Kildare, an amiable, high-minded, warm-hearted, gallant fellow of
learning and culture and fine manners. He served as a major in the
British forces during the American Revolution, and for a time was an
aid-de-camp on the staff of Lord Howe. He was dismissed from the British
army, however, for active sympathy with the French Revolution, went to
France, and took refuge among the friends he had made there. There he
met and married Anne Syms, better known as "Pamela," a woman of great
personal and mental attractions, whose origin was involved in a mystery
that was never revealed, and concerning whom many romantic stories have
been written and told. It is generally believed that she was an
illegitimate daughter of Philippe Égalité, Duke of Orleans, sometimes
called "Philip the Handsome," by an Irish woman named Syms, and was,
therefore, a half-sister of King Louis Philippe of France. By Edward
Fitzgerald she had three children: Edward Fitzgerald, who was an officer
in the British army; Pamela, who became the wife of Sir Guy Campbell;
and Lucy, who became the wife of Captain Lyon of the Royal Navy. Several
years after Fitzgerald's tragic end she married John Pitcairn, an
American, with whom she came to the United States, and lived in
Philadelphia until her death in 1831.
While he was in Paris Lord Edward met Wolfe Tone, the leader of the
Revolution of 1798, Arthur O'Connor, Thomas Addis Emmet, an elder
brother of Robert Emmet, and other fellow countrymen, who were
conspiring with the French directoire for an attack upon Ireland. He
joined the movement with great earnestness and enthusiasm, and finally
arranged with the French government to send a fleet of forty-three
vessels with fifteen thousand troops under General Hoche, Wolfe Tone
being attached to the commander's staff, to attack the Irish coast
simultaneously with an uprising of the people. Ireland was taken by
surprise and thrown into a panic, but Providence intervened. A violent
gale arose, the landing was postponed, the French fleet became
separated, and each vessel found its way back to the Continent.
Lord Edward remained in France until March, 1798, when he returned to
Dublin, was betrayed by a man named Mangan, and a guard of soldiers was
sent to arrest him in 151 Thomas Street, just below the Bank of Ireland.
A tablet with an inscription now marks the house. There was a desperate
struggle, in which the captain of the guards was killed by Lord Edward,
and the latter received a bullet in the shoulder, from which he died in
prison a few days later at the age of thirty-two. As everybody knows,
the rebellion was a failure, and nearly all the other leaders were
captured and executed. Wolfe Tone was betrayed by an old school friend
and sentenced to be shot. He tried to kill himself in prison. The
wound, though fatal, was not immediately so, and he lay ill for several
months before death rescued him. Poor Pamela lived in poverty and
distress for several years before she was able to return to her friends
in France. "Frascati," her home, now belongs to a prosperous Dublin
tradesman.
A little farther down on the shore of the bay is a monument marking the
spot where the transport _Rochdale_, carrying the entire Ninety-seventh
Regiment of Foot, went ashore a hundred years ago, and the names of an
entire regiment, officers and men, were instantly erased from the
British army list. Since then an artificial harbor has been inclosed by
long breakwaters of masonry, giving a place of refuge for ships in
distress.
The tram line terminates in a pretty and picturesque village, called
Dalkey, which was a medieval stronghold and the scene of many fierce
fights, first between the earls of the Pale of Dublin and invading
Danes, and after that with the pirates who haunted this coast for a
century. It was a Danish settlement for several centuries, and afterward
the most important outpost of Dublin, defended by seven great castles,
three of which still remain in partial ruins. One of them is now
remodeled for use as a town hall. They are imposing piles of masonry,
and thick mats of ivy conceal the ancient wounds.
We took an "outside car" at the end of the tram line at Dalkey to drive
around the shore of the bay, which the driver assured us was the most
beautiful in the world and even surpassed the Bay of Naples, which it is
said to resemble, and for that reason many of the names are the same.
The resemblance might possibly be detected by a person with a vigorous
imagination. Killiney Bay, however, is a lovely sheet of water,
surrounded by high bluffs that are clad in June with glowing garments of
gorse and hawthorn. The first is a low bush which has a brilliant yellow
flower, and the hawthorn trees are as white as banks of snow. The land
is divided into meadows and pastures on the slopes by hedges of
hawthorn, and the turf is concealed by millions of buttercups as yellow
as gold. It is a rocky coast. Rugged crags that break out give a stern
expression to the picture, and sometimes rise a hundred feet or more in
frowning precipices of black granite.
Here and there the towers of a castle or the chimneys of a villa arise
from banks of foliage, and, perched along the bluff above the seashore,
like the chalets of Switzerland, are comfortable cottages and mansions
in which rich people from Dublin dwell. Clinging to the side of the
bluff and protected by a stone wall is a splendid roadway encircling the
entire bay, quite as beautiful, although on a smaller scale, as the
Corniche road from Nice to Monte Carlo. The deep blue of the water, the
vivid green of the foliage, which seems more pronounced in Ireland than
anywhere I have ever been, the great white banks of hawthorn, the yellow
of the buttercups and the gorse give a brilliancy to the landscape that
does not appear anywhere on the Riviera or anywhere else I know.
The winding road with this wonderful panorama always before you leads
finally through a glen into a park named after the late Queen
Victoria,--a wild stretch of rocky woodland and pasture, which in
ancient days was one of the principal meeting places of the Druids, and
it was well chosen. The land was purchased by subscription to
commemorate the queen's jubilee in 1897, and has been thrown open to the
public ever since. From the number of people who are present every
Sunday afternoon one would think the money was well invested.
A winding path leads to the summit, which is cleared of trees, and in
the center a shaft of stone rises about sixty feet, which, the
inscription tells us in quaint and laconic manner, was erected by John
Mapas, Esquire, June, 1742, in order to give employment to his less
fortunate neighbors, "last year being hard with the poor." A hundred
yards distant is a round, conical tower marked, "Mont Mapas." Nobody
seems to know who erected it or what it is for. And there is a pyramid
of seven tiers of stone thirty feet square at the base and eighteen feet
high, with a flat stone at the top.
There is a monument to mark the spot where the Duke of Dorset was killed
by being thrown from his horse in 1815, and what is more interesting,
four Druid judgment seats, formed of rough granite blocks about twelve
feet long, two feet high, and three and a half feet wide at the top.
They are situated in pairs some distance from each other, and tradition
says that the Druid chiefs in prehistoric times sat in judgment upon
them to settle disputes between their people and to receive petitions
from the members of their tribes. Of course, we know that Ireland was
held by the Druids once, and it is very certain that they could not have
found a more appropriate or a lovelier place than this for their
assemblies.
We took our luncheon at the Washington Inn at Dalkey, where a large and
familiar engraving of George Washington, a picture of Sulgrave Manor,
the English home of the Washingtons, a pedigree of the family, and a
representation of its coat of arms, showing its development into the
Stars and Stripes, hung upon the wall. I asked the landlady the whys and
wherefores of all this, and she told me that her name is Martha
Washington and that she is very proud of it. Her ancestors came from
Sulgrave, where they trace their relationship to the Father of our
Country.
Another trolley line, with cars marked "Howth" (pronounced Ho-th),
starting from the same place, Nelson's Pillar, on Sackville Street, will
take you entirely around the great island hill at the north entrance of
the harbor of Dublin and for a mile or two on the shore of the Irish
Sea. For the first fifteen or twenty minutes the car runs through the
busy streets of the city, past the Amiens railway station, which, a
friendly priest who occupied the adjoining seat told me, occupies the
site of the house in which Charles Lever wrote "Harry Lorrequer,"
"Charles O'Malley," and other famous novels, and the good father sighed
when he said that the reckless gayety and the jolly folks that Lever
painted with his pen existed no longer. He was a most interesting
companion was this friendly priest, and talked incessantly of the scenes
and associations through which our little journey led.
We passed a monumental gate supported by two classic columns. One of
them was marked in large letters "Deo Duce" and the other "Ferro
Comitante" (With God for my guide and a sword by my side), which, he
told me, was the motto upon the coat of arms of the great Lord
Charlemont, who had taken so active a part in the history of Ireland. It
was a famous family, he said, although the present earls are decadents
and have no place in public affairs.
This ancient family seat, called "Marino," was built at a tremendous
cost by a _dilettante_ earl who never allowed his expenditures to
trouble him, but left the anxiety entirely to his creditors. The
interior of the villa at the time it was built was the perfection of art
and luxury. The floors, the ceilings, and the wainscoting were of
mosaic. The walls were hung with the finest Irish poplin and decorated
by the most noted artists of the time. The villa has been the scene of
ghastly carousals and assemblies of the finest intellects in Ireland.
The grave and the gay have gathered and dined beneath its roof, but the
estate was sacrificed to the extravagance of the family, and its
splendor, somewhat tarnished and rusty, to be sure, is now enjoyed by
the students of the Christian Brothers, who occupy the beautiful villa
for a school.
On one side of the car line high walls shut out to the ordinary
passer-by the beauties they are intended to protect, but from the top of
the tram cars any one can share them for "tuppence." On the other side
is the water, the Bay of Dublin, and, running parallel with the shore,
is a long spit of land called the North Bull, which was formerly a
terrible menace to the commerce of the coast. Nearly every winter's gale
sent a ship or two to destruction, and the bodies of hundreds of poor
seamen have been washed up where the children are now playing in the
sand. Here and there the skeletons of dead vessels may yet be seen, but
the North Bull is no longer dangerous. Modern devices protect
navigation, and in the midst of the heather and the glowing yellow gorse
golf links have been laid out and a clubhouse has been erected,
surrounded by lilacs, laburnums, and hawthorns, now in the full glory of
their bloom. It is only twenty minutes' ride by street car from the
center of Dublin, and the business men can come out here to spend the
long summer evenings at their sport.
[Illustration: BAILEY LIGHT AT HOWTH, MOUTH OF DUBLIN BAY]
A little farther on is a beautiful mansion built in 1835 upon the site
and with the materials of Clontarf Castle, one of the oldest and most
famous within the English Pale--which was an area sixty miles long and
thirty miles wide around the city of Dublin. The castle originally
belonged to the Knights Templar, and from them passed to the Knights of
St. John. In 1541 it was surrendered to the crown by Sir John Rawson,
prior of Kilmainham, who was created Viscount of Clontarf as
compensation.
The famous battle of Clontarf, the final struggle between Christianity
and heathenism on the soil of Ireland, was fought here on Good Friday in
the year 1014 between the Danes under Sigtryg, the Viking, and the Irish
under Brian Boru. Eight thousand men were slain on one side and four
thousand on the other, including every prominent chief. The Irish were
victorious, and, although the Danes were not immediately driven from the
island, it was the end of their domination. They came in a thousand
boats all the way from Denmark, from Scotland, the Orkneys, and from the
many islands of the north, and when their leaders were killed they fled
to the water to regain their ships, which lay at anchor or were beached
on the shore of Dublin Bay. The Irish warriors followed and continued to
slay them until the sea was crimson with heathen blood.
Brian Boru was not a myth, although we commonly associate him with fairy
tales. He was the real thing, and it is often said that he was the only
Irishman that ever did rule successfully over all Ireland. He was the
first of the O'Briens and was King of Munster. His early career was very
much like that of Alfred the Great, who lived but a short time before
him in the middle of the ninth century, and he was not only the greatest
warrior, but the greatest lawgiver and executive, and the greatest
benefactor of his native country in the semi-savage days. His rival was
Malachi the Great, the first of the O'Neills, who became king of Meath
in 980 and reigned at Tara. To keep the peace Brian Boru and Malachi
agreed to divide Ireland between them; but they did not get along well
together, and Brian drove Malachi from his capital far into the north.
Malachi finally submitted, and then all Ireland, for the first time in
its history, was at peace under a single monarch for nearly forty years.
Brian devoted himself to the development of the industries, the
encouragement of agriculture, and the education of the people. He made
wise laws and enforced them with justice. He founded schools and
colleges. He encouraged art and science, he built roads in every
direction, and he gave the distracted country the blessings of peace and
prosperity. Instead of fighting among themselves, the people gave their
attention to farming, cattle-breeding, trade and manufacturing,
literature and the polite arts, and the historians say that another
twenty years of Brian's reign would have changed the entire history of
the country. Rare Tom Moore has given us a picture of Ireland in those
days, when, according to his verses, a beautiful young lady, "Rich and
rare were the gems she wore," traversed the entire country, from north
to south and from east to west, without being molested.
When Brian became an old man, Mailmora, king of Leinster, conspired with
the Danes, the Manxmen, the chiefs of the Orkneys, and the Scots to
overthrow him. Sigtryg of the Silken Beard arranged with them to
consolidate their forces to overcome the Irish. Sigurd, Earl of Orkney,
brought an army ten thousand strong. Broder, the great Viking of the
Isle of Man, brought a fleet of two hundred ships and ten thousand men,
covered with mail from head to foot, to meet the Irish, who always
fought in tunics. Broder had once been a Christian, but had fallen from
grace. He was the tallest and the strongest man of his time. His hair
was so long that he had to tuck it under his belt. He wore a coat of
mail "on which no steele could bite," and he had "no reverence for God
or for man, for church or sanctuary."
The venerable Brian Boru, then seventy-three years of age, was camped in
what is now Phoenix Park, surrounded by twenty thousand warriors
representing the different Irish clans. His sons prevailed upon him not
to engage in the battle, and he gave the command to his son Morrough.
But he led the column to the Hill of Clontarf on the morning of Good
Friday, and when the invaders were in plain sight Brian Boru, holding
aloft a crucifix, rode from rank to rank reminding his men that on that
day their Lord had died for them, and exhorting them to smite the
heathen hip and thigh for their religion and their homes. Then, giving
the signal for the onset, he withdrew to his tent at the top of the
hill, where he could observe the conflict.
Battles in those days were a series of hand-to-hand encounters. The
commanders selected each other for single combat. The fighting extended
for two miles along the shores of the Bay of Dublin, and human beings
were cut down like stalks of corn. The aged king remained in his tent
engaged in earnest prayer for victory while the air was filled with the
clash of steel, and the Danes and his own soldiers were dying by
thousands around him. Toward nightfall the heathen gave way and began to
retreat. Their commanders were all slain or desperately wounded. Brian's
grandson, Thorlough, smote the Earl of Orkney with his battle-axe and
cleft his head down as far as his neck. Broder, the great Viking,
desperately wounded, was flying from the field when he recognized Brian
of the Long Beard at the door of his tent. He rushed upon the old man
with a double-edged battle-axe. Brian seized his trusty sword and they
struck together. Brian's head was amputated and Broder's legs, one at
the knee and the other from the ankle. At sunset when they returned from
the battle, Brian's servants found their king dead and Broder stretched
by his side.
The body of Brian and that of his son Morrough were conveyed with great
solemnity to Armagh and laid at rest in the cathedral, but their tombs
have disappeared. The funeral ceremonies lasted for a fortnight, and all
Ireland was filled with lamentation. Every petty chief and prince in the
island tried to grasp the power. As the old song runs--
"Each man ruled his own tribe,
But no man ruled Erin."
And that condition continued for a century and a half, all Ireland being
distracted by the rivalries of the several chiefs, the O'Briens, the
O'Neills, the O'Connors, and the O'Loughlins.
That part of the battleground lying on the shore of the bay has been
built over, and behind it the land has been divided into small country
places where the rich men of Dublin spend their idle hours. Their homes
are encircled with high fences, and are divided by a maze of roads and
lanes concealed by canopies of green foliage that overhangs the walls.
A little farther on are the ruins of a church surrounded by a silent
battalion of gravestones. It was the Abbey of Kilbarrack, and one of the
tombstones, badly defaced, marks the burial place of Francis Higgins, a
detested government spy who betrayed Lord Edward Fitzgerald to the
government in the insurrection of 1798. He is known as "The Sham
Squire," because for a time he succeeded in passing himself off as a
country gentleman of wealth and was married to a lady of good family.
When the fraud was detected he was sent to jail, and she died of shame
and mortification. Being boycotted by all honorable men, he became a spy
and informer, and popular hatred pursued him to the graveyard, which had
to be watched because the people resented his burial in consecrated
ground and would have thrown his body into the bay.
The car line follows the curves of the coast down to the shore of the
Irish Sea, where a monstrous mass of rocks, covered with heather and
rhododendrons and gorse, now as yellow as gold, rises five hundred or
six hundred feet, with here and there a dense mass of foliage. It is
known as the Hill of Howth, and is considered one of the most
picturesque places in Ireland. At its foot is the village of Howth, and
on either side are the ruins of ancient strongholds, located so as to
command the entrance to the harbor.
The title of the Earl of Howth dates back to 1177, and was bestowed in
battle. It has been held honorably by the Lawrence family, one of the
oldest in Ireland. They won their name and their lands by the sword.
The founder of the house was Amory Tristam, a Norman adventurer, who
followed Strongbow to the conquest of Ireland, and has been immortalized
in Wagner's opera, "Tristam and Isolde." While Tristam, loyal knight and
true, was attending a red-haired Irish princess to her destined husband,
the King of Cornwall, they drank by mistake a love potion which bound
them forever in a frenzied romance. It ended with Tristam dying in his
castle and Isolde coming over the sea to perish like Juliet upon her
husband's lifeless form.
Amory Tristam assumed the name of St. Lawrence, because of a great
victory that he won over the Danes on the anniversary of that saint; and
Howth Castle has been the seat of the family from the beginning. A long
line of overlords lie under the shadow of a ruined old abbey, and the
present earl, William Ulick Tristam St. Lawrence, must join them soon,
because he is more than eighty years of age. He was a member of
parliament in his younger days, succeeded to the earldom in 1874, and
until he became too feeble was a famous sport. His son and heir, Thomas
Tristam St. Lawrence, is a man of fifty, who married the daughter of
Benjamin Lee Guinness, the great brewer of Dublin, and inherited many
millions from her father.
Many interesting legends are told of the hill and the Castle of Howth
and of events that have occurred during the eight hundred years since it
became a center of activity. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the
Princess of Connaught, Grace O'Malley, landed at Howth on her return
from England and found the gates of the castle closed. The warder
refused her entrance because the family were at dinner. Indignant at
this breach of hospitality she returned to her ships, and meeting on the
way the heir of the house, she picked him up and carried him off to
Mayo, where she held him until she had obtained a pledge from the earls
of Howth that they would never again close the doors of their castle
against hungry travelers. And they have faithfully kept the vow.
The Howth family holds the almost unique distinction in Ireland of
perpetual loyalty to the English crown.
Another trolley line runs out to Donnybrook, the scene of the famous
fair, which was abolished, however, nearly one hundred years ago, even
before the time of Sir Walter Scott's visit to Ireland in 1825, for he
says: "We dined at Walter's, and in the evening drove to Donnybrook--the
scene of the noisy fair which is now dissolved and abolished. It was a
charming ride, thick with villas and all the insignia of ease and
opulence; in fact, not to be distinguished from the innumerable hosts of
jaunting cars plowing the fine road in every direction at a speed
apparently most cruel." Sir Walter's description holds good to-day.
Donnybrook is the most respectable and aristocratic of all the suburbs
of Dublin. The tract of land where the cattle fair was formerly held in
the fall of each year is still vacant and is used for a pasture. A
"merry-go-round," or a "whirl-about," as they call it here, was the only
diversion that we could find in the silent and orderly surroundings, but
every year in August on the adjoining land and reached by parallel roads
the Dublin horse show is held, and it is the great event of the season
socially, and otherwise. It brings over from London and other parts of
England large crowds of fashionable people, it draws the sporting
element from every part of the kingdom, and all Ireland is represented.
Donnybrook, originally Dombenach Broc, in Gaelic, is a small but rapid
stream, which comes down from the hills of Wicklow and empties into the
Bay of Dublin. The cattle-dealers of Ireland for two hundred years used
to meet upon its banks for the sale, exchange, and exhibition of animals
for eight days in the month of August annually, and drew around them
saloon and restaurant keepers, peddlers of every sort, and shopkeepers,
who went out from Dublin with stocks of goods and exposed them as a
temptation to the men who had sold their cattle and had the money in
their pockets. In addition to the tradesmen, itinerant shows gathered to
entertain the ranchmen, strolling players, jugglers, Irish bards with
harps and songs, bagpipes, and other public entertainers made it their
rendezvous. Naturally these attractions called together the lads and
the lasses, who flirted, danced to the music, and had a good time
generally.
"Donnybrook capers, that bothered the vapors,
And drove dull care away."