The liveliness of Marianne’s description of her journey accords with her great-grandniece Marcia Rice’s account of her at Dane Court in 1880. Yet, Marianne, for all her gentility and mildness of disposition, had learned to be intrepid. She had run the great house at Godmersham for thirty years and, indeed, one reason for her going to Ireland at this time may have been to assist Cassandra who, in 1884, perhaps anxious about her own security of tenure in Ballyare, had shown interest in setting up a convalescent home in nearby Ramelton.6 It may be that Marianne had in mind either to help her niece run it – she certainly did not lack experience – or to be, with her ailing sister Louisa, one of its first residents, for both were now in their eighties. Cassandra, now in her early fifties, was very active and able, as Marianne herself had been, and they formed a quiet, comfortable relationship in the house in Ballyare. The proposal to open a nursing home shows the resourceful spirit of Cassandra who, like her father, was a fluent Irish speaker and greatly involved with the education and physical welfare of her family’s tenants. She was, in many ways, as conservative as the rest of her family, yet maintained a wide circle of friends with varying political views. One of her closest friends, Charlotte Grace O’Brien, was the daughter of the former Young Irelander, William Smith O’Brien. Charlotte’s nephew, the writer and Home Rule MP Stephen Gwynn, later described the difference in the Gweedore he recalled from his childhood, and that of the late nineteenth century:
In the old days, now unhappily almost forgotten — when one used to hear that if Lord George’s horse broke down the tenants would gladly draw his car back the twenty miles to Ballyarr, on the Lennan, where he lived — things may have run smoother.7
Things were not running smoothly in the early 1880s. While continuing land acts slowly shifted the balance of power between landlord and tenant, they could not stabilise the already volatile state of public feeling. Though Parnell thought he had succeeded in settling matters concerning arrears and rent strikes in April 1882, the murder of the newly-arrived Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his under-secretary, Thomas Burke, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park on 6 May 1882, outraged moderate opinion in both Ireland and England. Parnell, who had no knowledge of or involvement in the murder, condemned it, as did the IRB. While arrests were made and those convicted hanged, it could not have been considered an ideal time for an English lady of eighty-three to emigrate to Ireland.
If, as Amanda Vickery has recently observed, ‘letters build community out of absence’, Marianne’s letters from Ireland served an important function in her life. In addition, they leave a clear picture of a clever, stoic and perceptive woman.8 She had her own means of coping with her exile for, like Jane Austen herself, beyond the hazards of weather and travel, she almost always avoided reference to the real dangers of life in Ireland during the last two decades of the century. Instead, she made for herself a version of the life she had known in England, as Marcia Rice, quoting her sister’s recollection of visiting Marianne in Donegal, confirms:
Her favourite expression was ‘Gadge my love.’ My sister remembered the same. ‘Gadge my love, what filth,’ she exclaimed when out for a walk on a typical Irish day … My grandmother was dead and Aunt May had left England to make her last home with her niece Cassandra Hill at Balyare [sic] in County Antrim [sic]. She was then naturally much older and frailer, but she still took little walks, visiting the poor in the village. ‘Who is my neighbour?’ she said one day, looking across the table at my sister. ‘That is Cecil’s child, Aunt May.’ ‘Law, my dear, then I must get up and give her a kiss.’ My sister said she was ‘very charming, always bright and gay and never out of humour’. Though celebrated in the family as ‘very witty’, her remarks were never unkind. One little incident has been handed down, it always caused her great-nephew, Arthur Hill, much amusement. It took place at a railway station – Aunt May was at the booking office when an ungallant man tried to push her from her place. ‘You may have heard,’ said he, ‘that the first shall be last, and the last first.’ ‘Very likely,’ was her rejoinder, ‘but I am first now,’ and she stood her ground!9
It may have amused Arthur that Marianne had learned when to stand her ground: yet, unlike him, she had also learned how and when to move with the times. Her Rice great-nieces’ accounts of her, supported by her letters and the Garden Book, indicate that this frail, elderly little lady with lavender ribbons, who had lived her life between great houses and rectories in Hampshire and Kent, her very expressions speaking more of the bon ton of the eighteenth century than the demotic of the late nineteenth, should have been an unlikely candidate for life in the cold, stormy and often dangerous county of Donegal in the 1880s and 1890s. Yet, the opposite was true. Just as Elinor Dashwood could adapt to comparative poverty more easily than her supposedly unworldly sister and, just as Anne Elliot managed to leave her home in a dignified fashion when her elder sister could not, Marianne had the quality of endurance, of grace under pressure, which Jane Austen so admired, and attributed to her favourite characters. There were birds and flowers to enjoy in Donegal, a parish to look after, and nieces and nephews to write to or even, weather permitting, to visit. Until her very last years, Marianne regularly travelled to London and Chawton, despite her dislike of the journey, and she made every effort to go to County Down to visit the two Norahs, her niece and great-niece.
Visits to Ireland in the mid-1880s presented problems for other members of the family, as one of Marianne’s great-nephews found out. Cecil Knatchbull-Hugessen came to Ireland by ship, disembarking at Derry at the end of August 1887, and travelled to the Donegal estate owned by Wybrants Olphert of Ballyconnell for some shooting. Writing to his sister Eva from Falcarragh he described, with a casual disregard bordering on contempt, his views of the place, ‘a little collection of dingy white houses about fifty in number, & situated about half a mile from the town & 6 miles from the mountains’. He went on to give his opinions of Donegal people, and of the dangerous state of the country:
We have comfortable rooms in the house of one Bankhead, a pensioner of the Royal Artillery who says he is the only loyal man in the country. We have been recommended by Greene’s friend who told him of his plans to change our abode as Bankhead besides being a loyalist is bailiff of the Stewart estate and in rather bad odour with some of the people who might possibly interfere with us while fishing in annoyance; but we have two tolerably able-bodied blackguards in our pay. Condy Wilson, an ex Fenian, & now water bailiff to Olphert, & John Ferry a whisky sodden brigand who is the caretaker of the property of Dick (Greene’s friend) who is Station Director of the medical appointment of the Navy. I certainly have no intention of leaving this house, & I don’t believe there is any reason for doing so ... This place seems fairly quiet & probably will be so till October when Olphert has 80 more tenants to evict. I have just seen a letter of his to Dick in which he says he has had no rent at all for 5 years. We had a long talk yesterday with one of the coastguard who said among other things that lots of the evicted people had told him that they would be only too glad to pay their rent & go back to their holdings but that they daren’t do it. As old Bankhead says the people are not to be blamed for all this trouble but their advisers, the blackguardly agitators & the priests through whose hands the money for the Land League passes.10
What was being described was known as the Plan of Campaign, the next phase of the Land War, adopted in 1886. Though Parnell had no connection with the infamous Phoenix Park murders, the atrocity deflected attention from and perhaps delayed his attempts to bring about some approach towards Home Rule. By 1886, however, a change of government from Liberal to Conservative seemed to present another opportunity. Parnell urged his new organisation, the National League, successor to the Land League, to avoid violence in order to allay fears in England: another recession in the mid-1880s, the failure of tenants to pay their rent and the consequent evictions and outbreaks of violence led to the formation by the left wing of Parnell’s followers of the Plan of Campaign. Under thi
s plan, landlords would be offered affordable rents and, if this were not acceptable, the money would be withheld as a fund to help the evicted.11 As Robert Kee points out, ‘Parnell took care to remain aloof.’12 Meanwhile, another organisation, the Irish Landowners’ Convention, had been set up in 1886. The aim of this was to protect landlords’ interests from the Plan, from the National League, and from the negative effects of continuing legislation.13
In Gweedore, Somerset Ward’s old opponent, Father McFadden, was perfectly ready to play his part in implementing the Plan of Campaign, simplifying the issue as ‘a struggle between planted Protestants and native Catholics’.14 To him, Lord George Hill was a ‘speculator’, his son an ineffective inheritor of an inglorious legacy, and the Gweedore Hotel little more than a barracks for the housing of eviction agents.15 He knew his capabilities as an organiser and used them to good effect, coordinating not only rent strikes but also civil disobedience.16 He carried his point: Arthur Hill, who had carried out the evictions urged by Somerset Ward, was obliged by November 1887 to reinstate more than one hundred and thirty tenants who had lost their homes, to give a reduction in rent of 30 per cent, pay legal costs of £900 and reduce the tenants’ arrears by 60 per cent.17 As president of the parochial branch of the National League, Father McFadden kept a ‘war chest’ of money paid in by the tenants who withheld rent: with this, he set up negotiations with the landlords. On 4 January 1888, at a meeting in the nearby parish of Doe, attended by Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, he made the statement which defined his role in the eyes of the tenants:
[Spoken in Irish] If ye pay behind backs, ye will be watched. If you stick together, I will give you my blessing.
[Spoken in English] Mrs Boner was put out. Mrs Boner is since gone to her account and somebody must account for her death. One man had a fork, another a stone and they could only get out one that day. Now that is a sample of how you ought to conduct the campaign. Let them [constabulary note takers] take a note of it. I don’t care about all the note takers. I am the law in Gweedore. They could not arrest any person without my consent. I despise the Coercion Act. If I got a summons, I would not reply to it. I say your methods are strictly honest.18
This statement made many enemies, and may have been a factor contributing to a tragic event just over a year later. At the time, Father McFadden was arrested and imprisoned for three months, and Cecil Knatchbull-Hugessen’s host Olphert was boycotted, suspected by his tenants of having used his son’s position within the household of the Lord Lieutenant to bring about the arrest. When released, however, McFadden returned in triumph to Gweedore, an attraction in himself, and such public figures as the flamboyantly nationalist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Yeats’s first love, Maud Gonne – who arrived on horseback – made the journey to Donegal to see him.19 McFadden was suspicious of the motives of such visitors. ‘What did she want in Gweedore?’ he later asked of another friend of Yeats, the poet Katharine Tynan, who he hoped would present his side of the struggle to the world. ‘He always wanted to know what any person from the outside world wanted in Gweedore,’ Tynan recalled. ‘Donegal “of the Strangers” was well-guarded at this outpost from foreign invasion.’20
Yet, some visitors who, in the spirit of Thomas Carlyle, admired Lord George’s work in Gweedore, unexpectedly found Father McFadden a powerful and persuasive force. One of these, an American named William Henry Hurlburt, published an account of a meeting with him. Despite his regard for Lord George’s work, Hurlburt did not admire Arthur Hill, or his ‘vacillation’. Captain Hill, he was given to understand, was ‘always of the mind of the last man that speaks to him’, giving Father McFadden a constant advantage.21 When Hurlburt went to see McFadden in his impressive house, he found him able, intelligent and persuasive, convinced that agents were ‘the curse both of Ireland and the landlord’, ready to explain that he kept the people’s money to be ready to pay as and when a settlement was reached, and convinced that he was not simply the only possible buffer ‘between my people and obligations which they are unable to meet’, but also the only conduit by which the landlord might receive any remuneration.22 Just before Hurlburt left, the almost teetotal Father McFadden offered him a glass of wine. Hurlburt, who accepted, was later informed that Arthur Hill’s ‘declining that same courtesy under Father McFadden’s roof’ had brought about the priest’s implacable enmity.23 Whatever the cause, McFadden and Captain Hill were sworn opponents, and Father McFadden retained the advantage of tactical superiority.
Matters finally came to a terrible conclusion in early 1889. In late January of that year, Father McFadden ignored a summons to appear in court, where he was to be charged with incitement to discourage rent payment. A warrant issued for his arrest precluded forcible entry and McFadden refused to give himself up to the constabulary. Then, on the morning of 3 February 1889, after Father McFadden had said Mass and left the chapel at Derrybeg to climb a flight of steps and walk the short distance to his house, District Inspector William Martin of the Royal Irish Constabulary, with a considerable force of policemen, stepped forward to arrest him.24 Martin, whose short temper had involved him in confrontation on earlier occasions, had been given to understand that Father McFadden was saying Mass at another parish that morning, and may have been irked by the necessity of having to begin again at Derrybeg. Sword unsheathed, he confronted the priest as he left the church, taking hold of the collar of his soutane, and causing McFadden to stumble. The cleric righted himself, but his stumble had been seen by some of his parishioners, and a cry went up that Martin was killing the priest. Alarmed and incensed, the congregation surged forward. Suddenly, in a terrible reprise of the situation Father McFadden had seemed to commend in his much-quoted speech of January 1888, someone threw a stone and others picked up paling posts. As hysteria and confusion increased, Inspector Martin was corralled within the confines of Father McFadden’s garden, cut off from his officers and, in a matter of minutes, horribly bludgeoned. He collapsed at the front door of the parochial house; upstairs McFadden who, separated by the crowd from the officer, had finally gained the safety of his house, called in vain for calm. It was too late. Though Father McFadden surrendered to the County Inspector when he arrived, gave his word that he would not try to escape, and made his house available to the wounded, the inescapable fact was that Inspector Martin lay dead at his feet.25 McFadden later described his distress at what had occurred to Katharine Tynan, as he walked with her over the scene of the crime:
He was a brave fellow and he faced them like a lion. I wish he hadn’t been so brave for his own sake. I struggled to get to him to protect him, but the people were determined to save me whether I liked it or not. Here he stood up among them, just in this spot … It was terrible that I could not help him ... They were completely out of hand. It all happened in a few minutes. It has been a great trouble to me ever since that I could not save him … He died there on the hearthrug at your feet. The anger died out of them when they saw what they had done. They carried him in here. The poor fellow: he was beyond all help.26
As Katharine Tynan later wrote, ‘After this affair, to a great many good folk Father McFadden was a very terrible person. Others knew him as a zealous, devoted priest.’27 In the aftermath of the murder, however greatly Father McFadden regretted it, consequences for his parishioners were severe. Within a week, in what came to be known as ‘the Gweedore Terror’, police and soldiers were dispatched to Donegal in large numbers; gunboats were stationed off the coast in search of fugitives trying to escape to the offshore islands such as Gola; houses were unceremoniously searched; and forty-eight people were arrested. Father McFadden was one of ten charged with murder, while thirteen others were charged with conspiracy. At the trial at Maryborough (now Port Laoise) in October 1889, where Edward Carson was one of those assisting the Attorney General in conducting the case for the crown, Father McFadden pleaded guilty to obstruction. He was released, while seven others, of whom six pleaded guilty, were convicted of manslaughter and given s
entences from six months’ hard labour to ten years’ penal servitude. The case became notorious, entirely enmeshed in the debate over Land Reform and Home Rule and, for some years afterwards, the degree to which tenants or clergy were responsible was constantly referred to as argument for or against self-government for Ireland.28 As a talking point it was displaced only by the growing storm over the Katherine O’Shea scandal, which shortly engulfed Charles Stewart Parnell. Once he had been named as co-respondent in the divorce action taken against Mrs O’Shea by her husband, his status as ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’ was in question. As J.C. Beckett explains, ‘Popular opinion in Ireland was deeply divided; but the whole weight of clerical influence was against Parnell, and it was his morality, rather than his policy, that seemed to be on trial.’29
It was to this complex, turbulent ‘Donegal of the strangers’ that Marianne Knight had come in late 1884, a quiet English gentlewoman with no experience of violence or agrarian agitation and, as her aunt Jane might have reminded her, no knowledge of ‘the manners there’. Beyond the first, which had described her journey to Ireland, no letters have survived for the first three years she spent in Ballyare. By the time the series can be seen to resume, February 1887, Parnell had not yet fallen, yet the Plan of Campaign had already been denounced by the British government in December 1886 as an ‘unlawful and criminal conspiracy’.30 In parliament, debate continued over the introduction of a Coercion bill, the Criminal Law & Procedure (Ireland) Act which became law on 19 July 1887, closely followed in August by the suppression of Parnell’s National League.31 While the debate was going on Marianne, normally so reserved, and perhaps unusually exercised by the struggle in which her nephew was then engaged with his recalcitrant tenants, for once spoke her mind:
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