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

by Jonathan Bardon

  This farm I trust will not be tenanted by any man.... If such a traitor to your cause enters this part of the country, why, keep your eyes fixed upon him—point him out—and if a pig of his falls into a boghole, let it lie there.

  Charles Stewart Parnell, president of the Land League, had returned from a spectacularly successful whistle-stop tour of America during which he had delivered speeches to Irish-Americans in sixty-two towns and cities, addressed Congressmen in the House of Representatives, and raised great sums for famine relief and for the Land League. Now he gave his full support for the approach recommended by Davitt. At Ennis, Co. Clare, on Sunday 19 September, even though it was four o’clock in the morning, hundreds were waiting for him when he arrived. A procession formed up with lighted torches and a band to escort him to his hotel. Later in the day, speaking to a crowd that had now swollen to 12,000, Parnell asked:

  Now, what are you going to do with a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted? (A voice: Shoot him!) Now I think I heard somebody say, ‘Shoot him,’ but I wish to point out to you a very much better way, a more Christian, a more charitable way which will give the lost sinner an opportunity of repenting. When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and at the market place and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him in a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.

  Soon afterwards this advice was followed with striking effect in Co. Mayo. Here by Lough Mask, Captain Charles Boycott was to experience at first hand the formidable power of the Land League.

  Episode 196

  THE RELIEF OF CAPTAIN BOYCOTT

  On 18 October 1880 The Times published a letter from Ireland. It was from Captain Charles Boycott, an army captain from Norfolk, who had an estate surrounding Lough Mask House in Co. Mayo and also acted as agent for Lord Erne’s extensive properties in the province of Connacht. After several seasons of atrocious weather, tenants had been unable to pay the rent. Boycott had issued eviction orders but, as he explained to the press, his process-server had been intimidated and driven back. Now, he told readers, a howling mob had coerced all his workers to leave him; the blacksmith and the laundress refused to work for his family; and shopkeepers in nearby Ballinrobe would not serve him. In its editorial The Times concluded: ‘The persecution of the writer, Mr Boycott, for some offence against the Land League’s code, is an insult to the government and to public justice.’

  Loyalists in Ireland agreed, and the Belfast News-Letter headed a campaign to send an expedition to rescue Captain Boycott. Ulster Protestants clamoured to be part of a rescue expedition and to lift his potatoes and thresh his corn. When arrangements were made to hire a special train to take hundreds of loyalists to Connacht, the anxious Irish Chief Secretary, W. E. Forster, wrote to the Prime Minister, W. E. Gladstone: ‘This would be civil war, we know the whole countryside would be up against them.’ Forster rushed a thousand additional troops to Connacht to reinforce the police protecting Boycott. Then he announced that there would be no special train, and he strictly limited the rescue team to fifty men. And so twenty-five Orangemen from Co. Cavan and twenty-five Orangemen from Co. Monaghan boarded a train at Clones on 11 November. At Athlone each volunteer was issued with a revolver. As the Orange labourers marched out of the station at Claremorris between lines of soldiers with bayonets fixed, a great crowd of local people subjected them to a storm of groans, hissings, hootings and booing.

  As darkness fell the rain lashed down in blinding sheets. The owners of carriages hired by the police refused to allow their vehicles to convey the Orangemen. The Ulstermen had no choice but to walk to Ballinrobe, a walk which took them five hours. Next morning, after spending the night in the infantry barracks, the men tramped the final four miles to Lough Mask House. The cavalcade of Orangemen, infantry, cavalry and police was described by the Daily News correspondent as being ‘like a huge red serpent with black head and tail’. At the iron gates to Lough Mask House, Captain Boycott gave no greeting to the fifty labourers who had come so far to salvage his crops.

  The Cavan and Monaghan labourers sang Orange songs around campfires they had built and then settled down for the night in rain-sodden tents supplied by the army. Captain Boycott rather meanly charged the Orangemen ninepence a stone for their potatoes. Despite a torrential rainstorm accompanied by gale-force winds, the men were up early. The task ahead was formidable: they had to lift two acres of potatoes, eight acres of turnips and seven acres of mangolds. Twenty acres of corn had already been cut, but the sheaves had still to be threshed.

  Meanwhile the Land League imposed a strict discipline on the local people. They followed the instructions given by the Connaught Telegraph:

  Be calm, be cool and, at the same time, resolute and determined.... Treat those mailed and buckshot warriors with silence and contempt.... Show the world over by your calm, but resolute demeanour, that you are worthy of your name and traditions.

  To the great disappointment of foreign correspondents—some of them from as far away as the Russian Empire and the United States—there were no incidents of violence.

  After two weeks, on Friday 26 November, the work was finished. To reinforce the current nationalist joke that the clerk of the weather had joined the Land League, the worst storm that Mayo had endured in many years burst over the area. The Orangemen had a sleepless last night as their tents in the encampment were ripped to shreds by the howling winds.

  The relief of Captain Boycott was proclaimed a victory by loyalists. But it had cost £10,000 to save crops that were not worth a tenth of that sum. To rescue every beleaguered landlord in this way would be quite impossible. The French newspaper Le Figaro reported: ‘The bright Irish have invented a new word, they are currently saying to boycott somebody, meaning to ostracise him.’

  Boycotting now swept the country. Any landlord attempting to evict tenants suddenly found himself powerless. Evictions fell sharply. The Land League was the real victor in this episode which had captured the imagination of the world.

  Episode 197

  ASSASSINATION IN THE PHOENIX PARK

  Back in 1847 the Tenant Right League summarised its demands as the ‘three Fs’: fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale. In 1881 W. E. Gladstone, the Prime Minister, seeing the great power of the Land League, decided to grant these three demands in a new Land Act. From now on land courts, and not the landlords, would decide what a fair rent would be—the first rent control in United Kingdom history. ‘Fixity of tenure’ ensured that tenants could not be evicted provided they had paid the rent. Finally, ‘free sale’ gave the tenant a clear right to sell the interest in his holding to an incoming tenant without landlord interference.

  Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, cautiously welcomed the act. The problem was that many tenants, their crops ruined by bad weather, were quite unable to pay their rents. In any case, the ultimate aim of the Land League was to get rid of the landlords altogether. While Parnell advised farmers to ‘test the act’, the Irish countryside remained turbulent. There were so many violent incidents that the Irish Chief Secretary, W. E. Forster, pushed through a coercion act giving special powers to the police and military. In reaction, the speeches of Irish MPs and Land League members were so ferocious that in October Parnell and other prominent leaders were imprisoned in Kilmainham Jail in Dublin.

  This only made the situation worse. Parnell’s sisters, Anna and Fanny, formed the Ladies’ Land League which openly organised extreme action. The high-profile prisoners meanwhile issued a ‘no rent’ manifesto from their prison cells. The country slid more and more out of government control. Finally, on 2 May 1882, in what became known as the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’, the leaders were released on condition that they called a halt
to the turbulence in the countryside. In return Gladstone promised an arrears bill which by the end of the year would give protection from eviction to more than 100,000 tenants who were behind with their rent. This was too much for Forster: he resigned.

  On 6 May, four days after the release of Parnell and his associates, Lord Frederick Cavendish took his first walk as the new Irish Chief Secretary in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, in the company of Under-Secretary Thomas Burke. It was a fine evening, the park was full of people, and the two gentlemen stopped to watch a game of polo. Suddenly a number of men came up from behind, stabbed the Chief Secretary and Under-Secretary to death with twelve-inch surgical knives, and then made their escape in a waiting cab.

  The assassins were members of a group calling themselves the ‘Invincibles’. Eventually they were caught and brought to justice. This appalling act shook Parnell and caused him to distance himself from the more extreme agitators. He now set about concentrating on constitutional politics to obtain Home Rule for Ireland. For that he needed the co-operation of the Liberals. Many Liberals, however, were convinced that Parnell was up to his neck in conspiracy with murderers. On 22 February 1883 Foster made a blistering attack on Parnell in the House of Commons. He accused him of conniving at the assassinations. ‘It’s a lie,’ Parnell cried out, but it was years before Liberals felt they could work with him.

  Rather later than some other European states, the United Kingdom was gradually becoming more representative, more democratic. In December 1884 Gladstone gave the vote to all male heads of households. The Irish electorate leaped from under a quarter of a million to nearly three quarters of a million. In the following year it was decided that, in spite of a steady fall in population due mainly to emigration, Ireland would be allowed to keep all its 103 seats at Westminster. Ireland had been serioiusly underrepresented at the time of the Union. Now it was overrepresented. Very soon Ireland would be deciding what government would be in power in London.

  On 8 June 1885 there was to be a division in the Commons on an additional tax on wines and spirits. Parnell summoned all absent Nationalists to Westminster by telegram, and all thirty-nine Irish Parliamentary Party MPs trooped through the lobby to vote against the Liberal government. Gladstone’s administration lost by 263 votes to 252. As one MP remembered, ‘a collection of bores and the bored became a mass of screaming, waving, gesticulating lunatics’, and Lord Randolph Churchill emitted hysterical yells ‘like a wild animal fastening its teeth on the prey’.

  Lord Salisbury, with Parnell’s help, now formed a Conservative government. His majority was too slim for comfort, however, and in November he called an election.

  For Ireland, that general election of 1885—the first to be conducted on the new franchise—was certainly the most momentous of the century.

  Episode 198

  THE FIRST HOME RULE BILL

  No one could predict the outcome of the general election of 1885 in Ireland. The number of voters had been tripled by the Reform Act of the year before. Party scrutineers were fiercely vigilant during the extraordinary turnout, which reached over 93 per cent in some divisions.

  Liberal representation on the island was completely wiped out. The Irish Parliamentary Party leaped to eighty-six seats, one of these being won in Liverpool by T. P. O’Connor. Because the Conservatives and Liberals were so evenly matched in numbers, Charles Stewart Parnell, at the head of the most disciplined political party in the United Kingdom, could call the shots. At first Parnell was inclined to keep the Conservatives in power. But it was unlikely that the new Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, would ever concede Home Rule. And what about Gladstone, the Liberal leader?

  In December 1885 the political journalist Thomas McKnight visited a leading Liberal, Sir Edward Cowan, at Craigavad in north Down. Ulster Liberals had just completed the magnificent Reform Club at the entrance to Royal Avenue in Belfast. Now there was not a single Liberal MP representing Ireland. McKnight had some grim news for his host: producing a letter, he announced abruptly: ‘Gladstone has gone over to the Home Rulers.’ Cowan replied incredulously: ‘Impossible! Absurd!’ But McKnight presented his proof:

  I put Mr Gladstone’s letter in Sir Edward’s hands. He read it slowly and then hesitated to speak.

  What do you think of it?’, I asked.

  ‘I must candidly say that I do not like it.’

  ‘Nor I. It means to us utter ruin.’

  The news of Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule immediately brought Liberals and Conservatives together in Ulster. Solid Protestant opposition in the north to Home Rule had not really entered into the calculations of either Parnell or Gladstone. Parnell duly transferred the Irish Party’s support to the Liberals. With some distaste Queen Victoria accepted Gladstone as her Prime Minister for the third time on 30 January 1886, disinclined as she was to ‘take this half-crazy and in many ways ridiculous old man for the sake of the country’.

  It would be quite wrong to conclude that Gladstone had gone over to Home Rule simply to get back into power. For years he had immersed himself in books on Irish history, and it is clear that deep conviction was behind his decision to take his party along this treacherous course.

  The Conservative politician Lord Randolph Churchill wrote to a friend in February: ‘I decided some time ago that if the Grand Old Man went for Home Rule, the Orange card would be the one to play.’ And play that card he did. Churchill was billed as the principal speaker at a ‘Monster Meeting of Conservatives and Orangemen’ in Belfast’s Ulster Hall on 22 February. When he put in at Larne, Churchill proclaimed to cheering supporters: ‘Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right.’ Then, after enjoying a selection of loyal airs played by the Ballymacarrett Brass Band and the Britannic Flute Band, the audience in the Ulster Hall listened to Churchill for one and a half hours with rapt attention:

  On you it primarily rests whether Ireland shall remain an integral portion of this great empire sharing in its glory ... or whether, on the other hand, Ireland shall become the focus and the centre of foreign intrigue and deadly conspiracy.

  He urged loyalists to organise so that Home Rule might not come upon them ‘as a thief in the night’.

  Not since the second reading of the Great Reform Bill in 1832 were the Commons and its public gallery so packed as when Gladstone introduced the Home Rule Bill on 8 April 1886. The journalist Frank Harris recorded the occasion:

  The house was so thronged that members sat about on the steps leading from the floor and even on the arms of the benches and on each other’s knees.... Every diplomat in London seemed to be present; and cheek by jowl with the black uniforms of bishops, Indian princes by the dozen blazing with diamonds lent a rich Oriental flavour to the scene.

  Gladstone spoke for two and a half hours. Harris described his demeanour:

  His head was like that of an old eagle—luminous eyes, rapacious beak and bony jaws.... His voice was a high, clear tenor; his gestures rare but well chosen; his utterance as fluid as water.... He seemed so passionately sincere and earnest that time and time again you might have thought he was expounding God’s law conveyed to him on Sinai.

  By later standards, the Prime Minister was offering a very limited form of devolution—little more than control over the police, civil service and the judiciary. But, whatever their private reservations, the Nationalist MPs gave Gladstone their full backing. Parnell knew that all his party’s disciplined energy would be needed to secure the passage of the bill. In stark contrast, within the Liberal ranks there was rebellion.

  Episode 199

  ‘IS THEM ’UNS BATE?’

  In a speech to Liberals in Portsmouth in 1886 Charles Stewart Parnell held up a map of Ireland. The Conservative constituencies—those opposed to Home Rule—had been coloured in in yellow. He said in mocking tones:

  This yellow patch covered by my forefinger represents Protestant Ulster—and now they say they want a separate parliament for this little yellow patch up in the north-east!

  Yet Parnell, l
eader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, was forced to pay attention to the Ulster question as the crucial vote in the House of Commons approached. In his final speech in support of the Home Rule Bill he said to MPs:

  We cannot give up a single Irishman. We want the energy, the talents and the work of every Irishman to ensure that this great experiment shall be a successful one. The best system of government for a country I believe to be the one which requires that government should be the result of all the forces within that country.

  Not all the forces in Ireland, however, wanted an Irish parliament. The 1881 census returns showed that there were 866,000 Protestants in Ulster, and almost all—Conservatives and Liberals alike—passionately opposed Home Rule. The strength of their feeling would soon be manifest.

  It was a rebellion within the Liberal government’s ranks, however, that defeated Home Rule. Like the Conservatives, the Liberal dissidents feared that Home Rule would begin the dismemberment of the Empire. On the night of 8 June 1886 ninety-three Liberal MPs voted with the Conservatives against the bill; and as a result of their defection from party ranks, Home Rule was defeated by a margin of thirty votes.

  In Belfast the journalist Frankfort Moore received the news by electric telegraph:

  As I made my way homeward on [that] lovely June morning ... although it was only four o’clock, I was met by groups of working men who had risen two or three hours before their usual time ... to learn the result of the division in the House of Commons; and when I told them that the bill had been defeated, the cheers that filled the air at the news surprised the policemen at the corners.... I met scores of the same class ... in the ultra-Protestant Sandy Row ... to put to me in their own idiom and staccato pronunciation the burning question: