by A. N. Wilson
Peel’s comparatively charitable practical help was not followed up with much enthusiasm by the Liberal government of Lord John Russell, which came to power in the summer of 1846. After a year of untold sufferings in Ireland, there was, quite unrelated, a British banking crisis in 1847. The famine had now been afflicting Ireland for two years, killing hundreds of thousands of people and forcing others to emigrate. The reaction of the chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood, was expressed in a letter to the Irish viceroy, the Earl of Clarendon – ‘Now financially, my course is very easy. I have no more money and therefore I cannot give it … Where the people refused to work or sow, they must starve, as indeed I fear must be the case in many parts.’7 There was relief given to famine-sufferers by the British government – perhaps £7 million from a government which believed spending to be wicked and which had convinced itself that it was strapped for cash. It is only fair to note that seven years later the British government found £70 million to finance the Crimean War.8
How many died – and why? It is the second question which explains the gross, the truly terrible answer to the first. Indeed one needs to answer the question why the famine happened in at least two ways. It is very much not a simple question of one particular fungal disease destroying one tuber, though that is where one begins.
The population of Ireland by 1845 had probably reached some 8.3 million. True, it had increased dramatically over the years, as had the populations of other European countries, but apart from isolated cases of hunger in times of bad harvest, cases which could be (and usually had been) dealt with by the charity of landlords or others in the locality, there was no obvious sense in which this was an island incapable of feeding itself. ‘There is no evidence that pre-famine Ireland was overpopulated in any useful sense of that word.’9
The way in which this population sustained itself, however, can be seen with the eyes of hindsight to be calamitous. The potato blight might have been a nuisance, or worse than a nuisance, to those farming twenty acres or more. The evidence suggests that none of these comparatively small farmers (still less the larger landowners) died of starvation. The big divide in Irish society was not so much between landlord and tenant as between those with at least twenty acres and those with less, or none. The great majority of Irish peasants farmed little strips of land, and their only crop was the potato. Few of them it would seem ever went fishing, on the plenteous inland waters of Ireland, nor did they put to sea as the Welsh, Scotch and Cornish had done, time out of mind, returning with plentiful supplies of fish. The potato was the ideal crop for a peasant economy, an agrarian world which had been unaffected by any of the momentous changes which had come upon the English countryside. The potato needed next to no maintenance, as a crop. You simply planted it, watched it grow, harvested and ate it. In the intervening months of the year, you could play your fiddle and sing your songs. What else was there to do? The education of Catholics until the abolition of the Penal Laws in the eighteenth century had been confined to the hedge-schools – run out of doors by enterprising priests so as not to infringe the law. Burke went to a good one, evidently, but for most, educational possibilities were nil. How could an Irish Carlyle, the well-educated peasant, have ever been? Such was the hold of the Protestant Ascendancy over Ireland that four years after the Catholic Emancipation Act there were still no Catholic judges in the whole of Ireland.10
The big landlords owned the place, the prosperous tenant farmers did well out of the arrangement. Inevitably, there was more thieving in this type of economy than there was in England, so Irish crime figures for the period are always higher than English. To English contemporaries this proved that the Irish were feckless, dishonest, potentially violent. The reality is that if you started from scratch and invented a society such as that controlled by the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, in which the bottom 4 (out of 8+) million were given no educational or economic advantages or incentives, they would end up, very much as the Irish peasantry did end up, cultivating very small patches of land and doing little else besides. It was simply appalling bad luck that this very deprived and numerous group of people subsisted on one tuber alone which, since its introduction in the seventeenth century, had given no sign or indication that it would fail. It was the reliability of the spud, as well as the ease of growing it, which made it the favoured peasant food. Two million acres of Ireland were given over to potatoes. Three million people ate nothing else. Nothing. (Adult males consumed between twelve and fourteen pounds daily.)
All visitors to Ireland in pre-famine days were shocked by the poverty of the peasants. Froude, in 1841, saw, in Galway, ‘the rags insufficient to cover the children and boys of twelve running about absolutely naked … The inhabitants, except where they had been taken in hand and metamorphosed into police, seemed more like tribes of squalid apes than human beings.’11 ‘Only magnificent châteaux and miserable cabins are to be seen in Ireland,’ said a French observer. All noted the mud floors, peat roofs and insanitary conditions in which the rural poor were housed.12
Comparable scenes were perhaps to be found in England, where the wages of agricultural labourers had started to fall badly behind those of the hired industrial workers in the factories. But England, because its economy was based on industry, and on the investment of the rentier class, was immeasurably richer and stronger than Ireland. The Irish landlords varied enormously. In areas where the landlord was compassionate, starvation was often averted. In many cases, however, landlords showed no mercy or were absent. Peasants who lived on estates with absentee landlords could often expect no pity from the small prosperous tenant farmers or the estate managers. Prosperous farmers continued, through the famine years, to prosecute starving labourers caught stealing food from their fields. They refused money wages to those unable to pay in advance for their ‘conacre’ portions of land.13 (It was reckoned that half an acre of conacre would support a labourer’s family.)14 Many therefore simply did not have the money to buy the cheap imported corn. ‘Conacre’ rent was between £12 and £14 an acre, paid not in cash but in labour. A typical family of 4–7 people in Westmeath at this time was trying to subsist on 10d. a day. To earn the 10d. on one of the government’s ‘job creations’, the labourer would have to walk 3½ miles to work and 3½ miles back, his sole meal of the day a small ration of oatmeal. No wonder violence broke out when the hungry were able to muster up the energy for it.
By the end of September 1846 the people of Clashmore, Co. Waterford, were living on blackberries, at Rathcormack, Co. Cork, on cabbage leaves. In Leitrim, the parish of Cloone, with 22,000 inhabitants, had no bread and no baker, but at the same time Irish corn grown on neighbouring farms was harvested, bagged and taken for export. At Youghal near Cork there were riots of ‘enraged’ people who tried to hold up a boat laden with export oats. At Dungarvan in Co. Waterford, a crowd of the starving unemployed entered the town, plundering shops and ordering chandlers and shopkeepers not to export grain. After the police failed to clear the streets, the 1st Royal Dragoons were called out. The crowd began to pelt them with stones. After the Riot Act had been read out, the soldiers opened fire, leaving several men wounded and two dead.
‘The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.’ These words of John Mitchel in The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) 1860 very understandably became the unshakeable conviction of the Irish, particularly those forced into exile by hunger. The tendency of modern historians is not so much to single out individuals for blame, such as Charles Edward Trevelyan, permanent head of the Treasury, as to point to the whole attitude of mind of the governing class and the, by modern standards, gross inequalities which were taken for granted. Almost any member of the governing class would have shared some of Trevelyan’s attitudes.
But there is more to John Mitchel’s famous statement (one could almost call it a declaration of war) than mere rhetoric. Deeply ingrained with the immediate horrors of the famine was the overall structure of Irish agrarian socie
ty, which placed Irish land and wealth in the hands of English (or in effect English) aristocrats. It was the belief of a Liberal laissez-faire economist such as Lord John Russell that the hunger of Irish peasants was not the responsibility of government but of landowners. No more callous example of a political doctrine being pursued to the death – quite literally – exists in the annals of British history. But Lord John Russell’s government, when considering the Irish problem, were not envisaging some faraway island in which they had no personal concern. A quarter of the peers in the House of Lords had Irish interests.15
Of the three leading Whig ministers in 1848, only Russell himself had no direct economic interest in Ireland. Many of the English parliamentarians owned land there. Lord Palmerston for example – British foreign secretary in Russell’s Cabinet – owned many acres of County Sligo. In common with many landowners he never went near his tenants in their plight, and certainly sent no relief, preferring to export them in their hundreds to Canada. When, in November 1847, the ship Aeolus arrived at St John with 428 passengers, almost all of them were Lord Palmerston’s tenants. The following report was made of their condition:
There are many aged persons of both sexes on board and a large population of women and children, the whole in the most abject state of destitution, with barely sufficient rags upon their persons to cover their nakedness … One boy, about ten years of age, was actually brought on deck stark naked.16
Eight passengers were dead on arrival at St John. The inhabitants of the Canadian port had nowhere to house them and demanded that the passengers of the Aeolus be given a free passage back to Ireland. The matter caused such scandal that Palmerston was called to make a statement in the House of Commons, blaming his agents. They in turn made the tenants write cruelly unconvincing letters to the St John newspapers expressing their deep gratitude to Lord Palmerston for rescuing them from the famine. They remained in the dockside slums there, struggling for some kind of existence. That winter the streets of St John were full of ‘swarms of wretched beings going about the streets imploring every passer-by, women and children in the snow, without shoes or stockings and scarcely anything on’.17 Many more went to New York. Some, risking the frequently violent anti-Irish feeling of the English working class, came to England, usually to work in the most menial capacities as navvies, often forcibly separated from their families. These were the survivors. In the five years of the famine the population of Ireland fell from a little over 8 million to a little over 6. About 1 million of that can be attributed to deaths by natural causes, and by (usually enforced) clearances of the land.
That leaves the eternally shaming statistic of 1.1 million deaths by starvation in Ireland between 1845 and 1850. Throughout this period, the viceroy in Dublin Castle continued to draw his salary of £20,000 per annum. (The prime minister’s salary was £5,000.) While labourers in Westmeath struggled their seven miles a day to earn 10d. and while over a million died for want of anything to eat, anything at all, the viceroy kept up his lavish court. Lord Clarendon’s household accounts for 1848 show £1,297 spent on wine; £1,868 on butcher’s bills; £619 on poulterers, £352 on fishmongers and £562 on the butter man. Lord Clarendon as viceroy, supporting a government which had come into power on the Free Trade ticket, had done nothing to check the profiteering which went on in the worst of the famine areas.18 (Throughout the winter of ’46–7, for instance, prices rocketed and speculators made a fortune selling imported maize – ‘£40,000 and £800,000 were spoken of as having been made by merchants in Cork’, wrote one despondent contemporary.19
The riot police and troops were sent to quell the angry mobs, with the cynical promise of extra provisions. Trevelyan arranged for the provisioning of 2,000 riot troops with beef, pork and biscuit, to be mobilized at short notice in order to put down food riots.
It is all so horrible that one cannot and need not exaggerate the suffering of the hungry and the callousness of their governors. That should not prompt the distorted view that no one on the English side of St George’s Channel was shocked by what was going on, nor offer cause to suppose that all the rich and powerful were (to use Bishop Berkeley’s description of Irish landlords) ‘vultures with iron bowels’.20 Towards the end of 1846 a group of ‘merchant princes’ in the City of London, led by Baron Lionel de Rothschild and Mr Thomas Baring, set up ‘The British Association for the relief of the extreme distress in the remote parishes of Ireland and Scotland’. Trevelyan did not believe the fund would do any good, but Queen Victoria donated £2,000, Rothschilds £1,000, the Duke of Devonshire (who in addition to his various English palaces also owned the castle of Lismore in Co. Waterford) £1,000 and Sir Charles Wood £200. The British Association appointed an anglicized Pole, Count Strzelecki, to administer distribution of the funds. Evangelical Christians and Quakers helped with their work.21
Yet these overtures from the English side were undoubtedly made against a tide of prejudice and bitterness. The hordes of Irish poor crowding into English slums did not evoke pity – rather, fear and contempt. The Whiggish Liberal Manchester Guardian blamed the famine quite largely on the feckless Irish attitudes to agriculture, family, life in general. Small English farmers, said this self-righteous newspaper, don’t divide farms into four which are only sufficient to feed one family. (The economic necessities which forced the Irish to do this were conveniently overlooked by the Manchester Guardian: indeed economic weakness, in the Darwinian jungle, is the equivalent of sin.) Why weren’t the English starving? Because ‘they bring up their children in habits of frugality, which qualify them for earning their own living, and then send them forth into the world to look for employment’.
We are decades away from any organized Irish Republican Movement. Nevertheless, in the midst of the famine unrest, we find innumerable ripe examples of British double standards where violence is in question. An Englishman protecting his grossly selfish way of life with a huge apparatus of police and military, prepared to gun down the starving, is maintaining law and order. An Irishman retaliating is a terrorist. John Bright, the Liberal Free Trader, hero of the campaign against the Corn Laws, blamed Irish idleness for their hunger – ‘I believe it would be found on inquiry, that the population of Ireland, as compared with that of England, do not work more than two days a week.’ The marked increase in homicides during the years 1846 and 1847 filled these English liberals with terror. There were 68 reported homicides in Ireland in 1846, 96 in 1847, 126 shootings in the latter year compared with 55 the year before. Rather than putting these in the context of hundreds of thousands of deaths annually by starvation, the textile manufacturer from Rochdale blames all the violence of these starving Celts on their innate idleness. ‘Wherever a people are not industrious and are not employed, there is the greatest danger of crime and outrage. Ireland is idle, and therefore she starves; Ireland starves, and therefore she rebels.’
Both halves of this sentence are factually wrong. Ireland most astonishingly did not rebel in, or immediately after, the famine years; and we have said enough to show that though there was poverty, extreme poverty, before 1845, many Irish families survived heroically on potatoes alone. The economic structure of a society in which they could afford a quarter or half an acre of land on which to grow a spud while the Duke of Devonshire owned Lismore, Bolton (and half Yorkshire), Chatsworth (and ditto Derbyshire), the whole of Eastbourne and a huge palace in London was not of the Irish peasant’s making.
By 1848/9 the attitude of Lord John Russell’s government had become Malthusian, not to stay Darwinian, in the extreme. As always happens when famine takes hold, it was followed by disease. Cholera swept through Belfast and Co. Mayo in 1848, spreading to other districts. In the workhouses, crowded to capacity, dysentery, fevers and ophthalmia were endemic – 13,812 cases of ophthalmia in 1849 rose to 27,200 in 1850. Clarendon and Trevelyan now used the euphemism of ‘natural causes’ to describe death by starvation. The gentle Platonist-Hegelian philosopher Benjamin Jowett once said, ‘I have always felt a certai
n horror of political economists, since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good.’22 As so often Sydney Smith was right: ‘The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, 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.’23
7
The Victorians in Italy
IRELAND DREW FORTH the darkest, most pessimistic, and most repressive aspect of the Victorian character. Italy tapped its sunniness, its optimism, and its belief in a liberal future. Gladstone’s attitude to Italy is a good yardstick, not only of his own inner journey, but that of his contemporaries; for one of the secrets of his phenomenal and long-lasting political success was that, eccentric though he was, he was also a truly Hegelian figure embodying the spirit of his age. As his liberal biographer and hero-worshipper Morley saw it, ‘slowly and almost blindly heaving off his shoulders the weight of old conservative tradition, Mr Gladstone did not at first go beyond liberty with all that ordered liberty conveys’. But his visit to Italy in the autumn of 1850 drew him ‘into that great European stream of liberalism which was destined to carry him so far’.1
He had first visited Italy as a very young man in 1832, with his brother John. Since, it had been chiefly a place in his mind, the land above all else of Dante, the writer next to Homer most revered by Gladstone. It was also, needless to say, a place associated in his mind with loose living, and in 1849 he had set out on a quasi-farcical journey to ‘rescue’ Lady Lincoln, the wife of an old Eton friend who had eloped to Italy with Lord Walpole.2 He had managed to hear Lucia di Lammermoor and an early Verdi (The Masnadieri) and he saw some splendid scenery as he chased from Naples to Milan to Lecco – but he failed to bring the lady home, and it horrified him to find she was pregnant. His hamfisted chase, indeed, brought on her confinement.