FORT SAUNDERS.
GALWAY.
Galway is an old Spanish colony, planted on the western coast of
Ireland, and which kept for a long time intimate relations with the
mother country. Things and people have retained the original stamp to an
uncommon degree; but for the Irish names that are to be read on every
shop, you could believe yourself in some ancient quarter of Seville.
The women have the olive complexion, black hair, and red petticoat of
the _mañolas_; the houses open on a courtyard, a thing unknown in other
parts of Ireland, as well as in Great Britain; they have grated windows,
peep-holes in the door, and are adorned with sculptures, in the Moorish
style; the steeples of churches affect the shape of minarets; the very
fishermen in the port, with the peculiar shape of their boat, sails and
nets, and something indescribable in their general outline, remind you of
the hardy sailors of Corunna.
The remembrance of seven or eight centuries of busy trade with the
Peninsula, does not show itself solely in faces, manners, or dwelling, it
is to be found also in local tradition. Among others, there is the story
of the Mayor Lynch Fitz-Stephen, who gave in 1493 such a fearful example
of ruthless justice. His only son, whom he had sent to Spain to settle
some important affair, was coming back with the Spanish correspondent of
the family, bringing home a rich cargo, when he entered into a conspiracy
with the crew, appropriated the merchandise, and threw overboard the
unfortunate Spaniard. The crime was discovered, the culprit arrested, and
brought to trial before his own father, who was exercising the right of
high and low justice in the district, and by him condemned to the pain of
death. The general belief was that the Mayor would contrive to find some
pretext to give his son a respite; and in order to supply him with that
pretext, his relations drew up a petition of grace, which they presented
to him, covered with signatures. Lynch listened to their request, then
merely told them to come back for an answer on a certain day he named.
At the appointed time the suppliants appeared again; but the first sight
which caught their eyes was the dead body of the Mayor’s son hanging from
one of the grated windows of his house. An inscription, placed in 1524,
on the walls of the cemetery of St. Nicholas, records the memory of that
event.
Galway is only a big borough nowadays, where ruins are nearly as numerous
as inhabited dwellings. From the road that skirts the Bay, after leaving
the harbour, the long islands of Arran may be seen rising on the west;
from another road, which goes northwards, Lough Corrib appears, famous
for its salmon fisheries. As an historic place, the county possessed
already the field of Aughrim, celebrated for two centuries as the spot
where James II. lost his last battle against William III.—a battle so
murderous that the dogs of the country retained a taste for human flesh
for three generations after. But since the last year it has acquired
a new celebrity: another and no less epic battle has been fought at
Woodford in August, 1886, for the agrarian cause. The account of it is
worth telling. Never did the character of the struggle between League and
landlord appear in such a glaring light. All the factors in the problem
are there, each playing its own part. It is like a vertical cut opening
Irish society down to its very core, and permitting to see it from basis
to summit; a supplementary chapter to Balzac’s _Paysans_.
Woodford is a pretty village seated on the shore of Lough Derg on the
slope of the hills which divide Galway from Clare. The principal
landowners there are the Marquis of Clanricarde, Sir Henry Burke, the
Westmeath family, Colonel Daly, and Lord Dunsandle. Agrarian hatred is
particularly alive in that district; the Galway man is bloodthirsty,
and counts human life as nought. Five or six years ago Mr. Blake, Lord
Clanricarde’s agent, was shot dead, and in March, 1886, a bailiff named
Finley, a veteran of the Crimean war, had the same fate while he was
going to proceed to an eviction on the account of Sir Henry Burke. The
spot is shown still where the unfortunate man was murdered and his corpse
left twenty-four hours without sepulture, nobody daring or willing to
bear it away. A detachment of the police in the pay of the Property
Defence Association having settled their barracks in the vicinity of
Woodford, the inhabitants, about one thousand in number, organized a sort
of grotesque pageant, which made its progress along the streets of the
town behind a coffin bearing the inscription: _Down with landlordism!_
then concluded by burning the coffin in sight of the barracks.
There are two churches, one Protestant, the other Catholic. The faithful
who attend the first are two in number, no mere nor less, which would be
sufficient to show how legitimate it was for the Irish to protest when
obliged to pay the tithes of an altogether alien worship. The second
is headed by a jolly compeer, much beloved by his parishioners for his
good humour and liberality, Father Caen, a pastor of the old school,
whose boast it is that he keeps the best table and cellar, and has the
prettiest nieces in the county. He is president of the local board of
the League; the treasurer of that committee is the _guardian of the poor
law_ of the district, what we would call “l’administrateur du bien des
pauvres;” but the true agent of the League—the _Deus ex machina_ of the
place—is the secretary, Father Egan, curate of the parish, an austere,
thin, fanatic-looking man, a peasant’s son, with all the passions of his
race, who sucked the hatred of landlords with his mother’s milk, and ever
remembers that many of his kindred have been reduced to emigrate, and
that an uncle of his went mad after being evicted. A feature to be noted
down; that priest, tall, strong, sinewy, is an excellent shot and an
inveterate poacher. Nothing would be easier for him than obtaining leave
from the landowners to shoot on their grounds; but he scorns the leave.
His delight is to lurk at night till he has shot some of their big game,
or to head openly a _battue_ for a general slaughter five miles round.
* * * * *
One of the finest estates in the county is that of Lord Clanricarde, to
which are attached three hundred and sixteen tenants.
Hubert George De Burgh Canning, Marquis of Clanricarde and Baron
Somerhill, was born 1832, according to the _Peerage_. He was never
married, has no children, belongs to the House of Lords as Baron
Somerhill, is a member of two or three great clubs, and lives in
Piccadilly, at the Albany, a sort of caravanserai (not to say seraglio),
almost exclusively a resort of rich bachelors. That is about all that is
known of him. His tenants do not know him. The only glimpse they ever had
of their landlord was on the following occasion. In 1874, at the funeral
of the late Marquis, a man of about forty, with fair hair, who had come
from London for the ceremony, was noticed among the mourners. He was said
to be the new master. That was all: he disappeared as he had come. Save
for that hazy and far-away remembrance, the landlord is for the Woodford
people a mere name, a philosophical entity of whom they know nothing
except that he has a land agent at Loughrea, a little neighbouring town,
and that into the hands of that agent they must pay every year £19,634
out of the product of the land. The tenants of Woodford are in that sum
for about £1,000.
The Marquis’s father died in 1874. Quite contrary to the present owner,
he was the prototype of the Irish lord resident. Great sportsman,
scatter-brain, violent, extravagant, but kind and open-handed, he was
liked in spite of his numerous failings, and tradition helping him he was
emphatically the master almost all his life long; a fact which he was
wont to illustrate by boasting that if it pleased him to send his old
grey mare to the House of Commons, the electors would be too happy to
vote unanimously for the animal.
In 1872, however, the Marquis’s tenants took it into their heads to cut
the tradition, and gave their vote to a certain Captain Nolan, the _Home
Rule_ candidate. The irascible nobleman took revenge for what he chose to
consider as a personal insult by raising the rent of all bad electors.
He went so far in that line that in 1882 the _Land Commissioners_ had
to reduce them by half. That judgment could not, of course, have a
retrospective effect and bring a restitution of the sums that had been
paid in excess during the last ten years, and which varied from £50 to
£100. It may be imagined how they must weigh still on the peasant’s
heart, and what a well-prepared ground the agrarian movement was to find
at Woodford. The successive murders of the land agent Blake and Bailiff
Finlay were among the first and visible signs of that ferment of hatred.
* * * * *
Those crimes, which remained unpunished, and the responsibility of which
is thrown at each other’s heads by the two parties, came with the usual
accompaniment of fires, mutilations, verbal and written threats. The
reign of terror had begun in the district; no bailiff was any longer
willing to serve a writ or assignation. There came a time when the
landlords nearly gave up all hope of finding a land agent to take the
place of the one who had been murdered; at last they discovered the man—a
certain Joyce, of Galway—a man who united an indomitable spirit with
the most consummate skill; deeply versed in the art of talking to the
peasant, a fine shot, carrying his potations well; ready for anything.
A professional exploit had made his name famous in the neighbourhood.
Having to serve writs upon several farmers, and being unable to find
bailiffs willing to carry them, he made a general convocation in his
office of all the debtors, with the pretext of submitting to them some
mode of accommodation. The proposition being unanimously rejected, Joyce
gets up, goes to the door, and after having turned the key, leans with
his back against it; then, producing out of his pocket as many writs as
there were farmers in his room, distributes them among the visitors. The
poor devils were caught; according to the terms of the law, nothing but
submission was left to them. It will not be unnecessary to add here that
Joyce, a born Catholic, had been recently converted to Protestantism,
which is reputed an abomination in Ireland, and consequently went by the
name of the _renegade_. Such was the man who came to settle at Loughrea
under protection of a special guard of constables, and hostilities soon
began.
* * * * *
The harvest of 1885 had been but indifferent, and besides, by reason of
American competition, the price of the chief local products had fallen
down considerably—from about 15 to 20 per cent.—which implies for the
farmer an utter impossibility to pay his rent, unless the nett profit he
draws from the soil be estimated above 15 or 20 per cent. of his general
receipt. Even in Ireland reasonable landlords are to be found. Those who
understood the situation felt for their tenants, and, without waiting to
be asked, granted a reduction of rent. At Woodford, Lord Dunsandle and
Colonel Daly of their own impulse, and Sir H. Burke after some demur,
gave up 15 per cent. of the unpaid rent.
As for Lord Clanricarde, he gave not the least sign of existence. When
the November term came, his tenants demanded a reduction of 25 per cent.,
upon which Joyce declared that not a penny was to be given up. This
seemed so hard that it was generally disbelieved; and an opinion spread
itself that by applying personally to the landlord justice would be
obtained. A collective address, signed by the 316 Woodford tenants, was
accordingly drawn up and presented to him.
The Marquis of Clanricarde vouchsafed no manner of answer. Then, Father
Egan put himself in motion. He first obtained from the Bishop of Clonfert
that he would send a second petition to the master, representing to
him the true state of affairs, the reduction consented to by the other
landlords, &c. Lord Clanricarde did not even acknowledge reception of the
prelate’s letter. Let us state here, once for all, that he never swerved
from the attitude he had adopted from the beginning, so aggressive in its
very stolidity. Never once did he depart from that silence, except when
he once wrote to the _Times_ that, personally, he did not object to the
proposed reduction, but was in the habit of leaving to his agent the
care of that sort of thing.
Seeing that there was no satisfaction whatever to be expected from him,
the Woodford tenants imitated their landlord, and henceforth gave no
sign of life, or paid him a single farthing. In the month of April,
1886, Joyce resorted to the legal ways and set up prosecutions against
thirty-eight of the principal farmers, whose debt was £20 and above,
assuming by that move the attitude of a moderate man who has to deal with
obvious unwillingness to pay.
And it was that which gave to the Woodford affair its peculiar character,
which made it a _test case_, a decisive trial where the contending forces
have measured their strength, where the inmost thought of the Irish
peasant has shown itself in full light. If the chiefs of the League had
singled it out from amidst a hundred (as, indeed, we may believe they
did, whatever they might aver to the contrary), they could never have
achieved a more complete demonstration of their power. Chance, however,
had also its usual share in the turn which affairs took. Joyce, it
appears, had began prosecutions against seventy-eight lesser tenants, and
at the moment when success was on the point of crowning his efforts, the
procedure was quashed for some legal flaw.
As for the bigger ones, judgment had been entered against them, and the
execution followed. The first step was the selling out in public court
of the tenant’s interest in his holding. Ten of the men capitulated
immediately, paying the rent in full with interest and law costs, that
is to say, about 80 per cent. above the original debt. As for the
twenty-eight others, fired by political passion, pride, and the ardent
exhortations of Father Egan, they did not waver, and allowed the sale to
proceed.
Agreeably to the usage established since the League has been supreme in
Ireland, not one bidder came forward at the sale. The representative of
the landlord therefore remained master of the situation, and got for a
few shillings the interest of the twenty-eight farmers—interest which, in
certain cases, was worth £200 and more.
It now remained to evict those tenants from their farms, and take
possession in their place. Let us remark that, being certain of having
allowed the landlord, through the sale, to help himself to a value
of five or six times his due, those men were bound to consider such
an eviction a gratuitous piece of cruelty. Well knowing before-hand
that the eviction would by no means be an easy task, for all Ireland
breathlessly followed the course of events, Joyce singled out amongst
the twenty-eight defaulters, the four tenants for whom the eviction was
sure to bear the hardest character, namely, Conroy, Fahey, Broderick,
and Saunders. These were all people of comfortable means, who had for
many years been established on their lands, who were profoundly attached
to the house where their children or grand-children had been born, and
which they had themselves built, enlarged and improved at great expense;
rural _bourgeois_ rather than peasants; men that in a French country town
should have been mayors, _adjoints_, or municipal councillors.
For each of them eviction not only meant ruin, the voluntary and
definitive loss of a small fortune laboriously acquired, and which could
be estimated in each case at ten or twelve times the amount of the annual
rent; it was, besides, the upsetting of all their dearest habits, the
destruction of home, the end of domestic felicity. “Placed between this
result and the choice of paying £30 or £40, which he has in his strong
box, or which he will experience no difficulty in borrowing if he has
them not—what country-bred man would hesitate?” thought Joyce. “Conroy,
Fahey, Broderick, and Saunders shall pay! They shall pay, and after them
the others must inevitably follow suit.”
This was very sound reasoning. But Joyce calculated without the League
and its agent, Father Egan. The four chosen victims did not pay. With a
resolution that must really seem heroic to whoever knows the workings
of a peasant’s soul, Conroy, Fahey, Broderick, and Saunders unanimously
declared that the agent might expel them by force—_if he could_—but yield
they would not.
Ah! there was a fearful struggle. It was not without the most terrible
inner combat that they kept their word. At home they had the money ready;
nothing could be simpler than to go and pay it. Now and then temptation
waxed almost too strong. James Broderick is an old man of seventy years.
One day, called to Loughrea by the tempter, he went, in company with his
friend Fahey.
“Now, look here, Mr. Broderick,” Joyce said to him, “it goes to my heart
to evict a good man like you from such a pretty house.... You have lived
in it for these thirty years—it is the pearl of Woodford.... Let us make
an arrangement about all this: you pay me down your rent with for costs,
and I give you any length of time for the rest.... His lordship will
even give you back the tenant-right for the price he paid himself,—fifty
shillings.... Now what do you say?”...
Old Broderick wavered; he was on the point of yielding.
“Indeed, Mr. Joyce, you cannot do more than that,” ... he uttered in a
trembling voice, involuntarily feeling for his pocket-book.
But Fahey was there. He took the old man’s arm and drew him aside.
“It is not _time_ that we want!” he said to him. “_What we want is to
uphold the principle!_”
Truly a great word. As fine as any recorded on History’s page, for those
who know how to understand it rightly. If the peasants can remember a
principle when their property is in question, verily one may say that the
times are near being fulfilled!
All conciliatory means were now exhausted. It only remained to have
recourse to force. Joyce knew better than anyone what resistance he was
going to encounter. Personally he thought he was going to meet death. He
went resolutely nevertheless, but not without surrounding himself with a
regular army.
The bailiffs of the place refusing to act, some had to be sent for from
Dublin. Those bailiffs, escorted by about a hundred emergency men, were
supported besides by five hundred constables armed with rifles and
revolvers. Woodford lies at a distance of about twenty miles from the
nearest railway. The traps and horses necessary to carry all these people
had to be sent down from Dublin, nobody consenting to give any manner of
help. The same thing occurred for provisions and for the implements of
the siege, pickaxes, levers, iron crowbars, which were indispensable to
the assailants, and which were brought down with the army to Portumna.
These preparations lasted three weeks. The mobilisation, decreed by Joyce
at the end of July, could only be completed by the 17th of August.
On the next day, the 18th, this army moved forward and left Portumna in a
column, marching on Woodford.
But on their side the Leaguers had not remained inactive.
All the night long squads of voluntary workmen had been hard at work.
When the police caravan arrived in sight of the village, they found the
road barred by trees and heaps of stones placed across the way. They were
obliged to dismount and go round by the fields.
In the meantime, from the top of the neighbouring heights horns were
signalling the appearance of the enemy; the chapel bells began to toll
an alarm peal. From all the points of the compass an immense multitude
of people hastened to come and take up their position on the hills of
Woodford.
When the bailiffs made their appearance, headed by Joyce, armed to the
teeth, by the under-sheriff whom the duty of his charge obliged to
preside at the execution, and leading on five hundred policemen, an
indescribable, formidable howl rose up to heaven; the Irish _wail_ which
partakes of the lion’s roar and of the human sob, of the yell of the
expiring beast and of the rushing sound of waters.
That lugubrious hooting was to last during two entire days, with
full-stops, _da capo_, _decrescendo_ and _rinforzando_ of great effect.
* * * * *
The first house attacked by the assailants was that of Conroy. It is a
solid, comfortable-looking dwelling, built on the bank of Lough Derg.
To the under-sheriff’s summons, the inhabitants, posted on the roof,
answered only by derisive laughter. The door, which was of solid oak, was
closed and barred inside. The order was given to break it open. A few
minutes’ work sufficed to do it.
When it fell crashing under the axes, it was perceived that a wall had
been built behind it.... A triumphant shout rose from the crowd.
“A breach must be made!” thundered Joyce. The stone wall was attacked.
Immediately, from the roof, from the windows, poured a deluge of scalding
hot lime-water, which fell on the assailants, blinded them, burnt them,
and sent them back howling and dancing with pain. Again the crowd
applauded, saluting with screams of laughter every ladleful of hot water
that took effect. The custom of Galway authorizes, it appears, that
singular way of defending one’s house. _It is no breach of the peace._
One can scald the bailiffs without any qualms of conscience or fear of
consequences.
Nothing loth, the Conroy family freely used the permission. The miracle
was that they did not use more murderous weapons. But the League’s
agents were there holding back, according to their custom, the too fiery
spirits, and keeping them within the bounds of legal hostilities. At
their head the priest Egan was conspicuous, loudly advising the besieged,
pointing out to them the uncovered assailants, telling them on what
point to direct the effort of resistance. As for the police, mute and
motionless, they beheld the drama without taking part in it. Four hours’
work were needed to make the breach. At last the bailiffs were able to
enter the house, expel the inhabitants, and take possession of it. They
were obliged literally to carry away the youngest Miss Conroy, who
desperately clung to the walls and furniture, and refused to come out of
her own will.
* * * * *
Night came, and the bailiffs have no right to carry on their proceedings
after sunset. They were therefore obliged to postpone their operations
till the next day. What made matters worse was, that they must
necessarily go back to Portumna, for they need expect to find no lodgings
in Woodford. It is easy to foretell the complication of events that now
followed.
The whole of next day was employed in the eviction of Fahey. That of
Broderick lasted another day, and caused the arrest of twenty-seven
persons, for in spite of the League’s efforts heads were waxing hotter
and hotter, and the combatants began to be rather too excited on both
sides.
But where resistance took a truly epic character was in the house of
Thomas Saunders. With twenty-three comrades he held in check all assaults
_during four entire days_. Not content with scalding the bailiffs by
means of pumps and cauldrons installed on purpose, he had, by a stroke of
genius, the idea of throwing on them hives of bees, that came out enraged
from their cells and cruelly stung everything before them. Who knows
that there may not be in this a precious indication for future warfare!
European strategists may before long add “the chaste dew-drinkers,”
as Victor Hugo called them, to the pigeons and the war-dogs. However
that may be, Joyce’s mercenaries, burnt, stung, and crest-fallen, were
compelled, for three nights running, to retreat on Portumna.
The green flag meanwhile was proudly waving its folds on the summit of
Saunders’ house, which enraptured Ireland, intoxicated with joy at the
news of this unprecedented siege, immediately baptized _Fort Saunders_.
Agitation was fast spreading over the whole country. The military
authorities judged it indispensable to send down 200 mounted men, and to
have the place patrolled at night. In Portumna councils of war were held,
and serious thoughts were entertained of having recourse to the antique
battering-ram and “tortoise” in order to approach the place and succeed
in taking it. Three days passed in new preparations and supplementary
armaments.
At last, on the 27th of August, a new assault was attempted. It failed
like all the others, but the law must, it was felt, at all costs, be
enforced; the police interfered about some technical point, took the
house at the bayonet’s point and made all its inmates prisoners.
Thus ended, without effusion of blood, this memorable campaign; three
weeks’ preparation, eight days’ fighting, a thousand men on foot,
enormous expense had been required in order to succeed in evicting four
tenants of the Marquis of Clanricarde, out of a number of 316, and that
in the midst of scandalous scenes which gave the noisiest publicity to
the agrarian cause. Everybody was of opinion that enough had been done,
and evictions were stopped.
The affair at Woodford marks a date in the annals of the Irish
revolution. One has seen in it peasants living in relatively good
circumstances fight for principles and go to the furthest ends of
legality,—without overstepping them. Moreover, these events have taken
place in a county famed for its violence and represented in Parliament
by Mr. Matthew Harris, which is saying enough; (his motto was, till
lately, “When you see a landlord, shoot him down like a partridge”).
Three or four years sooner such events could not have taken place without
involving fifteen or twenty deaths of persons. Here not a single one
occurred. One could not but acknowledge that the honour of this was due
to the League, to its moderating and constitutional influence. In vain
it protested that it had nothing to do with those conflicts; its agents
and its general instructions played the first part in it. Therefore it
reaped all the fruits of this, came out of the ordeal greater, surrounded
with a poetical halo, sovereign. History often has such ironies. At the
price of their domestic happiness, four obscure heroes had just won in
face of public opinion the cause of the serfs of the glebe against the
lords.