Death on the Holy Mountain

by David Dickinson

  ‘Sunday it was,’ said Powerscourt, ‘the day they buried him.’

  ‘Friday, I’m sure it was Friday,’ said Johnny.

  ‘There you are,’ said the old man triumphantly, ‘and you’re not even newspapermen. Young James would have told me if you were newspapermen.’

  Richard Butler made a brief reappearance in his dining room. He was carrying a large tray with three further bottles of port and an enormous jug of iced lemonade.

  ‘I thought it might be a long evening, boys,’ he said, depositing his precious cargo directly in front of Uncle Peter. ‘This should keep the vocal cords in working order.’

  ‘The commissariat has arrived,’ said Uncle Peter thankfully to the departing Butler. ‘Supplies.’ He had the air of a man who has just found the Ark of the Covenant. As he looked again in his book for the right place to start, his eyes peering down at the pages, his right hand, guided by apparently unseen forces, reached out for the port bottle and refilled his glass. Not a drop was spilt. Even Johnny Fitzgerald, a man with some experience in these areas, nodded his appreciation.

  ‘Excuse me, Uncle Peter,’ said Powerscourt apologetically, ‘don’t you think it would be helpful if you gave us a brief biography of Parnell before we start? You and Johnny and I have lived through it, after all, but Young James here was only a child when the man died.’ Powerscourt watched as the old man’s mouth opened and closed several times.

  Then Powerscourt understood. This was a change of plan. Old men didn’t like changes of plan. In his mind Uncle Peter was already lost in the details of Parnell’s funeral. Now he was asked for the view from the mountain top.

  ‘Let me try,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it won’t be very good but it might help.’ He paused briefly, marshalling his thoughts. ‘Born in famine times. Protestant landowner from County Wicklow. Elected to Westminster Parliament mid-1870s. By the end of that decade two bad harvests in a row filled the island with the terror of another famine. With Michael Davitt Parnell founded the Land League. Farmers asked their landlords for reduction or cancellation of their rents. Widespread agrarian violence. Landlords who refused were sometimes boycotted. Two results. Gladstone passed a law that made it easier for the tenants to purchase their land. And he imprisoned Parnell in Kilmainham Jail for inciting violence, which guaranteed Parnell immortality in Ireland. Became Leader of Irish Parliamentary Party in 1880. Turned it from undisciplined rabble into formidable fighting force. Parnell and his MPs fought for Home Rule for Ireland. Gladstone was converted to Home Rule, a form of devolution. Through the ’80s Parnell carried on a passionate affair with Katherine O’Shea, wife of another Irish MP. Cited as co-respondent in 1889 divorce case. Savaged by hostile publicity when details of the adultery came out in court. A few MPs stayed loyal, remainder fought him tooth and nail. Pro- and anti-Parnellites contested three by-elections in Ireland through 1891. Parnell lost them all. Married Katherine O’Shea June 1891.’

  ‘Admirable,’ said Uncle Peter. ‘Now then,’ he went on, wiping his mouth quickly with the sleeve of his jacket, ‘let us begin.’ He read in a light tenor voice that gradually filled the dining room. ‘“Chapter Twenty-Seven,”’ he said. ‘“Charles Stewart Parnell died at a quarter to midnight on 6th October 1891 in Mrs Parnell, formerly Mrs O’Shea’s house at Number 10 Walsingham Terrace in Brighton. He had been ill for some days. The months of strain as he campaigned unsuccessfully to hold on to his political base at those three by-elections in Ireland, the Irish Parliamentary split into bitter faction fighting after the shock of his divorce case, must have taken their toll. He had endured levels of abuse and hostility unparalleled even in Ireland. Lime had been thrown in his face. On another occasion eggs had been hurled at him and his trousers were torn in a scuffle in a hotel, the waiter repairing his breeches under the table while Parnell ate the remains of his supper. Everywhere he went he was pursued by the national anthem of his opponents, ‘Three Cheers for Kitty O’Shea’. Sometimes his enemies would shake battered clothes on poles at him, proclaiming to all and sundry that these were Kitty O’Shea’s knickers.

  ‘“On his last evening he asked his wife to lie down on the bed beside him. His old dog Grouse, at his request, was also present in the bedroom. He had not slept for two days and a local doctor had given him some medicine. Throughout his life Parnell was a superstitious man – the colour green had always been anathema to him – and he believed that his lack of rest was a bad omen. And it was October, a month he always said was his unlucky time of year. During the evening he dozed and Mrs Parnell thought she heard him mutter ‘Conservative Party’ as if he were planning some further political manoeuvre. If she touched him, he smiled. Later he said, ‘Kiss me, sweet wifie, and I will try to sleep a little.’ Those were the last words on earth of the man who changed the face of Irish politics. Just before midnight he was gone. He was only forty-five years old.”’

  Uncle Peter’s voice began to crack towards the end, whether due to lack of refreshment or emotion unclear. As he topped up his glass he turned to his little audience of three.

  ‘What do you think of it so far?’ he asked. ‘Do you like it well enough?’

  ‘Excellent start,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Splendid,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Let’s have some more, Uncle Peter,’ said Young James in an uncharacteristically long speech.

  ‘Short sentences wherever possible,’ the historian declared, ‘nothing too ornate in the prose style department. Gibbon. Always liked Gibbon. Never got to the end of that Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, mind you. Don’t suppose many people did.’

  He peered down at his black book once more, checking on the way that there were still plentiful supplies of port to hand. ‘“The news of his death travelled round the world. In New York’s fourth ward, heavily populated with Irish immigrants, portraits of the dead leader appeared in the windows, draped in black. About twelve o’clock on the morning of Saturday 10th October Parnell’s body set out on the long journey back to Dublin for his funeral and burial. A number of Irish MPs accompanied him on his journey. Mrs Parnell was too upset to travel, but her wreath went with him every step of the way: ‘My true love, my darling, my husband.’ Rain was falling heavily as his coffin, almost covered with wreaths of large white flowers, was carried out to an open-sided funeral carriage drawn by four black horses. The umbrellas of the small crowd were useless in the violent squalls of rain. They took shelter in the doorways and in the rooms of houses being redecorated close by, saluting the coffin respectfully as it passed. The route went along the King’s Road on the sea front, past Regency Square and the West Pier whose great girders were being pounded by the waves, its promenades totally deserted, and up West Street to Brighton station. The coffin was lifted into a van attached to a special saloon on the 1.45 to Victoria station in London. En route to the capital it was decoupled at Croydon and diverted to Willesden where many Irish men and women came to pay their last respects. Another wreath bore the message, ‘Charles Stewart Parnell, Salutation. He died fighting for freedom.’ Shortly before seven o’ clock the train set off from Willesden on its melancholy eight-hour journey through the dark heart of England to Holyhead and the Irish boat. Sixteen men carried Parnell’s coffin on to the steamer, the Ireland, where it was wheeled on a trolley into the smoking saloon on the lower deck, an appropriate, if temporary, resting place for a man so devoted to cigars. A black cloth was laid over it, covered in its turn by a green flag. Twenty-eight more wreaths, which had travelled north with the coffin, were placed alongside it. ‘Died fighting for Ireland’. ‘In fond memory of one of Ireland’s greatest chieftains who was martyred in the struggle for her independence.’ At two forty-five in the morning, nearly fifteen hours after the corpse left the house in Brighton, the Ireland set off to carry Charles Stewart Parnell on his very last crossing of the Irish Sea to Dublin.”’

  ‘Still awake, are ye?’ croaked the old man, pouring himself a tumbler of iced lemonade. ‘Plenty more to go.’


  Johnny Fitzgerald rose and took one of the bottles of port from in front of the old man. ‘Thought we’d better keep you company,’ he said cheerfully.

  Powerscourt was thinking that the political questions raised by Parnell in his lifetime, the land question, the precise relationships to exist between England and Ireland, the thorny conundrum of Home Rule, had not been answered yet. Gladstone had promised that it would be his life’s mission to bring peace to Ireland or perish in the attempt. It had been one of the chief political objectives of his long career. Well, Gladstone had perished. Ireland still did not have peace. Maybe another act in the long drama was being played out in these Irish rooms with the great holes on the walls where ancestors from centuries before had rested in their great houses. Maybe the theft of these paintings was the start of another chapter. Maybe they were all part of a story that went back eight hundred years.

  ‘“The Ireland was late arriving in Kingstown,”’ Uncle Peter continued, staring down at his book, ‘still battered by the storm, angry waves lashing at the harbour walls. Great crowds had often welcomed Parnell home from his Parliamentary triumphs here in the past, bands playing ‘The Wearing of the Green’ or ‘A Nation Once Again’. They were silent this morning except for a low moan as the coffin came into view. Among the crowd in Kingstown early that morning was the young Irish poet W.B. Yeats, come to greet his friend Maud Gonne who had met Parnell in Ireland in the days before his death.”’

  ‘Bitch goddess!’ said James, with sudden and unexpected force.

  Uncle Peter looked up at him like an elderly bishop whose sermon has just been interrupted by a junior member of the choir. ‘I beg your pardon, Young James? What did you say?’

  ‘Bitch goddess!’ James repeated with the same vigour as before. ‘Maud Gonne is Yeats’s bitch goddess. She wouldn’t marry him and she wouldn’t leave him alone. She’s tormented him for years, the cow!’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Uncle Peter, ‘but perhaps it’s just as well the poet man met his bitch goddess. Answer me this, Young James, would we have had Homer’s Iliad without Helen of Troy? She was somebody’s bitch goddess, though I’m damned if I can remember whose just at this moment. Would your man Shakespeare have written Antony and Cleopatra without Cleopatra and her snake, best thing that ever happened to her in my view? Or John Donne written his verses without all those mistresses of his? What would have happened if they had married anyway, Yeats and Maud Gonne? Maybe they’d have lived happily ever after, taking out the tarot cards under the fruit trees in the garden in the afternoon and writing obscure papers for the Theosophical Society in London in the evening. No pain, no poem. I’ve never had much to do with the women myself,’ he admitted, ‘too temperamental for me, but I’ve always understood that the one thing they’re good for is a bit for inspiration for the poetry writing classes when the normal things like drink have failed.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Uncle Peter went on, fuelling his cynicism with another large gulp of Cockburn’s finest Old Tawny, ‘your man Yeats, so a professor from Trinity told me once – don’t ask me his name, that’s gone too for the present – he told me Yeats thought he and his friends could create an alternative version of the Irish past to fill the political vacuum left by the death of Parnell and the squabbling of his associates. Horse manure!’ He paused for just one more mouthful. ‘Horse manure and gobshite! How many people from Carrick-on-Shannon or Ballywalter know where the bloody Abbey Theatre Yeats founded actually is? How many people have bought tickets for the performances? How many Catholic farmers and shopkeepers and solicitors are ever going to buy a book of poetry, any damned poetry, let alone stuff with titles like “The Song of the Wandering Aengus” or “The Valley of the Black Pig” or “The Host of the Air”, for God’s sake? And how many Christian Brothers are going to teach poetry written by a Protestant from Sligo, if they teach poetry at all?

  ‘Damn. I’m lost now. Where was I?’

  ‘Parnell’s just off the boat, Uncle Peter,’ said Johnny, ‘and it was still raining. This was Ireland, after all.’

  Uncle Peter looked as if he was going to continue his diatribe, but he went back to his book.

  ‘“The body was carried quickly ashore and placed on the waiting train. There was a short delay while the mail was unloaded from the Ireland. Charles Stewart Parnell began his last journey into Ireland’s capital on track laid in 1834 by the Dublin and Kingston Railway Company, at the time the first commuter line in the world. At seven thirty on Sunday morning it reached Westland Row station. As the coffin, six feet four inches long, was finally removed from the large deal case which had protected it on its rough journey across the sea, the crowd surged forward and hacked the case to pieces, breaking the wood up into fragments to be treasured as relics, as if they had come from a dead saint. A soaking escort of nearly a thousand members of the Gaelic Athletic Association, a nationalist body devoted to Irish games, widely believed to be infiltrated by Fenians or members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, more devoted to insurrection than to ball games, formed an honour guard round the bier as it was laid on its hearse. They were all dressed in green and carrying hurling sticks tied with black crepe and green ribbon. Here was a blatant warning to any anti-Parnellites who might have thought of trying to disrupt the proceedings. Violence would be met with violence.”’

  Johnny Fitzgerald had been holding his hand up and waving it for a minute or so. ‘Those bits of the deal case enclosing the coffin, Uncle Peter,’ he said, ‘I know something that might be useful for this section of your book when you next revise it. You could buy bits of them, the relics I mean, in many of the Dublin pubs that evening when the funeral was over. They were changing hands in some places for a pound or more. Mind you, one of the publicans told me afterwards that there was enough wood on sale that night to cover fifty coffins. Maybe they increased and multiplied, like those loaves and fishes on the mountain.’

  ‘Thank you, Johnny,’ said Uncle Peter. ‘I am seriously thinking of banning all interruptions in the manner of a French teacher of mine who punished any disturbances when he was giving dictation with a severe thrashing.’ Uncle Peter took advantage of the diversion to open another bottle. ‘Anybody else wish to interrupt? Young James, have you further comments on the personalities involved you would like to impart to us? Powerscourt, you have been commendably quiet so far?’

  All three shook their heads.

  Uncle Peter’s appearance was rather wild now, wisps of hair falling down on to his lined forehead. He looked, Powerscourt thought, like an aged prophet come out of the wilderness with his book to lead his people on a last crusade, or a man who had spent too long in solitary confinement. A large drop of port had fallen on to his green dressing gown. At any moment, Powerscourt felt, a dragon’s mouth might dart forth and gulp it down. Uncle Peter’s drinking continued regularly, like the beat of a metronome. From outside the dining room came faint noises of doors being bolted and creaky sash windows closed. The household was going to bed.

  ‘“Parnell’s last journey across the city resembled a secular version of the Stations of the Cross, the stops at the great memorials to Ireland’s past replacing the final stages of Christ’s journey. The procession moved slowly away from Westland Row station, outriders on either side, the honour guard of the hurling stick youths surrounding the coffin, crowds marching six abreast behind them, the pavements packed with mourners, women kneeling down and crossing themselves as it passed by. Down College Street they went, stopping at the Old Parliament building on College Green. Here, until its abolition in 1800, an Irish Parliament had sat, composed entirely of Protestant members and looking after entirely Protestant interests, able to pass limited amounts of legislation. Parnell’s great grandfather had been a prominent member of this Assembly. Now the cortège rested for a minute to honour the great grandson who had nearly secured the return of an Irish Parliament to Dublin, one that would have been dominated by Catholics. Nobody in an Irish crowd would have failed to see the symbolic significance of
this moment. At the rear one of the thirty-three bands on duty that day began playing the Dead March from Saul. The procession continued through the rain, crossing the river Liffey and advancing along the northern quays to St Michan’s Church, one of the oldest in the city. As the coffin entered the church one of the officiating clergy said at the porch, ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, he that believeth in me shall not perish but have everlasting life.’ As the coffin went through the church it passed under the archway of the organ which, according to legend, Handel himself had played at the first performance of the Messiah. Down in the crypt of St Michan’s, some special atmospheric properties, unique to the church, had kept a number of corpses in a state of remarkable preservation, the wooden caskets cracked open to reveal skin and strands of hair. There is even a figure, deep from Ireland’s past, known as The Crusader. Up above, as the prayers for the dead were intoned, Parnell’s own body was beginning its long rot towards eternity. For most of the congregation this was the first, and probably the last, Protestant funeral service they would ever attend.

  ‘“Elsewhere in the city groups of mourners began forming up for the final procession. Societies and clubs assembled on St Stephen’s Green at twelve, members of Dublin and provincial Corporations gathered in Grafton Street. The Parnell Leadership Committee, the small remnant of his Parliamentary supporters, met in the National Club. Fresh mourners were still pouring into the city on special trains from all over Ireland, the carriages filled with people wearing the black armband with a ribbon of green.”’