They are buried side by side in the little graveyard of Tully, close to Ballyare House, not far from the small town of Ramelton. Set high on a hill, Tully is a beautiful place, shaded by yew trees from the worst effects of the winter winds.82 The sisters lie together by a sheltering wall, one headstone leaning toward the other. Their inscriptions are simple: Marianne is remembered as the third daughter of Edward Knight Esquire of Godmersham Park, Louisa as the widow of Lord George Augusta Hill, of Ballyare and Gweedore. Two scriptural quotations, almost obscured, serve as reminders of the essential beliefs which sustained them in their exile: ‘I shall be satisfied when I wake with thy likeness,’ is inscribed below Louisa’s name; below Marianne’s, even more simply, ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’.
Postscript: A New Century
Ah! — ’ said Mr Parker. — ‘This is my old house — the house of my forefathers — the house where I and all my brothers and sisters were born and bred — and where my own three eldest children were born — where Mrs Parker and I lived till within the last two years — till our new house was finished … It is an honest old place — and Hillier keeps it in very good order. I have given it up you know to the man who occupies the chief of my land. He gets a better house by it — and I, a better situation!’
SANDITON
The life of Marianne Knight, beginning so near to the start of a new century, drew to a close almost at its end. Her youngest sister, the enigmatic, strong-willed Cassandra, died only five years into the Victorian era: she did not live to see the the gradual erosion of her husband’s power and standing. Louisa, on the other hand, lived through the great changes wrought in the second half of the century, feeling their full effect and unable to comprehend why her own efforts seemed to yield so little result. Yet, though she had the longest life of all her family, Marianne did not ask herself the questions that so troubled Louisa. Instead, an exile from the home and land she loved, she became increasingly distant from the changes all around her so that at the end she found it easier, as the very old sometimes choose to do, to return to the memory of what she termed ‘our lost paradise’ – Godmersham in Kent. It was not a strategy which could work for everyone. The youngest child of Lord George and Cassandra, Cassandra Jane Louisa Hill, the last companion of Marianne’s life, had no such memory to return to as she witnessed the collapse of the life and the system to which she had been accustomed, and which she had expected to continue.
Cassandra Hill, brought up by Louisa, was imbued, like the Knight sisters, with the Georgian sense that, while politeness was all, borders must be maintained between the classes. The only one of the Hill children to be born in Ireland, she cared for the tenants of the estate, instructing them in, among other skills, the Irish language, which as her father’s daughter she knew and loved. In some ways Cassandra’s situation anticipated that of the novelist and daughter of the Big House, Elizabeth Bowen, born in 1899: living through the troubled times of a century Cassandra would merely glimpse, Elizabeth Bowen understood the fine line between absolute politeness and the maintenance of protective barriers. She believed that ‘politeness is not constriction; it is a grace; it is really no worse than an exercise of the imagination on other people’s behalf’.1 Cassandra Hill’s closest friend, Charlotte Grace O’Brien, was the daughter of a convicted felon, the Young Irelander and fellow-member of the Protestant Ascendancy, William Smith O’Brien: it was a matter of politeness to Cassandra Hill to ignore the fact that her friend’s father had once been sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, and that he had in fact been transported for his part in the rising of 1848. Cassandra was capable of admiring Charlotte’s good mind and independent stance, commending in principle her desire to improve the social conditions of the oppressed, while disagreeing completely with her support for Home Rule. The movement baffled and saddened Cassandra: unlike Marianne, she could not simply state that the tenants ought to be severely punished, and leave it at that. Cassandra Hill, like Elizabeth Bowen and unlike Marianne and her sisters, was one of the Anglo-Irish gentry who, all over the country, were seeing the disintegration of all that their families had built up. As Charlotte O’Brien’s nephew, Stephen Gwynn, later recalled:
One of Charlotte O’Brien’s closest friends in Donegal, Miss Cassandra Hill, daughter of old Lord George Hill, laboured strenuously to promote among the peasantry pleasant social life – reading, writing, dancing, and the study of the Irish tongue – but to promote only what she herself would entirely approve. She could never have been what Charlotte O’Brien was – a link between Will Upton, the Fenian, prouder of hs Fenianism than of anything else, and Aubrey de Vere, the cultivated Irish Unionist, lover of his country and of his people, but opponent of their ideals.
The result appeared when a new revolution began. It drove Miss Hill and all of her kind, good kindred into despairing opposition to those whom they had loved and for whom they had laboured – those peasants of Gweedore, who in my boyhood would have drawn Lord George’s old pony phaeton from the back of Errigal to his hall door at Ballyarr [sic]. It found Charlotte O’Brien confident in her faith that justice must be done, even though the sky should fall upon herself and her own class.2
The sky would fall upon the class of Charlotte O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Cassandra Hill even though, as Gwynn himself had observed, the pursuit of justice had been the stated goal of Cassandra’s father, Lord George. ‘Over the harbourmaster’s office [in Bunbeg] you will trace Lord George Hill’s hand in the inscription from Proverbs, set up there in Irish, “A just weight is a pleasure to the Lord, but an unequal balance is an abomination in his sight.” ’3 Cassandra clearly believed that in educating the tenantry, with regard for the language and customs of Ireland, she was acting in the best and just interests of everyone. In this she had, for eleven years, the support of Marianne, and their close, almost symbiotic relationship was only slightly marred by anxiety over where they might live if Arthur Hill should, as he indicated he might, dispose of Ballyare. Yet, despite Cassandra’s declarations of independence, Marianne worried, until the detachment of approaching death removed from her the need or capacity to do so, that Cassandra would be left to manage alone at Ballyare. It did not happen. Cassandra did not endure the distress of seeing her house demolished, as Elizabeth Bowen eventually did: yet, like Marianne and Jane Austen, she lost her home. Shortly after Marianne’s death, Arthur Hill, following the precedent set by his uncle Edward Knight in 1874, sold the family home.4 Cassandra was obliged, after all, to find herself somewhere else to live. No record exists of the offer of a refuge from any of her cousins in England: yet, Cassandra was not without support. Just as the rebel Lord Edward’s daughter Pamela had aided Louisa’s passage through the complications of Irish society in the middle of the nineteenth century, so the convicted felon’s daughter, Charlotte O’Brien, proved herself Cassandra’s true friend at its end. As Stephen Gwynn later explained, Charlotte decided to build a house outside Dublin in Foxrock, ‘then a place of whins and stone’.5 She called it ‘Fáilte’, the Irish word for welcome. In a time of loss and sadness, Fáilte became Cassandra’s refuge and, before long, her last home.6 Charlotte O’Brien, finding that her relatives, the Gwynns, had decided to leave Foxrock, lived there only a short time. ‘After a few years,’ Gwynn wrote, ‘she sold it to the friend who had been its most frequent tenant’.7 It was at Fáilte, on 16 August 1901, that Cassandra Hill died after an illness lasting over a week; her death certificate giving the cause as ‘haematoma, 8 days’ and ‘exhaustion’.8 She was fifty-nine years old.
As Estyn Evans, editor of the only twentieth-century edition of Facts from Gweedore, pointed out in 1971: ‘You cannot send those of planter stock back across the water, any more than you can recall millions of Irishmen from America.’9 To him, the ‘clash of native and newcomer … struck the sparks in Irish culture’.10 Cassandra, Louisa, and their sister Marianne had been newcomers: the children of the next generation were not. They were, however, by the beginning of the
twentieth century, suffering from the weary exhaustion experienced by many of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Cassandra’s brothers, Augustus and George, neither of whom married, did not live to see old age. Augustus, who was present at the death of his younger sister, was sixty-nine when he died in 1908 and the youngest brother George, Louisa’s delicate only son, who had retired from the practice of the law and come to live with Cassandra at Fáilte, died on 22 March 1911 of ‘malignant disease of liver’ and, like his sister, ‘exhaustion’.11 He was aged sixty-two. Arthur, who outlived all his siblings, died in 1923. He had been married since 1871 to Helen Emily Chenevix Trench, daughter of the Archbishop of Dublin, and the couple had seven children. Arthur based himself at Wilford House, Bray, in Wicklow, not far from Foxrock, so that the family, though no longer involved in the life of Donegal, were together in the capital. Ireland was still part of the Empire, and the careers of two of Arthur’s sons reflect their sense of belonging not only to Ireland but also to that Empire. His eldest son, Arthur Fitzgerald Sandys Hill (1876–1961) succeeded to the title, and became 6th Lord Sandys, Baron of Ombersley; his second son, Vice Admiral Hon. Sir Richard Augustus Sandys Hill (1880–1954) fought in the Somaliland Campaign from 1902 to 1904, and in the Great War of 1914–18, later serving as aide-de-camp to George V in 1930, then seeing active service in the Second World War.
Though Cassandra’s elder daughter, Norah, died in 1920, before Partition, her children became deeply involved in the unfolding history of Ireland, and especially in the emergence of what became Northern Ireland. When Somerset Ward wrote in 1881 to his brother-in-law Arthur Hill that he would help him deal with his unruly tenants once ‘the wedding [was] over’, he was referring to the marriage of his daughter, Norah Louisa Fanny Ward, to a young man named Henry Lyle Mulholland.12 He was the son of John Mulholland, a businessman in the linen trade, who had been MP for Downpatrick from 1874 to 1885: ‘a strong supporter of Tory politics’, he was raised to the peerage in 1892 to become 1st Baron Dunleath of Ballywalter, County Down.13 Norah Ward’s husband became the 2nd Baron Dunleath on the death of his father in 1895, and the family lived at Ballywalter Park. The Mulhollands’ eldest son, Andrew Edward Somerset, of whose imminent birth Marianne had written from Isle O’Valla in September 1882, died in September 1914 at Ypres.
Henry Lyle Mulholland, who lived until 1931, was a Justice of the Peace for County Down, and MP for North Londonderry from 1885 until 1895. Ballywalter Park was a meeting place for prominent political figures, such as Col E.J. Saunderson. Staunchly Unionist, and utterly opposed to Home Rule, he had been compelled to retract a condemnation of Gweedore’s Father McFadden as a ‘ruffian’ after the murder of Inspector Martin in 1889.14 His family made an alliance with that of the Knights when his son John married the Mulhollands’ second child, Eva Norah Helen, while two of Eva’s brothers, Charles and Henry, married into another significant political family. Charles (1886–1956), who also fought in the First World War and was awarded the DSO, acting as Military Secretary to the second-last Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1919 to 1921, succeeded to the Dunleath title in 1920 and married Sylvia Brooke, daughter of Sir Arthur Brooke of Colebrooke. Sylvia, who died in 1921, a year after her marriage to Charles Mulholland, was the sister of Basil, later 1st Viscount Brookeborough, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland until 1963. Charles’s younger brother Henry, or Harry (1888–1971), another veteran of the First World War, had married Sylvia’s sister Sheelah Brooke. As the Rt Hon. Sir Henry Mulholland, he was elected MP for County Down to Northern Ireland’s first Parliament at Stormont, in 1921, becoming Speaker of the House in 1929. These great-great-grandnephews and nieces of Jane Austen could not have been more involved in the setting up of Northen Ireland, a fact which might well have awakened the ironic amusement of their distant aunt, in the light of her warning to her niece Anna to avoid writing about Ireland, since she knew nothing of ‘the manners there’.
Other, more personal legacies came down to the Irish descendants of Jane Austen’s brother Edward. Norah Dunleath expressed a marked disdain for too much heating in the house, a characteristic inherited from the Knights of Godmersham and Chawton, used to dealing with grand, cold houses. Even on a bleak winter’s day in Donegal during late November 1890 Marianne, aged eighty-nine, struggled to finish her family letters before allowing herself to go and sit by the heat of the fire.15 ‘The house was cold in winter,’ 4th Baron Dunleath remembered of his childhood in Ballywalter Park, ‘as my grandmother had dispensed with the 1849 hot air central heating system since she considered it to be unhealthy’.16 A frugal refusal to give in to cold, like the inherited love of the natural world, continued as the generations changed. At Ballywalter, the gardens were developed and tended by successive generations of Norah’s family, as her grandson ruefully recalled: ‘My grandparents were responsible for designing the rock and water garden and there have been many times when both my father and I wished that they had not bothered.’17 Norah Dunleath, known to her grandchildren as Gogo, loved to entertain and give house parties, quite in the style of the Godmersham of Jane Austen’s time. She had, moreover, another passion inherited from the Knights, as her grandson wrote:
My grandmother was also a compulsive ornithologist and had an aviary with adjacent enlosed pens which contained exotic and screeching birds. This cannot have added much to the appearance of the garden anymore than could have the deerpark in front of the house which must have looked something like the Maze Prison with a ten foot high fence round it to prevent the deer from escaping … Whatever happens we shall always do our best to maintain this garden’s personality … I am thankful indeed to my forbears for having left me with a framework of such potential …18
This love of the garden and birds provides one enduring link between Jane Austen and these, her Irish family. Where politics was concerned, however, though generally conservative and unwilling to condone the need for violent action in the great or the small, Jane Austen could not be cited as their most powerful influence, for she preferred to keep her political opinions to herself.
None of Edward Knight’s children were required to face the terrible recurring bitterness of Ireland in the twentieth century, yet one of his descendants, many times great-nephew of Jane Austen and of May, Lou and Cass, had to face the consequences of that long struggle. ‘If I were to be reborn and God asked me how I would like to come back,’ wrote Timothy Knatchbull in 2009, ‘I would say English. But if there were no positions available, I would be sorely tempted to choose Irish.’19 Few of Jane Austen’s family in England could have made such a statement, especially if they had been through all that Timothy Knatchbull had endured. His grandfather, Lord Mountbatten, and his twin brother Nicholas were among those killed in August 1979 by an IRA bomb at Mullaghmore in Sligo, close to Donegal. Yet, Timothy Knatchbull, like Cassandra Hill and her brothers, knew Ireland well from childhood, and found himself able not only to forgive what had happened, but also to understand the motivation of the perpetrators. ‘By revisiting Ireland,’ he wrote, ‘I slowly became better informed, and as I re-evaluated my experiences I eventually found the path to being able to forgive.’20
He went further still. Cassandra Hill had, while disagreeing with Charlotte O’Brien’s politics, been able to accept that her friend held radically different beliefs: Timothy Knatchbull found himself able to understand and forgive the extreme political beliefs and terrible actions of a man he had never known. This was Thomas McMahon, one of those convicted of the bomb which killed Timothy Knatchbull’s grandfather, brother and friend, and severly injured his parents. ‘Perhaps the most difficult question was how I felt about Thomas McMahon,’ he wrote of his time spent trying to comprehend what had happened. ‘At the end of the year I accepted at least this: that if I had been born into a republican stronghold, lived my life as dictated by conditions in Northern Ireland, and been educated through the events of the 1960s and 1970s, my life might well have turned out the way the way Thomas McMahon’s did. In this respect I felt ultimatel
y inalienable from him.’ 21
This extraordinary act of compassion, the ultimate encapsulation of Elizabeth Bowen’s definition of politeness as the imaginative consideration of others, recalls a fundamental faith held by Jane Austen. Never called upon to deal with Ireland, and opposed to her niece’s even contemplating it, she knew that each human being is ‘ultimately inalienable’ from the others. When she warned Anna Austen that, without knowing the manners of Ireland, she might be liable to give a false picture, she spoke a simple if inconvenient truth. Marianne, Louisa and Cassandra all found out for themselves that they were in a country so different from England as to be initially incomprehensible to them. Yet, they learned from Jane Austen. In the six novels and those letters which have survived, she left a record not only of elegance and wit but also of compassion for the frailty of the human condition, no less profound because couched in irony, and bounded by the politeness which governed all. It may be this quality of detached compassion which Marianne, Louisa and Cassandra, in their own different ways and according to their own human limitations, brought with them when they made the long and difficult journey to Ireland and which, having learned to love the place, they tried to pass on to the next generation. Timothy Knatchbull is, through Fanny, Edward Knight’s descendant; his profound and moving declaration of imaginative compassion indicates that Jane Austen’s family did indeed possess the capacity to learn ‘the manners there’. Perhaps, in the end, the fact that the graves of Marianne, Louisa and Cassandra Knight lie, not in Godmersham or Chawton but in Donegal, not far from the spot where Timothy Knatchbull’s terrible epiphany occurred, stands testimony to the efforts of Jane Austen’s nieces to understand and declare their solidarity with their nearest and most distant neighbour.
May, Lou & Cass Page 27