Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) by William Henry Hurlbert

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The grand gallery of the castle, the finest in the kingdom, though a
trifle narrow for its length, is hung with pictures and family
portraits. One of the most interesting of these is a portrait of the
black Earl of Ormon'de, a handsome swarthy man, evidently careful of his
person, who was led by that political flirt, Queen Elizabeth, to believe
that she meant to make him a visit in Ireland, and, perhaps, to honour
him with her hand. He went to great expenses thereupon. At a parley with
his kinsman, the Irish chieftain O'Moore of Abbeyleix, this black earl
was traitorously captured, and an ancient drawing representing this
event hangs beneath his portrait.

The muniment room, where, thanks to Lord Ormonde's courtesy, we found
everything prepared to receive us, is a large, airy, and fire-proof
chamber, with well-arranged shelves and tables for consulting the
records. These go back to the early Norrnan days, long before Edward
III. made James Butler Earl of Ormonde, upon his marriage with Alianore
of England, granddaughter of Edward I. The Butlers came into Ireland
with Henry II., and John gave them estates, the charters of some of
which, with the seals annexed, are here preserved. There are fine
specimens of the great seals also of Henry III., and of his sons Edward
I. and Edmund Crouchback, and of the Tudor sovereigns, as well as many
private seals of great interest. The wax of the early seals was
obviously stronger and better than the wax since used. Of Elizabeth, who
came of the Butler blood through her mother, one large seal in yellow
wax, attached to a charter dated Oct. 24, 1565, is remarkable for the
beauty of the die. The Queen sits on the obverse under a canopy; on the
reverse she rides in state on a pacing steed as in her effigy at the
Tower of London. The seals of James I. follow the design of this die.
Two of these are particularly fine. At the Restoration something
disappears of the old stateliness. A seal of Charles II., of 1660, very
large and florid in style, shows the monarch sitting very much at his
ease, with one knee thrown negligently over the other. Many of the
private letters and papers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, during which Kilkenny, as it had been often before, was a
great centre of Irish politics and intrigues, have been bound up in
volumes, and the collection has been freely drawn upon by historians.
But it would obviously bear and reward a more thorough co-ordination and
examination than it has ever yet received.

There is a curious Table Book here preserved of Charles I. while at
Oxford in 1644, from which it appears that while the colleges were
melting up their plate for the King, his Majesty fared better than might
have been expected. His table was served with sixty pounds of mutton a
day; and he wound up his dinner regularly with "sparaguss" so long as it
lasted, and after it went out with artichokes.

An Expense Book, too, of the great Marquis, after he became the first
Duke of Ormonde, Colonel Blood's Duke, kept at Kilkenny in 1668 throws
some interesting light on the cost of living and the customs of great
houses at that time. The Duke, who was in some respects the greatest
personage in the realm, kept up his state here at a weekly cost of
about L50, a good deal less--allowing for the fall in the power of the
pound sterling--than it would now cost him to live at a fashionable
London hotel. He paid L9, 10s. a week for the keep of nineteen horses,
18 shillings board wages for three laundry-maids, and L1, 17s. 4d. for
seven dozen of tallow-candles. The wines served at the ducal table were
Burgundy, Bordeaux, "Shampane," Canary, "Renish," and Portaport, the
last named at a shilling a bottle, while he paid no more than L3, 18s.
for six dozen bottles of Bordeaux, and L1, 1s. for a dozen and a half of
"Shampane." This of course was not the sparkling beverage which in our
times is the only contribution of Champagne to the wine markets of the
world, for the _Ay Mousseux_ first appears in history at the beginning
of the eighteenth century. It was the red wine of Champagne, which so
long contested the palm with the vintages of Burgundy. St. Evremond, who
with the Comte d'Olonne and the great _gourmets_ of the seventeenth
century thought Champagne the best, as the Faculty of Paris also
pronounced it the most wholesome of wines, doubtless introduced his own
religion on the subject into England--but the entry in the Duke's
Expense Book of 1668 is an interesting proof that the duel of the
vintages was even then going as it finally went in favour of Burgundy.
While the Duke got his Champagne for 1s. 2d. a bottle, he had to pay
twenty shillings a dozen, or 1s. 8d. a bottle, for five dozen of
Burgundy. He got his wines from Dublin, which then, as long before, was
the most noted wine mart of Britain. The English princes drew their best
supplies thence in the time of Richard II.

From the castle we drove through the snow to the Cathedral of St.
Canice, a grand and simple Norman edifice of the twelfth century, now
the Church of the Protestant bishop. An ancient Round Tower of much
earlier date stands beside it like a campanile, nearly a hundred feet in
height.

There is a legend that Rinuccini wanted to buy and carry away one of the
great windows of this Cathedral, in which mass was celebrated while he
was here. The Cathedral contains some interesting monuments of the
Butlers, and there are many curiously channelled burial slabs in the
floor, like some still preserved in the ruins of Abbeyleix. Lord de
Vesci pointed out to me several tombs of families of English origin once
powerful here, but now sunk into the farmer class. On one of these I
think it was that we saw a remarkably well-preserved effigy of a lady,
wearing a plaited cap under a "Waterford cloak"--one of the neatest
varieties of the Irish women's cloak--garment so picturesque at once,
and so well adapted to the climate, that I am not surprised to learn
from Lady de Vesci that it is very fast going out of fashion. This
morning before we left Abbeyleix she showed us two such cloaks, types
from two different provinces, each in its way admirable. Put on and worn
about the room by two singularly stately and graceful ladies, they fell
into lines and folds which recalled the most exquisitely beautiful
statuettes of Tanagra; and all allowance made for the glamour lent them
by these two "daughters of the gods, divinely tall," it was impossible
not to see that no woman could possibly look commonplace and
insignificant in such a garment. Yet Lady de Vesci says that more than
once she has known peasant women, to whom such cloaks had been
presented, cut off the characteristic and useful hood, and trim the
mangled robe with tawdry lace. So it is all over the world! Women who
are models for an artist when they wear some garment indigenous to their
country and appropriate to its conditions, prefer to make guys of
themselves in grotesque travesties of the latest "styles" from London
and Paris and Dublin!

Kilkenny boasts that its streets are paved with marble. It is in fact
limestone, but none the worse for that. The snow did not improve them.
So without going on a pilgrimage to the Kilkenny College, at which
Swift, Congreve, and Farquhar,--an odd concatenation of
celebrities--were more or less educated, we made our way to the Imperial
Hotel for luncheon. The waiter was a delightful Celt. Upon my asking him
whether the house could furnish anything distantly resembling good Irish
whisky, he produced a bottle of alleged Scotch whisky, which he put upon
the table with a decisive air, exclaiming, "And this, yer honour, is the
most excellent whisky in the whole world, or I'm not an Irishman!"

Urged by the cold we tempered it with hot water and tasted it. It shut
us up at once to believe the waiter a Calmuck or a Portuguese--anything,
in short, but an Irishman. It is an extraordinary fact that, so far, the
whisky I have found at Irish hotels has been uniformly quite execrable.
I am almost tempted to think that the priests sequestrate all the good
whisky in order to discourage the public abuse of it, for the "wine of
the country" which they offer one is as uniformly excellent.

Kilkenny ought to be and long was a prosperous town. In 1702, the second
Duke of Ormonde made grants (at almost nominal ground-rents) of the
ground upon which a large portion of the city of Kilkenny was then
standing, or upon which houses have since been built.

These grants have passed from hand to hand, and form the "root of title"
of very many owners of house property in Kilkenny. The city is the
centre of an extensive agricultural region, famous, according to an
ancient ditty, for "fire without smoke, air without fog, water without
mud, and land without bog"; but of late it has been undeniably
declining. For this there are many reasons. The railways and the
parcel-post diminish its importance as a local emporium. The almost
complete disappearance of the woollen manufacture, the agricultural
depression which has made the banks and wholesale houses "come down"
upon the small dealers, and the "agitation," bankrupting or exiling the
local gentry, have all conspired to the same result.

From Abbeyleix station we walked back to the house through the park
under trees beautifully silvered with the snow. At dinner the party was
joined by several residents of the county. One of them gave me his views
of the working of the "Plan of Campaign." It is a plan, he maintains,
not of defence as against unjust and exacting landlords, but of offence
against "landlordism," not really promoted, as it appears to be, in the
interest of the tenants to whose cupidity it appeals, but worked from
Dublin as a battering engine against law and order in Ireland. Every
case in which it is applied needs, he thinks, to be looked into on its
own merits. It will then be found precisely why this or that spot has
bees selected by the League for attack. At Luggacurren, for instance,
the "Plan of Campaign" has been imposed upon the tenants because the
property belongs to the Marquis of Lansdowne, who happens to be
Governor-General of Canada, so that to attack him is to attack the
Government. The rents of the Lansdowne property at Luggacurren, this
gentleman offers to prove to me, are not and never have been excessive;
and Lord Lansdowne has expended very large sums on improving the
property, and for the benefit of the tenants. Two of the largest
tenants having got into difficulties through reckless racing and other
forms of extravagance found it convenient to invite the league into
Luggacurren, and compel other tenants in less embarrassed circumstances
to sacrifice their holdings by refusing to pay rents which they knew to
be fair, and were abundantly able and eager to pay. At Mitchelstown the
"Plan of Campaign" was aimed again, not at the Countess of Kingston, the
owner, but at the Disestablished Protestant Church of Ireland, the
trustees of which hold a mortgage of a quarter of a million sterling on
the estates. On the Clanricarde property in Galway the "Plan of
Campaign" has been introduced, my informant says, because Lord
Clanricarde happens to be personally unpopular. "Go down to Portumna and
Woodford," he said, "and look into the matter for yourself. You will
find that the rents on the Clanricarde estates are in the main
exceptionally fair, and even low. The present Marquis has almost never
visited Ireland, I believe, and he is not much known even in London.
People who dislike him for one reason or another readily believe
anything that is said to his disadvantage as a landlord. Most people who
don't like the cut of Dr. Fell's whiskers, or the way in which he takes
soup, are quite disposed to listen to you if you tell them he beats his
wife or plays cards too well. The campaigners are shrewd fellows, and
they know this, so they start the 'Plan of Campaign' on the Portumna
properties, and get a lot of English windbags to come there and hobnob
with some of the most mischievous and pestilent parish priests in all
Ireland--and then you have the dreadful story of the 'evictions,' and
all the rest of it. Lord Clanricarde, or his agent, or both of them,
getting out of temper, will sit down and do some hasty or crabbed or
injudicious thing, or write a provoking letter, and forthwith it is
enough to say 'Clanricarde,' and all common sense goes out of the
question, to the great damage, not so much of Lord Clanricarde--for he
lives in London, and is a rich man, and, I suppose, don't mind the
row--but of landlords all over Ireland, and therefore, in the long-run,
of the tenants of Ireland as well."

At Luggacurren, this gentleman thinks, the League is beaten. There are
eighty-two tenants there, evicted and living dismally in what is called
the Land League village, a set of huts erected near the roadside, while
their farms are carried on for the owner by the Land Corporation. As
they were most of them unwilling to accept the Plan, and were
intimidated into it for the benefit of the League, and of the two chief
tenants, Mr. Dunn and Mr. Kilbride, men of substance who had squandered
their resources, the majority of the evicted are sore and angry.

"At first each man was allowed L3 a month by the League for himself and
his family. But they found that Mr. Kilbride, who has been put into
Parliament by Mr. Parnell for Kerry, a county with which he has no more
to do than I have with the Isle of Skye, was getting L5 a week, and so
they revolted, and threatened to bolt if their subsidy was not raised to
L4 a month."

"And this they get now? Out of what funds?"

"Out of the League funds, or, in other words, out of their own and other
people's money, foolishly put by the tenants into the keeping of the
League to 'protect' it! They give it the kind of 'protection' that
Oliver gave the liberties of England: once they get hold of it, they
never let go!"

I submitted that at Gweedore Father M'Fadden had paid over to Captain
Hill the funds confided to him.

"No doubt; but there the landlord gave in, and the more fool he!"

With another guest I had an interesting conversation about the Ulster
tenant-right, which got itself more or less enacted into British law
only in 1870, and of which Mr. Froude tells me he sought in vain to
discover the definite origin. "The best lawyers in Ireland" could give
him no light on this point. He could only find that it did not exist
apparently in 1770, but did exist apparently twenty years later. The
gentleman with whom I talked to-night tells me that the custom of Ulster
was really once general throughout Ireland, and is called the "Ulster"
custom, only because it survived there after disappearing elsewhere.
There is a tradition too, he says, in Ulster that the recognition of
this tenant-right as a binding custom there is really due to Lord
Castlereagh. It would be a curious thing, could this be verified, to
find Lord Castlereagh, whose name has been execrated in Ireland for
fourscore years, recommending and securing a century ago that
recognition of the interest of the Irish tenant in his holding, which,
in our time, Mr. Gladstone, just now the object of Irish adulation, was,
with much difficulty and reluctance, brought to accord in the
Compensation for Disturbances clause of his Act of 1870!

Of this clause, too, I am told to-night that the scale of compensation
fixed for the awards of the Court in the third section of it was devised
(though Mr. Gladstone did not know this) by an Irish member in the
interest of the "strong farmers," who wish to root out the small
farmers. There is an apparent confirmation of this story in the fact
that under this section the small farmers, under L10, may be awarded
against the landlord seven years' rent as compensation for disturbance,
while the number of years to be accounted for in the award diminishes as
the rental increases, a discrimination not unlikely to strengthen the
preference of the landlords for the large farm system.

CHAPTER V.

DUBLIN, _Tuesday, Feb. 14th._--I left Abbeyleix this morning for Dublin,
in company with Mr. and Mrs. Henry Doyle. Mr. Doyle, C.B., a brother of
that inimitable master of the pencil, and most delightful of men,
Richard Doyle, is the Director of the Irish National Gallery. He was
kind enough to come and lunch with me at Maple's, after which we went
together to the Gallery. It occupies the upper floors of a stately and
handsome building in Merrion Square, in front of which stands a statue
of the founder, Mr. William Dargan, who defrayed all the expenses of the
Dublin Exhibition in 1853, and declined all the honours offered to him
in recognition of his public spirited liberality, save a visit paid to
his wife by Queen Victoria. The collection now under Mr. Doyle's charge
was begun only in 1864, and the Government makes it an annual grant of
no more than L2500, or about one-half the current price, in these days,
of a fine Gainsborough or Sir Joshua! "They manage these things better
in France," was evidently the impression of a recent French tourist in
Ireland, M. Daryl, whose book I picked up the other day in Paris, for
after mentioning three or four of the pictures, and gravely affirming
that the existence here of a gallery of Irish portraits proves the
passionate devotion of Dublin to Home Rule, he dismisses the collection
with the verdict that "_ce ne vaut pas le diable_." Nevertheless it
already contains more really good pictures than the Musee either of
Lyons or of Marseilles, both of them much larger and wealthier cities
than Dublin. Leaving out the Three Maries of Perugino at Marseilles, and
at Lyons the Ascension, which was once the glory of San Pietro di
Perugia, the Moses of Paul Veronese, and Palma Giovanni's Flagellation,
these two galleries put together cannot match Dublin with its Jan Steen,
most characteristic without being coarse, its Terburg, a life-size
portrait of the painter's favourite model, a young Flemish gentleman,
presented to him as a token of regard, its portrait of a Venetian
personage by Giorgione, with a companion portrait by Gian Bellini, its
beautiful Italian landscape by Jan Both, its flower-wreathed head of a
white bull by Paul Potter, its exquisitely finished "Vocalists" by
Cornells Begyn, its admirable portrait of a Dutch gentleman by Murillo,
and its two excellent Jacob Ruysdaels. A good collection is making, too,
of original drawings, and engravings, and a special room is devoted to
modern Irish art. I wish the Corcoran Gallery (founded, too, by an
Irishman!) were half as worthy of Washington, or the Metropolitan Museum
one-tenth part as worthy of New York!

The National Gallery in London has loaned some pictures to Dublin, and
Mr. Doyle is getting together, from private owners, a most interesting
gallery of portraits of men and women famous in connection with Irish
history. The beautiful Gunnings of the last century, the not less
beautiful and much more brilliant Sheridans of our own, Burke, Grattan,
Tom Moore, Wellington, Curran, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, O'Connell, Peg
Woffington, Canning, and Castlereagh, Dean Swift, Laurence Sterne are
all here--wits and statesmen, soldiers and belles, rebels and royalists,
orators and poets. Two things strike one in this gallery of the "glories
of Ireland." The great majority of the faces are of the Anglo-Irish or
Scoto-Irish type; and the collection owes its existence to an
accomplished public officer, who bears an Irish name, who is a devout
Catholic, and who is also an outspoken opponent of the Home Rule
contention as now carried on.

The gallery is open on liberal conditions to students. Mr. Doyle tells
me that a young sister of Mr. Parnell was at one time an assiduous
student here. He used to stop and chat with her about her work as he
passed through the gallery. One day he met her coming out. "Mr. Doyle,"
she said, "are you a Home Ruler?" "Certainly not," he replied
good-naturedly. Whereupon, with an air of melancholy resignation, the
young lady said, "Then we can never more be friends!" and therewith
flitted forth.

A small room contains some admirable bits of the work of Richard Doyle,
among other things a weird and grotesque, but charming cartoon of an
elfish procession passing through a quaint and picturesque mediaeval
city. It is a _conte fantastique_ in colour--a marvel of affluent fancy
and masterly skill.

I found here this morning letters calling me over to Paris for a short
time, and one also from Mr. Davitt, in London, explaining that my note
to him through the National League had never reached him, and that he
had gone to London on his woollen business. I have written asking him to
meet me to-morrow in London, and I shall cross over to-night.

LONDON, _Wednesday, Feb. 15th._--Mr. Davitt spent an hour with me
to-day, and we had a most interesting conversation. His mind is just now
full of the woollen enterprise he is managing, which promises, he
thinks, in spite of our tariff, to open the American markets to the
excellent woollen goods of Ireland. He has gone into it with all his
usual earnestness and ability. This is not a matter of politics with
him, but of patriotism and of business. He tells me he has already
secured very large orders from the United States. I hope he is not
surprised, as I certainly am not, to find that the Parliamentarian Irish
party give but a half-hearted and lukewarm support to such enterprises
as this. Perhaps he has forgotten, as I have not, the efforts which a
certain member of that party made in 1886 to persuade an Irish gentleman
from St. Louis, who had brought over a considerable sum of money for the
relief of the distress in North-Western Ireland, into turning it over
to the League, on the express ground that the more the people were made
to feel the pinch of the existing order of things, the better it would
be for the revolutionary movement.

The Irish Woollen Company will, nevertheless, be a success, I believe,
and a success of considerably more value to Ireland than the election of
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as M.P. for Deptford would be.

As to this election, Mr. Davitt seems to feel no great confidence. He
has spoken in support of Mr. Blunt's candidacy, and is hard at work now
to promote it. But he is not sanguine as to the result, as on all
questions, save Home Rule for Ireland, Mr. Blunt's views and ideas, he
thinks, antagonise the record of Mr. Evelyn and the local feeling at
Deptford. I was almost astonished to learn from Mr. Davitt that Mr.
Blunt, by the way, had told him at Ballybrack, long before he was locked
up, how Mr. Balfour meant to lock up and kill four men, the "pivots" of
the Irish movement, to wit, Mr. O'Brien, Mr. Harrington, Mr. Dillon, and
Mr. Davitt himself. But I was not at all astonished to learn that Mr.
Blunt told him all this most seriously, and evidently believed it.

"How did you take it?" I asked.

"Oh, I only laughed," said Mr. Davitt, "and told him it would take more
than Mr. Balfour to kill me, at any rate by putting me in prison. As for
being locked up, I prefer Cuninghame Graham's way of taking it, that he
meant 'to beat the record on oakum!'"

If all the Irish "leaders" were made of the same stuff with Mr. Davitt,
the day of a great Democratic revolution, not in Ireland only, but in
Great Britain, might be a good deal nearer than anything in the signs of
the times now shows it to be. Mr. Parnell and the National League are
really nothing but the mask of Mr. Davitt and the Land League. Mr.
Forster knew what he was about when he proclaimed the Land League in
October 1881, six months or more after he had arrested and locked up Mr.
Davitt in Portland prison. This was shown by the foolish No-Rent
manifesto which Mr. Parnell and his associates issued from Kilmainham
shortly after their incarceration, and without the counsel or consent at
that time of Mr. Davitt--a manifesto which the Archbishop of Cashel,
despite his early sympathies and connection with the agrarian agitation
of 1848, found it expedient promptly to disavow. It would have been
still more clearly shown had not Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster parted
company under the restiveness of Mr. Gladstone's Radical followers, and
the pressure of the United States Government in the spring of 1882. But
after the withdrawal of Mr. Forster, and the release of Mr. Davitt, the
English lawyers and politicians who led Lord Spencer and Sir George
Trevelyan into allowing the Land League to be revived under the
transparent alias of the National League, gave Mr. Davitt an
opportunity, of which he promptly availed himself, to regain the ground
lost by the blundering of the men of Kilmainham. From that time forth I
have always regarded him as the soul of the Irish agitation, of the war
against "landlordism" (which is incidentally, of course, a war against
the English influence in Ireland), and of the movement towards Irish
independence. Whether the agitation, the war, and the movement have gone
entirely in accordance with his views and wishes is quite another
matter.

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