by Colin Murphy
A week after the events at McGurk’s cottage, Owen had trotted his brother’s horse to a quiet spot beside the shore of Lough Mask and pulled out the rifle that would have been the instrument of Boycott’s death. He had a vivid recollection of his father hurling a musket out over the waters of Derrintin Lough where he used to fish as a boy. A musket with which he’d killed. Owen took his brother’s weapon and, with his good right arm, repeated the action, watching as the rifle twirled in an arc across the sky, Lough Mask’s placid waters claiming it forever. Events had come full circle, he thought, as he watched the ripples fade and disappear.
‘It wasn’t the famine or hatred of the English that made my brother what he was,’ he’d said to Fr O’Malley over a drink that evening. ‘It was my own father. He may have had no choice, and he was normally a peaceful man, but when he killed that gamekeeper before Thomas’s eyes, he set his son on the violent course of his life.’
The priest nodded. ‘We must measure what we bequeath to our children in far greater terms that the material things we leave behind,’ he said.
A few days later they’d read in the newspaper that Boycott and his family had made it safely to Claremorris, overtaking the huge military cavalcade as it conducted the labourers from Cavan and Monaghan to the train station. From there, Boycott and the men who had laboured to bring in his harvest went their separate ways. The military escort then broke up and returned to their separate barracks in Dublin, Ballinrobe and Kildare. No protests greeted the Boycotts either in Claremorris or upon their arrival in Dublin, Fr O’Malley’s counsel reaching all the way to the east coast of the country. Yet it wasn’t quite the end of Boycott’s troubles in Ireland, for the proprietor of the Hamman Hotel in Dublin’s main thoroughfare, Sackville Street, received several warning letters, some threatening a boycott of his premises, others from militants threatening his life should he continue to house the Boycott party under his roof. The Boycotts were requested to vacate the hotel and Charles, Annie and the others took the mail boat for England on the morning of the first day of December 1880. Boycott’s long and troubled involvement with Ireland had finally come to an inglorious end.
‘Here it is,’ Owen called out to the others, who had been scouting about among the long grass in search of his father’s grave. There was little trace of his childhood home left; that sad little one-roomed cottage had long since tumbled to ruin and only a handful of stones remained stacked upon one another. All the others had fallen and been swallowed whole by the earth and nature’s unrelenting growth.
He beat back the foot-high grass to reveal the vague shape of a grave, fifty or so moss-covered stones, most of which had collapsed into the earth as his father’s body had been reclaimed. He had stood there another day, in another life, his brother at his side as they’d listened to the priest perform the funeral rite. Now, at last, Thomas would find a final resting place beside the father he had loved so dearly.
They dug the grave and lowered the coffin into the soft, peaty earth. Fr O’Malley said a mass and finished with the final rite of burial. ‘O God, by Your mercy rest is given to the souls of the faithful, be pleased to bless this grave. Appoint Your holy angels to guard it and set free from all the chains of sin the soul of him whose body is buried here, so that with all Thy saints he may rejoice in Thee for ever. Requiem æternam dona ei Domine; et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace.’
In her innocence, Niamh sobbed profusely as she looked into the dark hole in the earth, but Owen felt no sting of tears as he cast a handful of soil on to the coffin. He had none left to shed.
His brother had said that he and his family owed their very existence to an act of violence. But Owen had pondered this during the inactive days of his recovery. He asked himself: was there a living soul on earth who could say any differently? We are all the product of some violent confrontation, some war or battle, ancient or within memory, that had steered and determined the course of our lives, all the way back to when man had first emerged from his primordial lair. But now, more than ever, Owen believed that bloodshed was not necessary to chart the paths of our lives. Humanity’s blossoming was proof not of the success of violence, but the success of its avoidance.
He watched as the others followed his lead and cast their small handfuls of Mayo earth on to his brother’s final place of rest, at his father’s side.
‘You’re home, Thomas,’ he whispered as he felt Síomha’s arm slip inside his own.
A lone bird took flight from the heather nearby and Owen watched as it soared away across the valley and the bountiful waters of the lough far below.
HISTORICAL EPILOGUE
A system has been instituted in the Limerick locality of ‘Boycotting’ local solicitors to prevent them from acting professionally for plaintiffs in eviction cases.
–The Limerick Chronicle, 23 November 1880
The Land Agitation is spreading to the North. We draw attention to the Land League’s warm reception in Ballyshannon, Enniskillen and Derry, which has resulted in the formation of local branches, while the most successful of last week’s demonstrations was in Cavan, one of the counties that supplied the men for the Boycott expedition.
–The Nation, 27 November 1880
Mr Walter Lambert, a large landowner and magistrate at Athenry has been ‘boycotted’ by his neighbours.
–The Irish Times, 27 November 1880
The agent of an estate at New Pallas has been boycotted after the tenants offered to pay their rent according to Griffith’s Valuation and were declined.
–The Nation, 4 December 1880
Lord Clanricarde’s tenants near Loughrea have refused to pay rent beyond Griffith’s valuation and the local Land League threatened he shall be ‘Boycotted’.
–The Nenagh Guardian, 5 December 1880
Photograph of the so-called ‘Boycott Expedition’ taken on the steps of Lough Mask House at the end of November 1880. Charles Boycott is in the back row, fourth from right. Annie Boycott is seated in front of him. William and Madeleine (face blurred) are to his right. Asheton Weekes is in the front row, centre, wearing a tam o’shanter..
The practice of boycotting spread almost with the same virulence as the blight that had once ravaged Ireland’s potato crops. By the end of December 1880 boycotts had sprung up in every county in Ireland, including the loyalist north, where Parnell had partially succeeded in separating the issue of landlordism from nationalism. The Chief Secretary for Ireland, William Edward Forster, wrote to Gladstone: ‘Unless we can strike at the boycotting weapon, Parnell will beat us.’
Under huge pressure, primarily brought about by the use of the boycott, within a year a new Land Act was passed by the British Government, finally granting the Irish tenantry ‘The Three Fs’ that they had long sought: fair rent control, fixity of tenure on leases, and freedom of sale. This Act and further Land Acts in the decade that followed allowed tenants the opportunity to purchase the land they farmed, returning the land to Irish ownership for the first time in centuries and signalling an end to landlordism in Ireland. They were also granted a rent abatement of twenty-five percent in cases where the tenant was in financial difficulties. Parnell and Davitt’s Land League was a victim of its own success, however, and the League ultimately outlived its usefulness. Yet it had been the single greatest instigator of agrarian reform in Ireland’s history.
The trial of Charles Stewart Parnell and many other Land League leaders took place just weeks after Captain Boycott’s departure from Ireland. In a sense it was the Land League itself and the tactic of boycotting that were on trial. The defendants were acquitted and Michael Davitt remarked that, ‘We have beaten the Government to smithereens…nothing contributed more to the victory than boycotting.’
A Coercion Act was introduced in 1881 in an attempt to bring an end to boycotting. Parnell, Davitt and hundreds of other Land Leaguers were arrested without trial. But British Prime Minister Gladstone quickly realised that coercion was hardening Irish attitudes and negotiat
ed a deal with Parnell while he was in Kilmainham Gaol – nicknamed ‘The Kilmainham Treaty’ – in which Parnell won further concessions to the Land Act and an end to coercion. Davitt and Parnell were released in early 1882. Parnell would bring Ireland to the brink of Home Rule before the scandal involving Kitty O’Shea, another MP’s wife, destroyed him politically. He died in 1891, aged just forty-five.
Michael Davitt continued to work for land reform in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. He campaigned tirelessly on behalf of workingmen everywhere, Britain included, for universal suffrage, for the underprivileged, against anti-semitism, and was one of the founding members of the British Labour Party. He died in 1906, aged sixty, always maintaining to the last that violence was self-defeating. Mahatma Gandhi attributed the development of his own mass movement of peaceful resistance in India to Michael Davitt and the Land League, and successfully adopted the strategy of boycotting. Despite the vast contribution he made to Irish freedom, Davitt has never been granted the accolades he so richly deserves.
Although Lord Mountmorres’s former sheep-herder, Patrick Sweeney, was initially questioned about the landlord’s murder, no evidence could be found linking him to the killing. He was also believed to be incapable of having carried out the assassination given his age and limited intelligence. Considering the planning and clinical nature of the atrocity, it was widely believed that several individuals had been involved, most likely extremist nationalists. No one was ever charged with Mountmorres’s murder.
Bernard Henry Becker continued his travels through Ireland, and given the partisanship of most newspaper correspondents at the time, his reports to The Daily News of London displayed a good deal of impartiality. He visited the homes of landlords and tenants alike in Mayo, Galway, Clare, Limerick, Kerry and in late January 1881, boarded a ship in Cork and returned to England. Later that year he published his collected accounts under the title Disturbed Ireland – Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. He continued to write for The Daily News and the well-known society journal, The World. He also travelled widely in the cities and towns of northern England and brought the plight of the impoverished there to a wider world. He died in 1900, aged sixty-seven.
James Redpath returned to America where he continued to promote the Irish cause through the columns of The Chicago Inter Ocean and The New York Herald, in which he wrote a passionate condemnation of landlordism and of Captain Boycott himself, as the former land agent was, at the time, on a visit to New York in the company of his family. In 1881 he released a book entitled Talks about Ireland, which covered the famine, landlordism, enforced emigration and, of course, the original boycott itself. His contribution to the causes of anti-slavery in the USA and Haiti was recalled in Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America, by John R McKivigan (2008). He died in 1891, aged fifty-eight.
Fr John O’Malley continued his work with the Land League, speaking at countless meetings and encouraging the practice of boycotting as a peaceful means of achieving justice. He also continued to condemn violent acts carried out by extreme nationalists. Much loved by his parishioners, he was not just an inspirational force in the struggle for tenants’ rights, but a generally caring and humanitarian man who did all in his power to help the unfortunates of the world. He continued to minister in Neale until his death on 30 May 1892 at the age of fifty-seven. He was buried at the foot of the high altar in St John the Baptist Church & Calvary in Neale, which his parishioners had built and which still stands today. Beside the building is a monument in the form of a church bell, erected in 2000, inscribed with his name, suspended on stone taken from Neale’s original church. The Fr O’Malley Millennium Park in Neale also honours his memory.
Arthur Boycott’s character is a composite of several people – primarily Arthur himself, who later became a vicar, and Charles’s younger brother, Tom, who served in the Royal Navy, as well as Charles’s army colleagues, most of whom, unlike Charles, had seen active service in far-off lands.
The portrait of Charles’s father, William (and his influence on Charles’s personality) is similarly a composite. As a young man on Achill Island, Charles was a close acquaintance of a man called Edward Nangle, an imperious, domineering figure who utterly detested Catholicism and believed that the Pope was the Antichrist. Nangle had set up the Achill Mission with the specific ambition of proselytising the Catholic population. Charles and his siblings did grow up in a strict Protestant household with a rigid line drawn between the ‘gentlemanly class’ and the so-called ‘lower classes’, and Charles’s father may or may not have been like the authoritarian figure portrayed. In a curious portent of events fifty years later, his tenant farmers once rioted and besieged his rectory because of excessive tithes, and the rector was forced to concede to their demands.
Asheton Weekes eventually became a clergyman and cemented his bonds with the Boycott family by marrying Charles’s niece and ward of court, Madeleine. Young William also studied to be a clergyman; he married and became the final rector of Burgh St Peter to bear the name Boycott.
When he left Ireland, Charles Cunningham Boycott took up a position as the agent for Sir Hugh Adair’s estate in Flixton, Suffolk, not far from his birthplace in Burgh St Peter, Norfolk. During and after the boycott in Mayo, £2,000 was raised in England by public subscription in sympathy with his plight, a vast amount of money to the ordinary man (representing, in today’s money, about £800,000 in earnings, the equivalent of £150,000 in spending power today). He also eventually managed to offload the lease on Lough Mask Estate, though for considerably less than it was worth. He retained his smaller Kildarra Estate and, when the political situation calmed in the following years, he often returned there with Annie for summer holidays. Despite his apparently handsome financial situation, he proved to be as poor a businessman in his later years as he had been in Ireland, and when he died he left Annie with huge debts, which required the sale of most of his remaining assets, including Kildarra. His health declined rapidly in the mid-1890s and he died at his home in Suffolk in June 1897, aged sixty-five.
Although there are no references to the Boycotts having had a daughter (biographies refer to them as childless), an Achill Island death certificate was issued for a Mary Boycott, who died on 26 December 1875, aged nineteen. This puts her birth year at 1856, just a couple of years after Charles and Annie’s marriage. At the time they were residents in Achill Island. Furthermore, there was a strong tradition in the Boycott family of handing down names through the generations and Charles’s grandmother and great-grandmother were both called Mary. The name Boycott is rare enough in England, so the odds of Mary not being a close relation to Charles and Annie are astronomical. The cause of Mary’s death was listed as menorrhagia. There was ‘no medical attendant’. She was recorded as being a spinster, a farmer’s daughter, and, most surprisingly, a Roman Catholic. No family member was present at her death, which took place in the cottage of a Margaret Gaughan.
Although the strategy of ostracism had been employed before 1880 in different parts of the world, most notably the National Negro Convention’s refusal to support slave-produced goods in 1830, the boycott only truly came into its own when it proved so effective on a national level during Ireland’s Land War. The widespread, almost global publicity of the ‘Boycott Affair’ ensured that the efforts and success of the villagers of Neale and Ballinrobe, County Mayo, were known the world over and were an inspiration for countless other movements that sought to redress injustice by peaceful means. Among these were the famous Montgomery Bus Civil Rights Boycott in Alabama, the United Farm Workers’ Grape Boycott (which was among the most successful in US history and which won Mexican and Filipino grape workers significant labour rights), the Indian boycott of British goods organised by Gandhi, several anti-apartheid boycotts against South Africa and countless others.
At the time of the original boycott in County Mayo, Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s father, said of the act of boycottin
g:
‘It is better than any eighty-one-ton gun.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Charles Boycott & The Land War
Althoz, Josef L., Selected Documents in Irish History (M.E. Sharpe 2000)
Beresford Ellis, Peter, Eyewitness to Irish History (John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey 2004)
Boycott, Charles Arthur, Boycott - The Life Behind the Word (Carbonel Press 1997)
Campbell, Fergus J.M., The Irish Establishment, 1879-1914 (Oxford University Press 2009)
Davitt, Michael, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (Harper & Brothers 1904)
Dixon McDougall, Margaret, The Letters of Norah on her Tour Through Ireland (Series of letters to The Montreal Witness as Special Correspondent to Ireland, 1882)
Jordan, Donald E., Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge 1994)
Marlow, Joyce, Captain Boycott and the Irish (History Book Club 1973)
‘Miracle at Knock, and a Disturbed County Mayo’, article, The Galway Advertiser, 13 August 2009
The Erne Papers – Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
‘The Neale Heritage Walk’, pamphlet issued by Mayo County Development Board