Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (20 page)

The Irish adored him. They loved his subtle invective—it was O’Connell who called Sir Robert Peel’s smile ‘the silver plate on the lid of a coffin’—and his popular image was best expressed in a drawing which showed him wrapped in a fur-collared coat, with his top-hat breezily on the back of his head, and on his face a Gorgonzola expression of ironic goodwill. He was called ‘The Liberator’, and his vast demonstrations were conducted with absolute order. A quarter
of a million people gathered in 1843 to hear him speak on the hill of Tara in County Meath, the legendary seat of the Irish kings—the dramatic mass of the hill was entirely covered, summit to foot, with the vast silent crowd and its fluttering banners. It was said to be the largest assembly ever gathered in Ireland, and when the crowd dispersed to its vehicles after the meeting, the horseback marshals found that not a thing had been stolen, nor a fence damaged.

Under such leadership the Irish were united as never before in support of Repeal, but they did not want to break away from the Crown. The appeal of the old Gaelic culture had not yet been harnessed to political purposes, and the links with England seemed to most people too old and too complex to be broken. Thousands of poor Irish families, every year, crossed the Irish Sea to look for work in Liverpool or London. Perhaps a majority of the enlisted soldiers of the British Army were Irish Catholics—
St
Patrick’s
Day
was the most familiar of all the Army’s marching songs. The new railway lines in England were being built largely by Irish navvies. The Repealers did not think in terms of armed insurrection, either, for they thought that in the end the sheer weight of Irish opinion would be enough to end the Union.

The English were nervous nonetheless, and took no chances. They imprisoned O’Connell once, in 1843. They proscribed his monster meetings. They packed troops into Ireland. When a Repeal meeting was organized at Clontarf outside Dublin, where Brian Boru had repelled the Norse invaders in the eleventh century, they used guns, warships and thousands of soldiers to prevent it. A pattern of coercion was emerging, and it seemed to Irish fatalists that for all the irrepressible patriotism of the people, Ireland was getting less Irish every year: 

Such was the state of Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine: overcrowded, discontented, lively, oppressed, politically inflamed. Nearly every observer forecast catastrophe, without often being specific. If it was not a catastrophe of one kind, it would certainly be of another.

In castles, Anglican rectories, pleasant country houses and Georgian terraces throughout the island were scattered the Anglo-Irish, the rulers of the Protestant Ascendancy. Though some of their families had been there for centuries, they were strangers in the land. They honoured a separate religion, they spoke a separate language, they lived in a manner inconceivably remote from the slums of Dublin or the mud huts of the west, and they viewed O’Connell and his kind not as patriots, but as traitors. To them Ireland was irrevocably, organically, part of the United Kingdom, alien but their own, and by ordinary English standards they had become half-foreign themselves: ‘bold, queer-looking people’, is how Jane Austen once described an Anglo-Irish family.

Some of the Anglo-Irish were immensely rich, with vast estates and the authority of local princes. Some were habitually insolvent. Whatever their circumstances, they formed an occupying caste. Their head was the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, living in his castle in Dublin as representative of the Queen. Their church was the Church of Ireland, with bishops of gentlemanly stock and choirs well-trained to the harmonies of Handel or S. S. Wesley. Their young men frequently went off to take commissions in the British Army, which was officered by the Anglo-Irish as largely as it was manned by the Irish Catholics, or to join the East India Company—the very first famine relief fund was subscribed in Calcutta. Those who stayed at home provided virtually the whole professional stratum of Irish life, besides controlling what Irish industries and businesses remained, and creating almost everything that was visually beautiful (for while the ancient Irish folk-crafts languished, the English brought to the particular washed air of Ireland, at once sparkling and imprecise, the meticulous charm of London’s Georgian style).

They lived in enclave. Consider Kilkenny, a small market town some seventy-five miles south-west of Dublin. Just as in a city like Madras the English lived aloofly in their own quarter, with the Indians out of sight in ‘Black Town’,
1
so in a town like Kilkenny
rulers and ruled were clearly segregated. At one end of the town stood the castle of the Dukes of Ormonde, hereditary butlers to the Crown of England. In its great hall, in 1366, had been enacted the Statutes of Kilkenny, forbidding the Anglo-Irish intimate contact with the indigenous Gaels, and thus setting the style of the apartheid which has split Ireland ever since. It stood immensely above the River Nore, full of treasures, all towers, gateways, monumental stables, with a private theatre and a fine Parade where the garrison paraded on festive days to pay tribute to the Duke. Not far away was the Anglican cathedral of St Canice, once a Catholic see, now plastered all over with honorifics of the Ormondes, trophies of Anglo-Irish gallantry and other reminders of changed times. Down by the river was the Protestant school of Kilkenny College, where Swift, Congreve and Bishop Berkeley had all been educated: in the upper town were the comfortable terraces where the Anglo-Irish doctors, lawyers and army officers lived, the respectable stores where their wives shopped, the comfortable old Club House Hotel where their sons roistered. Shabby and unpainted amidst this trim consequence, the remains of old Ireland lingered in poor monastery wall or neglected church: and across the river at the lower end of the town, well away from Castle, Parade, Club House and Cathedral, was the quarter called Irishtown, where the natives of the place resided hugger-mugger.
1

Or take a place like Mallow. This little town in County Cork was a spa. It had been adopted by the Anglo-Irish at the end of the previous century, and in the 1840s it was still one of the more fashionable Irish towns, at whose upstairs bay windows visitors from all over the island sat behind their fens to watch the gay world go by. Mallow too had its castle, in a park at the end of town with a herd of rare white deer, but its civic imagery was of a different kind. If Kilkenny stood for the power of the Anglo-Irish, Mallow represented the boyish, engaging qualities of this contradictory people. Here, in
an atmosphere of well-bred high jinks, they indulged their passions for gambling and horseplay. Here members of the club known as the Rakes of Mallow indefatigably debauched themselves, and members of the oldest hunt in Ireland, the ‘Dashing Duhallows’, tried to kill themselves several times a week in season. The real centre of Mallow was the pump room of the spa. This was a little half-timbered house built in a mock-rustic manner in a dingle beside a canal, and it stood there on the Fermoy road like a heartless laugh: for it was like a parody of the real country cabins in which, only a mile or two along the same road, the starving peasants lived with their pigs and their piles of excrement. Around this dainty structure the life of Mallow revolved: the evening whist-parties, the race meetings on the banks of the Blackwater, the starlight dinners, the scandals, the drunken quarrels maudlinly resolved, and all that witty, unreal
joie
de
vivre
which kept the Ascendancy energetically insulated from the terrible truths around it.
1

For though the Anglo-Irish often loved their subject Catholics, and were often excellent landlords to them, they seldom understood them except on a level of benevolent badinage. They responded easily to the comic and gregarious side of the Irish, and the Irish obliged them with japes and blarney. But they seldom recognized the strength of the Irish identity. It was not that the Protestants of the Ascendancy were unkinder, or more insensitive, than other peoples. It was simply the force of history. They had been raised as the children of a superior culture, deposited among an illiterate peonage who honoured a debased religion and talked a useless archaic tongue: and of course the more they looked upon the Irish in this way, the more true their illusion became. Centuries of oppression had made the Irish tortuous and unreliable, now fawningly obsequious, now rising in vicious rebellion, and it was undeniably true that they seldom lived up to the standards of fairness and restraint expected of an Englishman.

So a gulf lay between the peoples. They met in the centre, where
Protestant and Catholic middle-classes co-existed, but Catholics seldom penetrated the ballrooms of Viceregal society in Dublin, while Protestants slumming it in the taverns of the Irish felt themselves intruders. It was rare indeed that an Anglo-Irish family mingled on genuinely equal terms with the local Gaels. One that tried was the family of St Georges, who lived at Tyrone House on the Galway coast, looking across to the Connemara Mountains. The younger St Georges had, so to speak, gone native. They liked the local girls, took to the company of local farmers, and gradually became absorbed in the environment. Politically this may have been far-sighted, but socially it was a disaster. Their gaunt mansion on its bluff above the sea had been one of the gayest houses in Galway, its invitations eagerly accepted, its lights ablaze across the bay on summer evenings. By the 1830s, as the St Georges began their metamorphosis into Irishness, it was beginning to look forlorn, without the spanking jaunting-carts drawn up at its door, or the tea-parties on its lawns: and before long, so inexorable were the unwritten laws of the English occupation, Tyrone House would be altogether deserted, its lovely gardens overgrown and its high silhouette windowless against the sky.
1

The best of the Anglo-Irish behaved admirably during the famine, setting up soup kitchens, foregoing rents, visiting the sick and the dying, and frequently dying themselves from infection. ‘It will be consoling to her Ladyship to learn’, Lady Gore-Booth of Drumcliffe, County Sligo, was told by her parish priest, ‘that the humble prayers of God’s humble creatures were offered every night in every home for the spiritual and temporal welfare of every member of her Ladyship’s family.’ The great houses were besieged by poor people begging food or work, and some of the landowners started ambitious relief schemes of their own. At Birr in King’s County, for example, the third Lord Rosse suspended work on his telescope, the biggest in
the world, which lay black and tremendous on stone piers in the middle of his demesne, to supervise the digging of a moat around the estate, a project which, though it was planned on orthodox military lines and perhaps had a cautionary intent, nevertheless gave work to hundreds of poor labourers.
1
Where the relationship was good before the catastrophe, it seems to have been strengthened: we find one landlord warmly thanking his destitute tenants for helping him through
bis
troubles by the prompt payment of rents. Some members of the Ascendancy felt themselves, in this universal emergency, closer to the Irish than they had ever been before, and it was generally admitted that Anglican clergymen proved more effective shepherds to this errant flock than most of the Catholic priests.

But clearly this was a crisis beyond the capacities of Ireland. It was left to the imperial Power, at a time when imperial duties were still hazily conceived, to save the Irish from extermination. Ideologically the British were ill-equipped for the task. In their eyes Ireland was a hybrid sort of possession, neither quite a colony nor quite a region of the Mother Country. They were astonishingly ignorant about it: Whitehall knew more about the economic situation of India than of Ireland. Politically individualism was the fashionable doctrine, and economically laissez-faire was all the rage—in the matter of famine as in all else, the less the State interfered, the better. Sir Robert Peel, who was the Tory Prime Minister during the first months of the famine, did buy
£
100,000 worth of Indian corn and meal in the United States, with which he hoped to prevent Irish food prices soaring: but everyone knew that he was using the issue to force through the final repeal of the Corn Laws, the supreme triumph of Free Trade, and his more virulent opponents actually disbelieved in the existence of the famine. His Government fell in 1846, and the Whigs who took over, under the dwarfish and canny Lord John Russell, were even more resolute Individualists. Abetted and advised by the devout Free Trader Charles Trevelyan, permanent head of the Treasury, the British
Government decided that if the potato crop failed again the imperial Power would interfere no more in the natural progress of affairs, would import no more food, but would leave the control of the disaster to the forces of private enterprise.

This was the negation of empire, whether empire of the old commercialist kind, which depended upon Government protection, or of the new idealist kind, which relied upon Government support. But the educated classes of England, indignant though they were about slave conditions in Jamaica, or even the unjust harassment of innocent Afghan tribesmen, were inured to miseries nearer home. The poor were always with them—‘wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature’, wrote an American observer of England in 1845, ‘lying in bleeding fragments all over the face of society’. London, the greatest of all capitals, was also among the most heartless; the new factory towns of the English Midlands and North were places of unrelieved ugliness and exploitation; it did not often lie upon the English conscience that only 60 miles away across St George’s Strait there lay beneath the authority of the Crown the saddest country in Europe.