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

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Several handsome lodges or cottages have been built about the extensive
grounds. These are comfortably furnished and leased to people who prefer
to bring their households here rather than take up their abode in the
hotel, which, however, seems to be a very well kept and comfortable sort
of place, with billiard and music rooms, a small theatre, and all kinds
of contrivances for making the country almost as tedious as the town.
The establishment is directed now by a German resident physician, but
belongs to an Irish gentleman, Mr. Barter, who lives here himself, and
here manages what I am told is one of the finest dairy farms and dairies
in Ireland. Our return trip to Cork on the "light railway," with a warm
red sunset lighting up the river Lea, and throwing its glamour over the
varied and picturesque scenery through which we ran, was not the least
delightful part of a very delightful excursion.

After we got back I spent half-an-hour with a gentleman who knows the
country about Youghal, which I propose to visit to-morrow, and who saw
something of the recent troubles there arising out of the Plan of
Campaign, as put into effect on the Ponsonby property.

He is of the opinion that the Nationalists were misled into this contest
by bad information as to Mr. Ponsonby's resources and relations. They
expected to drive him to the wall, but they will fail to do this, and
failing to do this they will be left in the vocative. He showed me a
curious souvenir of the day of the evictions, in the shape of a
quatrain, written by the young wife of an evicted tenant. This young
woman, Mrs. Mahoney, was observed by one of the officers, as the
eviction went on, to go apart to a window, where she stood for a while
apparently writing something on a wooden panel of the shutter. After the
eviction was over the officer remembered this, and going up to the
window found these lines pencilled upon the panel:--

"We are evicted from this house,
Me and my loving man;
We're homeless now upon the world!
May the divil take 'the Plan'!"

CORK, _Monday, Feb. 27._--A most interesting day. I left alone and early
by the train for Youghal, having sent before me a letter of introduction
to Canon Keller, the parish priest, who has recently become a
conspicuous person through his refusal to give evidence about matters,
his knowledge of which he conceives to be "privileged," as acquired in
his capacity as a priest.

I had many fine views of the shore and the sea as we ran along, and the
site of Youghal itself is very fine. It is an old seaport town, and once
was a place of considerable trade, especially in wool.

Oliver dwelt here for a while, and from Youghal he embarked on his
victorious return to England. He seems to have done his work while he
was here "not negligently," like Harrison at Naseby Field, for when he
departed he left Youghal a citadel of Protestant intolerance. Even under
Charles II they maintained an ordinance forbidding "any Papist to buy or
barter anything in the public markets," which may be taken as a piece of
cold-blooded and statutory "boycotting." Then there was no parish priest
in Youghal; now it may almost be said there is nobody in Youghal but the
parish priest! So does "the whirligig of time bring in his revenges"!

At Youghal station a very civil young man came up, calling me by name,
and said Father Keller had sent him with a car to meet me. We drove up
past some beautiful grounds into the main street. A picturesque
waterside town, little lanes and narrow streets leading out of the main
artery down to the bay, and a savour of the sea in the place, grateful
doubtless to the souls of Raleigh and the west country folk he brought
over here when he became lord of the land, just three hundred years ago.
Edmund Spenser came here in those days to see him, and talk over the
events of that senseless rising of the Desmonds, which gave the poet of
the "Faerie Queen" his awful pictures of the desolation of Ireland, and
made the planter of Virginia master of more than forty thousand acres of
Irish land.

We turned suddenly into a little narrow wynd, and pulled up, the driver
saying, "There is the Father, yer honour!" In a moment up came a tall,
very fine-looking ecclesiastic, quite the best dressed and most
distinguished-looking priest I have yet seen in Ireland, with features
of a fine Teutonic type, and the erect bearing of a soldier. I jumped
down to greet him, and he proposed that we should walk together to his
house near by. An extremely good house I found it to be, well placed in
the most interesting quarter of the town. Having it in my mind to drive
on from Youghal to Lismore, there to make an early dinner, see the
castle of the Duke of Devonshire, and return to Cork by an evening
train, I had to decline Father Keller's cordial hospitalities, but he
gave me a most interesting hour with him in his comfortable study.
Father Keller stands firmly by the position which earned for him a
sentence of imprisonment last year, when he refused to testify before a
court of justice in a bankruptcy case, on the ground that it might
"drift him into answers which would disclose secrets he was bound in
honour not to disclose." He does not accept the view taken of his
conduct, however, by Lord Selborne, that, in the circumstances, his
refusal is to be regarded as the act of his ecclesiastical superiors
rather than his own. He maintains it as his own view of the sworn duty
of a priest, and not unnaturally therefore he looks upon his sentence as
a blow levelled at the clergy; nor, as I understood him, has he
abandoned his original contention, that the Court had no right to summon
him as a witness. It was impossible to listen to him on this subject,
and doubt his entire good faith, nor do I see that he ought to be held
responsible for the interpretation put by Mr. Lane, M.P., and others
upon his attitude as a priest, in a sense going to make him merely a
"martyr" of Home Rule. I did not gather from what he said that, in his
mind, the question of his relations with the Nationalists or the Plan of
Campaign entered into that affair at all, but simply that he believed
the right and the duty of a priest to protect, no matter at what cost to
himself, secrets confided to him as a priest, was really involved in his
consent or refusal to answer, when he was asked whether he was or was
not on a certain day at the "Mall House" in Youghal. Of course from the
connection of this refusal in this particular case with the Nationalist
movement, Nationalists would easily glide into the idea that he refused
to testify in order to serve their cause.

As to the troubles on the Ponsonby estate, Father Keller spoke very
freely. He divided the responsibility for them between the
untractableness of the agent, and the absenteeism of the owner. It was
only since the troubles began, he said, that he had ever seen Mr.
Ponsonby, who lived in Hampshire, and was therefore out of touch with
the condition and the feelings of the people here. In a personal
interview with him he had found Mr. Ponsonby a kindly disposed
Englishman, but the estate is heavily encumbered, and the agent who has
had complete control of it forced the tenants, by his hard and fast
refusal of a reasonable reduction more than two years ago, into an
initial combination to defend themselves by "clubbing" their rents. That
was before Mr. Dillon announced the Plan of Campaign at all.

"It was not till the autumn of 1886," said Father Keller, "that any
question arose of the Plan of Campaign here,[8] and it was by the
tenants themselves that the determination was taken to adopt it. My part
has been that of a peace-maker throughout, and we should have had peace
if Mr. Ponsonby would have listened to me; we should have had peace, and
he would have received a reasonable rental for his property. Instead of
this, look at the law costs arising out of bankruptcy proceedings and
sheriff's sales and writs and processes, and the whole district thrown
into disorder and confusion, and the industrious people now put out of
their holdings, and forced into idleness."

As to the recent evictions which had taken place, Father Keller said
they had taken him as well as the people by surprise, and had thus led
to greater agitation and excitement. "But the unfortunate incident of
the loss of Hanlon's life," he said, "would never have occurred had I
been duly apprised of what was going on in the town. I had come home
into my house, having quieted the people, and left all in order, as I
thought, when that charge of the police, for which there was no
occasion, and which led to the killing of Hanlon, was ordered. I made my
way rapidly to the people, and when I appeared they were brought to
patience and to good order with astonishing ease, despite all that had
occurred."

As to the present outlook, it was his opinion that Mr. Ponsonby, even
with the Cork Defence Union behind him, could not hold out. "The Land
Corporation were taking over some parts of the estate, and putting
Emergency men on them--a set of desperate men, a kind of _enfants
perdus_," he said, "to work and manage the land;" but he did not believe
the operation could be successfully carried out. Meanwhile he
confidently counted upon seeing "the present Tory Government give way,
and go out, when it would become necessary for the landlords to do
justice to the rack-rented people. Pray understand," said Father Keller,
"that I do not say all landlords stand at all where Mr. Ponsonby has
been put by his agent, for that is not the case; but the action of many
landlords in the county Cork in sustaining Mr. Ponsonby, whose estate is
and has been as badly rack-rented an estate as can be found, is, in my
judgment, most unwise, and threatening to the peace and happiness of
Ireland."[9]

I asked whether, in his opinion, it would be possible for the Ponsonby
tenants to live and prosper here on this estate, could they become
peasant proprietors of it under Lord Ashbourne's Act, provided they
increased in numbers, as in that event might be expected. This he
thought very doubtful so far as a few of the tenants are concerned.

"Would you seek a remedy, then," I asked, "in emigration?"

"No, not in emigration," he replied, "but in migration."

I begged him to explain the difference.

"What I mean," he said, "is, that the people should migrate, not out of
Ireland, but from those parts of Ireland which cannot support them into
parts of Ireland which can support them. There is room in Meath, for
example, for the people of many congested districts."

"You would, then, turn the great cattle farms of Meath," I said, "into
peasant holdings?"

"Certainly."

"But would not that involve the expropriation of many people now
established in Meath, and the disturbance or destruction of a great
cattle industry for which Ireland has especial advantages?"

To this Father Keller replied that he did not wish to see Ireland
exporting her cattle, any more than to see Ireland exporting her sons
and daughters. "I mean," he said, quite earnestly, "when they are forced
to export them to pay exorbitant rents, and thus deprive themselves of
their capital or of a fair share of the comforts of life. I should be
glad to see the Irish people sufficient to themselves by the domestic
exchange of their own industries and products." At the same time he
begged me to understand that he had no wish to see this development
attended by any estrangement or hostile feeling between Ireland and
Great Britain. "On the contrary," he said, "I have seen with the
greatest satisfaction the growth of such good feeling towards England as
I never expected to witness, as the result of the visits here of English
public men, sympathising with the Irish tenants. I believe their visits
are opening the way to a real union of the Democracies of the two
countries, and to an alliance between them against the aristocratic
classes which depress both peoples." This alliance Father Keller
believed would be a sufficient guarantee against any religious contest
between the Catholics of Ireland and the Protestants of Great Britain.

"I was much astounded," he said, "the other day, to hear from an English
gentleman that he had met a Protestant clergyman who told him he really
believed that a persecution of the Protestants would follow the
establishment of Home Rule in Ireland. I begged him to consider that Mr.
Parnell was a Protestant, and I assured him Protestants would have
absolutely nothing to fear from Home Rule."

Reverting to his idea of re-distributing the Irish population through
Ireland, under changed conditions, social and economical, I asked him
how in Meath, for example, he would meet the difficulty of stocking with
cattle the peasant holdings of a new set of proprietors not owning
stock. He thought it would be easily met by advances of money from the
Treasury to the peasant proprietors, these advances to be repaid, with
interest, as in the case of Lady Burdett Coutts, and the advances made
by her to the fishermen now under the direction of Father Davis at
Baltimore.

I was struck by the resemblance of these views to the Irish policy
sketched for me by my Nationalist fellow-traveller of the other night
from London. "The evil that men do lives after them"--and when one
remembers how only a hundred years ago, and just after the establishment
of American Independence ought to have taught England a lesson, the
Irish House of Commons had to deal with the persistent determination of
the English manufacturers to fight the bogey of Irish competition by
protective duties in England against imports from Ireland, it is not
surprising that Irishmen who allow sentiment to get the upper hand of
sense should now think of playing a return game. England went in fear
then not only of Irish beasts and Irish butter, but of Irish woollens,
Irish cottons, Irish leather, Irish glass. Nay, absurd as it may now
seem, English ironmasters no longer ago than in 1785 testified before a
Parliamentary Committee that unless a duty was clapped on Irish
manufactures of iron, the Irish ironmasters had such advantages through
cheaper labour and through the discrimination in their favour under the
then existing relations with the new Republic of the United States that
they would "ruin the ironmasters of England."

In Ireland, as in America, the benign spirit of Free Trade is thwarted
and intercepted at every turn by the abominable ghost of British
Protection. What a blessing it would have been if the meddlesome
palaverers of the Cobden Club, American as well as English, could ever
have been made to understand the essentially insular character of
Protection and the essentially continental character of Free Trade!

It should never be forgotten, and it is almost never remembered, that
when the Treaty of Versailles was making in 1783 the American
Commissioners offered complete free trade between the United States and
all parts of the British Dominions save the territories of the East
India Company. The British Commissioner, David Hartley, saw the value of
this proposition, and submitted it at London. But King George III. would
not entertain it.

When I rose to leave him Father Keller courteously insisted on showing
me the "lions" of Youghal. A most accomplished cicerone he proved to be.
As we left his house we met in the street two or three of the "evicted"
tenants, whom he introduced to me. One of these, Mr. Loughlin, was the
holder of farms representing a rental of L94. A stalwart, hearty,
rotund, and rubicund farmer he was, and in reply to my query how long
the holdings he had lost had been in his family, he answered, "not far
from two hundred years." Certainly some one must have blundered as badly
as at Balaklava to make it necessary for a tenant with such a past
behind him to go out of his holdings on arrears of a twelvemonth. Father
Keller gave me, as we left Mr. Loughlin and his friend, a leaflet in
which he has printed the story of "the struggle for life on the Ponsonby
estate," as he understands it.

A minute's walk brought us to Sir Walter Raleigh's house, now the
property of Sir John Pope Hennessey. It was probably built by Sir Walter
while he lived here in 1588-89, during the time of the great Armada; for
it is a typical Elizabethan house, quaintly gabled, with charming Tudor
windows, and delightfully wainscoted with richly carved black oak. A
chimney-piece in the library where Sir John's aged mother received us
most kindly and hospitably is a marvel of Elizabethan woodwork. The
shelves are filled with a quaint and miscellaneous collection of old and
rare books. I opened at random one fine old quarto, and found it to
contain, among other curious tracts, models of typography, a Latin
critical disquisition by Raphael Regini on the first edition of
Plutarch's Life of Cicero, "_nuper inventa diu desideraia _"--a
disquisition quite aglow with the cinquecento delight in discovery and
adventure. In the grounds of this charming house stand four very fine
Irish yews forming a little hollow square, within which, according to a
local legend, Sir Walter sat enjoying the first pipe of tobacco ever
lighted in Ireland, when his terrified serving-maid espying the smoke
that curled about her master's head hastily ran up and emptied a pail of
water over him. In the garden here, too, we are told, was first planted
the esculent which better deserves to be called the Curse of Ireland
than does the Nine of Diamonds to be known as the Curse of Scotland. The
Irish yew must have been indigenous here, for the name of Youghal,
Father Keller tells me, in Irish signifies "the wood of yew-trees." A
subterranean passage is said to lead from Sir Walter's dining-room into
the church, but we preferred the light of day.

The precincts of the church adjoin the grounds and garden, and with
these make up a most fascinating poem in architecture. The churches of
St. Mary of Youghal and St. Nicholas of Galway have always been cited to
me as the two most interesting churches in Ireland. Certainly this
church of St. Mary, as now restored, is worth a journey to see. Its
massive tower, with walls eight feet thick, its battlemented chancel,
the pointed arches of its nave and aisles, a curious and, so far as I
know, unique arch in the north transept, drawn at an obtuse angle and
demarcating a quaint little side-chapel, and the interesting monuments
it contains, all were pointed out to me with as much zest and
intelligent delight by Father Keller as if the edifice were still
dedicated to the faith which originally called it into existence. It
contains a fine Jacobean tomb of Richard, the "great Earl of Cork," who
died here in September 1643. On this monument, which is in admirable
condition, the effigy of the earl appears between those of his two
wives, while below them kneel his five sons and seven daughters, their
names and those of their partners in marriage inscribed upon the marble.
It was of this earl that Oliver said: "Had there been an Earl of Cork in
every province, there had been no rebellion in Ireland." Several Earls
of Desmond are also buried here, including the founder of the church,
and under a monumental effigy in one of the transepts lies the wonderful
old Countess of Desmond, who having danced in her youth with Richard
III. lived through the Tudor dynasty "to the age of a hundred and ten,"
and, as the old distich tells us, "died by a fall from a cherry-tree
then."

In the churchyard is a hillock, bare of grass, about a tomb. There lies
buried, according to tradition, a public functionary who attested a
statement by exclaiming, "If I speak falsely, may grass never grow on my
grave." One of his descendants is doubtless now an M.P. Mr. Cameron had
kindly written from Cork to the officer in charge of the constabulary
here asking him to get me a good car for Lismore. So Father Keller very
kindly walked with me through the town to the "Devonshire Arms," a very
neat and considerable hotel, in quest of him. On the way he pointed out
to me what remains of a house which is supposed to have served as the
headquarters of Cromwell while he was here, and a small chapel also in
which the Protector worshipped after his sort. Off the main street is a
lane called Windmill Lane, where probably stood the windmill from which
in 1580 a Franciscan friar, Father David O'Neilan, was hung by the feet
and shot to death by the soldiers of Elizabeth because he refused to
acknowledge the spiritual supremacy of the Queen. He had been dragged
through the main street at the tail of a horse to the place of
execution. His name is one of many names of confessors of that time
about to be submitted at Rome for canonisation. We could not find the
officer I sought at the hotel, but Father Keller took me to a livery-man
in the main street, who very promptly got out a car with "his best
horse," and a jarvey who would "surely take me over to Lismore inside of
two hours and a half." He was as good as his master's word, and a
delightful drive it was, following the course of Spenser's river, the
Awniduffe, "which by the Englishman is called Blackwater." Nobody now
calls it anything else. The view of Youghal Harbour, as we made a great
circuit by the bridge on leaving the town, was exceedingly fine. Lying
as it does within easy reach of Cork, this might be made a very pleasant
summer halting-place for Americans landing at Queenstown, who now go
further and probably fare worse. One Western wanderer, with his family,
Father Keller told me, did last year establish himself here, a Catholic
from Boston, to whom a son was born, and who begged the Father to give
the lad a local name in baptism, "the oldest he could think of."

I should have thought St. Declan would have been "old" enough, or St.
Nessan of "Ireland's Eye," or Saint Cartagh, who made Lismore a holy
city, "into the half of which no woman durst enter," sufficiently
"local," but Father Keller found in the Calendar a more satisfactory
saint still in St. Goran or "Curran," known also as St. Mochicaroen _de
Nona_, from a change he made in the recitation of that part of the Holy
Office.

The drive from Youghal to Lismore along the Blackwater, begins,
continues, and ends in beauty. In the summer a steamer makes the trip by
the river, and it must be as charming in its way as the ascent of the
Dart from Dartmouth to Totness, or of the Eance from Dinard to St.
Suliac. My jarvey was rather a taciturn fellow, but by no means
insensible to the charms of his native region. About the Ponsonby estate
and its troubles he said very little, but that little was not entirely
in keeping with what I had heard at Youghal. "It was an old place, and
there was no grand house on it. But the landlord was a kind-man."
"Father Keller was a good man too. It was a great pity the people
couldn't be on their farms; and there was land that was taken on the
hills. It was a great pity. The people came from all parts to see the
Blackwater and Lismore; and there was money going." "Yes, he would be
glad to see it all quiet again. Ah yes! that was a most beautiful place
there just running out into the Blackwater. It was a gentleman owned it;
he lived there a good deal, and he fished. Ah! there's no such river in
the whole world for salmon as the Blackwater; indeed, there is not!
Everything was better when he was a lad. There was more money going, and
less talking. Father Keller was a very good man; but he was a new man,
and came to Youghal from Queenstown."

We passed on our way the ruins of Dromaneen Castle, the birthplace of
the lively old Countess of Desmond, who lies buried at Youghal. Here,
too, according to a local tradition, she met her death, having climbed
too high into a famous cherry-tree at Affane, near Dromaneen, planted
there by Sir Walter Raleigh, who first introduced this fruit, as well as
the tobacco plant and the potato, into Ireland. At Cappoquin, which
stands beautifully on the river, I should have been glad to halt for the
night, in order to visit the Trappist Monastery there, an offshoot of La
Meilleraye, planted, I think, by some monks from Santa Susanna, of
Lulworth, after Charles X. took refuge in the secluded and beautiful
home of the Welds. The schools of this monastery have been a benediction
to all this part of Ireland for more than half a century.

Lismore has nothing now to show of its ancient importance save its
castle and its cathedral, both of them absolutely modern! A hundred
years ago the castle was simply a ruin overhanging the river. It then
belonged to the fifth Duke of Devonshire, who had inherited it from his
mother, the only child and heiress of the friend of Pope, Richard,
fourth Earl of Cork, and third Earl of Burlington. It had come into the
hands of the Boyles by purchase from Sir Walter Ealeigh, to whom
Elizabeth had granted it, with all its appendages and appurtenances. The
fifth Duke of Devonshire, who was the husband of Coleridge's "lady
nursed in pomp and pleasure," did little or nothing, I believe, to
restore the vanished glories of Lismore; and the castle, as it now
exists, is the creation of his son, the artistic bachelor Duke, to whom
England owes the Crystal Palace and all the other outcomes of Sir Joseph
Paxton's industry and enterprise. His kinsman and successor, the present
Duke, used to visit Lismore regularly down to the time of the atrocious
murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish, and many of the beautiful walks and
groves which make the place lovely are due, I believe, to his taste and
his appreciation of the natural charms of Lismore. I dismissed my car at
the "Devonshire Arms," an admirable little hotel near the river, and
having ordered my dinner there, walked down to the castle, almost within
the grounds of which the hotel stands. It is impossible to imagine a
more picturesque site for a great inland mansion. The views up and down
the Blackwater from the drawing-room windows are simply the perfection
of river landscape. The grounds are beautifully laid out, one secluded
garden-walk, in particular, taking you back to the inimitable Italian
garden-walks of the seventeenth century. In the vestibule is the sword
of state of the Corporation of Youghal, a carved wooden cradle for which
still stands in the church at that place, and over the great gateway are
the arms of the great Earl of Cork, but these are almost the only
outward and visible signs of the historic past about the castle. Seen
from the graceful stone bridge which spans the river, its grey towers
and turrets quite excuse the youthful enthusiasm with which the Duke of
Connaught, who made a visit here when he was Prince Arthur, is said to
have written to his mother, that Lismore was "a beautiful place, very
like Windsor Castle, only much finer."

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