The Cambridge academic Henry Nelson Coleridge recollected reaching Bridgetown in 1825:
How a man’s heart swells within him, when after sea and sky and sky and sea for nearly a month, he first sees the kindly land beckon to him over the salt waves! And that land tropical! Carlisle bay sleeping like an infant, and countenanced like the sky on a June morning, the warrior pendants, the merchant signals, the graceful gleaming boats, the dark sailors, the circling town, the silver strand, and the long shrouding avenues of immortal palms greenly fringing the blue ocean!… Barbados is the most ancient colony in the British empire. It has never changed hands, and been invaded once only by the forces of the Long Parliament.86
Here was an early taste of that imperial nostalgia which Barbados and Bridgetown would continue to elicit right up until the present day.
Early Bajan currency: the so-called ‘Pineapple Penny’ minted in England for commercial use in Barbados. The coin depicts, on the obverse, an African in profile wearing the royal diadem of the Prince of Wales with the motto ‘I serve’ inscribed beneath (1788).
3
Dublin
‘One whole and integrated Empire’
‘They will follow me wherever I go.’ When the Earl of Kildare chose for the site of his townhouse a cheap, boggy plot of land on the south side of the River Liffey, polite society was appalled. Out at the rougher edges of Molesworth Fields, this was ‘the lands of tib and tom’, an almost rural outpost a long way from the theatres, drawing rooms and coffee-shops of fashionable north Dublin.
James and Emily Fitzgerald knew what they were doing. Delighted with the designs of Richard Cassels (or Castle) for their country seat of Carton House in Maynooth, County Kildare, they now set the German architect to work on Dublin’s grandest private home. As the residence of Ireland’s leading ‘patriot’ politician, a hugely wealthy landowner who always skilfully balanced the interests of Ireland and England with his own, Kildare House had to fulfil many expectations. Begun in 1745, its pedimented façade, ornamental railings and gilded interiors remain to this day a triumph of eighteenth-century English Palladian design – so much so that, across the Atlantic, the Irish architect James Hoban would later draw extensively on its styling for his own plans for George Washington’s White House in the newly independent America.
In 1766 Kildare was elevated to the Dukedom of Leinster, and so Kildare House became Leinster House, an essential sight for anyone visiting Ireland’s capital. ‘Viewed the Duke of Leinster’s house,’ the agricultural economist and author Arthur Young reported in 1776, ‘which is a very large stone edifice, the front simple but elegant, the pediment light. There are several good rooms, but a circumstance unrivalled is the court, which is spacious and magnificent. The opening behind the house is also beautiful.’1 When the eponymous hero of The History of Ned Evans (1797) passed along Merrion Street, he too ‘was infinitely struck with the grandeur of the Duke of Leinster’s house. The beautiful opening at the back of that noble palace, and the elegant disposition of the ground, with the refreshing shrubs that surround it, charmed his fancy, and made him think it a dwelling fit for a sovereign.’2
This rural Elysium didn’t last for long. As Kildare predicted, Dublin’s smart set were quick to follow him across the Liffey, and the south side was soon being carved up for terraces, squares and five-storey townhouses. Today, Leinster House serves as the seat of Ireland’s Houses of the Oireachtas or National Parliament and – despite all the dreadful emendations of state-bureaucratic interior design – in the two-storeyed great entrance hall, with its black and white squared floor, or the sweeping staircase or the grandiose Filippo Francini ceiling, you can still just capture a taste of that airy eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish world.
Leinster House is, however, more than just another aristocratic mansion converted to democratic use. Standing now between the National Library and the National Museums, just north of the business suites of St Stephen’s Green and just west of the hotels and restaurants of Merrion Square, the house sits at the heart of what guidebooks like to call ‘Georgian Dublin’. This is the Dublin of the twenty-first-century city-break: Trinity College, the National Gallery and the Shelbourne Hotel set in an affluent urban landscape of sash-windowed terraces, neo-classical elegance, ‘colourful Georgian doors’, high-end shopping and easily consumable culture. According to the ‘Visit Dublin’ website, an ‘elegant Georgian metropolis with wide streets, gracious squares and great houses, neatly bordered by two canals … a city that will capture your heart’.3 In short, an Irish capital focused on marketing the architecture and aesthetic of a colonial, Protestant past.
It was not always so. The preservationist impulse is a new phenomenon. In the aftermath of Ireland’s independence in 1922 there was a concerted attempt to sweep away this Georgian history – the past of Leinster and Fitzwilliam, Rutland Square and St Stephen’s Green. Eamon de Valera’s interwar government thought the architecture ‘un-national’ and set out plans to demolish all of Merrion Square. In place of this imperial architecture, Dublin was to rise again as a peasant-Gaelic capital, shorn of the neo-classical detritus of the humiliating eighteenth century. In the early 1960s, one Irish government minister was positively gleeful about the swathe of demolition ripping through his city’s terraces. ‘I was glad to see them go,’ he told a visitor, ‘they stand for everything I hate.’ Under the hand of usually Fianna Fáil politicians, Georgian Dublin was put to the wrecking ball, with the most egregious destruction being of sixteen Georgian terraced houses on Lower Fitzwilliam Street in 1963 to make way for the bland, modernist headquarters of the Electricity Supply Board. A decade later, as further developments were allowed to scythe through Kildare Place and Mountjoy Square, one nationalist letter writer to the Irish Times was wholly unapologetic about the elimination of this colonial legacy: ‘Georgian buildings are an offence to all true-blue Irishmen, they are a hangover from a repressive past … and they must go.’4 In the doleful judgement of the leading historian of Georgian Dublin, Kevin Corrigan Kearns, ‘Many Irishmen believe that the Georgian structures are English architectural types transplanted on Irish soil by the Anglo-Irish … The call to erase the Georgian heritage from the Dublin cityscape has often been justified as an act of national purification on the premise that the architecture and structures are not Irish.’5
Instead, Dublin was to become a martyrs’ memorial to those patriots who secured a pure, free Ireland liberated from the British Empire after a long and bloody struggle. This Dublin is the Dublin of the General Post Office, scene of the 1916 Easter Rising and the Proclamation of Independence, and the Jim Larkin Statue opposite it, commemorating the life of the great trade unionist and republican. This is the modern Dublin of the Famine Memorial, of the statue of Daniel O’Connell, which commands the O’Connell Bridge across the Liffey, of Croke Park (scene of a bloody and vengeful massacre by British special forces in 1920) and the Gardens of Remembrance.
Dedicated to the Irish patriot dead and opened in 1966 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, the Gardens of Remembrance also provided the most symbolic stop on the Dublin leg of Queen Elizabeth II’s tour of Ireland in 2011 – the first state visit by a British monarch for over a century. ‘The image of the Queen with her head bowed in the Gardens of Remembrance seemed to me a significant moment,’ reflected the Irish author Colm Toibin. ‘It suggested that now there is such ease and open harmony between our islands and our two governments, we can include without worry the Irish patriot dead.’6 It was a sentiment which the Queen was subtly to endorse as she spoke at the Dublin Castle state dinner of the ‘painful legacy’ of a colonial rule that had not been ‘entirely benign’. For Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times, Elizabeth II’s pitch-perfect progression around the one-time colonial capital suggested as much about Britain as Ireland:
The familiar question that was posed was whether the Irish have got over their sometimes neurotic love-hate relationship with the Brits. But it was joined by a question that was co
mpletely unexpected: have the British got over their post-imperial delusions of grandeur? Or to put it another way, is Britain’s self-image now sufficiently cleansed of the stains of empire that it can treat Ireland as an equal?7
All of which speaks to the deep, historic complexity of Britain’s relationship with Ireland, a relationship that has shaped the streets and squares, the bridges and buildings of Dublin. For in what remains of eighteenth-century Dublin, one can begin to trace an important transition in the history of British colonialism, emerging from the failures of the so-called First Empire of the Thirteen Colonies and readying itself for a more expansionist Second Empire reaching eastward. The story of Dublin in the second half of the eighteenth century reflects the new global realities confronting London after defeat in America and escalating competition from France and Spain. In the face of such danger, there was a stark realization that the internal bonds of Empire had to be tightened: a secure perimeter around the island of Ireland was just as important as the promotion of Atlantic trade. In the aftermath of the American and French revolutions, the architects of the British Empire were forced to think much more intensively about the kind of Britishness their colonial project was premised on. It was a readjustment that would force Ireland to change from an uncomfortable colony into a component part of the British Isles – and one which had both to be defended against external invasion and fully integrated within the colonial economy. What was altogether more surprising about this shift was the extent to which so many of the most important elements within Ireland then became willing participants in the British Empire’s global ambitions. How Ireland was transformed from a problem to a partner in imperialism can all be chronicled through the beautiful and ostentatious urban fabric of Georgian Dublin.
TOO GREAT TO BE UNCONNECTED
The complexity of Ireland’s status in the British imperial imagination is partly the product of longevity. ‘Ireland may be regarded as the earliest English colony,’ noted Friedrich Engels in the 1850s, ‘and one which, by reason of her proximity, is still governed in exactly the same old way; here one cannot fail to notice that the English citizen’s so-called freedom is based on the oppression of the colonies.’ Engels traced the ‘English wars of conquest’ back to the twelfth century, when Henry II gifted himself the ‘Lordship of Ireland’ and the Anglo-Normans picked up from where the Vikings had left off. ‘Neither should it be forgotten, of course, that three hundred years of invasion and plunder by the Danes had already dragged the country considerably backwards.’8
But for the most part, Ireland as a colonial project only began to enter English and then, crucially, British consciousness in the sixteenth century. On the face of it, the island exercised a high degree of autonomy under colonial control. In 1541, Ireland was granted the formal status of a kingdom in her own right and, what is more, had a parliament of Commons and Lords whose history could be traced back to the Middle Ages. But from the 1590s, there were quickening calls for the destruction of the old Gaelic order and the colonization of Ireland under the plough of English settlers, whose task would be to establish a political and economic framework capable of civilizing the people and securing the Protestant faith. Royal policy and private enterprise came together as large allocations of farmland, beginning on the confiscated Munster estates of the rebellious Irish peer the Earl of Desmond, were handed out to English colonists for growing grain. Soon enough, some 12,000 English settlers were farming in the southern half of Ireland. Their numbers expanded exponentially in the early 1600s and then moved northward following the 1607 ‘flight of the earls’ (which saw the leading Gaelic aristocracy flee to Europe in the hope of recapturing Ireland from the English with Spanish help) and the lucrative confiscation of estates across Ulster. King James I and VI parcelled these tracts out in smaller allotments in the hope of building up a more diverse and sustainable rural society. And just as James’s kingship had personally combined the two crowns of England and Scotland, so the Ulster plantations offered an early example of lowland Scots and English settlers working together in an obviously ‘British’ colonial enterprise. By the 1630s Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Strafford, could announce to James’s son, Charles I, that the systematic settlement of English colonists was the best means for enriching the English government and for ‘civilizing … this people, or securing this kingdom under the dominion of your imperial Crown’.* Prior to the outbreak of the English Civil War (or War of the Three Kingdoms) in 1641, some 100,000 people had migrated from England, Scotland and Wales into Ireland.9 Remarkably, the liberating events of 1649 – the execution of a king; establishment of a republic – did little to alter official policy towards Ireland. Indeed, the Lord Protector, who came to political maturity amidst the 1641 Irish Rebellion and its lurid tales of Protestant settlers massacred by Irish Catholics, proved positively messianic about bringing the Pale to heel. ‘We should see Oliver Cromwell’s Irish policy as part of his general imperial policy,’ explained his biographer Christopher Hill. ‘The native Irish were treated much as the original settlers of New England treated the Indians.’10 In 1649 the rebels of Drogheda and Wexford were put to the sword; the dispossessed were exiled to Barbados; and the practice of Catholicism was outlawed, with a few priestly lynchings to make the point. It was an early stage in the strategy of conquest and colonization.
In the aftermath of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne and the 1691 Battle of Aughrim – the conclusive clashes of the Glorious Revolution at which King William III consolidated his victory – there was further sequestration of indigenous lands. Protestant, colonial culture became far more assertive, with the 1720 Declaratory Act, which clarified the supremacy of the British parliament over Ireland. ‘The … Kingdom of Ireland hath been, is, and by Right ought to be subordinate unto and dependent upon the Imperial Crown of Great Britain, as being inseparably united and annexed thereunto.’ All peoples of Ireland – both the conquered Irish Catholics and the British colonists – were declared subject to the ‘full power and authority’ of the Westminster parliament.11 The ‘Penal Acts’ – a series of petty but savage measures primarily directed against Ireland’s dominant Roman Catholic population – reaffirmed Ireland’s subjugated status. In 1792, the Dublin-born politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, who would prove such a glittering critic of imperialism in the British Houses of Parliament, described the legislation ‘as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man’.12
And yet Ireland was neither an occupied territory nor a police state; it could not be viewed in the same light as Barbados, the Bahamas or the Thirteen Colonies. Its proximity to Great Britain and pre-history as a dependent kingdom stretching back to Henry II excluded such obvious imperial identification. ‘By the late seventeenth century, Ireland resembled not so much a model colony, a terra Florida near home, drawn up in conformity with an official blueprint, but rather an unruly palimpsest, on which, though much rewritten and scored out, could be discerned in an untidy jumble: “kingdom”, “colony”, “dependency”, and, faintly, “nation”.’ Ireland could not be set within the obvious ‘imperial paradigm’ of ‘mother and child, metropolitan legislature and local Assembly, imperial core and colonial periphery’.13 It was altogether more complicated – not least because of the Protestantism of the migrant communities from Scotland and England.
At the apex of that settler society stood the professional and landed elite of the so-called ‘Protestant Ascendancy’, a term coined in the 1790s to classify the ruling caste of Georgian Ireland. These were the descendants of the pioneer military and landowning classes of the Elizabethan plantations and comprised an entrenched clique oriented around the established, Anglican church and who effortlessly monopolized law, civil society and high politics. An official architecture and public ritual were designed to cement the colonial hegemony. Of the Ascendancy’s centre of political power, the Irish Houses of Parliament, the
Victorian historian W. E. H. Lecky wrote,
The traces of recent civil war and the arrogance of a dominant minority were painfully apparent. The walls of the House of Lords were hung with tapestry representing the Siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne. A standing order of the House of Commons even excluded Catholics from the gallery. The anniversaries of the Battle of Aghrim, of the Battle of the Boyne, of the Gunpowder Plot, and, above all, of the discovery of the rebellion of 1641, were always celebrated.14
Roy Foster invites us to think of the Ascendancy as ‘marginalized if not isolated’ in the same manner as ‘colonial Virginia, or even the Kenya highlands in the 1920s’.15 But the Anglo-Irish Protestants themselves fiercely resented any attempt to put them alongside the rebellious colonists of Massachusetts or the Caribbean sugar barons. As ‘English-born-in-Ireland’, they wanted to be equal partners in Empire, not troublesome colonial cousins. Like their West Indian peers, they were militarily dependent upon the British state for protection against the indigenous (in this case, Catholic) majority but regularly felt aggrieved at their treatment by the mother country. As they expressed an ever greater emotional attachment to the island of Ireland, there was the lurking fear that Westminster, tiring of its obligations, might even one day sell them out. The emergent ‘nationalism’ of these Irish Protestants was ‘a potent mixture of triumphalism, anxiety and wounded amour-propre’ which constituted neither a plea for Irish secession nor a suspicion of Empire. It was, in fact, just a perfect recipe for misunderstanding, slights and religio-cultural confusion – neatly summed up in one 1780s diplomatic memo on the muddled status of Ireland within the British Empire: ‘Ireland is too great to be unconnected with us and too near to be dependent on a foreign state and too little to be independent.’16
Cities of Empire Page 13