“I don’t like what I see, Samuel Tidy. Do you?”
“It is not what Quakers believe in.”
William nodded and pursed his lips. The trouble was, he thought, he’d seen it all before. He’d seen the French Revolution turn into terror and dictatorship. How quickly the underdog could turn into a tyrant. He’d supported the cause of Catholic emancipation since he was a youth; and God knows, if this peaceful army of O’Connell’s was militant, it was understandable. But as he watched the phalanx of priests marching in front of their men, with fifes playing and banners flying, he sensed a triumphalism that disturbed him.
Perhaps it was because he was middle-aged, but the older he got, the more William respected compromise; and from his perspective, these local priests were going further than necessary. Reforms were needed, of course, but there was no need for this bad feeling. For relations between the British government and the Vatican, nowadays, were actually rather cordial. During the years when Napoleon dominated Europe and threatened its Catholic monarchs, Rome had been glad that England stood as the bulwark against him; and after Napoleon’s final defeat, when the territories of Europe were reordered at the great Congress of Vienna, a dozen years ago, it had been the British who insisted that the rich Italian Papal States must be given back to the Pope, who had been grateful to Britain ever since. O’Connell and the parish priests had a good case, for instance, when they complained about the tithes; but their outrage about the Prime Minister’s veto over bishops was unnecessary. William himself was in a position to know that, behind the scenes, the British government and the Vatican discreetly arranged the top Church appointments together, to everyone’s satisfaction.
“I’m with O’Connell on Catholic Emancipation. And since I was never for the Union, I would support its repeal,” he remarked to Tidy. “But times change, and one must look for what is practical. This militancy is dangerous.”
William usually spent about three months a year in London. He enjoyed sitting in the British House of Lords and keeping up with events in London. And much could be achieved there. Even Grattan thought so, for he’d spent the last fifteen years of his life in the London Parliament. And despite the fear of Catholicism which, William now understood, was ingrained in the English like a race memory, there were many in the British Parliament, especially in the liberal Whig party, who were most anxious to grant the Irish Catholics what they wanted. This very spring, the last legal disabilities had been removed from the Dissenters. It was inevitable that, with time, the Catholics would be similarly treated. Patience was needed.
But what he saw here was war. War of tenant upon landlord, war of Catholic upon Protestant.
“I fear also,” Tidy continued, “that this will arouse the worst fears of the Presbyterians and Orangeists.”
“How right you are,” William concurred. Since he was a boy, the Presbyterians had changed their tune completely. In those days, most Ulster Presbyterians wanted to be free of England and its Church, which made them second-class citizens. But nowadays, with their own rights secured, they were the strongest supporters of the Union. “United with England and Scotland, we are part of a Protestant majority,” they judged. “Without England, we become a minority in a sea of Irish papists.” And propelled by that fear, their preachers were starting to sound as strident as they had back in the days of Cromwell. When they read of these marching priests and tenants in Clare, it would arouse all their worst fears.
And suddenly, William felt a pang of nostalgia for the days of his youth. He longed for the old Patriots, or the men of ’98, like Patrick Walsh or noble young Emmet. They had all shared a common vision—of a free Ireland, where Catholic and Protestant, Presbyterian and Deist, could live together in equality under the law. It might be idealistic, but it was a noble ideal, and he missed it.
Nor was it impractical. For if the new republic of America, with its separation of church and state, could realize such an ideal, then why not here in the Old World, too?
Yet when he considered these men, marching in Ennis—no matter how justified their grievances—Lord Mountwalsh thought he heard not the continuing march of enlightenment, but a heavier, grimmer sound: the slow, sectarian thud of boot on blood, as though, like a returning prophesy, an age-old darkness was closing in again.
Tidy’s thoughts at that moment were following quite a different course. He was glad he had gone to stay with the earl. He had never stayed in a great country house before. He had especially liked the library. He had even liked the earl’s wife, whose heart was in the right place, even if she had seemed to him a little foolish. And he was glad that Mountwalsh had brought him to see this election. For this, too, was instructive.
But his thoughts were less on the election than upon what he had seen already in County Clare.
He had never been to the west before. Dublin and Leinster he knew, with their rich farmlands; the busy port of Cork, also. Ulster he knew, with its farmsteads, its cloth and linen industries. But the rural west of Ireland he did not know.
How was it possible, he asked himself, amidst such magnificent scenery, that the people could be so neglected and so poor? How was it that the burgesses of Ennis could allow the terrible squalour of the shantytowns along the approaches to their town? Were they not ashamed? How could the landlords—not only the absentees, but those there to see, Irishmen of the same blood, if they were Christians—let their neighbours live in such conditions and do nothing about it? How could the poor themselves take so little care that they would have families in the first place, to bring them up in deprivation? Why was there no industry, no enterprise to bring employment? His practical, self-controlled Quaker soul protested against this vast, cruel carelessness.
But now that unpleasant young political man was returning. He had learned as much as he cared to from Stephen Smith. But he took a deep breath and tried to remember that it was not for him to make judgements upon another man.
Stephen loved the mad business of the election. O’Connell had sent him on an errand, but he had promised to return to Lord Mountwalsh, and as he could only remain with him for a minute or two, he was glad to have something amusing to tell him. The scene he had just witnessed had been quite remarkable. For the harangue Father Murphy had delivered had been mesmerising in its intensity.
“It was all in Irish,” he explained. “The O’Connells had to translate, because most of us from Leinster didn’t have enough Irish to understand. First, he reminds them of their duty, and they all look suitably solemn, but he isn’t sure he has them. Then he reminds them of all the others that are voting as they should, and how accursed they will be by all their fellows if they let them down. That affects them considerably, by the look of it. And then comes the clincher. Did they not know, he cries, wagging his long bony finger at them, that one of the Catholic men voted for the Protestant— and that he was struck down by an apoplexy as soon as he stepped out of the booth? ‘Divine retribution will be swift,’ he cries. ‘You may count upon it. The saints are watching, and taking note!’ He was quite terrifying. I was frightened myself.”
The earl gave a wry smile. Stephen was chuckling. But Tidy was not amused.
“Do you mean that there was an unfortunate who was struck with an apoplexy, or that there was no such man?” he asked seriously.
“Heavens, man,” cried Stephen, “I haven’t the least idea. What does it matter?”
“Does it not matter to thee whether a thing is the truth or a lie?” the Quaker asked.
“You haven’t the spirit of devilment in you,” said Stephen, “or you would understand.”
“I hope,” answered Tidy quietly, “that I have not.”
It was a little while later, walking along the street where the local newspaper, the Clare Journal, had its offices, that Stephen caught sight of the big, blue-eyed fellow he had noticed in the band of tenants who’d been harangued by Father Murphy. They’d all voted for O’Connell. He’d checked. Now it remained to be seen whether Callan the agent
would evict them, or whether he could be persuaded not to.
The big fellow was standing by a small cart and looking serious. Beside him was a girl, maybe ten or so, pale and with a solemn face. The big man had his arm around her shoulder. Father and daughter, obviously. Was he comforting her, or she him? She must know what he had done.
Pity, he thought, that the girl was so plain.
1843
It began quietly, in America. A farmer in the New York region, looking out over a field of growing potatoes one day, noticed that something was amiss.
Some of the potato leaves had spots on them. He waited a few days. More of the leaves were spotted now, and the ones he had first noticed had withered. The stems on which they grew seemed to be affected, too. That night, he discussed with his wife whether he should dig them up or lift the entire crop early.
The following morning, when he went out to the field, there was a stench of putrefying matter rising from the ground.
He set to work at once. He dug up everything that looked infected. Many of the potatoes were already rotting; in others, rot had clearly begun. When he had completed this work, he made a large bonfire and burned them all. About half of the crop was still in the ground.
Being a decent man, he went to all his neighbours and then into the local town, to warn of the blight and discover whether others were experiencing similar problems. A number of farmers were reporting the same thing.
Some days later, he saw spotting once again and said to his wife: “Better lift the whole crop. Save what we can.” A good many of the potatoes were obviously infected, and these he destroyed, as he had the others. About half the remaining crop, fortunately, appeared to be sound, and these he stored in a pit.
Ten days later, he checked the crop he had saved. He picked out a potato and cut it open with a knife. It was rotten. He tried another. The same. Half the potatoes he had thought were sound were now useless.
Phytophthora infestans: it was a fungal infestation. But where had it come from?
Nobody knew, but the likelihood was that it had come into the United States as an importation. For, desirous of avoiding any degeneracy in the potato stock, the American agriculturalists were in the habit of importing fresh seed potatoes from Peru. Some of the ships also brought guano, the seabird manure used as fertilizer. It seems likely that the fungus spread from the guano to the seed potato on the ship.
Having established itself in New York, the fungus was already starting to spread with astonishing rapidity. It would cross New Jersey and Pennsylvania. By 1845, it would reach the American Midwest.
The trade in seed potato was triangular. From America’s eastern seaboard, the seed was exported east to Europe. By the time it was established in the Midwest, the blight would also appear in the Low Countries of Holland and Belgium, and on the south coast of England.
“You have never read The Wild Irish Girl?” Lady Mountwalsh looked at Dudley Doyle with astonishment. She thought everybody had.
Everyone liked Henrietta. She must be fifty, Doyle thought; yet there was still something girlish about the Englishwoman William had chosen as his bride. And the complexion, the peaches-and-cream complexion that had turned heads in every drawing room in London and Dublin—it was still the same. That, and the china-blue eyes that were turned upon him now, and the delectable, plump little breasts. He envied Mountwalsh his marriage bed. The couple had been happy and had raised a healthy family. She might be a little silly, but there was certainly no malice in her. And she was, as he supposed, an enthusiast for all things Irish.
“And you,” she said, “with those dark, Celtic good looks.” He smiled. One had to like her.
“You know, Henrietta, in Irish, my name actually means ‘dark foreigner.’ So I must suppose that my ancestors were Viking pirates,” he explained to her, “rather than Irish heroes.” Vikings who would certainly have married local Irish women, themselves a mixture of tribes from northern France and, so the legends said, people from the Spanish peninsula. Since those ancient days, what other strains would have entered the blood? Norman, Flemish, Welsh, English, to be sure. Some more Spanish, probably. His clever, somewhat ruthless mind enjoyed such analysis. “It’s hard to know what Celtic means, really,” he remarked.
But Henrietta knew. It meant the romantic heroine of Lady Morgan’s famous novel, the wild daughter of the “Prince of Con-naught,” who wins the heart of the prejudiced Englishman and teaches him to love the glories of Irish wit and learning, bravery and generosity. It meant the purity of soul that came from the timeless Celtic wellsprings. It meant Hibernia—a land of heroes and mystics, a magical counterpart to the sterner beauties of Scotland in the novels of Walter Scott. It had made Ireland quite fashionable. In fact, Doyle had read the book, though he preferred to tease Henrietta gently by pretending that he hadn’t. And if, to him, it was all nonsense, the fictional romantic Celt was at least an improvement upon the traditional view of the Irishman as a bog-dwelling murderer and devious papist—a slander that was still to be found in the cartoons of Punch magazine or the pages of any English newspaper.
Every time Henrietta went back to London with her husband, she told people about the Ireland she knew. True, he thought wryly, it was an Ireland that consisted of the big house on St. Stephen’s Green and this great estate in Wexford, with its rolling pastures and its ornamental gardens. It was a land where you called upon similar-minded neighbours, enjoyed their dinner parties, where you were waited upon by their loyal Irish servants, played cards, went to the club. Since her husband was a decent man and one of the best landlords in Ireland, she had encountered a friendliness from the local Irish tenants and labourers that was entirely genuine. And all this was glossed with a magical Celtic romanticism that coloured the landscape like a charming evening sunset amongst the hills. However, if she induced some members of the English governing class to take a more kindly view of the western island, then so much the better, he supposed.
“This is a most excellent meal,” he added with a smile. Gaston, the Mountwalshes’ chef, always performed miracles with the produce from the estate whenever he accompanied them into Wexford. Outside, the dusk was gathering. The magical season of Halloween, the old Celtic festival of Samhain, was only days away.
Much as he liked Henrietta, however, it was not her that he had really come to see. He glanced across the table at Stephen Smith. They hadn’t spoken much yet, as the fellow had only arrived that afternoon, looking tired. But when William Mountwalsh had invited Doyle to stay, he had told him: “Stephen Smith is a man I think you should know better.” And William, he always reckoned, was a fair judge of men. “Though, of course,” the peer had added, “I know how hard you are to please.”
If his ancestors had always chosen to remain in the merchant class, Dudley Doyle had chosen a slightly different style. To all outward appearances, he looked, dressed, talked, and, to a large extent, thought like a country gentleman. He belonged to the Kildare Street Club, whose members were mostly landowners. But although he owned two farms in Meath, he had always lived in town except in the summer months, when he resided in a seaside villa he had built at Sandymount, in the southern part of Dublin Bay. He had ample funds. The collection of Dublin properties that old Barbara Doyle had passed on to his grandfather was still in his hands. He owned a half share in a thriving wine merchants, and received ground rent from three large pubs. And though he met the country gentry at his club, at the races, or as a guest in their houses, he often preferred the company of the university men. At Trinity College, he had been a precise, classical scholar. But for many years now, he had chosen to occupy his spare time in the private study of political economy. Since being widowed two years ago, he had devoted himself to these studies even more. From time to time, if asked politely, he would even give a lecture upon the subject.
As his eyes took in Stephen Smith, he saw much that he did not like. A trace of carelessness in his dressing. He himself was always fastidious. An intelligent face, certainly,
but not a university man. A pity. The earl had said that he was poor, and poverty, Dudley Doyle considered, was always a mistake. Also that he was amusing. But what were his verbal weapons? Were we speaking of a mere gift of utterance, the broad blade of humour, the vagaries of vulgar whimsy, thrown over a company like a gladiator’s net? Or were we speaking of something with more politesse, the rapier of repartee, with which he himself was adept, quick, and deadly? It remained to be seen.
“You are an associate of Mr. O’Connell, I understand?” he said to Smith. “Do I take it, therefore, that you are a Whig?”
Since his astonishing election for Clare, fifteen years before, it was hard to imagine how Daniel O’Connell could have played his cards better. The English government had been so shocked by the result that it had promptly removed the right to vote from the forty-shilling freeholders, Catholic and Protestant alike, and raised the qualification so high that only the better sort of farmers—the more responsible element—could vote in future. But they had been forced to give way and let Catholics sit in Parliament. O’Connell, hailed as the Liberator, had gained his main objective. And soon after that, when the liberal Whig party had come to power, O’Connell had seen his chance. Building up a large following of sixty Irish members, he had skilfully managed an alliance with the Whigs that had been fruitful. He charmed the Whig grandees in person; and leading his sixty followers to their aid in close votes, he made them very grateful to him. The Irish Catholics gained. “We’ll do all for you that we can,” the government promised. A year after young Queen Victoria came to the throne, even the vexed question of tithes was finally resolved. Above all, the long decade of Whig government saw enlightened men sent out to govern Ireland: fine men like the Under Secretary, Thomas Drummond, who came to love the country and who never ceased to remind the Ascendancy landowners: “Property has rights, gentlemen, but it also has responsibilities.” A dozen years after his election, O’Connell could say that his compromise with the Whigs had produced real benefits.