Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (59 page)

Ahmed
Arabi,
The
Egyptian
1

T
HROUGH all these years Ireland festered. Drained of vitality by famine and emigration, alternately conciliated and coerced by its imperial masters, pitifully derelict and neglected, in the decades since the Great Famine the island had not reconciled itself to subjection. Sometimes years had gone by without trouble, and the country lay in stagnant trance. At other times it flamed into violence. Ireland remained the most baleful, in some ways the most alien of all the British possessions, and though the old Gaelic language had retreated to the remoter corners of the countryside, still the sense of Catholic Irishness was as deep and as emotional as ever. All over the island work still stopped in the fields and peat bogs when the Angelus rang, and in the shanty-churches of the west the priests still cheerfully splashed holy water over their congregations with a mop out of a zinc bucket. Wherever they went, Irishmen remained the most virulent enemies of British rule. An Irish priest was one of Riel’s closest advisers. An Irish labourer tried to kill Prince Alfred during his visit to Australia. The militant Governor of Montana during the worst period of Anglo-American rivalry in the west was an Irishman educated in the prisons of Tasmania. An Irish free-lance, Alfred Aylward, alias Murphy, was an influential adviser to the Boer command in the Transvaal war. Far more than most emigrants, the Irish abroad retained their sense of nationhood and ancestral grievance. ‘
Good
Health!
’ ran a well-known toast of their
diaspora,
 

Within Ireland the groundswell of discontent was now embodied in two very different movements. The Fenians were people of violence, who believed in the overthrow of British rule by force, and who had powerful friends among the Irish emigrants in America and Australia: mostly working-class men, they had launched an unsuccessful rebellion in 1867, besides mounting two ludicrously abortive invasions of Canada from the United States. The Irish Home Rule movement, on the other hand, fought its cause constitutionally, and demanded only autonomy for Ireland within a federal system. Founded in 1870 by a Protestant barrister, Isaac Butt, many of its members were Anglo-Irishmen of the professional classes, and everything about it was moderate. Its leaders were moderate. Its demands were moderate. Its abilities were moderate. Butt’s personality, though colourful in a stagey way, expressed the spirit of reasonableness, aggrieved rather than furious: and doggedly his supporters soldiered on, year after year in the House of Commons, against the apathy of Tories and Liberals alike—for as yet few people in Britain took Ireland’s passions very seriously, believing as they generally did that Irishmen were only an inferior and misguided sub-variety of Englishmen.
1

For years these two liberation movements, as different in texture as in velocity, flowed along in separate streams—the ferociously anti-British Fenians, the restrained Home Rulers, each representing in such different styles a common irrepressible instinct. But in 1875 there appeared in the House of Commons a new Irish member of such dazzling originality that in his person both factions could find their champion, to make him the spokesman of all Ireland’s aspirations, and for one tumultuous decade the uncrowned king of his people.

Avondale, in County Wicklow, was the family home of Charles
Stewart Parnell—whose name was pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable, and whose family divided their time between their town house in Dublin and this delectable estate. It was a paradigm of Anglo-Ireland. The square Georgian house stood well away from the road, wide-eaved and comfortable, not unlike those misery-built mansions of Tasmania: sheltered by silver firs, attended by pleasant gardens, with woods all around for children’s adventuring, well-built stables for hunters and carriage horses, and lawns running gently towards the river below. Here there grew up the most memorable of all the Irish patriots, whose cause was the cause of all the bog-Irish, the dispossessed illiterate villagers, the superstitious Catholic townsmen and the Fenian fanatics.

Parnell’s father was an unobtrusive Anglo-Irish country gentleman, but his mother was the stridently opinionated daughter of an American naval officer. From this mixed background Parnell derived a curious magic of personality, and a bigot streak. There was said to be madness in his father’s family, and all his life Parnell was the slave of eccentric fancies and taboos. He hated the colour green, and blamed the greenness of a floor carpet when he had a sore throat. He was afraid of October, of Fridays, of three candles, and thought cobwebs good for the treatment of cuts. Moody, silent, an animal lover, a devoted reader of
Alice
in
Wonderland
who found nothing in it to make him smile, nobody who met him in his prime ever forgot his presence. Some found him evil, some thought him a kind of saint, none seemed quite able to isolate his fascination. It was like a spell.

He was a strikingly handsome man, high-browed, trimly whiskered, with a sense of powerful self-control—indifference, some critics called it. His breeding was part of his appeal, for it struck piquantly on the ear to hear this urbane Protestant, captain of the Wicklow cricket team, proclaiming the revolutionary cause of Ireland, and his power came from his combination of latent ferocity and languid, mannered elegance. Butt called him ‘an ugly customer, though he is a damned good-looking fellow’, and Gladstone called him ‘a genius—a genius of an uncommon order’. As an orator he was
sui
-
generis
. He was not a natural speaker—his repartee sounds laboured and un-rhythmic, perhaps because he had no ear for music—but even so he could enthrall the House of Commons as easily as he could
arouse a crowd of Irish peasants to ecstasy. Parnell was the antithesis of the political dilettante: in his early years at least he wanted neither office, nor popularity, nor even perhaps fame for himself, but only the freedom of Ireland. He detested England. He despised the Parliament he sat in, as he despised his beery Irish colleagues there. He was, first to last, an unreconcilable enemy of the British Empire.

Yet it was to Avondale, with all its measured delights of the Ascendancy, its gentle sounds and merry pleasures, that this strange rebel returned for solace or stimulation. His career was full of troubled ironies, and perhaps the old life in County Wicklow touched some suppressed emotion in his heart. He loved the place all his life. ‘There is no place like Avondale, Jack’, he used to tell his brother.
1

The Anglo-Irish, whom we last saw in perplexed disarray during the Great Famine, had now reached their corporate maturity—passed it, perhaps, for they were eighteenth century people at heart. They had lost little of their confidence during the century, and ‘Ascendancy’ was a weak word for their status in the land. They still owned most of it, they still governed their peasantry absolutely, they could still evict at will, set their own rents and choose their own tenants. They were a ruling class by inheritance, by instinct and by nature. The economic gulf between landlords and peasants had perhaps narrowed since 1848—by 1871 there were only 40,000 single-room mud cabins in Ireland—but the improved roads and railways had enriched the social lives of the Anglo-Irish gentry, and had made them more than ever an alien elite. Some were rich, and lived with plentiful servants and lordly horses. Many more were poor or spendthrift, and cheerfully scratched along in big draughty houses where the rats ran wild. Hygiene was not their forte, hardship did not dismay them: until 1875 even Pakenham Hall, the vast country house of the Pakenham family, employing at least twenty indoor servants
and engaging the affection of earls, possessed only one bathroom. Yet whatever their circumstances, all were
special
people, born to authority, feeling themselves to stand by right as by heredity in the position of noblemen.

Their self-esteem had increased with the extension of Empire, for if they provided a ruling class for Ireland, they formed an imperial caste too. For its private soldiers the British Army depended still upon Irish Catholic recruits, for its leadership it relied to an astonishing degree upon the Anglo-Irish, and the Irish regiments of the Crown were among the cockiest and most formidable of them all: 

Many of the imperial activists who have appeared in these pages sprang from the Protestant Ascendancy: Macnaghten of Kabul, Napier of Sind, the Lawrence brothers, John Nicholson, Burton the explorer, Garnet Wolseley, William and Elizabeth Butler, Colley of Majuba. ‘Getting the old man’s Irish out’, subordinates used to say when one of these leaders was especially stimulated, and the Empire was engraved with their deeds, quirks and excesses. Wherever they went the Anglo-Irish behaved larger than life, and their high spirits, their touch of brogue, their good looks and their habitual irreverence gave to their English colleagues a very misleading impression of life in Ireland. They looked at the Empire in their own way, for they had grown up with the miseries of the Great Famine and the Fenian troubles, the conflicts of Irish patriotism and imperial sentiment, the alternate clenching and relaxing of British resolve in Ireland. They knew imperialism from both sides, and perhaps understanding its dilemmas more clearly than most, threw themselves into the imperial adventure with an extra gusto or sense of involvement.

Yet they had inner conflicts of their own: for though they formed
an occupying caste in their homeland, foreign to its working people and commonly hated by them, still they often loved the island with a tortured intensity.

The Anglo-Irish still lived separately. If to visiting Englishmen they seemed archetypically Irish, to the indigenes they seemed inalienably English. They often resented this anomalous condition—those whose families had been in the island for a couple of centuries felt themselves to be as truly Irish as any hut-peasant of the west—but they could never quite escape it.

Nobody was more shut off from the life of the country than the Viceroy or Lord-Lieutenant, the head of the Irish Government and the Queen’s representative. By the 1870s his office was a political appointment, and he was generally a member of the British Cabinet, but he lived in Dublin in a state of royalty. His headquarters and official residence was Dublin Castle, a weird conglomeration of structures in the heart of the capital. Armed sentries stood at its gates, beneath the gilded crests of monarchy, and it seemed to stand withdrawn or sequestered from the life of the city about it. Within its confused perimeter it was like a municipality of its own. A great parade ground was its centre, and around it an irregular jumble of buildings represented the imperial continuity, all ages, all styles, all purposes. There were classical porticos and colonades. There was a round tower like Windsor’s. The Chapel Royal was whimsical Gothick, the Bedford Tower was based upon a design for Whitehall by Inigo Jones. The yard was lit by tall gas-lamps, and high above its ornamental archways stood lead figures of Mars, with attendant lion, and Justice, holding her scales with a dubious air.

Through their State apartments here the Viceroys and their ladies ornately moved, the focus of Irish social life, at whose balls and levees appeared not only the grandees of the Ascendancy, but numbers of Catholic gentry too.
1
The great hall of St Patrick was
hung with the banners of the Knights of St Patrick, the Ascendancy’s own order of chivalry, and decorated with apposite paintings—
The
Beneficent
Government
of
George
III,
or
Henry
II
Receiving
the
Submission
of
the
Irish
Chieftains
. The presence chamber above, with its canopied throne in red velvet, was thick with the mystique of monarchy, and over the yard in the. Chapel Royal Viceroy and Primate sat each in his private pew surrounded by the names, dates and arms of his predecessors. It was a powerful presence, Dublin Castle, but it had a defensive air, as though its occupants had constantly expected to discover, during the long centuries of their authority, that the Irish Chieftains had not submitted after all, but were hammering at the gates with shillelaghs.

In the country the Anglo-Irish style was easier, but scarcely less introspective. Perhaps the most striking enclave of all, where the Ascendancy seemed to be most neatly encapsulated, was the well-known village of Castletownshend in County Cork, This was one of the prettiest places in Ireland, and one of the few in which the Anglo-Irish chose to live in community. It stood only a few miles from Skibbereen and Schull, whose miseries were glimpsed during the years of the Great Famine, but it was far from emaciated itself. Its single main street, with a clump of trees in the middle, led gently downhill to the harbour (the haven, as they called it in Ireland), with the castle and the Protestant church at one end, and substantial family houses scattered throughout: and it formed, in its pleasant way, as solid a block of Anglo-Irish values and memories as Dublin Castle itself. Two closely connected families, the Somervilles and the Townshends, dominated the place. They had repeatedly intermarried, they were always in each other’s houses, and they had made Castletownshend, tucked away at the water’s edge, almost a private colony of their own.