by Neil Hegarty
Detail from the Ardagh Chalice, wrought in gold, bronze and silver. This treasure of early monastic Ireland was lost for centuries, before being rediscovered in 1868 in a County Limerick field.
The tomb of Columbanus at Bobbio, high in the Apennines of northern Italy. Columbanus founded monasteries across a swathe of western Europe; he died at Bobbio in November 615.
Henry Warren’s illustration of the death of the ageing Brian Boru at the sword of the Manx warrior Brodir during the Battle of Clontarf, April 1014.
Giraldus Cambrensis – sharply observant, learned and untrustworthy – chronicled the first years of the Anglo-Norman presence in Ireland. His Topographia Hibernica, a page from which is shown here, was profoundly influential in medieval Europe.
Daniel Maclise’s Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife is a Victorian view of a pivotal moment in Irish history; the couple are wed amid piles of corpses, with divinities thronged around.
The Battle of Kinsale – shown here in Franz Hogenberg’s 1602 engraving – marked the eventual, hard-won and bloody Elizabethan victory in Ireland.
Hugh O’Neill morphed from ally to bitter enemy of the English state: this astringent image captures a contemporary Elizabethan view of the Earl of Tyrone surrendering to the English after the suppression of the rebellion in 1602.
The Buildings of the Company of Mercers, from ‘A Survey of the Estate of the Plantation of Londonderry’. The Company of Mercers was among the London guilds participating (reluctantly) in the Plantation of Ulster. The Mercers established estates in the valley of the ‘fishy, fruitful’ river Bann in the new county of Londonderry.
Lough Swilly, County Donegal, looking north to the Atlantic. This fjord-like inlet witnessed both the Flight of the Earls and the capture of Wolfe Tone; and both Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill were alive to its strategic possibilities.
Two views of a figure celebrated in England as a democrat and vilified in Ireland as a genocidal maniac: Oliver Cromwell, at the notorious storming of Drogheda; and in death.
A popular image of the siege of Derry. With its images of defiant heroism in the face of adversity, the siege was a defining moment in the formation of an Ulster Protestant identity.
The familiar image of the victorious King William on his white horse at the Battle of the Boyne, by Jan Wyck. King James – his defeated opponent and father-in-law – fled back to France; the conflict in Ireland continued for a further year.
The eighteenth-century elegance of College Green, Dublin, with a rebuilt and expanded Trinity College (right) and Ireland’s new Parliament House, the first purpose-built bicameral parliament in the world.
In A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift suggests sardonically that ‘a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled’. Swift was a waspish observer of eighteenth-century Irish society – and a vital contributor to the country’s cultural debate.
The Irish House of Commons in the eighteenth century, neither democratic nor representative of the Irish population, but nevertheless a crucible of energetic debate.
Theobald Wolfe Tone eagerly embraced the principles of the French Revolution, and envisaged an Ireland in which religious division was set aside in the interests of a secular republic.
Thomas Moore, creator of Moore’s Melodies, was born over a grocer’s shop in Dublin and died in rural Wiltshire, having established himself as a favourite of London society.
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington – Irish-born soldier, statesman and prime minister. His insights into the Irish political scene eased the passing of legislation enabling Catholic Emancipation.
Young, idealistic and a famous orator, Robert Emmet led a rebellion that in hindsight symbolized the end of French Revolutionary fervour in Ireland.
Lord Castlereagh’s political career took him from Dublin in the aftermath of the 1798 Rising to the Congress of Vienna as British foreign secretary. He committed suicide by slitting his throat with a letter opener.
Colourful, vigorous and politically daring, Daniel O’Connell was the ‘Liberator’ to his followers, whom he led in the cause of repeal of the Act of Union.
This Punch cartoon captures the loathing felt for O’Connell in many quarters of British society. Here he is portrayed grown obscenely fat on the activity of his loyal supporters.
Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852–65) shows the increasing visibility of Irish emigrants – here ‘a stoic from the Emerald Island, with hay stuffed in his hat to keep the draft out’ – in British society.
Many Irish migrants went further afield than England. In this engraving of the emigration office on the wharf at Queenstown (Cobh), passengers are preparing to set sail for America.
‘Ireland’s Latest Martyrs’ were executed at Manchester in 1867 for the murder of a policeman. The executions came amid a wave of anti-Irish feeling in Britain; in Ireland the events at Manchester bolstered the Fenian cause.
This pamphlet explicitly linked the agitation for Home Rule with the rebellions of 1641 and 1798.
William Ewart Gladstone’s political mission ‘was to pacify Ireland’. He became a passionate supporter of Irish Home Rule, and in the course of a long career, he brought two Home Rule bills to parliament.
Charles Stewart Parnell was the enigmatic, authoritarian and charismatic Protestant leader of the Irish Home Rule movement. Following his citation in a divorce case, the Catholic Church publicly condemned him, and his support ebbed away.
Scots-born James Connolly became a leading proponent of Irish socialism. He sustained a leg injury in the course of the Easter Rising so he had to sit rather than stand for his subsequent execution.
Women were present in virtually all theatres of the Easter Rising. Elizabeth O’Farrell accompanied Patrick Pearse in his formal surrender to British officials; in this photograph she is imperfectly edited out, with her disembodied feet still visible behind Pearse.
In the course of a long career, Arthur Griffith was by turns a journalist, political theorist, founder of Sinn Féin, treaty negotiator – and ultimately president of Dáil Éireann.
Maud Gonne is remembered for her passionate involvement – as actress, journalist and political agitator – in the cause of Irish nationalism.
Sir John Lavery’s portraits of Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera capture the differing destinies of the two men. Collins took the reins of power in the newly independent Irish Free State, but was killed months later at the age of thirty-one; de Valera lived for a further fifty-three years, in the process holding the offices of both taoiseach and president of Ireland.
Scenes from the Irish Troubles: a mural of a civil rights march at Derry; Bobby Sands was the first man to die in the hunger strikes of 1981; the iconography of the Orange ‘marching season’ recalls scenes from Ulster’s tempestuous history.
Ireland in the aftermath of the Troubles: Ian Paisley, now first minister of Northern Ireland, shakes hands with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in Dublin (April 2007); Sinn Féin leaders welcome the Good Friday Agreement (April 1998).
John Kelly, whose brother Michael was killed on Bloody Sunday, welcomes the findings of the Saville Inquiry at the Guildhall, Derry; the backdrop image is of a second victim, James McKinney (June 2010).
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
THE STORY OF IRELAND.
Copyright © 2011 by Neil Hegarty.
Introduction copyright © 2011 by Fergal Keane.
Maps © 2011 by Encompass Graphics.
Afterword copyright © 2012 by Neil Hegarty.
All rights reserved.
For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
This book is published to accompany the television series entitled Story of Ireland, first broadcast on BBCNI and RTE in 2011.
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* The Pelagian model posited that humankind was born without original sin, and was therefore capable of attaining grace without the need of Divine intervention.
* In addition to his other activities, Colum Cille is also credited with the sighting (and banishment) of the Loch Ness Monster.
* A confederation of Pictish tribes had inhabited parts of what is now Scotland since before the Roman conquest.
** Colum Cille was not the first missionary to Scotland. St Ninian, about whom little is known, was evangelizing there at the end of the fourth century. His Casa Candida in Galloway was the country’s first Christian chapel, and his shrine at Whithorn attracted pilgrims from Ireland itself until the Reformation.
* Henry had married the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152; she had brought to the marriage additional vast French territories as her dowry.
* There are several later copies of the bull, including a fourteenth-century document now preserved in the UK National Archives.
* Poynings was in fact the second-in-command to the official Lord Deputy of Ireland, Henry, Duke of York – who at the time was four years of age.
* Simnel was pardoned by Henry VII, who recognized that the pretender had been a pawn in the hands of others: and rather than hand Simnel over to the executioners, the king gave him a job in the royal kitchens.
* In sixteenth-century England the average male height was 1.7 metres (5 feet 6 inches).
* Howard, later Duke of Norfolk, was the uncle of two of Henry VIII’s wives: Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard; ironically, in the aftermath of the Reformation, the Howards would remain one of England’s most visible Catholic families.
* Chichester remains best known for setting in motion the expansion of Belfast from an insignificant settlement at the mouth of the river Lagan into, eventually, the largest city and industrial powerhouse of Ulster.
* Also at this time, many Gaelic Irishmen were rounded up and dispatched to Europe: some six thousand, for example, were shipped off to serve – rather improbably – in the army of Lutheran Sweden, then beginning its ascent into one of Europe’s most influential powers. The Irish presence in Sweden dwindled as men deserted in favour of the armies of Europe’s Catholic powers, especially of Spain – but a detectable Irish presence persisted nevertheless in the Swedish army in the following decades, with several individuals carving out significant careers. See, for example, Harman Murtagh, ‘Irish Soldiers Abroad, 1600–1800’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 304.
* Not that this emotional relationship was ever permitted to tilt into sentimentality, for Swift remained sharp in his references to Ireland’s many imperfections: in providing the money to found St Patrick’s psychiatric hospital in Dublin, for example, he noted acidly that ‘no Nation wanted it so much’.
* The law forbidding intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants was not repealed until 1778; the Tone marriage therefore indicates the extent to which penal legislation went unheeded in everyday life.
* Cornwallis already had a considerable military and political career behind him: he had been present in 1781 at the Siege of Yorktown, which effectively ended the American War of Independence; later, he was posted to India, where he was credited with instituting widespread reforms to British rule and in the process laying the foundations for the Raj. In 1798, he oversaw the defeat of the French.
* On occasion, this violence was extreme: gang-rape was a feature of the so-called Rockite uprising in Munster in the early 1820s, which led to the deaths of at least a thousand Protestants. See James S. Collins, Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–24 (Cork: Collins Press, 2010).
* An exception was the localized emigration from Waterford and the southeast in order to work on the Newfoundland fishery. This migration had continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the result that a substantial Irish population had become established on the Newfoundland coast. By 1720, the British authorities were remarking ‘the great numbers of Irish roman Catholick servants’ (that is, fishery workers) settled on the coast south of St John’s. (Quoted in Willeen Keough, ‘Creating the “Irish Loop”’, in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall, 2008), 12–22, 12.
* Patrick Geoghegan notes suspicions of a string of affairs, some of which can be given credence. The most notorious scandal involved Ellen Courtenay, who accused O’Connell of rape. It seems more likely that they had an affair, and a child may have been the result. O’Connell’s enemies may have been out to damage him, yet ‘Courtenay’s claims cannot be discarded lightly’. There are indications of a string of other affairs too, including with his daughter’s governess. See Patrick Geoghegan, King Dan: The Rise of Daniel O’Connell 1775–1829 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2008), 181.
** As in the case of John Magee, prosecuted for printing in his Dublin Evening Post a harsh review of government policies. O’Connell, in his defence of Magee, grandstanded his own opposition to the government, in the process earning Magee the harsh sentence of two years’ imprisonment and a £500 fine. Magee, unsurprisingly, later became estranged from O’Connell.
* Attendance numbers at the Monster Meerings were inevitably a matter of dispute: O’Connell’s supporters claimed that 400,000 gathered at Lismore, Cork and Mallow, and almost a million at Tara; others disagreed.
* The Free Trade Act signed between Britain and France in 1867 symbolized a wider acceptance of the principles of laissez-faire economics.
* The effects of the civil war manifested in other ways too: the Union government’s introduction of the draft led to an immediate tapering off of Irish immigration into the United States; and competition for employment between the Irish and free black Americans led to increasing racial tension and occasional acts of extreme violence.
* Fenian incursions into Canadian territory have been credited with helping to mend the testy relationship between the original Canadian provinces and to nudge them towards Confederation – this came about in July 1867.
* These fears of Fenian activity were not wholly unjustified, and Gladstone’s implied solution did not work as planned: in the course of the 1880s Fenian bombers targeted Scotland Yard, the Palace of Westminster, London Bridge, the Tower, the city’s fledgling Underground and Greenwich Observatory.
* The disestablishment bill also relieved the Church of Ireland of the expense of maintaining many ruinous and ageing buildings; as a result, it emerged from the settlement financially rather better off.
* Davitt viewed the conflict in terms of a clash between the Boers and British. He had little or nothing to say about the denial of political rights to the majority African population. This attitude contrasts sharply with his sharp observations on the situation of the New Zealand Maori and Australian Aboriginal populations during his 1889–90 tour of the region.
* Casement was born outside Dublin to a family with Ulster antecedents. He was sent by the Foreign Office as consul to postings in Africa and South America. His reports on the widespread human rights abuses in the Belgian Congo led to changes in the political governance of the territory. He was knighted in 1905.
* ‘A typical volunteer’, writes Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘was James English, a 38-year-old labourer from County Waterford, married with five children. By enlisting, he instantly increased his family’s earnings by 154 per cent, and if anything was to happen to him, his wife was guaranteed a pension.’ (Quoted in Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 [London: Profile, 2004], 133.)
* In the course of the voyage, the Libau was disguised as a Norwegian cargo vessel (complete with a consignment of kitchen equipment) and renamed the Aud. The ship was eventually captured by British naval vessels on 22 April and escorted into Cork harbour, where she was scuttled by her captain. Casement was captured at the same time on the Ke
rry coast.