Charles Stewart Parnell: The uncrowned contradiction of Ireland

A Wicklow granite stone marks the grave of Charles Stewart Parnell at Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery. Photo: Author’s collection

In the 1880s Irish politics fluctuated between agrarian crises and the promise of Home Rule. One politician above all dominated arguments: Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell’s rise to the top was spectacular, almost as rapid as his fall. Parnell had little interest in Irish culture or language though as he had acute insights into the “schizophrenia of the Anglo-Irish condition” with his class’s divided loyalties between England and Ireland. Parnell believed they could contribute to Ireland’s future. The irony of a Protestant landlord leading a militant Catholic anti-landlord movement was lost on no-one. But, said biographer Paul Bew in C.S. Parnell, he rendered significant service to the cause of Irish nationalism, and still remains a potent symbol.

The Parnell family were Cheshire Protestants established in Ireland during Cromwellian times with an estate in Queen’s County (Laois). Early Irish Parnells were undistinguished until Sir John Parnell, Charles Stewart’s great-grandfather, who sat in the Protestant parliament in Dublin and opposed the 1801 Act of Union. Charles Stewart called him incorruptible though glossed over his anti-Catholic Emancipation attitude. Sir John’s son William was a liberal who inherited the Avondale estate in Wicklow. He was a Westminster MP from 1817 to 1820, and wrote the novel Maurice and Berghetta which suggested the need for concessions to Catholics. His son John Henry inherited William’s liberal tendencies though died when Charles was just 13 years old. John Henry’s American wife Delia Tudor Stewart Parnell survived her husband by 40 years and became a more permanent anti-English influence on her son. She had republican leanings though her son was not impressed by the “so-called Fenians” who visited their Dublin home. Nevertheless, the political views of both parents allowed Parnell to rebel against his class without rebelling against his family.

Charles Stewart Parnell was born on June 27, 1846 at Avondale, in Wicklow’s Vale of Avoca. Aged six he was sent to Yeovil, Somerset to be educated at a girl’s school and in his teens he attended Rev Alexander Whishaw’s school at Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. He then went to Magdalene College, Cambridge but never completed his studies. He returned to Avondale to become an Irish country gentleman, enjoying his dogs and horses. In a brief visit to America in 1871 he wooed Miss Woods (coincidentally Katherine O’Shea’s maiden name was Wood) but was rebuffed, his brother John noting that the jilting drove him into politics. The Ballot Act 1872 introduced the secret ballot which reduced the cost of electioneering while the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland prompted Protestant involvement in the Home Rule movement. By 1874 Parnell felt confident enough to approach Home Rule leaders. Though a poor public speaker with an English accent, he was nominated for the seat of Dublin. He was defeated but was successfully elected for Meath a year later, backed by the Catholic church. For the rest of his career Parnell uneasily reconciled his social conservatism with strident Catholic nationalism.

Irish politics was then dominated by Isaac Butt’s Home Rule League founded in 1873. In parliament Butt’s team was unfailingly polite but ineffective in progressing either home rule or land reform. Parnell’s election as a Home Rule MP two years later did not cause much excitement, one newspaper saying his convictions were awakened merely by a parliamentary vacancy. He came to public notice when he argued with Dublin’s Mayor over the distribution of funding to support celebrations of the centenary of Daniel O’Connell’s birth. It was an undignified squabble but it showed determination to be seen as a militant nationalist MP. Similarly at Westminster where he was mostly quiet in the early days, he attracted notoriety for defending Fenians who had accidentally murdered a policeman in Manchester.

By 1877 he was practising parliamentary obstruction. Butt had obstructed the Irish Coercion Bill of 1875 but Parnell and allies Joseph Biggar and John O’Connor Power widened the tactic to cover all imperial business. Despite Butt’s disapproval, Parnell was becoming the effective Irish party leader and he deposed Butt as president of the Home Rule Confederation. Dublin too was warming to him, giving him a rapturous welcome home, beginning a rapport with the capital that would last until his death.

O’Connor Power took him to Mayo and Parnell began to pay an interest in land reform, vowing to “reclaim the waste lands of Ireland”. Parnell noted the problem of smaller tenants was not cheaper rent, but more land. He wanted farmers to own their land but British landlords remained powerful in Westminster and seemed unlikely to co-operate. Parnell attracted the interest of American Fenian leader John Devoy. Devoy offered support for Parnell in fighting for land rights and an independent Ireland, though Parnell did not respond. In the West Michael Davitt led a new militant movement to advance the land issue. Parnell, Davitt and Devoy met in 1879 though at this stage Davitt described Parnell’s attitude as “friendly neutrality”. Parnell agreed that the land question was vital, but he thought it could be solved constitutionally within the United Kingdom.

That winter, wet weather, crop failures and falling prices threatened Ireland with another Famine, though this time the rural population would not passively accept disaster. Antipathy increased against landlords especially in the west. Davitt invited Parnell to speak in Westport and after the Irish National Land League was set in Dublin in November 1879, Parnell became its new president. He set off across the Atlantic on a fundraising mission, and his respectability attracted wealthy Irish Americans who were wary of Fenianism. In two triumphal months he visited 62 cities and first spoke of breaking “the last link” with England. It was also the first time people referred to him as the “uncrowned king of Ireland”.

He hurried home for the 1880 election which saw Gladstone’s Liberals defeat the Conservative government. The Irish Parliament Party was mainly successful in the west of Ireland, and Parnell was only narrowly reelected party leader by 23 votes to 18, in a nominal total of 59 MPs. The Land League committed to the removal of landlordism and Parnell tried to steer the party in that radical direction, despite his own ambiguous position as a landlord.

In the middle of the political storm, Parnell began his relationship with Englishwoman Katherine O’Shea, wife of Whiggish Home Rule MP Captain William O’Shea. Katherine (Katey to friends and Kitty to enemies) had lived apart from her husband since 1875. Aged 35, she entranced Parnell on their first meeting in 1880. The relationship developed quickly and he moved into her house in Eltham, south of London, though Parnell claimed he was married “to his country”. The relationship was common knowledge in London political circles by 1881 and Captain O’Shea lied when he said he was unaware of it. Katherine said her husband encouraged her. Bew believes O’Shea calculated that the relationship would bring him political advantage.

Most people in Ireland were blissfully unaware of the “Chief”‘s new status amid deeper worries. Agrarian outrages were increasing and calls for change heightened when the House of Lords rejected a moderate Compensation for Disturbance Bill to help evicted tenants. The peasant mood strengthened to refuse to pay rents. The government wanted to arrest Parnell for extremist rhetoric, but worried that no Dublin jury would convict him. In 1881 the government announced the arrest of Davitt. Parnell and his angry Irish MPs were expelled from parliament. With the Land League bent on revolution, Parnell stressed a parliamentary solution was still viable. He was happy when Gladstone introduced the “Three F’s” bill providing a fixed period tenure at fair price and for free sale of the tenant’s interest. Parnell tried to steer a course between peaceful support of the government position and potentially dangerous agitation. At a Land League meeting Parnell said they needed to “test the act” but decided tenants should determine fair rent not the land commission appointed by the government.

He was finally arrested in Dublin on October 13, 1881. Charged with “treasonable practices” he was taken to Kilmainham. He believed the timing was fortunate, as he wrote to pregnant Katherine. “The movement is breaking fast and all will be quiet in a few months, when I shall be released.” Parnell’s lieutenants were less sanguine and when they denounced the arrest, they were arrested too. The internees called for a general strike against rents and the government immediately suppressed the Land League, urged on by Irish Chief Secretary William Forster.

This only added to the agrarian outrages as secret societies took over, which Parnell predicted. By March 1882 violence was worse than ever in Ireland and the government was ready to compromise. Parnell was released on parole in April to attend his nephew’s funeral in Paris and went to Eltham where he saw Katherine and their dead newborn son. The mourning Parnell then returned to prison in Dublin, where he instructed Captain O’Shea to take a letter to Gladstone requesting the release of his comrades and modifications to the Land Act in return for a commitment to end outrages. This, Parnell said, would enable cooperation between the Irish Party and Liberals in parliament. Gladstone was delighted, especially with the prospect of cooperation, which Bew said was a promise O’Shea extracted out of Parnell. Nevertheless, the so-called Kilmainham Treaty had widespread support across Ireland. Forster resigned and on May 5 Gladstone appointed Frederick Cavendish as Irish Chief Secretary. A day later Cavendish was walking in Phoenix Park with his undersecretary Thomas Burke when both were stabbed to death. These murders wrecked the Kilmainham Treaty and instead of land reform, the government brought in a severe coercion bill. The devastated Parnell considered resigning but was persuaded to stay on. But he would become a more conservative nationalist with a new organisation behind him.

In October 1882 Parnell began the Irish National League with the support of the Catholic Church. Unlike the Land League, the National League’s focus was on national not agrarian issues. In 1883 the League arranged for a “tribute” to help the heavily indebted Parnell. A papal order of disapproval had the opposite effect with subscriptions pouring in, including from Irish church leader Archbishop Croke. That year too, Katherine had another baby, a daughter, who survived, and a second daughter was born the following year.

Parnell photographed in November 1881. Photo: Library of Congress

Thanks to the National League, Home Rule moved to the centre of the political agenda. In 1884 the franchise was widened, while Parnell introduced a watertight pledge for Irish members to support his objectives. In 1885 the League signed a “Concordat” with the Irish Catholic Church in which the church would support Parnell in return for Catholic control of the education system. Parnell’s dominance of the party was complete and with an election due, a strong, disciplined and united Irish party backed by the clergy, would hold the balance of power.

O’Shea had the ear of government minister Joseph Chamberlain and persuaded him that Parnell might settle for what was called “the central board scheme” which would devolve education and communication powers to an Irish board. Parnell was appalled and in a Cork speech demanded the “restitution of Grattan’s parliament”. The speech contained his most enduring phrase: “No man has a right to say to his country: ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no further’ and we have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the progress of Ireland’s nationhood and never shall.” The words are now on his statue and were often repeated by later nationalists, but Bew says Parnell had a narrow meaning and was marking out the maximum territory he could negotiate within. Grattan’s parliament (1782-1800) was Protestant only and not as independent as Parnell made out.

In June 1885 the Liberal government was defeated on the floor and a Conservative government took over with Lord Salisbury as prime minister. The Tories came to a temporary compromise with Parnell, agreeing to drop the coercion bill and passing the Ashbourne Act as the first step in creating a peasant landowning class in Ireland. After the Tories appointed pro-Home Rule Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Carnarvon, Parnell issued a manifesto for Irish voters in Britain to vote Tory in the election, held in October. This was wishful thinking on his part as the balance of forces in the Tories remained strongly unionist. But it also reflected Parnell’s politics. Home Rule aside, he was a Tory.

In England Parnell’s manifesto prevented a Liberal landslide, though they still won 86 more seats than the Tories. But that was exactly the same amount of seats the Irish Parliamentary Party won, taking almost every Irish seat outside north-east Ulster. Tories were disappointed Parnell had not given them power and ended their flirtation with Home Rule. Parnell quickly tossed them out of office. Around the same time Gladstone’s son Herbert flew the “Hawarden Kite“, a press declaration from the family home that his father was considering an Irish settlement. Gladstone became prime minister again on February 1, 1886 and made a commitment for some form of Irish autonomy.

There remained one major fly in Parnell’s ointment. In January Captain O’Shea convinced him to support him as candidate for Galway city, against the advice of lieutenants Tim Healy, John Dillon and William O’Brien. There was almost certainly blackmail involved. Nevertheless Parnell survived the Galway crisis and began to lock horns with the new PM. Gladstone may have been converted to Home Rule, but he was also keenly aware of Irish Unionist resistance. Parnell persuaded him that the problem was southern Protestant landlords but neither took the Ulster Unionists seriously enough, who worried not just about “Rome Rule” but also losing access to free trade in imperial markets.

Gladstone came up with a credit scheme to pay out distressed landlords and linked a Home Rule Bill with a Land Bill. Though many in Ireland believed it did not go far enough, Parnell said it was a “fair solution” that would lead to autonomy. But the real problem was Gladstone’s own party, many of whom thought it went too far. Gladstone saw the bill might be defeated in a vote, while the even more conservative House of Lords was resolutely opposed. The land reform was abandoned though debate on Home Rule Bill continued. Tories complained Home Rule would lead to demarcation disputes and Protestants would suffer under a Catholic dominated parliament. Parnell reminded Westminster that London had the ultimate power, in the event of breaches. It was in vain, MPs including Joseph Chamberlain deserted the Liberals to join the new Liberal Unionist grouping and the Bill was defeated. In the July 1886 general election they helped bring the Tories back to power.

Parnell blamed Chamberlain for snatching triumph from his grasp. Chamberlain would link Parnell with agrarian crime which surged again in Ireland in 1887 but Chamberlain’s Irish contact O’Shea played his part too. Realising that the Home Rule failure had ended his hopes of a sinecure, O’Shea resigned his seat in Galway. The only thing restraining him from hurting Parnell was Katherine’s 93-year-old “Aunt Ben” who was expected to leave a large sum to her niece. If O’Shea was still married to her he could expect to get some of the money.

In 1886 new Irish chief secretary Arthur Balfour launched new and drastic coercion action. Meanwhile Tim Healy began a new “Plan of Campaign” for tenants to refuse to pay rent which would instead be put in an estate fund for use in the event of landlord retaliation. Parnell was opposed as he thought it would restrain the alliance with the Liberals and believed Home Rule was the more important objective. He was determining whether Irish MPs would sit on at Westminster after Home Rule. Initially leaning towards complete withdrawal, which might attract Tory votes, by 1888 he accepted that retention was needed, as many Irish questions would still be decided by London after Home Rule.

But his enemies were on the move. On April 18, 1887 the Times published a letter purporting to be from Parnell justifying the Phoenix Park murders. Parnell said the letter was a “villainous and bare-faced forgery” but opponents did not accept his version. Parnell returned to Ireland where observers worried over his health issues, but he remained remarkably calm. Tensions increased when Police fired on demonstrators at Mitcheltown killing three. Parnell explicitly disavowed political violence. Then the Times issued a second supposed Parnell letter urging people to “make it hot for old Forster and co”. Parnell demanded a parliamentary inquiry to settle the matter, but the Tories and Chamberlain gave practical aid to the Times and also investigated Nationalist crimes more generally. Taking place between 1888-89, the inquiry was loaded and took the view the Land League was a conspiracy. Towards the end Dublin journalist Richard Pigott was exposed as the forger, though Parnell was disappointed it was not O’Shea. Parnell gave evidence in May 1889 and in a poor performance misled parliament about his connections with the Fenians in the 1870s. “Parnell gave the impression that he knew nothing about the movement he was supposed to be leading,” one observer noted. Nevertheless his enemies had been exposed trying to dishonourably discredit him. In triumph, he met Gladstone at Hawarden before Christmas 1889, seemingly at the peak of his powers as Irish leader.

All that crashed around him barely a week later when O’Shea filed for divorce, citing Parnell as co-respondent. O’Shea had nothing to lose, as when Aunt Ben finally died she left her money to Katherine in a way that O’Shea could not touch. Parnell accepted the charge of adultery but said he followed a gentleman’s code of honour and never deceived O’Shea. Parnell now wanted to marry the mother of his two children and did not contest the action. He believed O’Shea could be “squared away” with a £20,000 bribe to confess his own adultery but he could not come up with the money. Bew said Parnell lost his “unique position of power and authority for the want of a ready £20,000 in 1890.”

Initially the Irish party rallied around Parnell, offering unequivocal support. Even when the divorce case started in November 1890, the bishops stayed silent believing it to be a political matter. It took the English “nonconformist conscience” to begin the rebellion. Many of Gladstone’s own supporters would no longer support an Irish alliance with Parnell at the helm. Gladstone sought out an intermediary, Justin McCarthy, to let Parnell know. However McCarthy either failed to contact Parnell or if he did, failed to impress upon him the import of Gladstone’s words, and even more remarkably failed to tell anyone else. Gladstone also sent his letter to English Liberal MP and Parnell’s friend John Morley, but he too failed to inform Parnell.

When the Irish Parliamentary Party met on November 25, Parnell and most others present remained unaware of Gladstone’s position. Parnell defended himself against O’Shea and appealed to party loyalty before being unanimously reelected to the chair. After the meeting Morley finally showed Parnell Gladstone’s letter. Parnell refused to resign. Gladstone then leaked the letter to the press. Parnell went on the attack and leaked details of his Hawarden meeting about Gladstone’s weak Home Rule proposals. But his argument about unreliable Liberals was undermined by his own alliance with the party. With the crisis growing, Irish party members called an extraordinary meeting over Parnell’s objections. Five party leaders including O’Brien and Dillon issued a manifesto repudiating Parnell. Parnell clashed with Healy over what exactly happened at Hawarden, and when Parnell supporter John Redmond referred to him as “master of the party”, Healy quipped “Who is to be the mistress of the party?” Parnell called Healy a “cowardly scoundrel”. Any hope of rapprochement ended and 45 members withdrew from the party room leaving Parnell with 27 followers. A few days later, the bishops called on Irish Catholics to repudiate Parnell.

Yet Parnell returned to Dublin to a hero’s welcome. Anti-Parnellites had seized the offices of Parnell’s paper United Ireland, and a furious Parnell led a crowd which stormed the building and scuffled with opponents. It seemed to be therapeutic, Parnell telling Katherine it was splendid fun. “I wish I could burgle my own premises every day”. But few outside Dublin believed Parnell could turn around the Liberals to support him and Home Rule. His candidate was rejected in a North Kilkenny byelection, but he still refused to compromise. The last year of his life was war to the knife.

Parnellites lost two more by-elections but he remained undaunted. He married Katherine at Steyning registry office in Sussex on June 25, 1891 two days before his 45th birthday. The wedding was the last straw for the previously supportive Catholic Freeman’s Journal. Opponents questioned the wisdom of having a landlord at the head of a Home Rule movement and Parnell did not help his cause by saying the land question was exaggerated. Parnell spent one last desperate campaign in the west, though western smallholders were no longer behind him. A sectarian element emerged with many opponents saying a Protestant could never lead the Irish masses. Parnell addressed this head on in a Belfast speech saying that until the religious prejudices of Northern Protestants were conciliated, Ireland could never be united or enjoy “perfect freedom”. It is a truth that Ireland still grapples with today.

Parnell’s speech fell on deaf ears in the south and it was his last major intervention. Anti-Parnellites gloried in his physical deterioration and even hinted that he would commit suicide. Parnell spoke to hostile crowds in Athlone, Castlebar and Westport where a fiddler taunted him with The Girl I Left Behind Me. The Connaught Tribune saw Parnell as a relic and “all but a dead man”. In October he returned home to Brighton to be with Katherine. She recorded his last words as “Kiss me sweet Wifie, and I will try to sleep a little,” and he died on October 6, 1891.

Parnell’s death did not reunite the Irish party, contrary to most expectations. The split was too bitter, and the Anti-Parnellites were themselves divided. Supporter Augustus Moore said Parnell was not inventive, eloquent or resourceful but he was honest and earnest unlike those who “deserted him for Barabbas.” The party was reunited in the 20th century under John Redmond, and achieved peasant land ownership with the 1903 Wyndham Act, and finally won Home Rule in 1912. But it was never enacted due to the First World War, and more importantly, the resistance of Ulster’s Protestants. Not until late in life, did Parnell ever come to grips that two different peoples lived in Ireland. Though a Protestant, he could only identify with Southern Irish Protestants. Yet his Belfast speech was a transformative suggestion. Bew says it might stand better on his Dublin statue than “the windy blast of ‘patriotic’ rhetoric” which currently adorns it.

Famine in Ulster: Rise of the Orange Order

Detail from the Famine stain glass window at Belfast City Hall. Photo: Belfast City Council

In my last post, I talked about how history has judged Treasury Assistant Secretary Charles Trevelyan poorly when it comes to the Irish Famine. The post mentioned how Irish historian Christine Kinealy has led what became the post revisionist school of Famine researchers. Kinealy has written extensively on the Famine and founded Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. This post examines her 2002 work The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion, written after the 150th anniversary commemorations, particularly how the Famine exacerbated tensions between Ireland’s two major religious groups. Most of Ireland’s eight million population in 1845 were Catholic, but there were also one and a half million Protestants, mainly in the north-east.

Kinealy said the Famine was an all-Ireland experience, though it has rarely been seen that way in Northern Ireland. When the British government proposed a rate-in-aid tax on all Ireland in 1849, Northern Irish ratepayers opposed it as it would keep up “an army of beggars fed out of the industry of Ulster”. The Newry Telegraph claimed the blight did not cause distress in the north because they were “an industrious people who desire to work”.

These stereotypes were passed down to the 20th century. When the Free State government undertook a national survey of famine folk memories in the 1930s, the Northern Unionist government would not allow it in their jurisdiction. Even when in 1997 Belfast City Council erected a stain-glass window in memory of Famine victims in the city, DUP councillor Sammy Wilson called it Sinn Fein propaganda, saying there was no evidence of Famine in Belfast.

Kinealy disagreed, saying Belfast suffered acutely in the Famine. Mortality in Belfast and Lurgan workhouses in 1847 were among the highest in Ireland while a Quaker visitor to county Down likened it to the worse he had seen in west Cork. Ulster lost 17pc of its population to Famine, which was not far behind Connacht and worse than Leinster. As in the west, dependency on potatoes grew in the north in the early 1820-30s as the domestic linen industry collapsed. After the second failed harvest in 1846 the price of oatmeal skyrocketed in Belfast and by the end of 1846 the city’s mayor wanted the government to suspend the distillation of alcohol so grain could be used to feed people. There were food riots as hungry labourers demonstrated at bakeries demanding free bread and police arrested ringleaders.

The British government was aware of grain shortages and when the blight first struck, prime minister Peel took two measures in response. He created a Relief Commission, funded jointly by government and landlords and secretly buying Indian corn (the infamous “Peel’s Brimstone” which caused dysentery). Longer term Peel wanted to remove Ireland’s dependence on potatoes by repealing Britain’s Corn Laws. But he tied that measure to a coercion bill which was defeated in 1846, handing over power to Lord John Russell’s Whig government. Russell had similar ambitions for Ireland as Peel. Initially a minority government, it won outright power in the 1847 election but was dominated by a radical bloc which prioritised British land reform over Irish Famine relief. It led to a downgrade of Irish public works, which treasurer Charles Wood viewed more as a punitive tool for moral regeneration than a relief outlet. As Famine peaked in 1847, landlord-dominated relief committees often misapplied funding. The government moved to Poor Law relief supported by local taxation, which increased large-scale clearances. Many more voluntarily surrendered their holdings under the terms of a new Quarter Acre Clause, which denied relief to occupiers of more than this quantity of land, across Ireland.

The Famine coincided with increasing tension between Catholic and Protestants. The Orange Order was founded in the 18th century but was suppressed by the 1823 Unlawful Oaths Bill. In 1845 Peel decided not to renew the legislation and the Grand Orange Lodge reformed. It wanted the “Romish Emancipation Bill…entirely repealed, and the constitution restored to its original integrity” and immediately attracted a large membership. The Belfast Protestant Journal scolded those who did not support the July 12 marches for “fold(ing) their arms in cold indifference while the enemy has been invading.”

The Orange Order noted measures Peel had passed to placate the Irish Catholic Church and resented and feared the church’s growing political power. The Orange belief that Catholics were traitorous grew after the Young Ireland rebellion. The Young Irelanders had split from O’Connell over his alliance with the Whigs and were gradually radicalised by the Famine, Chartist agitation in Britain, and the wave of revolutions across Europe in early 1848. The ecumenical Young Ireland movement included several prominent Protestant leaders and seemed to be natural allies with the Protestant north. In 1847, Catholic Young Irelander Thomas Francis Meagher told a Belfast meeting that Repeal of the Act of Union would not result in a Catholic Ascendancy. But most Protestants rejected his overtures.

When July 12, 1848 came round, a pastor opened Orange Order festivities by demanding that Protestant Repealers among them should “immediately take the train to the asylum”. Later that month Young Ireland was driven to the precipice by the suspension of habeas corpus, and its revolution was a miserable failure. But its repercussions were significant. Rather than bringing Catholics and Protestants together as they hoped, it reawakened the Orange Order’s claim to be loyal and true defenders of Britain and contributed to a polarisation between those for and against the Act of Union. Belfast became the centre of unionism. In the south, conservative Catholic merchants and strong farmers had survived the famine and helped the Catholic Church strengthen its position under the ultramontane leadership of Dr Paul Cullen, for whom home rule was indeed Rome Rule. The rest of the century saw Ireland’s politics play out on religious lines.

The Famine was forgotten in the North. Even in the South it was consigned to folk memory. There were two standard 20th century texts: Robin Dudley Edwards and Desmond Williams’ The Great Famine (1944) and Cecil Woodham Smith’s The Great Hunger (1962). Taoiseach Eamon de Valera commissioned Edwards and Williams book, but was disappointed in its lack of nationalist zeal, it was well received by historians and became a bulwark of the revisionist school which depicted the Famine as inevitable. By contrast, Woodham Smith’s book was panned by historians as a “great novel” but became a hugely popular best seller.

The Northern Irish Troubles in the late 1960s contributed to constraint on the Famine as blaming the British government could be construed as support for the IRA’s campaign of violence. It was not until the sesquicentenery commeroration of the Famine (1995-98) that scholars such as Kinealy began to challenge the revisionism. Not coincidentally this was the time of the Northern Irish peace initiatives. Revisionist Irish historian Mary Daly said that the improving Northern Irish situation allowed Irish people to talk about aspects of history “we may previously have been uncomfortable with”.

A new Labor government in London also helped. British prime minister Tony Blair’s 1997 Famine apology was famously read out by actor Gabriel Byrne at a televised commemoration event in County Cork. “Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy,” Byrne quoted Blair. Kinealy said the apology acknowledged that the Famine was as much Britain’s history as Ireland’s. But Unionist deputy leader John Taylor said Blair’s apology was unnecessary and would lead to further demands. “The Irish mentality is one of victimhood,” Taylor said. Taylor’s words show Irish Catholics and Protestants share one thing in common: Old habits die hard either side of the border.

Charles Trevelyan’s corn: the Treasury secretary and the Irish Famine

Eden Ellis’s 1848 portrait of Trevelyan at the Treasury. Courtesy: National Trust

In the last half century Charles Trevelyan has become the archvillain of the Irish Famine. The Assistant Secretary of the Treasury has been condemned as the man most responsible for British policy between 1845 and 1850 when, under two different governments, one million Irish people died and another million left the country. Academic papers, books, songs and newspapers have held Trevelyan responsible for the British government’s meanness, bigotry and incompetence in Ireland, some seeing it as deliberate depopulation to restructure Irish society in the name of political economy and Protestant evangelism. Robin Haines’s meticulously researched Charles Trevelyan and the Irish Famine (2004) is an important corrective to the accepted history.

Charles Edward Trevelyan came from a wealthy Somerset family of Cornish extraction. Born in 1807, Trevelyan had an Irish grandmother and travelled to Ireland in 1843 to research distant relatives. He was educated in the East India Company training college at Haileybury, Hertfordshire and graduated top of his class. In 1826 he went to India to learn Hindi and Persian at Fort William College, Calcutta and was assigned to the revenue department in Delhi. He was regarded as a young man of outstanding ability and strong civil sense. He gained a reputation for settling local disputes and put his career in jeopardy when he accused a superior of corruption (the case was proven). Trevelyan made an important ally in Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay when he married his sister Hannah Macaulay. Aged 33 in 1840, Trevelyan came home to take the senior role at the Treasury, Assistant Secretary. He served in the role for almost two decades before being appointed governor of Madras. During the Famine years Britain distributed £10,000,000 in government grants and loans to Ireland (0.3pc of GNP) while administering £1,000,000 in private subscriptions. This money was raised under the direction of Dublin Castle, but administrative and fiscal responsibility lay with Trevelyan as the chief treasury official.

In religion Trevelyan was evangelical, which modern historians have often used as pejorative shorthand for “hard-heartedness, cultural insensitivity, humourlessness, and self-righteousness”. Trevelyan believed in the superiority of his Christianity but Haines said he was tolerant of Catholicism and little different from the “relaxed broad-church episcopalianism” of his class. Nor was Trevelyan as powerful as modern texts make him out to be. It was not until later in the 19th century that senior civil servants became policy advisors, acting on reforms proposed by Trevelyan himself. Trevelyan did have considerable discretion, especially as a new inexperienced Whig administration took power in 1846, but he consulted daily with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and had regular meetings with Treasury Lords and other ministers.

Trevelyan was economically orthodox, like the Robert Peel and John Russell governments he served. The Tories and Whigs practised laissez-faire principles of “small government” yet both had interventionist policies in Ireland. One of Trevelyan’s tasks in 1846 was to prove to the British tax-paying public that Irish distress was real and public works served an important purpose. Had the blight struck in the more optimistic 1850s, said Haines, Britain would have been more generous. In the 1840s coffers were low after decades of low taxes and heavy Napoleonic-era debt repayment. Britain was economically depressed leading to a financial crisis in October 1847. Any government spending, especially if it interfered with free markets, stimulated political anxiety, influenced by a press that was critical of Ireland and believed its distress was exaggerated.

In 1846 Trevelyan was vexed at the Times‘ refusal to take the crisis seriously. His attitude was that official measures should not disturb ordinary trade but people should not be allowed to starve. People did starve but disease in overcrowded workhouses killed just as many. Irish officials criticised Trevelyan but Whitehall was caught in bureacratic crossfire between Dublin Castle and Westminster. Many Irish barbs at him were really aimed at Russell and his Treasurer Charles Wood. Dublin Castle pettily refused to find office space for Trevelyan’s key Irish official Sir Randolph Routh. Trevelyan was never “dictator of relief” and his bosses overruled him if he was too “generous”. Russell was infuriated that 1847 profits from non-potato crops worth £40 million lined landlords’ pockets rather than feed the poor. He thought unlimited government funding would worsen the problem. Even after the second potato failure in 1846, Wood believed that the crisis was exaggerated, despite daily briefings from Trevelyan.

In early 1847 reports of mass death poured in from the west of Ireland. No one knew the exact number as many bodies were interred at night with no burial service. Nearly three quarters of a million people were surviving on public works. Yet Britain was suffering compassion fatigue, and private charity efforts failed to raise much money. The 1847 potato crop had minimal blight but the crop was scanty due to a lack of seed potatoes. Russell knew that Ireland’s distress would continue but instructed Trevelyan to end support of public works. If some regions were fed entirely at government expense, discontent and sedition would result elsewhere, the prime minister reasoned. Landlords would have to sacrifice rents to feed their tenants.

Resistance grew in Ireland against paying the increased poor rate and many Poor Law Unions became bankrupt. The Relief Commission was disbanded, and 22 distressed unions relied on the generosity of the British Association. Following government policy Trevelyan refused to re-open public works. Fever and dysentery struck Dublin and Trevelyan urged staff to move to the suburbs. The situation worsened as English banks folded while disaffected labourers in Clare and Tipperary rioted against the lack of public works. A Clare priest quoted in a letter to Trevelyan said, “Ireland is like a farm that is never manured, all goes out nothing comes in, the end must be exhaustion.”

In January 1848 Whig journal Edinburgh Review published an anonymous piece, The Irish Crisis. Trevelyan wrote it, as colleagues who vetted it, including Russell and Wood, were aware. Trevelyan’s “crisis” was not just the potato failure but the accompanying shortfall of exchequer funding. He saw no irony in believing the crisis ended when the Board of Works and Relief Commissions disbanded, leaving local government in charge. As Haines said, its publication was precipitous and premature, especially as the potato failed again in 1848. But its immediate impact was positive. Renowned Irish priest Father Theobald Mathew complimented it, while British observers thought it was a comprehensive answer to overseas critics.

The final paragraph contains a sentence often used to pillory Trevelyan: “The deep and inveterate root of social evil remained, and this has been laid bare by a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence”. Trevelyan’s “direct stroke” has been interpreted as referring to the Famine, whereas he was referring to the God-given chance for the gentry to save the poor from starving. Haines said Trevelyan meant that having endured the blight, the government had to implement permanent measures to stimulate economic and social advancement.

As 1848 progressed, Trevelyan worried about the threat of insurrection in Britain and Ireland. Chartism was on the march and he advised the government to suspend habeas corpus and arrest its leaders for sedition. He was delighted with a “great & bloody victory” when 40,000 armed police stared down the mainland threat in April, but Ireland remained a concern. A failed rebellion in July was followed by another disastrous potato harvest a month later. Trevelyan argued against government purchase of grain as private trade was bringing in enough.

In the west, people continued to die in large numbers. Trevelyan analysed the figures in mid 1848 and reported that Ireland’s population was down by a million and “emigration was still in active progress.” Yet Trevelyan and the government he served believed they had done a good job, removing unsustainable small holdings. Famine could have been even worse without the government public works program which employed 700,000 people at its peak. Trevelyan told Father Mathew that “although there is still much that is painful & gloomy in the state of Ireland, I am satisfied that a social regeneration is taking place.” The deaths continued into 1849-50 as did support for distressed Poor Law Unions.

History has not judged the Russell government well for allowing starvation and death to devastate an island that was part of the world’s richest economy. Russell’s biographer blames his hatred of Irish landlords and his “Malthusian fear” of long-term relief. Haines said the Whigs were influenced by an empty Treasury. Peel has been better judged by history but a Tory government would have done little better, and were perhaps lucky to lose power when they did.

Trevelyan has been judged more harshly than either prime minister. Haines thinks the onomatopoeic resonance between “Trevelyan” and “Treasury” contributed to the problem. Early Irish historians understood the constraints Trevelyan worked under, but his reputation fell drastically after the publication of two texts in the 1960s.

The first was Jennifer Hart’s 1960 academic article Sir Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury. Haines says Hart relied on a small selection of Trevelyan’s letters to make generalisations which thorough examination of his correspondence does not support. Two years after Hart’s text came Cecil Woodham Smith’s bestseller The Great Hunger. Woodham Smith relied greatly on Hart’s work and her sample letters were guided by Hart.

Hart argued that Trevelyan believed the Irish Famine “was the judgement of God on an indolent and unselfreliant people (and) God had sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson”. This has often been quoted as damning proof of Trevelyan’s uncaring attitude to Ireland. However Haines said it is a misreading of two letters, one to landlord Lord Monteagle, the other to Father Mathew. Haines said Trevelyan’s hostility in letters at this time was not against the Irish poor but against the landlords who were trying to get government expenditure diverted to improve their own estates. Trevelyan’s more common, though less well quoted, directive was to ensure that “the People cannot under any circumstances be allowed to starve.”

Haines accepts that the writing of history is always revisionist and quoting O’Gráda, says shattering dangerous myths is the historian’s social responsibility. John Mitchel’s The Last Conquest of Ireland Perhaps (1861) first brought the view that while the potato caused the blight, the English caused the Famine. A revisionist school led by Robert Dudley Edwards, Roy Foster and Mary Daly reacted against Mitchel’s thesis and their semi-benign view of English involvement became orthodoxy by the 1960s. Influenced by Hart, Cecil Woodham Smith began the post-revisionist school, blaming the British government, and especially Trevelyan for wanting to clear Ireland of its surplus peasantry. Her book drew many admirers with some comparing the Famine to Nazi genocide. British historian A.J.P. Taylor concluded “all Ireland was a Belsen”.

Hart’s paraphrasing has been repeated many times, spreading “proof” that Trevelyan hated the Irish Catholic poor. Yet he was a great friend of Father Mathew and he despised sectarianism, chastening officials who demonstrated anti-Irish or ultra-Protestant tendencies. Haines said that while Hart was not responsible for the way her work was interpreted, it has sustained the caricature of Trevelyan that still largely prevails.

One of the worst examples was Robert Kee’s influential television series Ireland: a history (1980) which presented a grim and ancient Trevelyan (who was only 38 at the time) as a monstrous detail-obsessed dictator of relief. Kee admitted in the accompanying book that he took liberties but for TV purposes “there were more important considerations than being wholly fair to Trevelyan”. Simon Schama repeated the charges against Trevelyan in A history of Britain (2002), not even mentioning the role of politicians in the Famine. Trevelyan’s reputation shattered further with the popularisation of the ballad The Fields of Athenry. Now sung at many sporting events in Ireland and elsewhere, it tells the story of a young woman lamenting the departure of her convict lover to Botany Bay. Its first verse goes:

By a lonely prison wall
I heard a young girl calling
Michael, they have taken you away
For you stole Trevelyan’s corn
So the young might see the morn
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay

Often believed to be a traditional Famine era song, Athenry was written in 1979 by Pete St John and was recorded by Paddy Reilly in 1982. The phrase “Trevelyan’s corn” does not appear in folkloric sources, unlike “Peel’s Brimstone”. Few folk balladeers would have even heard of Trevelyan. Famine interviews collected by the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1930s put the blame on rapacious landlords, not London leaders like Peel, Russell or Trevelyan, whom Cormac O’ Gráda says “were remote and unfamiliar to the underclasses”.

Trevelyan was a contradiction; imperious and self-possessed, but also high-minded, generous and tolerant. He was wedded to 18th century Enlightenment values including the inviolability of private property and free trade but was hardened by the Famine. By 1848 he no longer insisted that “none be allowed to starve”. He believed the only way forward was to institute social welfare and economic advancement to stop it from happening again. Trevelyan was not the tyrant who brought death and suffering to Ireland on an unimaginable scale. Haines said the blight caused the Famine, not the English. It infected not just the tubers but “the fissured subsoil of a vulnerable economy poised to collapse under the weight of an unprecedented natural disaster”. Britain’s responsibility for that economy being so vulnerable is a moot point, but the subject of a different book.

The Politics of Repeal

British and Irish MPs sat in the Houses of Parliament in London during the 1840s. Photo: Author’s collection.

Irish historian Kevin Nowlan wrote his landmark work The Politics of Repeal to examine how the Irish Famine influenced politics in Ireland and Britain. He soon realised that most factors pre-dated the Famine and found that 1841 was a better starting point. This was the year Daniel O’Connell began agitating to repeal the Act of Union, and Robert Peel became prime minister for the second time. O’Connell put Irish Repeal at the centre of British politics and it became Peel’s greatest headache as premier.

The Act of Union dates to 1801 when prime minister William Pitt dissolved the Protestant-only Dublin parliament. Following the 1798 rebellion, Pitt wanted to head off French revolutionary ideas in Ireland and believed political integration and free trade would encourage English capitalists to invest in Irish cheap labour. Pitt promised Catholic Emancipation within the United Kingdom, safeguarded by an overall Protestant majority. However George III’s objections denied Emancipation until Daniel O’Connell won it in 1829. The “Liberator” O’Connell then supported a Whig government in parliament and won modest reforms, including national schools, commutation of tithes, fairer municipal government and Catholic appointments to public office. The Whigs were defeated in the 1841 election and though new prime minister Peel accepted the need for reform in Ireland, O’Connell could not consider an alliance with him. They had a long and acrimonious relationship, almost fighting a duel in 1815 when Peel was Irish Chief Secretary. Peel viewed O’Connell as a violent demagogue while O’Connell derided him as “Orange Peel” reliant on Irish Tories. O’Connell would now concentrate on Repeal of the Union.

The Catholic Church initially showed little enthusiasm for O’Connell’s new Repeal Association. The liberal-minded O’Connell tried to win non-Catholic support and important Repealers including Thomas Davis, William Smith O’Brien and John Mitchel were Protestant. Some Northern Protestant reformers like Sharman Crawford wanted a more federal model, but most Irish Protestants preferred the Union. With the electoral system allowing only the wealthiest to vote, Irish Tories trounced Repealers in the 1841 election.

Initially Peel left management of Irish affairs to the parallel unelected administration in Dublin Castle. The Castle’s top officials were Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary, both Protestants, with the distinction between their roles ill-defined. Peel claimed his government would show no religious favour but Dublin Castle filled key roles with Protestant appointees. Irish issues filtered to the top of Peel’s agenda over the question of funding Catholic education, especially Maynooth College, the Catholic seminary founded in 1795. The college survived with inadequate state funding and the Catholic hierarchy petitioned Peel to increase the grant. Peel saw merit in the proposals but Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary were divided on the issue, so the prime minister ignored the requests. This was dangerous as O’Connell’s Repeal movement was gaining momentum.

Repeal was an elastic concept. O’Connell wanted a Catholic-influenced Irish parliament but was vague about whether a Dublin parliament would be answerable to London. Nowlan says O’Connell’s genius was not precise definitions but his emphatic, simple propositions as symbols of Irish claims. This gave O’Connell wiggle room to negotiate but it meant his views often did not match the expectations of some supporters, especially the group that became known as Young Ireland. That this was an intractable problem, was shown in Young Ireland’s own later split between moderates like Charles Gavan Duffy and William Smith O’Brien and radicals like John Mitchel. Duffy’s and Thomas Davis’s influential Nation newspaper, founded in 1842, had considerable literary quality and was a rallying point for Young Ireland demands for a new nation of Ireland. Young Ireland tried to win over landlords and middle-class Protestants but were no more successful than O’Connell. Young Ireland would remain wedded to British constitutional links, even as it edged towards revolution.

Initially, O’Connell emphasised that only Repeal of the Act of Union would ensure Irish social and economic progress. He criticised the unpopular Irish Poor Law with its rigid workhouse test and wanted security of tenure for small farmers, though he postponed precise fixes to his future Irish parliament. He hosted large popular meetings across the south, which became the “monster meetings” of 1843. In February 1843 he led a three-day Dublin Corporation debate on Repeal and promised to settle for a “dependent parliament”, a moderate position which attracted widescale interest in Britain, and the important support of the Irish middle class including Catholic bishops. O’Connell pledged to gain three million members in three months. The Nation eagerly backed the campaign. O’Connell’s Repeal rent jumped substantially that year as the monster meetings spread belief that “Repeal was coming”. The scale, orderliness, and respectability of his meetings alarmed Dublin Castle which wanted new legislation to repress it. They were supported by the still formidable 80-year-old Duke of Wellington who managed government business in the House of Lords.

Home Secretary James Graham advised Peel to be cautious about changing the law as the British Anti-Corn Law League was organised on the same lines as the Repeal Association. But Peel could not ignore O’Connell and in May 1843 he warned parliament he would “prefer civil war to the dismemberment of the Empire”. O’Connell responded that he was obeying the law and he “set their blustering at defiance”. Dublin Castle dismissed magistrates sympathetic to O’Connell, but that just made the cause more popular.

O’Connell was at the height of his powers, but could not get London to budge. He began to argue for lesser reforms, unwilling to face Peel’s “civil war”. When the Repeal Association announced a final monster meeting at Clontarf, the notice mentioned “Repeal cavalry” and other military terms. O’Connell denounced the notice, but the damage was done and Dublin Castle banned the meeting. The government arrested O’Connell and others on charges of seditious conspiracy. The so-called “Traversers” were charged, convicted and jailed for several months, before the House of Lords overturned the verdict.

Peel had emerged triumphant from 1843 and began to wean Catholic support away from O’Connell. He ordered a commission under Lord Devon to examine Irish land issues, and he supported Catholic causes. Irish charities were run exclusively by Protestants but Peel’s Charitable Donations and Bequests Bill created a new ecumenical board including Catholic bishops. O’Connell opposed the bill as a state bid to control the Church but Peel’s bill passed with support from the moderate archbishops of Dublin and Armagh.

While his organisation was buoyed by his release from prison, O’Connell seemed chastened and backed away from major Irish reform. He courted Federalists like Crawford which alarmed Nation founders Charles Gavan Duffy and, especially, Thomas Davis who wanted “unbounded nationality”. Even when O’Connell abandoned federalism, the Protestant Davis began to find fault with O’Connell over religious matters.

In April 1845 Peel introduced a Maynooth Bill to raise the annual grant. Ultra Tories condemned it and Peel needed Whig support to pass the bill. While it was well received in Ireland, it was followed by the more problematic Academic Institutions (Ireland) bill. The Colleges Bill, as it became known, proposed to establish ecumenical university colleges in Belfast, Cork and Galway to complement the Protestant Trinity College in Dublin. Though it was based on the pioneering work of Waterford Catholic MP Thomas Wyse, Peel did not confer with clergy on the bill and both Protestant and Catholic bishops objected to its proposed secular nature. One Protestant Tory MP called them “godless colleges”, a refrain O’Connell soon made his own. As with the Bequests Bill, the Catholic hierarchy was divided. Moderates requested safeguards such as Catholic college appointees, paid chaplains, and penalties for proselyting, which the British government supported. This compromise was unacceptable to firebrand Catholic Archbishop of Tuam John MacHale who called it an “infidel, slavish and demoralising scheme.” The Repeal movement split over the bill. O’Connell decried the lack of a chair in Catholic theology at the colleges while his son John ramped up animosity by criticising Young Ireland supporters of the bill, especially Davis who worried that a Catholic ascendency would replace the Protestant one. As tensions over the bill bubbled, the Devon Commission released its report into Irish land problems. It found that superior prosperity in the north was due to the “Ulster custom” of tenant rights but its response offered nothing new apart from compensation for improvements. Even this modest proposal failed to pass parliament.

In autumn 1845 the first reports appeared of a potato blight in Ireland. Peel became convinced the protectionist British Corn Laws needed repeal, unlike the Act of the Union. His cabinet split on the matter and Peel resigned on December 5. Whig leader Lord John Russell was unable to form government, forcing Peel to change the Corn Laws in an unstable new government with the goodwill of the Whigs but without the support of protectionists. With an early election likely, O’Connell argued that Ireland needed to see what could be “squeezed out” of the Whigs.

The Young Irelanders disagreed, believing they needed not just defy the Tories but stand aloof from the Whigs, who also opposed Repeal. Peel was concerned with a breakdown of law and order in Ireland, not just due to the growing food shortage but because the Orange Order was threatening clashes with Repealers. Peel progressed a drastic coercion bill in tandem with Corn Law reform saying relief measures would be useless if lawlessness prevailed in Ireland. Under the Protection of Life (Ireland) bill, police could be drafted into proclaimed areas, curfews imposed, and collective fines levied to compensate victims of outrage, with penalties of 15-years transportation. The Whigs favoured the bill, but Irish MPs were outraged and obstructed it in parliament. The delay robbed Peel of the urgency he claimed was needed. Once the Corn Laws were passed, Russell’s Whigs joined O’Connell and the Tory Protectionists to defeat the coercion bill on a second reading. Peel’s government resigned and the path opened up for a new alliance between Russell and O’Connell. The potato failure was almost ignored during these debates. Peel had secretly bought American corn and introduced relief measures but his belief was that Irish property should support Irish poverty, a view the Russell government also held. In Opposition, Peel backed government famine measures with little criticism.

As Russell prepared to take power in July 1846, Irish disagreements exploded in public. O’Connell wanted to be rid of political embarrassment to get the best deal from the Whigs and looked for ways to expel Young Ireland from the Repeal Association. He set an elaborate trap with a proposal to insist on the use of peaceful and constitutional methods in the Association’s constitution. While no one was yet proposing the use of force, Young Irelanders objected to the universality of the “peace resolutions”, believing a more militant policy might some day be required. Following a tempestuous meeting where Thomas Francis Meagher made his “Sword” speech, Young Irelanders walked out of the Association.

Most saw this as a victory for O’Connell. Catholic bishops approved, ensuring that Young Ireland would never gain the trust of the religious people of the countryside. But shortly afterwards the potato crop failed a second time. O’Connell’s alliance with the Whigs was tarnished as Russell offered little beyond “promises and inadequate expedients”. Their Poor Unemployment Act provided some work but offered little to help people get affordable food. Young Ireland leader William Smith O’Brien took a step backwards after the split but Meagher and Richard O’Gorman wanted to take a more active part in Irish affairs. They took part in a Dublin protest meeting on December 2 with a promise to get organised in 1847.

O’Connell was stung into action. He met Young Irelanders on December 15 but the “peace resolutions” remained a stumbling block. In January Young Irelanders created the Irish Confederation as a new political movement, though O’Brien remained a reluctant leader. The Confederation urged landlords to embrace Repeal and formed Famine committees. The poor, meanwhile struggled through a harsh winter, with three quarters of a million people surviving on inadequate relief works. Treasury secretary Charles Trevelyan implemented government policy with great industry and sense of duty but also with a narrow, doctrinaire approach to state intervention. Russell and Trevelyan believed the Irish gentry were not doing enough. But those same landlords had influence in Whig circles including cabinet members Palmerston and Lansdowne and they ensured that little meaningful change would disturb established interests. Russell proposed to change the law to place the burden of supporting the poor on the Poor Law Unions. Russell’s Soup Kitchen’s Act saved lives in winter but there was no grand scheme to get people out of poverty. He refused to support Protectionist leader George Bentinck’s proposal to fund major railway development in Ireland.

The Repeal Association offered a feeble response, as its great leader was dying. While O’Connell went on pilgrimage to Rome, his son John met with Confederation leaders in May to discuss reunion. He admitted the Whig alliance had failed and wanted Young Ireland to return to the fold but he would not agree to dissolving both organisations and creating a new body. He also refused to stamp out “placehunting” as that would simply give Orange Protestants a monopoly of Irish public offices. His father died in Genoa on May 15 leaving Ireland without a capable leader. O’Connell’s death briefly spurred the Repeal Association in the general election that followed and the disloyal Young Irelanders failed to win any seats except O’Brien in Limerick and his Tasmanian friend Chisholm Anstey in Youghal. Yet it was not clear what the Repeal Association stood for under the younger O’Connell.

Meaningful action on the land question after the Devon Commission was foiled by property interests. The situation was worsened in 1847 by the Quarter Acre clause in the new Poor Law Bill which forced landholders with more than a quarter acre to quit their land to gain relief. Tenant leagues sprang up across Ireland and a new and original thinker’s work appeared in the Nation. James Fintan Lalor’s thesis was that Repeal was irrelevant and land tenure was a “mightier question”. Lalor accepted private land ownership but believed the “ultimate proprietor” was not the Crown but the people of Ireland. He wanted landlords to give tenant security and pledge allegiance to Ireland.

Moderate Young Irelanders including Duffy and the landlord O’Brien were sceptical but a radical wing led by John Mitchel enthusiastically backed Lalor. Mitchel’s proposals to extend land rights were defeated, leaving the Confederation without a cohesive land policy. Devin Reilly attacked the government for allowing export food to leave Ireland during the Famine, leaving a nation “coolly, gradually murdered”. Mitchel and Reilly resigned from the Confederate committee and founded the radical newspaper the United Irishman.

Ireland descended further into the mire. Relief schemes lapsed and many poor law unions became bankrupt, a situation worsened by a London financial crisis due to over-extended banks. Rural Irish people expressed their anger by refusing to pay rent. Troops were called out to support rent collectors, as landlords began largescale eviction of smallholders. By November 1847 agrarian outrages were a serious problem and Irish Lord Lieutenant Clarendon demanded a new coercion bill. The Crime and Outrages (Ireland) Bill enabled Clarendon to proclaim disturbed districts and draft in additional police but he believed it did not go far enough.

Confederate leaders Duffy and O’Brien had not opposed the bill, causing disquiet among younger supporters such as Meagher and O’Gorman. Having left the fold, Mitchel was less circumspect. Following Lalor, Mitchel was convinced Ireland’s political and social structure needed radical change. In February 1848 his United Irishman mocked the Lord Lieutenant as “Butcher Clarendon”.

The relationship between the Whig government and the Repeal Association was also fracturing. John O’Connell contacted Confederate moderates to seek reconciliation. Again reunion negotiations stalled over placehunting and the format of a combined organisation. When O’Connell’s brother Daniel resigned as Waterford MP to accept a British consular position, Meagher contested the February by-election against a Repeal candidate, hoping the contest would determine whether O’Connellites or Confederates would prevail in Ireland. But Meagher’s hometown support was mainly among those without the franchise and a Whig-aligned third candidate defeated both Repeal factions.

The disappointment both sides of the Repeal movement felt was replaced by exciting news of the overthrow of the French monarchy that same month. The near bloodless and classless revolution impressed Irish moderates and radicals alike. Many believed that a fearful Britain would capitulate to a united Irish call for Repeal supported by republicans in the new French government like Interior Minister Ledru-Rollin. Even the conservative O’Brien called for the formation of an Irish guard while Meagher demanded admission to the court of St James as Irish ambassadors. Both were charged with sedition for these statements. Once released on bail they joined a Confederate Irish mission to Paris.

New foreign minister Lamartine’s “Manifesto to Europe” seemed to encourage democratic movements across the continent, but the British embassy leaned on him not to support revolution in Ireland. Lamartine overruled Ledru-Rollin ensuring cordial Anglo-French relations was the top priority. The Irish mission got only vague words of sympathy. As Mitchel said, “Lamartine has let us know distinctly we must rely on ourselves.”

As Young Ireland statements became warlike, Clarendon urged more coercive action though the government turned down his request to suspend habeas corpus. In April the government did pass the Crown and Government Protection Bill to get around antiquated and harsh Treason laws. The law introduced a new statutory offence of treason-felony by which capital offences, including speeches, could be dealt by transportation.

In May, O’Brien, Meagher and Mitchel faced court on the more minor charge of sedition. O’Brien and Meagher were acquitted after juries could not agree on a verdict. But Clarendon dropped the sedition charge against Mitchel and tried him under the new treason-felony legislation. The sheriff packed the jury with unsympathetic Protestants and the defence had no argument against the open defiance Mitchel had shown in his newspaper. He was sentenced to 14 years’ transportation. The verdict brought Repealers closer together with even John O’Connell calling Mitchel an Irish martyr. By early June the two sides agreed to dissolve the Repeal Association and Irish Confederation to form the new shortlived Irish League.

Yet Young Irelanders continued to secretly plan for an uprising. Dublin Castle infiltrated their meetings and Clarendon told London of a possible revolution around autumn harvest time. After Duffy and other newspaper editors were arrested on treason-felony, Meagher held a meeting on Slievenamon mountain urging followers to arm themselves. In mid-July Clarendon finally convinced Russell’s government to suspend habeas corpus. Young Ireland leaders dispersed, and with no clear plan of action, a ragtag army under O’Brien was defeated by armed police at Ballingarry. Though O’Gorman also led skirmishes in Limerick and John O’Mahony raided barracks in Tipperary and Waterford, the revolution was over.

O’Brien, Meagher and others were charged with high treason, which proved an embarrassment for the government when they were found guilty. The punishment of being “hung, drawn and quartered” could never be carried out but the prisoners refused to accept the lesser sentence of transportation. In July 1849, the government passed the Transportation for Treason (Ireland) Bill to force them to accept the sentence. Fintan Lalor led one final assault on a Waterford barracks in September. Though it too was a failure, many of those involved would become leaders of the Fenian movement in the next decade.

Repeal was dead but so were millions of Irish people. The Famine exhausted Ireland, with food shortages accompanied by cholera. Landlords, many in deep debt, responded with large-scale evictions. Though Russell wanted to introduce measures to relieve tenants, it was again defeated by cabinet vested interests. In a rare enlightened measure in 1850, the government extended the Irish electoral franchise which quadrupled the number of voters. A united group of 48 Irish members led by Duffy was elected to parliament in 1852, devoted to fixing the land question. It proved no more disciplined than the Repeal Party and quickly broke up. Nowlan believes Fenianism was the most striking outcome of the British government failures of the 1840s but there was also the tentative beginnings of reform that would convince later prime minister William Gladstone to champion Irish land rights and home rule.

Killing Remarks: the British press and the Irish Famine

“Ejectment of Irish Tenantry” Illustrated London News December 16, 1848.

When the potato crop failed across Europe in 1845, nowhere was more vulnerable than Ireland where two million people depending on the crop for survival. The situation was compounded by a second failure in 1846 and a third in 1848. It led to demographic collapse. By 1852 one million Irish people were dead while another million had emigrated, mainly to Britain and America. This was a gigantic failure of will on the part of the British government which ruled Ireland from London. American historian Leslie Williams’ Daniel O’Connell, the British Press and the Irish Famine explores one of the reasons for that failure: the British press’s poor view of Ireland in general and Daniel O’Connell in particular.

Ireland had been united with Britain for almost half a century, but it was an unequal union. Ireland’s Protestant-only parliament dissolved itself in 1800 but most power remained in the hands of a Protestant elite supported by Tory governments in London. Irish Catholics led by brilliant barrister Daniel O’Connell used the courts to challenge Protestant domination. He founding the Catholic Association in 1823 and achieved Catholic Emancipation six years later. In parliament O’Connell worked for further reforms in alliances with the British Whigs. That ended when the Tories returned to power in 1841. O’Connell began advocating repeal of the Act of Union. It wasn’t just the government he had to fight, the Times newspaper and editor John Delane also had a deep loathing of O’Connell. As O’Connell held mass meetings throughout the Repeal year 1843, the Times dismissed his movement as “agitation” and believed the “Repeal rent” was merely excuse to enlarge O’Connell’s personal fortune. This negativity descended into generalised racial attacks. The Times believed that Britain had bestowed “kindnesses” on Ireland which was met by distrust and ingratitude.

The weekly Punch also turned its famous political cartoons against the Liberator. It often showed the ogre O’Connell holding a bag labelled “rint” (the mispelt “rent” a signifier of inferior class and ethnicity) while he feasted on his ignorant “pisantry” (punning on worthless “pissants”). When Tory prime minister Robert Peel banned O’Connell’s Clontarf meeting in 1843 and subsequently arrested him, Punch portrayed O’Connell as “the Irish Frankenstein” losing control of the violent Repeal monster. The Times and Punch continued the attack on O’Connell during his trial, but the more sympathetic Illustrated London News drawings showed him as a dignified leader. An all-Protestant jury found O’Connell guilty but his jail sentence was overturned on appeal to the House of Lords. Punch portrayed him as a little boy crying “I will have Repale”.

Determined to weaken O’Connell’s hold on Ireland, Peel formed a royal commission headed by the Earl of Devon into the conditions of Irish land occupation. Though dominated by landlords, the Devon Commission took its job seriously, interviewing a thousand witnesses and publishing detailed findings in early 1845. The report avoided radical reform but criticised landlords for subdividing holdings at ever increasing rents while lessees had no security of tenure. Even this was too much for the Times which blamed the Irish for their impoverishment. The newspaper sent Thomas Campbell Foster to investigate, dubbing him its “Irish Commissioner” as if he was a corrective to the government body. His letters ran from August 1845 to January 1846 and though this was exactly when the potato blight made its first appearance, Campbell concentrated on “agrarian outrages”, attacks and murders of officials by desperate Irish peasants. While Forster (and the Devon Commission) correctly identified that peasants got no compensation for land improvements, he preferred to blame their “their own apathy and indifference” and believed the answer was an English-style grain industry. His letters home reflected British moral superiority.

By October 1845 many British and Irish papers were reporting the blight but Campbell focused on Irish violence. On November 1 he finally acknowledged “rotten potatoes” but was still critical that Limerick was holding an All Saints Day fair with “thousands of people idling in the street”. Campbell condemned Irish apathy saying “they will do nothing till starvation faces them.” With calls to keep Irish agricultural produce at home to compensate for potatoes, the Times worried there would be less supply to England and the grain price would rise. It believed the problem would be solved by the repeal of the Corn Laws, tariffs on foreign grains which kept food prices high. This was the policy of the opposition Whigs and anti-protectionist the Economist founded in 1843 to promote free trade. Protectionist newspapers preferred to downplay the famine, the Scotsman believing Irish distress was only a “repeal cry”. Neither side wanted English money to be spent on Irish relief and the closer Ireland came to catastrophe the more London papers focused on the impact to England.

Peel resigned in late 1845 but Whig leader Lord John Russell could not form a government. Peel resumed power and tried to implement Corn Law repeal. The Tories split between Peelists and protectionists as the government wobbled on for six months. When O’Connell voted with Whigs and Tory Protectionists to defeat an Irish Coercion Bill, Peel’s government was doomed. While O’Connell wanted another alliance with a Whig government, the Times warned the Whigs would soon tire of “unprofitable concessions and rejected advances”.

Punch preferred to delight in Irish political troubles thanks to a split in the Repeal organisation with the Young Ireland faction opposed to the Whig alliance. “A gentleman in difficulties” showed the farmer O’Connell unable to control his Young Ireland shoat while another cartoon showed a “monkey faced” Young Ireland leader and MP William Smith O’Brien selling bullets, blunderbusses and pistols to an equally simian “Paddy”.

Irish people were starting to die in numbers, but it was not bullets and blunderbusses killing them. The sympathetic Illustrated London News reported of men, women and children perishing in Galway “of diseases brought on by misery and destitution”. As a particularly cruel winter set in, deaths rose sharply. In December even the Times noted that in Skibbereen, Co. Cork entire families were dying “in every wretched hovel” with rats devouring the corpses. Yet the same paper in the same month claimed there was “grand national embezzlement” with a million Irish paupers “feeding and clothing themselves on the bounty of the British nation”. It said England must be “freed from the dragchain of Irish improvidence” and like prime minister Russell, believed Irish landlords should take responsibility for the crisis. Neither Russell nor the Times distinguished between sympathetic landlords who lived on their lands from absentee landlords who allowed unscrupulous middle men and agents a free hand in Ireland. Many senior Whigs were large property owners in Ireland including foreign minister Lord Palmerston and Lord of the Treasury Marquess of Lansdowne.

In January 1847 the government extended the Irish Poor Law to allow for outdoor relief in the form of soup kitchens but insisted the cost be borne from local rates. As Black ’47 took hold, the Times said Ireland’s normal state is destitution, describing the worst famine in a century as business as usual. When Tory protectionist leader George Bentinck proposed a famine relief scheme to build Irish railways, the Observer accused him of promoting Ireland “at the expense of John Bull’s pockets”. Only the Illustrated London News showed understanding. Its reports and drawings from West Cork in February showed scenes of growing horror with sparsely-attended funerals every hundred yards.

When Smith O’Brien demanded action in parliament, the government blamed Dublin Castle. Russell’s hands were tied by opponents to Irish aid within his government. In March he proposed a new Poor Law for Ireland to grant outdoor relief to able-bodied poor at landlords’ expense. He saw it as a transition from a land of indolent potato-growers to grain-fed day labourers reliant on seasonal wages from landholders. As Williams wrote, it would result in thousands pushed onto the roads and workhouses to die.

Yet the villain, according to Punch, remained Daniel O’Connell. Though the Liberator was dying in early 1847, Punch’s cartoons still saw him as a charlatan “rint” collector outwitted by Russell’s Irish policies. Ireland’s great statesman was demeaned as a fat old man in a ridiculous hat taking money from paupers. O’Connell’s final impassioned speech at Westminster was accorded little respect. Parliament, he said, was ignorant “of the real state of horror in which Ireland is plunged.” O’Connell died en route to Rome in May 1847, the Times blaming the Liberator for his own death for neglecting the advice of Paris doctors. While the world mourned a great statesman, the Times called him a “perfect demagogue” whom few Englishmen would “believe one single statement to be correct.”

As 1847 potato harvest approached, British papers claimed that Ireland was recovering. In Punch‘s cartoon “Consolation for the Million, a British breadloaf congratulated the Irish potato for looking so well. But while the blight receded in 1847 the government had refused to distribute seed potatoes. Only one seventh of the usual crop was planted, bringing a harvest far too small to feed starving millions. The death rate increased while many western Poor Law Unions went bankrupt. A famine financial appeal led by the Queen fell on deaf ears, the Economist said because Britain’s own poor were suffering and “the Irish do not deserve famine relief”. Newspapers turned their attention to agrarian crime and the murder of Major Denis Mahon in Roscommon overshadowed all other considerations. British reports portrayed Mahon as a sympathetic landlord though he had evicted 900 people that year. When a Catholic priest unwisely compared Mahon to Cromwell, papers suggested the Church was fomenting revolution. “The priest sends out his Thug upon a sacred mission,” the Times thundered.

Williams was among many modern historians who unfairly blamed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles Trevelyan for Britain’s cold-hearted response. The Peel and Russell governments were responsible for the Irish situation. Trevelyan efficiently followed government policy at all times and was sympathetic to Ireland. Nevertheless he ran the day-to-day operation with a miserly iron hand. In early 1848 Trevelyan wrote about its “success” in the Whig journal Edinburgh Review. He believed the famine was over and the Irish would be transformed by the experience. Potatoes were too easy to grow, permitting too much leisure time, which offended Victorian moralism. Potato cultivation also disturbed the hierarchical relationship between classes and Irish smallholders were more akin to South Sea Islanders than “the great civilised communities”. Such independence, said Trevelyan, led only to “poverty, discontent and idleness.” The feeding of the Irish was less important than re-ordering their lives. The blight was “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence” and now that it had exhausted itself, Irish peasants would become obedient bread-eating agricultural labourers, curing their indolence while serving their masters.

Not everyone was convinced by Trevelyan’s rosy view. The Irish Lord Lieutenant wrote privately they were “a long way from those halcyon days with which Trevelyan winds up his article.” After the third potato failure in 1848, landlord Monteagle suggested the Edinburgh Review ask Trevelyan to write another article called “The Relapse”. But even after the third failure, British newspapers were still blaming the Irish for their problems. The Times said the Irish were “sitting idle at home, wishing death to the Saxon, and laying everything that happens on the Saxon’s door.” Young Irelanders, already radicalised by Britain’s famine response, were encouraged by news of a successful uprising in France. By July even the moderate Smith O’Brien was threatening revolution. The government mobilised the army and removed habeas corpus in Ireland. Smith O’Brien’s rebellion came to a miserable end at Ballingarry, where his ragtag army were defeated by 50 well-armed policemen in a strong defensive position. Though the Times dismissed the rebellion as a “great sham”, it demanded participants be treated as “enemies and traitors”. The papers keenly followed the treason trials of Smith O’Brien, Meagher, MacManus and O’Donohoe and it was not until they were sentenced to death (later commuted to transportation) that newspapers returned to the ongoing agony of the Famine.

On December 16, 1848, the Illustrated London News printed the powerful illustration “ejectment of Irish tenantry” where a woman begs a mounted landlord to spare her cabin while soldiers with fixed bayonets look on. A vast and necessary social change was taking place in Ireland, the ILN said, but it was accompanied by “an amount of human misery that is abundantly appalling.” While the soldiers were an uncomfortable reminder that social change in Ireland was being carried out at the barrel of a gun, the press continued to see Ireland’s debt-ridden landlords as the cause of the problem. Russell’s government passed an encumbered estates act in 1847 but sales were tied up in the Courts of Chancery. When Peel proposed an encumbered estates commission to bypass the courts, Punch pictured him as the new St Patrick “turning the reptiles out of Ireland”. The Times imagined a new plantation of Ireland, though ironically their own anti-Irish reporting turned off likely British investors.

Starvation continued in 1849, but like modern media, the press were absorbed by royalty when the Queen announced a visit to Ireland. Punch imagined Victoria as fashionably-attired Britannia paying “a morning call” at the ragged hut of Hibernia, who tells her, “Sure Sisther, it’s not what you’ve been accustomed to exactly, but anyhow you’re welcome”. Victoria’s tour of eastern cities steered well-clear of famine-affected areas, but the visit helped bring more knowledge of Ireland to English readers. When the royal yacht reached Waterford Harbour, Prince Albert took a steamer up the river to the city “so famous for butter and bacon and Young Irelandism“, a Times dig at Waterford-born Thomas Francis Meagher, then on his way to exile in Van Diemen’s Land. The paper believed that the royal visit was the “concluding chapter of the history of Irish rebellion”. As steam travel and railways reduced the tyranny of distance, the ILN even promoted Irish tourism such as “Excursion to Killarney” though it had to gloss over ruined and abandoned houses along the way, “the very picture of desolation”. At late as Christmas 1849, the paper was still offering “illustrations of the new Poor Law” showing starving shoeless women searching for potatoes in a field in the middle of winter while Kilrush “in-door paupers were obliged to go to bed without dinner”.

By 1850, said Williams, Ireland was completely transformed by “blight, bureaucracy and the press”. The British government failed to prioritise humanitarian concerns and evaluated relief efforts not on effectiveness but on “theoretical correctness, administrative convenience, economic ‘soundness’ and political acceptability”. The British press were unable to keep up with the long-running saga with its constantly shifting dynamics and failed to grasp the depth of the tragedy. Some courageous journalism from the ILN aside, Irish events were reported primarily for their impact on England. Distancing from the tragedy was inevitable and even today, most Western media consumers are spared the horrors of Third World famines. Compassion fatigue sets in and after a time, people dying day after day ceases to become “news”. It was easy to blame the Irish for their own problems because they were lazy, dirty, lying, improvident or violent. By unstated contrast, the British had the exact opposite traits: industrious, clean, truthful, thrifty and law-abiding. The “killing remarks” of Williams’ title were rooted in this subconscious concern for validating British values.

The Pickardstown Ambush: Nicholas Whittle’s great escape

Nicholas Whittle in later years at the Pickardstown shrine. Photo: Pickardstown Ambush website

Hidden away on the back road from Tramore to Dunmore is a shrine and reminder of Waterford’s main engagement in the Irish War of Independence, It happened on January 7, 2021 and its 103rd anniversary is this weekend. That war attracted young and idealistic men and women to fight for a national cause, inspired by the 1916 Easter Rising. According to historian F.S.L. Lyons, the War of Independence fell into three phases. The first phase in 1919 and early 1920 saw small-scale hostility between rebels and Irish police forces. The second phase in the rest of 1920 saw an increase in Irish flying squad actions and British counter-measures including the deployment of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, exploding into extreme violence in November and December. The third phase from the start of 1921 until the truce in July witnessed what Lyons called “the tactics of ambush, the development of guerrilla war a l’outrance.”

A l’outrance is French for “until the bitter end” and the war was fought most bitterly in the south, especially in Cork and Tipperary under formidable leaders Tom Barry and Dan Breen. They spilled the war over into West Waterford where IRA brigades had success, notably at Ardmore in November 1920 when they ambushed troops from Youghal. The pressure was also on for a major engagement in East Waterford. However Waterford was one of the few Redmondite strongholds left in Ireland after 1918 and the IRA’s East Waterford brigade was politically weak. It was also faced with a major British army garrison in Waterford city. In their one attempt at action in the second phase of the war, East Waterford brigade attacked Kill’s Royal Irish Constabulary barracks in September 1920 and though it failed, the barracks was evacuated. There was also a successful minor attack on military trucks at Ballyduff Glen on December 5, 1920.

At year’s end there was an ambitious new plan for another rural ambush on one of the four remaining outlying RIC barracks at Tramore, Portlaw, Passage or Dunmore. East Waterford commandant and former British army veteran Paddy Paul picked Tramore because the British believed it was a quiet area. The terrain was open and the roads were good for defenders, so they planed a night ambush to allow the flying squad to disperse in darkness.

On the cold winter night of January 7, 1921, 60 IRA men gathered outside Tramore. Two groups came from Waterford city, one from Dunhill and the fourth came from West Waterford. They set up at points near the crossroads of the old and new Tramore Road and the metal bridge across the Waterford-Tramore rail line. The plan was to launch a feint attack on the Tramore RIC barracks and then from all four points on the crossroads, ambush the army troops expected to respond from Waterford. The key was to hold fire until the troops stopped at the barricade behind the bridge and were within the ambush position to allow fire from all angles. It went wrong when someone fired early and the trucks stopped outside the ambush zone.

The West Waterford men beyond the bridge were rendered useless by the fog of war. Dungarvan man John Riordan said they were confused with nothing to aim at. “We were ‘in the dark’ in every sense of the word,” Riordan said. “Nobody seemed to know exactly what was happening”. Meanwhile the nearer East Waterford men were overwhelmed by British fire. They were trapped and tried to retreat. Two rebels were killed and two were wounded as the men dispersed into the night. Frightened of further ambush the British did not give chase. They suffered no serious casualties. There were no more major engagements in Waterford though low-level harassing including mail raids, army stores destruction and road blocking continued to war’s end.

One of the most gripping stories of the Pickardstown Ambush and its aftermath is told by wounded IRA men, Nicholas Whittle. Whittle was born in Waterford in 1895, his father was baker Patrick Whittle. Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond was the local MP and Waterford was a Redmondite city, however the Whittles regarded Redmond as a “rogue”. Sixteen-year-old Nicholas joined the National Volunteers in 1912 and learned to use a gun. During the First World War he worked at the family bakery. He became involved in Sinn Fein in 1915 and supported the Rising in 1916 though saw no action. He joined the Sinn Fein election committee the following year, acting as bicycle courier dispatching messages across the county. He was appointed Director of Elections for Waterford city and after Redmond died in 1918, Whittle found himself at 23, presiding over “the greatest human dogfight” he ever experienced. The by-election attracted national attention and was marred by violence, police intimidation and bribery. Redmond’s son William retained the seat, defeating Sinn Fein’s Dr Vincent White aided by the fearsome Ballybricken pig buyers. In the December 1918 national election Redmond held onto the seat despite the Sinn Fein landslide. Whittle was scapegoated for the Waterford losses and accused of lavish spending in the campaign.

Disillusioned, he left Sinn Fein for months though returned after Dr White was elected city mayor in 1919. Whittle trained twice a week with volunteers but found it dull. The war was heating up in other parts of the country and in early 1920 a military court of inquiry sacked Waterford’s IRA leaders for inactivity. Whittle was keen to fight but knew they needed experienced military men. He approached his second cousin Paddy Paul who served in the British Army in the First World War. Paul agreed and was appointed Battalion Instructor while preparations continued for an attack. On the night of Thursday, January 6, 1921, Whittle finally got the order to “fall in” near the Mental Hospital in Ballytruckle the following evening. “Bring your gun with you as we will be going into action,” Whittle was told. After receiving confession, Whittle turned up at 7.30pm Friday with 15 other armed men. They travelled six miles across country before Whittle found out the target was Tramore, and they arrived around 10pm. Whittle volunteered for the feint attack on the police barracks. They attacked the barracks with a volley of riflefire which was met with return fire. At a signal, the IRA men dispersed under fire back to the railway bridge. A West Waterford man told Whittle that the British were introducing martial law in Co. Waterford that midnight. “And here we are, giving a fine reception to it.” he told Whittle.

Barracks police fired Verey lights after the attack. A short while later Whittle could see lights from vehicles in the distance approaching from Waterford. “They’re coming, lads. They’re coming,” an officer shouted. Whittle was attached to a shotgun party which was ordered to leave the men beyond the bridge to deal with the first British truck and to hold fire until the second truck approached. If things got too hot, they were to fall back under cover of riflemen stationed above. The final instruction was that the order to fall back would be passed from man to man.

However as the first truck passed, Whittle heard shooting across the road. The truck pulled up before the bridge with its lights on. Gunfire increased, some aimed at Whittle’s position, which became untenable. Most men retreated without orders, but Whittle stayed put. Crouching close to a ditch, Whittle saw only one other man and suggested they retreat. He felt a sharp prod of pain in the back of his neck and dropped unconscious on the road. “I must have been only momentarily stunned because, when I came to, the action was still proceeding,” Whittle recalled. Lying on his back and thinking he was about to die, Whittle heard a British officer shouting, “Come on, lads! Get out and get into them.” The soldiers replied, “bayonet the bastards.” Then an Irish voice from the other side of the road shouted, “Up the rebels. Give it to the suckers.” It was followed by a blast of gunfire which silenced the British.

The Pickardstown shrine in August 2023. Photo: author’s collection

A soldier approached Whittle and shot him while on the ground. Assuming Whittle was dead, the soldier moved on. As he passed Whittle, the soldier was shot in the groin and fell next to him, still alive and cursing his fortune. More soldiers approached and pointed at Whittle asking, “Is this bloke finished?” An officer replied, “Yes, that fellow is out alright”. A soldier said, “Maybe he is only shamming. Turn him over.” Whittle kept his cool. He lay still on the ground as they turned him over, kicked him in the ribs, and prodded him with rifle butts. “Yes, that fellow is finished,” the officer repeated. Whittle had been shot three times, in the face, neck and chest.

The soldiers found another IRA man, beaten into unconsciousness, and the officer ordered he be taken alive. As Whittle considered ending his charade, the officer told his men to take Whittle’s gun but leave the body for now. After they left, Whittle rolled slowly across the road. He dragged himself up a ditch and fell over a fence into a field. With firing still active, Whittle could not risk lifting his head. He found a cutting in the field and lay in water which helped staunch his wounds. He crawled across the field towards Dunmore East but could not find a way past a thick hedge fence. Face torn by briars, but sustained on adrenalin, he pushed his way through the fence into the next field, finally stumbling on a farmhouse where he appealed for help.

The farmer was suspicious. He said if soldiers found an IRA man there, they would burn the house down. But once he opened the door, he took pity on Whittle and let him in. When Whittle told him he was a cousin of Paddy Whittle who lived two miles away, the farmer said, “I won’t give you water. I’ll give you a drop of whiskey.” He handed him the bottle and told him to go to his cousin’s house. Whittle reluctantly went back outside clutching the whiskey bottle, taking an occasional sip. Weakened, he walked unsteadily until he found a haystack. As the first sign of daylight appeared, another farmer appeared. He offered no help but told him to keep walking to his cousin’s house.

He staggered to the Whittle house where a milk boy recognised him, though getting his name wrong. “Ah, poor Paddy, you’re all covered with blood. What happened to you?” He gave him milk and a cigarette, “the first kind person I had met since I was wounded” and then woke up Whittle’s cousin, Paddy Whittle, and his wife. Nicholas asked Paddy’s wife to bandage his wounds but like the farmers, she only wanted him out of her house. Paddy overruled her saying he was welcome to stay. Whittle wrote a note to family doctor Philip Purcell which he gave to the milk boy to take to Waterford, warning him not to mention his whereabouts to anybody. He remained in great pain all day still wearing muddy clothes.

Dr Purcell arrived at 3pm and cut off the clothes with scissors. Using a forceps, he drew a bullet from the small of Whittle’s back, bandaged his wounds, and lifted him into bed. “I can remember Doctor Purcell emptying his cigarette case on the bedside table and whispering to me, under no circumstances to leave the house, no matter what was said to me,” Whittle recalled. Purcell told him Paddy Paul and other IRA men would come later that night and collect him and another wounded man in a nearby house and take them both to the Mental Hospital which he said was the safest place in the county. Purcell burned the clothes and Whittle fell into a deep sleep.

He woke around 7pm to the noise of footsteps in the room. Paul was there with two others. They bundled Whittle into his cousin’s suit and Paul offered his overcoat against the cold. Whittle was put into a pony and trap with the other wounded man, Mickey Wyley. They set off on by-roads to Waterford. IRA man Tom Brennan rode on a bicycle a hundred yards ahead, to give warning by lighting a cigarette if he thought a military truck was approaching. They could see a line of lights from troop trucks on the main Tramore road but arrived without incident at the Mental Hospital. Whittle was placed on a stretcher and put on a bed where he immediately fell asleep. He stayed in the medical wing for 10 days, missing the funeral of “D” Company comrade, Michael McGrath, killed in the ambush. The funerals of McGrath and fellow rebel Thomas O’Brien a day later were huge affairs though authorities limited the cortege to 40 people.

A week later, a hospital attendant who was also an IRA man, rushed into the ward and said the British had raided the County Infirmary on the same street the previous night and, an hour ago, had raided nearby St. Patrick’s Hospital. Whittle and Wyley were moved to safer wards while a doctor certified them as insane under false names. While still convalescing, an IRA man asked Whittle for the names of the householders who refused help so their houses could be burned down. Whittle agonised over the request but decided that “as God had been so good in sparing me through that terrible night, I would consider it wrong to be hard now on others.” He refused to give names.

Finally the two men were removed to a safe farmhouse outside Waterford. They were officially pronounced dead. Though Whittle’s family knew the truth, they closed their shop for a day on IRA orders, pulled down the window blinds, and went into fake mourning at a mock funeral. Waterford was placed under martial law with a curfew and restrictions on movements while householders had to pin on their doors a list of all occupants. The fugitives stayed at the farmhouse for two weeks before they heard the British had searched an empty house nearby. That night the men were hurriedly moved by pony and trap to Dunmore East and then to another house in Woodstown. But with the British still searching, Paddy Paul moved them out of harm’s way via Kilmeaden across the river by fishing boat to South Kilkenny.

After three weeks in Mooncoin, Paul arranged for them to stow away on a boat to England but the captain refused at the last minute. When a second captain offered to take 12 volunteer stowaways, the IRA became suspicious and turned down the offer. Finally a disguised Whittle went by train to Dublin. He passed through the city the same day three IRA men were hanged at Mountjoy Jail. At Dún Laoghaire he boarded a ship to Holyhead. The journey was anxious due to an unexplained revolver under his bed while he suspected that a chatty priest was really a detective. When he returned to his bunk he found the gun belonged to a British officer. From Wales he went to Crewe and changed trains until he arrived at his destination – the presbytery of a friendly priest. While he was away the family house in Waterford was raided.

Sensing local suspicion Whittle moved to another (unnamed) British city under an assumed name. When the Truce was declared in June 1921, he visited his brother, a priest in Wells. As peace continued, he returned to the Mooncoin safehouse in Ireland and made contact with Paul. A day later a comrade drove him home to Waterford. He did not like the way the Redmondites were taking over the local IRA, and he supported the anti Treaty side in the civil war. Paddy Paul eventually retook Waterford for the Free Staters in 1922.

Whittle considered the Pickardstown ambush one of the most important engagements in the Anglo-Irish war. He said there was a lull in the war before Christmas 1920. “It was during this lull, and in the first week of the new year, that the country was startled by the news that a major engagement between IRA forces and British military had taken place at a point in Ireland where it was least expected,” he said. Though a failure, Pickardstown helped galvanise the IRA for the bitter fight that forced the British to make concessions later that year. Ireland, albeit partitioned, was on its way towards independence.

Shane MacGowan: Poguetry in motion

Shane MacGowan. Photo: Steve Pyke

The great Anglo-Irish band The Pogues were fortunate to have two fine lyricists, both now dead. The lesser known of the two, Philip Chevron died of cancer in 2013 but his legacy is assured as the author of the Pogues’ best song Faithful Departed. The other, Shane MacGowan, was the same age as Chevron and the only surprise is that it took another ten years for MacGowan to join him in the grave, given his lifelong battering of booze and drugs. In 2007, the Guardian was amazed that MacGowan had survived half a century. MacGowan finally died of complications from pneumonia on November 30, 2023, aged 65. As with Chevron’s death, I felt deep sadness at the news.

I loved Horslips in the 1970s for the way they fused celtic and rock music traditions. Then the Pogues blew me away when they added punk to that mix in the 1980s. I will never forget two raucous Pogues concerts I attended, one on St Patrick’s Day in London and the other in Melbourne where MacGowan’s wildness on stage was matched only by Irish pub shenanigans after the gig. Two great albums where the power of McGowan’s songwriting and performing shone through, will stay with me for life: Rum, Sodomy and Lash (1985) and If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988).

MacGowan was born on Christmas Day 1957 in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent. By coincidence I was living there in 1988 when I saw the Pogues for the first time. It’s still hard to reconcile Tunbridge Wells’ home country genteelness with MacGowan’s rough edges. His Irish parents took him back to the homeland where, more credibly, he was raised at a farmhouse near Borrisokane in rural Tipperary amid “three generations of Fenians”. His mother was a folk singer and his father was a wannabe-writer. There was always music in the background. He claimed his parents gave him Guinness and whiskey as a child because they believed it would stop him from becoming an alcoholic. His family returned to England when he was six, first to Brighton and then to London. Despite the Tunbridge Wells experience, it was a huge culture shock for them and his father took refuge in Irish music, especially the Dubliners. Young Shane loved them too, “especially the dirty songs.”

He also absorbed his father’s book collection and by age eight was reading the novels of Joseph Heller and the poetry of Yeats. Aged 12 he gained a student bursary for prestigious Westminster public school where he impressed with his literary knowledge before being expelled for taking marijuana and LSD. He took a succession of menial jobs. Aged 17 and hooked on “the acid, the booze, the dope and the pills” he spent six months in rehab at St Mary’s of Bethlehem hospital.

In 1976 he went to a gig where the Sex Pistols were the support act. It was a life changing event. “This was the band I’d been waiting for,” he said. MacGowan became immersed in the London punk scene of the late 70s. Performing as Shane O’Hooligan he founded The Nipple Erectors, later called The Nips, playing “bog standard shouty punk”. He met tin whistler Peter “Spider” Stacy at a Ramones gig and joined Stacy’s punk band The Millwall Chainsaws, a band one observer called “brilliant but shit”.

Stacy said the idea of combining Irish and punk music “came to us like Archimedes in the bath”. In 1982 they formed The New Republicans with Stoke-born banjo player Jem Finer and were joined by Nips guitarist and would-be accordionist James Fearnley and Anglo-Irish bassist Cait O’Riordan. They built up a live following under the name Pogue Mahone and a MacGowan-penned single Dark Streets of London achieved airplay on the BBC. There were complaints from Scotland because of Pogue Mahone’s meaning in Gaelic. The BBC instructed DJs that the song could only be played between 8pm and midnight, which NME’s Sean O’Hagan said, was the only time it was permissible to say “kiss my arse” in a language no-one understood.

The publicity was good for the band and Stiff Records signed them up, insisting the band ditch its name. Following the example of the Nips, they shortened it to The Pogues and released their first album Red Roses For Me, a collection of Irish songs and MacGowan tunes. They reached a wider audience in 1984 with MacGowan’s snarling rendition of “Waxie’s Dargle” on Channel Four’s The Tube (Stacy stole the show by repeatedly smashing his head on a beer tray). Elvis Costello became involved with the band after they supported him on tour. He wooed and married bassist O’Riordan while producing the Pogues’ second album Rum, Sodomy and Lash. Costello claimed his job was to “capture them in their dilapidated glory before some more professional producer fucked them up.” Chevron, who emerged from Ireland’s punk scene with The Radiators, joined the band, replacing MacGowan on guitar.

The album was a revelation, due almost entirely to its lyrical power. Its wealth of classical references jarred against MacGowan’s alcoholic stupor from the start of the first song The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn: “McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed / There’s a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head.” The album’s wild attitude was summed up by its memorable cover; Théodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” with the band members superimposed on the faces of the shipwrecked crew which resorted to eating their dead before being rescued.

Poster for a Pogues gig at the Leadmill, Sheffield, featuring Shane MacGowan. Artist: Martin Bedford

The Pogues were not yet ready to be cannibalised and went to make an even better album in If I Should Fall From Grace With God. Producer Steve Lillywhite imposed a more disciplined studio approach than Costello, but gave the band a wide leash, if no rum nor sodomy. Mark Deming said the sound was tight and precise “while still summoning up the glorious howling fury” of Rum. Fairytale of New York became the band’s signature piece and featured in every lazy journalist’s subsequent cliche piece about MacGowan. Chevron flew high with Faithful Departed and my only regret is that my battered CD copy of the album does not feature the rollocking The Irish Rover. Check out this fabulous version on the Late Late Show with the Dubliners. As Joe Merrick wrote, MacGowan aligned Irish music with his experiences of “fallen souls, wasted life and the cruelty of the city.”

But as the Medusa crew and one of the Pogues’ punk contemporary bands might have said, Pop Will Eat Itself. The next album Peace and Love (1989) was serviceable but not on the same plain of genius as the previous two. MacGowan was sacked from the Pogues in 1991 and achieved success with own band The Popes. Though the band reunited with MacGowan in 2001 they were running on fumes. Shane became a 21st century institution and like Keith Richards, famous just for staying alive. Julian Temple’s 2020 Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan is worth watching for insights into his enduring genius.

MacGowan has wider cultural power beyond his songwriting ability. I remember going to Germany in 1988 to support the Irish football team in the European Championships and I met fans from London and Birmingham. They were all born in England and had English accents. But they wore green shirts and all said they were absolutely Irish. Five years earlier I would have been doubtful. But Shane MacGowan and the Pogues widened Irishness in the late 1980s. As former president Mary Robinson said in her Diaspora speech, the richness of Irish heritage is beyond territorial. That speech remains a warning as Ireland now frets over its own immigration issues. “If we expect that the mirror held up to us by Irish communities abroad will show us a single familiar identity, or a pure strain of Irishness, we will be disappointed,” Robinson said. “We will overlook the fascinating diversity of culture and choice which looks back at us. Above all we will miss the chance to have that dialogue with our own diversity which this reflection offers us.” Shane MacGowan would have raised a glass or twelve to those sentiments.

So sad to see the grieving of the people that I’m leaving
And he took the road for God knows in the morning

Shane MacGowan “Sally MacLennane“

Lola Montez: an extraordinary life

Lola Montez arm in arm with Cheyenne chief Light in the Clouds (1852). Photo: Collection of Gail Dane Gomberg Propp

Lola Montez is a name many people remember without knowing quite why they remember it. I was dimly aware of her as a famous 19th century dancer but was drawn to her recently when I discovered she was Irish. Fellow Irishman Thomas Francis Meagher was also drawn to her when she lived in the mountain mining districts of California in the winter of 1854. Meagher “walked through five feet of snow” to pay respects and found Montez with her arm in a bandage, “her pet grizzly bear having given her a slap of his paw the day before, as she was tenderly helping him to a lump of sugar.” I assumed it was a fanciful story but her biographer confirms it was true. Bruce Seymour’s Lola Montez A Life said Montez’s pet bear tried to maul her before someone clubbed it over the head. A notice later appeared in the local paper announcing “Grizzly for sale.” It was one of many great stories of a most colourful life.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography primly calls Lola Montez a “dancer and courtesan” but she was a lot more besides. When she died in 1861, she was probably the most well known woman of her time after Queen Victoria. Stories swirled about the mysterious woman variously called a beautiful Spanish noblewoman, an Irish slut and a native New Yorker. She was twice a bigamist and constantly fighting with the law. She charmed packed-out theatres in Europe, America and Australia and was loved by kings and composers. She caused a revolution in Bavaria and was made countess. She was a handy shot with a revolver, and armed with a whip and vicious temper, she intimidated more men than any woman of her time. She was the first white woman to be photographed arm in arm with a native American and the first woman to be photographed smoking. She was a brilliant self-publicist and walking headline, and though given to outrageous lies, some extraordinary portion of what she and others said about her was true.

This wild life was a remote possibility for a girl born in Ireland in 1821. Her mother Eliza Oliver was the illegitimate daughter of Protestant MP and sheriff of Cork, Charles Silver Oliver. Her father Edward Gilbert was an ensign in the 25th Foot Regiment when he met and married Eliza. Though Grange in Sligo claims the birth of Eliza Gilbert, Lola told the King of Bavaria she was born on February 14 in Limerick and for once she may not have been lying, Certainly her mother’s brother lived in Limerick.

Gilbert was stationed in Sligo and Boyle for two years before being transferred to the 44th Foot in India. The young family travelled across the ocean and up the Ganges but Ensign Gilbert died of cholera in Patna. The widow returned to Calcutta where she married Scottish lieutenant Patrick Craigie. Craigie was concerned about his stepdaughter growing up wild amid the lushness of India and aged six, Eliza junior went to Scotland to live with his father, a former provost of Montrose. There she gained the reputation of an exotic creature with a love of fun and mischief. Aged 11, she went to Sunderland with Craigie’s sister Catherine Rae and her husband who were establishing a boarding school. A year later Craigie arranged for his old commander General Jasper Nicolls to look after his stepdaughter. Nicolls enrolled her in school in Bath where she received a fine education.

Her mother returned from India in 1836 accompanied by Wexford-born lieutenant Thomas James. She intended to marry 16-year-old Eliza off to a wealthy 64-year-old widower in India. Eliza was horrified and the reunion with her mother was a failure, but Eliza’s budding beauty attracted Lieutenant James and the pair eloped to Ireland. They married at Rathbeggan, Co Meath on July 23, 1837, took lodgings in Dublin and visited the James family seat near Mt Leinster. Eventually James returned to his regiment in India. The marriage unravelled on the long sea voyage and the relationship was rocky by the time they arrived north of Delhi in 1839. She left James and decided to return to Britain.

En route she met Lieutenant George Lennox, nephew of the Duke of Richmond. Ladies aboard were scandalised as Eliza and Lennox openly fraternised and spent evenings in his cabin. They arrived in Portsmouth arm in arm and Eliza established herself in London as Lennox’s mistress. The affair lasted barely a summer but long enough for Lieutenant James in India to find out and sue for divorce.

Eliza decided to go on stage. Lennox gave her contacts in British theatre and, too old to learn ballet, she became a Spanish dancer. She travelled to Spain and learned some of the language, culture and dance. While she was away the Consistory Court granted the divorce but granted neither party the right to remarry. The decision would have consequences but for now the excitement was the emergence of an exotic unknown beauty.

Returning from Spain, Eliza befriended nobleman the Earl of Malmesbury who provided money to get her started. He lobbied for her stage debut, a dance at Her Majesty’s between the acts of the Barber of Seville and began a publicity blitz. She was billed as Spanish noble Lola Montez who would dance El Oleano which had steps called “death to the tarantula.” On stage Montez slowly captivated her audience as she mimed the crushing of the tarantula. It was a sensation in the auditorium which demanded an encore. The press lauded Lola and her “spider dance” as the talk of London. When one paper noted that the supposed Senorita was actually Mrs James, Montez began a tactic she would frequently reuse, an indignant letter to the editor, which claimed she was a native of Seville who never before “set foot in this country.” When the unabashed newspaper threatened to drag in nobles to unmask her, the theatre manager refused to renew her contract. Montez decided to continue her career on the continent.

Her first performance in Dresden was underwhelming, the locals preferring opera to dance, but she charmed many young men who gave her introductions to Berlin. At Berlin’s Royal Theatre she danced El Oleano in front of Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV to mixed acclaim, with flowers on the stage but hisses amid the applause. The King was impressed, however, and when his brother-in-law Czar Nicholas I of Russia arrived in Berlin, Lola privately entertained them at his palace. Lola overstretched a few days later by gatecrashing the VIP section of a grand parade for both monarchs. When a gendarme tried to escort the mounted Lola from the restricted area she lashed out with her whip and was allowed to stay where she was.

Montez was charged with assault of a gendarme but she tore up the legal summons which led to a more serious charge of judicial contempt. The matter never came to trial and proved a goldmine of publicity for the dancer who continued east towards St Petersburg. First she went to Warsaw, then a Russian satrapy, where she charmed critics at the Grand Theatre. However she argued with theatre director and gendarmerie chief Ignacy Abramowicz, who was alarmed at the politics she spoke with new Polish friends. Abramowicz paid infiltrators in the crowd to boo and hiss her and she denounced him from the stage to great applause. Abramowicz expelled her from Warsaw. She then conquered the stage in Stettin, Danzig, Konigsberg and Riga before arriving in St Petersburg where her Polish reputation had preceded her. Though Nicholas I had seen her in Berlin, he forbade his subjects the same privilege and his newspapers refused to mention her. Her plans in disarray she went back to Berlin, where she met Hungarian musical genius Franz Liszt.

Liszt, then 32, was at the height of his powers as a performer and met Lola following one of his concerts. They quickly took up together though for once Lola was not the centre of attention. In Dresden they attended a Richard Wagner opera but Wagner took a dim view of Lola whom he called “a heartless, demonic being.” Lola also introduced a young piano-playing fan of hers named Hans Von Bulow to Liszt and the young Von Bulow would become a lifelong student of Liszt. Like Lola, Von Bulow would run foul of Wagner, who stole his fiance.

Lola was expelled from Dresden for slapping a friend of Liszt on the face. She and Liszt split up though they remained friends. Lola moved to Paris where it was easy for a woman of wit and intelligence to make friends and she was soon bosom buddies with the Jockey Club, a notorious group of wealthy men who attended races and theatre. A theatre critic friend of Liszt began a successful campaign to get her onstage at the Opera where she danced l’Olia (El Oleano). The theatre was packed out with ballet lovers and Jockey Club members. While the latter applauded loudly, those who understood dance found Montez too unorthodox though undeniably beautiful. Lola won a second and third billing but was criticised in the press. One critic who knew Spain said Mme Montez had “nothing Andalusian about her except a pair of magnificent black eyes.”

Lola was lost to the Opera but stayed in Paris. She took dancing lessons and learned to become a top pistol shot. She moved in with wealthy Alexander Dujarier who ran the newspaper La Presse. Dujarier assisted her in getting a new dancing gig. She had wild support from the audience but again critics complained. Unsurprisingly La Presse was an exception, saying she got away with breaking the rules. She was on the verge of success in Paris when tragedy struck. Dujarier got into an angry exchange while gambling and his offended opponent demanded satisfaction. They met in a duel; Dujarier shot first and missed but his opponent did not. Dujarier died. The bullet also killed Montez’s Paris career as the theatre lost interest in her without her patron.

Lola went back on tour. In Bonn she accompanied Liszt to a dinner where a brawl started. When Liszt toasted the English, Dutch and Austrians in the audience, an angry Frenchman screamed that he had forgotten them. An Englishman yelled back sarcastically, “What about the Emperor of China” and although the host Professor Wolff tried to calm matters down, the din of angry voices rose until Lola, the only woman present, climbed on the table and shouted, “Speak, Professor Wolff, I pray you!”

Lola returned to Paris for the Dujarier murder trial. In testimony she called herself “an artiste of the dance” and said she would have stopped the duel had she known. When asked how she would have done that she replied, “I would have sacrificed myself.” Though the murder was obvious, the jury would not convict a duellist. Lola left Paris in the arms of new English lover Francis Leigh and they travelled to fashionable resorts in Belgium and Germany. They parted company and she was seen with a Russian nobleman but that didn’t last long either. In Munich for Oktoberfest she met her next major conquest.

King Ludwig I of Bavaria was 60 years old and had been on the throne for 20 years having turned a near bankrupt kingdom into one of the most financially sound realms of Europe. He was hard of hearing which made him distrust those around him but he was an enthusiastic poet and a patron of culture and turned Munich into a centre of art and design. Though married to Queen Therese with eight children, Ludwig maintained freedom to have affairs and his court artist Joseph Stieler painted all his mistresses. In 1846 a courtier gave him the petition of a Spanish dancer who wanted to perform in Munich but noted her chequered history. Ludwig was intrigued and granted her an audience.

Stieler’s portrait of Lola.

Though Lola dressed to impress, her first meeting with Ludwig was unexceptional. He told her to speak to the theatre director though reserved a final decision for himself. When the director pointed out that Lola’s notoriety might improve box office takings, Ludwig agreed on the condition Lola danced in Spanish costumes. Ludwig was in the royal box as Lola made her debut. Audiences and critics were divided but the king was enchanted, caring less about her technical skill than her fiery spirit, beautiful face and magnificent body. He demanded Stieler do her portrait as an excuse to meet her every day. While the painter worked, the king and the dancer spoke together in Spanish. Ludwig was giddy with love and she promised to stay in Munich with him. Though they had no sex, Lola considered herself his official mistress with gossips believing she was a secret British agent. Her imperiousness added to disquiet especially after Ludwig granted her a permanent seat in the theatre’s royal enclosure. She assembled her own court of young male admirers and she spent Ludwig’s money as quickly as she got it. The king’s friends plotted about how to get him out of her grasp but opposition to her merely stiffened his resistance.

Lola was her own worst enemy and gradually became a pariah in Munich. One day she flew into a rage when one of her young beaux stood her up and she rang every bell in a building looking for him shouting “I am the king’s mistress”. The news scandalised the city. When police investigated, Lola claimed someone had impersonated her to blacken her reputation. Ludwig believed her version. He decided to give his “Lolitta” a large annual income as long as she didn’t marry. His advisors’ fears worsened when she intervened in a pay dispute with teachers and even announced the settlement ahead of the official department.

Officials tried to bribe her to leave Bavaria. She refused, which convinced Ludwig she did not love him merely for his wealth, though he was perturbed by her young male acolytes. Citizens opposed his plan to grant her Bavarian citizenship and graffiti appeared on city walls: “Montez you great whore, your time will come soon.” Her home was surrounded by a mob which police dispersed. After a crown minister called her “the unspeakable female” Ludwig sacked his government. Rumours began that Lola was now the power behind the throne. Mobs attacked the palace leaving Ludwig shaken but when the dowager empress of Austria suggested he abandon Lola, Ludwig told the grand dame to mind her own business.

When London papers unmasked Lola’s past she sent letters to papers across Europe saying she was from Seville, “my mother a lady of Irish extraction…which I suppose is the cause of my being called Irish.” In Wurzburg she attacked a sentry who tried to pick up her lapdog, leading to more hostility. Ludwig remained hopelessly in love and made her the Countess of Landsfeld. The British Ambassador told London that the King was now deeply unpopular.

Lola’s hopes to become a dignified countess were undermined by drunken young male friends who lifted her on their shoulders before she crashed into chandeliers and fell to the ground unconscious. Stories of half-naked men flooded Munich. She was whistled and jeered in the streets and chased into a church while her acolytes were attacked. The military guarded her house and the palace while the King shut down the university. Rioters became more violent shouting “We want Lola Montez out of Munich”. The King’s sister begged him to comply. Finally Lola stormed out of her house armed with a pistol and fled in a carriage, the news greeted with jubilation. They cheered Ludwig but he was heart-broken. He ordered Lola to seek safety in Switzerland and considered abdication.

In February 1848 uprisings spread across Europe from Paris. The unrest continued in Bavaria despite Lola’s departure with people demanding liberal government. Not having heard from Ludwig, Lola disguised herself as a man and returned to Munich. Someone saw through her false beard and she was arrested. Ludwig hurried to police headquarters. They talked alone for three hours before he convinced her to return to Switzerland. Word spread that Lola was back, many believing Ludwig had connived her return.

Officials proposed a constitutional monarchy. When Ludwig could not agree, he abdicated in favour of his son Maximilian. Lola asked him to join her and also asked for money to finance her extravagant lifestyle. With unrest growing, Ludwig worried he would be barred from returning. He stayed in Munich, reluctantly paying Lola’s bills. At year’s end she moved to London, her spell on the king broken. In 1849 she met 21-year-old barrister’s son George Trafford Heald, eight years her junior. He proposed marriage and once Lola was satisfied with his family wealth, she accepted. She asked for Ludwig’s permission (and continuation of her allowance) though the king was angered to find out she did not wait for the answer.

Lola signed the marriage register as Maria de los Dolores de Landsfeld, a widow from Seville. Heald’s sister considered her a shameless gold digger and found out Captain Thomas James was still alive. On August 6, police arrested Lola for bigamy. She gained bail at a packed court hearing and immediately left for Italy with Heald. Facing the possibility of jail, Lola skipped bail. Their relationship quickly unravelled and he returned to England alone. Moving to France, Lola regained Heald’s affection while continuing to soak Ludwig’s purse. With mounting bills Heald abandoned her a second time. Lola lived alone in Paris and wrote a very unreliable memoir.

Lola smoking a cigarette in Boston 1852.

Lola decided to go back on stage. She made a successful return at Boulogne then Brussels before heading to Prussia where the police director banned her as a dangerous liberal. She returned to France before taking her tour to America, sharing a liner with Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, whose celebrity status outshone her own on arrival in New York. There she met impresario Thomas Barry who prepared her to perform. They reworked the spider dance to become a pas de deux with American dancer George Washington Smith. The Broadway Theatre was packed on December 29 for her debut in a Tyrolean opera that lasted only 40 minutes. While some critics panned her dancing even they admitted Lola held her audience. She did great business for three weeks. She moved to Philadelphia and posed for a photo with Cheyenne chief Light in the Clouds who had just met the president. She was also photographed in Boston smoking a cigarette and though unflattering, it is probably the first ever photo of a woman smoking.

Her tour moved to Richmond, where her support for states’ rights was popular. In some towns there were protests at her “indecency” and the publicity usually added to the box office takings. On May 25, 1852 she made her acting debut in “Lola Montez in Bavaria”, a loose rendition of her time with Ludwig, which was successful though one critic called it full of “unsubstantial puffs”. It led to other dramatic roles which she took south, including a long run in New Orleans. There she was arrested for assaulting her servant over a wages row and Lola drew a dagger and kicked police. After she dramatically attempted suicide by drinking from a vial labelled poison, police reluctantly let her go though she faced charges a month later. There she took over from her lawyer and harangued attorneys and witnesses alike. Once again she jumped bail to Panama, bound for California.

Montez arrived in San Francisco in May 1853 and played to packed houses, though ladies were not recommended to attend as her dance obliged her to search for the spider “rather higher in her skirts than was proper”. Believing Heald was dead and James didn’t count, Lola re-married again; this time as “Maria Dolores Eliza Rosana Landsfeld” to Patrick Hull, a San Francisco newspaper editor whom she befriended at sea. In Sacramento, she stormed off stage when the audience laughed at her. The following night police threatened to arrest unruly theatregoers. She made a speech where she said she loved America and was loudly applauded.

Lola then fell in love with a place, Grass Valley, a mining community in the mountains, where the air was similar to Simla in India. She and Hull soon parted, possibly after she found out Heald was not dead. She made Grass Valley home. Admirers came to visit, including Thomas Francis Meagher, and she was free of the need to pretend she was Spanish, though the grizzly had to go. She heard about Australia’s gold rush (Meagher may have listed its attractions) and decided on a tour down under with a company of California stage veterans.

Lola arrived in Sydney in August 1855. Although the Sydney Morning Herald primly ignored her, another paper The Empire assured readers her play would not affect public morals. After her first performance mainly to men, she appealed for women to attend, which they did in increasing numbers. Sydney was a success though she was plagued with ill health. She sacked her California support crew who tried to slap a writ on her as she left the city, a row which finally got the Herald‘s attention. There was more success in Melbourne, Geelong and Adelaide and an inevitable letter to the editor after criticism of the spider dance. There was more free publicity when a pastor demanded her arrest for indecency. She inaugurated a new theatre in Ballarat though she threatened to whip local newspaper editor Henry Seekamp after he published a critical letter. Seekamp grabbed his own whip and the two traded blows in a hotel and pulled each other’s hair before being dragged apart. Lola’s latest whip exploits quickly sped around the globe and did nothing to dampen theatre crowds. Her run in Ballarat came to an end when a woman, incensed at Lola’s criticism of her tour manager husband, whipped her without warning causing severe bruises. Lola appeared next in Melbourne “against medical advice” as the promotion material put it. Lola abandoned plans for an Asian tour and decided to retire again to America. On the way home her actor lover Frank Folland disappeared off the boat into the ocean, with rumors that it was suicide over endless quarrels with Lola. His death deeply affected Lola and she found spirituality.

She returned to New York where she took to the lecture platform charming audiences with her wit and style. She reminisced on her life and praised Ludwig as “refined and high toned.” The Boston Post wrote “she talks vastly better than she dances.” Being Lola, there was more drama when she travelled to France to marry an Austrian nobleman only to find out he was married with five children. She returned to America to continue her career as a respected lecturer. In 1860 there was time for one last tour of Britain and Ireland (she was due to perform in Meagher’s Waterford but went to Manchester instead). She took a pro-Democrat position and defended slavery which did not go down well and she fell ill in London before returning to New York. As America edged towards war she suffered a stroke. Though papers reported she was dying she lived on until January 17, 1861 when her lungs finally failed her. She was buried in New York’s Green-Wood cemetery where Meagher’s wife would join her in 1906 as would a statue of Meagher himself a century later, though Lola’s own epitaph is illegible. In Bavaria, Ludwig had outlived her and took “great consolation to hear her dying as a Christian.” Not regarded as a feminist hero, Lola Montez fought primarily to free her life from prejudice and restrictions. But as her biographer Seymour says, that meant “blazing trails other women could follow.”

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects 46. Costa Rica

The inner harbour at Punta Arenas, an illustration by Ramon Páez to accompany Thomas Francis Meagher’s article “Holidays in Costa Rica” in Harper’s New Monthly in December 1859.

When Libby Meagher left for Ireland before Christmas 1857, Thomas Francis initially satisfied himself with a visit to Washington and then a speaking tour of the midwest. He even placed an ad in the Irish News offering his speaking services to literary societies. But with his celebrity status fading and the gigs drying up, Meagher announced a new plan in March 1858. “I visit Central America—especially Costa Rica,” Meagher announced, “for the purpose of investigating the true state of affairs there, and gaining familiarity with a noble region for which a momentous future inevitably draws near.”

The region’s future looked promising in an age of sea travel. Americans wanting to travel from the east to the west coast needed to take a ship to Central America, before crossing the isthmus and then taking another ship up to San Francisco. Travel and trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific would be helped enormously if there was a canal in one of the countries with the shortest borders between the oceans: Nicaragua, Costa Rica or Panama (then part of New Granada with modern day Colombia.)

There was also the possibility of starting Irish immigration to the region. In the News Meagher had talked up the prospect of the Irish leaving the “drinking, debauchery and riotousness” of the New York slums and touted the work of the Irish Aid Society in helping Irish families head west. His Irish-American judge friend Charles P. Daly and wife Maria Lydig Daly helped fund the Costa Rica trip, and Meagher’s letter to Maria Daly suggests he was exploring Irish immigration options to the country.

Meagher did not admit this publicly, claiming the trip had no political purpose and he only wanted to collect material for lecturing and newspaper articles. Mitchel’s paper reported that he carried a letter from the Costa Rican minister in Washington, but Meagher said he was merely carrying letters of introduction. His traveling companion was a fellow former Stonyhurst student, Ramón Páez, son of exiled Venezuelan former president and follower of Simón Bolívar, Antonio Páez. Meagher said Páez Jr was an “accomplished linguist, a botanist, a geologist, and a splendid draftsman” who would do the scientific and artistic work, while Meagher would “endeavor to do the rest, whatever that may be.” Meagher dismissed “saucy statements” from rival papers including the New York Herald which said Meagher and Páez “were in South America to lend a hand in the new revolution in Venezuela.”

Given his support for William Walker’s revolution in neighboring Nicaragua, Meagher almost certainly had a political purpose in mind. Costa Rican president Mora Porras led the coalition that defeated Walker and though it was costly, with Costa Rica losing half its troops to battle and disease, the war was a source of great national pride and importance. Meagher was in the country when the presidents of Costa Rica and Nicaragua signed a joint decree on May 1, 1858 requesting French and British military support. Both countries were suspicious of America, and of Meagher’s support for the filibusters. A year earlier Walker had tried to launch another expedition in Nicaragua but was arrested by the US Navy and repatriated to New York. Walker arrived in New York in late 1857 and like Fabens, instructed the firm of Campbell and Meagher to defend him. Meagher accompanied Walker to Washington to meet Secretary of State Lewis Cass. Cass called the Navy’s arrest of Walker “illegal, inexcusable, and unauthorized.” He said the government did not consider Walker a criminal and he was free to go. Walker’s case was probably helped by a letter he wrote to President Buchanan which the New York Evening Post believed “was the production of Thomas Francis Meagher.” Meagher denied the allegation.

Meagher described the trip to Costa Rica in three articles called “Holidays in Costa Rica” for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. After a three-day journey from Panama in March, Meagher and Páez had an undignified arrival at low tide in Punta Arenas. Though it was the country’s principal port on the Pacific “where the entire coffee-crop of Costa Rica is shipped to Europe and the United States,” it lacked a wharf. Small boats took passengers and cargo within 50 yards of shore, with the last part of the journey, “through the slimiest mud, have to be got over on the back of a native, whose knees,” Meagher said, “are none of the steadiest when put to the test of 200 pounds of Irish flesh and blood.” On terra firma they enjoyed the charms of Punta which Meagher called “the Newport of Costa Rica” before they traveled up the mountains to San José. In the capital Meagher presented letters of introductions to the bishop of San José and the palace of government. On Easter Sunday they joined the throngs in the central plaza where an effigy of Judas Iscariot was hanged on a gibbet before it was set alight.

The introductory letters opened doors, including one to the presidential ball where Meagher’s invite called him “Señor Mars.” As Athearn wrote, the unintentional association with the god of war was probably pleasing to the man of the sword. The ball was in honor of another otherworldly creature, Felix Belly, a French journalist and promoter of a Nicaraguan trans-isthmian canal. Belly had persuaded president Mora to allow France to build a canal, much to Meagher’s alarm. Although French officials denied Belly was operating with their consent, the Irish News published an article called “Casus Belly” suggesting a war might be needed to keep the “meddlesome French” out of Central America. Meagher spotted the president of Costa Rica and a Nicaraguan general at the ball before finally seeing the “closely shaven head and the finikin figure, the spy glass and spider-legs of M. Belly himself.” Belly was from head to toe, according to Meagher’s critical eye, “one compact smile, cozily framed.”

Belly made serious advances in Central America. He settled a long standing border dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, got French warships stationed on Lake Nicaragua, and most importantly, was granted a 99-year canal concession. Meagher made no similar inroads and after the presidential ball, he and Páez moved on to the central city of Cartago passing a child’s funeral, “the little corpse prettily dressed and decked with flowers, violins and flutes preceding it,” and an old priest carried in a gilt sedan-chair, “with his shriveled hands blessing it at times.” They climbed to the crater of Irazu volcano on the day Páez heard of an uprising in Venezuela which led to the recall of his father. Páez immediately returned home via Panama while Meagher continued eastwards to Greytown where he sailed back to New York in June on the US Navy vessel Jamestown. Belly’s canal came to nothing due to a lack of investment capital while Meagher’s trip also ended in disappointment. He believed immigration to Costa Rica was not practical because its government was “irresponsible and armed with a Constitution fatal to liberty.” He was soon rejoined by his wife back from Ireland. Unlike the fuss made over Meagher’s first wife, the Waterford papers were silent about Libby other than to say she arrived from London “accompanied by her respected father-in-law Thomas Meagher Esq.” and she returned to New York on June 9. 

Restored to the editorship of the Irish News, Meagher sided with Senator Douglas “on the true side of the Democratic fence” over president Buchanan’s support of the proposed Lecompton Constitution. Douglas felt that it had been fraudulently and undemocratically enacted. Nevertheless Meagher maintained sympathy for the south and spent the end of 1858 on a southern tour. He accused abolitionists of treason for hiding their hostility to the republic “by their assaults on the domestic institutions of the south.” Meagher also kept an eye on Central America for further openings and would return to Costa Rica in the years to come. Meanwhile his Irish friends were trying to woo him to support further revolutions in the land of his birth. One particular colleague from Ballingarry days traveled across the Atlantic to seek him out.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 11. The Year of Repeal

Ireland’s Palladian-style parliament house (1727-1800) at College Green, Dublin. After the 1801 Act of Union, the building became the property of the Bank of Ireland. Photo: Author’s collection

Opinion sometimes comes foaming and surging like a tide; sometimes it steals into new channels, as silently as health returning to the cheeks of an invalid – Charles Gavan Duffy “Four Years of Irish History” (1883)

Newly home from Stonyhurst College in April 1843, Thomas Francis Meagher did not stay long in Waterford. In May he headed overseas again to take a grand tour of Europe with young friends. The tour’s lasting significance came from a boat trip up the Rhine to visit the new nation of Belgium. A decade earlier Belgium had successfully broken away from the Netherlands and now, as Meagher’s friend Pat Smyth wrote, “Belgium became in his mind a model of what Ireland should be.” Meagher would weave the 1832 siege of Antwerp into his famous Sword speech in 1846, though he glossed over the fact that the British helped defeat the Dutch invaders. After the tour Meagher remained a young man of leisure in Waterford, exploring rivers by boat, down the Suir to Duncannon and Passage, up the Barrow to New Ross, or picnicking on Lady’s Island and Dunbrody Abbey. Occasionally with friend Thomas Condon he would sail beyond the harbor to Tramore bay.  However politics were simmering away behind Meagher’s carefree days.

Meagher’s lifestyle was an anomaly in Ireland in 1843. The country was predominantly agrarian and poor and its explosive rise in population from five to eight million from 1800 to the 1840s was almost exclusively rural. Supposedly an integral part of the United Kingdom, the largest empire in the world and the center of the Industrial Revolution, Ireland was a second class citizen, a source of cheap labor and food for Britain. Irish cotton and wool industries could not compete with more advanced English competition and collapsed when the Act of Union removed protective duties. A recession following the Napoleonic wars caused agricultural prices and land values to plummet causing grave hardships to millions of small farmers.

While the British government denied mechanization and urbanization to Ireland, they simultaneously blamed the Irish for their own backwardness. Since improvement initiatives tended to increase rents, tenants persisted with subsistence farming, creating no surplus capital. Meanwhile absentee landlords plowed their rents into more profitable English markets. German historian Friedrich Von Raumer called Irish tenant farmers “expellable serfs” who could be evicted if they fell behind with rent. Peel’s 1843 Devon Commission, which looked into the problem of Irish land leases, found that superior prosperity in the north was due to tenant rights, the “Ulster custom” of fixity of tenure, but the government ignored its findings.

There were also laws mandating tithes, which were one tenth of the produce of agricultural land levied for the support of the state-established Church of Ireland and its clergymen. Catholics, who also supported their own priests, bitterly resented tithe payments and many refused to pay them. The tithes also offended protestants like Methodists and Unitarians which did not belong to the established church. The injustices inspired a long guerrilla-style “land and tithe” war lasting from 1815 to the 1840s. Illegal gangs such as Ribbonmen and Whiteboys waged terror on landowners and many members were transported to Australia for their crimes.

A small but growing Irish middle class believed that only a parliament in Dublin could solve these intractable problems. In 1843 Daniel O’Connell, free from his Dublin mayoral duties, harnessed a mass movement for Repeal, similar to the Catholic Association that helped him win Emancipation in 1829. In parliament O’Connell led a loose alliance of Irish MPs. These were no threat to his old enemy, Tory prime minister Robert Peel, who gained a huge majority in the 1841 election. Although the 1840 reforms had given Catholics control of municipal councils, franchise restrictions still gave Protestants influence beyond the proportion of their population. Aided by nationalist newspapers, especially the Nation which started in 1842, O’Connell now declared 1843 would be the “Year of Repeal”. O’Connell wanted to recruit three million Repealers and held large-scale meetings to demonstrate to Peel the size of his support in Ireland.

When German travel writer Johann Georg Kohl visited Waterford in 1842 he was struck by repeal fever in the city. At a city hotel he noted a Repeal Room where “the friends of repeal are always to be found, perusing the opposition papers of England and Ireland, which are taken for their use.” A day later Kohl took a passage to New Ross on a steamboat called the Repealer. “What is there to be found in Ireland that has not some connexion with repeal?” Kohl asked. “I was informed that the repealers go almost exclusively by this boat, and hence it was also called the People’s Steamer. On the flag which waved from the quarter-deck were the words ‘Hurrah for the Repeal of the Union!’ O’Connell can now, at his meetings, truly boast that the repeal cause is progressing with the rapidity of steam.”

Thomas Meagher was a senior member of O’Connell’s Waterford organization. As mayor he declared Ireland would be “plundered, degraded and impoverished” until the Repeal of the Union was granted. Both he and his son Thomas Francis served on committees, acted as stewards at repeal dinners, and supervised the collection of the repeal rent. In April 1843 the mayor chaired a city trades meeting to petition parliament for Repeal which Thomas Francis also attended. There Thomas Francis heard the speech of a “Sheil in the rough,” local schoolmaster James Nash, who said the Union “had not left us a pewter spoon to run a railroad with through a plate of stirabout.” Nash was untroubled by British threats of coercion to stop Repealers. “Let them come on; let them draw the sword; and then woe to the conquered.” Meagher drew on Nash’s potent imagery in his Sword speech three years later.

O’Connell held spectacular events across the country each Sunday throughout 1843, often in places of great historical importance. These stage-managed processions combined politics with theater and mass audience participation. Half pilgrimage and half summer fair, they attracted hundreds of thousands supporters. A million people reportedly attended the meeting on the Hill of Tara in August. Nationalist newspapers exaggerated the numbers to prove the mass support behind Repeal, while Unionist newspapers did the same to put pressure on the government to suppress the Repeal agitation. The Times sarcastically called them “monster meetings” and O’Connell gladly appropriated the term.

On Saturday night the roads leading to the meeting place were aflame with the torches of people walking long distances. Then as dawn broke the hillsides were thronged with those hearing Mass at outdoor altars or eating breakfasts of bread and potatoes cooked over turf fires. Late in the morning local leaders arrived on coaches or on horseback accompanied by temperance bands. When O’Connell’s coach appeared the horses were detached, and amid great cheers Repealers pulled the carriage by hand to the meeting place. These parades were often five miles long and took hours to complete. O’Connell often combined themes of Repeal with his crusade against slavery. A float in the Cork procession featured two boys; one painted black bearing the label “free” representing Africa where Britain had abolished slavery, while the second boy representing Ireland was painted white, wore chains and his label read “A Slave Still!”  When the float came before O’Connell, “Africa” thanked O’Connell for helping him to gain his freedom but reminded him his companion was still in bondage. Then “Ireland” knelt before O’Connell and, at the Liberator’s command, broke his chains. As the float trundled off through the city, the boy triumphantly displayed his free arms to cheering onlookers.

On June 11, O’Connell used the abolition metaphor at the monster meeting in Mallow, County Cork. He asked whether the Irish would live as slaves or die as freemen. “Have we not the ordinary courage of Englishmen? Are we to be trampled on?” he asked. “It will be my dead body they will trample on.” The Freeman’s Journal noted the “countless thousands who formed the body guard of the Liberator” and banners with provocative slogans such as “See the conquering hero comes” and “We submit to no Saxon superiority.” The Mallow Defiance, as the speech was called, posed a serious challenge to the Peel administration. O’Connell believed that a large demonstration of Irish will would be enough of a signal for the British to concede to their demands. “The parliament will naturally yield to the wishes and prayers of an entire nation,” he said.

Waterford held its monster meeting on July 9. That morning Thomas Francis Meagher collected O’Connell in the mayor’s carriage from the village of Kilmacthomas and drove him 15 miles to Waterford. According to the Nation, there was another enormous procession, “led by a temperance band and headed by the trades of Waterford – Carpenters, Farriers, Shoemakers, Tobacco Spinners, Coopers, Housesmiths, Shipsmiths, Coach-builders, Bakers, Tailors, Ropemakers, Pipemakers, Chandlers, Shipwrights, Nailers, Wicker-workers, Butchers etc.” The Suir was “black with arrays of boats” and 300,000 people crammed Ballybricken Hill, where young Meagher had another job, this time introducing O’Connell. The Liberator slammed local Tory politicians and noted there were only 800 electors in Waterford where the rateable qualification to vote was £10 compared to one shilling in Bristol. Afterwards O’Connell attended a paying dinner for 450 supporters at City Hall presided by Meagher’s father where toasts were proposed as well as the “most tremendous cheering” and “handkerchief-waving.” 

The attitude to O’Connell’s campaign was markedly different across the channel with the Times calling Repeal a “hopeless and miserable delusion.” Unlike in 1829 where there was solid British support for emancipation, Westminster was firmly opposed to the end of union. Both Whigs and Tories considered Ireland necessary to British defense and the preservation of the Empire and the one time parliament voted on Repeal in 1834, the major parties combined to deny it by 523 votes to 38. The government also had a moral commitment to protect Irish Protestants who feared a Catholic ascendancy in an independent Ireland. On May 9, 1843 Peel told parliament he would stop at nothing to defend the Union. Even civil war, he said, was preferable to “the dismemberment of the Union.” With parliamentary support, Peel had the freedom to employ any tactic he believed necessary to preserve the Union, canceling out O’Connell’s vague threats of defiance.

Despite his outbursts, O’Connell did not support a no-rent campaign which started in Carlow. At the 30th monster meeting in Lismore, County Waterford on September 24, O’Connell said “the state coach of the constitution was going downhill too rapidly” and he needed to act as “a drag upon the wheels.” He urged the crowd to leave Repeal management to him and hinted he might be willing to strike a deal with the government. The now 20-year-old Thomas Francis Meagher represented his father at Lismore and gave a speech at dinner that evening. According to the Nation, Meagher referred to the 1826 election when “Waterford released itself from the tyranny of the Beresfords, and prepared the way for emancipation” and he prophesied that Repeal would now follow after which O’Connell replied, “well done, young Ireland!” O’Connell would not always remain as supportive of young Ireland or of Meagher himself.

A week after Lismore on October 1, O’Connell held his 31st monster meeting at Mullaghmast Co Kildare, the reputed site of a summary execution of Irish gentry by the English army during the time of Elizabeth I. Stewards wore a hat badge bearing the inscription “O’Connell’s Police”, perhaps to needle the prime minister whose brilliantly blue jacketed Irish Peace Preservation Force he founded in 1814 were called Peelers long before the London Metropolitan police he founded as Home Secretary in 1829 were called Bobbies. O’Connell arrived at Mullaghmast dressed in the scarlet robes of a Dublin City alderman and wearing a cap of green velvet with gold in the form of an Irish crown. He said Mullaghmast was where English treachery “consummated the massacre of the Irish people” and handed out a document entitled “A full and true account of the dreadful slaughter and murder at Mullaghmast on the bodies of 400 Roman Catholics”. The document would later be used in evidence against him. 

The meetings were expected to climax a week later at Clontarf on October 8, the scene of the famous battle where Munster king Brian Boruma and his Limerick and Waterford men defeated Dublin Vikings in 1014. Attendees were coming from across Ireland and beyond. Irish-born Liverpool woolbroker Terence Bellew MacManus chartered four steamers to take thousands across from Merseyside and Manchester. But Peel was determined the meeting would not happen. His trigger was unauthorized notices around Dublin which referred to “mounted Repeal volunteers” parading at the event. O’Connell disowned the notices but the reference to an Irish cavalry and other military terms gave Peel the excuse to act.

On Saturday October 7, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland declared the meeting illegal. He pasted proclamation notices on walls that afternoon while British warships patrolled Dublin Bay. That evening O’Connell hosted a meeting which heard calls to defy the ban. Despite the Mallow Defiance, O’Connell did not want to send unarmed followers to slaughter. He sent messengers across the country to say the meeting was off. Despite the late hour of the ban, Dublin remained quiet on Sunday. A day later O’Connell condemned the government but warned against violence saying his followers must remain true to constitutional agitation and the British Government had used the rebellion of 1798 to justify the Act of Union. Another futile rebellion might leave Ireland even worse off.

The cancellation did not appease Peel. Within a week his government sent more soldiers and ships to Ireland and arrested Repeal leaders, including O’Connell, his favorite son John O’Connell, and two newspaper editors Charles Gavan Duffy of the Nation and Pilot founder Richard Barrett. Seven accused, quickly nicknamed the Traversers, were charged with “attempting to undermine the Constitution and to alienate the loyalty of Her Majesty’s forces in Ireland.” Younger Repealers expected this to be a signal for resistance but O’Connell insisted on no opposition. Repeal would be achieved peacefully, he claimed, and the old Irish parliament would reopen in College Green within six months. Few believed him. Peel had called O’Connell’s bluff and the seeds were planted for a fatal split in the Repeal movement.