by Anne Clare
I thank the goodness and the grace that on my birth have smiled
and made me in these Christian days a happy English child.
Instead, they taught where they could, and especially to their sons, the stuff of Irish Ireland. Joe’s ancestors in Roscommon were reputed to have faced Sir Richard Bingham’s Tudor savagery at Ballymote Castle.[4]So we find their descendant, the young Thomas, home for the holidays from Rockwell College, singing that rousing Gaelic ballad ‘Aílilíu na Gamhna’ at a concert in Moneygall. A happy child – but definitely not an English one.
MacDonagh’s love affair with Muriel progressed against lessening opposition, and with much enthusiasm by the leading players. They saw each other almost daily during their courtship, and when he could not come, three, and even four, letters would arrive.[5] In those days, when you posted a letter in Dublin for a Dublin address it reached its destination in a matter of hours. When he was expected and the doorbell rang, Muriel would fly to the door to greet and embrace him.[6] She was still a Protestant when they married on 3 January 1912. Because it was a ‘mixed’ marriage, it was a low-key affair in the little temporary chapel waiting to be replaced by the Church of the Holy Name which stands today on Beechwood Avenue. There was no best man or bridesmaid, but Pádraig Pearse was to be witness. Unfortunately, Pearse failed to appear, and a man cutting a hedge stood in for him. Informality was the order of the day.[7]
By now MacDonagh was lecturing in English in University College, Dublin, and their marriage was a happy one.[8]Their first child, Donagh, was born later that year on 12 November at Temple Villas, like his aunts Grace and ‘John’ and his uncle Edward Cecil. Barbara, Muriel and Thomas’ daughter, was born three years after that. In one of life’s strange vagaries, when Donagh was born he was christened at the Church of the Three Patrons in Rathgar, and who should drop in to pray before cycling into the city but Pearse, who knew nothing of the christening. The delighted father came up to him with the greeting, ‘Well, you got here in time for the christening anyhow.’[9]
The romance between Joseph Plunkett and Grace Gifford was not as instant as that between her sister Muriel and Thomas MacDonagh, but they were meeting at the MacDonagh house on Orwell Road and at various Irish Ireland activities. He was, as usual, doing a balancing act between his enormous grá for life and indifferent health. To understand this extraordinary young man, who was to become the great, tragic love of Grace’s life, it is essential to learn of his background.
His mother, Josephine Cranny, was the daughter of a very wealthy father who owned whole stretches of first-class residences, especially in the now elitist Dublin 4 area. Their home was a nucleus building of what is today Muckross Park Dominican College, the name deriving from the Cranny’s Kerry origins. Though an heiress, the young Josephine had been a sort of personal assistant to her mother, answerable to her beck and call. Marriage to her first cousin, George Noble Plunkett, may have been a welcome release. There were many suitors from the time she was sixteen, though her father’s reaction to these early ‘offers’ was to place her as a boarder in a school run by the Sacred Heart Convent nuns at Roehampton, south-west of London, for a year. In fact she was twenty-seven, to George’s thirty-three, when they married. It was an arranged union, an effort to conserve the property, to ‘keep it in the family’. There had always been a great affection between the two young cousins, and the papal title ‘Count’ may well have swung the balance in George’s favour. Josephine brought to the marriage a commendable skill as a singer, pianist, violinist and flautist, as well as property on Marlborough Road, Donnybrook, and the prospect of much more. In turn, George brought to the union family property on Belgrave Road in Rathmines, a well-earned reputation as a fine-art connoisseur and a wide reading expressed in an enormous appetite for books, especially books about Ireland; in fact their housing requirements eventually spilled over from his library.[10] He brought something else to the marriage, less tangible but very important: a kindly disposition, although, uncharacteristically, he shared a deep dislike, with others, of W. B. Yeats. Recently a grandson, remembering his grandfather, described him as ‘a sweet and gentle dote’.[11]In Dublin parlance, this is the vocabulary of merit and love.
On the American leg of their worldwide honeymoon, the couple met legendary Irish patriots John Boyle O’Reilly, John Devoy and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. On returning to Dublin, they set up home at 26 Upper Fitzwilliam Street which was to remain their town residence until their children were grown up.
In 1866, the Count was called to the bar, but he did not practise as a lawyer. Even before his appointment as Curator of the National Museum his interests were politics, journalism, learned societies, fine art and books; he himself wrote a highly regarded monograph on the work of Sandro Botticelli. When he eventually took up his duties as curator of the museum, he was classed as a higher civil servant and, as such, was required to attend the yearly state levee when the viceroy came, a duty that was an affront to the Count’s nationalism. He had to wear the requisite black velvet embossed jacket with cut steel buttons, knee breeches of flannel-lined white satin, silk stockings with laced clocks, and buckled patent-leather shoes. At balls the wives were expected to wear a train. It was important to be seen on these occasions, but the Plunketts were wealthy enough to sometimes ignore such need, and the Count’s post was not a sinecure but one gained on merit.[12]
This is not to say that they did no entertaining. In fact, every year the residents of the very upper-class Merrion and Fitzwilliam enclaves gave ‘dances’, and Josephine was not wanting as a hostess. An afternoon children’s party would be followed by an adult dance and a cold supper, with professional musicians (violinist and pianist) who provided music until six the next morning. The repertoire included waltzes, lancers, gallops and the Boston. About 150 guests danced through the small hours, and ‘almost all’ the young men in uniform disappeared, on active service, between one year and the next.[13]Josephine’s parties were on a more lavish scale than those of Isabella Gifford, but then the Plunkett children’s parties had no fake poached eggs and no hurdy-gurdy. You can’t have everything in this life.
Joseph Plunkett was reared by a strict disciplinarian. To illustrate this point, and to furnish an odd little coincidence between the Plunkett and Gifford households, the story of Biddy, who nursed Joseph and his siblings, is apt. From their babyhood, Biddy washed, ironed, sang patriotic songs and took them to play in Fitzwilliam Square. Apart from the similarity of her name and occupation with those of Bridget Hamill, she also knitted socks (though not striped). On returning from a stay in Paris, Countess Plunkett considered that Biddy had become too familiar and dismissed her summarily, to the grief of her young charges.
In the matter of holidays, however, the Plunketts were in a class of their own. Greystones was enough to get the Gifford girls past the snobbery of their peers, but the Countess thought nothing of bringing the whole family to spend the summer in St-Malo in Brittany, or Knokke in Belgium. One year she hired a canal boat to transport them all, with furniture, to Tuam. Nearer home, a house in Firhouse was rented for three summers, from which they could come and go to Upper Fitzwilliam Street. That house was called ‘Charleville’, and the whole family used to stand at the gate and vigorously boo a neighbouring driver of a two-ponied trap because she whipped the ponies unmercifully.[14]Finally, the Count bought Kilternan village (complete with abbey) in County Dublin, and again they moved freely between Fitzwilliam Street and Kilternan, where they had cows, dogs and horses and also huge greenhouses with grapes and peaches.[15]
Like Isabella Gifford, the Countess was a study in contrasts. She had been reared by her mother never to look at servants when speaking to them – though it was suggested that this arose partly from fear, the teenage Josephine having been scared of giving orders to those much her senior. In any event, to her credit she eventually tried to take on management of her estate. A grandson remembered her climbing a roof to assess damage. ‘No shame in getting your hands
dirty,’ she would say, ‘never be ashamed of it.’[16]
The eldest child of the marriage, Joseph Mary Patrick Plunkett, to give him his full name, was ill from infancy, a misfortune attributed to his parents being cousins. Early pleurisy and pneumonia developed into glandular tuberculosis, but his physique and eager mind were at war with his recurring illness. Paradoxically, his body was that of a vigorous young man, as testified by his sister Geraldine.
From 1900, when he was thirteen years of age, he was schooled, as his father had been, by the Jesuits in Belvedere College, but, on an apparent impulse, perhaps because she had been happy at her English boarding school, the Countess placed her three boys, Joseph, George and Jack, in Weybridge boarding school in England. Joseph and George were later sent to Stonyhurst College to take a two-year philosophy course. They joined the officer training corps there, went on manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain and said, if anything, that this experience increased their sense of nationalism.[17]England was training Ireland’s future rebels!
The Plunkett daughters did not receive the same educational care as their brothers, an approach typical of the day. Allowed to sit in on their brothers’ lessons with tutors, a few terms at the Sacred Heart schools in Leeson Street and at Mount Anville comprised their formal education. But they also had access to their father’s huge store of books, which was their Stonyhurst, and they emerged well educated.
Irish winters had such a poor effect on Joseph’s condition that his mother took him to Paris, where he studied under the Marists at Passy. He also wintered in Italy, Sicily and Malta and spent some time with his sister in Algiers where, apart from learning Arabic, he indulged in both dancing and skating. In fact, while there in 1911, his skating was considered so skilful that he was offered a job as instructor at the largest skating rink in Cairo and was youthfully tempted by the magnificent white uniform that went with the job. Sartorially speaking he was never a dandy but, nevertheless, had suits ‘of good cloth, worn carelessly’.[18]
After the War of Independence, when the Free State was established, portraits of the executed leaders of 1916 were displayed on school walls. What the students saw of Joseph Plunkett – always called Joseph Mary Plunkett – was a schoolboyish face in pince-nez amongst the group of Proclamation signatories. There was no way of knowing then that most pictures of his adult life had been deliberately destroyed when he set out with a false passport to join Sir Roger Casement in Germany and that this old photograph seemed to have been superimposed, not very flatteringly, on the official portrait of the other signatories.
Nellie Gifford, who obviously regarded him as her favourite brother-in-law, said:
Data is a cold affair, for the Professors. History will be cold on the warm, human motive that impelled them [the Irish rebels] towards their target, or the odd kinks, loves and capabilities – all in short that make the man live on. Ignoring these endearing little items leaves the subject on the dissecting table for all time … Joe was a very devout Catholic and a minor mystic and a minor poet. He himself would be the last to say otherwise … He inherited a weakened physique that housed a courageous and generous personality. Whenever there was a bit of fun, as at the amateur theatricals held in a hall owned by his mother, he was keenly attracted. Above all he was always interested. Any topic carrying your own particular slant gained his eager attention, his quiet attention, as if he must lean a little out of the chatting circle, retiring (from it) and relishing (your slant) to the full. He was bigger than his memory will probably be.[19]
Dr Theo McWeeney said of him, ‘he had rather untidy, silky hair … his bright darting eyes lit up his face. His hands were long and delicate, graceful hands. He was a man who spoke quickly, gaily, full of enthusiasms … He had an interior life of a great intensity.’[20]
Joseph Plunkett’s sense of humour was puckish. In Algiers, on losing a broken piece of Celtic jewellery in the sand, he remarked, ‘That will give food for thought if an archaeologist finds it some day.’ When very young, his party piece was to sit on a chair, quite still, arms rigidly at his side, and let his dextrous feet do a spirited jig or reel to the Irish music.
Joseph Plunkett had fallen in love before meeting Grace Gifford. The girl was Columba O’Carroll, daughter of a doctor in the Fitzwilliam area. Her family disapproved because of her young suitor’s ill-health, but the romance inspired a very beautiful poem in The Circle and the Sword, the collection of his work selected and seen through publication by Thomas MacDonagh while Joseph was in Algiers in 1911. His poem about his first, youthful love was written to Columba (his ‘dove’):
White dove of the wild dark eyes
Faint silver flutes are calling
From the night where the star mists rise
And fireflies falling
Tremble in starry wise,
Is it you they are calling?[21]
The two young men, Thomas the senior by nine years, met when the Countess sought a tutor to teach Joseph Irish. They took to each other instantly, sharing a love of literature and an abiding sense of nationalism; the people of the Donegal Gaeltacht, where they studied Irish, recalled them proudly and affectionately. Thomas and Joseph also shared an irreverent nickname for Pearse. They felt his inspirational dream for Ireland was not well served by his occasional impracticality and referred to him affectionately as ‘Pop’ – ‘Poor Old Pearse’. Despite that, he inspired them. His dream for Ireland was theirs too.
Joseph lived for two and a half years with his sister Geraldine in one of the Plunkett houses on Marlborough Road, Donnybrook. Since he was not well after his return from Algiers, it was felt that this arrangement was desirable for his full recovery. She was very fond of him, her eldest brother, and also very much aware of his wide-ranging interests, which included motorbikes, art, the wireless, wine, playing the violin, poetry and the study of mysticism. He had even found time, in 1906/07, to design the Irish postage stamp which depicted a neat, Celtic cross. It was sometimes found postmarked on envelopes beside Edward VII stamps, cocking a snook at the monarch, as it were, because it was, at that time, unofficial. It appeared again in blue and black or green and black around Easter Week 1916. Later it became an official stamp of a free Ireland.
Among Plunkett’s favourite mystics was the irrepressible woman-before-her-time St Teresa of Ávila. They had much in common, Joseph Plunkett and Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, a young Irish rebel and the first woman doctor of the Catholic Church: both from wealthy backgrounds, both suffering ill health, which they determinedly ignored, both much travelled, both as much at home with the practical side of life as with its spiritual dimension, both humorous and warmly human, both determined to change that which they saw as wrong.
The ‘Columba verse’ indicates how the young poet set about expressing his love for his lady. But it is his poem where he tries to express his love for Christ that is best remembered. He is the supreme pantheist: everything in nature reminds him of his Redeemer: flowers, stars, skies, birds, rocks and trees:
I see his blood upon the rose
and in the stars the glory of his eyes.
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
his tears fall from the skies.
If it is true that we are known by our friends, then the goodly company who constituted Joseph’s mind-companions, including not only Teresa of Ávila but also St Thomas More, St Francis and St John of the Cross, stamp him with a certain greatness which would have benefited his country eventually had he lived. It is sometimes said that he was already dying before his execution, but he had recovered repeatedly from such attacks. Another visit to a warmer climate might once more have restored his health, and, besides, by 1916 penicillin was little more than a decade around the corner.
For all that, this frail revolutionary did a lot of living in a short space of time: missions to Germany and America, and an insurrection, of which he was Director of Military Operations. Time may have been running out for Joseph Plunkett, but he grasped the passing hours and defied his
mortality. No leader, however physically robust, could have managed more in the short time left to him.
Notes
[1]Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, p. 19.
[2] NGDPs.
[3]Midland Tribune, 1916 Jubilee Supplement (undated).
[4]Donagh MacDonagh, ‘Thomas MacDonagh’, An Cosantóir, vol. V, no. 10, p. 525.
[5]Donagh MacDonagh, ‘A Poet and Scholar Died’, The Irish Press, 6 April 1956, p. 4.
[6]NGDPs.
[7]Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, p. 19.
[8]NGDPs.
[9]Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, p. 19.
[10]Eilís Dillon, ‘A Victorian Household’, in Victorian Dublin, edited by Tom Kennedy, Dublin: Albertine Kennedy Publishing with Dublin Arts Festival, 1980, pp. 64–65, 71.
[11]Conversation with Eoghan Plunkett, Countess Plunkett’s grandson.
[12]Dillon, ‘A Victorian Household’, pp. 69–70.
[13]Ibid., pp. 68–69.