by Colm Toibin
This note would surface again and again in her letters and diaries. As late as 1920, when she was negotiating the sale of land at Coole, she wrote to Sir Henry Doran of the Congested Districts Board: “May I draw your attention to the fact that through all the troublesome times of the last forty years we have never had to ask compensation from the County or for police protection. We have been, in comparison with many other Estates, a centre of peace and goodwill. This was in part owing to the liberal opinions and just dealing of my husband and my son.”
In the table of contents for Sir William’s autobiography, Chapter V11 contains a section entitled “The Gregory Clause”. Sir William devoted two and a half pages to the subject, most of it a quotation from an article published in the Dublin University Magazine in 1876 that attempted to justify the Gregory Clause, which was passed by the House of Commons in March 1847.
Sir William Gregory was one of a large number of Irish landowners and politicians who took the view that the system of land-holding that had been in place in Ireland before the Famine could not continue. They believed that there were too many smallholdings and too many tenants. In 1848, Lord Palmerston, for example, wrote to Lord John Russell: “It is useless to disguise the truth that any great improvement in the social system of Ireland must be founded upon an extensive change in the present state of agrarian occupation, and that this change necessarily implies a long, continued and systematic ejectment of small holders and squatting cottiers.” During the first two months of 1847, in the House of Commons debates on the famine in Ireland, Sir William Gregory had argued against the system of relief being used. He supported the idea of assisted emigration. He also proposed an amendment to the Poor Law Act in March 1847 that was to have far-reaching implications. The clause stipulated that no one who held a lease for more than a quarter of an acre of land should be allowed to enter the workhouse or to avail of any of the relief schemes. This meant that a cottier tenant whose potato crop had failed a second year in succession and who had no money to buy food would be faced with a stark choice. If he wanted to take his family into the workhouse, the only place where they could be fed, he would have to give up his lease and he would never get it back. His mud cabin would be razed to the ground as soon as it was empty. If he and his family survived the workhouse, where disease was rampant, they would have nowhere to go. They would have to live on the side of the road, or try to emigrate. Nor could a man send his wife and children into the workhouse and stay on the land himself. They could get no relief unless he gave up the lease. “Persons”, Sir William said in the House of Commons, “should not be encouraged to exercise the double vocation of pauper and farmer.”
In his autobiography, Sir William quotes the Dublin University Magazine article from 18 to justify himself: “That this clause has been perverted to do evil no one can deny, and those who only look to one side of the question have often blamed its author for some of the evils that were inflicted by its provisions … The evil results we have alluded to were not foreseen, certainly they were not believed in by Mr Gregory, whose advocacy of the emigration clause is the best proof of his good motives to those who do not know the humanity and the kindness which, then and always, have marked his dealing with his tenants on his own estates.”
The effects of the clause, however, were foreseen by those who voted for it in the House of Commons on the night of 29 March 1847, as well as by the nine MPs who voted against it. Sir William’s proposing speech was followed by William Smith O’Brien, who was reported as saying: “If a man was only to have a right to outdoor relief upon condition of his giving up his land, a person might receive relief for a few weeks and become a beggar for ever. He thought this was a cruel enactment.” Another speaker in the same debate said that the consequence of Sir William Gregory’s clause “would be a complete clearance of the small farmers of Ireland – a change which would amount to a perfect social revolution in the state of things in that country … to introduce it at once would have the effect of turning great masses of pauperism adrift on the community.” Hansard reported that Mr Bellew, speaking in support of the clause, argued that it “would tend to the gradual absorption of the small holdings now so extensively held, as well as the conversion of masses of starving peasantry into useful and well-paid labourers”. And Sir G. Grey in the same debate said that he “had always understood that these small holdings were the bane of Ireland”.
In his autobiography, Sir William wrote: “There is no doubt but that the immediate effect of the clause was severe. Old Archbishop MacHale never forgave me on account of it. But it pulled up suddenly the country from falling into the open pit of pauperism on the verge of which it stood. Though I got an evil reputation in consequence, those who really understood the condition of the country have always regarded this clause as its salvation.”
The Gregory Clause radically reduced the number of small tenants. Roughly two million people left Ireland permanently between 1845 and 1855, according to the historian Oliver MacDonagh, who also wrote: “The cottier class had virtually disappeared. The number of holdings under one acre had dropped from 134,000 to 36,000 … the number of persons per square mile … had fallen from 355 to 231; and the average productivity had risen greatly. In short, the modern revolution in Irish farming had begun.”
Sir William’s father died of fever during the Famine, and he himself witnessed the suffering around Coole and wrote about this in his book. “I did … all I could to alleviate the dreadful distress and sickness in our neighbourhood. I well remember poor wretches being housed up against my demesne wall in wigwams of fir branches … There was nothing that I ever saw so horrible as the appearance of those who were suffering from starvation. The skin seemed drawn tight like a drum to the face, which became covered with small light-coloured hairs like a gooseberry. This, and their hollow voices, I can never forget.” In April 1847, four thousand destitute labourers gathered at Gort, the nearest town to Coole, looking for work. A year later, a Poor Law inspector wrote that he could scarcely “conceive a house in a worse state or in greater disorder” than the workhouse in Gort. A quarter of the population in the area sought relief in those years.
No one denied Sir William’s personal concern about his tenants during the Famine, but the Poor Law clause he proposed in the House of Commons became one of the main causes of suffering in Ireland in those years. The importance of the Gregory Clause was emphasized during Sir William’s lifetime by Canon John O’Rourke, author of the first history of the Famine, which was published in 1874 and remained in print as the only serious account for many years. Canon O’Rourke wrote: “A more complete engine for the slaughter and expatriation of a people was never designed … Mr Gregory’s words – the words of a liberal and pretended friend of the people – and Mr Gregory’s clause – are things that should be forever remembered by the descendants of the slaughtered and expatriated small farmers of Ireland.”
Sir William’s “evil reputation” was as much a part of the legacy of Coole as his good name as a landlord. His famous clause helped to undermine the very class that Yeats and Lady Gregory later sought to exalt. Neither Yeats nor Lady Gregory wrote plays or poems about the Famine. It was not part of the Ireland they sought to celebrate or lament or dream into being. And there is something astonishing in the intensity with which Yeats sought to establish Coole Park and its legacy as noble, with “a scene well set and excellent company”,
Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame
Or out of folly into folly came.
Lady Gregory’s response to her ambiguous legacy is fascinating. There was nothing impetuous in her nature. In the years after she had edited her husband’s autobiography, she began to learn the Irish language, she went once more to the Aran Islands, and she began to study Irish history in order to edit the letters of Sir William’s grandfather. Gradually, her unionist sympathies dissolved, disappeared. The transformation was slow. She did not go the way of other women of her class such as Constance Gore-Boo
th or Maud Gonne. She did not become a firebrand or a revolutionary. Her personality was calm and steadfast, and there was an odd wisdom in the way she lived after the death of Sir William. She loved Coole and she wished to remain true to her husband’s memory and keep the estate and the house in order until Robert, her only child, could come into his inheritance. And slowly she began to love Ireland also, in the way that other nationalists of her time loved Ireland, inventing and discovering a rich past for her, and imagining a great future, and managing to ignore the muddy and guilt-ridden history in between this ancient glory and the time to come.
She was intelligent enough to manage the contradictions in her position, to allow her own response to her heritage to remain natural and easy. Fortunately, she was not introspective. She lacked vanity and this preserved her from too much self-examination.
She gave part of herself up to re-inventing Ireland. “Irish”, she would write, “is the most ancient vernacular literature of modern Europe.” In these last years of the nineteenth century she discovered that the “great bulk of [Irish] literature is certainly older than the twelfth century, but we can carry it back much farther, certainly to the seventh century. The Cuchulain stories were put into permanent literary form at about the same date as Beowulf, some 100 to 200 years before the Scandinavian mythology crystallised into its present form, and at least 200 years before the oldest Charlemagne Romances, and probably 300 years before the earliest draft of the Nibelungenlied.”
Her old friends began to notice the change in her. After the publication in 1898 of Mr Gregory’s Letter-Box, the correspondence of her husband’s grandfather, Sir Frederick Burton told her that he saw a tendency to Home Rule on her part. “No, not Home Rule,” she replied, “but I defy anyone to study Irish history without getting a dislike and distrust of England.” She began to defend her new self to her friends. In a diary entry in 1900, she wrote about a dinner party with members of the establishment: “At dinner I had a fight for the Irish language. Lord Morris says that he never spoke against its being taught in the schools, for he never heard any proposal at all being made for it at the Board:– if he had he would only have laughed at such an absurd craze. Lecky, defending his Trinity professors, sneered at me for calling Irish a modern language. I said yes, just in the same way as modern Greek; and Lady Morris told him it is spoken all around Spiddal.”
In February 1898, however, when Yeats told her that Maud Gonne was inciting hungry tenants in Kerry to kill their landlords and seize food, Lady Gregory reverted to her role as property-owner: “I was aghast and spoke very strongly, telling him first that the famine itself was problematic, that if it exists there are other ways of meeting it, that we who are above the people in means and education, ought, were it a real famine, to be ready to share all we have with them, but that even supposing starvation was before them it would be for us to teach them to die with courage than to live by robbery.”
Lady Gregory first saw W.B. Yeats in the spring of 1894, as she noted in her diary: “at Lord Morris’ met Yates [sic] looking every inch a poet, though I think his prose ‘Celtic Twilight’ is the best thing he has done”. In the summer of 1896 she met him again when he was staying with Arthur Symonds at Edward Martyn’s house, which was close to Coole. “As soon as her terrible eye fell upon him,” Symonds later said, “I knew that she would keep him.” She invited Martyn’s house-party to Coole and invited Yeats to return. When he came again to Edward Martyn’s house the following summer, both he and Lady Gregory were fresh from protesting against Queen Victoria’s jubilee, he by walking in a procession in Dublin in the company of Maud Gonne behind a coffin with the words “British Empire” inscribed on it, she by refusing to light a bonfire, much to the disgust of her neighbours and friends the Goughs, “on the grounds of the Queen’s neglect of the country”. On a rainy afternoon that summer in a neighbour’s house Yeats and Lady Gregory began the conversation that resulted in the Abbey Theatre.
She had a typewriter and servants and a big house. She typed out letters to the great and the good seeking support for their theatre. She began to collect folklore in the immediate area (“An old man in the workhouse”, she wrote, “has a long poem but very few teeth, and the Moycullen priest, an Irish expert, is coming to help me interpret it tomorrow”); she offered Yeats two hundred thousand words for his use, which he put into shape and considered his own and published under his own name in six long essays. She later wrote with great reverence about folklore collecting: “It was a changing of the table of values, an astonishing excitement … It was not to the corners of newspapers or even to the Broadsheets of ballads sung in the little towns I looked now for poetry and romance, it was to stone-breakers and potato-diggers and paupers in the workhouse and beggars at my own door.” Others were not as reverent about her activities among the people in those years. The writer Brinsley MacNamara wrote that she gathered “material for her books and plays in the cabins and cottages of Clare-Galway, where she had been industriously plied with folklore specially invented for her visits, and all of which she had innocently accepted”.
In the early years of their relationship, Yeats had a sense of her practical and dutiful nature, but none of her talent. She dreamed that she had been writing some articles, and that Yeats had said to her: “It’s not your business to write. Your business is to make an atmosphere.” Her life as a writer began slowly and tentatively. It began with her writing out the stories she heard in the area around Coole.
Her folklore collecting was not part of an unusual ambition, nor was her urge to create popular, or readable, versions of the ancient sagas. Her best friend in London, Lady Layard, who had given her the gift of her typewriter, was the daughter of Lady Charlotte Guest, who had made a readable and popular translation of the Welsh epics known as The Mabinogion. In 1878 her cousin Standish James O’Grady published his History of Ireland: The Heroic Period, in which he told the story of the sagas: “The forefront of Irish History we find filled with great heroic personages of a dignity and power more than human … Century after century the mind of the country was inflamed by the contemplation of these mighty beings whom … men believed to be their ancestors.” In 1892 Standish Hayes O’Grady, also her cousin, had published his Silva Gadelica, which included translations from ancient Irish sagas that were stilted and literal but accurate. Lady Gregory had met during her years in London figures such as Edward Clodd, who wrote about the power of ancient stories, and Alfred Nutt, who had published in 1900 a tiny pamphlet called Cuchulain, The Irish Achilles. For further reading, Nutt suggested Eleanor Hull’s The Cuchulain Saga in Irish Literature.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the study of an ancient Ireland had become part of the cultural life of certain (and indeed uncertain) Irish Protestants. Both of Oscar Wilde’s parents had collected folklore or studied archaeology. It was part of the harmless idealization of the Irish landscape that is also to be found in the painting of the period, and in the songs of Thomas Moore. (It was part of the invention of tradition that also occurred in Scotland and Wales as traditional forms of life began to disappear.) Oscar Wilde’s mother’s extreme nationalism was unusual; most of the antiquarians, including both O’Gradys, remained unionists or apolitical. But this began to change in the 1890s. In 1898 Lady Gregory, through Yeats, met Douglas Hyde, who had founded the Gaelic League as a non-political organization aiming to revive Gaelic culture, but who remained alert to the political implications of such a revival. The Gaelic League, Hyde wrote to Lady Gregory, aimed “at stimulating the old peasant popish aboriginal population”.
Hyde spoke Irish and translated songs and poems and stories, but he also enjoyed landed-gentry pastimes such as shooting at birds. Lady Gregory later wrote that when some ladies heard that a gentleman, namely Hyde, “had been talking Irish to the beaters while shooting with us said that was nonsense because no one who spoke Irish could be a gentleman. They also had never heard the language had the dignity of a literature.”
In Febru
ary 1900, as a result of pressure from the Gaelic League to introduce Irish as a school subject, Professor Robert Atkinson of Trinity College in Dublin wrote a report which stated that Irish literature “has scarcely been touched by the movements of the great literatures; it is the untrained popular feeling … My astonishment is that through the whole range of Irish literature that I have read (and I have read an enormous range of it) the smallness of the element of idealism is most noticeable … And as there is very little idealism there is very little imagination … The Irish tales are devoid of it fundamentally.”
In that same year an English editor asked Yeats to write a version of these sagas, but he refused, saying that he did not have the time. When Lady Gregory suggested that she might do a translation, Yeats was not enthusiastic; he had no confidence in her literary skills. But she set to work, and when she showed him a section she had done, he changed his mind and encouraged her. Yeats, she later wrote, “was slow in coming to believe I had any gift for writing and he would not encourage me to it, thinking he had made better use of my folk-lore gathering than I could do. It was only when I had read him one day in London my chapter ‘The Death of Cuchulain’ that he came to look on me as a fellow writer.” Her aim was to refute Atkinson, to produce a version of the Cuchulain story that would display all its ingenuity and intricacy but also would be accessible to the general public. She thought it “might be used as a school book”, which meant that she took great care not to include material that would shock the prudish. Much had been published over the years in fragmentary form; Lady Gregory now sought to stitch it together, making use of earlier translations, so that as a narrative it would make sense; she invented an idiom for it which was neither a direct translation nor standard English. She translated it into the English of Kiltartan, she said, the area around Coole, but much of it, in fact, is quite plain and natural, almost neutral in its tone.