by Jan Morris
This was the negation of empire, whether empire of the old commercialist kind, which depended upon Government protection, or of the new idealist kind, which relied upon Government support. But the educated classes of England, indignant though they were about slave conditions in Jamaica, or even the unjust harassment of innocent Afghan tribesmen, were inured to miseries nearer home. The poor were always with them—‘wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature’, wrote an American observer of England in 1845, ‘lying in bleeding fragments all over the face of society’. London, the greatest of all capitals, was also among the most heartless; the new factory towns of the English Midlands and North were places of unrelieved ugliness and exploitation; it did not often lie upon the English conscience that only 60 miles away across St George’s Strait there lay beneath the authority of the Crown the saddest country in Europe.
So throughout 1846 and 1847 Ireland was left to find its own solutions. There was no Government relief, no Government buying of food, and the costs of public works, the only form of relief, was borne entirely by the local rates. Butter, milk and eggs were still exported from Ireland, for it would be economically improper to interfere with the natural flow of commerce, and soldiers convoyed them to the seaports, in case the populace rebelled against this organic process. The Irish peasant, it was officially decreed, must buy his own food on the free market, and the Irish landlords (whom the Whigs blamed for the disaster, for they were nothing if not impartial) must foot the bill.
But the Irish economy was not geared to such demands. In normal times Ireland hardly imported anything, least of all food: there were very few import merchants, and only rudimentary systems of distribution. The orthodox principles of supply and demand simply did not work in such a country at such a time. There were few middle-class committee people to organize relief. The stiff upper lip, the spirit of self-help, the gift of cooperative efficiency, all were lacking from the Irish ethos. So desperate was the situation, so impoverished were many of the landlords themselves by now, so cruel was the winter of 1847, that by the end of the year nearly half a million men had no work at all, and when the free enterprise system did begin to work, and food trickled in from England, hardly anybody could afford to buy it. Now the peasants were deprived even of the nettles, the roots, the blackberries they foraged for in summer, and in some places there was nothing to eat at all but
There was an official change of heart in the first months of 1848, when an Ireland gripped in snow and starvation seemed almost beyond redemption. The Government decided that against all its principles, and against the solemn convictions of Her Majesty’s Treasury, direct relief must be supplied. Commissariat officers were summoned from distant parts of the Empire—Canada, the West Indies, the Mediterranean—to help dole it out, and a dramatic gesture symbolized the decision. The chief bastion of the Whig Progressives in London was the Reform Club, a splendid Renaissance palace in Pall Mall. The chef of this prestigious club was Alexis Soyer from Paris, one of the most famous cooks in the world, and in February 1848 he was officially invited to go to Dublin to superintend the distribution of Government soups. He had himself devised a recipe for a nourishing broth which would cost only ¾d a quart: a¼ lb leg of beef, 2 oz of dripping, 2 onions, ½ lb of flour, ½ lb of pearl barley, 3 oz of salt and ½ oz of brown sugar, to 2 gallons of water. This tenuous mixture was dispensed from a building very like a cattle-shed, erected outside the Royal Barracks in Dublin, with a hundred bowls set at long tables and supplied with chained spoons. In the starving went by one door, to eat their broth and leave at the other end: and when a bell rang, in came another hundred, until, when the system was working at its smoothest, M. Soyer from the Reform Club was feeding 8,750 Irishmen a bowl of soup a day.
But it was too late. Ireland was crippled, and the imperial Government never was able to master the catastrophe. The British had not yet had much experience of natural calamities in their possessions—they had never felt it their responsibility to deal with the endemic famines of India. Nor had they yet learnt to apply the new technology to the imperial mission. The great famine was an Act of God, as the insurers insisted, and neither the Government, nor the landlords, nor even perhaps the peasants, improvident though they were, could properly be blamed for it. It was everybody’s fault, and nobody’s: but what it chiefly demonstrated, in our historical context, was the incompleteness of the imperial purpose. England’s sense of imperial duty was still intermittent, and shared only by a minority: the Empire had no pride of cause or mission yet, and no conviction of destiny.
7
In the middle of it all O’Connell, aged and demoralized, died at Genoa. They brought his body home to Ireland, and laid it in state beneath a black catafalque in the Dublin Pro-Cathedral (only the Protestants, who constituted some ten per cent of the Dublin population, had a full cathedral—two of them, in fact). Priests stood in attendance, and Dubliners poured in night and day, pale and black, to light their votive candles and weep beside the coffin.
But The Liberator had long been past his prime, and in his old age there had arisen a new and more militant body of Irish protest—Young Ireland. This was a very different movement. Led by William Smith O’Brien, a Protestant landlord descended from Brian Boru himself, it had intellectual leanings, published its own newspapers, and numbered in its ranks men who actually hated England and all she stood for, and were ready to die upon her bayonets. Its most active leaders had cataclysmic visions of sweeping the British into the sea, out of the ravaged island once and for all—‘a kind of sacred wrath’, one of its leaders, Joseph Mitchel, called it, and Fintan Lalor, another, saw the famine itself as the key to revolution. ‘Unmuzzle the wild dog’, he instructed the people in sinister metaphor. ‘There is one at this moment in every cabin throughout the land, nearly fit to be untied—and he will be savager by and by.’
It was 1848, the year of revolution throughout Europe, and in Ireland these men believed their time too was near. On a wave of fearful idealism the leaders of Young Ireland, at this abysmal moment of their country’s history, launched themselves into armed rebellion. They were frank about their intentions. This was to be a holy war, and a fight to the death. It was a cause, they said, cleansed of the tricks and corruptions of politics, a cause for ‘the young, the gallant and the good’. But in Ireland then the young, the gallant and the good were mostly near starvation, and were interested less in political independence than in physical survival. The Young Irelanders found themselves revolutionaries without a revolution. The Catholic clergy would not help—the Pope himself, in a Rescript, instructed the Irish priests to ‘apply themselves to watch over the spiritual interests of the people, and in no way to mix themselves up with worldly affairs’. Attempts to arouse the exhausted Irish public fizzled dismally, and by the summer the Young Icelanders, having made their seditious purposes plain to the world, found themselves with no arms, few supporters, and less than £1,000 in the bank.
The British for their part were almost over-prepared for them. Alarmed by the revolutions sweeping across Europe, and by the near-revolution of the Chartists at home, they assumed a general rising to be imminent—a servile war is what the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Clarendon, foresaw, like the slave rebellions of earlier empires. Habeas Corpus was suspended, and troops were encamped on the outskirts of every major town. O’Brien and Mitchel were arrested and charged with sedition. O’Brien was acquitted by a jury that included three Catholics, and was unable to agree: Mitchel was sentenced, by a unanimous Protestant jury, to fourteen years’ transportation, and was whisked away within an hour of the verdict, chained in a warship on his way to Bermuda.
The surviving leaders shakily proceeded with their plans. At the end of July Smith O’Brien toured the country districts, but was greeted with apathy almost everywhere. At Enniscorthy he was told the people were not ready. At Wexford they were cowed by the presence of British warships off-shore. At Kilkenny he found that owing to a misprint his followers numbered not 17,000, as
he had been led to expect, but only 1,700. At Cashel, the ancient and spectacular shrine of Munster, where the cathedral and its attendant castle clustered high on a craggy rock above the plain—at Cashel, where if anywhere the spirit of Irish independence should have blazed, O’Brien found no Young Irelanders at all. Only at Mullinahone, in northern Tipperary, did the disheartened revolutionary find a rebellious potential. There they rang the chapel bells for him, and several thousand men assembled with pikes, forks and a few guns. Most of them had come only in hope of food, and when they were told that they would have to forage for themselves during the campaign, nearly all went home: but for O’Brien the die was cast. He marched his force northwards to the village of Ballingarry, in Limerick: and it was there on July 30 that the Young Ireland revolution of 1848, the most pathetic in the long history of Irish risings against the English, reached its poignant dénouement.
When O’Brien paraded his followers outside the village he found he had some 40 armed men, 20 with guns, 18 with pikes, together with an unarmed rabble of about 80 men and women. The scene sounds heartrendingly Irish. Ballingarry was the very model of a Limerick village, a small cluster of mud houses grouped around a road junction, sloping slightly on the face of a hill, and looking across green but stony country to the wide plain of the Mague below. Its inhabitants were mostly starving, and sat huddled in shawls and rags on stools outside their huts, or hung around the tavern listless and emaciated. Its roads were unpaved and dusty, and above it rose the stark volcanic mound called Knockfeerina, with a cairn on the top, and a Giant’s Cave in its flank, and the charisma of Irish legend all about.
Here in a field, marked off with stones and boulders, the ragged army prepared for battle. At its head, on horseback, was the patrician O’Brien, a tall and sombre figure, with wistful child-like eyes, a Roman nose and a broad honourable brow; beside him was his chief lieutenant, Terence McManus from Liverpool, tall too but cast in a stagier Irish mould, with his loud laugh and his irresponsible swagger; behind them in tattered ranks was as sad a force as even Ireland had known, clutching its sticks and stones and shotguns, pitiably thin, utterly ignorant, but sustained, one can only suppose, by some truly noble urge or desperate grievance. These were the eighty Irishmen preparing to take on the British Empire, as their country sank into despair around them: but they were denied even a tragic finish, and the revolution ended ridiculously.
Even as the force paraded, news arrived that a body of police was on the way. The rebels threw up a barricade, ready to defend Ballingarry, and gunmen, pikemen and stone-throwers were poised in readiness. The villagers gathered at a prudent distance to watch. When about thirty policemen came marching down the road, and saw the barricade ahead of them, and this raggle-taggle crowd all about, they lost their nerve, broke ranks, and ran for the nearest house. It belonged to the Widow McCormack, and was a pleasant four-square farmhouse on the crest of an adjacent rise, with a walled cabbage patch in front, a yard behind, and a little thicket of trees to protect it against the wind. Mrs McCormack, as it happened, was on her way into Ballingarry, leaving at home her five or six young children, so without formality the policemen, clutching their muskets and helmets, precipitously dived into the house, closed the doors behind them, and barricading the windows with Mrs McCormack’s mattresses, disappeared from view.
Off the rebels went hot-foot and hilarious in pursuit, breathless up the steep bumpy slope, leaving Ballingarry out of sight behind them. McManus dashed headlong into the yard, and seizing a bale of hay laid it against the back door and set fire to it. The others threw themselves on the ground and awaited events: and at this moment the Widow McCormack, having learnt on her way to the village that her house was about to become a historic site, tearfully appeared upon the scene, understandably anxious about her children. She seems to have moved the courtly O’Brien, for he told McManus to burn no more hay, and with a couple of others went boldly around to the front of the house, opened the garden gate, and walked up to the front door beneath the muzzles of the policemen’s guns. There was silence. O’Brien climbed on to a window-sill, watched breathlessly by the rebels behind him and the policemen in front, put his hand through the open window over the piled mattresses, and shook hands with the flabbergasted constable inside. ‘We do not want your lives,’ he grandly said, ‘only your arms.’
But now the rebels crouching below the garden walls began throwing stones at the house. The nervous police replied with a volley of musket fire. One rebel was killed, another severely wounded, and almost before the constables had time to reload, the entire revolutionary force, under fire at last, faded away from the Widow McCormack’s farm, to hide in outbuildings or declivities round about, or slink away in their rags to cabins in the village, O’Brien, pausing only to declare that an O’Brien never turned his back on an enemy, retreated nonetheless on horseback, and in half an hour the revolution was over. Mrs McCormack, returning to her home, found that the children had not been harmed, and set about clearing up the mess.1
8
Ten years earlier it might have ended differently, but the poor Irish had lost their spirit. Famine had broken them, and few had heart for protest or self-assertion. An instinct now seized this tragic people to leave Ireland for ever, and start afresh in some less cursed land. It was as though, after centuries of hopeless struggle, the fire had died in them. Never was a people further from the ecstasy of revolution. Instead in their hundreds of thousands the Irish survivors made for the ports, with their poor bundles of possessions and their children heavy on the hand. This was something quite new to Ireland. Unlike the English and the Scots, the Irish had never been wanderers. They had no instinct for the exotic: perhaps they were exotic enough in themselves. They loved their country with a mystic attachment, and the free English-speaking communities scattered across the world, familiar though they were with Cockney or Glaswegian, seldom heard the brogue.
Now something cracked. The island lay desolate, and if any Irishmen hoped for a true union with England, that prospect had vanished for ever. The contrast was cruel, between the rich and powerful kingdom on one side of the Irish Sea, just getting into the stride of universal supremacy, and the shattered sister isle so close and yet so unutterably estranged. In these conditions the Act of Union was dearly no more than an act of dominance, and far from exciting the sympathy of the English, the Great Famine had merely sharpened their exasperation. ‘The great evil with which we have to contend,’ wrote Charles Trevelyan, ‘is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.’ The Irish were so hopeless, so absolutely dependent upon the leadership and organization of others. They fought each other for relief foods, they stubbornly resisted any change of diet, they stole and cheated and lied in the midst of tragedy. And after all the British had done for them, even then they had, in the depths of their ingratitude, mounted the revolution of 1848—itself, in its mixture of self-delusion and ineptitude, a typically Irish operation. Russell himself summed up the public attitude thus: ‘We have subscribed, worked, visited, clothed, for the Irish, millions of money, years of debate, etc, etc, etc. The only return is rebellion and calumny. Let us not grant, lend, clothe, etc, any more, and see what that will do’.1
The island seemed doomed, governed by rulers who despised it, and plagued too by self-doubt and even self-contempt. In the years immediately after the Great Famine about a million Irish people decided to start again elsewhere, or were shipped off by landlords only anxious to be rid of them (‘I have got rid of crime and distress,’ said Mr Spaight of Derry Castle, Tipperary, ‘for £3 10s a head,’ while Sir Robert Gore Booth, whose family was so numbly prayed for by their tenants in County Sligo, responded by shovelling three shiploads of them off to America). Most of them wanted to go to the United States, the old enemy of the British Empire, where hearts beat, they had been told, to an Irish rhythm. ‘The Irishman looks on America,’ wrote the litterateur Colley Grattan, ‘as the refuge of his ra
ce…. The shores of England are farther off in his heart’s geography than those of Massachusetts or New York.’ In those days, though, America did not offer unlimited immigration, so most of the refugees went first to Canada.
The journey there was only an extension of the Irish nightmare: first the long trudge across Ireland to the sea, in parties often of five or six hundred half-starved travellers, to board steamers in Sligo or Cork, or to be crammed on to schooners and sloops in lesser havens like Ballina, Killala or Tralee: then the miseries of the passage, often via Liverpool, in conditions akin to those on the Middle Passage of the slavers, in ships often unsound, with heartless and frequently incompetent crews, packed aboard without enough food or water, sometimes without any lavatories at all, and often infected with typhus: and finally the landing on the other side, unwanted still as they all too often discovered, and greeted only by overworked health officers and resentful immigration men.