Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  Ireland’s Era of Ancient Celtic Freedom is by any standards one of the marvels of European history. The Gaelic-speaking nation, secure in its seagirt fortress, was ruled by bards and tribal chieftains, among whom a long succession of ard rí or ‘high kings’ exercised supreme authority. The Irish king lists, compiled by medieval monks, contain some 200 names, the earliest of which, like Slaine (1934–1933 BC) or Bres (1897–1890 BC), are clearly mythical; the precise-looking dates are the product of pure guesswork. The latest names such as Muirchertach Mac-Lochlain (d. AD 1166) or Ruaidre Ua Chobar (d. 1186) were unable to exert anything more than nominal authority.8 The high point is often taken to have been reached by Brian Bóraimhe, Brian Boru (r. 1002–14), who is described in the medieval Book of Armagh as Imperator Scottorum or ‘emperor of the Irish’.9 He battled the Vikings, briefly established hegemony over all the island, and died at the Battle of Clontarf, the ‘Bull’s Meadow’, near Dublin. Mael Sechneill mac Domnaill, king of Meath (r. 980–1002, 1014–22), known as Malachi Mor, was deposed by Brian Boru, but regained the high kingship after Clontarf.10

  The Era of Foreign Domination, which lasted more than 700 years, is conventionally divided into three sub-periods. The first, under the heading of the ‘Lordship of Ireland (1171–1541)’, saw the kings of England ruling as overlords but not annexing the country. The second, under the heading of the ‘Kingdom of Ireland (1541–1801)’, was launched by Henry VIII’s Crown of Ireland Act and terminated by the the Napoleonic Wars; it saw the English monarchs (and from 1707 British monarchs) reigning in parallel over realms joined by personal union. The third sub-period, under the heading of ‘British Ireland (from 1801)’ saw ‘John Bull’s Other Island’ integrated into the expanded United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Presuming that British rule in Ireland can be recognized as legitimate – which purists do not accept – republican teaching holds that it ended in the years 1916–18; in the eyes of unreconciled unionists, it has never ended.

  Official accounts sometimes circumnavigate a number of episodes which the majority of Irish people would prefer not to have happened. One of these, the Plantation of Ulster, saw a Protestant colony, mainly of Scottish Presbyterians, established in northern Ireland in the early seventeenth century (exactly the same era in which the Pilgrim Fathers established similar colonies in North America).11 Other regrettable episodes deriving from religious conflicts include the reconquest of Ireland by Oliver Cromwell in 1649–5212 and the victory of Protestant forces under William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1689.13 Nonetheless, the Irish show few signs of forgetting the suffering of their forebears; memories remain alive of Cromwellian atrocities such as the Siege of Drogheda or of the discriminatory, anti-Catholic Penal Laws enforced after 1691.14

  The last decades of the Kingdom of Ireland, however, are usually viewed with favour. In the era of the American War of Independence, an Irish Patriot Party came to the fore, demanding the repeal of the Penal Laws, seeking to share English traditions of liberty, and aiming to establish a degree of constitutional autonomy. Their leader was Henry Grattan (1746–1820), a member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant elite, who worked for the emancipation of the Catholic majority. ‘Patriots of Ireland,’ declared George Washington in 1788, ‘your cause is identical with mine.’ In 1782 Grattan persuaded the British government to grant self-government to the Irish parliament in Dublin – henceforth ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ – and to sever many mechanisms of British control save for the Crown and the Crown’s representative, the viceroy. His policy, which imitators called ‘Home Rule’, was summed up by the slogan: ‘The [Irish] Channel Forbids Union, the Ocean Forbids Separation’. It came to grief thanks to fears in London generated by the French Revolution and by the rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798. But it was long remembered as an experiment ahead of its time.

  The nineteenth century, therefore, is often regarded by the Irish as a time when foreign oppression returned with a vengeance. The first phase of life in the United Kingdom was dominated by O’Connell’s campaign for freedom of religion and the rights of the Roman Catholic Church; the second phase by a great national awakening of the sort which occurred in many European countries. The roots of the movement lay in the realization in the decades after the Great Famine of 1846–9 that the lifeblood of traditional Irish culture had been haemorrhaging for generations and that only a concerted effort could prevent the country being turned into a ‘West Britain’ as advocated by British officialdom. The result was an explosion of interest in national history, Gaelic language, Celtic myths, Irish literature and folk music. Its heroes were not rebels or soldiers, but poets like Brian Merriman (1749–1805), scholars like James Hardiman (1782–1855) or Samuel Ferguson (1810–55), and writers like William Carleton (1794–1869). Their work came to fruition in the Gaelic Revival at the century’s end.

  No activity was more typical of this movement than the collection, distribution and writing of popular songs. And no member of it was more influential than the great poet song-writer Thomas Moore (1779–1852), friend of Byron and Shelley, and author of ‘The Minstrel Boy’, ‘The Meeting of the Waters’, ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ and many others. Fired by Moore’s example, a veritable torrent of lyrics and melodies poured forth. Almost all of the songs which were to feature in Ireland’s twentieth-century history had been composed before the First World War. They included ‘A Nation Once Again’ (1854), ‘The Wearing of the Green’ (1864), ‘God Save Ireland’ (1867), ‘The Soldier’s Song’ (1907), ‘Danny Boy’ (1913) and Thomas Moore’s ‘Let Erin Remember’:

  Let Erin remember the days of old

  ’Ere her faithless sons betrayed her,

  When Malachi wore the collar of gold

  Which he won from the proud invader:

  When her kings, with standard of green unfurl’d,

  Led the Red-branch knights into danger,

  ’Ere the emerald gem of the western world

  Was set in the crown of the stranger.15

  Tone-deaf historians may dismiss these songs and their lyrics as ‘doggerel’; if so, they may be ignoring a valid point of entry to the mood and spirit of some important historical moments. Irish intellectuals have also tended to be dismissive; they could be envious of Tom Moore’s enduring popularity. As all would have agreed, however, ‘the stranger’ was the king of England.

  Monarchy has featured in the Irish story, therefore, in a variety of periods and in a number of guises. The native high kings of ancient Ireland were a historical reality of which the modern Irish are inordinately proud. The medieval lords of Ireland were for practical purposes English kings by another name; the Kingdom of Ireland, which Henry VIII bequeathed to his heirs and successors in perpetuity, was an evolving polity, parts of whose heritage persist to the present. The British monarchs of the nineteenth century reigned over a sorrowing Ireland plagued by the death and departure of millions. Queen Victoria visited Dublin four times between 1864 and 1900, Edward VII and George V just once each, in 1904 and 1911 respectively. On these occasions, the desire of the inhabitants to please their guests without compromising their principles could prove hilarious. When Edward VII visited the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, he found the buildings bedecked not with red, white and blue but with the royal horse-racing colours; when he drove into the south-western village of Tully in his fleet of open-topped Panhards and Cadillacs, he was greeted by a group of pony riders holding up a banner: ‘FRIEND OF OUR POPE’.16

  As the nineteenth century drew on, the main thrust of Irish politics was directed to the struggle for Home Rule, that is for autonomous self-government under the British Crown. Its minimum goal was to restore institutions similar to those of the pre-Union kingdom. The period is for ever associated with the name of Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91), who commanded the political scene for only a short period but with immense panache. The son of an Anglo-Irish-American Protestant family, he turned the Irish Parliamentary Party into a major political force, and concentrated all hi
s efforts on gaining influence with the British establishment. He took advantage of the uproar in the Irish countryside during the Land War, when tenants battled landowners (like the notorious Captain Boycott), and he won over many voters who might otherwise have espoused radicalism. While campaigning for the restoration of the pre-Union Irish parliament, he kept his ultimate objectives deliberately obscure. ‘No man has the right’, he once declared, ‘to say to his country: “Thus Far, and No Further”.’ He made a huge impression on Britain’s Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, not least when Parnell’s party held the balance of power at Westminster after the election of 1885. Gladstone duly performed a volte-face and adopted the principle of Home Rule. But Parnell’s sudden and early death, aged forty-five, robbed Ireland of its ‘uncrowned king’; the Home Rule Bill lost its most powerful motor; and a series of Conservative governments after Gladstone played the Irish Question out of court.17

  Parnell’s democratic strategy overshadowed all other Irish political trends. A revolutionary, republican movement certainly existed; the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), known as the Fenians, had been founded in 1858 by people with strong Irish-American connections. They had organized an abortive rising in 1867 and a number of sporadic acts of violence continued to be perpetrated. But by the century’s end, their tiny, clandestine membership was judged marginal to the mainstream.18

  During Parnell’s lifetime, Irish society was revitalized by the Roman Catholic Church, which achieved a position of unprecedented authority. No longer the patron of a dispossessed and starving nation served by a downtrodden clergy, it came into its own as a major force in education, social care and nation-building. Its four archdioceses and its thousand parishes became the focus of activities and enterprises. They were supported by a wide variety of religious orders and lay organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians (originally founded in the sixteenth century) or the Knights of Columbanus (1915). The Irish Church was deeply conservative in temper; it preserved and promoted many traditional customs such as the worship of relics, the veneration of saints and adoration of the Virgin Mary; its idea of progress was to adopt Vatican-sponsored cults like that of the Immaculate Conception or the Sacred Heart of Jesus. When in 1879 the Mother of God was judged to have appeared in person at Knock in County Galway, the Church’s special mission to the Irish people was confirmed.19

  Predictably, Ireland’s ancient Christian tradition was enriched by her equally strong musical inclinations; the encounter has borne much fruit, not least in hymnology. Yet the best known of Irish hymns was slow to take its final form. The Gaelic words of ‘Rop tú mo Baile’ are attributed to a sixth-century monk, Dállan Forgaill; the folk melody ‘Slane’ is named after a battle of the same era. The two were not put together until Mary Byrne translated the Gaelic into English in 1905, Eleanor Hull versified it in 1912, and the verse joined the tune in a hymnary of 1927. The English version has become a worldwide favourite among hymn-singers, and has been translated back into modern Gaelic many times:

  Be Thou my vision, O lord of my heart, Bí Thusa ‘mo shúile a Rí mhór na ndúil

  Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art; Líon thusa mo bheatha mo chéadfaí’s mo stuaim

  Thou my best thought by day or by night, Bí thusa i m’aigne gach oíche’s gach lá

  Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light. Im chodladh no im dhúiseacht, líon mé le do ghrá.

  Be Thou my wisdom, Thou my true word, Bí Thusa ‘mo threorú i mbriathar’s imbeart

  I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord Fan thusa go deo liom is coinnigh mé ceart

  Thou my great Father, I Thy true son, Glac cúram mar Athair, is éist le mo ghuí

  Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee, one. Is tabhair domsa áit cónaí istigh i do chroí.

  In all, four Home Rule bills were introduced into the Westminster Parliament – in 1886, 1892, 1912 and 1920. The third one was critical because the Irish Party held the balance at Westminster. Facing ferocious opposition from the Ulster Unionists, it started its passage through Parliament in April 1912 under the sponsorship of Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government, cleared the House of Lords after three rejections, received royal assent, and entered into British law as the Government of Ireland Act on 18 September 1914. The widespread impression was that a suitable compromise had been found, that Parnell’s dream had been realized. The suspension of the Act due to the outbreak of the Great War did not cause the expected uproar; and wartime preoccupations defused the looming confrontation between the armed Ulster Volunteers in Belfast and their counterparts in Dublin, the Irish Volunteers. Hundreds of thousands of Irishmen served in the British forces in 1914–18, some 50,000 of them sacrificing their lives.

  Given what was to happen within a matter of months, therefore, it is pertinent to ask about Irish attitudes to the Crown. Curiously, information on this subject is not readily forthcoming. The essay on ‘Ireland in the Twentieth Century’ on the Irish government’s official website20 makes no single mention of monarchy whatsoever. More surprisingly, the distinguished Irish historian most closely associated with this period has little to say either. Roy Foster’s chapter entitled ‘The New Nationalism’, covering the years between Parnell’s death and the First World War in his now standard account, contains no single sentence about republicanism; and it makes only two passing references to the IRB in the context of its rivalry with the Gaelic League.21 The important issues according to him were cultural nationalism, the Gaelic language, the Land Question, the socialist movement, opposition to the Boer War, Anglophobia and anti-Protestant sentiment, but not, apparently, the monarchy. This must surely be an omission. For kings and queens, royal titles and the ‘Crown’ figured in political debates at the time, and have never ceased to do so.

  Politics, however, cannot explain everything. The years of the struggle over Home Rule were equally the years when both Britain and America were swept by a popular craze for Irish songs. The star turn was the tenor John McCormack (1884–1945), an opera singer who took to the concert platform. His signature song was ‘The Wearing of the Green’, whose words referred to the United Irishmen of 1798:

  Oh Paddy dear, and did ye hear the news that’s going round

  The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish land.

  No more Saint Patrick’s Day we’ll keep: his colour can’t be seen

  For there’s a cruel law agin’ the Wearing of the Green.22

  And no number rivalled the success of a song that exuded pure contentment:

  When Irish eyes are smiling sure’tis like a morn in spring;

  With a lilt of Irish laughter you can hear the angels sing.

  When Irish hearts are happy all the world is bright and gay,

  And when Irish eyes are smiling sure they’d steal your heart away.23

  Nor were the smiles confined to the native Irish. Parts of Ireland in that era were the preserve of the British elite, the playground of the highest servants of the Crown; some of them would look back on those halcyon pre-war days as the happiest in their lives. One of the most evocative of memoirs was written by a future British prime minister:

  My father had gone to Ireland as secretary to his father [who had been] appointed Lord-Lieutenant by Mr Disraeli… We lived in a house called ‘The Little Lodge’, about a stone’s throw from the Viceregal [residence]. Here I spent nearly three years of childhood… I remember my grandfather, the Viceroy, unveiling the Lord Gough statue in 1878. A great black crowd, scarlet soldiers on horseback… the old Duke, the formidable grandpapa, talking loudly to the crowd. I recall even a phrase he used: ‘and with a withering volley he shattered the enemy line.’ I quite understood… that a ‘volley’ meant what the black-coated soldiers used to do with loud bangs so often in the Phoenix Park where I was taken for my morning walks…

  In one of these years we paid a visit to Emo Park, the seat of Lord Portarlington, who was explained to me as a sort of uncle… The central point in my memory is a tall white st
one tower… [which] had been blown up by Oliver Cromwell. I understood definitely that he had blown up all sorts of things and was therefore a very great man.

  My nurse, Mrs Everest, was nervous about the Fenians. I gathered these were wicked people… On one occasion when I was out riding on my donkey, we thought we saw a long dark procession of Fenians approaching. I am sure now it [was] the Rifle Brigade… But we were all very much alarmed, particularly the donkey, who expressed his anxiety by kicking. I was thrown off and had concussion of the brain. This was my first introduction to Irish politics!

  It was at ‘The Little Lodge’ I was first menaced with Education. The approach of a sinister figure described as ‘the Governess’ was announced… Mrs Everest produced a book called Reading without Tears. It certainly did not justify its title in my case… [When] the Governess was due to arrive, I did what so many oppressed peoples have done in similar circumstances: I took to the woods. I hid in the extensive shrubberies… which surrounded ‘The Little Lodge’…

  My mother took no part in these impositions… My picture of her in Ireland is in a riding habit, fitting like a skin and often beautifully spotted with mud. She and my father hunted continually on their large horses… [She] always seemed to me a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power… She shone for me like the Evening Star.24