by Jan Morris
The edge between Anglo and Irish was difficult to define, and became in practice a distinction of religion. Protestants, by and large, lived south of the Liffey, Catholics north, and Anglo-Irish society was as reluctant to cross Sackville Bridge into the Catholic quarters of the north as was the London upper crust to venture south of the Thames into Southwark or darkest Battersea. But Irishness, as the world thought of it, was common to both sides. The Irish literature of the day was mostly Anglo-Irish, and there was little that was Gaelic to the genius of men like Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde—Yeats liked to sit and meditate among the imperial monuments of St Patrick’s. Dublin was an English city with regional eccentricities, still an alien enclave, a Pale, clustered around its protective castle: for it really was a castle, with ancient military origins, and it stood on a slight elevation above the rest of the city, as though to keep an eye on things.1
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Ireland was the only one of the Queen’s dominions whose love for Her Majesty appeared to the British less than absolute. In fact the Irish probably bore no more grudge against Victoria than did the French Canadians, but whereas in Quebec the discontent of nationalists was bottled up in introspection, in Ireland it had repeatedly burst into violence. The British in Dublin were all the more determined to show the flag and beat the drum for Jubilee. They were, however, handicapped. Military grandeur was hard to come by, when the forces in Ireland were virtually an army of occupation, constantly on guard, and unable to leave their camps across the island. Lord Roberts, the Commander-in-Chief, had gone to London to lead the imperial troops in the Jubilee procession, and the commander in Dublin, Major-General Lord Frankfort de Montmorency, had gone to England too (by the Holyhead route, of course).2 The cruiser Melampus and the gunboat Gossamer had both sailed away from Kingstown for the Spithead review, taking the Admiral with them, and leaving nothing to fire a signal salute in Dublin Bay. All they could scrape up for the Jubilee parade in Phoenix Park were three squadrons of the 3rd Hussars and four battalions of miscellaneous infantry. ‘As a military display’, the Irish Times had to admit, ‘the review cannot be considered a success—the paucity of troops … threw more or less a damper on the proceedings.’
But they did their best. The obligatory free dinners, flag-hoistings and illuminations were announced, and the Irish Times published the inescapable Jubilee Ode:
Thou rulest supreme, as no other,
Queen, Empress and Woman, in one—
Our Sovr’n, our Lady, our Mother,
Like whom there is none!
An Irish Honours List was published, too, among those honoured being Mr Reginald Guinness and Lord Roberts; there was a big thanksgiving service in St Patrick’s, attended by all the nabobs of the Ascendancy; ‘than the bicycle races’, one observer wrote, ‘nothing finer could have been witnessed. Many of the performances established records for pluck and endurance.’
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‘Everything was orderly and peaceable’, reported the Irish Times ruefully next day, ‘till about half-past nine o’clock, and then a slight break was made in the smoothness of the proceedings.’ An aggressive crowd of Irishmen marched down Dame Street, shouting, brandishing sticks, beating tin cans, singing nationalist slogans and carrying a black flag, which was hoisted at half mast above the City Hall. They smashed windows, wrenched lamp standards out of their sockets, fought with the police and climbed all over the statue of William III—one young man was seen sitting on the royal shoulders, pummelling the curly-wigged head. From the roof of the National Club, a stronghold of Irish dissent, a shower of stones hailed down on the police below. All the best shop windows were broken in Henry and Mary Streets, fights broke out all over the city, and some 200 casualties were brought into the Jervis Street hospital alone. All over Dublin orators sprang to their soap-boxes. In Phoenix Park the beautiful Miss Maude Gonne, at a meeting demanding the amnesty of ten political prisoners held in England, cried in her lovely and very English voice (for she was the daughter of an English colonel) that they would never obtain anything from England until they were able to wrench it from her ‘in some hour of danger or defeat, which, pray God, may come soon’. The police got boos and brickbats everywhere, and at 10.30 a second procession appeared in the streets. It carried a draped coffin with skull and crossbone flags, and marched towards the Castle to the beat of a muffled drum. One of its banners carried the words ‘The Record Reign’, the next said ‘Starved to Death’.
The crowd groaned in sympathy as it passed, somebody struck up The Boys of Wexford, and all the electric illuminations went out.
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The Irish Times blushed. Ireland had made itself ‘the scorn of the British Empire’. When numbers of Dubliners were charged next day with disorderly conduct the magistrate said the city seemed to have been ‘in a state of siege’: in the coroner’s court the inquest on a woman killed during the disturbances degenerated into a nationalist demonstration, with coroner, police, jury and public exchanging hot-tempered insults. The news from the provinces, too, hardly made reassuring reading up at the Castle. There had been disloyal scenes at Cork and Waterford, and at Limerick, where an Australian gift of 900 sheep carcasses and 340 quarters of beef had been distributed to the poor, a crowd of women hooted and booed anyone who applied for it, sometimes seizing the meat from the unfortunate indigents and throwing it into the Shannon. The Jubilee had not been exactly a fiasco, but nobody could pretend that the Irish had celebrated it in any mood of loyal conciliation.
Where there was not actual opposition there was sometimes mischievous parody, for one of the most potent Irish weapons was mockery. Every sort of Irish celebrity turned out to be having a jubilee that year. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Daniel O’Connell, first prophet of Irish independence, and this was celebrated with innumerable High Masses. It was the thirteenth centennial of the death of St Columba, and this was commemorated, in the very month of Victoria’s Jubilee, with immense and fervent ceremony on a mountain slope in Donegal. Monsignors and parish priests in many parts of Ireland celebrated their own jubilees or anniversaries, with parish feasts and episcopal messages. There was more rejoicing that summer over the Golden Jubilee of Canon O’Hanlon of Sandymount, author of a well-loved book about the Irish saints, than there was over the Diamond Jubilee of Alexandrina Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
For though this was, by Irish standards, a moment of political hiatus, still the anger of the people was slowly gathering its strength, and combining in movements peaceable and militant. The Irish had almost had enough. Catholic emancipation and agrarian reform had done little to blunt their passions. Their detestation of English rule was constantly underestimated by the British, whose worst prejudices were aroused by Irish hostility, and whose contempt for Irish abilities was profound. ‘The moment the name of Ireland is mentioned’, Sydney Smith had written, ‘the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants, and the fatuity of idiots.’ They could not grasp the force of the separatist movement in Ireland—not just an adolescent craze or a pastime for cranks, but an expression of centuries of emotion, almost ready to flower into revolution. They were also abysmally ignorant about Ireland. Even Gladstone only went there once, and Lord Salisbury never went at all, declaring himself unable to face the miseries of the sea crossing.
The Irish Republican Brotherhood—the Fenians—had long been preparing for violence. Its great strength was among the Irish of the United States—‘America,’ as a speaker said at Miss Gonne’s meeting in Phoenix Park, ‘the greater Ireland beyond the seas, where there are millions of Irishmen, disciplined, armed, ready to fight for Ireland.’ The Fenians had already mounted one unsuccessful revolution, in 1866, had abortively invaded Canada, and had committed various sorts of outrage in England, including raiding the arsenal of Chester Castle. But a host of less provocative bodies also stoked the patriotic fires. The Gaelic League worked for a revival of
the Celtic ways and language. The Gaelic Athletic Association wished all young Irishmen to play ancient Irish games like hurling and Gaelic football—games chiefly remarkable, as one apprehensive policeman wrote, for their savagery. The embryo Irish trade union movement was strongly nationalist. The Phoenix Literary and Debating Group, in Cork, was really an armed revolutionary movement, and in the mountains of the south fervent young Irishmen practised drill formations at night, or greased their rifles in isolated farmhouses. Ireland murmured, as Kipling wrote, with ‘the secret half a country keeps, the whisper in the lanes’.
It was not a mass movement. Most Irishmen were politically numb, and few demanded more than Home Rule within the Empire. But already the portents were ominous. In Belfast the Ulstermen, encouraged by the Conservative-Unionists in London, bound themselves ever more stubbornly to union with Britain—Home Rule would be Rome Rule, Ulster Will Fight and Ulster Will Be Right. ‘We declare to the people of Great Britain’, a mammoth Ulster convention had resolved in 1892, ‘that the attempt to set up … an all-Irish Parliament will result in disorder, violence and bloodshed.’ In the south, too, the threats were becoming more explicit. ‘Let us work together,’ cried the young poet Patrick Pearse, the son of an English father, ‘and exact a good measure from the English. But if we are deceived there are those in Ireland, and I am one of those, who will counsel the Gael to have no further dealings with the English, but to answer them with the sword’s edge.’ ‘Live Ireland—Perish the Empire!’ was an old Irish slogan now revived: and far away in Lourenço Marques the British Consul, Roger Casement, was already cherishing an Irish patriotism which the British would consider treasonable, and which was never better expressed than he would one day tragically express it himself: ‘Ireland has outlived the failure of her hopes, and yet she still has hopes. Ireland has seen her sons, aye, and her daughters too, suffer from generation to generation always from the same cause, meeting always the same fate, and always at the hand of the same power; and always a fresh generation has passed on to withstand the same oppression. … The cause that begets this indomitable persistence, the faculty of preserving through centuries of misery the memory of her lost liberty, this surely is the noblest cause that men ever strove for, ever lived for, ever died for.’1
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The noblest cause? Treason or patriotism? Splendid defiance or squalid disobedience? It was around the name of Ireland that the moral problems of imperialism first assembled: whether one race ever had the right to rule another, and whether the end could justify the means. The miseries of Ireland had infected England, too, and the Irish question was the most crippling of all the imperial burdens. The Irish garrisons, and the Royal Irish Constabulary, were terribly expensive. The Irish M.P.s were a plague to Parliament. The Home Rule movement had split the Liberal Party and toppled the most revered statesman in Europe from his Premiership. Ireland was always on the English mind, like a nearer Egypt. It was a backward people, properly part of the White Man’s Burden. It was a proud and ancient people, only kept backward by oppression. It was a nation incapable of self-government. It was incapable of self-government only because it had never been allowed to try. It was really British anyway, and had no right to separate loyalties. It was a Celtic entity, different in race, custom and religion. It would prosper only as part of a greater whole. It would prosper only when it stood on its own feet. It was a nuisance. It was heroic. It was blind. It was prophetic. It did not know its own luck. It had lived in tragedy for eight centuries. Free Ireland and you would dismember the Empire. Hold Ireland and the Empire would never be serene.
Oh Ireland, Ireland, green and bitter island! ‘That cloud in the west,’ Gladstone had called it. ‘That coming storm! The minister of God’s retribution upon cruel injustice!’
1 And is now Dun Laoghaire.
1 Parnell, who was born in 1846, was an Anglo-Irish Protestant himself, like several of the most inspired Irish nationalists, and was the leader of the Home Rule movement at Westminster. Surviving false imputations that he was secretly involved in Irish violence, he was ruined in 1890 when he was named co-respondent in a divorce suit, and died soon afterwards.
2 Captain Charles Boycott, whose ostradzation by angry Irish tenants gave this word to the English language, had understandably left Ireland, and had died at Bungay, in Suffolk, just a week before the Jubilee.
1 I quote Mr James Gaynor, who still lived on the Duckett’s Grove estate in 1965, occupying the lodge he was born in eighty-eight years before. He remembered this occasion well, and vividly described it. Duckett’s Grove is now a deserted ruin, and the queens and animals have vanished.
1 To a degree the Anglo-Irish gentry is self-perpetuating still. Many Englishmen settled in Ireland after the Second World War, to escape the austerities of home, and the Germans and Americans who buy estates there now are presently moulded not into the pattern of Gaelic Ireland, but into the authentic postures and tastes of the old Protestant Ascendancy.
1 Himself buried in St Patrick’s.
2 Cadogan, Eton and Christ Church, was the fifth earl, had been one of Queen Victoria’s favourite courtiers, and owned half Chelsea. He died in 1915.
1 Throughout almost the whole period of Lord Salisbury’s Premierships it was held by one or another of his nephews.
2 The Viceregal Lodge is now Arus an Uachtarain, the home of the President of Ireland: the Chief Secretary’s Lodge is the American Embassy.
1 Some of the Fermoy barracks were destroyed during ‘The Troubles’ of the 1920s, others stand empty and crumbling above the town, and one block forms part of a German-owned pencil factory.
1 The last available space for a Viceroy’s coat of arms was filled, in 1922, by the coat of arms of the last Viceroy, Lord FitzAlan.
1 Though the purposes of many buildings altered, and the condition deteriorated, the centre of Dublin remained visually much the same until the 1960s, when the first of the high rise buildings marred its skyline, and Nelson was blown up. Many of the street names have been changed, and many of the most elegant squares have gone sadly down in the world, but it is still true to say that almost everything of beauty in Dublin was placed there by the British.
2 How imperial a soldier’s life was in those days is illustrated by this general’s career. After the Crimea he served in India, in the Windward Islands, in Canada, in Abyssinia, in the Sudan, in India again and in Ireland. His eldest son won the V.C. at Omdurman in 1898 and was killed at the head of Montmorency’s Scouts, in the Boer War. The general himself died in 1902, of apoplexy.
1 Casement, who was 33 in 1897, had enjoyed a distinguished career in the Consular Service, but was to be hanged in London in 1916 as an Irish traitor, having conspired with the Germans during the First World War. I have taken an anachronistic liberty in quoting this passage, for it comes from his last statement before the court that sentenced him to death.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Omens
Persia and Egypt, Greece and Rome,
And vaster dynasties before,
Now faded in Time’s monochrome,
In what do we surpass their lore?
Some things they knew that we know not;
Some things we know by them unknown;
But the axles of their wheels were hot
With the same frenzies as our own.
Francis Burdett Money-Coutts
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‘TH’AT cloud in the west!’ Here and there across the radiant horizons of the British Empire several such clouds were loosely forming, and gave to a few imaginative watchers a sensation of storms to come. It was as though that blaze of pride were too brilliant to last, like a preternaturally glittering summer day. Kipling caught this mood of presentiment in Recessional. Elgar would presently orchestrate it. Fisher felt it, as he watched the Germans building their battle fleets, and realized that all the glory of Empire could be shattered in one exchange of gunfire in the North Sea. Even the public showed a morbid interest in fantasies of foreign invasio
ns and British defeats, calculated to chill the most Jingo spine: one horridly popular French publication, Plus d’Angleterre, suggested that when their nemesis came at last the British would have to pay an indemnity of £560 million, and hand over Dover, the entire Royal Navy, most of the Empire and the Elgin Marbles to the French. For one Power to rule so much of the world seemed a challenge to fate—and every educated Englishman was aware of the fate of empires. The most frenetically imperialist of writers seldom failed to mention the fall of Rome, Ozymandias or the decline of Spain, if only to speculate what marvellous things the archaeologists would discover, when they dug through the debris of the Pax Britannica.
