THEREFORE, my Friends, stand to it One and All: Refuse this Filthy Trash.
He signed himself ‘M. B. Drapier’, posing as a draper dealing in woollen cloth. But even the dogs in the street knew that the author was Jonathan Swift. He had become a national hero overnight. The government frantically tried to prosecute the printer, but no jury could be found to convict him. In the Irish House of Commons MPs deserted the government benches to join the opposition, now calling themselves ‘Patriots’, to vote overwhelmingly against ‘Wood’s Halfpence’. The outcome was that in 1725 the government decided that it had no alternative but to withdraw Wood’s patent and his notorious halfpence.
Swift added to his hugely popular series of Drapier’s Letters. The Patriots particularly delighted in his fourth letter in which he declared ‘that by the laws of God, of nature, of nations, and of your own country, you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England’. And he did not confine his strictures to the English government. He included
our Country Landlords; who, by unmeasurable screwing and racking their Tenants all over the Kingdom, have already reduced the miserable People to a worse Condition than the Peasants in France, or the Vassals in Germany and Poland.
Episode 121
A MODEST PROPOSAL
I reland in the early 1700s was an island of stark contrasts. At the top of Irish society there were men who were as rich as German princes. These were the winners in the wars and convulsions of the previous century. At the bottom rungs of society were families who owned little or nothing, cultivating the soil with spades, working for farmers, or renting patches of land. Lacking the protection of leases, these people were ‘rack-rented’, that is, they paid rents which were generally raised from year to year to the very limit of what they could pay.
Angered by the ruthless exploitation of the rural poor, Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, launched a savage attack on the landlords in a pamphlet published in 1729. It was entitled A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland, from Being a Burden to their Parents or Country; and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick. Since he believed the landlords treated their domestic animals better than the poor people who worked for them, he set out to shock his readers with terrible irony: he suggested that the peasantry should raise their babies to be served for dinner at the tables of the rich.
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked or Boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a Fricassée or a Ragoût.
I do therefore humbly offer it to publick Consideration, that of the Hundred and Twenty Thousand Children, already computed, Twenty thousand may be reserved for Breed; whereof only one Fourth Part to be Males; which is more than we allow to Sheep, black Cattle, or Swine; and my Reason is, that these Children are seldom the Fruits of Marriage, a Circumstance not much regarded by our Savages; therefore, one Male will be sufficient to serve four Females. That the remaining Hundred thousand, may, at a Year old, be offered in Sale to Persons of Quality and Fortune, through the Kingdom, always advising the Mother to let them suck plentifully in the last Month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good Table....
I grant this Food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for Landlords; who, as they have already devoured most of the Parents, seem to have the best Title to the Children.... It will have one other Collateral Advantage, by lessening the Number of Papists among us.... I believe no gentleman would repine to give Ten Shillings for the Carcase of a good fat Child; which ... will make four Dishes of excellent nutritive Meat.…
Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the Times require) may flay the Carcase; the Skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable Gloves for Ladies, and Summer Boots for fine Gentlemen.
As to our City of Dublin; Shambles may be appointed for this Purpose ... and Butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the Children alive, and dressing them hot from the Knife, as we do roasting Pigs.
Swift’s Modest Proposal is almost certainly the most ferocious and uncomfortable pamphlet ever to have been written in the English language.
The Church of Ireland Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley, is remembered today as one of the greatest philosophers of the eighteenth century. He was so appalled by the wretched condition of the peasantry who lived and worked around him in Co. Cork that in 1735 he asked the landlords a series of rhetorical questions in a pamphlet he titled The Querist:
Whether there be upon earth any Christian or civilised people so beggardly wretched and destitute, as the common Irish?
Whether, nevertheless, there is any other people whose wants may be more easily supplied from home?
Whether, if there was a wall of brass a thousand cubits high round their kingdom, our natives might not nevertheless live cleanly and comfortably, till the land, and reap the fruits of it?
Whether an Irish lady, set out with French silks and Flanders lace, may not be said to consume more beef and butter than fifty of our labouring peasants?
Whether there be any country in Christendom more capable of improvement than Ireland?
Whether we are the only people who starve in the market of plenty? Whether there be not every year more cash circulated at the card-tables of Dublin than at all the fairs of Ireland?
In Ireland, as in every part of Europe in the eighteenth century, the poor were particularly vulnerable to bad weather. That was demonstrated with terrible force in 1740, the year of the ‘Great Frost’.
Episode 122
1740: THE YEAR OF THE GREAT FROST
During January 1740 Arctic weather descended on Ireland, so intense that vast numbers of fish were found dead around the shores of Strangford Lough and Lough Neagh. In north Tipperary a whole sheep was roasted on top of nineteen inches of ice on the River Shannon at Portumna, ‘at the eating of which they had great mirth, and drank many loyal toasts’. Afterwards a hurling match was played on the ice between two teams of gentlemen. So sharp was the frost that people from Tyrone walked directly across the frozen waters of Lough Neagh as they travelled to the market in Antrim town.
Lasting seven weeks, this ‘Great Frost’ froze the sea around both English and Irish ports, stopping the carrying of coal across the Irish Sea to Dublin. Hedges and ornamental shrubs were torn up around the city, and fourteen men were arrested for felling trees in Phoenix Park. For the ordinary people of Ireland, this Siberian weather was a disaster. The temperature plummeted so greatly that potato stores in straw-covered clamps in the ground were turned to inedible pulp. As Michael Rivers, a Co. Waterford merchant, observed,
[The frost] has already destroyed a great part of the potatoes that lie in the cabins that lodge them and most of the potatoes of our country that are in the ground, by which the poor are likely to suffer greatly.
Three weeks later Richard Purcell wrote from north Cork:
The eating potatoes are all destroyed, which many think will be followed by famine among the poor, and if the small ones, which are not bigger than large peas and which be deepest in the ground, are so destroyed as not to serve for seed, there must be sore famine in 1741.... If no potatoes remain sound for seed, I think this frost the most dreadful calamity that ever befell this poor kingdom.
So many wild birds had been killed that there was an eerie silence across the land. This poem appeared in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal:
No lark is left to wake the morn,
Or rouse the youth with early horn;
The blackbird’s melody is o’er
And pretty robin sings no more.
No thrush to serenade the grove
And soothe the passions into love,
Thou sweetest songster of the throng,
Now only live in poet’s song.
Huge numbers of cattle and sheep had been kille
d by the extreme cold. Then, for those animals which survived, there was little or no grazing—the usual rains did not follow when a thaw set in during February. ‘The cattle are all dying,’ it was reported from Lismore in Waterford at the end of March. In April a correspondent from north Wexford wrote to the Dublin newspaper Pue’s Occurrences:
Without rain what is to come of us? The corn that is sowed is perishing, the corn we have in our haggards is so prodigious dear the poor cannot purchase it.... As for flesh meat they cannot smell to it, they have lost all their sheep long ago, and now their last stake, their little cows are daily and hourly dropping for want of grass.
Corn prices more than doubled; at Drogheda a mob boarded and smashed up a vessel laden with corn; and in the capital at the end of May the Dublin Newsletter reported:
The bakers having made but little household bread, the populace were so greatly enraged that they broke open their shops that night and on Sunday; some sold their bread and gave them money, others took it away, and in this manner they went through the city.
The drought was so severe that the streams that usually turned the water-wheels to power corn mills and woollen tuck mills dried up. In the tinder-dry conditions fires raged in many towns: 150 houses burned down in Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary, 53 in Wexford town, and 20 in the village of Moate, Co. Westmeath.
The harvest in the autumn of 1740, depleted though it was, brought some relief. Then bad weather returned. Violent gales blew in September, followed by blizzards along the east coast in October, covering Belfast in what were described as ‘prodigious’ quantities of snow. Two terrible storms hit the country in November, accompanied by more snow and frost. On 9 December the heavens opened with such force that floods were reported across the island, washing houses and ‘whole trees’ into the River Liffey, and one correspondent from Navan, Co. Meath, described ‘the greatest flood in the River Boyne that was ever known in the memory of man’.
On the following day temperatures dropped and the Arctic weather returned. The only outcome now could be famine—a famine so terrible that 1741 would be remembered as the ‘Year of the Slaughter’.
Episode 123
1741: THE ‘YEAR OF THE SLAUGHTER’
The great frost of 1740, followed by a prolonged drought, killed livestock, destroyed stores of potatoes, and produced a harvest with a pitiful yield. A survey in Louth during January 1741 revealed that only one household in five in the county had enough food to see them through the following months. There is no reason to believe that the rest of Ireland was in any better condition.
Lord Justice Hugh Boulter, Archbishop of Armagh, started a scheme of relief in Dublin on New Year’s Day 1741. Three thousand were being fed every day by mid-January. By April the numbers had reached 4,400. At first the archbishop was paying for this out of his own pocket; it cost him £18 a day. Then Dean Jonathan Swift, Bishop George Berkeley and a number of noblemen rallied round to contribute and raise funds. In Waterford nearly 2,000 were being served boiled oatmeal two days a week.
Every year energetic Dubliners rise early to climb Killiney Hill to greet the dawn on midsummer’s day. As the sun rises these people look down on the fabulously expensive homes of Van Morrison, Bono of U2 and other members of Ireland’s prosperous elite. Only a few of them will know why there is an obelisk at the summit, or why there are remains of a huge wall surrounding the hill. These constructions are evidence of a great relief scheme to provide work for the starving in 1741, funded by John Mapas, one of the few wealthy Catholic landowners in the area. In a similar relief scheme in Co. Kildare, organised by Lady Katherine Conolly, a huge obelisk was erected close to Castletown House.
Their bodies weakened by hunger, people fell prey to disease, including smallpox and dysentery, known then as ‘the bloody flux’. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal’s correspondent wrote from Drogheda:
We have a great mortality among the poor people, who die in great numbers from fevers and fluxes. One poor man buried eight of his family in a few days.
John Usher, a land agent at Lismore, Co. Waterford, wrote to his employer in London in February:
A bloody flux and a violent fever rages so all over the country that scarce a day passes that we do not bury fifteen or sixteen even in this small place.... For my own part, were it not for the business of this place I would fly for my life.
Now the killing disease was typhus, an infection spread mainly by body lice. Typhus produced delirium, vertigo, a high fever, bloodshot eyes and a spotted rash. Most victims died from heart failure. From west Cork Sir Richard Cox wrote:
By all I can learn, the dreadfullest civil war, or most raging plague never destroyed so many as this season. The distempers and famine increase so that it is no vain fear that there will not be hands to save the harvest.
The Rev. Philip Skelton, curate of Monaghan parish, reported that there were
whole parishes in some places ... almost desolate; the dead have been eaten in the fields by dogs for want of people to bury them. Whole thousands in a barony have perished, some of hunger and others of disorders occasioned by unnatural, unwholesome, and putrid diet.
An anonymous author of an open letter to Archbishop Boulter described conditions in the vicinity of Cashel, Co. Tipperary:
Multitudes are daily perishing.... I have seen the labourer endeavouring to work at his spade, but fainting for want of food and forced to quit it. I have seen the aged father eating grass like a beast ... the helpless orphan exposed on the dunghill, and none to take him in for fear of infection ... the hungry infant sucking at the breast of the already expired parent ...
The wealthy and powerful also succumbed from fever. They included Sir Alexander Staples, a Dublin merchant, and three judges: Lord Chief Justice Sir John Rogerson, Prime Serjeant Bettesworth, and Chief Baron Wainwright.
The Irish called this year of 1741 bliain an áir, ‘year of the slaughter’. Out of a population of 2,400,000, between 310,000 and 480,000 died as a direct result of famine and fever that year. A greater proportion of the population died in this one year than during the six years of the Great Famine in the 1840s when the population was more than three times larger than it was in 1741. All Europe suffered famine in 1741, but no country, except for Norway, suffered as much as Ireland.
The Duke of Devonshire, the viceroy, on government business in London, was kept informed of the famine in Ireland. He was so appalled by what he read that he at once agreed to support a plan proposed by the Charitable Musical Society. He personally sought out the composer George Frideric Handel and handed him a letter inviting him to Dublin.
Episode 124
THE FIRST PERFORMANCE OF HANDEL’S MESSIAH
The terrible famine of 1741 had filled the city of Dublin with emaciated and fever-ridden refugees from the countryside. The wards of the Charitable Infirmary on Inns Quay and Mercer’s Hospital in Stephen Street could take no more patients. Money was needed—and quickly. The plight of those placed behind bars for debt in the city’s prisons was the special concern of the Charitable Musical Society. A magnificent new Musick Hall had been opened in October 1741—why not invite the famous composer Handel over from London to give charitable performances there?
George Frideric Handel had good reasons for accepting the invitation. His last oratorio had been poorly received, and he was in severe financial difficulties. Besides, he was working on another great oratorio, the Messiah, composed to passages selected from the Scriptures by his friend Charles Jennens. Handel preferred to submit this composition to an audience that did not include his London critics.
Handel arrived in Dublin on 17 November and gave his first concert in the Musick Hall on 23 December. In a letter to Charles Jennens he expressed delight with his reception:
The Musick sounds delightfully in this charming Room.... I exert myself on my Organ with more than usual success.... I cannot sufficiently express the kind treatment I receive here; but the Politeness of this generous Nation cannot be unknown to you.
&
nbsp; Rehearsals for the Messiah began in February 1742. Great care had to be taken in obtaining permission for the choirs of Christ Church and St Patrick’s Cathedrals to take part. It was known that Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s, was opposed to his vicars choral singing with bands. So Handel decided to call personally on the famous dean, the author of Gulliver’s Travels. When told by his servant who was at the door, the elderly Swift responded: ‘O! A German, and a genius! A prodigy! Admit him.’ Permission was granted. The Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Devonshire, gave the services of His Majesty’s Band of Musick. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal published this report on the first public rehearsal on 8 April:
Yesterday, Mr Handel’s new Grand Sacred Oratorio, called The Messiah was rehearsed at the Musick Hall in Fishamble Street, to a most Grand, Polite, and Crowded Audience ... and was allowed by the greatest Judges to be the Finest Composition of Musick that ever was heard.
Though the tickets cost half a guinea apiece, so great was the expected audience that the stewards issued a special request to
A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process Page 34
