Unlikely Rebels (2 page)

Frederick Gifford, the Catholic father of the Gifford rebels, married Isabella Julia Burton, a Protestant, on 27 April 1872 in the venue of her choice, the Church of Ireland parish church of St George, on the north side of Dublin. Though they differed in religion, both were unionists politically. Relatively little is known of Frederick's family, except what his name and faith imply, the details given on his marriage certificate and a few notes written in after years by his daughters Sidney (known as ‘
John') and Nellie.

The official details which Frederick gave on his marriage certificate were that he was a bachelor, ‘of full age', pursuing a career as a land and law agent; that he lived at 8 Hardwicke Street, Dublin; and that his father, William Gifford, was a surgeon.
[1]
Family papers relate that both his (unmarried) parents died young, in County Tipperary, and that two maternal Catholic maiden aunts had raised him.
[2]
There is also an indication that his father, an aristocrat, left instructions and money to have his son educated in law, a process helped by the Solicitors' Benevolent Fund, but that he did not publicly acknowledge paternity. There was a rumour at the time, even more dramatic, that Frederick's mother was a daughter of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The only other information can be inferred from heraldic sources, which confirm that the Norman Giffords came to Ireland in the twelfth century, along with their impressive family motto: ‘I would rather die than be dishonoured.'

Owing to his being orphaned early with, apparently, neither siblings nor cousins, Frederick Gifford cuts a lonely figure, symbolic in a way of a man who seemed to be only nominally head of his household, who was for many years the only Catholic in a family of fourteen and who is buried alone in Deansgrange Cemetery, County Dublin. Surprisingly, though the more loved of the Gifford parents, he is the forgotten man. His fine tombstone, erected by Isabella, lies broken on his grave.

Isabella's details given in their marriage certificate include addresses at 7 Russell Place (near St George's church) and ‘Innisfallen', Howth, a fine residence in its own grounds. There is one fleeting mention in family records that she escaped through a window to marry Frederick, perhaps because of family opposition to his Catholicism. She gave her father's profession as ‘Clerk in Holy Orders', but it was the curate of St George's, R. Johnston, who married them. In fact, her father had died twenty years earlier.

Isabella's forebears, brothers Francis and Thomas Burton, came to County Clare in 1610. They were taking over land which had been violently seized from its lawful owners, though their own hands had not been bloodied in the process. They settled in a country that seemed subdued after the ‘Flight of the Earls', and the people appeared to accept the Tudor and Stuart system of administration, based on the English model of shires and sheriffs, provincial presidents and lord justices, a system completely supportive of the fourteenth-century Statutes of Kilkenny and their denigration of the Irish. The Burton men were loyal to the legal obligations of those statutes, which forbade marriage to the Irish: their wives' recorded names show neither a Gráinne nor a Bridget among them. The sons of the earlier Burtons began to make their way in the world. Their line produced an eminent banker, an alderman, a mayor and an MP. Three of them became high sheriffs, including F. P. Burton, who took that office in 1751. His son Samuel married Hannah Mallet in 1808. They had four sons, including Robert Nathaniel Burton and Sir Frederick William Burton, who was an artist and Director of the National Gallery in London.

It was the second son, Robert Nathaniel, who married Emily Cole Hamilton Walsh and fathered her nine children, among them Isabella. Isabella's elder sisters, Hannah, Emily and Mary, remained unmarried and had enough money invested on which to live for some time. When faced with financial difficulties, they took up nursing to earn a living, Hannah eventually becoming a matron in an English hospital.

There is nothing in the family papers to indicate what became of Isabella's brothers, except for portraits taken in Buenos Aires and London, and references to their having been doctors. On the other hand, family papers, family word of mouth and church records inform us about the life of Isabella's father, Robert Nathaniel Burton, who was vicar of Borris, County Carlow, during the years of the Great Hunger.
[3]
He and the local parish priest used to give their breakfasts to the hungry. The vicar could read the Gaelic Bible from his time in Clare, and learned the Catholic rite for the dying – there were so many dying – so that if the priest was not available he could ease them into death with some dignity. Almost inevitably, he caught typhus and died in 1851. His brother, Sir Frederick Burton, financed the rearing of the vicar's children. He himself had been engaged to Margaret Stokes, an archaeologist, but when she caught smallpox her face became disfigured, and, according to Isabella, he jilted her. Isabella never forgave him for that.

Isabella's maternal line was more colourful.
[4]
Miss Emily Bisset, daughter of a wealthy Huguenot merchant, was her grandmother. Some Huguenots expelled from France had settled in America and felt themselves loyal Protestant subjects of the British Crown. They were, in fact, known as the United Empire Loyalists. When Britain lost the American War of Independence, these Huguenots fled northwards and were under the protection of the British army stationed at Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Bissets settled in their new North American home, Mr Bisset building his gold into the brickwork of his house (there being no banks).

When a young officer from Ireland, Captain Claude Cole Hami-lton Walsh, whose mother was the Hon. C. Hamilton of Beltrim Castle, County Tyrone, met the fifteen-year-old Emily Bisset, they fell in love. He married her a year later, when she was sixteen, taking her back with him to his family home at Gortalowry House, Cookstown, County Tyrone. There Emily bore him twenty-three children, among them some sets of twins. Emily is reputed to have had red hair, which her great-grandchildren inherited, ungratefully. Claude was a boyhood friend of the Duke of Wellington and is reputed to have been on his staff at Waterloo, so it is not surprising to learn that the Iron Duke was godfather to one of Claude and Emily's sons.

Eventually, when there were still sixteen of his family unprovided for, Claude died. Emily sold her home, realised her other assets, chartered a ship, had the complete makings of a house put on board, purchased a year's supply of food, engaged governesses for the younger children and servants for the house and set sail for Australia. It is generally accepted that the only career for an upper-class girl in those days was wifehood, so perhaps Emily decided Australia was the best place to bring her unmarried daughters, since there was a great scarcity of marriageable women for the officers stationed there.

One of Emily's daughters, named after her, married Rev. Robert Nathaniel Burton, and they settled in Ireland. Their daughter Isabella mothered the six Gifford girls, all of whom, from this United Empire Loyalist background, played a determined part in Ireland's War of Independence, completely in contrast to the non-involvement of their brothers.

Isabella remained true to her upbringing, and, despite Frederick's Catholicism, she ignored the Catholic baptisms of the Gifford sons in accordance with the Palatine Pact, and reared their whole family, boys and girls, as Protestants.
[5]
The two parents still shared their political unionism, and, thanks to Nellie Gifford's notes and correspondence and detailed descriptions by ‘John' Gifford, we get a very full picture of what it was like to grow up in Dublin in a privileged unionist household at the end of the nineteenth century.
[6]
But why were only the girls involved in the fight for Irish independence? The answer may have an economic element: to get a decent job in their day, being a Protestant unionist was a definite help; in fact it was almost obligatory. Even membership of a tennis club required a Protestant ‘passport' at the time.

Notes

There is no picture in the Gifford family papers of the head of the family, Frederick. As one gets to know Isabella, one cannot imagine her lending herself to the popular photographic pose of the time: the husband sitting and the dutiful wife standing, hand on his shoulder, flanked by an aspidistra. Called the ‘Guvnor' by the servants of the house, a more appropriate name for Frederick might have been ‘The mistress's husband'. He seems to have been portly, at least in later years, and with an agreeable personality that made him an easy mixer. Nellie was his favourite child, and when she was a little girl he occasionally brought her with him about the country on his legal work – even as far as Donegal town, where they stayed in Hamilton's Hotel.
[1]

Yet there was a certain remoteness in his relationship with his family. One Sunday morning he left his umbrella behind in church. One of the boys was sent to fetch it, but after a long time he came back, with no umbrella. Asked why he had been so long, he named the Protestant churches he had tried in the locality. He knew his father did not worship at St Philip's Church of Ireland with the rest of the family, but had no idea that it was mass in Rathmines parish church that he attended.
[2]

Although this indicates a distance between Frederick and his children, he was close to them in other ways. When one of them was put to bed for a misdemeanour, he would try to sneak up to the culprit with a piece of cake or some other delicacy, by way of consolation. Even so, though he was the more liked of the parents, Nellie was the only one who loved him unconditionally. The children tended to blame their mother, in fact, for any distancing they felt from their father.

Frederick never practised criminal law, which was considered not quite gentlemanly in those days. The two maternal Catholic aunts who reared him when his parents died, apprenticed their young nephew to a solicitor on the Liffey quays, James Swazy, whose offices were over Twigg & Brett, wine importers. He was working as an articled clerk when he married Isabella, but later changed to an office in the more prestigious Dawson Street.
[3]

A lawyer in Ireland, particularly a land agent, could not have started at a more propitious time than the late nineteenth century. The big word in Ireland was ‘land', and, in orbit around it, its various satellites bore the ugly names of ‘rack rents', ‘absentee landlords', ‘potato blight', ‘famine', ‘starvation', ‘cholera', ‘emigration' and ‘death'. Sir William Butler, one-time general in the British army, gives what may be presumed an unbiased account of an eviction he had seen: ‘The thatched roofs were torn down and the earthen walls were battered in by crowbars: the screaming women, the half-naked children, the paralysed grandmother, the tottering grandfather, were hauled out.'
[4]

After the Famine years, in 1879, with the memories of the Great Hunger still very much alive, Michael Davitt joined forces with Charles Stewart Parnell, the Home Ruler, to found the Land League. So effective was this leadership that within the working life of Frederick Gifford a huge upheaval of landownership took place in Ireland. Despite Frederick's distaste for eviction, his unionism precluded his support of republicanism. Gladstone's disestablishment of the Anglican Church in 1869 must have pleased Frederick, the Catholic. In the following year, Gladstone's first Land Act attempted, in a feeble way, to give some stability to tenants-at-will, by trying to give them some protection from unfair eviction, allowing them to borrow two-thirds of the cost of buying their land from the government and curbing exorbitant rents. Then there was the advent of Joseph Gillis Biggar, the grocer from the north of Ireland who, as an Irish nationalist MP, used obstructionism as a parliamentary weapon to delay the business of parliament in an attempt to force the British government to negotiate with the Irish nationalist MPs. He gummed up the ‘mother of all parliaments' by deliberately droning on, even through the night, until, in 1881, the parliament was obliged to introduce ‘closure of debate'. Never again was the Irish Parliamentary Party ignored, most especially when Parnell, their new leader, embraced more aggressive tactics.

The New Departure policy, which sought an amalgamation of parliamentary action and physical force to pursue the common ideals of land reform and self-government, was best expressed by Parnell's famous seven words to a tenant demonstration in Mayo in June 1880: ‘Keep a firm grip on your homesteads.'
[5]
Huge crowds, menacingly quiet, gathered at evictions. Boulders were dropped from heights to hinder the approaching Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). Then Parnell introduced another weapon – a psychological one – in his fight for the tenants, and the word ‘boycott' entered English dictionaries: it meant ‘
to shun'.
Captain Boycott, agent to Lord Erne, refused to acknowledge the bad harvests which made the tenants unable to pay rent and he evicted them. Parnell organised the total ostracising of Boycott by all. The land agent had to employ harvesters from the north of the country whose fees crippled him. Defeated, he fled.

Lawyers had particularly difficult transactions. The scope can be gauged by the £10 million authorised for tenant purchase under the Land Purchases Acts of 1885 and 1888. The legal professionals, including Frederick Gifford, were hands-on interpreters of the many Land Acts during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. There were added problems with all the statutes on land tenure. In the course of land sale and purchase, the conveyancing would have entailed scrutinising the title deeds, checking for squatter's title and fragmentation of property and noting rights of way, turbary rights and water rights. The late nineteenth-century land and law agent, however, had the
additional
headaches of acquiring knowledge of the many statutes passed on the subject of Irish land tenure down to the Redemption of Rent Act of 1891, the sixteen Land Acts passed between 1830 and 1891, the Supreme Court Rules of 1891 and the County Court Rules of 1890. Rules were issued under the Land Purchase Act of 1891, both in the Supreme Court and in the Land Commission; there were more rules pertaining to appeals to the Land Commission and from the Land Commission to the Courts of Appeal. Finally, there were also the rules under the Acts of 1860 and 1870.
[6]

Nellie Gifford mentions her father's repeated visits to the Land Commission, but there are only a few glimpses seen of him at home with his family. He drew ‘well enough', said Nellie, and sometimes ‘broke out in cartoons' – as would his daughter Grace. He also made a small hobby of ‘silverpoint', in which artistic discipline the artist used a silver pen on specially prepared paper. He was a fan of the then current musical success of Gilbert and Sullivan, and he sometimes used the adjective ‘Gilbertian'. He could read the score of the comic operas and could play them on a six-sided or seven-sided concertina.

Frederick enjoyed an easy friendship with John B. Yeats, with whom he had in common not only art but also the law. Unlike his wife, he also enjoyed Sundays when the servants departed and he could go to the kitchen to warm his feet on the fender of the big range. He had a sense of fun and would, for instance, throw his handkerchief up at a cobweb on the high ceiling, to disapproving comments from Isabella. She was queen of the kitchen domain and resented his intrusion; the children confessed distaste for the kitchen when there were no servants there.

Frederick took an interest in gardening, bringing some plants over from England. One particular return from their two-month annual summer stay in Greystones, County Wicklow, was recalled by Nellie, because on their arrival home not only had the grass grown almost knee-high but the plants her father had put down before leaving were ‘climbing and sprawling', and, most curious of all, low-growing, very red apples were in fruit. On biting the apples, the children discovered they were a new ‘fruit' which they had never encountered before and which they were told were called ‘tomatoes'.
[7]

Frederick's daughter Sidney has left us a description of the smoking regalia of her father's bachelor days. A gentleman of that time would not smoke in the presence of ladies, so when he needed the solace of his tobacco Frederick would retire to another room and put on his smoking jacket. His outfit comprised not only the velvet embroidered jacket but also a velvet embroidered cap. His smoke finished, he discarded the allegedly polluted garments and put on his ordinary clothes to rejoin his womenfolk.
[8]
Nellie evocatively summed up her father as she saw him: ‘He bore the vague, average hallmarks of what were called “the gentry” in Victorian times.
'
[9]

Isabella was six stone in weight when she married: a small, pretty, blonde, twenty-nine-year-old member of a strongly unionist and strongly Protestant Carlow family.
[10]
Her golden hair was pinned up but curled about the ears. Her portraits show attractive features, but there is little animation there. Her eyes look at the camera uncompromisingly, and her well-formed mouth is set in composure, not disclosing her reputedly excellent teeth.

There is no way a pen picture may be drawn to suggest that Isabella was a ‘mumsie' type of mother. Phrases about her have survived to suggest instead that cuddles and kind words were in short supply but, it must be conceded, the social mores of Victorian upper-class Dublin might have regarded demonstrative motherly love as ‘not quite the thing'. Perhaps it would be fairest to register first the pejoratives attached to her name, lingering long after her death, and then mention her undoubted virtues:

Mother was not a port in a storm;
rather she was a storm in a port.
[11]

This antithetical summing-up by Isabella's daughter Nellie suggests a personality which might be called ‘fractious' or ‘difficult'. It was also observed that she was ‘always carping' and ‘easily ruffled'.
[12]
Most damning, perhaps, was her likely response to a childish query: the enquirer would be told not to ask stupid questions, or a reference would be made to ‘hopeless ignorance':

There was a pyrotechnic quality in her family that flared up at any ignorance or clumsiness which left us afraid to ask any questions. Though she seldom used many of her talents she was skilful in many arts. She could contrive a hat without effort, though she had never been taught anything but the elegancies of her times; a little French, Italian and German, water-colour painting. Her poetic fancy ran on the lines of Tennyson, a man of blameless character according to her information, and her sonnets had earned her the name of Sappho among her brothers.
[13]

Artists, according to Isabella, came ready-made and instinctive, and anyone who kept steadily at a job, especially an artist, she termed, in a contemptuous voice, a slogger. It was observed that Isabella had little sense of humour, and even her grandchildren, though she never spoke crossly to them, saw her as
She Who Must Be Obeyed.
[14]
One day this mother of twelve surviving children told one of her daughters, ‘I never liked babies' – but they knew that without her telling them. When their nursemaid, Bridget Hamill, departed for her ‘day off' after Sunday dinner, their mother had a distressed look because she would be burdened with them for the rest of the day. As to every other day, the norm was that they went out after breakfast with Bridget and went out again after a simple lunch of bread and butter, provided with bags of raisins and biscuits.

Isabella had defended Bridget Hamill when she was interviewing her as a nursemaid for the junior members of the family. Bridget's then employer, a publican, made disparaging remarks about her, but neither his trade nor his attitude pleased Isabella, so when he had finished his tirade she turned to Bridget and said, ‘Call to Temple Villas and we will hear your side of the story.' Bridget obviously impressed her, and, happily for all of them, the girl became a loved employee and godmother of the youngest Gifford son, Edward.

Frederick and Isabella had met when they attended the College of Art in Kildare Street, then called the College of Design. Encouraging this artistic streak in her children, Isabella brought them each year to the Royal Hibernian Academy Opening Day and also took them (probably on the Bridget-less Sunday afternoons) to the National Gallery, the museum, concerts, any worthwhile art exhibition that was on, the circus and Dublin Zoo. She had sold some of her artistic work before her marriage and on one occasion felt confident enough to point out to John B. Yeats what she considered to be a flaw in one of his paintings.

Isabella did have her soft spots, and one of them was her Huguenot maternal grandmother, Emily Bisset, who chartered the ship for Australia. She appeared also to be close to Kate, her eldest daughter, and to have had a special liking for her second son, Liebert, though he seemed to be the least talented of her six boys.

As to the power structure in this family, a glance at their observance of the Palatine Pact shows who was the boss. This pact proposed that in ‘mixed' marriages the boys follow their father's religion and the girls that of their mother. So the Gifford girls were all promptly baptised in Protestant churches with chosen godparents, but although the first three boys were baptised within a fortnight of birth, in Donnybrook Catholic church, there was a ragged pattern thereafter. Frederick Ernest was not baptised for almost a year and Edward Cecil for almost six months, with the very unusual situation of the officiating priest being his godfather and his nursemaid, Bridget Hamill, being his godmother. Anyhow Isabella brought them up from infancy, boys and girls, in her own faith. In fact, the census return of 1901 shows the whole house to have been Protestant, with the exceptions of Frederick and the servants. Isabella Gifford simply ignored her sons' Catholic baptisms. The Palatine Pact was eventually turned on its head in the Gifford household, with the boys remaining Protestant, true to their upbringing, but untrue to their baptisms, and four of the girls later choosing to convert to the faith of their father, in spite of their Protestant baptisms.
[15]