May, Lou & Cass
Page 34
66 – Capt. the Hon. Somerset Ward to Capt. Arthur Hill, 27 May 1881, PRONI, Saunderson Papers, T2996/11/1.
67 – Ibid.
68 – Ibid.
69 – ‘Passive resistance’ was the phrase used by the Land League in its ‘No Rent Manifesto’, 18 October 1881, signed by, among others, Parnell, Davitt and Dillon: ‘Against the passive resistance of the entire population military power has no weapon.’ See Richard Aldous and Niamh Puirseil, We Declare: Landmark Documents in Ireland’s History (London: Quercus, 2008), 91.
70 – The Marquess of Conyngham had given an abatement of 33 per cent. See Ward to Hill, 29 May 1881, PRONI, Saunderson Papers, T2996/11/4.
71 – Ward to Hill, 28 May 1881, PRONI, Saunderson Papers, T2996/11/2.
72 – Ibid.
73 – Ibid.
74 – Ward to Hill, 29 May 1881, PRONI, Saunderson Papers, T2996/11/3.
75 – Ward to Hill, 29 May 1881, PRONI, Saunderson Papers, T2996/11/4.
76 – Ibid.
77 – Ibid.
Notes: Chapter 8
1 – Jane Corder, Akin to Jane: Family Genealogy of Jane Austen’s Siblings and Descendants, 1760–1953, MS compiled 1953, Jane Austen’s House Museum (JAHM), Chawton, Hants, 51. Second copy lodged at College of Arms, London., 117–18.
2 – M.C. Hammond, Relating to Jane: Studies on the Life and Novels of Jane Austen with a Life of her Niece Elizabeth Austen/Knight. (London: Minerva Press, 1998), 313–5. The opinion of their brother’s kind treatment of his sisters, quoted by Hammond, was expressed by Walter Rice, father of Marcia, writing to his brother Ernest on the day before leaving Dane Court for the last time.
3 – MK to Montagu Knight, 11 October 1884, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/1. No surviving letters from MK suggest that she was permanently based in Ireland before 1884. Almost all the letters of her correspondence with the Knights of Chawton and the Rices of Dane Court (1884–1895) are from Ballyare House in Donegal; any which are from elsewhere, including those from Norah Ward’s house in Strangford, indicate that MK was permanently based in Donegal.
4 – The series of land acts began in 1860 and continued until 1923. Throughout the 1880s there were further Acts not only in 1881 (Land Law [Ireland] Act, providing for fair rent, free sale, fixity of tenure and the establishment of the Land Commission), but also in 1882 (Settled Land Act, empowering the Land Commission to cancel arrears of less than £30); 1885 (Lord Ashbourne’s Land Purchase Act, making available a loan fund for tenant purchase); 1887 (Land Law [Ireland] Act providing for the extension of the Act of 1881 to leaseholders); and 1888 (Land Purchase Act giving further extensions of facilities for purchase).
5 – MK to Montagu Knight, 11 October 1884, HRO, 39M89/F124/1. Norah Ward Jr had married Henry Lyle Mulholland in 1881. The child she was expecting when this letter was written, Andrew Mulholland, would die at Ypres in September 1914.
6 – See correspondence concerning Cassandra Hill’s interest in establishing a convalescent home in Ramelton, PRONI, Saunderson Papers, T2996/17/2.
7 – Stephen Gwynn, Highways and Byways in Donegal and Antrim, with Illustrations by Hugh Thomson (London: Macmillan, 1928), 142.
8 – Amanda Vickery, ‘Do Not Scribble,’ London Review of Books, 32, no. 21 (4 November 2010): 36.
9 – Corder, Akin to Jane, 118. Ballyare is, in fact, in County Donegal, not Antrim, as Marcia Rice mistakenly supposed.
10 – Cecil Knatchbull-Hugessen to Eva Knatchbull-Hugessen, 29 August 1887, CKS, Knatchbull Archive, U951/C114/1.
11 – Robert Kee, The Laurel and the Ivy: The Story of Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish Nationalism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993), 524–5.
12 – Ibid.
13 – Terence Dooley, The Big Houses and Landed Estates of Ireland: A Research Guide (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 50.
14 – Patrick MacGill, in a thinly-veiled portrait of McFadden (renamed Father Devaney), has him declare in his novel Glenmornan that ‘the Irish people and the Catholic Church are one and the same’, almost directly quoting words McFadden used in addressing an 1884 reunion of Donegal emigrants living in Glasgow. See Patrick MacGill, Glenmornan (1918, reprint Brandon, 1983), 293; Dooley, The Big Houses, 165.
15 – Rev. James McFadden, P.P., The Present and the Past of the Agrarian Struggle in Gweedore: With Letters on the Railway Extension in Donegal (Londonderry: The Derry Journal, 1889), 57. The ‘Coercion Act’ referred to was the Criminal Law and Procedure (Ireland) Act (Crimes Act) of 19 July 1887, which preceded official government condemnation of the Land League as a dangerous organisation.
16 – Ibid., 163–4.
17 – ‘Evictions in Gweedore,’ The Derry Journal, 13 August 1886, 8.
18 – ‘Notes from Speech of the Revd. James McFadden P.P. Gweedore,’ National Archives, C.S.O.R.P. 1889/11318, Glenveigh, 4 Jan. 1888, Stephen Cooley, Constable to Sgt. Orr, Plan of Campaign Meeting Derryart Chapel, quoted in Dooley, The Big Houses, 167.
19 – Katharine Tynan, The Middle Years (London: Constable & Co., 1916), 86. Blunt, a cousin of George Wyndham, future Chief Secretary, wanted to become ‘fully acquainted with this [Home Rule] branch of the Irish question’. ‘It stood me … in good stead that I was an English landlord myself,’ he wrote, ‘and no ignoramus, as nearly all the Radical supporters of Home Rule in the House of Commons were, in agricultural matters.’ To him, Fr McFadden was ‘wise … and filled with an unconquerable energy … a shrewd man of business … President and everything else of the League, at mortal feud with the landlords’. See Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, The Land War in Ireland: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, in Continuation of ‘A Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt’ (London: Stephen Swift and Co., Ltd., 1912), 41; 55.
20 – Ibid. The name Donegal is an anglicisation of the Irish ‘Dún na nGall’, or ‘Fort of the Strangers’.
21 – William Henry Hurlburt, Ireland Under Coercion: the Diary of an American (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1888), 85.
22 – Ibid., 97
23 – Ibid., 104.
24 – William Limerick Martin (1847–1889), though born in Tulla, County Clare, was a member of the Martin family of Ross, in Galway. He was a cousin of Violet Martin who, as Martin Ross, wrote critically acclaimed novels and short stories with her cousin, Edith Somerville, including the novel The Real Charlotte (1894), which addresses the issue of land agitation and the rise of the new middle classes.
25 – Martin’s body was later taken to the Gweedore Hotel, where the inquest was held on 4 February 1889.
26 – Tynan, The Middle Years, 87–8.
27 – Ibid.
28 – Hugh Dorian, The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth- Century Donegal, ed. Breandán Mac Suibhne and David Dickson (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000), 43–5.
29 – J.C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 403.
30 – T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin, F.J. Byrne, eds., A New History of Ireland, 8: A Chronology of Irish History to 1976 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 361.
31 – Ibid., 362. This was the Act condemned by Father McFadden in his speech of 4 January 1888 to the tenants of Gweedore.
32 – MK to Florence Knight, 4 February 1887, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/20.
33 – See Knight Family Scrapbooks, HRO, Knight Archive, 78M89/6.
34 – Maria Edgeworth to Charles Sneyd Edgeworth, quoted in Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972), 454.
35 – MK to Florence Knight, 4 February 1887, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/20.
36 – MK to Florence Knight, 10 April 1888, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/2.
37 – Ibid.
38 – MK to Florence Knight, 5 May 1888, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/3.
39 – MK to Florence Knight, 25 June 1888, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/4.
40 – Ibid.
41 – MK to Florence Knight, 9 July 1888, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/6.
43 – Ibid.
44 – MK to Florence Knight, 10 June 1889, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/8.
45 – MK to Montagu Knight, 29 June 1889, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/9.
46 – MK to Florence Knight, 10 July 1889, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/9.
47 – Ibid.
48 – MK to Montagu Knight, 17 September 1889, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/10.
49 – Death Certificate of Lady George Hill, 29 July 1889, transcribed from Death Register no. 7, 15, Donegal Ancestry, Ramelton, County Donegal. The death was registered on 15 August 1889, with Fanny Hopkins as witness. Louisa’s name was wrongly transcribed as Louisa Jane Hill, and corrected by the registrar. Cause of death was ‘senile decay and cerebral haemorrhage, one day, certified’.
50 – MK to Montagu Knight, 17 September 1889, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/10.
51 – Ibid.
52 – Ibid.
53 – FCK, 12 March 1843, Pocket Books, CKS, Knatchbull Archive, U951/F24/40.
54 – MK to Montagu Knight, 28 September 1889, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/15.
55 – MK to Edward Bridges Rice, 21 September 1889, CKS, Rice Archive, EK-U116 (uncatalogued), Hammond no.1/232. Edward Bridges Rice died in 1902, only seven years after Marianne.
56 – Ibid.
57 – Ibid.
58 – Misses Lawrence, Miss Janet Glaze, Miss Macdonell, Miss Irvine, all with London addresses, 13 September 1889, GHB, 2, An Chúirt, Gweedore Court Hotel and Heritage Centre, County Donegal. Written underneath in another hand is: ‘One would suppose [illegible] was too near the hotel.’ Written over the words ‘too near’ in yet another hand is the phrase: ‘The nearer the Church the further from God.’
59 – Traditionally, tenants’ rents were paid twice a year, on 1 May and 1 November, the ‘Gale Days’.
60 – MK to Florence Knight, sent 18 November 1889, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/11/2.
61 – Ibid.
62 – ‘Sept. 8Th 1890. Miss Knight, Miss Hill & Mr Hill, Hotel very comfortable. Ballyare House, Ramelton.’ entry in GHB, 2, An Chúirt, Gweedore Court Hotel and Heri- tage Centre, Gweedore, County Donegal.
63 – MK to Florence Knight, 3 February 1890, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/17.
64 – MK to Florence Knight, 13 July 1890, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/13.
65 – MK to Florence Knight, 28 November 1890, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/16.
66 – MK to Florence Knight, 28 January 1891, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/19.
67 – MK to Florence Knight, 7 April 1891, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/21.
68 – MK to Florence Knight, 8 June 1891, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/23.
69 – MK to Florence Knight, 16 July 1891, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/24.
70 – MK to Florence Knight, 28 December 1891, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F32/1.
71 – MK to Florence Knight, 25 July 1892, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/25.
72 – MK to Florence Knight, April 1893, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/32.
73 – MK to Florence Knight, 15 May 1893, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/33.
74 – MK to Florence Knight, 15 September 1893, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F32/2.
75 – MK to Montagu Knight, 15 September 1894, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F32/4.
76 – MK to Edward Bridges Rice, 20 February 1895, CKS, Rice Archive, EK-U116 (uncatalogued), Hammond no.1/373. Edward Bridges Rice survived Marianne by only seven years. He ‘died in his sleep by the fire on his eighty-third birthday’. Hammond, Relating to Jane, 265.
77 – Cassandra Hill to Edward Bridges Rice, 20 February 1895, CKS, Rice Archive, EK-U116 (uncatalogued), Hammond no.1/374. ‘Cecy’ was Cecilia, Edward Rice’s wife.
78 – It is not clear whether Montagu sent MK an original MS of JA’s charades or, which may be more likely, a copy of A Collection of Charades, privately published by the Austen Leigh family in June 1895, shortly before this letter of thanks was sent by MK. See Deirdre Le Faye, A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 698.
79 – MK to Montagu Knight, 22 July 1895, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F32/6.
80 – JEAL, Memoir, 155.
81 – The death certificate of Marianne Knight, registered eight days after her death, in the ‘District of Ramelton in the Union of Milford in the County of Donegal’ describes her as a ‘female’, ‘spinster’ and ‘gentlewoman’, who died at the age of ninety-four of ‘senile decay and asthemia’. Her nephew Augustus Hill is registered as having been present at the death, at Ballyare, on 4 December 1895. Death register no. 7, 98, Donegal Ancestry, Ramelton, County Donegal. A memorial window dedicated to Marianne in St Nicholas’ Church, Chawton, mistakenly gives the year of her death as 1896. ‘Asthemia’, a condition recently suffered by astronauts, has been defined as ‘a kind of agitated depression, where they became irritable, couldn’t sleep, and started to withdraw from their colleagues … a normal response to a confined environment’. ‘The Biggest Challenge for Astronauts is Living Together,’ Guardian, 23 November, 2000.
82 – ‘Tully’ is an anglicisation of the Irish word ‘tulach’, meaning ‘a hill or mound’. See Patrick. S. Dineen, ed., Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla, an Irish-English Dictionary (Dublin: The Educational Company for the Irish Texts Society, 1927), 1276.
Notes: Postscript
1 – Elizabeth Bowen, ‘The Big House,’ in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Virago, 1986), 29.
2 – Stephen Gwynn ed., Charlotte Grace O’Brien: Selections from Her Writings and Correspondence, with a Memoir by Stephen Gwynn (Dublin: Maunsel and Co., Ltd, 1909), 47.
3 – Stephen Gwynn, Highways and Byways in Donegal and Antrim, with Illustrations by Hugh Thomson (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1928), 146–7.
4 – Ballyare House was sold in 1900 to William Russell, and stayed in his family until 1974 when it was bought by Ian Smith. In 1981 it was purchased by Andy O’Loughlin and since 1989 is the property of Roy and Noreen Greenslade.
5 – Gwynn, Highways and Byways, 146–7.
6 – Cassandra Hill is registered as ‘Head of Family’ in the Census of Ireland, 1901, with ‘income derived from mortgage on land and dividends’, www.census.nationalarchives.ie/reels/nai0003737225
7 – Gwynn, Highways and Byways, 119.
8 – Death Certificate, 21 August 1901, District of Rathdrum, Dublin.
9 – Estyn Evans, ‘The Northern Heritage,’ Aquarius, 4 (1971): 54.
10 – Ibid.
11 – Death Certificate, 25 March 1901, District of Stillorgan, Dublin.
12 – Capt. the Hon. Somerset Ward to Capt. Arthur Hill, 29 May 1881, PRONI, Saunderson Papers, T2996/11/3.
13 – Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘Family History,’ Ballywalter Park, series ed. Peter Rankin (Belfast: Ulster Architectural Society, 1985), 35–6.
14 – Col Saunderson did not change his mind about Father McFadden, and was supported in this by his parliamentary colleague, Edward Carson. ‘Carson has just made a magnificent speech, which has completely vindicated all I said about McFadden’, PRONI, Saunderson Papers, T2996/2/B/442.
15 – MK to Florence Knight, 28 November 1890, HRO, Knight Archive, 39M89/F124/16.
16 – Lord Dunleath, ‘A Dinosaur That Defied Extinction’, Ballywalter Park, 9.
17 – Lord Dunleath, ‘Not A Botanical Golf Course’, Ballywalter Park, 30–1.
18 – Ibid., 31.
19 – Timothy Knatchbull, From a Clear Blue Sky (London: Hutchinson, 2009), 369.Timothy Knatchbull is a direct descendant of Edward Knight, through Fanny, Lady Knatchbull.
20 – Ibid., Introduction, xiii.
21 – Ibid., 367.
Picture Acknowledgements
The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to include the following copyright material
Bal
lyare House, County Donegal, reproduced by kind permission of Brendan Meegan
Chawton Great House, sourced from G.F. Prosser, Select Illustrations of Hampshire (1833), Hampshire Record Office, 728.8, reproduced with thanks to Hampshire Record Office
Chawton Rectory, c.1803, artist unknown, reproduced with thanks to Jane Austen’s House Museum, Jane Austen Memorial Trust
Edward Austen Knight (1768–1852) at the time of his Grand Tour (oil on canvas), English School, (19th century) / Jane Austen Society, on loan to Chawton House Library, UK
Edward Knight (1794–1879), sourced from Akin to Jane, ed. Joan Corder (Private circulation, 1953), reproduced with thanks to Jane Austen’s House Museum, Jane Austen Memorial Trust
Elizabeth and Marianne Knight, 1805 (on ivory), reproduced with thanks to Jane Austen’s House Museum, Jane Austen Memorial Trust
Elizabeth Austen Knight, n.d. (from an ivory pounce box), reproduced with thanks to Jane Austen’s House Museum, Jane Austen Memorial Trust
Godmersham Park, Seat of Thomas Knight, Esq., 1785, artist unknown. Engraving by William Watts (1752–1851) as part of his ‘Seats of the Nobility and Gentry’ series, produced in 1779–86. With thanks to Godmersham Park Heritage Centre
Gweedore Hotel, Co. Donegal, c.1890, by William Lawrence [4576 W.L.] With thanks to Mícheál Ó Domhnaill and Tony McHugh of Comharchumann Fordartha, Derrybeg.
Isle O’Valla, Strangford, reproduced by kind permission of Rhoma Buchanan
Hill Family Crest, sourced from Akin to Jane, ed. Joan Corder (Private circulation, 1953), reproduced with thanks to Jane Austen’s House Museum, Jane Austen Memorial Trust
Knights of Chawton Family Crest, sourced from Akin to Jane, ed. Joan Corder (Private circulation, 1953), reproduced with thanks to Jane Austen’s House Museum, Jane Austen Memorial Trust
Knights of Godmersham Family Crest, sourced from Akin to Jane, ed. Joan Corder (Private circulation, 1953) reproduced with thanks to Jane Austen’s House Museum, Jane Austen Memorial Trust
L’Aimable Jane, silhouette of Jane Austen by an unknown artist (3181) © National Portrait Gallery, London