Pax Britannica (51 page)

This is not how it seemed to the public at large, nor how the newspapers presented the case. In ten years Britain had acquired new territories fifty times as large as the United Kingdom—what else could that be but profitable enterprise, to make the richest of countries richer yet? It would have been almost inconceivable for the enthusiastic reader of the
Daily
Mail
that summer, scanning the list of imperial acquisitions since, say, that year they all went down to Brighton with Aunt Flora, to suppose that all those exotic new names, those Kadunas and Lusakas, those Bulawayos and Bugandas, did not mean hard cash in the imperial till. The idea that it might all be losing money would have shocked him. The suggestion that money might be better spent on schools, hospitals, pensions, would probably have seemed unpatriotic. The thought that it might all be a colossal error of judgement, and that the British might be better off without any Empire at all, would probably have struck him as quite lunatic.

So the foreigner’s first impression was right in a way. London was not, like Rome, paved with the spoils and trophies of Empire, because this was only incidentally an imperial capital. The New
Imperialism was too new to have planted its own monuments—and too insubstantial, for it was a gusty sort of movement, a sudden gale of emotion, swooping suddenly out of that leaden London sky. It was like a fad: as everybody sang Dan Leno’s songs, or copied Marie Lloyd’s hair, or went bicycling on summer evenings, so they talked excitedly of Greater Britain and the White Man’s Burden, thrilled to Sullivan’s settings of Newbolt’s
Songs
of
the
Sea,
and dreamt with the Poet Laureate of British victories, land and sea alternately, like schoolboys in bed imagining endless triumphs at the wicket. Beneath this fizz the affairs of England tremendously proceeded, the statesmen practised their delicate art and the Empire-builders did their best.

B
Y Telford’s road or Stephenson’s railway line the British travelled to Holyhead in Anglesey: and sailing out to sea through a mesh of forts and stoneworks, in four hours the packet-boat took them to Kingstown. It had once been called Dunleary, but was renamed in honour of a visit by King George IV in 1821.
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For hundreds of thousands of British soldiers, for generations of British administrators, for a whole class of Anglo-Irish gentry, this was the gateway to the nearest and most fateful of all the British possessions: Ireland.

It was 750 years since Henry II had sent his first English armies to the sister isle, but the British had never quite succeeded in subduing it. It lay there through the centuries festering, a drain on English wealth, a prod often to English consciences. To most Englishmen it was an integral part of the kingdom, like Scotland. The Irishman was only an ornery and inconsequential kind of Briton, talking a comical dialect and pursuing a misguided form of Christianity: if he rebelled against English sovereignty he was guilty of plain treason, like any other subject of the Crown. To the Irish patriot, on the other hand, Ireland was a nation and the Irish were a race: possessing their own language, honouring the most ancient Christian church in the West, with arts and mores and aspirations all their own—an oppressed people whose nationality was being deliberately stifled, so that by the 1890s Gaelic was alive only in a few remote corners of the island, and the land lay ruined and empty. And to plague the issue further still, there were many people on both shores who suffered from a dichotomy of these views, who were not at all sure where the right lay, or what Ireland really was, or what it should mean to be Irish.

Before 1800 Ireland had a parliament of its own, of a kind. It met in handsome classical premises in the centre of Dublin, with its own
Houses of Lords and Commons, but since 1692 no Catholics had been eligible to sit in it, so that the native Irish were virtually unrepresented. The Act of Union of 1800 abolished it anyway, and united the English and Irish Parliaments at Westminster; Irish constituencies now sent their members to the Imperial House of Commons, and representative Irish peers sat in the House of Lords in London. Under Gladstone two Home Rule bills had been introduced, intended to revive the Irish Parliament, and give it autonomy in internal affairs. The first had been rejected by the Commons, and led to Chamberlain’s defection from the Liberal Party; the second was thrown out by the Lords and led to Gladstone’s fall, the return to power of the Conservative-Unionists, and the triumph of the New Imperialism.

The Protestant north-east of Ireland, Ulster, flourished moderately. Its separate character had been moulded early in the seventeenth century, when its aristocracy had fought an unsuccessful campaign against the English, and their lands had been distributed among immigrant settlers, mostly Lowland Scots. Few of its people wanted Home Rule, and in Belfast there were prosperous shipbuilding and textile industries. The Catholic south was a different world. Half-emptied by the fearful potato famine of the 1840s, drained still further by mass migrations abroad, deprived of industry, bled of cash, impoverished by bad agriculture and generations of absentee landlordism, the green landscape lay there stagnant and forlorn. The population of Ireland had been 8 million in 1841: it was 5 million in 1897. Its literacy rate was little higher than Burma’s. Its death-rate was actually rising, and Dublin’s was higher than any other European city’s. Its peasantry was weakened by malnutrition and dulled by a fatalistic form of Catholicism that was peculiarly its own. Its countryside, one of the most fertile in Europe, was neglected and dilapidated—more than 60 per cent of it given up to grass, a proportion unparalleled in the world, and only about 11 per cent ploughed. The chief ambition of young Irishmen was simply to leave: to the cities first, out of the morose countryside, to Liverpool or London next, to America or Australia best of all. Marriages were fewer, and happened later, than in any other country: of women between 15 and 45, only one in three was married. This was
a sick, old country, peopled by absent friends. A standard decoration of the Irish cottage was the daguerrotype of a daughter far away, with her rings and ornaments painted in gold upon the photograph. The country hummed with suggestions of subversion, but peace was maintained in a sullen equilibrium. This was a moment of pause. A series of Land Acts had at least relieved the peasants of their worst social burdens: they had security of tenure now; Ireland no longer often saw the horrible old scenes of peasant eviction, helmeted constables shamefacedly at the gate while the tenants, prodded by an impatient bailiff, stumbled out with their pathetic bits and pieces. The Conservative-Unionists hoped to conciliate the Irish by material concessions—‘killing Home Rule by kindness’—and were generous with grants for agricultural improvement, and loans to help the peasantry buy its own land.

Home Rule seemed a dead letter. Charles Stewart Parnell, that fascinating genius of Irish liberty, had died in 1891, and though the spell of his character lived on, still some of the fire had left the movement.
1
Gladstone was at death’s door. The British were cock-a-hoop with Empire. The Irish Home Rulers at Westminster could do little but protest or boycott.
2
In the imperial context, set beside the marvels of African expansion, or the Great Game, Ireland’s anxieties seemed nagging and parochial. The island brooded impotently.

Implanted in this melancholy setting were the Anglo-Irish, successors to settlers whose Englishness had been enforced as a matter of royal policy; under the fourteenth-century Statutes of Kilkenny they had been forbidden to intermarry with the Irish, to speak
Gaelic or even to behave in Irish ways. This was the Protestant Ascendancy, an imperial ruling caste. Its members could be English-born, English-descended, or simply Anglicized Irish. Though often poor they were usually gentlemanly, and they owned most of the large Irish estates—sometimes complete communities of their own, the smithy, the sawmill, the carpenter’s shop, the laundry, the piggery, the dairy, the kennels, all clustered around the big ungainly house with its lawns and rhododendrons. From their ranks chiefly sprang the hunting and shooting men, healthy and imperturbable, whose dash was legendary throughout the Empire, and who represented for many the true Irish character: for the Anglo-Irish were the Middle Nation, English to the Irish, Irish to the English. They shared many of the common settlers’ attitudes. They loved the Mother Country in the principle, but not always in the practice. They were separated from the native peasantry by barriers of caste and religion, but sometimes they went native themselves, and embraced the Irish cause ferociously. The Pale, the circuit of delectable residential country around Dublin, had been traditionally their preserve since Henry II’s Anglo-Norman barons settled and fortified it: and one of the saddest imperial allusions in the language was the contemptuous epithet ‘beyond the pale’—not quite a white man, not a pukka sahib, Irish in fact.

At Duckett’s Grove in County Carlow one Anglo-Irish landlord, William Duckett, Esquire, Deputy Lieutenant, celebrated the Diamond Jubilee with a fête. The Union Jack flew from a turret of the great bleak mansion, and the gardens were gay with bunting, white cloths on trestle tables, the scrubbed white frocks of the tenantry and the ribbons of the presiding gentry. There was a nourishing al fresco dinner for the estate employees and their families—150 souls in all, many of them in the Duckett service all their lives, and all of them given a holiday that day with full wages. The health was drunk of Mr and Mrs Duckett and Miss Olive Thompson (locally known, we are told, as ‘The Children’s Friend’). Plaques were distributed among the young people, engraved with portraits of Queen Victoria, and there were games all afternoon on the lawn, while the old ladies sat chatting in the shade, remembering the Jubilee of ’87, the celebrations at the end of the Crimean
War, the Queen’s Coronation sixty years before, or best of all the astonishing festivities, it seemed only yesterday, when the 70-year-old Mr Duckett, game as ever, had brought home his new bride and her daughter Miss Olive Thompson, and the tenants had taken the horse from the carriage shafts and pulled the ladies up the drive themselves, cheering and laughing, through the castellated gatehouse and up the long drive with its sculpted images of ‘queens and animals and I don’t know what’.
1

In the evening all the local people came to Duckett’s Grove for the fireworks: from Ballyhade and Uglin, Killerig and even Ballyhacket Cross they came on foot and in donkey-cart, dressed in their respectful best, and grateful in advance to Mr and Mrs Duckett and Miss Olive Thompson. A great tar barrel blazed as the sun went down, and presently the rockets soared over County Carlow, while Mrs Duckett gave a magic lantern lecture in the coachhouse. They danced till midnight, and then home to their lodges, their gatehouses, their whitewashed cottages went the Irish, and Mr Duckett, Mrs Duckett and the Children’s Friend, making sure the flag had been correctly lowered, parted along the long polished corridors of the mansion, and went to bed.

Many Anglo-Irish were understandably distressed, when accused of being oppressors. The absentee landlord of evil memory had rarely survived the land reform laws, and the resident landowners were often admirable employers of the paternal kind. If they did not exactly love Ireland, they were often passionately attached to their particular slice of it: they treated their tenants like wayward children, and thought that nobody else understood them. Gladstone and his supporters aroused their bitter mockery. You had to live among the Irish to know them. One had nothing
against
the people, but one had only to look around to realize that they needed strong leadership.
The Irish were priest-ridden, credulous and stubborn, but nobody could deny their charm, and surely nobody would dispute that the fête at Duckett’s Grove, for example, showed how happy the relationship was, between the
right
kind of landlord and his tenantry.

These were familiar imperial sentiments. The British in Ireland did not think of themselves as Empire-builders, but in a way they were. The land hunger which drove many Englishmen to the distant colonies took many more over the Irish Sea, and there was still a steady flow of retired Army people who lacked the capital to buy estates in England, but could, like Kitchener’s father, live a gentleman’s life on the other side.
1
They forfeited nothing by emigrating to Ireland. They could still vote in the English elections, and all the appurtenances of privileged English society were available on the spot: an English church in the village, excellent hunting, Trinity College, Dublin, for the boy to go to, if he had a taste for the Church or the Law, fine Irish regiments of the British Army waiting to welcome a soldier’s son. The Anglo-Irish were the Establishment of Ireland. Their newspaper was the
Irish
Times
,
their church the Church of Ireland, disestablished by Gladstone in 1869, but still ornately representative of Authority. Their social life was full and agreeable, and they formed a racy and good-looking
élite
—‘tall, strong, handsome chaps’, Friedrich Engels thought them in 1856, with ‘enormous moustaches under colossal Roman noses’.

Anglo-Irish generals sometimes seemed to enjoy a monopoly of British command, perhaps because Ireland gave more chance of authority to the upper middle classes: the indigenous Irish aristocracy had mostly left long before for France or Spain. The flow of Irish recruits was almost essential to the survival of the volunteer British Army, and the part played by the Anglo-Irish in the wars of the Empire was out of all proportion to their numbers. The shrine of the Ascendancy was St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, where
Swift had been Dean. It was decked with Anglo-Irish monuments. Irish wolfhounds lay sleepy at the foot of the Royal Irish Regiment’s memorial, scrolls and battle honours all around, with a frieze illustrating the storming of the Shive Dagon pagoda in 1852. Cobwebby flags of Connaught Rangers and Royal Irish Fusiliers hung from the high ceiling, and here was the tomb of the hero Thomas Rice Henn, Royal Engineers, whose troop of eleven soldiers had, in Afghanistan in 1880, covered the retreat of an entire British brigade—‘I envy the manner of his death’, his compatriot Garnet Wolseley
1
had written of him, ‘—if I had ten sons, I should indeed be proud if all ten fell as he fell’. Near by a Viceroy of India was remembered: the Earl of Mayo, who was assassinated while inspecting a penal settlement on the Andaman Islands in 1872: an Anglo-Irishman
par
excellence
, descended from ten generations of settlers, son of an evangelical father, an excellent shot and rider to hounds, educated at Trinity College and Unionist in all things.

In the choir hung the helmets, swords and banners of the Order of St Patrick, a knightly order which represented the flower of the Anglo-Irish chivalry. In the nave a large royal crest marked the pew of the Viceroy of Ireland, Lord Cadogan,
2
and his wife, a niece of the Anglo-Irish Duke of Wellington. Opposite sat Lady Plunket, whose husband, the fourth Baron Plunket, had been until his recent death Archbishop of Dublin—a Trinity man again, and the grandson of a Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Next to hers was a pew dedicated to the memory of Sir Benjamin Guinness, the richest man in Ireland, who had restored the cathedral entirely at his own expense, and who was, as it happens, Lady Plunket’s father. It was a close-knit society, the Protestant Ascendancy, and seldom abashed.