May, Lou & Cass

by Sophia Hillan

  In his day, Lord George had tried, according to his beliefs, to understand his tenants’ point of view and accommodate their wishes, where it accorded with his view of the correct management of the estate. Now, his son proposed to run the estate from the comfortable suburbs outside Dublin. As Maria Edgeworth had her fictional Thady say of an absentee Rackrent:

  Sir Kit Stopgap, my young master, left all to the agent, and though he had the spirit of a prince, and lived away to the honour of his country abroad, which I was proud to hear of, what were we the better for that at home?62

  For Arthur Hill, there were difficulties in addition to those identified by R.F. Foster. One was his reluctance to deal with the issues in person; another, that the rent reductions required by the League referred to the levels set decades earlier by Griffith’s valuation. In the view of many landlords, these valuations bore no relation to the real value of land and, in common with many other landlords, Arthur Hill did not see why he should give in to his tenants’ demands.63

  By 1881, Arthur had clashed with Father McFadden over the payment of rents. His brother-in-law, Somerset Ward, was writing to him in terms of the strongest indignation, urging him to tackle not only the wider problem of tenant refusal to pay rents but also, specifically, the urgent problem of Father McFadden. Somerset Ward had already expressed his frustration in the Gweedore Hotel Book: ‘Very comfortable,’ he wrote, ‘in spite of behaviour of natives who have boycotted hotel, stopped supply of bread & coerced male servants into resignation of their appointment — house patrolled at night by constabulary, & loaded revolvers are handed about inside, we suppose in order to protect our eatables.’64 It was following this that Somerset Ward wrote to his brother-in-law, adamant that Arthur should not give in to the tenants’ demands. In 1881, with more legislation imminent and his daughter, Norah Ward, granddaughter of Lord George and Cassandra, about to be married, Ward could not suppress his indignation. He was furious at McFadden’s composure, at the boycotting of the Gweedore Hotel and at the ineffectiveness of Arthur’s agent.65 So strongly did he feel about the situation that he offered, once his daughter’s wedding was over, to take on the role of agent himself. As old comrades, both veterans of the Indian Mutiny, the attitudes of Arthur Hill and Somerset Ward to rebellion among the ‘natives’ remained in complete accord:

  I was studiously polite and courteous to [Father McFadden], and he was as oily as he could be — professed his anxious desire for peace — and good feeling between landlord and tenant. The hypocrite! As if he could not restore peace at once if he chose to do so. After some general conversation I asked him what the tenants wanted. He said they wished to have the mountains restored to them and the rents reduced to what they were 40 years ago, but he was good enough to say he considered their demands somewhat unreasonable. I told him I knew very well the influence he had on them — and also that you could not possibly give more liberal terms than what you have already offered viz. 10% of rents as I said at once — that you must have rents paid, otherwise you must enforce payment by legal process for the charges on the property must be paid …66

  McFadden, untroubled by any threat of action, indicated that the tenants were prepared to make sacrifices and ‘openly admitted … that the Land League was the cause of all the agitation for before it was formed the people did not know their power’.67 He added that he had exhorted the people not to break the law, and suggested that an abatement of 25 per cent though inadequate, might be acceptable. When Ward pointed out that Father McFadden, unlike Captain Hill, was comparatively well-off, McFadden agreed, but suggested that the tenants ‘wd not take that into consideration’. He left Ward with some advice: ‘We will suppose the rental is £1,000,’ he said. ‘Well, 25 per cent will be only £250. This will reduce the rental to £750, and it will be quite worth Capt. Hill’s while to accept of this reduction for the sake of peace.’ They parted with the reluctant agreement of McFadden to Ward’s meeting twelve tenants, from varying districts of the estate, the following day at the Derrybeg schoolhouse. Privately, Somerset Ward then gave his brother-in-law advice which would irredeemably alter relations between landlord and tenant in Gweedore.

  He is a thorough going rascal — and I am afraid you must push matters to an extremity. If so I should evict a great many men. 8 or 10 is not enough to cow 800. If they see you are determined to go on to the bitter end they may yield, but a very firm front must be shown.They will never yield unless they see plainly that you are master …68

  Following the meeting next day, Ward was careful to record his declaration to the tenants that he was present there ‘not … in an official capacity’, but simply as an interested party who wished to see the restoration of peace. He told them he knew of their membership of the Land League; Father McFadden rephrased this as ‘passive resistance’.69 When Ward brought up the subject of ‘isolation, commonly called boycotting of the landlord and all supposed to be favourable to them’, McFadden countered with ‘social ostracism’. Ward then asked the tenants for their terms, and McFadden asked them to speak one by one. They were very specific, ‘all unanimous in requiring a reduction of rents to what they were 40 years ago, the restoration of the mountains to the tenants and the expulsion of the Scotch farmers, and further an abatement equal to that given by the Marquess of Conyngham.’70Ward told them there would be no reduction, no restoration and no expulsion of Scots farmers, adding that they would be evicted if they did not pay their rents, for ‘tho’ the Land League was powerful the law was more powerful’.71 Father McFadden then gave what Somerset Ward described as an ‘oration’, expressing his hopes for the future:

  The new land bill may do great things for the tenants — he was in great hopes it wd. contain a clause remitting arrears — that the Land League was formed in consequence of landlord tyranny — that tenants were bound to protect themselves, that the Land League exercised a mighty power which compelled M. of Conyngham to grant the abatement he gave, and without the Land League you wd. not have offered them even what you have. He spoke good humouredly but very strongly.72

  McFadden finished by advising an abatement of 25 per cent, and Somerset Ward made his final offer of 10 per cent: if they thought their rents too high, he told them, they were free to go to court and make their case after the Bill was passed. Ward asked if they would accept an agreement to abide by whatever reduction the courts ordered, in addition to the 10 per cent abatement; there was no opportunity for a response, Father McFadden ‘at once jumped up and said he wd. never allow any of them to go into court. They were too poor to incur the necessary costs’.

  The plain English of that was of course that he knew the rents were so low that no Court wd. reduce them. He also drew the tenants’ attention to the fact that you had contributed nothing to relieve their distress at which I at once jumped up and said that I wd. leave it to any unprejudiced person to say whether you were in any way called upon to contribute to those who combined together to refuse to pay you a farthing of rent.73

  Though Somerset Ward emphasised to his brother-in-law that the discussion ‘was carried on very quietly and there was no heat on either side’, and that he hoped they would think better of their stance, neither he nor Arthur Hill can have been unaware of how dangerous a quiet this was. Every grievance had been remembered over the years: as far as the tenants were concerned, the time of reckoning had arrived. Whatever degree of loyalty some tenants might once have felt for Lord George, there was little for his son. Father McFadden knew of Arthur Hill’s failure to alleviate any recent distress, and Somerset Ward as his spokesman had sought to justify this position. There was no escape from the round of accusations, however quietly they were voiced, and there was no avoiding the fact that this was indeed a war.

  The last part of the letter above was written from Ballyare, but by the time Ward wrote the next day, he was again in the centre of the dispute at the boycotted Gweedore Hotel, where he looked in vain for Gillespie, the agent for the estate: ‘All the men have left. The laundry
girl also left last night, but the two maids and cook say they will not go. A nice state of things. There are 50 police in the district and 3 Sub. Inspectors … Your worthy agent is conspicuous by his absence.’74 He urged action, specifically the bringing in of ‘emergency men to work the farm here’. The blacksmith would no longer shoe the horses, local traders would not supply the police with food, so that provisions had to be brought from Letterkenny, and Gillespie was clearly unequal to the task of collecting rents. In desperation, Somerset Ward offered to come and act as agent himself: ‘If I could stay a month here and get to know the people, I might be able to do something’. In the meantime, he went about the estate to survey the extent of the difficulties, finding an old acquaintance, the local baker, about to give up his business, ‘such a reign of terror exists here’.75

  Ward also told Arthur Hill that he had learned from the baker that the tenants felt he ‘ought to have come down here [him]self and spoken to them’. There was no avoiding the fact that, while Lord George had made an effort to get to know his tenants in their own language, Arthur Hill’s behaviour increasingly recalled that of the traditional absentee landlord. Somerset Ward’s high-handed defence of his brother-in-law’s actions, followed by the spirited oratory of Father McFadden, could serve only to confirm this impression. Yet, Ward’s advice to his brother-in-law was sensible and practical:

  I think it would be wise to inform the tenants again decidedly that you require the rents to be paid by a certain date, say 15 June and that you will extend your offer of 10 per cent to all tenants paying all arrears to Nov last, on or before that date, that no abatement will be given to any in arrears after that date, and that you will proceed at once against them.76

  He still hoped that eviction could be avoided, and he felt that many would indeed be relieved to pay their arrears if they were not so afraid. He urged Arthur Hill in the strongest terms to come and settle matters, but added that, if his brother-in-law really could not come in person, he would stay and meet him at Ballyare and work out a strategy.77 In other words, in a time where compromise was no longer simply desirable but essential, Somerset Ward, well-versed in land management, was convinced that Arthur Hill of Gweedore was in real danger of missing his only opportunity to save the family estate. For Arthur, it was a problem of business. For his siblings, especially his youngest sister Cassandra and his stepmother Louisa, it was becoming more pressing with each day. For Marianne, with so few options left, the troubled country of Ireland would soon represent her only means of avoiding the prospect she most dreaded, that of living alone.

  Chapter 8: ‘The Fashion to be Poor’

  Lady George, Miss Knight and Miss Hill

  1879–1885

  ‘Her letters show her exactly as she is, the most active, friendly, warmhearted being in existence …’

  SANDITON

  Following the death of Lord George Hill in April 1879, Marianne returned to England. She could not go home for, since the death of her youngest brother, John, she no longer had one. Then, with the death of her last brother Edward on 5 November 1879, her position became even more precarious: there was now no one for whom her care need be a priority. In a sense, as the beloved aunt of so very many nephews and nieces, she had any number of possible options. In practice, this made her situation even more tenuous, for she was everyone’s concern, yet no one’s responsibility. Fortunately for Marianne, however, she still had three of her four sisters and, though Fanny continued to retreat further and further within herself, and Louisa stayed on in Ireland, Marianne knew she could always go to Dane Court while Lizzy lived. Accordingly, she did so, as her great-niece Marcia Rice recalled:

  In the summer of 1880, when I paid a fortnight’s visit to my grandmother at Dane Court — Aunt May was staying there. She was probably on a long visit and seemed to be thoroughly established. I was greeted at the door by her, an active, light, lively little lady in a white cap with lavender ribbons. She greeted me with great kindness and led me into the drawing room, where grandmama lay on a sofa. Throughout my visit Aunt May was much in evidence, she took full part in the family life and being ‘very witty’ contributed much to its gaiety. On many mornings she took me for a walk, chatting gaily all the while. She certainly enjoyed herself, darting from one side of the lanes to the other, looking for birds’ nests, which were the passion of Dane Court. She encouraged me to pick flowers and was a very happy companion for a little girl.1

  Marcia’s pen portrait of this bright and lively aunt, comfortable with children and prepared to settle wherever she was welcome, may give an idea of the kind of great-aunt Jane Austen, whom Marianne so resembled, might have been. Yet, however well-liked an aunt Marianne was, it was never certain that permanent homes would be available for the unmarried women of the family. Edward Austen Knight’s original family was shrinking with every year that passed and Fanny, the eldest of all, died on Christmas morning 1882, some weeks short of her ninetieth birthday. She was followed in 1884 by Lizzy, whose eldest son Edward Bridges Rice inherited Dane Court. Yet again, in an unsettling repetition of 1853, the unmarried daughters of the house, Caroline Cassandra and her sister Louisa, the young girls who had helped Marianne clear Godmersham, found themselves at forty-nine and sixty years old having to uproot from their lifelong home. Though their brother Edward was ‘very kind indeed … to the girls’, finding them a pleasant house nearby, Lizzy’s son Walter Rice thought ‘the experience for Louisa and Caroline Cassandra was a traumatic one’.2

  Marianne, by implication, was left once more without anywhere to go, and no record survives of her having been offered a permanent home anywhere in England. What is certain is that she travelled by land and sea to Donegal in October 1884, breaking her journey first with her niece Fanny, Lady Winchilsea, at Haverholme in Lincolnshire, then again in Ireland with her elder Hill niece Norah Ward, in County Down. She wrote from Norah’s home at Isle O’Valla House outside Strangford to her favourite nephew Montagu Knight, the new owner of Chawton, describing her arduous journey.

  Her letter, in which she asked Montagu to arrange to send on some luggage, seems to suggest that she moved permanently to Ireland at that point.3 It was hardly a propitious time. Though Ireland may have seemed the most logical destination for Marianne, it was still far from safe, despite or perhaps because of the series of land acts, begun over twenty years earlier, which were gradually altering all the old certainties.4

  Marianne, however, with little alternative, travelled to Ireland. Her letter of 11 October 1884 was the first of a series which would continue almost until her death. They were directed to her favourite nephew, Montagu Knight, and his wife, the former Florence Hardy of Chilham Castle, where Fanny’s one-time suitor Mr Wildman had lived. Marianne wrote while resting, before she travelled on to the untamed landscape of Donegal, in the far north-west of the island. Rest was necessary: the sea journey from Stranraer to Ireland, often uncomfortable and hazardous in stormy weather, was not pleasant for Marianne, who had recently celebrated her eighty-third birthday and had, moreover, always been prone to travel sickness:

  Most thankful am I to tell you that my journey was safely over, just before the violent gale which is still raging commenced. I left Haverholme last Wednesday & sailed in fog & rain to Dumfries, quite calm it was, & the sun shone brilliantly the next morning. I watched it rising as we sailed along. I had to rise at 5.30 & the train started at 6.30 from Stranraer — 2½ hours brought us there: the sea was almost quite calm, but there was a slight swell, which I hated, but managed to preserve my equanimity all the time, tho’ with difficulty! We sailed on to Belfast & thereafter ½ an hour to Downpatrick, where a Fly waited for me & deposited me … quite safely here at 4 o’ clock! I know you & Florence will be glad to hear of my being alive and well after all my fatigue — I was pretty tired, but a good dinner & 7 hours’ sleep through the night quite refreshed me. The wind began to rise before I got here, & tore on, to a perfect gale, with hail & rain through the night; & all yesterday, tho’ there
were a few intervals of sunshine. Today is bright & fine, but the wind is still boisterous & it is very cold. I was very sorry to leave H — & very glad I did, & was not persuaded to stay longer, as they most kindly urged me to do — I shd have been still waiting at Stranraer probably if I had staid till the next day only — I believe I go to Ballyare on, or about the 20th — I will let you know when to send my portmanteau to Liverpool. I hope you both are well & the Rectory too … Norah sends hers to you. Norah jnr is here for her confinement w[hic]h is to be soon.5