Butt Demands Home Rule (1872-4)

Chapter II

Butt Demands Home Rule (1872-4)

In March, 1872, 1 went to England to stay with John Barry, in Manchester. There unrest, racial and religious, prevailed amongst Irishmen. The execution of Allen, Larkin and O’Brien was not five years old, and the shooting of Sergeant Brett remained a sore subject with English citizens. Brett was in charge of a prison-van from which two Irish-American officers (Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasy) were rescued in Salford. A shot fired to force the lock killed Brett, who (unknown to the rescuers) was looking through the keyhole. The jury convicted five alleged assailants, including a Royal Marine named Maguire, although it was proved that Maguire was on board ship at sea in Her Majesty’s service when the rescue took place. So clearly guiltless was he that a unanimous protest from the reporters at the trial was lodged, and he was “pardoned.”

Dr. Murphy, of Oxford Street, Manchester, told me that after the executions (23rd November, 1867) a tattered outcast came to him on a winter’s day, with a letter from Colonel Kelly, for whose capture £1,000 reward was offered. As he opened his coat to produce the missive, Dr. Murphy saw that he had neither shirt nor vest. Yet the man could have gone to the nearest police station and drawn £1,000 by giving information as to the whereabouts of the fugitives.

Northern England was then disturbed by an anti-popery lecturer, Murphy, who infested the towns. His book, The Confessional Unmasked, was declared “obscene” by Lord Coleridge in the Queen’s Bench. Murphy used to erect a “confessional” on his platforms, where he enacted the part of a priest, while a woman in a nun’s garb appeared as a penitent. Indelicate questions were proposed by Murphy to the “nun” to provoke laughter. This masquerade aroused fury amongst Catholics. The Lancashire Irish grew restive, and the Government did their best to end the scandal, but bigotry was unchained, and anti-Catholic riots broke out in Ashton-under-Lyne. Many Irish homes there were wrecked. I visited the ruins with John Barry. On a small scale they resembled the devastated regions of France in 1918. Frontages of streets had disappeared, and the pitiful remnants of the tenants’ belongings were strewn about. The parish priest was an Italian, Canon Maglioni, whose church had been saved by the Fenians of Manchester, who guarded it with revolvers day and night, until the police got the mob in hand.

Barry discussed with the Canon in his Sacristy the chances of a fresh outbreak. Getting excited at the sufferings of his flock Maglioni darted to the vestment-chest. There lay a Sicilian dagger with a twisted blade like a “cris”. Seizing it he burst out, “If zay come again I vill give zem zis!” No mob came again, for Murphy’s enormities aroused Catholics elsewhere to desperation. At Workington, in Cumberland, on St. Patrick’s Day, 1872, the Irish miners left their pits with crowbars and axes to attack him. They scattered his meeting and left few remains of Murphy. The authorities felt small regret, for he made a living by promoting disorder and indecency. No one, I think, was “made amenable” for his demise.

The Sunday after Murphy’s death, Barry and I called on Father believing John Tracy, at Heaton Norris, near Manchester. The priest described to us with a twinkle the awe of his congregation at Mass that morning, and said that his sermon never before was listened to in such stillness. Those present hoped that he would draw a moral fromMurphy’s departure, but he never alluded to it, and stuck to the Gospel, keeping clear of earthly topics. To show how this perplexed his flock, he called in his old servant, Anne, and put her through a comic cross-examination.

“Anne,” said he, “who were those fellows who tried to break in on my breakfast this morning?”

“They said they were a ‘deputation,’ Your Reverence.”

“What kind of a deputation, Anne?”

“They said they were sent by the Congregation after Mass to ask you questions, Father.”

“I know, Anne, but what did they want?”

“Well, Father, to be honest, something against attacks on religion in your sermon was looked for.”

“What did they expect?”

“The deputation, Father, wished to speak to you.”

“About what?”

“They wanted to know positively was Murphy dead.”

“Well?”

“I let them in, and you told them you believed he was.”

“Then what did they say?”

“They said they were bid by many to see you.”

“What for?

“To know if it was true.”

“Was that all?”

“No, Your Reverence.”

“Go on.”

“Well: the spokesman made bold to say they hoped to hear that, with the blessing of God, Murphy died without the priest.

In other words, the Heaton Norris mill-workers wished for an assurance that a pretended zealot, who had persecuted them, had gone unabsolved to judgment in the world to come.

Father Tracy’s brother, Mat, a reporter on the Cork Examiner, was a “character.” He was dispatched during the Fenian Rising of 1867 in Kerry by its owner, J. F. Maguire (M.P for Dungarvan), to report events. Mat, equipped with a musket plus a lead-pencil, set forth and was speedily arrested. Telegraphic communication between England and Ireland was then in its infancy, and the Government had no details of Mat’s activities. Maguire, in his reporter’s bona fides, demanded in the House of Commons satisfaction for his arrest from Lord Naas, the Chief Secretary of the day. That nobleman (afterwards Lord Mayo, the murdered Indian Viceroy) effused in apology, and agreed that the arrest was an infringement of the “liberty of the Press.”

Maguire urged that compensation should be paid. Lord Naas concurred. Whether £100 or £500 was given, it was too much for Mat. Friends gathered round him night after night, to enjoy his compensation and hospitality. At the end of his jovial evenings he would raise his glass in pathetic self-pity, crying, “Ah, boys! The British Government has been the ruin of me!”

J. F. Maguire, M.P., was one of a handful who, in the ‘sixties, lifted faint voices in the House of Commons on behalf of Ireland. When George Henry Moore, M.P. for Mayo, ended a speech Maguire reproached him, saying, “Sir! You have stolen my question!” “What question?” queried Moore. “Ireland, sir,” was the reply. “Ireland is my question.”

In that epoch the Parliamentary franchise was limited in Irish counties to men of £12 valuation (not rent) and in boroughs to over £4 valuation. Towns with a few hundred electors (relics of the Act of Union) sent a score of “representatives” to London. A beggarly handful in a score of places - Athlone, Armagh, Cashel, Carrickfergus, Clonmel, Drogheda, Dundalk, Dungarvan, Ennis, Kinsale, Lisburn, Mallow, Newry, New Ross, Portarlington, Sligo, Wexford and Youghal, returned a member. In these constituencies the voters, if all were added together, did not exceed four thousand. In Portarlington they were less than 150, and no one save a Tory was ever elected there. For long after the Union, M.P.’s had also to possess a property qualification.

In 1830 an Election Petition Committee of the House of Commons found in the case of Wexford Borough that two families had arranged to divide its representation between them, and also the office of Mayor turn about. (Hudson’s Franchise, 1832, p.423.)

Up to 1840 Irish municipalities controlled by non-elective corporations levied and spent the rates. “Reform” in that year made councillors electable on a narrow franchise. In Dublin a “residential” qualification of nearly three years was required to secure a vote. The rate-collection of the Capital remained in the hands of an official appointed by the Lord-Lieutenant until the Local Government Act of 1898. That worthy was always a Tory, and never pressed for the rates of Nationalists until after a date when their voting “qualification ” was lost.

The Poor Law system was governed under a similar or even worse rule. The composition of the Guardians may be judged by the fact that in South Dublin Union all foundlings were baptized Protestants, down to the Act of 1898. Half the boards consisted of magistrates non-elected, who acted ex-officio, and the other half was chosen on a franchise under which owners like Lord Fitzwilliam were held entitled to 18 votes against one cast by the occupier.

Until the Ballot Act of 1872, every vote was scanned by the landlord’s agent, both at local and parliamentary elections. In counties no popular control existed. The sheriffs who were selected (or “pricked”) by the Assize Judge, nominated at their discretion 23 magistrates to form a Grand Jury each spring and summer, and they voted and spent the rates at their pleasure, without audit. They were not “corporations,” and could not be sued for misfeasance. Catholics were not employed by then, and landlords were exempt from County Cess, except on their own demesnes.

When the Act of Union of 1800 passed, one man, Lord Barrymore, controlled the whole of the rates in the County of Cork, which he could levy or spend as he liked. Pitt and Castlereagh were willing that this jobbery should continue. Maxwell’s Wild Sports of the West, published in 1823, deplores that there was no road into Erris, Co. Mayo, although the serfs had been taxed three times to make it. The Cess was spent building demesne walls, and in diverting roads to include picturesque views from the landlord’s windows, leaving the public to travel longer distances by new roads which the cottiers had to pay for. Some check had been placed on this by a Scotch Under-Secretary, Thomas Drummond, in 1837, but be was ferociously assailed for declaring that “property had its duties as well as its rights.”

Until the ‘thirties, Catholics and Nonconformists had to pay tithes to the ministers of a creed they disbelieved. This, in Cork, Kilkenny, and Wexford, led the peasants to resist tithe-proctors to prevent their harvests being seized. The police were fired on with fatal results. “Sheer sacrilege,” the parsons cried. Sir Robert Peel, however, took alarm when he learnt that the feeling of Catholics against being “sweated” to support a religion not their own was shared by Ulster Presbyterians. So, in 1838, he passed an Act to transfer the burden of the payment of tithes to the landlords, and they, of course, raised their tenants’ rents in proportion, being afterwards endowed with new powers of eviction.

Nine years later the famine of the ‘forties came with its clearances, and the emigration of millions to America. The “melancholy ocean,” declared by Disraeli in 1873 to be the sole cause of Ireland’s woes, was not made less melancholy by their tears.

Gladstone had saddled Ireland with income-tax in £853, although when the Union Act of £8oo passed it was promised that this tax would not be imposed. The excuse made was that the Famine loans must be repaid somehow.

In my youth a festering discontent prevailed everywhere, but no way of relief seemed open. From the Catholic clergy protests were not encouraged by Cardinal Cullen. Resident landlords of the old sort, who sympathized with their tenants, were few, for they mostly had been sold out under the Encumbered Estates Act, or the Landed Estates Act. After the Famine few tenants could pay rent, so the owners could not meet their mortgages. Many landlords, therefore, lost their estates under these Acts. In counties like Clare they saved themselves until the tenants became solvent by hiring mobs to beat off the “mapsmen” sent down by the Dublin Courts to mark out the bounds of their properties. Elsewhere sales took place to new buyers, who raised the rents, because in the Courts’ “conditions of sale” a usual headline to attract bids was, “The tenants are prosperous and the rents will bear a substantial increase.”

Commercialism thus replaced feudalism, and rent-raising became general. To help the speculators, an Act was passed in 1860 abolishing ancient tenures, and declaring that in future tenants should be deemed to hold by “contract” - the grimmest joke since the Norman intrusion. It was styled “Deasy’s Act,” but Baron Deasy, then Law Officer and M.P. for Cork, maintained that he never drafted or approved of it. A later colleague, Baron Dowse, used to say that its title should be, not the “Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, 1860,” but the “Landlords Act, 1860.”

Uneasiness in Ulster became rife. An unpublished letter from John Bright, M.P. to a Presbyterian Minister in Co. Derry (written before the Dissolution of 1868 - when Bright became a Cabinet Minister under Gladstone), is of interest:

Rochdale,

21st October, 1863.

Dear Sir, -

“I do not think the Treasury will make any advance of money to enable your tenantry to purchase their farms. The Government cannot do it without an Act of Parliament, and there is no Act to enable them to do it on the Statute Book.

But I hope if Lord Waterford is willing to sell at a price based on the rental he has been receiving, and not on the full value of the farms, including the tenants’ interest in them, you will have no difficulty In providing the purchase money, from other sources. If the landlord’s interest is not more than half the value of the farm, then the tenant will be able to offer the security of the whole farm for a loan equal only to one half of it, and thus he will have no difficulty in borrowing what he wants at a moderate rate of interest.

I think you must rely on your own arrangements for, in my opinion, Government can do nothing in the case.

I hope the time may come when an Act may pass to enable tenants to become owners of their farms by assisting them with funds to effect the transfer.

I shall be glad to hear from you how far Lord Waterford has done his part In this matter, and how far the farms have become the property of the tenants. When the whole transaction is accomplished, perhaps you will write to me with such particulars as may be useful to me in the further discussion of the Irish Land Question?”

Very truly yours,

John Bright.

The Revd. Nathl. Brown,

Fairy Fort,

Limavady.

Mr. Brown claimed to be the author of the phrase, “the three F’s” (fixity of tenure, fair rent, and free sale), which soon became the tenants’ war-cry. Two years later, Bright persuaded Gladstone to insert clauses in the Land Act of 1870 to enable advances to be made by the Treasury to help tenants to purchase.

By this time the Fenian exiles in America had become formidable. The Civil War in the United States ended in 1865, and its Government was pressing the Alabama claims against Britain, and was resentful, too, because England was alleged to have connived with Napoleon III in setting Maximilian, brother of the Austrian Emperor (shot by Jaurez), upon the tottering throne of Mexico. To appease feeling, in 1869 Gladstone disestablished the Irish Church, and in 1870 tried to deal with the land question. A “upas tree,” he declared poisoned Irish life, but conditions either in the House of Commons or House of Lords were not helpful to reform.

Until 1870 there was no measure to shield tenants from eviction. Tens of thousands were made homeless and driven abroad. Lord Atkinson, when Attorney-General for Ireland, and M.P. for N. Derry, used to say that Irish legal work consisted, “on the Common Law side,” of actions by absentee landlords to eject their tenants, and “on the Chancery side” of suits by mortgagees to compel the absentees to pay their debts. Confidence in the administration of justice there was none.

To illustrate popular distrust so far back as the ‘forties, Judge George used to tell that, having tried a man for murder at Mullingar, against whom no real evidence existed, he directed an acquittal. It was the last case at the Assize, and as the mail coach would not start for Dublin until two o’clock, he took a walk into the country. Outside the town he met a man running with his boots slung over his shoulder, who asked, “What o’clock is it, yer Honour? “Past twelve,” said the Judge. “Then I’m late!” he moaned. The prisoner is done for.” ”What prisoner? asked George. “Oh, Paddy ---,who is on trial for his life. I was a witness to his innocence, and now he will be hanged!” ” “Don’t trouble,” came the assurance, “the Judge ordered the jury to find him ‘Not Guilty,’ and he is a free man.” “My God!” said the rustic. “What influence he must have!” Ascendancy had expelled all hope of impartiality from peasant minds.

The late William Ryan, Q.C. (a relative of Lord Halsbury), revelled in stories of these days. His father was Registrar to Lord Norbury, whose house in Rutland Square, Dublin, became afterwards the office of the Congested Districts Board. According to Ryan, every affidavit then had to be sworn “in the presence and hearing of the Judge.” Norbury, to secure the fees, screened off his dinner table from the litigants in order that they could make oath ” before him.” Ryan’s father could thus certify that they were taken “in the presence and hearing of the Judge.” The son told me that up to the Act of Union (1800), when judges were paid by fees, Norbury ” charged” in favour of the plaintiff, to attract suitors to his court. When the law was changed, and a fixed salary given, he “charged” for the defendant, in order to drive suitors away!

Petty larcenies then were punished by hanging, and Ryan narrated that Norbury, either at Mullingar or Clonmel, sentenced to death a number of unfortunates on a forenoon and appointed next day for their execution. The condemned and their families, however, made such lamentations in the cells beneath the court that Norbury adjourned business for an hour and ordered the sheriff to stop their wailings by hanging them out of hand.

Curran’s jest against Norbury became famous. Asked at lunch by Norbury, “Is that hung beef?” he replied, “Not until Your Lordship tries it.”

A wardrobe of Norbury’s came into my possession, but in 1923 its fine front was splashed with bullets when, for the third time after my appointment as Governor-General of the Irish Free State, my house was shot up by youths obeisant to “the Republic.”

After Gladstone disestablished the “Irish Church” in 1869, the Protestants grew so embittered that, in 1870, when O’Doriovan Rossa was elected for Co. Tipperary, while in penal servitude, the Tory High Sheriff remitted his fees. Isaac Butt was aided by Tories, including two professors of Trinity College (Galbraith and Haughton), to start the Home Rule movement.

In England, John Barry, the ablest man of Irish brood in Britain, organized the exiles to advance Butt’s aims. Barry’s house in Manchester was a centre of political activity. An affable manner, great business capacity, wit, and a cheery buoyancy, made him a favourite alike with English, Irish, and Scotch. Son of a Wexford coastguard, schooled in Craster, Northumberland, without having seen Ireland, he was devoted to her cause. Yet he loved the English and Scottish peoples too, and about all three was comically quizzical. His objective was to get parliamentary candidates in Britain to support Home Rule.

The organization of the Irish vote there was his conception and achievement. No election took place after 1871 in Britain at which a group marshalled by Barry did not bring pressure on parliamentary candidates. In 1872 a vacancy occurred in Manchester, where Jacob Bright was the Liberal standard-bearer. Barry travelled to London and back three times in two days to consult Butt as to the pledge to be proposed. Finally Jacob Bright agreed to vote for an “inquiry” into Home Rule. The Conservative candidate at once became equally receptive, and Butt exultantly cried, “an embarrassment of riches! ” Bright won, and his victory was the first blow struck in England for Home Rule.

All the Lancashire priests visited Barry. Their sole topic of conversation was Ireland’s lack of leaders, and Butt’s great age. An old ecclesiastic heartened us one day, turning his face to the west, saying, “Let us not lose heart. Perhaps behind those watery Wickllow Hills a young man is growing up to lead the Nation.” Three years later Parnell strode brusquely on to the political stage. Few had heard of him until then, and some afterwards learnt with misgiving that he was an ensign in the Wicklow Militia.

Healy Index. Home.