OLD FORGOTTEN THINGS
Chief Justice Bushe died in 1843, and Maria Edgeworth in 1849, but Mrs.
Bushe lived on till 1857, a delight and an inspiration to her children
and grandchildren. To her, even more than to the Chief, may be ascribed
the inevitable, almost invariable turn for the Arts, in some form,
frequently in all forms, that distinguishes their descendants, and to
her also is attributed a quality in story-telling known as “Crampton
dash,” which may be explained as an intensifying process, analogous to
the swell in an organ.
But few of their grandchildren, that potent and far-reaching first
cousinhood of seventy, now remain. Bushes, Plunkets, Coghills, Foxes,
Franks, Harrises, they were a notable company, and I imagine that in the
middle and later years of the last century they made a clan of no small
power and influence. “Dublin is my washpot, over Merrion Square will I
cast out my shoe,” they might have said, possibly did say, in their
arrogant youth, when “The Family,” good-looking, amusing, and strenuous,
“took the flure” in the Dublin society of the ’fifties. From among them
came no luminary in Art, specially outstanding, yet there was scarcely
one of them without some touch of that spark which is lit by a coal
taken from the altar, and is, for want of a better term, called
originality; and although the reputations of neither Shakespeare nor
Michael Angelo were threatened, they could have provided a club
dedicated to “Les Quatz’ Arts” with a very useful selection of members.
(Yet the mention of Shakespeare, and the wish to be sincere, force me to
recall a tale of two of these first cousins of Martin’s mother and mine,
the one an artist of delightful achievement, the other, amongst her many
gifts, an astronomer and writer. The latter reproached the former for
her neglect of Shakespeare, and announced her intention of reading aloud
to her one of his plays. The artist replied with a high and
characteristic tranquillity, “Shakespeare was a coarse man, my dear, but
you may read him to me if you like. I can go into a reverie.”)
It is not out of place to mention here that the first writing in which
Martin and I collaborated was a solemnly preposterous work, a dictionary
of the words and phrases peculiar to our family, past and present, with
derivations and definitions--the definitions being our opportunity. It
might possibly--in fact I think some selections would--entertain the
public, but I can confidently say it will never be offered to it;
Bowdler himself would quail at the difficulties it would present.
* * * * *
Martin has, in her memoir of her brother Robert, given a sketch of life
at Ross as it was in the old days, in its patriarchal simplicity, its
pastoral abundance, its limitless hospitality, its feudal relations with
the peasants. Its simplicity was, I imagine, of a more primitive type
than can be claimed for any conditions that I can personally remember in
my own country. The time of which she has written was already passing
when she arrived on the scene, and she had to rely mainly on the
records of her elders. The general atmosphere there and in my country
was much the same, but a certain degree of sophistication may have set
in a little earlier here, and when I say “here,” I speak of that fair
and far-away district, the Barony of West Carbery, County Cork, the
ultimate corner of the ultimate speck of Europe--Ireland. You will not
find West Carbery’s name in the atlas, but Cape Clear will not be
denied, and there is nothing of West Carbery west of Cape Clear, unless
one counts its many sons and daughters who have gone even farther west,
to the Land of the Setting Sun.
The Ireland that Martin and I knew when we were children is fast leaving
us; every day some landmark is wiped out; I will try, as she has done,
to recapture some of the flying memories.
To begin with
CASTLE TOWNSHEND.
Castle Townshend is a small village in the south-west of the County of
Cork, unique in many ways among Irish villages, incomparable in the
beauty of its surroundings, remarkable in its high level of
civilisation, and in the number of its “quality houses.” “High ginthry
does be jumpin’ mad for rooms in this village,” was how the matter was
defined by a skilled authority, while another, equally versed in social
matters, listened coldly to commendation of a rival village, and
remarked, “It’s a nice place enough, but the ginthry is very light in
it. It’s very light with them there entirely.”
I hasten to add that this criticism did not refer to the morals of the
gentry, merely to their scarcity--as one says “a light crop.”
Castlehaven Harbour, to whose steep shores it adheres, defiant of the
law of gravity, by whose rules it should long since have slipped into
the sea, has its place in history. The Spanish Armada touched _en
passant_ (touched rather hard in some places), one of Queen Elizabeth’s
admirals, Admiral Leveson, touched too, fairly hard, and left
cannon-ball bruises on the walls of Castlehaven Castle. The next
distinguished visitors were a force of Cromwell’s troopers. Brian’s
Fort, built by Brian Townshend, the son of one of Cromwell’s officers,
still stands firm, and Swift’s tower, near it, is distinguished as the
place where “the gloomy Dean; (of _autre fois_) wrote a Latin poem,
called “Carberiae Rupes.” A translation of this compliment to the Rocks
of Carbery was printed one hundred and seventy years ago in Smith’s
“History of the Co. Cork.” It was much admired by the historian. A
quotation from it may be found in “A Record of Holiday,” in one of our
books, “Some Irish Yesterdays,” but candour compels me to admit that
four of its lines, descriptive of the coast of Carbery--
“Oft too, with hideous yawn, the cavern wide
Presents an orifice on either side;
A dismal orifice, from sea to sea
Extended, pervious to the god of day.”
--might be taken as equally descriptive of its readers.
The _Titanic_ passed within a few miles of Castlehaven on her first and
last voyage; I saw her racing to the West, into the glow of a fierce
winter sunset. It was from Castle Townshend that the first warnings of
the sharks that were waiting for the _Lusitania_ were sent; and into
Castlehaven Harbour came, by many succeeding tides, victims of that
tragedy. Let it be remembered to the honour of the fishermen who
harvested those sheaves of German reaping, that the money and the
jewels, which most of the drowned
[Illustration: CASTLEHAVEN HARBOUR.
V. F. M.
]
[Illustration: CARBERIAE RUPES.
E. B. C.
]
people had brought with them, were left with them, untouched.
It must have been eighty or ninety years ago that the first member of
“The Chief’s” family reached Castlehaven. This was his second son, the
Rev. Charles Bushe, who was, as Miss Edgeworth says of her stepmamma’s
brother, “fatly and fitly provided for” with the living of Castlehaven.
Somervilles and Townshends had been living and intermarrying in
Castlehaven Parish, with none to molest their ancient solitary reign,
since Brian Townshend built himself the fort from which he could look
forth upon one of the loveliest harbours in Ireland, and the Reverend
Thomas Somerville, the first of his family to settle in Munster, took to
himself (by purchase from the representatives of the Earl of
Castlehaven) the old O’Driscoll Castle, and lies buried beside it, in
St. Barrahane’s churchyard, under a slab that proclaims him to have been
“A Worthy Magistrate, and a Safe and Affable Companion.” The two clans
enjoyed in those days, I imagine, a splendid isolation, akin to that of
the Samurai in Old Japan, and the Rev. Charles Bushe, an apostle of an
alien cultivation, probably realised the feelings of Will Adams when he
was cast ashore at Osaka, may, indeed, have felt his position to be as
precarious as that of the first missionary at the Court of the King of
the Cannibal Islands.
My great-uncle Charles was for forty years the Rector of Castlehaven
Parish, and the result of his ministry that most directly affects me was
the marriage of my father, Colonel Thomas Henry Somerville, of Drishane,
to the Rev. Charles’s niece, Adelaide Coghill. (That she was also his
step-sister-in-law is a fact too bewildering to anyone save a
professional genealogist for me to dwell on it here. I will merely say
that my mother’s father was Admiral Sir Josiah Coghill, and her mother
was Anna Maria Bushe, daughter of the Chief Justice.)[6]
There is a picture extant, the work of that artist to whom I have
already referred, in which is depicted the supposed indignation of the
Aboriginal Red men, _i.e._, my grandfather Somerville and his household,
at the apostasy of my father, a Prince of the (Red) Blood Royal, in
departing from the family habit of marrying a Townshend, and in allying
himself with a Paleface. In that picture the Red men and women are armed
with clubs, the Palefaces with croquet mallets. It was with these that
they entered in and possessed the land. My grandmother (_née_ Townshend,
of Castle Townshend), a small and eminently dignified lady, one of my
great-aunts, and other female relatives, are profanely represented,
capering with fury, clad in brief garments of rabbit skin. The Paleface
females surge in vast crinolines; the young Red man is encircled by
them, as was the swineherd in Andersen’s fairy tale, by the Court
ladies. My grandfather swings a tomahawk, and is faced by my uncle, Sir
Joscelyn Coghill, leader of the second wave of invasion, with a
photographic camera (the first ever seen in West Carbery) and a tripod.
* * * * *
I think I must diverge somewhat farther from my main thesis in order to
talk a little about the Ancient Order of Hibernians (if I may borrow the
appellation) who were thus dispossessed. For, as is the way all the
world over, the missionaries ate up the cannibals, and the Red men have
left only their names and an unworthy granddaughter to commemorate their
customs.
Few South Pacific Islands are now as isolated as was, in those days,--I
speak of ninety or one hundred years ago--Castle Townshend. The roads
were little better than bridle-paths; they straggled and struggled, as
far as was possible, along the crests of the hills, and this was as a
protection to the traveller, who could less easily be ambushed and
waylaid by members of the large assortment of secret societies,
Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, Molly Maguires, Outlaws in variety, whose spare
moments between rebellions were lightened by highway robbery. I have
heard that my great-grandmother’s “coach” was the only wheeled vehicle
that came into Castle Townshend. My great-grandfather used to ride to
Cork, fifty-two miles, and the tradition is that he had a fabulous black
mare, named Bess, who trotted the journey in three hours (which I take
leave to doubt). All the heavy traffic came and went by sea. The pews of
the church came from Cork by ship. They have passed now, but I can
remember them, and I should have thought that their large simplicity
would not have been beyond the scope of the local carpenter. There was a
triple erection for the pulpit; the clerk sat in the basement, the
service was read _au premier_, and to the top story my great-uncle
Charles was wont to mount, in a black gown and “bands,” and thence
deliver classic discourses, worthy, as I have heard, of the son of
“silver-tongued Bushe,” but memorable to me (at the age of, say, six)
for the conviction, imparted by them anew each Sunday, that they were
samples of eternity, and would never end. My eldest brother, who shared
the large square pew with our grandfather and me, was much sustained by
a feud with a coastguard child, with whom he competed in the emulous
construction of grimaces, mainly based, like the sermons, on an
excessive length of tongue, but I had no such solace. Feuds are,
undoubtedly, a great solace to _ennui_, and in the elder times of a
hundred years or so ago they seem to have been the mainstay of society
in West Cork. Splendid feuds, thoroughly made, solid, and without a
crack into which any importunate dove could insert so much as an
olive-leaf.
Ireland was, in those days, a forcing bed for individuality. Men and
women, of the upper classes, were what is usually described as “a law
unto themselves,” which is another way of saying that they broke those
of all other authorities. That the larger landowners were, as a class,
honourable, reasonably fair-minded, and generous, as is not, on the
whole, disputed, is a credit to their native kindliness and good
breeding. They had neither public opinion nor legal restraint to
interfere with them. Each estate was a kingdom, and, in the
impossibility of locomotion, each neighbouring potentate acquired a
relative importance quite out of proportion to his merits, for to love
your neighbour--or, at all events, to marry her--was almost inevitable
when matches were a matter of mileage, and marriages might be said to
have been made by the map. Enormous families were the rule in all
classes, such being reputed to be the will of God, and the olive
branches about the paternal table often became of so dense a growth as
to exclude from it all other fruits of the earth, save, possibly, the
potato.
Equally vigorous, as I have said, was the growth of character. There was
room in those spacious days for expansion, and the advantage was not
wasted. There was an old lady who lived in West Carbery, and died some
fifty years ago, about whom legend has accumulated. She lived in a gaunt
grey house, that still exists, and is as suggestive of a cave as
anything as high and narrow, and implacably symmetrical, can be. Tall
elms enshroud it, and rooks at evening make a black cloud about it. It
has now been civilised, but I can remember the awe it inspired in me as
a child. She was of distinguished and ancient family (though she was
born in such remote ages that one would say there could have been
scarcely more than two generations between her and Adam and Eve). She
was very rich, and she was a miser of the school of comic opera, showy
and dramatic. Her only son, known, not without reason, as “Johnny Wild,”
is said, after many failures, to have finally extracted money from her
by the ingenious expedient of inveigling her into a shed in which was a
wicked bull, and basing a claim for an advance on the probability that
the bull would do the same. She lost ten shillings on a rent day, and
raised it among her tenants by means of a round-robin. Her costume was
that of a scarecrow that has lost all self-respect, yet--a solitary
extravagance--when she went in a train she travelled first-class. It is
said that on a journey to Dublin she was denounced to the guard as a
beggar-woman who had mistaken the carriage. It happened that the
denouncer was a lady with a courtesy-title derived from a peerage of
recent and dubious origin. The beggar-woman threatened to recite their
respective pedigrees on the platform, and the protest was withdrawn.
Naturally she fought with most of her neighbours, specially her
kinsfolk, and, as a result of a specially sanguinary engagement,
announced that she would never again “set foot” in the village sacred to
her clan (and it may be noted that the term “to set foot” invariably
implies something sacrificial, a rite, but one always more honoured in
the breach than in the observance) “until the day when she went into it
with four horses and her two feet foremost,” which referred to her final
transit to the family burying-ground. On her death-bed, a cousin, not
unnaturally anxious as to her future welfare, offered to read to her
suitable portions of the Bible, but the offer was declined.
“Faith, my dear, I’ll not trouble ye. I know it all by heart; but I’m
obliged to ye, and I wish I had a pound that I might give it ye, but I
haven’t so much as a ha’penny.”
She shortly afterwards died, and there was found in her bedroom, in a
desk, £500, and a further £20 was discovered rolled up in an old bonnet,
a black straw bonnet with bright green ribbons.