The viceroyalty of Lord Wodehouse brought him an earldom in the year he
retired from office--1868--but it would be an exaggeration to say that
he was conspicuously successful. Until his appointment to Ireland,
Wodehouse had had experience of under-secretaryships only, at the
Foreign and Indian Offices, and Lord Palmerston's selection came as a
surprise. It may have been due to the fact that Lord Wodehouse's wife
was a daughter of an Irish peer, the last Earl of Clare, and there have
been selections for the viceroyalty based on even more frivolous and
cynical reasons. There was, of course, a great deal of anxious and
dangerous work for Lord Wodehouse to do, and within a few months of his
arrival in Dublin he was coping night and day with the Fenian rising.
At first all the viceroy's energy and the underground activities of his
subordinates seemed helpless against the efforts of the latest society
for bringing about separation from England, but Lord Wodehouse was not
dismayed, and he met murder with execution and assassination with the
rope. The Fenian movement culminated in 1867 in a series of shameless
murders that once more drew the {262} attention of the English nation
to the disturbed condition of Ireland.
In the May of 1867 Mr. Gladstone declared in the House of Commons that
the time was near when the Government would have to deal with the Irish
Church, one of the strongest arguments of the Fenian party. Following
this declaration came the murder of a policeman in Manchester, when an
attempt was made to rescue two Fenian prisoners. Three men were
executed for the crime, and as the 'Manchester martyrs' they are to be
found in the calendar of Nationalism. There was a melodramatic attempt
to blow up a London prison, and thus free a Fenian incarcerated within
its walls. Everywhere the mention of the name of Ireland produced a
feeling of panic and an expression of profound contempt.
[Sidenote: The Earl of Kimberley]
Meanwhile Lord Wodehouse, whose administration, ending in 1866, was
wholly political, acted with rigour and fearlessness. The Home Rulers
mocked him, issuing imitation proclamations signed 'Woodlouse.' He
turned aside from signing warrants to welcome, in May, 1865, the Prince
of Wales--afterwards King Edward VII.--to Dublin to open the
International Exhibition, but that was almost the only occasion when he
made a public appearance unassociated with politics. There was some
effort to maintain the social side of Dublin Castle government, but the
times were not favourable to hospitality, and when in 1866 the viceroy
was succeeded by the Marquis of Abercorn, and took his place in Mr.
Gladstone's first ministry as Lord Privy Seal, under his new title of
Earl of {263} Kimberley, there was neither regret nor gratitude
expressed for his departure. The Nationalists and their Fenian allies
could not be expected to show approval or disapproval of persons who
merely administered the same system. To them Dublin Castle was the
outward token of England's rule in Ireland, and their object was to
destroy its existence.
Lord Kimberley died in 1902, aged seventy-six. He is not remembered
for his Irish viceroyalty, but as Foreign Secretary under Lord Rosebery
in 1892-94 he displayed an ability that was something above mere
industry. He declined to join an alliance which had for its object the
coercion of Japan after the latter's victory over China, and this
far-seeing act was the first step towards the Anglo-Japanese alliance
which many consider Lord Lansdowne's greatest achievement during his
tenure of the Foreign Office. Lord Kimberley was Colonial Secretary in
the days when the affairs of the outer Empire were not considered very
important, and a knowledge of the colonies something akin to bad form.
His administration of Indian affairs was decidedly tame, but he did no
harm. It was his fate who once had been a member of the strongest
Liberal Cabinet in the history of party government to witness the
Liberal debacle that followed the resignation of the Rosebery
Government. In the palmy days of Liberalism it was his good fortune to
serve under Gladstone--towards the close of his life he sat in the
Cabinet of a man who, having won the greatest prize of political life
too easily, treated it with {264} contempt, and in doing so wrecked the
party which enabled him to win some fame as a statesman. To Lord
Kimberley fell the task of leading the Liberal minority in the House of
Lords, and when he died in 1902, the Conservative and Unionist party
was in an apparently impregnable position, and Liberalism was in the
depths.
The fall of the Liberal ministry brought Lord Derby to the head of the
Government, with Disraeli as his Chancellor of the Exchequer. The
Prime Minister thereupon asked the Marquis of Abercorn to accept the
difficult and laborious post of Viceroy of Ireland, and the hazardous
position was accepted from a sense of duty. Lord Abercorn was in 1866
fifty-five years of age, and thirty-four years earlier he had married
Lady Louisa Russell, a daughter of the sixth Duke of Bedford, another
viceregal family. The viceroy was a popular landlord, though he, too,
had a constitutional objection to tenants who would not pay their
rents. But the respectable classes admired him, and those who knew him
personally considered that he was the right man for Ireland. He was
the proudest man in Ireland, with a flamboyant love of display.
Fenianism was most active during his first term, and Abercorn was
compelled to adopt similar methods in dealing with the trouble as had
been part of the Liberal administration of his predecessor. Ireland
has always refused to accept the spirit of the English party system,
and whether Liberal or Conservative ministry was in power, Dublin
Castle remained the same. There were the usual evictions, riots, {265}
murders, and other crimes scarcely less reprehensible, and the viceroy,
although protected to some extent by the Chief Secretary, who was, of
course, the mouthpiece of the Irish Government in the House of Commons,
found himself compelled by force of circumstances to undertake
political work against which his soul revolted. Lord Abercorn was not
a man to revel in a display of the power of the police, or even of the
tenacity and strength of the Castle bureaucracy. He aimed at the
improvement of the masses, the progress of education, and the
cultivation of the fine arts. In society the viceroy and the
marchioness were most popular. He was an intimate friend of the queen.
No charge of alienism could be laid against the head of the Irish
Hamiltons, and while every other great landlord had his land troubles,
the tenants of the Marquis of Abercorn had realized in a practical
manner their indebtedness to their landlord. If anybody should have
been the ideal viceroy Lord Abercorn was the man; but here, again, any
success achieved was purely social, and confined to a small area. The
unruly state of the country, its increasing poverty, and its record of
crime, found no palliative in the reign of the proudest of the
Hamiltons.
[Sidenote: Prince and Princess of Wales]
In April, 1868, the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Dublin, to
prove again that if Ireland had the reputation of being a nation of
rebels, it could be courteous to distinguished visitors. Lord and Lady
Abercorn received them in Dublin, and there were great rejoicings. The
executive had taken the most elaborate precautions for the safety {266}
of the royal pair, but events proved that they were quite unnecessary,
and Ireland might have been one of the most prosperous countries in the
world for all the prince and princess saw to the contrary. Within the
sacred walls of St. Patrick's Cathedral the Lord-Lieutenant presided
over a gorgeous ceremony, which formally created the Prince of Wales a
Knight of St. Patrick, and the banquet that followed in St. Patrick's
Hall was one of great splendour. The dinner brought together not only
all the notables of Ireland, but also the largest gathering of English
and Irish detectives that the Castle has ever contained. The number of
the detectives was quite embarrassing, but it was considered necessary,
with recollections of Manchester and Clerkenwell. The royal guests
were ignorant of this part of the programme, however, although the
prince once addressed a question to a gentleman whom he thought was the
viceroy's secretary. He was not enlightened as to the identity of the
detective-inspector from London, who was part of his bodyguard.
Benjamin Disraeli was Prime Minister at the time of the royal visit to
Ireland, and he had no difficulty in getting Abercorn a dukedom. On
August 10, 1868, his elevation was announced, and Ireland's only
duke--his Grace of Leinster--was joined by a second wearer of the
strawberry leaves. The new dignity had been earned years before Lord
Abercorn lived in Dublin Castle, and by no stretch of official
imagination could it be said to hallmark the Abercorn administration of
1866 to 1868. The General Election in the latter {267} year displaced
Disraeli, and gave Mr. Gladstone the reins of power, and the Duke of
Abercorn went out with the Tory Government to enjoy himself in
opposition until 1874, when Disraeli tasted the sweets of office again.
[Sidenote: The Irish Church disestablished]
We have Mr. Gladstone's own admission that the Fenian agitation of the
sixties was the primary cause of English interest in the Irish Church,
and in the great land question. It is one of the truisms of history
that agitation on unconstitutional methods is more effective than the
employment of peaceful persuasion. Catholic Emancipation proved that.
When Gladstone took office it was known that he would attempt to create
a contented Ireland by disestablishing the Irish Church, and by passing
a great Land Act. He chose as his Irish viceroy Earl Spencer, then an
unknown and untried young man in his thirty-third year. To be the
representative of the premier in Ireland was the most onerous and
dangerous position in the Government. The viceroy found society, lay
and clerical, against him, and with the passing of the Land Act of 1870
the upper-class Irish believed what they had only doubted before--that
Gladstone was the worst enemy of Ireland, and that Lord Spencer was his
dangerous satellite. There is no need to enter into the controversy
that ensued when Gladstone introduced the Bill disestablishing the
Church of Ireland, as the Protestant minority was termed absurdly.
Archbishop Trench declared passionately that the disestablishment would
'put to the Irish Protestants the choice between apostasy and
expatriation, and every {268} man among them who has money or position,
when he sees his Church go, will leave the country. If you do that,'
he continued, 'you will find the country so difficult to manage that
you will have to depend upon the gibbet and the sword.' It would be
unfair to dwell upon the ludicrous moanings of the Church party; they
prophesied not only the extinction of the Irish Protestants, but the
end of Christendom. We can be content with the knowledge that time has
given us of the prosperity and progress of Protestantism in Ireland.
It is a splendid example of the irony of life to recall Mr. Gladstone's
declaration when the telegram arrived at Hawarden, informing him that
an emissary was on his way from Windsor Castle. 'My mission,' he said,
'is to pacify Ireland.' That may have been true, but Gladstone brought
a sword rather than peace to the country which had such a long and
fateful connection with the statesmanship of the great Liberal. Lord
Spencer, his first viceroy, experienced all the fury of rebellious
Nationalism, and during his second viceroyalty had the unfortunate
distinction of being the governor of a country where no man's life was
safe, and where murder and outrage were as common as sand.
This is, however, anticipating events. The refusal of Lord Halifax to
accept the viceroyalty had restricted Gladstone's choice. Liberalism,
even in its mildest state, has never appealed to territorial magnates,
and the Whiggism of Lord Spencer was scarcely the fire-and-thunder
Liberalism {269} of his chief, but he stepped into the breach, and for
the rest of his life was one of the strongest champions of a political
faith unpopular amongst his own class. Born in 1836, and married at
the age of twenty-two, he brought the courage of youth to bear upon the
Irish situation. Gladstone never had a more faithful colleague and
Dublin Castle a more conscientious occupant. Dublin society was
inclined to frown upon the viceroy, and there was some talk of a
boycott of the viceregal functions, but Lord and Lady Spencer were
independent of the support of the official and professional class which
forms what is called society in the capital of Ireland. A great
English landlord and his wife could create any society they chose,
being somewhat in a similar position to the Scotsman who declared that
wherever he sat was the head of the table. Lord Hartington, better
known as the Duke of Devonshire, was Chichester Fortescue's successor
as Chief Secretary, and the two noblemen carried out Gladstone's
reforms with a thoroughness that for a time gave the impression that at
last the Irish nation was to be pacified and made amenable to English
rule.
[Sidenote: The Land Act of 1870]
The disestablishment of the Protestant Church in Ireland was, however,
a minor reform compared with the great Land Act of 1870. This was a
measure of reform that took away the breath of the Tory leaders, but it
has proved a most beneficial act, and when in the course of time it
became obsolete, it was a Unionist administration that improved upon
it, and passed an Act which, {270} compared with that of 1870, or even
that of 1881, out-Gladstoned Gladstone. It was not a brilliant
success, because it tried to do too much, and, of course, offended both
parties; but as the first attempt on a large scale to settle this
many-sided question, it deserves a high place in the records of
Gladstone's memorable Government of 1868-74.
Any determined effort to ostracize the viceroy was soon killed by the
presence and influence of Lady Spencer. She had been no more than
twenty-four hours in Dublin when she was nicknamed "Spencer's Fairy
Queen," a most flattering description of a great beauty and a charming
woman. Lord Spencer's skill as a horseman was in his favour, and his
regular attendance in the chase earned him the respect of a large
community which has a hereditary affection for the noblest of animals.
Castle seasons were enlivened by visits from the Prince of Wales, the
Princess Louise, and the Prince Arthur, now the Duke of Connaught;
while the important Dublin Exhibition was opened, and numerous Irish
industries patronized and helped.
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