"CIVIL WAR?"--INCIDENTS IN THE 'EIGHTIES--SIR
GEORGE TREVELYAN--LORD BARRYMORE
The streets of London were red one day in November, 1909, with
placards proclaiming:
"The Lords declare Civil War!"
I suppose the Radicals thought it paid to force the note. Mr.
Winston Churchill was their bandmaster for the moment. There is no
more effective political rhetorician, provided you accept that
fallacy about the folly of the people against which the warning of
Mr. Lincoln passes unheeded.
But there was, at least on one side, a state of feeling in the
country comparable to nothing I can remember except the feeling which
prevailed during the Home Rule crisis, and far stronger now than
then. In that crisis also the Lords came to the rescue of the
Kingdom, which they saved from disintegration and ruin. Ruin for the
moment it would have been; only to be finally averted by the
reconquest of Ireland. Even to the spectator those were stirring
days. England and Ireland from 1881 onward had become the Wild West.
The revolver was the real safeguard of personal {254} liberty. I
don't think it will be quite like that now, but it does seem as if
the bitterness of contention and the personalities of politics would
go further now than then; perhaps have already gone further.
I was in Ireland for a fortnight during one of the worst periods, but
there were times when London was as disturbed and distressful as
Ireland itself. Those were years of dynamite in England, when, as
Lord Randolph Churchill said, the railway stations were flying about
our ears, and when London Bridge came near being blown up, and when
Englishmen in high place were targets. From the Prime Minister down
to his youngest colleague, no man was safe without a guard of
detectives; and not then. Mr. Gladstone, whose courage was high,
shook off his escort whenever he could. Other Ministers paid more
respect to a very real danger. Sir George Trevelyan, who was
appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1882, submitted sensibly to
the precautions the Home Office and Scotland Yard thought needful.
One afternoon I met Trevelyan in a Bond Street shop. We left the
shop together. Two quite innocent-looking men were outside the door.
"I hope you don't mind," said Trevelyan. "I am obliged to let them
follow me." They were Scotland Yard detectives. As we walked down
the street they were within earshot all the way, their vigilance
unrelaxing. Whether they thought their ward in greater or less
danger because I was with him I cannot say. We parted at the corner
of Piccadilly. {255} In both streets the throng on the sidewalk was
dense, but through it these men made their way without violence,
without haste, but never for an instant allowing themselves to be
separated from the Chief Secretary by so much as an arm's length. He
walked in peril not only real but imminent. Two days before his
appointment as Chief Secretary his predecessor, Lord Frederick
Cavendish, and Mr. Burke, permanent Under Secretary, had been
murdered. To accept that inheritance of probable assassination was a
gallant act, quite characteristic of Sir George Trevelyan. But I do
not imagine that he or his friends ever while he held that office
forgot what had happened in Phoenix Park.
Not many evenings later I met Sir George Trevelyan at dinner. If he
had not been famous as a writer and Member of Parliament and Irish
Secretary and much else, he might well have been famous as a
diner-out. He had the art of conversation. His uncle's influence
had left him, in this respect, untouched. Where Macaulay discoursed
and reeled off dreary pages of encyclopædic knowledge, Trevelyan
talked lightly and well; claiming no monopoly, preaching no sermon,
wearying no company too well bred to show itself bored. He had a
felicity of allusion which was so wholly free from pedantry as to
seem almost accidental. His voice, like Browning's, was strident and
his laugh sometimes boisterous; but this was in moments of excitement.
On this particular evening there was something {256} besides his
inspiriting talk which drew the attention of the company. So long as
the ladies were at table he talked with his wonted energy. When the
dining-room door had closed on the last of these departing angels
Trevelyan sank into his chair with a sigh, drew a revolver from the
breast pocket of his coat, laid it on the table and said to his host:
"Pray forgive me, but if you knew how tired I am of carrying this
thing about!"
On Sir George Trevelyan as on others the Irish Secretaryship left its
mark. A year of office aged him as if it were ten. He came out worn
and grey: not yet forty-five years old. The tragedy was in one
particular a tragi-comedy. Half his moustache had turned white; the
other half black as before. And I suppose it shook his nerve more or
less and was perhaps responsible for that fickleness of purpose or of
view which led him first to oppose and then to adopt Mr. Gladstone's
policy of Home Rule.
I saw one side of the Irish question during a visit to Lord
Barrymore, then Mr. Smith-Barry, and his beautiful American wife, at
Fota Island, near Queenstown. Mr. William O'Brien had launched
shortly before this his New Tipperary scheme, of which one main
object was to ruin Mr. Smith-Barry who owned the old Tipperary.
Assassination was then only a political incident or instrument. Mr.
Smith-Barry, moreover, was hated not only as a landowner but for
having organized the one efficient defence against the {257}
spoliation of the landlords which down to that time had been
discovered. He had formed a company and raised a large sum of money
among his English friends, he himself being the largest contributor.
So he held the O'Brien cohorts at bay; at what money cost and at what
personal risk few men knew. But I apprehend that but for Mr.
Smith-Barry the Plan of Campaign and New Tipperary would have
succeeded and the South of Ireland been handed over to the Land
League.
One night as I was on my way from my room to the drawing-room, on the
other side of the hall, I saw by the front door a big man in a blue
cavalry cloak and cap, who had just entered. He was laying aside his
cloak as I passed, and took out of their holsters first one and then
another navy revolver, both seven-shooters. I said, too flippantly:
"You take good care of yourself."
He turned on me sharply, with a questioning look of keen eyes under
heavy eyebrows:
"Are you a friend of Smith-Barry?"
"I should hardly be staying in his house if I were not."
"Then I will tell you how you can best prove your friendship. Get
him to carry what I carry."
"Is he in danger?"
"Danger? There's a detective at this moment behind every tree about
the house, and even so we don't know what may happen. We hope he is
safe here at home, but he goes about unarmed, and it is known he is
unarmed, and no man who {258} does that can be sure of his life. We
have tried our best to make him take care of himself. He will not.
Now do you try."
This sudden outburst, this appeal, this flash of light upon the scene
were all impressive. The big man, it turned out, was the Chief
Constable of the county. He knew whereof he spoke. I promised to do
what I could and I talked with Mr. Smith-Barry.
He was a man equally remarkable for courage and for coolness, but in
matters affecting his personal safety he did not use the judgment for
which in other matters he was distinguished. He could not be
persuaded that anybody would think it worth while to kill him. He
knew well enough that the shooting of landlords had become a popular
pastime, but he could not, or would not, understand why he himself
should be shot.
"I am on good terms with my tenants; my rents are fair rents; I evict
nobody. What have they to gain by shooting me?"
But it was not from his own tenants that trouble was expected. It
was not because Mr. Smith-Barry was not a good landlord, but because
he was the leader of the landlords in the South of Ireland, and the
most formidable opponent of the League that his life was threatened.
"It may be so," he said: "but I think I will go on as I am." And
from that nobody could move him.
Now, as it happened, shortly before I left London I had met one of
the chief officials in the Home Office who said to me:
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"You are going to Ireland."
"Yes, but how do you know?"
"Never mind how I know. What I want to say to you is, Take a
revolver with you."
I was on the point of making a light answer, but stopped. If you get
a hint of that kind from a man who rules over the Criminal Department
of the Home Office and the police generally, you accept it and do as
you are told. I had a revolver with me, therefore, and when the time
came to go back to London I left it in its case on Mr. Smith-Barry's
writing-table, with a letter asking him to accept it from me and once
more begging him to carry it if only that it might be known that he
carried it, or if only out of his friendship to me. This prevailed.
He wrote me that he still thought we made a needless fuss about it,
but he could not refuse the gift and he could not refuse to carry it.
No letter ever pleased me more. I have never again seen my friend
the Chief Constable, but I have never forgotten him, and I think of
him now as a fine impersonation of that authority of the law which,
in those turbulent days, he asserted and successfully maintained
against great odds.
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