Chapter XIV: Fort Saunders

GALWAY.

Galway is an old Spanish colony, planted on the western coast of Ireland, and which kept for a long time intimate relations with the mother country. Things and people have retained the original stamp to an uncommon degree; but for the Irish names that are to be read on every shop, you could believe yourself in some ancient quarter of Seville. The women have the olive complexion, black hair, and red petticoat of the _mañolas_; the houses open on a courtyard, a thing unknown in other parts of Ireland, as well as in Great Britain; they have grated windows, peep-holes in the door, and are adorned with sculptures, in the Moorish style; the steeples of churches affect the shape of minarets; the very fishermen in the port, with the peculiar shape of their boat, sails and nets, and something indescribable in their general outline, remind you of the hardy sailors of Corunna.

The remembrance of seven or eight centuries of busy trade with the Peninsula, does not show itself solely in faces, manners, or dwelling, it is to be found also in local tradition. Among others, there is the story of the Mayor Lynch Fitz-Stephen, who gave in 1493 such a fearful example of ruthless justice. His only son, whom he had sent to Spain to settle some important affair, was coming back with the Spanish correspondent of the family, bringing home a rich cargo, when he entered into a conspiracy with the crew, appropriated the merchandise, and threw overboard the unfortunate Spaniard. The crime was discovered, the culprit arrested, and brought to trial before his own father, who was exercising the right of high and low justice in the district, and by him condemned to the pain of death. The general belief was that the Mayor would contrive to find some pretext to give his son a respite; and in order to supply him with that pretext, his relations drew up a petition of grace, which they presented to him, covered with signatures. Lynch listened to their request, then merely told them to come back for an answer on a certain day he named. At the appointed time the suppliants appeared again; but the first sight which caught their eyes was the dead body of the Mayor’s son hanging from one of the grated windows of his house. An inscription, placed in 1524, on the walls of the cemetery of St. Nicholas, records the memory of that event.

Galway is only a big borough nowadays, where ruins are nearly as numerous as inhabited dwellings. From the road that skirts the Bay, after leaving the harbour, the long islands of Arran may be seen rising on the west; from another road, which goes northwards, Lough Corrib appears, famous for its salmon fisheries. As an historic place, the county possessed already the field of Aughrim, celebrated for two centuries as the spot where James II. lost his last battle against William III.—a battle so murderous that the dogs of the country retained a taste for human flesh for three generations after. But since the last year it has acquired a new celebrity: another and no less epic battle has been fought at Woodford in August, 1886, for the agrarian cause. The account of it is worth telling. Never did the character of the struggle between League and landlord appear in such a glaring light. All the factors in the problem are there, each playing its own part. It is like a vertical cut opening Irish society down to its very core, and permitting to see it from basis to summit; a supplementary chapter to Balzac’s _Paysans_.

Woodford is a pretty village seated on the shore of Lough Derg on the slope of the hills which divide Galway from Clare. The principal landowners there are the Marquis of Clanricarde, Sir Henry Burke, the Westmeath family, Colonel Daly, and Lord Dunsandle. Agrarian hatred is particularly alive in that district; the Galway man is bloodthirsty, and counts human life as nought. Five or six years ago Mr. Blake, Lord Clanricarde’s agent, was shot dead, and in March, 1886, a bailiff named Finley, a veteran of the Crimean war, had the same fate while he was going to proceed to an eviction on the account of Sir Henry Burke. The spot is shown still where the unfortunate man was murdered and his corpse left twenty-four hours without sepulture, nobody daring or willing to bear it away. A detachment of the police in the pay of the Property Defence Association having settled their barracks in the vicinity of Woodford, the inhabitants, about one thousand in number, organized a sort of grotesque pageant, which made its progress along the streets of the town behind a coffin bearing the inscription: _Down with landlordism!_ then concluded by burning the coffin in sight of the barracks.

There are two churches, one Protestant, the other Catholic. The faithful who attend the first are two in number, no mere nor less, which would be sufficient to show how legitimate it was for the Irish to protest when obliged to pay the tithes of an altogether alien worship. The second is headed by a jolly compeer, much beloved by his parishioners for his good humour and liberality, Father Caen, a pastor of the old school, whose boast it is that he keeps the best table and cellar, and has the prettiest nieces in the county. He is president of the local board of the League; the treasurer of that committee is the _guardian of the poor law_ of the district, what we would call “l’administrateur du bien des pauvres;” but the true agent of the League—the _Deus ex machina_ of the place—is the secretary, Father Egan, curate of the parish, an austere, thin, fanatic-looking man, a peasant’s son, with all the passions of his race, who sucked the hatred of landlords with his mother’s milk, and ever remembers that many of his kindred have been reduced to emigrate, and that an uncle of his went mad after being evicted. A feature to be noted down; that priest, tall, strong, sinewy, is an excellent shot and an inveterate poacher. Nothing would be easier for him than obtaining leave from the landowners to shoot on their grounds; but he scorns the leave. His delight is to lurk at night till he has shot some of their big game, or to head openly a _battue_ for a general slaughter five miles round.

* * * * *

One of the finest estates in the county is that of Lord Clanricarde, to which are attached three hundred and sixteen tenants.

Hubert George De Burgh Canning, Marquis of Clanricarde and Baron Somerhill, was born 1832, according to the _Peerage_. He was never married, has no children, belongs to the House of Lords as Baron Somerhill, is a member of two or three great clubs, and lives in Piccadilly, at the Albany, a sort of caravanserai (not to say seraglio), almost exclusively a resort of rich bachelors. That is about all that is known of him. His tenants do not know him. The only glimpse they ever had of their landlord was on the following occasion. In 1874, at the funeral of the late Marquis, a man of about forty, with fair hair, who had come from London for the ceremony, was noticed among the mourners. He was said to be the new master. That was all: he disappeared as he had come. Save for that hazy and far-away remembrance, the landlord is for the Woodford people a mere name, a philosophical entity of whom they know nothing except that he has a land agent at Loughrea, a little neighbouring town, and that into the hands of that agent they must pay every year £19,634 out of the product of the land. The tenants of Woodford are in that sum for about £1,000.

The Marquis’s father died in 1874. Quite contrary to the present owner, he was the prototype of the Irish lord resident. Great sportsman, scatter-brain, violent, extravagant, but kind and open-handed, he was liked in spite of his numerous failings, and tradition helping him he was emphatically the master almost all his life long; a fact which he was wont to illustrate by boasting that if it pleased him to send his old grey mare to the House of Commons, the electors would be too happy to vote unanimously for the animal.

In 1872, however, the Marquis’s tenants took it into their heads to cut the tradition, and gave their vote to a certain Captain Nolan, the _Home Rule_ candidate. The irascible nobleman took revenge for what he chose to consider as a personal insult by raising the rent of all bad electors. He went so far in that line that in 1882 the _Land Commissioners_ had to reduce them by half. That judgment could not, of course, have a retrospective effect and bring a restitution of the sums that had been paid in excess during the last ten years, and which varied from £50 to £100. It may be imagined how they must weigh still on the peasant’s heart, and what a well-prepared ground the agrarian movement was to find at Woodford. The successive murders of the land agent Blake and Bailiff Finlay were among the first and visible signs of that ferment of hatred.

* * * * *

Those crimes, which remained unpunished, and the responsibility of which is thrown at each other’s heads by the two parties, came with the usual accompaniment of fires, mutilations, verbal and written threats. The reign of terror had begun in the district; no bailiff was any longer willing to serve a writ or assignation. There came a time when the landlords nearly gave up all hope of finding a land agent to take the place of the one who had been murdered; at last they discovered the man—a certain Joyce, of Galway—a man who united an indomitable spirit with the most consummate skill; deeply versed in the art of talking to the peasant, a fine shot, carrying his potations well; ready for anything. A professional exploit had made his name famous in the neighbourhood. Having to serve writs upon several farmers, and being unable to find bailiffs willing to carry them, he made a general convocation in his office of all the debtors, with the pretext of submitting to them some mode of accommodation. The proposition being unanimously rejected, Joyce gets up, goes to the door, and after having turned the key, leans with his back against it; then, producing out of his pocket as many writs as there were farmers in his room, distributes them among the visitors. The poor devils were caught; according to the terms of the law, nothing but submission was left to them. It will not be unnecessary to add here that Joyce, a born Catholic, had been recently converted to Protestantism, which is reputed an abomination in Ireland, and consequently went by the name of the _renegade_. Such was the man who came to settle at Loughrea under protection of a special guard of constables, and hostilities soon began.

* * * * *

The harvest of 1885 had been but indifferent, and besides, by reason of American competition, the price of the chief local products had fallen down considerably—from about 15 to 20 per cent.—which implies for the farmer an utter impossibility to pay his rent, unless the nett profit he draws from the soil be estimated above 15 or 20 per cent. of his general receipt. Even in Ireland reasonable landlords are to be found. Those who understood the situation felt for their tenants, and, without waiting to be asked, granted a reduction of rent. At Woodford, Lord Dunsandle and Colonel Daly of their own impulse, and Sir H. Burke after some demur, gave up 15 per cent. of the unpaid rent.

As for Lord Clanricarde, he gave not the least sign of existence. When the November term came, his tenants demanded a reduction of 25 per cent., upon which Joyce declared that not a penny was to be given up. This seemed so hard that it was generally disbelieved; and an opinion spread itself that by applying personally to the landlord justice would be obtained. A collective address, signed by the 316 Woodford tenants, was accordingly drawn up and presented to him.

The Marquis of Clanricarde vouchsafed no manner of answer. Then, Father Egan put himself in motion. He first obtained from the Bishop of Clonfert that he would send a second petition to the master, representing to him the true state of affairs, the reduction consented to by the other landlords, &c. Lord Clanricarde did not even acknowledge reception of the prelate’s letter. Let us state here, once for all, that he never swerved from the attitude he had adopted from the beginning, so aggressive in its very stolidity. Never once did he depart from that silence, except when he once wrote to the _Times_ that, personally, he did not object to the proposed reduction, but was in the habit of leaving to his agent the care of that sort of thing.

Seeing that there was no satisfaction whatever to be expected from him, the Woodford tenants imitated their landlord, and henceforth gave no sign of life, or paid him a single farthing. In the month of April, 1886, Joyce resorted to the legal ways and set up prosecutions against thirty-eight of the principal farmers, whose debt was £20 and above, assuming by that move the attitude of a moderate man who has to deal with obvious unwillingness to pay.

And it was that which gave to the Woodford affair its peculiar character, which made it a _test case_, a decisive trial where the contending forces have measured their strength, where the inmost thought of the Irish peasant has shown itself in full light. If the chiefs of the League had singled it out from amidst a hundred (as, indeed, we may believe they did, whatever they might aver to the contrary), they could never have achieved a more complete demonstration of their power. Chance, however, had also its usual share in the turn which affairs took. Joyce, it appears, had began prosecutions against seventy-eight lesser tenants, and at the moment when success was on the point of crowning his efforts, the procedure was quashed for some legal flaw.

As for the bigger ones, judgment had been entered against them, and the execution followed. The first step was the selling out in public court of the tenant’s interest in his holding. Ten of the men capitulated immediately, paying the rent in full with interest and law costs, that is to say, about 80 per cent. above the original debt. As for the twenty-eight others, fired by political passion, pride, and the ardent exhortations of Father Egan, they did not waver, and allowed the sale to proceed.

Agreeably to the usage established since the League has been supreme in Ireland, not one bidder came forward at the sale. The representative of the landlord therefore remained master of the situation, and got for a few shillings the interest of the twenty-eight farmers—interest which, in certain cases, was worth £200 and more.

It now remained to evict those tenants from their farms, and take possession in their place. Let us remark that, being certain of having allowed the landlord, through the sale, to help himself to a value of five or six times his due, those men were bound to consider such an eviction a gratuitous piece of cruelty. Well knowing before-hand that the eviction would by no means be an easy task, for all Ireland breathlessly followed the course of events, Joyce singled out amongst the twenty-eight defaulters, the four tenants for whom the eviction was sure to bear the hardest character, namely, Conroy, Fahey, Broderick, and Saunders. These were all people of comfortable means, who had for many years been established on their lands, who were profoundly attached to the house where their children or grand-children had been born, and which they had themselves built, enlarged and improved at great expense; rural _bourgeois_ rather than peasants; men that in a French country town should have been mayors, _adjoints_, or municipal councillors.

For each of them eviction not only meant ruin, the voluntary and definitive loss of a small fortune laboriously acquired, and which could be estimated in each case at ten or twelve times the amount of the annual rent; it was, besides, the upsetting of all their dearest habits, the destruction of home, the end of domestic felicity. “Placed between this result and the choice of paying £30 or £40, which he has in his strong box, or which he will experience no difficulty in borrowing if he has them not—what country-bred man would hesitate?” thought Joyce. “Conroy, Fahey, Broderick, and Saunders shall pay! They shall pay, and after them the others must inevitably follow suit.”

This was very sound reasoning. But Joyce calculated without the League and its agent, Father Egan. The four chosen victims did not pay. With a resolution that must really seem heroic to whoever knows the workings of a peasant’s soul, Conroy, Fahey, Broderick, and Saunders unanimously declared that the agent might expel them by force—_if he could_—but yield they would not.

Ah! there was a fearful struggle. It was not without the most terrible inner combat that they kept their word. At home they had the money ready; nothing could be simpler than to go and pay it. Now and then temptation waxed almost too strong. James Broderick is an old man of seventy years. One day, called to Loughrea by the tempter, he went, in company with his friend Fahey.

“Now, look here, Mr. Broderick,” Joyce said to him, “it goes to my heart to evict a good man like you from such a pretty house.... You have lived in it for these thirty years—it is the pearl of Woodford.... Let us make an arrangement about all this: you pay me down your rent with for costs, and I give you any length of time for the rest.... His lordship will even give you back the tenant-right for the price he paid himself,—fifty shillings.... Now what do you say?”...

Old Broderick wavered; he was on the point of yielding.

“Indeed, Mr. Joyce, you cannot do more than that,” ... he uttered in a trembling voice, involuntarily feeling for his pocket-book.

But Fahey was there. He took the old man’s arm and drew him aside.

“It is not _time_ that we want!” he said to him. “_What we want is to uphold the principle!_”

Truly a great word. As fine as any recorded on History’s page, for those who know how to understand it rightly. If the peasants can remember a principle when their property is in question, verily one may say that the times are near being fulfilled!

All conciliatory means were now exhausted. It only remained to have recourse to force. Joyce knew better than anyone what resistance he was going to encounter. Personally he thought he was going to meet death. He went resolutely nevertheless, but not without surrounding himself with a regular army.

The bailiffs of the place refusing to act, some had to be sent for from Dublin. Those bailiffs, escorted by about a hundred emergency men, were supported besides by five hundred constables armed with rifles and revolvers. Woodford lies at a distance of about twenty miles from the nearest railway. The traps and horses necessary to carry all these people had to be sent down from Dublin, nobody consenting to give any manner of help. The same thing occurred for provisions and for the implements of the siege, pickaxes, levers, iron crowbars, which were indispensable to the assailants, and which were brought down with the army to Portumna. These preparations lasted three weeks. The mobilisation, decreed by Joyce at the end of July, could only be completed by the 17th of August.

On the next day, the 18th, this army moved forward and left Portumna in a column, marching on Woodford.

But on their side the Leaguers had not remained inactive.

All the night long squads of voluntary workmen had been hard at work. When the police caravan arrived in sight of the village, they found the road barred by trees and heaps of stones placed across the way. They were obliged to dismount and go round by the fields.

In the meantime, from the top of the neighbouring heights horns were signalling the appearance of the enemy; the chapel bells began to toll an alarm peal. From all the points of the compass an immense multitude of people hastened to come and take up their position on the hills of Woodford.

When the bailiffs made their appearance, headed by Joyce, armed to the teeth, by the under-sheriff whom the duty of his charge obliged to preside at the execution, and leading on five hundred policemen, an indescribable, formidable howl rose up to heaven; the Irish _wail_ which partakes of the lion’s roar and of the human sob, of the yell of the expiring beast and of the rushing sound of waters.

That lugubrious hooting was to last during two entire days, with full-stops, _da capo_, _decrescendo_ and _rinforzando_ of great effect.

* * * * *

The first house attacked by the assailants was that of Conroy. It is a solid, comfortable-looking dwelling, built on the bank of Lough Derg. To the under-sheriff’s summons, the inhabitants, posted on the roof, answered only by derisive laughter. The door, which was of solid oak, was closed and barred inside. The order was given to break it open. A few minutes’ work sufficed to do it.

When it fell crashing under the axes, it was perceived that a wall had been built behind it.... A triumphant shout rose from the crowd.

“A breach must be made!” thundered Joyce. The stone wall was attacked. Immediately, from the roof, from the windows, poured a deluge of scalding hot lime-water, which fell on the assailants, blinded them, burnt them, and sent them back howling and dancing with pain. Again the crowd applauded, saluting with screams of laughter every ladleful of hot water that took effect. The custom of Galway authorizes, it appears, that singular way of defending one’s house. _It is no breach of the peace._ One can scald the bailiffs without any qualms of conscience or fear of consequences.

Nothing loth, the Conroy family freely used the permission. The miracle was that they did not use more murderous weapons. But the League’s agents were there holding back, according to their custom, the too fiery spirits, and keeping them within the bounds of legal hostilities. At their head the priest Egan was conspicuous, loudly advising the besieged, pointing out to them the uncovered assailants, telling them on what point to direct the effort of resistance. As for the police, mute and motionless, they beheld the drama without taking part in it. Four hours’ work were needed to make the breach. At last the bailiffs were able to enter the house, expel the inhabitants, and take possession of it. They were obliged literally to carry away the youngest Miss Conroy, who desperately clung to the walls and furniture, and refused to come out of her own will.

* * * * *

Night came, and the bailiffs have no right to carry on their proceedings after sunset. They were therefore obliged to postpone their operations till the next day. What made matters worse was, that they must necessarily go back to Portumna, for they need expect to find no lodgings in Woodford. It is easy to foretell the complication of events that now followed.

The whole of next day was employed in the eviction of Fahey. That of Broderick lasted another day, and caused the arrest of twenty-seven persons, for in spite of the League’s efforts heads were waxing hotter and hotter, and the combatants began to be rather too excited on both sides.

But where resistance took a truly epic character was in the house of Thomas Saunders. With twenty-three comrades he held in check all assaults _during four entire days_. Not content with scalding the bailiffs by means of pumps and cauldrons installed on purpose, he had, by a stroke of genius, the idea of throwing on them hives of bees, that came out enraged from their cells and cruelly stung everything before them. Who knows that there may not be in this a precious indication for future warfare! European strategists may before long add “the chaste dew-drinkers,” as Victor Hugo called them, to the pigeons and the war-dogs. However that may be, Joyce’s mercenaries, burnt, stung, and crest-fallen, were compelled, for three nights running, to retreat on Portumna.

The green flag meanwhile was proudly waving its folds on the summit of Saunders’ house, which enraptured Ireland, intoxicated with joy at the news of this unprecedented siege, immediately baptized _Fort Saunders_. Agitation was fast spreading over the whole country. The military authorities judged it indispensable to send down 200 mounted men, and to have the place patrolled at night. In Portumna councils of war were held, and serious thoughts were entertained of having recourse to the antique battering-ram and “tortoise” in order to approach the place and succeed in taking it. Three days passed in new preparations and supplementary armaments.

At last, on the 27th of August, a new assault was attempted. It failed like all the others, but the law must, it was felt, at all costs, be enforced; the police interfered about some technical point, took the house at the bayonet’s point and made all its inmates prisoners.

Thus ended, without effusion of blood, this memorable campaign; three weeks’ preparation, eight days’ fighting, a thousand men on foot, enormous expense had been required in order to succeed in evicting four tenants of the Marquis of Clanricarde, out of a number of 316, and that in the midst of scandalous scenes which gave the noisiest publicity to the agrarian cause. Everybody was of opinion that enough had been done, and evictions were stopped.

The affair at Woodford marks a date in the annals of the Irish revolution. One has seen in it peasants living in relatively good circumstances fight for principles and go to the furthest ends of legality,—without overstepping them. Moreover, these events have taken place in a county famed for its violence and represented in Parliament by Mr. Matthew Harris, which is saying enough; (his motto was, till lately, “When you see a landlord, shoot him down like a partridge”). Three or four years sooner such events could not have taken place without involving fifteen or twenty deaths of persons. Here not a single one occurred. One could not but acknowledge that the honour of this was due to the League, to its moderating and constitutional influence. In vain it protested that it had nothing to do with those conflicts; its agents and its general instructions played the first part in it. Therefore it reaped all the fruits of this, came out of the ordeal greater, surrounded with a poetical halo, sovereign. History often has such ironies. At the price of their domestic happiness, four obscure heroes had just won in face of public opinion the cause of the serfs of the glebe against the lords.