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- Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
This finely detailed and amply illustrated biography recreates the life and times of one of Ireland's earliest environmentalists, founder of the world movement for the protection of animals. A loveable Galwayman, Volunteer colonel, landlord-eccentric, lawyer-duellist, parliamentarian and champion of Catholic emancipation, his colourful, humorous personality is caught in this poised and readable work.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1989
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Some reviews of the 1975 edition
‘He waged a one-man battle to stop the ill-use of animals. For that alone he deserves to be remembered and to have won such a sympathetic and fair biographer as Miss Lynam’ — T.G. Barker in The Cork Examiner
The book is full of fascinating grace-notes about the history of both Ireland and England in a period of almost frenetic entanglement’ — John Horgan in TheListener
‘A courageous and attractive man who deserves to be remembered with affection’ — Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Irish Press
‘The most enthralling book I have read for a long time’ — Hilary Boyle in Hibernia
‘The most enjoyable book of 1975, I envy Shevawn Lynam her talents and her industry’ — Maureen Potter
Humanity Dick Martin ‘King of Connemara’ 1754-1834
Shevawn Lynam
THE LILLIPUT PRESS
To the Memory of my
O’Flaherty Grandmother
Contents
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to the directors and staffs of the various libraries and record offices in which I have worked in Ireland, England, France and the U.S.A. Mr. Kenneth Timings of the Public Record office, London, was an infallible guide, and I am also indebted to Miss Felicity Ranger of the Registry of Archives, London, for assistance in locating material. In a particular manner I wish to thank all those in the National Library of Ireland and the Irish Public Record office who have given me so efficient a service combined with such personal concern.
Without the generous cooperation of Humanity Dick’s direct descendants in Canada the book would not have been possible. I have to thank them for supplying me with a valuable collection of letters, documents and photographs. I owe innumerable patiently typed copies of material to Mrs. Mary Collison (née Martin) of Vancouver, while her brother, Tim, of Toronto, has earned my gratitude by acting as a liaison officer between me and the Canadian Martins in general.
The RSPCA gave me most welcome encouragement when starting on a book about the man who played the leading part in founding their society, and kindly put their records at my disposal. Mr. Mullius of the History of Parliament Trust was good enough to allow me to make use of material collected by that body, and Mr. Malcolmson, Keeper of the Records for Northern Ireland, most generously supplied me with the notes for his history of the Galway constituency. I also have to thank him for providing material from the Mount Stewart archives and Lady Bury for permission to use it.
The Surrey Record Office authorized me to use material from the Goulburn papers, Lord Buchan has kindly given me per mission to quote from Lord Erskine’s papers, and I am grateful to Lord Kilmaine for allowing me to make use of the diary of the second Baron and the copies of the Anti-Union in his possession. Mrs. Teresa O’Neill kindly lent me the invaluable appendix to her thesis for an M.A., The Sixth Parliament ofGeorge III, for which I wish to thank her.
The Martin family have made a most valuable contribution to the illustrations. I am indebted to Miss Florence Martin of Grimsby, Ontario, the head of the Ballinahinch branch, for the picture on the dustcover which is a copy of one presented to Humanity Dick’s daughter by S. C. Hall, the parliamentary reporter of The Times, and she also supplied me with a miniature of Humanity’s son, Thomas. Richard Martin of Vancouver kindly sent me copies of pictures of Humanity Dick’s father and two half brothers; Douglas Martin of Toronto provided me with a copy of the miniature of Humanity Dick’s eldest child, Laetitia. Tim Martin filled what would have been an important gap by kindly sending me a copy of a portrait of Humanity Dick in old age.
Mr. Richard Martin of Ross, the senior branch of the Martin family, has my sincere thanks for allowing me to have the caricature of Humanity Dick leading a donkey into court photographed, and the same is true of Mr. Michael Gorman of the Irish Tourist Board in regard to the picture of Humanity Dick addressing his ‘constituents’. I have to thank Colonel and Mrs. Lambert of Clareville for kindly allowing me to use a picture of their house, formerly Humanity Dick’s, as an illustration, and Miss Norah McGuinness for doing the drawing of it. I am grateful to the National Library of Ireland for permission to reproduce the drawing of Ballinahinch castle and lake from the Edgeworth papers, together with several pictures from published works, and to the Governor and Company of the Bank of Ireland for that of the Irish Parliament. Mr. Patrick Tutty of Dublin is to be thanked for undertaking all the necessary photography.
Mr. Gerald Lee of Galway has been indefatigable in sharing his historical knowledge of the west of Ireland with me and in keeping me supplied with local anecdotes associated with Humanity Dick and the Martin family in general. Frank Comyn and Michael Vahy of Ballinahinch have added much from their store of information accumulated on the spot that Humanity Dick loved best.
I have to thank my mother for meticulously sorting my library slips, Ruth Lynam for helping to scan newspapers, and Valerie Randell for sorting press cuttings. And I must thank Aer Lingus for most valuable cooperation.
Above all others, I wish to thank Dr. Maurice Sheehy of University College, Dublin. He read the book chapter by chapter from the first draft to the final stage, giving me unfailingly wise advice and the benefit of his own very wide knowledge, and I am also grateful to Dr. Donal MacCartney of University College, Dublin, for checking the historical references.
Finally, I humbly express my thanks to Cecil Woodham-Smith for giving me that encouragement which only a great writer can give to a lesser, and which she has given me so unstintingly.
The great historian William Lecky, in volume 2 of The History ofEuropean Morals in the Nineteenth Century (London 1925), declared ‘one of the peculiar merits of the last century’ to be the introduction of the ‘notion of duties towards the animal world,’ singling out ‘Mr Martin, an eccentric Irish member [of parliament]… to whose untiring exertions the legislative protection of animals in England is due.’ Today societies world-wide continue the work Richard Martin began in 1794 to eliminate cruelty to animals on his own estates in the most westerly European province, and many more fight to safeguard the environment prompted by a respect for the balance of nature on which Martin based his crusade. All are represented in the World Society for the Protection of Animals, with the Eurogroup for Animal Welfare co-ordinating those of the European Gommunity.
In 1970 the French authorities planned to build a road through Martin’s burial-place in Boulogne, but England’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals reinterred his remains beneath a marble slab bearing a bi-lingual tribute to him. Ireland pays daily homage to his warmth of heart through the ‘Richard Martin Rest Fields’ in which strayed, sick or abandoned animals are sheltered by the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In 1989 Humanity Dick Martin was fittingly commemorated with a tablet of Connemara marble set in the wall of the place he loved best, his former residence, Ballinahinch Gastle.
S.L.,Ashford, April 1989
Illustrations
1. Humanity Dick. Colonel Richard Martin, M.P. From theportrait hanging in the board room of the RSPCA
2a. A Street in Old Galway, 1840. By courtesy of J. P. O’F.Lynam
2b. Clareville, the house Robert Martin built where Nimble Dick had established his Manor of Clare, and which later came to be known as ‘Dick Martin’s Gate Lodge’. Anartist’s impression by Norah McGuinness
3. The Irish House of Commons, with Richard Martin third from the left in the back left hand row. By courtesy of theGovernor and Company of the Bank of Ireland
4a. Theobald Wolfe Tone. From a drawing done by his wife. Bycourtesy of the National Library of Ireland
4b. Playbill from Martin’s theatre in Kirwan’s Lane, Galway, announcing the opening performances in which the Martins and Wolfe Tone played. By courtesy of UniversityCollege, Galway
5. An Irish wolfhound such as the Prime Serjeant over whom Martin fought a duel with Fighting FitzGerald. Bycourtesy of Ireland of the Welcomes
6. Fighting FitzGerald in the clothes in which he chose to be executed. Published by J. Ridgeway, London, 1786. Bycourtesy of the National Library of Ireland
7a. Ballinahinch Lake with the house on the extreme right. Drawn for Maria Edgeworth by Mr. Smith during their visit there in 1835. By courtesy of the National Library ofIreland
7b. ‘Dick Martin’s Prison’ in Ballinahinch Lake where he detained those who were cruel to animals on his estates before there was an act to prevent such abuses. Printed forW. H. Bartlett and R. Wallis by Geo. Virtue of London
8. A Galway election as seen by ‘Phiz’, illustrating Charles Lever’s Charles O’Malley in which Uncle Godfrey, the Member for Galway, is supposed to be Humanity Dick.
9a. Richard Martin, M.P. in Smithfield Market. A sketch by Cruikshank. By courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
9b. The Trial of ‘Bill Burn’, under Martin’s Act. From an original picture by P. Mathews. By courtesy of RichardMartin of Ross
10a. Robert Martin
10b. Anthony Martin
10c. Captain Robert Martin, Jnr. By courtesy of the Martins of Canada
11a. Laetitia Martin, later Lady Peshall
11b. Thomas Martin
11c. Emily Martin, nee Kirwan, wife of Richard Martin, Jnr. By courtesy of the Martins of Canada
12a. Martin’s Bill in Operation. By courtesy of the Trustees of theBritish Museum
12b. Martin addressing his constituents. By courtesy of MichaelGorman
13a. Mr. Marthi and the Dromedary: The Hoax … Bycourtesy of the Trustees of The British Museum
13b. … and Humanity’s reply. By courtesy of the Trustees of theBritish Museum
14. The Terrible Paragraph!! or Dickey Donkey’s Dream is all my Eye and Betty Martin. By courtesy of the Trustees of theBritish Museum
15. Literary Squibs and Crackers or Dickey’s Visit to Bow Street. By courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum
16a. Daniel O’Connell. Engraved from a portrait by T. Carrick. By courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland
16b. Humanity Dick in old age, holding in his hand his Bill to abolish the penalty of death in cases of forgery. By courtesyof Tim Martin
Prologue
RICHARD MARTIN had earned the nickname of Nimble Dick. It contrasted with the more glorious name by which his great-grandson, another Richard Martin, was to be known, but it fitted equally well. An astute lawyer and County Galway gentleman, he was one of those people who manage to fall on their feet whatever the circumstances.
When James II of England was beaten by William of Orange at Aughrim in the west of Ireland on 12 July 1691, Nimble Dick was a captain in Luterell’s cavalry, to whom the Jacobites attributed their defeat. Afraid for his life at their hands, he avoided retreating with them to Limerick. Instead he threw himself on the mercy of the High Sheriff of Galway who was acting a neutral part in preparation for the formal surrender of the city. Nimble Dick was a gentleman of standing, and for his protection the Sheriff took him to the Williamite commander, de Ginckle, then entrenched before the town.
The Dutchman was working out the terms of surrender, and Nimble Dick, an Irishman and a Catholic, remained with him throughout. As the articles began to emerge they proved to be exceptionally lenient. The city dignitaries and all within the town were to be pardoned; they could return to their estates, to which their titles were confirmed, or join the Jacobite forces at Limerick; and religious toleration was guaranteed.
These advantageous conditions were in part the result of Nimble Dick’s exertions, but, due to a technicality, he himself was excluded from their benefits. The Mayor of Galway had added his name to the roll of freemen, which should have brought him within the scope of the Articles of Surrender, but with the brusque changes due to hostilities, he was never sworn and, thus, did not qualify for the general pardon.
The Irish Jacobites with whom Nimble Dick had fought represented Catholic Ireland. They considered that they were defending their legitimate King and regarded the English as traitors who had deposed three monarchs in forty years. Yet, the crown had been bestowed on William by the English parliament, and the Irish were rebels in the eyes of the law. Nimble Dick was, consequently, liable to all the penalties and, in particular, he faced the possible surrender of his vast estates.
But, as his nickname implied, he was resourceful. During the war he had saved the lives of some Protestant supporters of William’s and, resolved to capitalize on this, he set off for England to make use of what a client was to call his capacity for ‘plausible discourses’. Pleading his cause was a long and expensive business. It was said to have cost him his ‘hat full of sovereigns’ and took four years, but in the end he was successful. The King issued a warrant for his pardon, of ‘all treasons, rebellions and crimes’, making special reference to his having saved some Protestants ‘from ruin’, and confirmed his title to his estates. Only then was he able to feel they were safe for himself and his heirs.
By this time, more than five hundred years after the Anglo-Normans had invaded Ireland, the entire country was a patchwork of confiscated, divided and redistributed lands. The arrears of pay for successive English armies had been met by grants of Irish estates, but it was the Cromwellian conquest which brought to a climax the religious taboos introduced by the Reformation and the Elizabethan plantations, and put the westernmost province of Connaught in a special position. It was reserved, with County Clare, for the dispossessed native Catholics. They were transplanted to the west of the Shannon, the rest of the country became an English Protestant colony, and the population of Ireland sank to 850,000.
With boundless faith in the Stuarts, the displaced Catholics expected restitution at the restoration of Charles II. But he owed his crown to the Commonwealth army and his Act of Settlement confirmed the soldiers’ titles to their Irish lands. And when he attempted to compensate the disillusioned Catholics by an Act of Explanation, the compromise was so confused that the claims of thousands were never heard.
In the midst of these shifting sands, Connaught was full of contradictions. Some Catholics had been transplanted on to their Catholic neighbours’ lands under Cromwell. Others had been granted the possessions of co-religionists whom Charles had failed to pardon, while the more prosperous had acquired new properties by the mortgages they had arranged with the older, impoverished classes falling in. Nimble Dick had come by his lands in all these ways, and, in particular, had been granted practically all the estates of the ancient clan of O’Flaherty. Consisting of almost a quarter of a million acres of mountain, lake and bog with eighty miles of indented coastline, they made him the largest proprietor in fee simple in the British Isles.
Having obtained the King’s ear, he did not allow matters to rest. Scarcely had his pardon arrived than he addressed William. ‘With great pain and industry,’ he explained, he had acquired some thousands of acres in the remotest part of County Galway, but due to the rough nature of the country, he could not obtain tenants without great encouragement. He was ‘so sensible of His Majesty’s grace and favour’ that he was determined to invest all he had, or could borrow, in order to improve the land, and he proposed to build a town at a place called Clare where a fair was held. He would produce every possible inducement to get tradesmen and handicraftsmen to settle there, but if his lands could be elevated to the status of a manor, which would entitle him to exact fees and services from the tenants, he felt that he could carry out his plan more rapidly.
William did not hurry to reply, but three years later, on 5 July 1698, he issued letters patent erecting all Nimble Dick’s lands west of Galway into the manor of Clare, or Claremount, an event which his great-grandson was to turn to the advantage of the world at large. Nimble Dick and his heirs acquired for ever the right to hold a court-baron where their seneschals would have ‘full power and authority and jurisdiction to hold pleas … in all actions of Debts Covenant Trespass Accompt Contract and Detenue and all other causes and matters whatsoever happening and arising within the said manor.’ By special grace they could levy, collect and convert to their own use all fines, profits and emoluments arising out of the court, and they were to hold two weekly markets and two extra fairs at Claremount, as well as a court of Pye Powder during them.
With such a large estate the patent converted Nimble Dick virtually into a petty monarch, and there were rumblings of discontent. The House of Commons protested at such favour being shown a Catholic, while the Lords Justices pointed out to the Government that there was scarcely a Protestant in the area involved where, due to its remoteness, the inhabitants would be able to communicate easily with the King’s enemies in the event of a foreign war. But William was not moved. He had given his word for himself and his heirs, and he stood by it.
The Martins were one of the fourteen great families of Galway whom the Cromwellian soldiers had christened the ‘Tribes’. They were descended from Oliver Martin who was at the third crusade with Richard Coeur de Lion. Oliver was the only other survivor of the shipwreck on the King’s return journey to Europe and shared his monarch’s prison. It was Richard who gave Oliver the family arms: azure, a calvary cross, on five degrees argent, between the sun in splendour, on the dexter limb, and the moon in crescent, on the sinister, or. Their motto was: Auxilium meum a Domino.
The Martins came to Ireland following the Anglo-Norman conquest of 1169 in the retinue of the de Burgos and settled, like them, in Galway early in the thirteenth century. There the new arrivals took fright at the native Irish and walled themselves up in the town where they gradually built up a city state akin to those in northern Italy.
All rights and revenue to the mills of Galway were made over to one Thomas Martin, in 1365 at the period when the town began to come into prominence. With its fine port and vessels trading with Spain and Gascony, a thriving business in wine was built up over the centuries, and Galway became the entrepôt for the whole country. Hides and other commodities were exported, and the Irish beyond the walls supplied provisions.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Martins were among the most affluent of a prosperous and proud community in whose civic life they played a leading part. Peter Martin was made a bailiff in 1498, and from then on the Martins produced bailiffs and mayors in almost every generation, while Dominic Martin was the first recorder elected in 1595.
But the Martins had also been the first of the Tribes to venture out into the wild country of the native Irish. In 1590 Robert Martin had bought an estate from the O’Flahertys at Ross at the entry to the beautiful and rugged region of Connemara. Others had followed suit, and the Galway bye-laws about that time voiced a complaint against merchants taking to the country ‘without answering tax and talladge, scott and lott’ within the town.
The O’Flahertys of later generations, however, kept a jealous eye on the Martins with whom they had a standing feud, and when they saw Nimble Dick, the great-grandson of Robert Martin of Ross, growing fat on their lands, they could not be expected to suffer him gladly. The arrival of a riderless horse at Birchall, the house on the shores of Lough Corrib where Nimble Dick and his family lived, signified that the O’Flahertys had murdered his eldest son. The country people composed a dirge for him, ‘Robin the beautiful, Robin the brave’, but fortunately for the Martins they had another son, Anthony, and the succession was assured.
Anthony married his brother-in-law’s niece, Bridget Kirwan, settled down at Dangan, a mansion Nimble Dick had built on the outskirts of Galway, and had two sons and a daughter. The Treaty of Limerick which had ended the Jacobite war had guaranteed religious tolerance, but the Irish parliament had refused to ratify it, and penal laws excluded Catholics from most of their rights, including education. Ignoring the law, Anthony sent his second son, Robert, to the University of Louvain where an uncle had been a priest. Yet, despite this act of defiance, Anthony was a quiet man, to judge by his epitaph:
Esteemed in life, the Duitious Son, the
Tender Husband, the truly Affectionate
Father, Steady in Friendship, Frugal,
Human, Temperate, Valient, Beneficient
to the Distressed, only to punish
Ingratitude and Impiety.
But his son, Robert, was turbulent. A crack swordsman and a handsome, swashbuckling dandy, he stabbed to death an unfortunate officer he thought had insulted him, but was lucky enough to get off with manslaughter. When a disagreement with the Governor of Galway led to a law case which Robert won, he was not satisfied until he had followed the Governor to London where he fought a duel with him in St. James’s Street and gave him what he claimed was ‘the most unmerciful dhrubbing that ever was heard of in the streets of London’.
An ardent Jacobite, like every student of Louvain, when the news of the Scottish rebellion of 1745 reached him, he set forth for Scotland disguised as a peasant in a heavy frieze coat. On the way he stopped overnight at an inn where he was thoughtless enough to order fricassee of chicken. Such refined tastes did not tally with his appearance, and the innkeeper, growing suspicious, had him arrested. The lace ruffs at his wrists, which were badly concealed, confirmed the suspicions and he was thrown into prison. Once he was released, he turned about and made for home where he gave some thought to his future.
According to one of the penal laws, gavelkind, only a Protestant could inherit an estate whole and entire. As a result, a great many converts to Protestantism were elder sons who changed faith in order to retain their property intact. A French traveller in later years who asked the owner of Oranmore Castle, near Galway, what had made him change his religion, got the simple answer, ‘Oranmore.’
Robert’s elder brother, Richard, was married to the ‘sweet Mable Kelly’ of the bard Carolan’s song, but she had borne him no children, and no doubt in order to ensure Nimble Dick’s heritage, Robert now took out a Protestant Certificate. But it was known that he continued to be the leader of the Galway Catholics. It was rumoured that at Dangan he was fitting out a ship for the Pretender, and the Governor informed the Government that he could ‘bring to the town of Galway in twenty-four hours 800 villains as desperate and as absolutely at his devotion as Cameron of Lochiel’.
The Jacobite cause was, however, doomed and as the years passed and enthusiasm waned, Robert began to think of settling down. One of the great champions of the Catholic cause had been the eleventh Baron Trimlestown. The family, named Barnewall, were among the many Anglo-Normans who had gradually identified themselves with the native Irish, particularly after the Reformation when they were united by religious ties. The eleventh baron had left Ireland with the ‘Wild Geese’—the cream of Irish society who departed after the final Williamite victory at Limerick. He had entered the Irish Brigade, but later returned to Ireland, and when he died in 1746, he was succeeded by his son Robert. It was this twelfth Lord Trimlestown’s third sister, the Honourable Bridget Barnewall, whom Robert chose as his bride. Her two elder sisters, Thomasine and Margaret, were married respectively to Lords Gormanston and Mountgarret, both of whom were prominent in the Catholic struggle.
The wedding took place on 6 April 1753, when Robert was thirty-nine, and his brother, Richard, agreed to lease him the family seat at Dangan at a nominal rent of one peppercorn a year.
Chapter One
‘NEAR TWO miles from Galway … beautifully situated on the banks of the fine river of Lough Corrib, is Dangan, the seat of Robin Martin, Esq. When the virtuoso contemplates this situation, its contiguity to the lake, and the various other beauties it unites, we doubt not but he will allow it to be one of the most delightful places for abode he may have viewed in the kingdom.’ Thus wrote the editor of the Post-Chaise Companion.
The plantations which had been almost destroyed by a freak invasion of scarabaeus beetles blown in by the south-west wind a few years after Nimble Dick built the house, had by now grown again. They sloped down to the lake where pleasure boats were moored. The semi-fortified Elizabethan mansion of the Blakes stood only fifty yards across the narrow stretch of water at Menlo, and all around were green fields.
Galway, three miles away, was the remnant of an Anglo-Norman town in which for centuries the inhabitants had kept the natives at bay and enshrined their sentiments over the West Gate, ‘From the ferocious O’Flaherties, good Lord deliver us.’ There the Tribes had formed an oligarchy which throughout the medieval period had ruled with a rod of iron. Yet, they had taken largely to the Irish language, their French had grown rusty and their English, as exemplified by their bye-laws, was at best broken.
The city fathers kept a sharp eye on everything. Neither ‘O’ nor ‘Mac’ was allowed into the town. Prices were controlled, standards of workmanship guarded and rules for town planning established. Widows were entitled to a third of their husband’s goods, and the lot of the apprentice was regulated with as much justice as his master’s.
With bourgeois solemnity, the Irish tendency to extravagance and lavish hospitality was discouraged, gate-crashing was penalized, young men were ordered not to wear ‘gorgeous apparell’, women were to confine themselves to black, and the aquavit sold in the town was pronounced to be more like aquamortis.
Exhortations to morality were specific. A bye-law of 1519 declared that no man ‘should be found by nighte time in any man’s housse, to give coupillation, or to do with the good man’s servant mayd or daughter, by ways of advoutrey, to less 20s., and also the good man, in whos housse the same person is found with the said facte or cryme, to lesse to that good man 20s. and he that begetteth a freeman or merchaund’s daughter with child shall marry her, or give her a sufficient portion toward her preferment until another man.’ By 1584, things had not improved all that much, and a fine of 20s. was imposed on ‘any inhabitant comforting, lodging or mayntaining in his house or otherwise, any bawdry or harlotts’.
But the days of the little city state were numbered. It withstood a siege of nine months from Cromwell, and was defended by Mrs. Martin’s great-grandfather, General Preston, the first Viscount Taragh. At the capitulation, the soldiers had taken over the sumptuously furnished tall, stone houses, with their high-pitched roofs and elaborately decorated arched doorways. They had torn down the wainscoting and pulled out the doors to burn them; and Galway, ‘whose merchants were princes and great among the nations,’ paid the price of not conforming to the new religion and regime. The Tribes were banished beyond the walls for a generation, and Galway never recovered her former prosperity and splendour.
By the time the young Martins settled down at Dangan, a great part of the town’s walls were crumbling and many of the surviving old mansions were in a state of decay. The city which had been the second in Ireland had been surpassed by others, and was now just a struggling maritime town of 14,000 people. Neither the city fathers nor Cromwell had, however, managed to diminish the traditional hospitality. Galway women were still renowned for their beauty, vivacity and coquetry, and western conviviality made social life spontaneous and gay.
A year after their marriage the Martins had a son whom they christened Richard. It was a Martin family name. A Richard Martin had been Bailiff in 1519, another had been Mayor in 1535, and there had been Richards in every generation since; but it happened also to be the name of his great-grandfather, Nimble Dick, whose estates and privileges he would one day inherit.
The following year the Martins had a daughter, Mary; by then they lived partly at Dangan and partly in Dublin where Robert had taken a house. The journey between Galway and Dublin took several days, and they travelled in the style to which Mrs. Martin was accustomed, in a carriage and four accompanied by liveried outriders. Mrs. Martin shared the Barnewall family’s passion for animals, so that, apart from all the paraphernalia essential in those days to the journey of a whole household, some animals would have had to be accommodated.
At Dangan the children grew up in the atmosphere typical of the Connaught countryside. There, history had had a levelling effect, and the peasantry of today all too often turned out to be the forfeiting gentry of yesterday. The landlords in the west, being predominantly Catholic, had suffered like their tenants, so that the cleavage between the two classes which was to be found in the rest of Ireland did not exist. The gentry did not stand on social distinctions and the peasantry for the most part gave them a feudal loyalty.
The Martin tribe had been prolific and there was always a multitude of little cousins at a variety of removes for Dick and Mary to play with. Indeed, that Corporation which had granted the freedom of Galway to Lieutenant-Colonel O’Shaughnessy, despite the obnoxious prefix, ‘in consideration of his allyance in bloode to the whole town’, need not have confined their remarks to him. Apart from the relations, there were the tenants’ children, the farm, and the animals which Mrs. Martin brought up the children to care for and love. Finally there were the guests. Irish children were not excluded from the life of their parents, as in England, but were accustomed to mingle with the grown-ups, listen to their conversation and sit at table with them. This gave them poise early in life, and when the children’s aunts, Lady Gormanston and Lady Mountgarret, called, they were charmed by little Dickie and impressed with his excellent table manners.
Even the periods spent in Dublin had special attractions for the children, apart from those usual in a city. Turvey House, the Barnewalls’ original home, had secret hiding places and a subterranean passage, and there was more excitement at Trimlestown Castle. Mrs. Martin’s brother, Robert, 12th Baron Trimlestown, lived there. After his father had died in France he had returned to Ireland and his surroundings were the kind to delight a pair of children. Dressed frequently in scarlet, with a full powdered wig, he had a beautiful wife who defied fashion by wearing her hair loose and flowing. Robert was a doctor of great ability as well as a botanist, and, of course, an animal lover. He had a conservatory full of exotic plants, an aviary of rare birds and, chained up at the front door, an enormous eagle to whom the servants threw pieces of meat from a distance. Marshal de Saxe had presented him with a superbly painted coach, and he had a vast collection of books and prints.
But Uncle Robert, who had a number of distinguished patients, was not all-powerful; he could not save the life of his own sister, Bridget. She died in Dublin when the children were aged eight and nine, and this threw them both, but particularly Dick, into closer association with their father.
Dick was a sturdy boy, with rather ungovernable light brown hair and lively bright blue eyes. He was exceptionally warm-natured and loved all around him, whether man or beast. His powers of observation were highly developed and he had an acute sense of humour; and, as his father’s companion, he was growing up a good fisherman, an expert shot and a practised yachtsman.
Robert had plans for his son which arose to some extent from the history of his caste. The Anglo-Norman settlers had early shown a spirit of independence and resented being governed at a distance by England. By 1366 their tendency to identify themselves with the natives caused such concern that the Statutes of Kilkenny were passed to make fraternization illegal and to exclude the native Irish from English law. But although the statutes remained nominally in force for two hundred years, they could not prevent the Anglo-Normans from becoming ‘more Irish than the Irish’. When a bill was brought into the Irish parliament to change Henry VIII’s title from Lord of Ireland to King, it was found that, although all the members but one were Anglo-Normans, only one of them understood English, the rest knowing nothing but Irish.
These ‘English irlandized’, as they were called in England, gradually came to form a Middle Nation between the old natives and the new settlers who arrived with the different plantations. A high proportion of them were not converted at the Reformation. From then on they were united to the old race, and by the time the Battle of Aughrim had sealed the fate of the Gael, these people were among the acknowledged leaders of the Irish people.
Lord Macartney, a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, described the penal laws under which they lived as ‘the most complete code of persecution that ingenious bigotry ever compiled’. A Catholic might not go to school or university, study abroad or exercise a profession, possess land, own a horse worth more than £5, marry a Protestant, bear arms or sit in parliament. In practice these laws operated arbitrarily. If an invasion was suspected, they were applied; if peace prevailed, or England needed the good opinion of Catholic allies on the Continent, they were relaxed. These laws had decided how Robert Martin would be educated, and now they were to decide how he would educate his son.
One day when Robert and Dick were sailing on Lough Corrib, they were caught in one of the sudden squalls for which the lake is renowned. Dick was at the tiller, and Robert told him to keep the boat headed in to the western shore and his eye on the hill behind Dangan. This was the moment, as they made for safety, that he chose to announce to the boy what his plans for him were. He was to be sent to an English public school and university, and to be the first Martin to be brought up as a Protestant. This would entitle him to sit in parliament, and there he was to fight for Catholic emancipation.
In the beginning of 1761, the year that Dick was to be sent away to school, his father decided to remarry. His new wife was of a well-known Galway family, Lynch, and she was the childless widow of the Reverend John Vesey, grandson of an Archbishop of Tuam. News of the event reached Dick’s Aunt Thomasine Gormanston, who was now living with a part of her family in Belgium whence the first Lord Taragh had emigrated after the fall of Galway. The moment she heard of what had happened, Thomasine wrote home to her son, Lord Gormanston, ‘I am in pain about poor Mary Martin. For God’s sake give me a particular account of her in every respect and her brother.’ Whatever account Gormanston gave of them did not satisfy their Aunt Thomasine. Ten months later, Gormanston’s brother wrote to say that their mother was giving the greyhound Gormanston had sent her to the Belgian Princess Charlotte, because she had taken a resolution ‘to have no dog of her own any more, on account of her growing too fond of them’. He then added: ‘My mother is in great pain about R. Martin’s children. When you write next lett us know how they are and what is become of them.’
Nothing dramatic had become of them, and the relationship with their stepmother worked out satisfactorily. But Dick had by now gone to public school. He was fortunate in his father’s choice of Harrow; it was going through one of the most remarkable phases in its history. Under the headmastership of Doctor Sumner, assisted by Samuel Parr, one of the best classical educations was available, and the school was turning out men who made their mark in the field of learning.
Sumner, who was thirty-nine at the time, was a cheerful, good-tempered man with a brilliant classical reputation and a gift for eloquence. Parr, aged twenty-two, was small and benign, except when roused. He spoke with a slight lisp and vibrated with indignation at the slightest show of cruelty, servility or injustice. Both men were adored by their pupils.
There were over two hundred boys in the school when Dick arrived, and lessons only occupied about four and a half hours a day. During these, Mr. Parr dinned Caesar’s Commentaries, Ovid and the Greek Testament, and the whole range of classical writers into Dick and his companions. When they had gone to bed, he and Sumner talked what amounted almost to sedition—civil rights for the American colonists who were clamouring for their freedom.
Both men were Whigs, and the boys were accustomed to hearing the name of Wilkes and popular politics, while Parr was never tired of repeating what years later he was to sum up, on cruelty to animals, in a famous sermon on education: ‘He that can look with rapture upon the unoffending and unresisting animal, will soon learn to view the sufferings of a fellow-creature with indifference; and in time he will acquire the power of viewing them with triumph, if that fellow-creature should become the victim of his resentment, be it just or unjust.’ He believed that children should be taught at an early age to be kind to animals, but that this would be impossible ‘if the heart has been once familiarized to spectacles of distress, and has been permitted either to behold the pangs of any living creature with cold insensibility, or to inflict them with wanton barbarity.’ Dick heard the words ‘wanton barbarity’ reiterated constantly throughout his school-days, and he never forgot them.
Twice a year he went home to the west of Ireland. During his first year at Harrow, his father’s cousin Jasper of Birchall had died and had left Robert all his property in West Connaught which included Birchall where Nimble Dick had lived. If the family were there rather than at Dangan, young Dick had a sixteen-mile drive along a bumpy track. As he approached, bonfires would be lit along the way to welcome him, bare-footed children would run alongside the carriage cheering, and their elders would try to approach within earshot of ‘the young masther’ to voice some grievance he could see redressed. It was a foretaste of his adult life. Then when he arrived there would be the view across the lake, the blue humps of the Maamturk Mountains, the water lapping at the garden walls, and fishing and shooting to his heart’s content.
When he left Harrow in 1771, he was sent to ‘cram’ for his entrance to Trinity College, Cambridge. He was under the Reverend Joseph Gunning, a young man in his thirties who was a Fellow of Corpus Christi and had been vicar of Sutton in Suffolk for the previous three years. There, in an Elizabethan vicarage beside a pebble-built twelfth-century church, Dick studied well and was admitted a gentleman-commoner at Trinity on 4 March 1773; he matriculated that Easter.
The university at the time was more preoccupied with politics than learning, and gentlemen-commoners enjoyed special privileges which made it unnecessary to take their studies too seriously. Dinner in Commons was generally the only firm engagement of the day and was treated with some ceremony. It was usual to attend the barber and have one’s hair curled, then to change into knee breeches, a white waistcoat and white silk stockings. In the evening people mostly ate in their rooms where the bedmaker brought the bill of fare. No wine was drunk; instead, an enormous teapot of hot punch was kept on the hob. Drinking was not a Cambridge failing at the time, and Dick Martin was notoriously abstemious all his life. But Dr. Ewin complained of the ‘lavish way of spending both money and their time’ of the Irish and the sons of the big West Indian planters.
The counter-attraction to the tavern was the coffee house where the students perused the London newspapers with avidity. A boy of fourteen called William Pitt had just come up to college, and the rumour may already have circulated that his father intended him to be Prime Minister one day. At Trinity, Dick was sharing rooms with George Ponsonby, the son of the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and among his companions was the Marquis of Granby, soon to be the Duke of Rutland, who had won the university seat the year after Dick’s going up to college, and who spoke out in favour of the American colonists.
In the vacation Dick continued to pay his cherished visits to the west of Ireland where he now had two half-brothers, Robert and Anthony, but he also spent much time in London where he was a gay, sophisticated young man about town. His cousin, Lord Gormanston, had a house in Burlington Street, and was on close terms with the Royal Family, and through their mothers the two men shared an interest in animals. However far from one another the members of the Gormanston family might be, dogs, cats and canaries were passed around between them like so many picture postcards.
Dick shared a love of travel with his cousin, James Jordan of Rosleven Castle in County Mayo. Together they visited Europe where Dick, an excellent horseman, rode in all the leading riding establishments, and then they sailed for Jamaica, which was full of Irish planters, and remained there some time. When the American War of Independence at last broke out, they were in New England.
Dick came down from Cambridge without taking his degree, but, on his return from America, he intended to continue reading for the bar. He was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn on 1 February 1776, a couple of weeks before George Ponsonby, but probably under Rutland’s influence he decided to go straight into Irish politics.
The Americans were busy making comparisons between their situation and that of Ireland, and Franklin had been to Ireland to convince people that America’s cause was Ireland’s cause. This theme was to make the reputation of the parliament to which Richard Martin was now to offer himself as a candidate for Galway.
The cut and thrust of a Galway election became in later years proverbial. An old refrain, ‘He’s not the man for Galway!’, referred to somebody who could not fight a duel before breakfast; ride all day to hounds, jumping six-foot walls in the process; entertain on so lavish a scale that he was in permanent danger from the bailiff, whom, however, he could always foil by swamping him in yet more hospitality; drink bumpers of claret or rum-shrub into the small hours of the morning; then adjourn in order to fight another duel, jump more walls and evade more bailiffs. ‘The man for Galway’ had to live up to a tradition not demanded of candidates east of the Shannon.
Parliamentary representation at the time was based on property, not popularity. The entire country was composed of big estates and the tenants formed the greater part of the electorate. Every member of the established Protestant church who leased freehold land worth forty shillings a year or over was entitled to vote. He was called a forty-shilling freeholder, and he automatically voted according to the landlord’s wishes. The majority of the Martins’ tenants were Catholics, therefore not entitled to vote, and at the end of a long and momentous parliamentary career, Richard Martin must have looked back with a faint smile to his first election contest. It was a tame affair in which only 360 votes were cast and he footed the poll with fifty-three; but this did not keep him out of parliament. In common with a large section of the House of Commons, he purchased a seat for the freeman borough of Jamestown in County Leitrim at a cost of approximately £2,000.
On Tuesday, 18 June 1776, Richard Martin, in full court dress with a powdered wig, took his seat with the three hundred members of the Irish parliament. Situated at right angles to Trinity College, the parliament house was the most impressive public building in Dublin. Begun in 1728 and designed by Sir Edward Lovet Pearce who had travelled in Italy, it was built in the Italian style, with Ionic columns, a forecourt and arched entrances. The House of Commons was circular, with the members’ seats ranged around the middle in concentric circles, each rising above the other. Sixteen Corinthian columns supported a dome and behind a balustrade between the pillars there was a public gallery. One rule of political significance was that this was not cleared for a division, so that members’ votes were public. The whole combined magnificence with intimacy.
But the Irish parliament had little control over the Irish Government. This was composed of a Lord Lieutenant, or Viceroy, representing the Crown, a Chief Secretary with the powers of a Prime Minister, and Secretaries for the other Departments of State; and it was appointed by the English parliament at Westminster. The Irish parliament might irritate the Irish Government, but it could not change it. The Government, on the other hand, due to the borough system which gave the owners the control of several seats in parliament, was generally in a position to achieve the majorities it wanted by bribing a few individuals. The Administration was generally referred to euphemistically as ‘the Castle’ because Dublin Castle was its headquarters.
When the members took their seats in 1776 in this rather anomalous assembly, a large number had been bribed by the Government with places or pensions, one third of the members were new, and eighteen election results were disputed. The House included some of the most remarkable men Ireland has ever known, the standard of oratory was high, and leading the Opposition was Henry Grattan after whom the next parliament was to be named. Four years Martin’s senior, he was the son of the Recorder of Dublin and a lawyer who had found his way into politics through his friendship with Lord Charlemont and his political associate, Henry Flood. Grattan had entered the House earlier in the year, and he had now assumed the leadership of the anti-governmental forces Flood had been obliged to relinquish upon accepting office as Vice Treasurer. Small and misshapen, with a head which seemed to be stuck on to the back of his neck and a protruding chin, Grattan was characterized by the enthusiasm and impetuosity which he combined with a shining integrity and disinterestedness. He had a habit of weaving to and fro as he spoke in a shrill and inharmonious voice; but due to its glowing eloquence it was to become the voice of Ireland.
The Viceroy, Lord Harcourt, had procured an address from the previous parliament authorizing the despatch to America of 4,000 men from the Irish military establishment of 12,000. There had been time since then for the unpopularity of this measure to increase and for such a formidable opponent as Grattan to prepare to attack him on the grounds of corruption. Harcourt took the precaution of proroguing parliament the very day it assembled, and he continued to do so until his recall to England the following November.
Richard Martin scarcely had the feeling of having sat in parliament at all. Yet, before he was to sit there again, Harcourt, for whose policies he had no admiration, had died in a manner which could not fail to make Martin warm to him as a man. His favourite dog had fallen into a well, and when he went to the rescue, the ground had given way and flung him foremost into the mud where he had been suffocated. Such a generous effort would probably have counterbalanced a score of pensions in Richard Martin’s mind.
Chapter Two
FEW CONNAUGHT gentlemen in those days looked east of the Shannon for a bride, and there was a considerable likelihood of the ladies of their choice being connections. Richard Martin was no exception. His stepmother by her first marriage had a niece, Elizabeth Vesey, whose family was from County Mayo, just across Lough Corrib from the Martins’ estates, and at the age of twenty-three he fell deeply in love with her.
Elizabeth’s father, George Vesey, who was married to his own first cousin, was heir to Lucan House, one of the most impressive mansions in the neighbourhood of Dublin. But his elder brother, who was childless, was still resident there, and when a marriage had been arranged the wedding was planned to take place at the ancestral home of the Veseys at Holymount in County Mayo.
It was a large, square, stone house set in a splendid park traversed by the river Robe. Rolling along through the flat, fertile country, criss-crossed by loose stone walls, to be married there on 1 February 1777, Richard Martin had every reason to feel pleased with himself. He had won a beautiful, exceptionally gifted bride with whom, unlike many bridegrooms in similar circumstances, he was in love. And, related as he was by blood to all Connaught, he was now about to become related by alliance to some of the leading families in the kingdom.
Elizabeth was descended from a famous and prolific Archbishop of Tuam whose palace had been burned by Catholic extremists during James II’s reign. He fled to London, and on his return after the Williamite victory, settled down on the family estate at Holymount to rear fourteen children. Between them they produced fifty-eight grandchildren and nearly all of his great-grandchildren had made excellent matches.
As a result, Richard Martin was in due course to become linked with the great banking families of La Touche and Dawson. In the Irish parliament he was to be allied to Brown-low and Sir Vesey Colclough; and in the nobility to Baron Knapton, Viscount Northland, Viscount de Vesci, Lord Adare and Lord Lucan. More important still, he was to be connected with the Earl of Buckinghamshire who had just replaced Harcourt as Viceroy and who had married, when she was only fifteen, a sister of the Right Honourable Thomas Connolly, the descendant of a former Speaker of the Irish House of Commons. One of Connolly’s sisters was married to Elizabeth’s first cousin, Staples.
However rich she was in relations, Elizabeth was not so in fortune; it only amounted to £5,000. To Richard Martin this was immaterial. Throughout his life he considered money a disagreeable subject and, as time went on and he grew increasingly short of it, he was able to ignore it. His father, Robert, had recently suffered some financial reverses, but he had been impressed by Elizabeth’s charms and accomplishments—she could both paint and write—and readily gave in to the idea of a marriage.
He made a settlement on the couple to which Sir Michael Cromie, who had also just entered parliament, was a witness. Out of an annual income of some £6,000, he settled £1,500 on Dick, £900 of which was secured for any children in the event of their parents’ death, and £600 on Elizabeth in the case of Dick’s death.
While awaiting the recall of parliament, the young couple settled into Dangan with Robert and his family. There Elizabeth got her first taste of Galway politics. The family of Denis Daly, who was both a member of parliament and Lord Mayor, had acquired a virtual monopoly of the Corporation which they had ‘packed’ with their friends, and the Martins were among those foremost in trying to re-establish independence.
The summer assizes at Clonmel also gave them plenty to discuss at Dangan. Duelling was widespread, but it had been especially so in Ireland since the disbanding of the Irish army after Aughrim. It replaced the opportunities for displaying valour previously offered by the military life. A gentleman was scarcely a gentleman unless he had ‘smelt powder’, and to have ‘shot up at the bar’ more often than not meant to have fought well in a profession where duelling was particularly current.
Galway was considered one of the two greatest ‘fire-eating’ counties. The old saying, ‘as proud as a Galway merchant’, was said to point to characteristics acquired through long contact with Spain, and gentlemen were inclined to send a challenge on the slightest provocation. It was now felt that the whole science was in danger of falling into disrepute through being indulged in too lightly, and it was decided to establish regulations. Delegates from Tipperary and the different counties of Connaught met at Clonmel summer assizes and laid down the rules for the future conduct of affairs of honour.
Richard Martin would not have been his father’s son had he not been a duellist, and Elizabeth would probably not have accepted him had it not been known that he had ‘blazed’. Like Robert, he was expert with the small-sword. This was Galway’s speciality, calling for great agility in a very exacting form of fencing; and he was considered to be equally good with pistols.
The rules and regulations were now sent to all duelling clubs with the recommendation that copies should be made and kept by gentlemen in their pistol cases. In Galway they came to be known as the ‘thirty-seven commandments’ and a committee was established to meet alternately at Galway and Clonmel during the quarter sessions to examine complaints and give judgements in cases of doubt. Young Mrs. Martin, like most ladies in high society, was to have good reason to remember the commandments.
In preparation for the opening of parliament, the young couple moved up to Dublin and took a house in Kildare Street. The Duke of Leinster had built a house there in 1745, designed by the German architect, Cassels. A stately mansion in the Palladian style, it had set the stage for Dublin’s future development; people of fashion began to migrate from the north bank of the Liffey to the south, and around it there grew up terraces of houses with classical façades punctuated by decorated fanlights over the doorways, and elaborately stuccoed interiors.
Dublin was the second city in the empire, and, with a population of 160,000, it was a quarter of the size of London. Its social life was so strenuous that an appointment there was regarded more as a marathon than a performance of public service. Buckingham had chosen as his Chief Secretary Richard Heron, but, under pressure from his wife, he turned down the offer. ‘I have not, she thinks,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘constitution enough for the social meetings of that country.’ Buckingham interceded with a faint reproach to the lady, and her husband took her to the Bishop of London who had witnessed her vows of obedience on marriage.
After much delay, she gave in, and even did so with such a good grace that she was not deterred by a letter from Mrs. Waite at Dublin Castle which could only strike terror into her.
‘Mr. Heron and you will be visited by the whole town,’ it ran, ‘immediately after your arrival, and the whole town will expect you to return their visits as soon as possible. To omit one, either on your part or on his, will be a deadly sin, and therefore you should be fortified directly with a good porter, who is to be very exact in booking the names and places of abode of your visitants.’ Even the parting shot did not deflect the martyred Mrs. Heron from the path of duty. ‘Give me leave to tell you,’ the letter concluded, ‘that at this moment, Mr. Heron, and you, are as well known in Dublin, as if you had lived here for twenty years.’ The Bishop of Gloucester delivered the final blow. ‘Mrs. Heron,’ he wrote to the couple after their arrival, ‘will want all her health and spirits among her new acquaintance, the Irish.’
Fortunately for the Martins, they had good constitutions, and threw themselves into social life with enthusiasm. He already had a wide circle of friends in Dublin and through her connections they were at once associated with the Viceroy and his entourage. She was beautiful and graceful and he, though only of medium height, had a manly, athletic figure and a wit which was becoming proverbial. They were equipped to succeed in society.
Gentlemen at the time wore knee breeches, buckled shoes, coats down to the knee and lace at the neck and wrists. The ladies had full skirts, often with panniers, stiff bodices with a corset laced openly down the front, low, square-cut necks, and sleeves reaching to just below the elbows. They wore their hair raised up on towering structures of wire and padding, and the men wore wigs.
It was now a decade since it had become obligatory for the Viceroy to reside in Ireland, and this had given a great impetus to society which revolved to a considerable extent around the Viceregal court and the parliament. People vied with each other in the splendour of the houses they built and the lavishness of the hospitality they dispensed. It was the custom to serve seven-course meals accompanied by endless quantities of claret, many people kept open house, and overcrowding was general.
The Viceroy gave levees and balls with buffet suppers at Dublin Castle, the gentry attended charity balls and concerts all the year around, and the Martins, like the Buckinghams, were ardent theatre-goers; they both shone in the amateur theatricals which were the rage. Masquerades were popular, and it was not unusual after one of these for a few fashionable ladies to throw open their houses where food and drink would be served until dawn.
