Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine

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СКАЧАТЬ efforts on behalf of the Irish people ‘to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils’. Wolfe Tone achieved what Hamilton Rowan had not: he persuaded the French to mount an invasion of Ireland in 1796, which might have succeeded had the thirty-five expeditionary ships, laden with thousands of French troops, not been prevented by bad weather from landing in Bantry Bay in County Cork.

      Wolfe Tone was on board a French ship during the failed Bantry Bay expedition, and he persuaded Napoleon Bonaparte to launch another invasion fleet in 1798. The United Irishmen attempted to stir up an internal rebellion to coincide with the French invasion, but the government’s network of informers was effective, and the insurrection was ruthlessly put down in most areas. Only in County Wexford did a band of Catholic rebels mount a serious challenge to the army, but their indiscipline and lack of strategy eventually ensured their defeat. A small French fleet landed in County Mayo, but its troops surrendered to government forces when they could find no internal rebellion with which to join.

      Wolfe Tone himself arrived with a subsequent French expedition, which was defeated by a British fleet in Lough Swilly. He was arrested and taken to Dublin, where he was sentenced to hang. While in custody he slit his throat with a penknife and a week later he died of his wounds. The rebellion of the United Irishmen was at an end, but republicans still gather at Wolfe Tone’s grave in Bodenstown every year to honour the man they revere as the father of republicanism.

      While Wolfe Tone was attempting to bring revolution to Ireland, Archibald Hamilton Rowan was living a quiet life of near penury in America. At home in Ireland, his wife was attempting to restore his reputation in the hope that he might be allowed to return. He was eventually given permission to come back, first to Europe, then to England, and finally to Ireland. He became the master of Killyleagh Castle in 1806, where he retained his liberal beliefs to the end of his life. He was known as a benevolent landlord who reduced his tenants’ rents during times of economic distress. He also expressed a strong disapproval of slavery; a story in his autobiography recalls an encounter with a slave in New York State in 1799: ‘I lost one of my gloves, and having searched back the road for it in vain, I continued my route. Overtaking a Negro, I threw him the other, saying that “I had lost the fellow on that hill somewhere; that perhaps he might find it, and he never was possessed of such a pair in his life.” The fellow smiled. “No, Master, you not lost it; here it is;” and he took the fellow out of his bosom and gave them both to me. And this man was a slave, whose portion was stripes, and black dog his appellation from a whey-faced Christian!’

      Hamilton Rowan died in 1834 at the age of 84. His last public appearance was at a meeting of the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty, from which he was borne aloft by a triumphal crowd. Looking back on Hamilton Rowan’s life, William Lecky, the nineteenth-century Irish historian, described him as ‘foolish and impulsive, but also brave, honourable, energetic and charitable’.

      Archibald Hamilton Rowan’s son reversed the order of the family name, turning Hamilton Rowan into Rowan Hamilton. According to his great-great-grandson Denys, he did this partly to emphasize the Hamilton side of the family and partly to disassociate himself from his radical and embarrassing father. When Denys was at prep school, two American brothers with the surname Hamilton Rowan entered the school, and Denys has little doubt that they are relatives. ‘To me it is quite obvious that Archibald Hamilton Rowan took a common-law wife while he was in America, and started a family, but when I said to the American Hamilton Rowans, “You’re all from the wrong side of the blanket,” they didn’t like it much. Americans can be churchy.’

      However fruitful his American legacy, the extent of Archibald Hamilton Rowan’s Irish legacy – or at least the legacy of the United Irishmen – is considerable. Until the 1800 Act of Union, Britain and Ireland were legally distinct kingdoms with separate Parliaments. The Act brought the kingdoms together to create a ‘United Kingdom’. Some Protestants objected to the Act of Union because it removed any prospect of an independent Ireland. And some Catholics welcomed the Act of Union because it offered the possibility of a more tolerant administration. Over time, however, attitudes migrated into those with which we are familiar today; Protestants came to believe that the union with Britain would guarantee them their ascendancy, and Catholics came to believe that their condition could only be improved by a repeal of the union. These beliefs lie at the very heart of the two communities’ modern identities.

      Republican movements arose in the years after the United Irishmen’s failed rebellion; the forerunner of the modern IRA was the Fenian Brotherhood, named after Cuchulainn’s band of warriors, the Fianna. Formed in the aftermath of the Irish famine of 1845–51, during which the population of Ireland fell by as many as two million, the Fenians planted a bomb in a wheelbarrow outside Clerkenwell Prison in London in 1867. The bomb killed six people and injured hundreds of others. Rumours spread through London of further planned Fenian attacks, sparking widespread panic. When, six years later, a bridge over Regent’s Canal was destroyed by an explosion of gunpowder on a barge, it was immediately believed – wrongly – to be the work of Fenians: troops based at the nearby Albany Street barracks were mobilized to counteract the supposed Irish threat. Such fears would return a century later, when the Provisional IRA started planting bombs in England. And to this day ‘Fenian’ is a derogatory term used by Protestants to describe a Catholic.

      In 1886 the Liberal Party in Westminster, led by William Gladstone, introduced a bill attempting to grant Home Rule to Ireland. Home Rule would have amounted to limited self-government, an early form of devolution. Gladstone’s bill failed and Ulster unionists proceeded to do everything they could to prevent another bill from succeeding. The Presbyterians and Anglicans of Ulster had come to consider themselves defenders of the British empire, fearful for their prosperity and heritage in a Catholic-dominated Ireland. As another Home Rule bill passed through the House of Commons in 1913, a quarter of a million Protestant Ulstermen signed a covenant – some in their own blood – pledging to resist it. An Ulster Volunteer Force of 100,000 men was created, armed with weapons smuggled in from Germany, ready to fight for Ulster’s future. But as the prospect of civil war loomed, the attention of all parties was diverted by the outbreak of a bigger conflict – the First World War. The implementation of Home Rule was delayed until after the end of the war, and young men from both sides of the Irish divide joined the British army; unionists in order to prove their loyalty to the King, nationalists in order to earn the right to have Home Rule implemented once the Great War was over.

      On 24 April 1916, at the very height of the war, an event took place in Dublin which had a profound effect on the Irish people, whose attitudes were, to quote Yeats, ‘changed utterly’. A small number of rebels, led by Patrick Pearse – a poet and schoolmaster who once wrote: ‘There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; slavery is one of them’ – seized public buildings in Dublin and proclaimed the formation of ‘the Provisional Government of Ireland’. The rebellion was put down, and its leaders, including Pearse, were executed as traitors. The almost mystical influence that Pearse has come to exert on the modern republican movement was brought home to me by one republican, who told me this story. ‘Patrick Pearse had no republican background. His father was an Englishman. But when he walked down the street he saw the kids in their bare feet on the cobblestones, and their feet hacked with darkened blood. And the kids were playing, and singing about the Grand Old Duke of York, a bastard who had them shoeless and poverty-stricken in their own country. And he went up the stairs, and his brother Willie followed him up and said, “What’s wrong, Patrick?’ He said, “I’ve seen a terrible thing. Children, not fed properly, with their feet hacked, glorifying the Grand Old Duke of York.” Pearse was a sensitive man, and an educated human being, and he was choked up, and the two men hugged, and swore that they would never desist until English rule in Ireland had ceased. It was the last straw. And the last straw wasn’t theological or cultural. It was as simple as that.’

      Following the executions of Pearse and the other rebels, Irish expectations changed. No longer was Home Rule considered a sufficient ambition. The national objective became full independence. For two years, between 1919 and 1921, a war (known СКАЧАТЬ