Department about the expenditure of fuel in the Courtrooms and Judge’s chamber, to obtain the answer that the vigilant guardians of the public purse had failed to extract in writing. He was received politely by the Chief Justice, who said that he would put him in communication with the proper person; and, ringing the bell, which was answered by the elderly female who acted as Court-keeper, he remarked, as he turned on his heel and left the room, “Mary, this is the man that’s come about the coals.” Shortly after the Land Act of 1881 became law a very important case was carried to the Court of Appeal, of which Morris, as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was an ex officio member. Morris was not summoned, and, meeting the Lord Chancellor in the street, he expressed his surprise. The Chancellor, with some embarrassment, explained that he had not wished to put the Chief Justice to inconvenience, that he had summoned a sufficient number of Judges to constitute the tribunal, and that, in fact, there were not chairs enough on the bench of the Court of Appeal to accommodate any more. “Oh!” (said Morris, according to this story). “That need make no difference. I’ll bring my own chair out of my own Court, and I’ll form my own opinion and deliver my own judgment, Lord Chancellor!” In the early days of the Home Rule policy the Chief Justice, it is said, was a guest at a great official banquet in Dublin, where a lady of high position, full of enthusiasm for Mr Gladstone’s latest transmigration, asked him whether the great majority of those present were not ardent Home Rulers. “Indeed, Lady,” said Morris, “I suppose that, with the exception of his Excellency and yourself, and, perhaps, half a dozen of the servants, there aren’t three in the room!”
Lord Morris and Killanin married, in 1860, Anna, daughter of the Hon. G. H. Hughes, Baron of the Court of Exchequer in Ireland. By her he had four sons and six daughters. The eldest son, Martin Henry FitzPatrick, a graduate of the University of Dublin, a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, succeeds, on his father’s death, to the Barony of Killanin and to the baronetcy. The life peerage of Lord Morris of Spiddal ceases, of course, to exist.
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ARCHBISHOP CROKE (#ulink_76cc28ec-07b1-535c-bae4-66432f6a5ebc)
23 JULY 1902
DR THOMAS WILLIAM CROKE, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cashel and Emly – perhaps the most remarkable Irish ecclesiastic since the death of Cardinal Cullen, though there was little in common between the two men – was born close to the town of Mallow, county Cork, on May 19, 1824. His people were well-to-do farmers. Though his mother was a Protestant, he was destined from an early age by his uncle, who took charge of his education, for the priesthood. He was never in Maynooth, the great training college of the Irish priesthood, but spent ten years in colleges on the Continent established during the operation of the Penal Laws for the education of priests intended for the mission in Ireland and Great Britain. At the age of 14, he entered the Irish College in Paris, and spent six years there; another year was passed in a college in Menin, in Belgium, and after an additional three years in the Irish College in Rome he obtained the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and was ordained priest in 1848. Then for brief periods he was Professor in the Diocesan College, Carlow, and in the Irish College, Paris, after which he returned to his native diocese of Cloyne, Cork, as a missionary priest. In 1858 he was appointed president of St Colman’s College, Fermoy; after seven years he returned to the mission as parish priest of Doneraile. In 1870, when he was 45 years of age, he was appointed by the Pope, on the nomination of Cardinal Cullen, to the bishopric of Auckland, New Zealand. In 1875 the bishopric of Cashel and Emly became vacant. The parish priests of the see met, as usual, to propose three names – dignissimus, dignior, dignus – from whom the Pope was to select the Archbishop. But on the recommendation of Cardinal Cullen the three names were set aside by the Holy See, and Dr Croke was recalled from New Zealand to take charge of the Archdiocese of Cashel and Emly. He was received with extreme coldness by the priests; but a patriotic oration he delivered at the O’Connell Centenary in August, 1875, made him extremely popular. He was thence known as “the patriot Archbishop.”
In the early fifties, while he was a curate in the diocese of Cloyne, Dr Croke took an active part in the land agitation for “the three F’s” – fixity of tenure, fair rents, and free sale – conducted by Gavan Duffy. The movement did not long survive. It was deserted by most of those who had created it. Gavan Duffy, describing Ireland as like “a corpse on the dissecting table,” resigned his seat in Parliament and emigrated to Victoria. Before his departure Dr Croke wrote him a letter, which thus concluded:- “For myself I have determined never to join any Irish agitation, never to sign any petition to Government, and never to trust to any one man or body of men, living in my time, for the recovery of Ireland’s independence. All hope with me in Irish affairs is dead and buried. I have ever esteemed you at once the honestest and most gifted of my country-men and your departure from Ireland leaves me no hope.” In 1879, clean on a quarter of a century after that despairing letter had been written, Mr Parnell went down to the little market town of Thurles, in Tipperary, where Dr Croke resided, to request the Archbishop to give his support to the Land League agitation which had just been inaugurated. Dr Croke stated some years afterwards that he was at first reluctant to join the movement and that he only yielded his consent when Mr Parnell actually went on his knees before him, saying, “I must have the Bishops at the head of this movement, else it will not succeed.” However, Dr Croke soon became the most active Land Leaguer among the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He supported the agitation in vigorous letters and speeches. But he thought the no- rent manifesto, issued on the proclamation of the Land League by Mr W. E. Forster, in 1881, was going too far. He wrote an address to the people of Ireland denouncing it, not, indeed, so much because it was immoral, as because it was illogical. He said that the trim reply to the proclamation of the Land League was to refuse to pay taxes rather than to repudiate debts due to a number of individuals, who had no responsibility for the action of the Government. Two years later he sent another letter to the Press advocating a national testimonial to Mr Parnell for his services to Ireland. Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical letter condemning the tribute, but this had the effect of increasing the subscription, and ultimately Mr Parnell was presented with a cheque for £40,000. Dr Croke and a number of other Bishops were summoned to Rome to explain their conduct to the Holy See. When he returned he received a most enthusiastic welcome, and in a speech at a public meeting declared he was “unchanged and unchangeable.”
In 1890 it fell to the lot of Dr Croke to draw up, on behalf of the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Ireland, an address to the Irish people declaring that Mr Parnell was not a fit man to be their leader, because of the disclosures of the O’Shea divorce case. This address was not issued until after the publication of Mr Gladstone’s letter stating that his efforts on behalf of Home Rule would be fruitless if Mr Parnell were retained as chairman of the Irish party. The charge was subsequently made against the hierarchy that they had postponed taking action until they saw how things were going decisively, but Dr Croke explained, five years later, that the delay was due entirely to the fact that the document had to be sent to Bishop after Bishop for signature. After the fall of Mr Parnell Dr Croke retired from public life. Appeals were frequently made to him to try to settle the differences between Parnellites and anti-Parnellites, O’Brienites and Healyites, but he refused absolutely to intervene.
Dr Croke, physically, was over 6ft. high and well made in proportion. In his youth and early manhood he had been a champion athlete in leaping and jumping, and was distinguished also in the hurling and football fields. All through life he took the keenest interest in the national sports and pastimes of the Irish people. On the foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1885 for the revival of Irish games he became its president. In his address on the subject he said:-
“Ball playing, hurling, football kicking, according to Irish rules, ‘casting’ (or throwing the stone), leaping in various ways, wrestling, handy-grips, top-pegging, leap-frog, rounders, tip-in-the-hat, and all such favourite exercises and amusements amongst men and boys may now be said to be not only dead and buried, but in several localities to be entirely forgotten and unknown. And what have we got in their stead? We have got such foreign and fantastic field sports as lawn tennis, polo, croquet, cricket and the like. Very excellent, I believe, and health-giving exercises in their way, still not racy of the soil, but rather alien to it.”
There might be, he added, “something rather pleasing to the eye in the get-up of the modern young man who, arrayed in light attire, with party-coloured cap on, and racket in hand, is making his way, with or without a companion, to the tennis ground,” but he preferred the youthful athletes of his early years – “bereft of shoes and coat and thus prepared to play at hand-ball, to fly over any number of horses, to throw the sledge of winding-stone, and to test each other’s mettle and activity by the trying ordeal of three leaps, or a hop, step, and jump.”
Dr Croke was of a genial and warm-hearted nature. He delighted in hospitality at his palace in Thurles, and after dinner was fond of regaling his guests with humorous Irish stories and Irish comic songs. He had a contempt for books, but especially abhorred collections of sermons. He did not hesitate to declare that Irish history was too cheerless a chronicle for him to study. It was infinitely better, he also said, to try to make history, even in a small way, than to write volumes about it.
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MICHAEL DAVITT (#ulink_c83b2bf3-0d56-5614-8fe6-80c1fe6d303d)
31 MAY 1906
MR MICHAEL DAVITT died early this morning at a private hospital, in Lower Mount-street, Dublin, where he had been lying in a critical condition for some days. Michael Davitt, probably the most resolute and implacable enemy of the connexion between Great Britain and Ireland that has appeared in modern time, was born at Straid, a small village in county Mayo, in March, 1846, a few weeks before the birth of Charles Stewart Parnell, his associate in after life, though coming from a very different social stratum. Davitt’s father was a petty peasant farmer, who was evicted in 1851 for non-payment of rent, which, however, it is alleged, had not been raised during the period of his tenancy. The family then migrated to Lancashire, and settled in the small manufacturing town of Haslingden, where the boy found employment in a cotton mill, and, though a Roman Catholic, got his elementary education at a Wesleyan school. When he was 11 years old a machinery accident deprived him of his right arm, but he got casual occupation as a newsboy, as an assistant letter-carrier, and ultimately as an employé in a small printing office. Reading widely if not wisely, he drifted rapidly into the ranks of the Fenian Brotherhood, which became actively aggressive in 1865. When an abortive attempt was made by the Fenians to capture Chester Castle, early in 1867, Davitt, according to an admiring biographer, “though unable to shoulder a rifle with his single arm, carried a small store of cartridges in a bag made from a pocket-handkerchief.” When the baffled band of conspirators broke up, Davitt escaped detection and returned to Haslingden, where he immediately resumed “active operations,” arranging for the secret export of firearms to Ireland. This led to his arrest in 31 May, 1870, on a charge of “treason felony,” on which he was tried at the Old Bailey, with a confederate, before Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, and convicted, without hesitation, by the jury. A letter in Davitt’s handwriting was produced and sworn to, a passage in which, the Chief Justice said, in passing a sentence of 15 years’ penal servitude, showed that there was “some dark and dangerous design against the life of some man.” Towards the close of 1877, however, Davitt was released, after serving half of his sentence in Dartmoor Convict Prison, and a few months later he visited the United States, where his mother, herself of American birth, though of Irish blood, had settled with other members of the family. Before crossing the Atlantic he had rejoined the “Irish Republican Brotherhood,” the branch of the Fenian organization established in Ireland, and was elected a member of the “Supreme Council,” which practically admitted him to confidential relations, as the Special Commission found, with the Clan-na-Gael and the whole body of American-Irish Fenians. He told the Commissioners himself that he had “a well-defined purpose” in visiting the States, which, as his further evidence showed, was to “make the Land Question the stepping-stone to national independence.” With another Fenian and ex-convict, John Devoy, Davitt, during his stay in America, studied the methods of revolution through agrarian agitation devised 30 years before by Fintan Lalor, and on his return to Ireland the confederates launched the “new departure,” with the assent and co-operation of the emissaries of the Clan-na-Gael, the aim being to combine the physical force faction and the agrarian revolutionists in a common policy, embracing an attack on rents and the acquisition of complete control over local elected bodies. Into this policy Mr Parnell was gradually drawn, and the Land League, originally started at Irishtown, in Mayo, early in 1879, developed, half a year later, into a “national organization,” with its seat in Dublin, Parnell as president, and Davitt as one of the secretaries. In view of the anti-clerical developments of Davitt’s later career, it is worthy of notice that the Irishtown meeting was called to denounce a landlord who was also a parish priest, one Canon Burke. Parnell’s visit to America, his violent speeches there, the assurances given to the physical force party that their methods were not to be interfered with were among the first results of the foundation of the Land League. Davitt himself crossed the Atlantic in May, 1880, just after the general election, and for several months acted “as the link between the two wings of the Irish party,” explaining to the Fenians that the aims of the two sections did not clash and that they might be of mutual aid to one another.
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Charles Lysaght
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Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: Discover the fascinating lives of the figures that have shaped Ireland from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Explore the rich history of the island’s cultural, social and political landscape, with more than 100 obituaries carefully curated from The Times archive.The Irish have contributed richly to the world, most notably in literature, but also in the arts, law, politics, religion, scholarship, science, soldiering and sport. In this volume, The Times brings together a unique and fascinating collection of obituaries. The list includes people who have made the greatest impact in their fields, others who have led particularly interesting or influential lives, and a selection of notable Irish figures in the history of The Times.The obituaries have been compiled and edited by Dubliner Charles Lysaght. A lawyer, biographer and reviewer, Charles is a long-time writer of obituaries for The Times. In his introduction, he discusses the nature of Times obituaries and how they have reflected the sometimes troubled and controversial relationship of the newspaper with Ireland.This book features the major Irish figures of influence from the last 200 years and includes a diverse range of people, from Daniel O’Connell to Ian Paisley, James Joyce to Maureen Potter. This updated second edition builds on the first by adding some of Ireland’s most notable characters from the modern era, such as Maeve Binchy, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Terry Wogan.