Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (60 page)

The Anglican church, trimly stacked against rising ground above the sea, was plastered with memorials to the two families. One could read of Somervilles and Townshends fighting the imperial wars, administering the imperial justice, governing territories of hideous remoteness, sitting on Admiralty courts or being Anglican bishops. Here was a Townshend who had commanded the 14th light Dragoons under Wellington, and here a Coghill, a lateral
branch of the Somervilles, who had won a posthumous VC saving the regimental colours of the 24th Regiment after Isandhlwana. The Townshends, who had come to Ireland in the seventeenth century, lived in their waterside castle surrounded by family portraits and mementos, beneath ceilings elaborately painted by the Italian craftsmen who used to travel around Ireland catering to the Ascendancy. The Somerville headquarters was the house called Drishane at the top of the village, a comfortable, rectory-like place, shingled all over, with cedars in the garden and ivy on the walls. Between these two homes sundry ancillary Somervilles flourished, and lesser Townshends thrived.

The two clans lived in happy intimacy, hunting, dancing, marrying, the boys going off to the University, the Army or the Navy, and all growing up together, living and dying, with a sense of private permanence. They were neither rich nor poor; their houses were verminous, cold, and often needed a lick of paint: but they enjoyed the happy assurance of inherited privilege, not much blunted by feelings of guilt or self-doubt, and they very much enjoyed themselves.
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It was in 1879 that Parnell, determined to break the hegemony of this imperial caste, came into his own as leader of the Irish. He was already famous on both sides of the Irish Sea, because he had perfected in the House of Commons a technique of obstruction. Fiercer and more incisive than his leader Butt, he had lost patience with the plodding constitutionalists, and reached the conclusion that the British could not be reasoned into generosity, only goaded—‘we will
never gain anything from England’, he told an Irish audience in Lancashire, ‘unless we tread upon her toes—we will never gain a single sixpenny-worth by conciliation’. He declared open war, so he wrote, ‘against Ministers, Imperial Parliament and English public opinion’, and he fought that war excitingly and infuriatingly upon the floor of the House. His tactics made him immensely popular in Ireland—wherever he went vast crowds escorted him in triumphal progresses—and gradually the Irish members of Parliament, scenting the shift of the wind, swung into line behind him. He became the voice of Ireland, The Chief, the first Irishman who had ever succeeded in catching the English ear.

The technique was simple. It was literally to prevent Parliament doing any work at all until the British Government conceded Home Rule for Ireland. Whatever the subject of debate, Parnell and his colleagues would talk about it so endlessly, in such indefatigable relays, that the House of Commons was stagnated. Sometimes they just read hour after hour from Blue Books. Once a Joseph Biggar, the member for Cavan, told by the Speaker after three hours of filibuster that he must stop talking because his tired throat made him inaudible, picked up his papers and a glass of water, moved closer to the Chair, and said ‘As you have not heard me, Mr Speaker, perhaps I had better begin all over again’.

Parnell became the most hated man in the House—perhaps the most hated member Parliament had ever known. Whenever he stood to speak the House broke into jeers and howls, sometimes keeping him standing there for half an hour before he could open his mouth. Time and again he was expelled for obstruction, and the picture papers portray him escorted by Black Rod down the floor of the House in an attitude of suave disdain, one hand in his pocket, while from the Tory benches bearded, monocled or be-whiskered Conservatives shake their fists or wave their tophats in fury. Parnell did not appear to care, for he was over-awed by nobody: when Gladstone once quoted an inflammatory speech of his, Parnell accosted the Grand Old Man, whom he had never met before, in the lobby outside. ‘I wonder, sir, if I could see that portion of the speech at Sligo, that you read aloud?’ Gladstone handed it to him, and pointing to one passage Parnell said without rancour: ‘That is
inaccurate. I never said it Thank you, sir’.
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This maddening new kind of revolutionary accepted the abuse of the House with steely calm, infuriating his enemies by the imperturbable Britishness of his responses. He was every inch a gentleman, which made it all the worse.

In all this Parnell enjoyed the support of the Fenians, and in 1879 he capped his preeminence by becoming president of a new body, the Irish National Land League, concerned with the rural grievances of Ireland. The winter of 1878 had been brutal for the peasantry-heavy rains, crop failures, falling prices. Thousands had gone bankrupt. Thousands more had lost their homes. The eviction of peasants had been a commonplace of Irish life since the beginnings of English rule, but this was the period in which the image of Irish eviction impressed itself upon the imagination of the world. There we can see it all still, in faded sepia: the shabby whitewashed cottage behind, with its tufted thatch and tumble-down outbuildings, and the bowler-hatted landlord’s agent with his stick, and the helmeted constables lounging with rifles behind walls, as though about to take part in street fighting. There is no sign of the unfortunate tenants themselves, but a few pathetic scraps of furniture have been thrown out through the open door, and one policeman thoughtfully looks through the window, suggesting melancholy despairs inside. Through the Land League Parnell ruthlessly exploited the symbolism of the classic scene, and made the pathos of the Irish countryside the permanent backdrop of his drama.

The Irish had recovered some of their spirit since the demoralizing years of the Famine, and the ‘Land War’ now became a mass movement. For the first time the tenant-farmers as a class dared defy the Anglo-Irish. When a tenant was evicted, huge crowds of Irishmen gathered at his cottage to demonstrate in his support, and take his family off to shelter. Nobody would move into his farm, and the offending land agent was sent to Coventry—it was the terrible ostracization of Captain Charles Boycott, Lord Erne’s haughty agent in County Mayo, which gave his name to the English language.
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The Land League became almost a rival Government, setting up its own courts and making its own laws, and half Ireland was in a tumult of agitation. ‘Captain Moonlight’ made his terrifying appearance as agent of the Irish revenge, and landlords everywhere received threatening letters—‘Yo will be treated like a mad dog that is quartered and Berried under ground and that is the death yo must get’—‘the time has come that by God we don’t care for man or the divil’—‘we are the lads that dis not feare to do you….’ There were nineteen separate attempts upon the life of W. E. (‘Buckshot’) Forster, Chief Secretary of Ireland, and crime of every sort stalked the island horribly.

Parnell threw himself into this campaign with his usual ambiguous grace. He apparently welcomed a degree of violence—not enough to bring the full power of the Empire storming into Ireland, but enough to convince Westminster that Ireland could not be ruled by coercion. ‘Hold the harvest!’ the Land League exhorted the peasants, urging them not to hand over their crops to the landlords, and in Massachusetts Parnell’s eldest sister Fanny interpreted the phrase in a stirring nationalist poem, published in the Boston
Pilot
, an old enemy of Empire, and soon immensely popular among Irishmen all over the world: 

When, in 1868, a telegram arriving at Hawarden had told Gladstone he was to be Prime Minister for the first time, he was cutting down a tree in the park: and pausing for a moment from his work, he remarked to his companion: ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’. In 1880, when he was called to office for the second time, he was still preoccupied with the island. First, he was persuaded, he must restore law and order there, and within a few months he had introduced severe measures of coercion. In particular, he suspended
habeas
corpus 
so that the Land League agitators including Parnell, could be imprisoned without trial—for no Irish jury would have convicted The Chief, whatever the charge.

This led to the most spectacular of all Parnell’s Parliamentary displays. So incessant and relentless was the opposition of the Irish members that it took 46 hours of unbroken debate to force the coercion bill through. Parnell’s men filibustered in relays, taking it in turns to snatch a few hours’ sleep in the lobby, and constantly nagged by their leader to go back and keep talking—hour after hour, day after day, to the impotent frustration of Liberals and Tories alike. The House was baffled by this culminating impertinence. The principle of free speech seemed to be at stake—the English constitution turned topsy-turvy in the interests of Irish separatism. After forty hours of it the House presented a scene of squalid exhaustion. The dishevelled members sat about pale and testy, some of them in rumpled evening clothes from the night before last. The galleries were packed by successions of visitors. The Irishmen were all alone on one side of the house, about 100 Englishmen generally sat on the other. Every speech was interrupted by abuse, jeering and sarcasm, until at last, at nine in the morning of the third day, the Speaker interrupted the debate. He was Henry Brand, second son of the 21st Baron Dacre, who was no man to be trifled with by enemies of England. Since the days of Oliver Cromwell no single man had ever arbitrarily closed a debate in the House, and it was disputable whether the Speaker had a right to: but choosing a moment when Parnell was out of the chamber, and reading from a paper which trembled visibly in his hand, Brand now declared on his own responsibility, in defiance of the ancient customs of the House, that the debate must end.

It did. The British members cheered with relief. The Irish members, nonplussed in the absence of Parnell, walked out of the House in a body, shouting ‘Privilege! Privilege!’ as the Parliamentarians had cried it when Charles I invaded the Commons. The Coercion Bill was carried, and Gladstone now felt the decks clear for progress. He had Parnell and most of his principal lieutenants arrested, and locked up on suspicion of subversion in Kilmainham Jail—a grim old fortress above the Liffey in Dublin which was the
traditional place of incarceration for Irish patriots. Having proved his readiness to quell violence by force, he promptly put through a grandly conciliatory land reform bill, assuring the Irish tenants fair rents and fixed tenures.

Then, in a political act of great imagination, he persuaded the imprisoned Parnell to help him implement these reforms. ‘The Chief’ was offered his release if he would use his influence to calm the country, and see the Land Act safely through. Agreement was surreptitiously reached through intermediaries, and in March 1882 Parnell and his colleagues were released under the so-called Kilmainham Treaty, The first reactions were predictable—the Irish extremists accused Parnell of selling out to the English, the English reactionaries accused Gladstone of compromising with traitors. ‘Buckshot’ Forster resigned in protest, and the Queen herself was inexpressibly shocked. But the anger died, Parnell seemed ready to honour his word, the Land Act went ahead, and Gladstone’s favourite nephew, Lord Frederick Cavendish, sailed over to Dublin as a new and more liberal Chief Secretary and a precursor of better times. Barring unforeseeable setbacks, it seemed, the way to Home Rule in Ireland was open at last.

But as usual in Ireland, the unforeseeable almost immediately occurred.

The Viceregal Lodge, the Viceroy’s second residence, was a pleasant Georgian mansion surrounded by gardens and a ha-ha in the middle of Phoenix Park, one of the most beautiful parks in Europe. From his upstairs window the Viceroy could look across the grand green expanse of the park—1,750 acres, seven miles around, like a slab of open country on the flank of the capital—to the distant chequered pattern of the Wicklow mountains, generally blurred and hazy in the soft Irish light. Horsemen rode in the morning across the downlands of this paradise; street urchins threw sticks for conkers in the long lush avenues of horse-chestnuts; on Sunday afternoons music echoed faintly from The Hollow, where the St James Brass and Reed Band, the Father Mathew Band, or the heavily escorted Glencree
Reformatory Band, played boisterous marches to huge jolly audiences. Away to the left Robert Smirke’s immense monument to the greatest Anglo-Irishman, the Duke of Wellington, was embellished with iron sculptures made from the metal of captured cannon.

On the evening of May 6, 1882, the Viceroy, Lord Spencer, who had just returned to Dublin for a second term, was looking at this fine view out of his window. He had been sworn in that morning in the customary ornate ceremonies at the Castle, with his Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish. Now he was awaiting the arrival of Cavendish as his dinner guest, together with Thomas Burke the Under-Secretary. They had already spent the afternoon together, discussing Gladstone’s plans for Ireland: Spencer had returned to the Lodge by carriage, his guests were following on foot. They would make an odd dinner trio. Spencer was a hospitable man who owned 26,000 acres of the English Midlands, but who had been an active politician all his life, and was known as the Red Earl because of his flaming beard. Cavendish was the second son of the Duke of Devonshire, a diligent but unexciting man, who had been Gladstone’s private secretary, had married the Prime Minister’s niece, and had risen steadily in the Liberal ranks. Burke, from Galway, had spent his life in the Irish administration: he was a Catholic, a nephew of Cardinal Wiseman, but was a stern law-and-order man, and was particularly loathed by the extreme nationalists. The three men were doubtless expecting a sombre business dinner. Times were crucial in Ireland, Spencer and Cavendish had assumed office at an especially demanding moment, Burke would probably find his brains picked all evening.