Markievicz

A Most Outrageous Rebel

Lindie Naughton

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785370847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia irlandesa

Countess Constance Markievicz - one of the most remarkable women in Irish history - was a revolutionary, a socialist and a feminist, as well as an artist and writer. A natural leader, "Madame, " as she was known to thousands of Dubliners, took an active part in the 1916 Rising and was one of the few leaders to escape execution. Instead, she spent an arduous year in an English prison, surrounded by murderers, prostitutes and thieves. Later, during another stretch in prison, she would make history as the first woman elected to the British Houses of Parliament, and momentous event that is due to receive widespread commemoration at the time of its centenary in December 2018. Lindie Naughton's compelling biography sheds light on all facets of Markievicz's life - her privileged upbringing in County Sligo, her adventures as an art student in London and Paris, her marriage to an improbable Polish count, her political education, her several prison terms, and her emergence as one of the pivotal figures in early 20th century Britain and Ireland. Constance Markievicz, a woman with a huge heart, battled all her adult life to establish an Irish republic based on co-operation and equality for all. Her message is as relevant today as it was a century ago.

CHAPTER ONE

Alien Class, Alien Race

When Countess Markievicz was sentenced to death for her part in the 1916 Rebellion in Ireland, she risked putting half of Debrett’s into mourning – or so said her husband. Her social awareness, her generosity and her kindness were firmly rooted not only in her privileged background but in her native County Sligo. All her life she cursed the drop of ‘black English blood’ that ran through her veins. She was never to forget the great wrongs her ancestors had committed against the native Irish and, from the age of forty, making amends became her life’s work.

Her family had come to Ireland in Cromwellian times but, by the 1860s, when Constance Gore-Booth was born, its great days were numbered, along with those of the Ascendancy class in Ireland. At a time of rapid industrialisation and mechanisation, the Irish economy was stagnating and, since the Act of Union in 1800; it was closely tied to a rapacious British economy that saw Ireland purely as a market to be exploited.

When cheap manufactured goods from Britain flooded into Ireland, thousands of craftsmen, particularly textile workers, were left without work. At the same time, rural workers were hit hard by the rapid advances in agricultural machinery, which made farming less labour-intensive. With work scarce, those living on the land could barely feed their families, much less pay their rent or leave anything to their children. Unlike the rest of the United Kingdom, Ireland had few big industrial centres outside Belfast and Dublin and, with nowhere else to go, these two cities became magnets for impoverished families desperate for work. This situation was not helped by a growing population; with early marriage and large families the norm, the Irish population increased by 75 per cent between 1780 and 1821.

Even before the Great Famine of the mid-1840s, Irish men, women and children were starving; in some areas, infant mortality was a staggering 50 per cent. The steady stream of emigration began and, in the thirty years between 1815 and 1845, nearly a million Irish emigrants – twice the total for the preceding two hundred years – packed up their meagre possessions and went in search of the better life that newspaper articles and advertising promised in countries such as the USA, Canada and Australia. Later on, the land wars took their toll and, like other land-owners, the Gore-Booths had to work hard to make the estate pay. It was a troubled country to which the infant Constance returned after her birth in London in 1868; her grandfather’s cousin, Captain King, had been murdered during that year’s election campaign and Lissadell, the family home, was turned into a fortress, with windows sandbagged and guns mounted on the roof.

Sligo was solidly unionist, with a high proportion of Protestants in its population and four military barracks. Loyalists controlled business and commerce, forming the Sligo Association as early as 1688. William Butler Yeats described Sligo, home to his mother’s people, the Pollexfens, as a place where ‘everyone despised nationalists and Catholics’. When jobs were advertised, notices often baldly stated that ‘No Catholics need apply’. Meetings of the local Orange Order branch were held in Lissadell House.

You saw the landlords in their big demesnes, mostly of Norman or Saxon stock, walled in and aloof, an alien class, sprung from an alien race; then there were the prosperous farmers, mostly Protestants and with Scotch names, settled in snug farmsteads among the rich undulating hills and valleys, while hidden away among rocks on the bleak mountainsides, or soaking in the slime and ooze of the boglands or beside the Atlantic shore, where the grass is blasted yellow by the salt west wind, you find the dispossessed people of the old Gaelic race in their miserable cabins.

So wrote Constance in a 1923 article for Éire newspaper.

Her ancestors, the Gore family, had come to Ireland during the seventeenth century in the aftermath of the Nine Years’ War. When the English made their first major push to dominate Ireland, Sir Paul Gore, a successful soldier of fortune, was part of a cavalry troop led by the Earl of Essex, and was granted land in Donegal and at Ardtarmon on the shores of Drumcliff Bay, about two miles west of the present Lissadell House. The name Lissadill or Lissadell referred to the O’Daly hereditary poets, who had lived in the area since the twelfth century; the full name in Irish is Lios an Daill ui Dálaigh, meaning ‘O’Daly’s Court of the Blind’. Reminders of more ancient times included a round tower and carved high cross from the monastery founded by St Columcille in 574 at Drumcliff. The estate amounted to 32,000 acres spread over forty townlands in the parishes of Drumcliff and Rossinver.

In 1711, a marriage between Nathaniel Gore and Letitia Booth brought with it considerable estates in Manchester and Salford belonging to the Booth family. With this marriage, the Sligo family added ‘Booth’ to its surname. Constance may have inherited her vivacity from her wild and wilful great-great-grandmother. Legend has it that Letitia plunged to her death along with her coachman when she forced him to drive around the rim of the Derk of Knocklane, a fearsome semi-circular chasm with a sheer drop into the Atlantic Ocean about 200 metres below, located above the Yellow Strand about six kilometres to the west of the current Lissadell House. The wailing sound visitors hear over the chasm is reputed to be that of Letitia, the Banshee Bawn.

Around this time, Ardtarmon Castle burned down and the original Lissadell House was built close to the location of its current, more recent replacement. Robert Gore-Booth, Constance’s grandfather, was born in the original house on 25 August 1805 and, though still a boy, succeeded his father in 1814. At the age of twenty-one, he took over the estate at Lissadell, which was in bad shape. A tall man with a red beard, Robert was a Cambridge graduate who enjoyed the finer things in life, including gardening and playing his Stradivari cello, as well as hunting with horse and hound. He had become interested in architecture while travelling abroad and was determined to upgrade the Lissadell estate, using the income from the family holdings in England.

By 1833, he had doubled the size of the estate by acquiring land twenty miles to the south of Lissadell (including the town of Ballymote) for £130,000. This land was used for cattle grazing. Annual income from about 1,000 tenant farmers amounted to £15,000, which meant Sir Robert was considerably wealthier than most of his neighbours. About 300 of his tenants paid £4 a year each for a few acres of poor land, from which they scratched a paltry existence. The average yearly wage at the time for a farm labourer was between £15 and £18. Typically, any cash a tenant acquired went towards paying the rent, often to an absentee landlord living abroad in some splendour.

After the Act of Union abolished the regional parliament, the large estates did well, but little changed for the ordinary Irish and both the native Irish and the country’s administrators became passive and lethargic. The Industrial Revolution barely touched Ireland, although towards the end of the nineteenth century Belfast and the surrounding areas were allowed to develop heavy industry providing it did not interfere with profits on the larger island. For the majority, still living off the land, survival was a struggle and the dominance of the potato in the diet, favoured because it could feed an entire family from a small plot, was storing up problems for the future.

Between 1834 and 1835, Sir Robert began work on building a new and more splendid house at Lissadell. When, four months after coming into his inheritance, he had married Caroline King, daughter of Viscount Lorton, he received a marriage portion of £10,000, which he decided to put towards a new house. His wife died in childbirth soon after, but Sir Robert remained closely linked to the King family, with his sister Anne marrying Robert King in 1829. He had much admired the neo-classical style of Rockingham, his father-in-law Viscount Lorton’s home, overlooking Lough Key in Boyle, County Roscommon, which had been designed by John Nash.

In 1830, Sir Robert remarried; his bride was Caroline Goold, a renowned beauty. After the wedding, he commissioned the London architect Francis Goodwin to come up with a design for a new house; Goodwin had designed the town halls of Manchester and Salford. With the building works underway, Sir Robert and his wife embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe, collecting seventeenth-century Italian paintings and other items they would use to furnish their new home.

The house, two storeys over a basement with forty-eight rooms, was the last house built in Ireland in the Greek revival style. Standing at the end of a long avenue, its box-like exterior was relieved by a bay window the height of the building on its south side. Three large windows on each floor gave magnificent views of Knocknarea, the legendary burial place of Maeve, Queen of Connacht. Other rooms looked out on Sligo Bay and Ben Bulben. On the north facade was an unusual porte cochère entrance, large enough for vehicles to pass through; this Goodwin thought necessary because of the exposed position of the house.

Building materials included limestone from Ballysadare, the setting of Yeats’s ‘Salley Gardens’. Black Kilkenny marble was used for the floors, columns and staircase in the entrance hall, while ornate, Egyptian-style chimneypieces of Italian marble added grandeur to the other principal rooms. Family rooms were positioned on either side of a long gallery, supported by thick pillars and lit from above; the gallery contained an organ and Sir Robert’s art collection. Lighting for the house came from a local gasholder – Lissadell was the first house in Ireland lit by its own gas supply. In the basement, the servants’ quarters included a butler’s pantry, kitchen, bakery, wine cellar and china room, as well as sleeping quarters for the butler, the housekeeper and the maids. There was, however, no smoking room; Sir Robert abhorred the habit.

The setting was idyllic, as Constance recognised:

Behind the 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 Knocknareagh 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. Brave fishing boats tempted the outskirts. But there it lay, impassable, unfathomable, incomprehensible, beyond might be Heaven or Tír na nÓg, for the farther away your eyes pierced the more it glittered and dazzled and broke up into coloured lights and blue mysteries.

Sir Robert maintained the family tradition of living in Ireland, and the rents he collected went back into the estate. As a working farm requiring energetic management and a big staff, Lissadell bustled with life. Because horse riding was so important to the estate’s management, Sir Robert built a riding school for his children and it was here that the infant Constance had her first riding lessons. Inspired by his travels, Sir Robert introduced many new ideas and innovations, such as the planting of hardy grasses near the seashore to save the land from the pummeling of the Atlantic Ocean. He experimented with harvesting oysters and used the vast quantities of seaweed that grew on the coast to help enrich the soil.

From the time he took over Lissadell, Sir Robert showed an acute awareness of the problems caused by the sizes of the leases taken out by his tenants; they were extremely small, for the most part, which made it difficult for tenants to survive and for him to collect a decent rent. The Irish tradition of subdividing land among the sons in a family exacerbated this problem. On his Boyle estate, Viscount Lorton, father of his first wife, had begun offering leases of no less than sixteen acres. Following his lead, Sir Robert started encouraging his bigger tenants to increase their holdings, a move that, at the very least, caused some misunderstanding, since he was under no obligation to look after the evicted tenants.

Compared to some of his neighbours, Sir Robert was considered a ‘good’ landlord, committed to the local community and serving as magistrate, grand juror and lieutenant of the county before his election as an MP following the Great Famine. His tenants were encouraged to drain their land, while slates were provided for roofs and timber for new houses. Each year, before 1 April, all tenants were required to whitewash their houses. Improvements were financed by a £4,000 loan fund from which tenants could borrow at a favourable rate.

For this reason, the controversy that arose following his acquisition of 8,780 acres in 1833 at the ‘Seven Cartrons’ in the townland of Ballygilgan, east of Lissadell, is somewhat surprising. Sir Robert was continuing his father’s work in expanding the demesne. He had planted 52,100 trees within the demesne and had closed an old public road on the perimeter of the estate, replacing it with a new public road farther north and west. When he acquired the large estate in Ballymote, he funded this purchase, like that of Ballygilgan, with the sale and mortgage of family property in Manchester.

At the time, the British colonies of Australia, South Africa and Canada, as well as the United States, were attempting to attract settlers from Britain and Ireland. The big ports of Liverpool, London and Glasgow and smaller ones at Limerick, Waterford, Dublin and Belfast never had it so busy, with good reason. Like many other landlords, Sir Robert considered emigration a possible solution to the chronic shortage of land and, following the famine of 1831, arranged for fifty-two families to emigrate to Quebec in Canada, most of them leaving holdings of no more than two acres. He paid each person £2 for disturbance, £4 for every acre of good land they left, and sea passage to Canada. His aim was to increase all holdings to at least five acres, just enough to sustain a family and provide him with a rent. He was to pay compensation of £196.58.04 to tenants for ‘giving up possession’ in 1834, and again in 1835. The few families opting to stay at home were given land elsewhere. He paid £273 in passage money to America in 1839 and a further £148 in 1841, as well as providing thousands of pounds to provision the ships.

The alternative version of the story suggests that about one hundred families were summarily cleared from their homes, mostly by Sir Robert’s agent, Captain George Dodwell, who had a reputation for ruthless evictions and chicanery. For those who chose to emigrate, a ship called the Pomano was – allegedly – chartered; the boat was not registered on any list and was in poor condition. It sank long before reaching its destination and all aboard were lost. A ballad was composed about the disaster.

The story of the Pomano remains controversial, especially since the stories about the disaster were collected many years after the alleged shipwreck. In the period 1833 to 1834, many ships sailed from Sligo Bay and Ballyshannon; a brig called the Zephyr made several voyages, as did another called Britannia. A registered ship called the Pomona sailed from London on 4 April 1834 and arrived in Quebec on 11 May; it – or a ship with a similar name – made regular journeys across the Atlantic after that, most notably one from Sligo to Quebec on 31 May 1839. The name Pomano and variations such as Pomono and Pomone were popular ships’ names and it could be that the Pomano story has become confused with the tragic story of the Pomona, which set sail for the USA from Liverpool on 27 April 1859 with 373 passengers and thirty-five crew on board, many of them from the Sligo area. Battling gale-force winds in the Irish Sea, it hit the Blackwater Bank off Wexford and quickly sank. Hundreds of bodies were washed ashore over the next few days and, of the 400 or so on board, only twenty-three survived. It remains the sixth worst shipping disaster to have occurred in Irish waters.

Compared to others, the Gore-Booths responded well when Ireland was devastated by the Great Famine of the mid-1840s. Sir Robert’s wife Caroline became a familiar figure locally, riding out on her pony with panniers filled with food. The British Liberal government had failed to take decisive action, blaming the widespread starvation on the irresponsibility and selfishness of the local landlords. Yet, under a clause e...