Constance Markievicz E-Book

Anne Haverty

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

"Haverty's book remains a classic in Irish biography, and a rollicking good read."- Lauren Arrington, The Irish Times. Since its first publication Anne Haverty's biography has been recognized as a landmark in Markievicz studies, giving a historically complete account of a woman often maligned and misunderstood. Her vivid and engagingly written story will be enjoyed as much by the general reader as by the serious student of Irish history. This revised, updated edition comes with a new introduction. Aristocrat and republican, socialist and artist, feminist and free spirit, Constance Markievicz, née Gore-Booth, was a central figure in the revolutionary movement that culminated in the 1916 Rising, and in its long aftermath leading to Irish Independence. She was the first woman ever elected to Parliament and to hold a Cabinet position. From the privileged nineteenth-century world of her youth at Lissadell in Sligo and an artist's life in Paris to the dramas and disappointments of revolution and politi in Dublin, her compelling story provides an entrée to that tumultuous period in Irish history.

Leseprobe

CONSTANCE MARKIEVICZ

IRISH REVOLUTIONARY

Anne Haverty

the lilliput press

dublin

Dedication

For John and Maureen Haverty

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgments

1. LISSADELL: CHILDHOOD AND FAMILY LIFE

2. THE DEBUTANTE: LONDON AND DUBLIN

3. THE SLADE AND SUFFRAGE

4. PARIS AND POLAND

5. MARRIED LIFE: NATIONALIST AWAKENING

6. ‘LIVE REALLY IRISH LIVES …’

7. SINN FÉIN AND SOCIALISM

8. ‘I AM GOING TO TALK SEDITION’: THE IRISH CITIZEN ARMY

9. CLOAK AND PISTOL

10. THE EASTER REVOLUTION, 1916

11. ‘DEAD HEARTS, DEAD DREAMS, DEAD DAYS OF ECSTASY’

12. THE CONVICT’S RETURN

13. STATESWOMAN ON THE RUN

14. THE BITTER SPLIT

15. LIFE IN THE FREE STATE

Bibliography

Illustrations

Copyright

Introduction

while thereviews for the original edition of this life of Constance Markievicz were good, they were more muted than first-time authors are prone to expect. In particular, reviewers seemed to express a discernible note of resistance towards the subject. This should not have been altogether surprising. The Troubles in the North were still continuing and the new revisionist project in Irish historiography was at its height. Enthusiasm for nationalism and its heroes was on a downward slide.

But it was the attitude to Markievicz herself that I found puzzling. The first woman ever elected to parliament, the first woman to be a minister in government, the woman without whose corps of well-trained erstwhile boy scouts the events of 1916 might not have happened, without whom surely it could not have lasted as long as it did – why was she absent from the list? Why was she almost unmentioned in school history books? Why did she not figure among those who had influenced the making of the Republic? This was also after the feminist movement of the 1970s had helped to broaden perceptions and expectations of the place of women in society. We would soon elect a woman president. And here was a woman who, share though she might along with the famous ones an ideology that was now deeply unpopular, was surely a standard-bearer for equality, social and political engagement and not least courage.

That first edition was one of a series of lives of Irish women, published by Pandora, a feminist press. I chose Markievicz because among the possible subjects offered to me she was the one I knew least about. The others included women such as Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory and the Parnell sisters and, like almost everybody else, I knew about them mainly because of their connection with more famous men. Markievicz, as I was soon pleased to discover, was a stand-alone. Of course she was influenced by those around her and influenced them in turn. But she was more than a muse or an enabler or a facilitator, the preferred roles for women to play. She chose her influences, chose her associates. She was self-driven and self-confident enough to be able to be selfless. This was the heyday of giving up your advantages for your convictions. And she gave up quite a lot. In her writing she could express gracefully and blithely her ardent way of seeing things. Her humanity and sensibility is immanent in almost everything she writes. I found her admirable and hugely likeable. And revisiting her twenty odd years later, I still do.

In her own time she was admired and loved by a great many; was appreciated enough by the poor of Dublin to be chosen again and again as their representative, to be given a last farewell by them in their thousands. But then too Markievicz had her detractors, notably Sean O’Casey and Sean O’Faolain. It was O’Faolain, her first biographer, who perhaps did her most damage. Her friend, Helena Molony, described his book, published in the thirties, as ‘bad, inaccurate, catty and misleading’ and as a result she was ‘in great danger of being misunderstood’. The keynote of her character, Molony said, was ‘simplicity and sincerity’. Maud Gonne was angered by O’Casey’s and O’Faolain’s ‘sneers at her’. Markievicz, Gonne said, ‘was a great woman and I always think she does not get the credit she should’.

But it’s the cattiness that can seem to prevail. In our time Markievicz is also someone many love to hate. Some of the reasons why are fairly obvious. To be able to cast aside what most of us value so much – privilege, money, position – can cause discomfort or resentment. Her fervour and disregard for the conventions offend the prudent and the sensible. And for all the advances in equality, for a woman to be as assertive as she was is strangely even less acceptable now than it was then.

Maybe for these reasons much is made, as I say in the text, by present-day detractors of the allegation that it was she who shot a constable in St Stephen’s Green on the Easter Monday of 1916. The only source for this allegation, apart from rumour – and rumours were flying about anyone and anything in that dramatic week – is the account of a Miss Geraldene Fitzgerald. This came to light since the the first publication of my book and since it is so often cited against her and could be said to have passed into public lore it bears investigation.

Fitzgerald’s account is in the Dublin Castle files (kept in the British National Archives at Kew) marked ‘Evidence Against Countess Markievicz’ and stamped 14 July 1917. It purports to be from her diary, ‘kindly supplied’ to the taker of the evidence by her mother who lived in Birr, County Offaly. Consisting, however, only of two typewritten pages this cannot be verified. In fact it reads more like a deposition, taken down by someone tasked with gathering incriminating evidence.

Constable Lahiff was shot, according to the Dublin Metropolitan Police report, at about 12 am – Fitzgerald, who was training to be a public health nurse, says that on that day she was in High Street at 12.30 am. On her way home to St Stephen’s Green past Christ Church she took a longer route to avoid Jacob’s where the Sinn Féiners were in possession, and spoke to several people about the events. Making her way to the Jubilee Nurses’ Home on the south side of the Green adjacent to Harcourt Street, she was ‘greatly astonished to see the Sinn Féiners in the Park, digging trenches inside the railings while others of them were ready with rifles to fire on anyone in military or police uniforms who passed that way’. She sat down to dinner in the dining room with some colleagues. It would now be approaching 1 pm if not later:

Dinner! Such a meal. We were just seated and were taking our soup when we heard the most awful firing outside the house. We jumped up immediately and rushed to the front room to see what was happening. What we saw was this. All the men with their rifles fixed towards Harcourt Street. A lady in green uniform, the same as most of the men were wearing (breeches, slouch hat with green feathers etc) the feathers were the only feminine feature in her appearance, holding a revolver in one hand and a cigarette in the other, was standing on the footpath giving orders to the men. We recognised her as the Countess Markievicz – such a specimen of womanhood. There were other women, similarly attired, inside the Park, walking about and bringing drinks of water to the men. We had only been looking out for a few moments when we saw a policeman walking down the path from Harcourt Street. He had only gone a short way when we heard a shot and then saw him fall forward on his face. The ‘Countess’ ran triumphantly into the Green, saying ‘I got him’ and some of the rebels shook her by the hand and seemed to congratulate her.

Apart from the crucial matters of the timing and the location of the shooting (Constable Lahiff was shot at the Fusiliers’ Gate facing Grafton Street), which differ so greatly from all other accounts, including the official account, there are other very questionable aspects to this testimony. It was a warm day and the windows in the front-facing room may well have been open. But even so the likelihood of a remark carrying from inside the Green and across a wide stretch of road noisy with the activities of the revolutionaries, onlookers, and the traffic that was still going up and down, is small. Also, Constance was experienced with guns and it’s difficult to imagine her exulting like an untried markswoman in the accuracy of her shot when it was at such short range. The room adjoining the dining room would almost certainly have been on the ground floor, a vantage from which it would not have been possible to see into the Green. And there is the matter of those other women Fitzgerald claims to have seen ‘similarly attired’. Among the women revolutionaries only Margaret Skinnider may, apart from Constance, have worn breeches. Even the very assertive and rebellious Helena Molony wore a skirt. If indeed there were others ‘similarly attired’ could the witness be sure the person she saw was the Countess?

It’s difficult to know what to make of this account or to say what Geraldene Fitzgerald may or may not have seen – except that it seems at the very least fanciful and based more on a year’s worth of rumours than on reality. None of it would stand up in a court of law; which is probably why it did not appear on Markievicz’s charge sheet when she was tried in 1920. Only the obstinately mischievous, to put it kindly, can continue to cite it.

As well as Geraldene Fitzgerald’s ‘diary’, I am glad to have been able to make use of more recent publications. The archives of the Bureau of Military History, accessible online, are a trove of information through personal reminiscences, all the more intriguing for often contradicting each other. Among the books, Patrick Quigley’s The Polish Irishman provides much-needed new information about Casimir and Stanislas (Stasko) Markievicz.

Anne Haverty

Dublin, April 2016

Acknowledgments

the writing of this biography has depended on the help of good friends and benevolent acquaintances. I want first to thank Gemma O’Connor who suggested that I embark on it, and who was alway there with advice and books; Josslyn Gore-Booth who was more than generous with the papers in his possession relating to his great-aunt; and Aideen Gore-Booth who welcomed me to Lissadell.

There were several people who gave me information, ideas, time, encouragement and books. I am especially grateful to Seamus Scully who spent a lifetime compiling an archive devoted to the Gore-Booth sisters; to Caitriona Crowe, Frank Callanan, Sean MacBride, Richard Hayes and Maud Long; also Lucille Redmond, Margaret Robertson, Francis Stuart, Peter Haugh, Colm Tóibín, Mary Campbell, Patricia Boylan, Jim Ryan, Brian Lynch, Tim O’Grady, Taisy Grimes and Sheena Joughin; the Loughlins at Annaghmakerrig and my sister Geraldine Haverty. My gratitude is due to the staffs of the National Library, the National Museum, the Library of Trinity College Dublin, the British Museum and the Irish Astrological Society for their assistance and consideration.

Above all I want to thank dear Tony (Anthony Cronin); and for his invaluable help with this edition, Simon Beesley.

1. LISSADELL: CHILDHOOD AND FAMILY LIFE

in dublin, where the streets have solidly Irish names and most of the public monuments commemorate Irish people, the exotic name of Markievicz stands out, even if attached to relatively modest things – a block of municipal flats, a leisure centre, a small bust in St Stephen’s Green. Constance, Countess Markievicz, might have liked the flats, built in the austere economical style of the 1930s, to be more beautiful than they are but she would be proud to have them as a memorial. She spent much of her life earning the entitlement to be associated with the people of the city. Countess Markievicz got her title and foreign name from her marriage. She was actually Irish, a Gore-Booth from Co. Sligo.

As Constance Georgina Gore-Booth, she enjoyed every advantage the late nineteenth century could offer a girl. She belonged to a wealthy, aristocratic and kind family. She was clever, talented and beautiful, and enjoyed a wild, somewhat eccentric Irish upbringing as one of the spoilt darlings of a big country house on the romantic west coast. Born in London on 4 February 1868 at 7 Buckingham Gate, a family town house close to Buckingham Palace, she was the first child of Henry Gore-Booth, then aged twenty-five and heir to the baronetcy of Lissadell in Co. Sligo, and Georgina, née Hill, of Tickhill Castle in Yorkshire, whose grandfather was Lord Scarborough. Soon after her birth Constance was brought home to Ireland, to the house known locally as Lissadell Court. Her brother Josslyn was born in the following year, her sisters Eva and Mabel in 1870 and 1874 respectively, and another brother Mordaunt in 1876.

Lissadell is a classically beautiful and rather forbidding house. The approach from the main gate is by a winding avenue, two and a half miles long, that climbs and falls along the light Sligo coastline with the shore of Drumcliff Bay on one side and dark silent woods on the other and rises at its end to reveal the formidable grey stone building in low-lying parkland. Built by her grandfather, Sir Robert Gore-Booth, to replace a less impressive house, this structure was some thirty years old when Constance was brought here.

Lissadell expressed Sir Robert’s self-image as a great landowner, his effectiveness, his interest in the arts and something of an indefinable quality that might be called innocence. It had forty-eight rooms and was the first country house in Ireland to be lit by gas from a gasometer. Francis Goodwin of London who designed it was well known for his churches and public buildings and gave it a gaunt and ecclesiastical feel that may not have been intended. He – or Sir Robert – was probably inspired by the neoclassicism of Thomas Hope whose ideas appealed to rarefied tastes. The splendour of the house that resulted was modified by its austerity and idiosyncracy. The starkness of the exterior was alleviated by a bow on the south face and an unusual and grand porte-cochère as the main entrance on the north. Inside, there was the imposing geometry of neoclassicism and the coldness of marble. In the great hall, black Kilkenny marble was used for floor, columns and staircase. The principal rooms had chimney pieces of Italian marble sculpted in the style of the Egyptian revival, one of the rarest and most esoteric versions of neoclassicism.

The most striking feature at Lissadell, however, is the manner in which the family rooms, the dining room, drawing rooms etc., had the status of ante-rooms, pushed aside to right and left by a long and lofty gallery that possesses the heart of the house. The gallery was top-lit, its roof supported by thick white pillars, square columns running down one side, Ionic down the other. It contained an organ and Sir Robert’s collection of pictures, many of them Old Masters brought back from his European Grand Tour. These included a Rape of Lucretia, a St John the Baptist that was possibly a Caravaggio, and touchingly sentimental depictions of the Irish peasantry by Joseph Haverty, the noted nineteenth-century artist, hung in Florentine frames.

Lissadell was a house that easily accommodated reflection, solitude and high aspirations. It was also of course a hive of activity, its many charming sunny rooms, with their views of the sea, bustling with children, live-in relations and servants, noisy with animals and the comings and goings of farmworkers, stable grooms, herdsmen, coachmen and gardeners. Constance claimed to have not been particularly fond of the house but that was perhaps a necessary ideological stance. What she and Eva did love however, and were to write and speak of at length in the years to come, was the countryside around it:

We lived on a beautiful, enchanted Western coast where we grew up intimate with the soft mists and the coloured mountains and where each morning you woke to the sound of the wild birds, the sad wintry cry of starvation that came like a keen from the throat of the phillabin driven from its haunts by the storm winds … Behind the big gray barrack-like house, ranges of mountains lay like a great row of sphinxes against the sky and shut us out from Ireland. Trees and glades sloped down to the bay, across which Knocknarea rose, crowned by the great queen’s cairn. The bay slipped into the Atlantic, somewhere behind black cliffs, and the Atlantic was the end of the world.1

That part of Sligo, bounded by the great mountains, Ben Bulben and Knocknarea that rise like whales out of the sea, had an ethereal beauty. Salty fields and rich graceful vegetation washed in the volatile Atlantic light, birches rustling in the ocean breezes, a peasantry who, though poor, were imaginative and credulous – it was in this place that the poet Yeats gathered the stories of magic and legend that he wrote down in his book The Celtic Twilight, a place which provided him with images and metaphors for his poems that marked the beginning of the Gaelic resurgence.

On Ben Bulben, it was said, lay the door to the land of the Faery; and on its slopes Diarmuid, the tragic hero of the story of Diarmuid and Gráinne, met his death in a tussle with a boar. Under the cairn on the summit of Knocknarea was buried great Queen Maeve of Connacht who fought Cúchulainn of Ulster.

These unearthly figures, seen by day and by night, were both admired and feared. Yeats tells how his uncle’s housekeeper saw Maeve, ‘the finest woman you ever saw travelling right across from the mountain straight towards her, dressed in white with a sword by her side and a dagger lifted up in her hand and her feet and arms bare’.2

Lissadell (in Irish, Lios A’ Daill, the Fort of the Blind) itself has its story, one grounded in history more than legend. It was owned before the English conquest by the O’Dalys, hereditary poets who were free of tribute, or rent, because of their profession. In 1213 an O’Daly killed with an axe the tax collector of his territorial chief. He had to flee to Scotland but was eventually restored to favour and to Lissadell by writing poems in praise of his chief. The area also has its share of remains from the time of the great monasteries. In 574, St Columcille (Columba) founded at Drumcliff his monastery that was to last for almost a thousand years and its ruined round tower and carved high cross still stand on the road to Sligo from Lissadell.

The peasantry that gave Yeats his stories were of the people who provided much of the income of Lissadell. Sir Henry, Constance’s father, also had considerable property in Manchester but he owned almost 32,000 acres of the county of Sligo. From the letting of this land he received a yearly income of £15,000, an amount that in today’s terms would be equivalent to something like £750,000. About half of this land lay around Lissadell, the other half lay about twenty miles to the south and included the town of Ballymote, bought by Sir Robert in 1833 from Lord Orkney.

The tenant families who paid rent directly to Sir Henry and whose lives were, theoretically at least, in his control, numbered about one thousand. There were many more who paid indirectly through renting from one of Sir Henry’s larger tenant farmers such as Mr Barber, a model tenant who leased 450 acres and then sublet at a profit. Many of the smaller tenants were desperately poor. Some 300, paying less than £4 a year, rented a portion of land ranging from a few roods to a few acres that could provide a living of only bare subsistence. In a newspaper article many years later Constance described with revolutionary fervour the social structure of the Sligo countryside of her childhood:

You saw the landlords in their big demesnessnes, mostly of Norman or Saxon stock, walled in and aloof, an alien class, sprung from an alien race. … The prosperous farmers were mostly Protestant … and hidden away among rocks in the mountain sides or soaking in the slime and ooze of the boglands or beside the Atlantic shore where the grass is blasted yellow by the salt wind you find the dispossessed people of the old Gaelic race in their miserable cabins.3

The landlord system was an aspect of Irish life that was becoming ever more contentious during Constance’s youth. The majority of landlords were descendants of those successive waves of soldier-adventurers who came during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to subdue Ireland on behalf of the Crown. The more prominent and effective among them were granted land in return for their services, land from which the native Irish were turned out and then re-admitted as tenants. The first ancestor of Constance’s to set up in Ireland was a Paul Gore, who rode in the Elizabethan campaigns in which the conquest of Ireland became conclusive. He was granted the nucleus of the Lissadell estate and was made a Baronet of Ireland in 1621. The second great push came fifty years later when Cromwell’s bloody campaign uprooted the Irish and allowed English settlers to establish themselves throughout the country. The resistance of the Irish was sporadic and ineffective but it was to remain as an aggravation for generations to come.

The new proprietors saw themselves as brave and enterprising colonists and Ireland as a colony to be exploited. And the colonized regarded them with bitterness, resentment and a hostility that flickered into insurrection at irregular intervals. There was certainly hatred on both sides, at least initially. With the self-justification typical of colonialism everywhere, the English found the Irish uncivilized – and indeed they were not civilized in the English sense – and indolent. Their favourite prescription for peace and prosperity was to be rid of them entirely and to populate the land with a loyal and industrious peasantry from Scotland. To the Irish, their English conquerors were upstarts, foreigners and the cause of their servility and poverty.

The situation was exacerbated by the identification of both sides with opposing religions. In England, the Reformation and the establishment of the new Protestant Church were then burning issues while the Irish generally remained immune to the controversy and maintained the old Catholicism. Along with the Protestant settlers came a Protestant clergy. As a means of subjugation, the Penal Laws – a set of punitive measures including economic sanctions – were introduced, which reduced the Catholic population to the status of non-citizens. To the Irish, Protestantism came to be associated with coercion and privilege and Catholicism symbolic of a private revolt, a badge of pride and independence in the face of defeat. By 1775, 95 per cent of the land was owned by Protestants.

By the early nineteenth century turbulence had subsided into the apathy of an agrarian subsistence economy. The potato had been introduced; and its use became widespread since a plot of ground under this crop could feed twice as many people as the same plot under corn. This tenant population increased dramatically through the first half of the century while more and more of them lived in a state of distress, which contemporary travellers and observers found shameful and abhorrent. The hostile relation between landlord and tenant was by now largely replaced by a mutual tolerance and contempt. Whether landlordism was the principal reason for the endemic poverty is still open to question. The poorest tenants certainly – and they numbered at least a quarter of the whole – were obliged to hand over as rent any cash earned from the sale of animals or grain; and much of this money was either spent abroad or sent to landlords who lived abroad. About one-third of Irish landlords were absentees. Because of this, and because most of the people had little or no disposable income, Ireland was notoriously under-capitalized. Irish industry was at first proscribed, then never actively encouraged. Ireland never experienced an Industrial Revolution.

The population problem was solved quickly and brutally by the great mid-century crisis, the Famine. The destruction by blight of the potato crop in the years 1845–50 was more widespread and unrelenting than failures that had occurred before. Native resources were too meagre to avert starvation and the government, with the ambiguity characteristic of its dealings with Ireland, failed to act decisively. One million people died of starvation in those years and one million more left Ireland, most of them for America, in the wave of mass emigration that followed. Some millions more would emigrate within the next half-century. In 1841 the population numbered more than eight million. By the end of the century, it would be half that.

Constance was born into the relatively prosperous period of the post-Famine. The horrors of the Famine may have left a psychic scar but the physical effects were beneficial to those who remained. There were fewer people. Holdings could be larger where the landlord did not prefer to graze cattle on land cleared of tenantry. The prices of farm animals and farm products such as butter rose steeply from the 1850s to the 1870s so rents were easier to pay. Landlords, however, were becoming uneasily aware that their autonomy and the system under which they flourished was for the first time open to question. The analysis offered by the Radical, James F. Lawlor, before the Famine – ‘It is a question between a people and a class … a people of eight million and a class of eight thousand. They or we must quit the country or they or we are doomed…’4 – had invaded respectable English political circles in the shape of Gladstone and some Liberal allies. It was a Liberal government that had suffered the embarrassment of Famine on British territory and on Britain’s doorstep and succeeding generations of Liberals sought to lay the blame on the irresponsibility and wanton speculation of landlordism.

In an electoral speech at Wigan in 1868, the year of Constance’s birth, Gladstone, the future Prime Minister, spoke of the Irish aristocracy as

some tall tree of noxious growth, lifting its head to Heaven and poisoning the atmosphere of the land so far as its shadow can extend. It is still there, gentlemen, but now at last the day has come when, as we hope, the axe has been laid to the root. It is deeply cut round and round. It nods and quivers from base to base. There lacks, gentlemen, but one stroke more – the stroke of these Elections. It will then, once and for all, topple to its fall, and on that day the heart of Ireland will leap for joy.5

The iron seemed to have entered too into the soul of the peasantry. The Land League, a movement formed to win greater control of the land they farmed, enjoyed the support of the mass of the people. By 1881 even a benevolent landlord like Sir Henry Gore-Booth, Constance’s father, complained that his tenantry was less trustful, friendly and pleasant to meet, even if they were not positively ill disposed. Despite appearances however, the Irish tenantry was not innately radical. Its disaffection was primarily a result of what it regarded as the alien nationality of the landlords.

The identity of the landlord class and its position in Irish life was indeed ambiguous. The French writer de Tocqueville wrote that the Irish aristocracy ‘wanted to remain separated from the people and to be still English. It has driven itself into imitating the English aristocracy without possessing either its skill or its resources and its own sin is proving its ruin.’6 Although there were notable exceptions, the Irish aristocracy saw itself as the representative of England in Ireland. It knew only English culture, spoke with English aristocratic vowels, sent, if it could afford it, its children to England to be educated, its daughters to be presented at the English court and its younger sons to the English army, navy and church. Since the Irish people had never given their mandate to English rule, the harmonious relationship between the English landlord and his tenant was never reproduced in Ireland. Landlord and tenant shared neither the same church nor, in many parts of the country, the same language. Though they might behave as badly or, in some cases, worse than their Protestant counterparts, the few ‘Irish’ or Catholic landlords, known as the Old Irish, enjoyed a traditional loyalty that pre-dated the coming of the English. ‘In the minds of the Irish people they were different,’ wrote David Thomson in Woodbrook. ‘Their rights of possession were not questioned and their relationships with workmen and tenants were more intimate.’7

Constance’s father had a considerable standing among his peers. Sir Henry was not among the wealthiest – there were a few men such as the Duke of Leinster who owned well over a hundred thousand acres – but he missed by only a couple of thousand acres the status of being the second-largest landowner in the County of Sligo. His income placed him well above the level of most of the neighbouring gentry. And at a time when landlordism was under siege on several fronts he could be held up as an example of the justice of this system of land tenure. His tenants might well have thought that if they must have a landlord, they were fortunate in having Sir Henry Gore-Booth.

If his nearest neighbours, a Mr Gethin and Mrs Huddleston, who between them owned about three thousand acres at Ballyconnell, illustrated the worst aspects of Irish landlordism, Sir Henry, in the conduct of his estate, illustrated the best. Mr Gethin and Mrs Huddleston were absentee to the extent that they were not known by sight to their tenants. Sir Henry and his family lived on their estate and when his father’s agent died in 1871, Sir Henry took over its management using a thorough system of accounts and book-keeping that was undertaken on few Irish estates.8

The rents he charged, averaging 12s. to 15s. per acre, were lower than those approved by the Griffith Valuation. The Ballyconnell tenants paid 40s. per acre for land that was no better. Sir Henry oversaw an equitable and efficient distribution of land and organized the tenants to construct roads. He gave assistance with drainage and provided lime and slates for houses. At Ballyconnell, a man who improved his land by making a watercourse had to pay more rent, and all tenants paid 4/2d. more in the pound for the right to gather seaweed, which they used as fertilizer, from the foreshore. The people living in wretched conditions whom Constance remembered may have been the Ballyconnell tenants who ran out of potatoes by March and lived from then until summer on Indian meal bought on credit, to be paid for by ‘an extra take of fish or the produce of a cow or a crop of oats’.

At such a level of subsistence, finding the money to pay the rent was obviously a crippling burden. It was essential to pay it because a tenant could face eviction from his home and the loss of his livelihood if he did not. In the Famine years, the distress was augmented by the eviction of starving and desperate people from their holdings for non-payment. In the 1870s when the number of evictions rose again, there were only six evictions on the Lissadell estate, all, according to Sir Henry, of ‘idlers who would neither work or pay’.

Sir Henry’s attitude towards his tenants and the conduct of his estate was paternalistic, like a Victorian father’s towards his children. He was concerned for their welfare, did whatever was in his power to relieve the distress that many of them were regularly subject to, distrusted their capacity to handle their affairs and regretted their profligacy. He expected them not to question his authority or position. And it is unlikely that he himself ever questioned it.

Constance was familiar with most of her father’s tenants because, before the advent of the bicycle, urban bureaucracy in Sligo, and disposable cash, Lissadell was the centre of their world. Many of them supplemented the income from their little holdings with employment on its farm, woods and gardens; and they came to the house not only at half-yearly intervals to pay the rent but to consult Sir Henry about their personal affairs:

Few owners [wrote a correspondent ofThe Timeswho inquired into the Irish land question] have such intimate knowledge of their tenantry, holdings and necessities. The people come to him as adviser and friend, as an arbiter in family feuds and as their depositor for wills and marriage settlements. He has a curious carefully kept record of the troubles, disputes and condition of his poor neighbours.

But Sir Henry was typical of most landlords in that he regarded his tenants as essentially a nuisance. ‘The pity is,’ he told the Times, ‘that half the population of these townlands could not be deported and their holdings doubled in size.’ While he neglected to consider the material and psychological ill effects of tenant status, his exasperation is understandable since under the prevailing system, such small farms could not be economic. When the system changed, as it did in due course, the tenants set about consolidating their holdings as fast as any landlord could wish. Unlike many landlords, he was too humane to engage in the common practice of what was effectively deportation through offering to the people meagre inducements to emigrate, such as the fare to America and a small sum for necessities for the voyage. There was said to be a skeleton in the family cupboard that, it was believed, made the Gore-Booths conscientious.

In the 1830s when Sir Henry’s father, Sir Robert Gore-Booth, bought the town of Ballymote, he also bought a piece of land of about 800 acres, called the Seven Cartrons, and decided to farm it more profitably by grazing cattle on it. It was necessary therefore to induce the fifty-two families who lived there to quit. According to local lore, they were given £2 passage money and £4 in compensation and placed on a chartered ship called the Pomania, which was so unseaworthy that she foundered before she had sailed beyond Sligo Bay and was still in sight of land. Drowned bodies, it was said, were washed ashore at Lissadell and Raughley from where they had set out. A ballad still heard in Sligo tells of the purported tragedy:

The ship she was a rotten one,

The truth to you I tell;

They struck her on the Corraun Rock

Right under Lissadell …

Our rent was paid

We were not afraid

That from home we’d have to go.

We were forced to yield

And quit the field

And board the Pomano.9

There is evidence, however, that while the Pomania did sail from Raughley on 31 May with the tenant families on board she arrived safely in Quebec on 6 June, returning to Kingstown on 29 August. The writer of the ballad seems to be conflating this emigration with that of the notorious coffin ships during the Famine a decade later as a political ploy.

The Lissadell estate afforded a lifestyle that was delightful in its Victorian insouciance. Amusements were taken seriously and accomplishments cultivated. There was a ready supply of servants to hand and Lissadell had its full complement. In Constance’s childhood, the household included her grandfather, Sir Robert Gore-Booth, her maternal grandmother, Lady Emily Hill, and Aunt Augusta, her father’s sister. Sir Robert died in 1876, the year in which Constance’s younger brother, Mordaunt, was born. Lady Hill, to whom Eva had been very close, died in 1879.

Although he was a careful steward of his estate and, as President of the Sligo Agricultural Society and Chairman of the Sligo Leitrim and Northern Counties Railways embedded in regional development, Sir Henry was at heart a ‘huntin’, shootin’ and fishin” man. But his exploits were not confined to his own and his neighbours’ fields. He had a lifelong enthusiasm for the Far North and in the years before the Pole had been reached, he was one of those intrepid explorers who made pioneering expeditions in the icy waters of the Arctic. As a young man, he spent his summers yachting and fishing for salmon off Norway and his activities did not cease after he married. There is a family story that Lady Gore-Booth had the artificial lake in the grounds constructed as an attempt to keep him at home. In 1873 he went in a friend’s yacht as far as Spitzbergen; and in 1879 he explored the polar cap as far north as 780.241 when he voyaged in the Barents and Kara Seas under Captain A.H. Markham who would later go farthest north in the nineteenth century. Not long after this, he bought his own yacht and named her Kara. In 1882, fulfilling a promise he had made to the explorer Leigh Smith, he sailed to his aid through uncharted Arctic waters, successfully rescuing him. There is said to be a tiny isle in the Arctic Ocean called Gore-Booth Island. The exotic fauna he hunted accreted at Lissadell in glass cases: birds, great salmon, a bear with which Mr Kilgallon, the butler who travelled with him, engaged in a life-or-death struggle, and trophies such as walrus tusks and a whale’s skull.

Constance’s female relatives also had strong personalities. Her mother, Lady Gore-Booth, bore five children, managed the estate when Sir Henry was away, liked to entertain, and involved herself in philanthropic work such as her patronage of a lace-making school for the local women. Aunt Augusta, known as Wee Ga because of her very small stature, had a formidable will and was intensely interested in horses. Constance was greatly loved and approved of as a child in part because she inherited to a lavish extent the best qualities of these people. She resembled her mother in looks and had her self-assurance. She had Augusta’s love of horses and surpassed even her noted talent at riding. From her father, she got a skill and daring with guns and animals, a tendency to go far with whatever occupied her, to commit herself, and perhaps an ambition to be extraordinary, to test herself in some area that was not domestic.

She was loved especially because she was happy. She was healthy, energetic, clever and apparently uncomplicated. She put her siblings in the shade. Josslyn was a serious and conscientious boy while Con was quick-witted, quick in movement, the one with the japey schoolboy sense of humour. Eva, the future poet, was rather timid and fragile, an introspective, more inaccessible child. That the sisters were so different did not prevent the development of an almost symbiotic friendship between them. They complemented each other and Eva was to be Con’s closest, most affectionate and constant friend throughout her complicated life. Mabel and Mordaunt, who were much younger, had little impact on Constance.

An Anglo-Irish family (by the end of the nineteenth century, the word ‘Anglo-Irish’ was coming into vogue to describe those, usually of ‘planter’ descent, whose Irishness was ambiguous – before that they were known simply as Irish) could be quite isolated within its demesne. But Sligo was among the most planted of Irish counties and there were plenty of neighbours to visit and to hunt and shoot with. A family of cousins, the Wynnes, lived nearby at Hazelwood, a splendid eighteenth-century Palladian house. There were other relations not far distant. In the summer, there was a languid beach life of boating, fishing and shrimping. Swimming was not yet done, at least by the female sex, although the Morris family, many miles away in Connemara, was famous for having one of the new bathing machines. In winter, there was the hunting and shooting. The extensive stables were close to the sands where Constance, as a very young child, would ride her pony Storeen at full speed and on side-saddle. Her father taught her to ride and later to shoot, and she was among the zestful shooting parties who went after pheasant and woodcock in the mountain plantation on Ben Bulben and in the waterlogged boglands, or stalking the deer Sir Henry had introduced. These were occasions when Constance would display a quite extraordinary courage, daring, and enthusiasm for danger.

There were major events: the visits to Sligo town, sometimes on horseback when the Gore-Booth family rode the ten miles there, greeted on the road with the deference that fitted their station. Sligo was not one of those depressed and somnolent Irish towns that came alive only on fair day. Among its population of 11,000, it had its share of ragged children; but 500 ships called then at its port every year and it had a thriving middle class, professional and merchant families like W.B. Yeats’ relations, the Pollexfens, who enjoyed an active social life. There were yachting regattas and a rowing club, which specialized in races – although gentry like the Gore-Booths remained aloof from these traders’ activities. In August there was the journey to Dublin by train for the Horse Show. The Horse Show was the annual outing and social event for a gentry that worshipped the horse. Horses were bought and sold, there were riding and jumping competitions for all ages, sideshows, displays of the ladies’ philanthropic classes in handicrafts, and for the adults, balls and parties and gossip.

The girls’ education was provided by a series of governesses, the last of which, a Miss Noel, always called Squidge, commanded the undying affection of Constance and Eva. Squidge had intellectual interests. Before she came, they were taught only the usual female accomplishments of music, poetry, sketching and French, but no classics or history, and nothing to fit them for a career. Precocious, spoilt Con, whose interests lay primarily in the outdoors, was probably a trial to these women. But with anyone who suffered or needed help, she redeemed herself with an aristocratic impulse to kindness. There are stories that have a slightly uneasy ring of the princess among the poor about them but which hold some truth: how she sat up night after night with a stable groom who was ill; how, coming down to the kitchen one day, she saw a woman who was pregnant washing clothes, pushed her away from the tub and washed them herself; how she and Eva were liable to give away the clothes they were wearing to poor girls they met on the road – Eva her coat, Constance her shoes.

Both Eva and Constance endeared themselves to the country people – who were always called that, never ‘peasants’, except as an insult. Eva is credited with being as skilful a horsewoman as Constance, and when they were out riding across the countryside, they used to alight at the cabins and regale their inhabitants with tales of the feats to which they had pushed their ponies. The country people, with what many considered their regrettably retrospective cast of mind, told the children stories of the fairies and the queen who was seen on the mountain, stories of emigration and ‘the men of ‘98’ (the men of the rebellion of 1798, of which Wolfe Tone was the most famous). They probably kept to themselves the stories of the Fenians and the Rising of 1867 because those events were too close to the present, too close to the divide that stood between them and the children from the Big House. The children’s heroes were men who grappled with bears and pushed farther the frontiers of the Empire. The heroes of the people were men who fought against the Empire and for something called freedom, in the hopeless little risings that broke out in Ireland from time to time. The most recent of these was the Fenian conspiracy of 1867, which ended in a damp squib and the usual arrests and executions.

One sedentary occupation to which Con gladly applied herself as a child was sketching. Artistic inclinations ran in the Gore-Booth family. The book of sketches her grandfather made on his ‘grand tour’ in the 1830s lay around at Lissadell. And as further inspiration there were the pictures hanging high up in the gallery depicting wonderful and mysterious scenes. She drew horses, endlessly, and, later, the country people in characteristic attitudes. She watched with interest the process by which the women made dyes for their homespuns from wild plants and flowers. Constance could regard nature with a practical, exploitative eye whereas Eva’s gaze was meditative. Though Con’s outspoken, indiscreet personality could seem lovably bumptious, her empathy with her sensitive, reserved younger sister suggested it had a more complex dimension.

In 1880 when Constance was twelve and Eva ten, the then almost unknown artist, Sarah Purser was invited to Lissadell to paint some portraits of the family. Sarah Purser had just returned from a six-month stint as an art student in Paris, learning the trade by which she intended to make her living. Although rather plain and an ageing jeune fille she was admired and respected by the brilliant, scornful Maria Bashkirtseff. Bashkirtseff envied even Sarah’s poverty and wrote of her as a philosopher ‘with whom you can have discussions on Kant, on life, on the Ego and on death, which make you reflect for yourself and imprint on the mind what you have read or heard’.10

The Lissadell commission was clearly very important for Sarah Purser because, through a network of Gore-Booth relations, she soon ‘went through the British aristocracy like the measles’,11 and became one of the wealthiest and most popular artists in Dublin. She remarked later how lovely a child Constance was, ‘how idolized and spoilt and always so good-hearted in her absurdities’, and how her mother invested great hopes in her. But, a rather no-nonsense lady, she preferred Eva who was reserved and not given to self-dramatization. Miss Purser’s portrait of the two children positioned them in that era straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which they would both essentially inhabit. They are posed in the open air amongst the trees of Lissadell in an impressionist iridescence of blues and greens. Constance is wearing a hat, her expression wilful and dreamy at the same time, while Eva nestles in the grass at her feet, her averted profile angelic.

A year before the children had been exposed to a darker side of life. The late 1870s were years of poor harvests because of bad weather, and low prices due to competition in agricultural products from Holland, France and Scandinavia. The summer of 1879 saw incessant rain and cold and the potatoes rotted in the ground. The spectre of the Famine rose again. Many of the Gore-Booth tenants faced starvation. Sir Henry toured his lands and arranged for the poorest of his tenants to go into the workhouse of which he was a guardian, without suffering the forfeiture of their plots and cabins, which a contemporary regulation required. Lady Gore-Booth and the older children set up a food distribution centre at Lissadell, an event, it was said, ‘unique of its kind in Ireland at the time.’12 A measure of the extreme poverty of the people even then, as well of the benevolence of Constance’s family, is that straw was carted from the haggard at Lissadell to the houses of those who had no beds. It was in that year that Sir Henry gave 40 per cent reduction in their rents to his Ballymote tenants.

In a very graphic sense, politics lay all about Lissadell. Less inchoately, the rumbles of politicians could also be heard near at hand if one chose to hear them. The crusade, known as the Land War, to change the system of land tenure in favour of the peasantry was in full swing, in tandem with the Home Rule movement, which was seeking to have returned to Dublin the parliament it had lost in 1801. Gladstone seemed more extreme in his attitude to inherited wealth and privilege every day. There was a branch of the Land League in Sligo and a mass meeting was held in 1880 on Lissadell land.

Occasionally, an estate agent or landlord was shot. Even ‘good’ Sir Henry received in 1882 a couple of the ubiquitous threatening letters sent by one of the peasant secret societies common in nineteenth-century Ireland. But agitation and ill-spelt histrionic missives could still be ignored or treated with derision or irony. Politics, according to Constance, was never talked about at Lissadell. The attitude prevailed there that it was the bad landlords who gave a good system a bad name. Of course, acceptance of the status quo was not regarded as ‘politics’. Only reformism was considered ‘political’. Indeed, landlords liked to believe or pretend that nothing was happening and their tenants were loyal, and it was thought bad form to bring up the subject in conversation. ‘There were,’ it was written of the time, ‘euphemisms for receiving threatening letters, for being shot at, and other euphemisms for running away.’13 What made landlords complain loudly was that their hunting might be stopped or curtailed, or that their tenants were shooting their game. At mid adolescence, this may too have been Constance’s main concern and the extent of her political consciousness.

NOTES

Eire, 18 August 1923.The Celtic Twilight, W.B. Yeats (Colin Smythe, London, 1981) p. 81.Eire, 18 August 1923.James Fintan Lawlor, Collected Writings, ed. L. Fogarty (The Talbot Press, Dublin, 1947) p. 62–3.Gladstone, P. Magnus (John Murray, London, 1954) p. 193.Journeys to England and Ireland, Alexis de Tocqueville (Anchor, New York) pp. 152–3.Woodbrook, David Thomson (Penguin, London, 1976) p. 80.Article inThe Timeson the Irish land question on 7 March 1881 described the Gore-Booth estate as an example of good management.Sligo, Simbad’s Yellow Shore, T.A. Finnegan (Keohane, Sligo, 1977) p. 80.Journals of Maria Bashkirtseff, trans. Mathilde Blind (Virago, London1985) p. 515.Daughters of Erinby Elizabeth Coxhead (Secker & Warburg, London,1965) p. 131.The Times, 7 March 1881.From an unpublished novel by Hon. Mary Ponsonby, sister of Horace Plunkett, quoted inKilcooleyby W.G. Neely (Universities Press, Belfast, 1983) p. 119.

2. THE DEBUTANTE: LONDON AND DUBLIN

constance gore-booth grew up to be singular, although the manner in which she expressed her singularity was as yet banal. She seemed set fair to be a shining example of the classic type of wild Anglo-Irish girl, hard-riding, jolly, tomboyish. She was beautiful, slender but robust, with thick waist-length brown hair and classic features that her high-spirited vitality made distinctive. Her friends were the hunting crowd. In the winter there was a meet of the Sligo Harriers every Tuesday and Friday and Con rode with them from when she was fourteen. Her superior horsemanship was quickly recognized. The Sligo Independent, a local newspaper that reported the meets, regularly carried glowing accounts of Miss Gore’s deeds: ‘Her performance must be regarded as simply marvellous. … Her gallant and daring horsemanship, as she led the field almost from the start, was the subject of universal admiration.’1 It was Wee Ga who gave Constance the hunter she called Max after a hero she knew from her reading in German literature and their partnership was eulogized by a Mr Rowlette, neighbour and Master of the Sligo Hunt Club: