Fenian Problem: Insurgency and Terrorism in a Liberal State, 1858-1874 9780773576155

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the fenian problem

A Fenian insurgent as depicted by Punch shortly after the Clerkenwell bombing. Punch, 27 December 1867.

The Fenian Problem Insurgency and Terrorism in a Liberal State 1858−1874 BRIAN JENKINS

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008 isbn 978-0-7735-3426-1 Legal deposit third quarter 2008 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of grants from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Bishop’s University. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Jenkins, Brian, 1939− The Fenian problem : insurgency and terrorism in a liberal state, 1858−1874 / Brian Jenkins. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-7735-3246-1 1. Fenians. 2. Terrorism − Political aspects − Great Britain − History − 19th century. 3. Great Britain − Politics and government − 1837−1901. 4. Civil rights − Great Britain − History − 19th century. 5. Ireland − History − 1837−1901. i. Title. da954.j46 2008

941.081

Typeset in Palatino 10/13 by Infoscan Collette, Quebec City

c2008-901869-9

In memory of William John Davies and Arthur Davies

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Contents

Preface

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1 The Liberal State and Irish Nationalism 3 2 The Liberal State Responds to Fenianism 31 3 Invasion and Insurgency 61 4 The Struggle Transferred to Britain 92 5 The Rule of Law: Murderers and Martyrs 118 6 Fear of Terror

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7 The Quality of Justice 179 8 The Efficacy of Violence 209 9 Politics and Political Prisoners 233 10 The Policy of Conciliation 260 11 Mission Failure 286 12 End of the Beginning 326 Abbreviations 345 Notes 347 Index 427

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Preface

In Irish Nationalism and the British State: From Repeal to Revolutionary Nationalism (2006), I offered readers an explanation of the deepening Irish disillusionment with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of the emergence in the mid-nineteenth century of a violent nationalist movement committed to the creation of a democratic Irish republic. In this sequel to that study, I explore the response of successive governments of the British liberal state to the threat of Fenianism. If a state’s claim to be liberal had by the middle of the nineteenth century yet to be definitively defined, Britain was regarded as such because of the power of a representative parliament, the rule of law, and a broadening concept of individual freedoms. This is, then, essentially an investigation of high politics but with more than a cursory nod to public opinion at a moment when literacy was increasing, to a largely independent press increasingly outspoken, and to a dramatically expanding electorate. The form is narrative, which is usually less technical and more easily read than the analytical histories that have long become fashionable, and it holds out the tantalizing promise of attracting the interest of that well-informed general reader for whom so many academic historians pine. However, as one master of the form has recently written, narrative can exhibit both “analytical rigour” and “explanatory power.”1 The Fenians’ commitment to what in modern terminology would be described as a struggle for national liberation links them, however remotely, to the modern Irish Republican Army (ira). Just as that army divided into factions over tactics and objectives, so did its Fenian ancestors fall to squabbling among themselves over the most promising strategy for driving the British out of Ireland. The splinter group that eventually dominated the militant modern republican movement, the Provisionals, selected the

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phoenix as its symbol and by so doing perhaps recalled the Phoenix Societies that more than a century earlier had rallied to the Irish Revolutionary (later Republican) Brotherhood. Several leading Provisionals could claim a Fenian lineage and initially repudiated constitutional methods, particularly parliamentary politics. The rejection of constitutionalism had been the “very essence” of Fenianism. Fenians and Provisionals declared armed struggle the only realistic means of achieving Ireland’s complete liberation, yet both eventually embraced, however uneasily, a political strategy. Both organizations were also alike in their heavy dependence on Irish American sympathy and support, and both were confronted by British governments determined to criminalize those involved in the respective conspiracies. As a result, the treatment of the Fenian political prisoners served as a precursor of the Northern Ireland tragedy a hundred years later.2 The Provisionals waged a form of guerrilla warfare in Northern Ireland and conducted a systematic and brutally destructive campaign of terror both there and in Britain. In their time, the Irish American Fenians attempted large-scale raids across the international border into British North America. In Ireland, they and Irish republicans endeavoured to subvert the Catholic Irishmen who made up such a disproportionately large element of the rank and file of the British Army, attempted a full-scale insurgency in 1867 and, following its failure, briefly engaged in guerrilla activities in southwestern Ireland. Regarding themselves as revolutionary soldiers, they also utilized stealth to attack targets within the state. Did their plan to raid Chester Castle and make off with its store of weapons; their rescuing from police custody of the Fenian leader, killing a policeman in the process; their bombing of the Clerkenwell House of Detention, in which the only casualties were innocent civilians; their assassinations; and their reported resort to “explosive letters” addressed to public figures constitute a campaign of terror?3 To understand terrorism, one of its students argues, it is necessary first to understand insurgency. This he defines as a “struggle between a nonruling group and ruling authorities” characterized by violence that is intended “to destroy, reformulate, or sustain the basis of legitimacy of one or more aspects of politics.” Terrorism becomes a means whereby insurgents both demonstrate the weakness and vulnerability of an existing regime and attract popular support. That support, moreover, need not be active, for a people merely passive in their alienation are unlikely either to provide the state with intelligence or to betray insurgents. Although “insurgent terrorism” has recently been the focus of a collection of essays,

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much still turns on the meaning of terrorism. According to one calculation, more than 200 variations are on offer. With the Prevention of Terrorism Acts, modern British governments have illustrated the complaint that the “various definitions range from the absurdly over-specified to the unacceptably over-general.” Terrorism, to paraphrase the British law, is the use or threat of “serious violence” against persons or property in order to “intimidate or coerce either government or people for the purpose of furthering a political or religious cause.” Similarly, a group of European ministers have labelled as terrorism “the use, or threatened use, by a cohesive group of persons of violence (short of war) to effect political aims.” If valid, these definitions condemn as terrorists the Fenians of the 1860s and almost all insurgent groups. Of course, governments are inclined to employ this designation in “an attempt to brand opponents as illegal aggressors, without any rights.” Yet this does not appear to have been the case with respect to the British governments of the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, “words have different meanings, and connotations, for different peoples and states according to their historical experiences and present interests.” Certainly, for mid-Victorians, Fenianism became another word for terrorism.4 The absence of “homogeneous activity” has also contributed to the difficulty of finding a universally acceptable definition of terrorism. Motives, actors, and actions vary greatly. Thus, attacks on persons and property must have, in the opinion of analysts, “some broader symbolic meaning for a wider audience” in order to qualify as terrorism. In the words of one, the “‘nature of terrorism is not inherent in the violent act itself.’” Violence is “unequivocally terrorist,” Conor Gearty writes in Terror, “when it is politically motivated and carried out by sub-state groups; when its victims are chosen at random; and when the purpose behind the violence is to communicate a message to a wider audience.” However, this definition is arguably too exclusive if it is accepted that the defining intent of terrorism is to cause “fear and coercion through fear.” Irish agrarian secret societies, during their lengthy and savage struggles over access to and use of land, engaged in the “coercive intimidation” of innocent persons that helped to foster a culture of violence and might reasonably be considered acts of terrorism.5 In an era of truly monstrous acts of terror in which thousands of innocents are killed, it is tempting to dismiss the notion of Fenian terrorism, despite the Brotherhood’s unalloyed commitment to the violent dismantling of the United Kingdom. Having compared the activities of the Fenians of the 1860s with those of the Provisionals a century later, a group of contributors

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to Ireland’s Terrorist Dilemma acquit the former of “deliberate acts of murder or terrorism.” Gearty reaches much the same conclusion. However, several essential preconditions for a resort to terror were in place. There existed in Ireland a tradition of violence that went beyond specific acts to include “an ambivalence towards violence, an acceptance of the mystique of violence, and a belief that violence can lead to great political change.” Young Irishmen had long been taught by secular and clerical nationalists that the existing state and society were alien, illegitimate, unjust, oppressive, and tyrannical, and that positions on the continuum between constitutionalism and violence frequently “depend on particular views of the legitimacy of the state.” Convinced that the current regime was “unjust,” some Irish nationalists justified as realistic the adoption of abnormal means, including terror, to effect the profound constitutional change to which they were committed. There was no hope, the likes of John Mitchel and James Stephens insisted, of establishing an independent Irish republic by legal or normal means. Moreover, leading nationalists drove home this point by relentlessly impressing upon their fellow Irishmen the humiliations, contempt, and disrespect they suffered at the hands of the English. In deliberately exciting a “collective sense of unjust persecution,” they nourished a desire for vengeance. Terrorism, another in its legion of students has observed, springs from “human discontent with and resent[ment] of inequality and indifference and from a widespread belief that violence is justified in the face of oppression and insult.” Furthermore, as revolutionary nationalists committed to equality and fraternity, members of the Fenian Brotherhood were inclined to regard the “people” as a “transcendent force, a substitute for God, in whose name everything became justifiable.” The Irish people had the right, Mitchel asserted, to “strike at England anywhere and anyhow, in Canada, in Ireland, in London, by steel, or gunpowder, or firewood.”6 Successive British governments genuinely believed that the Fenians were committed not only to insurgency but also to terror. That relatively few Irishmen enlisted as soldiers of the revolution provided the movement with an added inducement to move from insurgency to terror. Moreover, ill-adapted as the Brotherhood’s cellular structure of “circles” was to the rapid absorption of recruits, it was well suited to the conduct of small-scale subversive activities. In 1866, the lord lieutenant of Ireland was quick to describe as a “system of terror” the intimidatory measures adopted by the Fenians to prevent information being given to the authorities. Nor did he question the reliability of a report submitted by a pair of warders who claimed to have overheard a conversation between two imprisoned Fenians

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during which they spoke of assassinations as “deliberately planned operations.” After all, one of the compromising documents found among the personal effects of a founder-member of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood was a letter from a correspondent advocating assassinations. Although Thomas Clarke Luby strenuously denied in open court that the Fenians intended to resort to this form of insurgency, it was not long before the Dublin police got wind of an “assassination circle.” Perhaps the response of successive governments to Fenianism should therefore be judged in the light of their reasonable conviction that they were confronted by insurgent terrorists. Certainly, a number of leading Fenians subsequently became indisputably identified with terrorism. William Mackey Lomasney, who waged a brief guerrilla campaign in Cork in 1867, was eventually to blow himself up while planting a bomb beneath London Bridge. The dynamite war of the early 1880s was sponsored by the Skirmishing Fund set up by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, while another prominent Fenian, John McCafferty, was to act as the liaison between the Irish Americans and the men who murdered, with peculiarly horrifying savagery, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke in Phoenix Park in 1882. Cavendish was slaughtered as a symbol of “the hated enemy.”7 In 2005, in response to actions of Islamic terrorists and ongoing threats, the government of the United Kingdom introduced amendments to the Prevention of Terrorism Act that would permit the authorities to detain suspects for up to ninety days without formal charge. Although obliged to “compromise” on twenty-eight days, thus paralleling the detention provisions already in place in Northern Ireland, ministers have made plain their intention to reintroduce the far longer period at some future date. Gearty, as a noted expert on terror and the director of a human rights centre at a prestigious English university, has roundly criticized the legislation and accused the government of overreacting. The intent was to sneak into English law a Continental system without the Continental safeguards, he wrote in an opinion piece for a major British newspaper, by bringing an arrest forward “to the start of an investigation, rather than leave it to the end, just before the charge.” He likens the proposal to that of Benjamin Disraeli to “repeal” habeas corpus following the bombing of the Clerkenwell House of Detention in December 1867. This was the then chancellor of the Exchequer’s response to a Fenian threat that Gearty suggests was little more than “alarmist talk.” Leaving aside the important distinction between the repeal and the suspension for a limited and prescribed period of this cornerstone of the rule of law, is the historical analogy apt or accurate? With the exception of the home secretary, the other members of the Cabinet

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scotched the proposal on the grounds that even in the midst of a Fenian panic neither Parliament nor the public would accept so radical a curtailment of one of the liberal state’s basic freedoms.8 For a liberal state of the mid-nineteenth century, especially one that lacked a written constitution, no less than for modern democratic societies, the effective countering of terrorism posed peculiar problems. The ethics of counterterrorism have been described “as an even more tangled and difficult subject than the ethics of terrorism,” for only “those measures of proven effectiveness” that are consistent with a liberal state’s “basic values” ought to be adopted. In short, what methods are legitimate? Modern scholars have identified a broad range of options to which governments might justifiably resort. In those instances where the violence is associated with foreign nationals, such as Irish-American Fenians, they might seek some understanding with the harbouring nation or threaten it with reprisals and restrict the admission of suspects. They ought to create systems of intelligence to gather information on terrorists in order to understand as well as defeat them. They need to penetrate terrorist organizations with the aid of agents and informers. They ought to deny subversives access to weapons. They require a national police force skilled in surveillance, detection, and interrogation, though heavy-handed methods are likely to prove counterproductive. In Britain’s modern struggle with the Irish Republican Army, its decisions to accord “counter-terrorist authority to the civilian police very early in the conflict” and to treat republican and loyalist terrorism as “essentially a law-enforcement problem and terrorists as criminals” have been judged a “qualified success.” Then again, the introduction of legislation to facilitate the preventive detention of suspects has been justified as a demonstration of a government’s determination to protect the state and its population. Into the same category fall measures to harden the predictable targets of the terrorists. Similarly, to ensure the punishment of persons who have committed terrorist crimes, thereby providing reassurance to a fearful society, the state is encouraged to make good use of those imprisoned members of subversive groups willing to provide information and give evidence against former colleagues in return for lighter sentences or freedom and a new life. In short, “firm” government offers hope of inspiring popular confidence. But “swiftness and sureness” are likely to be more important than severity with respect to punishment of the convicted terrorists. Not even the likelihood of death by execution will deter all political zealots, and enforcement of capital sentences runs the risk of creating martyrs. Last but by no means least, in an effort to starve terrorist movements of recruits,

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isolate them from the people, and halt “social acceptance of indiscriminate violence,” governments have been urged to tackle the perceived root causes of terrorism, address the real grievances of the general population, and create an unfavourable public image of the subversives.9 The research for this study was greatly facilitated by the individuals and institutions that granted me access to, and permission to quote from, the private papers in their possession. For this I am deeply grateful. Documents from the Royal Archives are quoted by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen. The Devonshire Papers at Chatsworth are quoted with the permission of his Grace the Duke, and those of the second Lord Lyons with that of his Grace the Duke of Norfolk. The Althorp Collection, currently on loan at the British Library, is quoted with the permission of Earl Spencer, and the Derby Collection at the Liverpool Central Library with that of the earl. Several jurisdictions of the Roman Catholic Church have been uniformly generous, specifically the Archdioceses of Baltimore, Dublin, and Toronto, for permission to quote from the Spalding, Cullen, and Lynch Papers, and the Diocese of Liverpool for access to Bishop Goss’s pastorals. His letterbooks are held by the Lancashire Record Office. The Archive of All Hallows College, Dublin, contains a body of material relevant to the political conduct of Irish priests in Britain, while the Catholic University of America holds a small but useful collection of the correspondence of O’Donovan Rossa. The large manuscript holdings of the National Library of Ireland include the Kilmainham Papers and those of S.L. Anderson, Devoy, Emly, Larcom, Archbishop Leahy (microfilm), Luby, Macdonell, Mayo, Monck, Monsell, Stephens, and Teeling, as well as a microfilm copy of the Rossa Papers in the New York Public Library. The Irish National Archives is the deposit for the Burke Papers, the notebooks of Judge Keogh, the large mass of Fenian Papers, and the Registered Papers of the Chief Secretary’s Office. Similarly important to this study are the deposits at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, namely, those of Abercorn, Dufferin, and O’Hagan, as well as the diary of John Martin. The British National Archives, formerly the Public Record Office, in addition to the public records of the Colonial, Foreign, Home, and War Offices, the Treasury Solicitors Department, and the Metropolitan Police, hold the private papers of Robert Anderson, Carnarvon, Cairns, Granville, Earl Russell, and Odo Russell. The Bright Papers are to be found within the immense manuscript collection of the British Library, as are the Carlingford (Chichester Fortescue) diaries and the papers of Cranbrook

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(Hardy), Gladstone, Iddesleigh (Northcote), Peel, Rose (Strathnairn), and Ripon. There is also a small but useful collection of Fenian manuscripts. The Somerset Record Office holds a large body of Fortescue correspondence (Strachie manuscripts), and the Suffolk Record Office is the deposit for the bulk of the Hardy Papers. The Clarendon, Du Cane, Hughenden and Kimberly (Wodehouse) deposits are at the Bodleian Library, while the Reform League Papers and the Howell Collection are located in the Bishopsgate Library. The Finsbury Library is the custodian of the letterbook and minutes of the Clerkenwell Explosion Relief Fund. Finally, I wish to thank the two anonymous readers of the manuscript for their several helpful suggestions for its improvement, and also Kyla Madden of McGill-Queen’s University Press for again gently shepherding me through the system. Brian Jenkins Bishop’s University Sherbrooke, Canada

the fenian problem

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1 The Liberal State and Irish Nationalism

“England is unquestionably the freest – that is the least unfree – country in the world, North America not excepted,” wrote Friedrich Engels, no admirer of her social structure. “As a result, an educated Englishman has a degree of independence about him that no Frenchman, let alone a German, can boast of.” Less surprising was the opinion offered by the London Times. It identified as the creed of the Englishman a conviction that it was “natural and easy for a man to be free” so long as he was provided with a “King, an Upper and Lower Chamber, the right of refusing the supplies, the Habeas Corpus Act, and trial by jury.” Liberty, Britons were taught, was the engine of their nation’s progress. Together with their self-defined, sterling character traits – “self-control, reason, honesty, love for order and freedom, manliness, character, respect for law, sobriety, and a firm dislike for enthusiasm or emotionalism” – it was traced to AngloSaxon times. Another nod might have been given to the Reformation for advancing the liberty of conscience that in turn advanced liberty of thought and thus contributed to the Scientific Revolution, in which Britons played major roles. The cause of political liberty also prospered with the Glorious Revolution that abruptly halted the Stuart experiment with royal absolutism. Monarch and subject were now both tied up to the law, one pamphleteer boasted, so English princes could never become “‘Arbitrary, Absolute or Tyrants.’” The power of Parliament was confirmed and the frequency of its sessions ensured by control of the purse. The concept of the liberal state was further advanced by the late eighteenth-century public debate – to which Adam Smith made so influential a contribution – on the proper limits of state power. However, the era of the French Revolution was to reveal that legislative repression of liberties was always possible.1

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National self-consciousness about the United Kingdom’s distinctive political institutions increased as the nineteenth century wore on. Europe provided proof of just how unreasonable it was to expect from a nation “the power of self-government in its collective capacity” if its individual citizens had been “trained in habits of servility” and were accustomed “to submit to every species of vexatious interference in their private affairs from Ministers, from Gendarmes, and from the police.” The Crimean War in the middle of the 1850s was in the British public’s mind a conflict between constitutionalism and despotism, despite their nation’s alliance with a pair of illiberal empires, the French and the Ottoman. The British monarch was obliged to appoint ministers from the ranks of the members of Parliament, to which representative legislature they remained collectively responsible, while the publication of official journals and the presence of note-taking reporters ensured that the proceedings were widely known. Nevertheless, Radicals and many Liberals considered the suffrage too restricted, the distribution of seats unrepresentative, and the tradition of open voting too vulnerable to influence and intimidation – hence the ongoing agitation for franchise reform and the secret ballot. But the force of public opinion was already powerful enough to compel reluctant politicians to institute investigations of the embarrassingly inept conduct of the Russian war. Whigs, in particular, had long avowed their “unbounded faith” in publicity. It sparked their countrymen’s “proud and general disdain of all sordid and fraudulent oppressions, against which no tricking, or activity, or influence, can ever hope to stand: and which, when roused and directed, no Ministry can encounter, and live.” Publicity and enquiry, one prominent Tory subsequently confirmed, were the “life and soul of representative government.”2 The rights of assembly and petition, the free expression of opinion, whether in Parliament, at public meetings, or by the press, had been much admired by the philosophes of the Enlightenment and were considered vital expressions of the liberal state. William Blackstone, in his seminal Commentaries on the Laws of England (1756), had declared the liberty of the press “‘essential to the nature of a free state.’” There must be no previous restraints on publications, he added, but the man who publishes “‘what is improper, mischievous or illegal … must take the consequences of his own temerity.’” The crime of seditious libel was one of a government’s disciplinary weapons, while stamp duty had long priced newspapers out of the reach of the vast majority of the population. The final removal of the duty in 1861 changed all of that, and the proliferation of newspapers was matched by an exponential growth in readership as literacy levels

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rose. “Liberty of thought and speech is the very air which an Englishman breathes from his birth,” the Times liked to boast. Nor could liberty be limited by a restriction on “the range of subjects.” There existed in England an “unrestricted freedom to express every opinion and develop every interest,” Napoleon III declared to a group of his countrymen in 1863, before adding the significant rider that English liberty respected “the foundations on which society and state are built.”3 Britons flattered themselves that unlike Continentals they were not tracked by spies and informers and had no need to fear that their words were being “noted down for crimination.” In France, the well-known existence of the cabinet noir discouraged a number of prominent figures from expressing controversial political opinions, even in their private correspondence. Hence the rude awakening when it was revealed that letters addressed to the Italian refugee nationalist, Giuseppe Mazzini, had been intercepted and opened at the Post Office at the request of the Austrian ambassador. In truth, the Post Office, like the cabinet noir, had long been intercepting mail. England’s claim that she stood apart from other countries in that her citizens were not liable to the “same petty persecution, the same vigorous police, the same insidious and incessant watching, the same dogging of their footsteps, opening of their letters and prying into cabinets as harass the subjects of continental states,” could in the opinion of the Times no longer be “uttered with justice.” A parliamentary investigation saw the abolition of both the “‘secret’ branch of the Post Office,” which dealt with foreign letters, and the deciphering office, but the “‘Private’ branch,” which handled interceptions, continued to operate, albeit “at a much lower level of activity.”4 The rule of law and respect for due process, even in the face of subversion, were additional cornerstones of the liberal state. The protection of habeas corpus was a highly prized right of the subject, and Thomas Macaulay described it, in his immensely successful History of England, as “the most stringent curb that ever legislation imposed on tyranny.” Here was the bulwark against arbitrary imprisonment and indefinite detention, but it had been suspended in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The Bill of Rights (1689) had denounced excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments. Indeed, freedom from torture, the presumption of innocence, the doctrine of reasonable doubt, a judge sufficiently independent in terms of tenure and salary not to be immediately submissive to political pressures, a jury of peers duly “impannelled and returned,” and the requirement of juror unanimity for conviction were the further protections of an accused when put on trial. The elimination of trial by jury in France, together with

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the political repression and press censorship of the Second Empire, brought Britain’s liberal freedoms into even sharper focus.5 Although liberty of conscience was another of the freedoms practised by liberal Britain, she stopped short of religious equality. Moreover, popular eruptions of sectarian violence suggested a reflexive anti-Catholicism. During the legislative preoccupation with Catholic emancipation and in the ongoing quest for social stability and public peace, Robert Peel secured Parliament’s approval for the creation in the capital of a modern, professional police force. He prudently exempted the City. Having earlier experimented as chief secretary with a Peace Preservation Force in Ireland, he organized the Metropolitan Police in 1829 and selected a pair of Irishmen, one of them a young Richard Mayne, to be the first commissioners. Yet many Britons regarded an efficient force with some suspicion, for they had difficulty reconciling its existence with “that perfect freedom of action and exemption from interference which are the great privileges and blessings of society in this country.” Would it become a political police, leading as in France, Austria, and Prussia to a “police state”? The challenge was to establish policemen as the “embodiment of the ‘rule of law,’” always operating within its constitutional limits. The police, the Times declared, was “the only organ through which a thoroughly enlightened and paternal Government communicates with the nation at large.” Policemen went unarmed in Britain as visible proof that physical force would be employed only “sparingly and with discretion.” They were dressed in distinctive uniforms and walked their “beats” of fourteen miles in daylight, slightly longer at night, to prevent crime. The many provincial forces that were established between 1829 and 1856, numbering 239 in England and Wales, adopted London’s prevention model, and were neither unified nor centralized. Britain lacked a national police, which in the minds of many critics would have created an excessive concentration of power in the hands of the government, although provincial forces judged efficient by a minuscule national inspectorate were rewarded with partial state funding. Similarly, the formation of detective departments was retarded in London by Commissioner Mayne, who believed that the majority of Englishmen regarded plainclothes policemen “with the greatest suspicion and jealousy,” fearful they would speed the nation down the slippery slope to a police state. After all, a political police needed to be “essentially a detective police.” But taxpayer complaints of the expense of maintaining large preventive forces, a conviction that the solving of crime would prove less of a tax burden, the sensation of a number of horrifying murders, and the literary fillip given to the reputation of detectives by novelists such Charles

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Dickens, whose Inspector Bucket solved the murder in Bleak House, led to the creation of detective departments but not their adequate staffing. Moreover, London’s detectives were forbidden “to disguise themselves to detect.” In many forces, a constant rotation of men between uniformed and plainclothes duties, adopted largely as a means of countering the temptations of corruption, meant that British policemen were ill-organized for the purpose of ferreting out political subversives. The nation lacked a coordinated domestic intelligence service.6 Although the British police were unarmed, the Bill of Rights had provided that “the Subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law.” Evidently, this article did not create a general right to bear arms. Nevertheless, Blackstone included it among the five rights “which serve principally as the outworks or barriers, to protect and maintain inviolate the three great and primary rights, of personal security, personal liberty, and private property.” Even as subsequently restricted under the Six Acts (1819) and the Vagrancy Act (1824), the possession of arms could only be declared illegal if the authorities were able to prove an intent to use them in furtherance of an “unlawful conspiracy.” That this was not a case easily made complicated the task of denying firearms to potential subversives. And while a licensing system was introduced in Ireland, no ban on the possession of firearms was enacted in Britain, even though John Stuart Mill, in his manifesto On Liberty (1859), conceded to the state those coercive powers necessary to prevent one individual doing harm to others. What constituted harm he did not specify, though “irrational nationalistic obsessions” and the excitement of ethnic and racial enmity were manifestly harmful errors. All of the while, the ideological objection of this most influential of contemporary thinkers to state paternalism was being eroded at the edges by the growing belief that Parliament could improve the lot of the people.7 The Irish were regarded as one section of the nation’s citizenry who could ill-afford to do without government intervention and control. They differed “in race, in religion, in civilization, and in wealth” from the British, wrote a contributor to the Edinburgh Review. “To extend similar laws and institutions to countries not merely widely different but strongly contrasted” was in his opinion unsound and unwise. That Ireland had an anomalous constitutional position was evident in the survival of the viceroyalty. The lord lieutenant had his own Privy Council, law officers headed by an Irish lord chancellor, and a bureaucracy staffing a score of departments. The chief secretary provided a personal link between the Irish executive, or government as it was called, and Parliament in London. But

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British ministers failed to heed the advice of observers who warned that to treat Ireland as some “distant province” would foster national spirit and allow jealousy and prejudice to fester, for historic memory was another impediment to genuine integration. The Catholic Irish recalled massive land confiscations, plantations of English and Scots Protestant settlers, ethnic prejudice, sectarian enmity, penal laws, and the establishment of an alien church and a Protestant Ascendancy. Nor were they likely to forget the English arrogance of the author of the Union, who announced that it would be the means of eradicating Irish barbarism and ignorance while promoting prosperity and internal tranquility. Unhappily, English investment, such as it was, did not produce a diversified and robust economy. Instead, a population that had experienced dramatic growth could find little employment off the land and became ominously dependent on a single source of food. The Great Famine, when successive potato crops failed, provided seemingly incontrovertible proof that prosperity had not been the Irish progeny of the Union.8 The failure of Catholic emancipation to follow hard on the heels of the Union was another source of Irish disillusionment and sectarian bitterness, for the constitutional arrangement had not, as William Pitt the Younger had implied it would, rescued Ireland from the “rancour which bigotry engenders and superstition rears and cherishes.” They were now governed, the most influential member of the Catholic hierarchy informed his fellow religionists in 1809, by a state and people notoriously prejudiced against their faith and particularly hostile to the Catholic Irish. They remained excluded from senior offices, from Parliament, and ineligible for certain distinctions. The door to the legislature was finally unlocked with the passage of emancipation in 1829, but Irish Catholics could be forgiven for concluding that, rather than the British generously throwing the door open, Daniel O’Connell had kicked it in with his skilfully organized and brilliantly conducted mass agitation. A Catholic population astutely politicized through membership in the Catholic Association had every reason to think of itself as a Catholic nation. In the hope of gradually smoothing over religious differences, the Whigs put in place during the early 1830s an avowedly non-sectarian network of national schools in which Catholic and Protestant children might be educated together. Instead, the schools fell victim to the deepening sectarianism. Many Protestants refused to attend them, and thus they effectively became publicly funded denominational institutions with Catholic clergy serving as managers. Nor did all of them promote the “value system” of the state or counter the deeply rooted and cordial hatred of the English name and nation that in the

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opinion of the Edinburgh Review had long infected the “vast majority” of the Irish with a “strong nationality.”9 Sectarian injustice suffered at the hands of Protestant magistrates was one of the grievances of the agrarian secret societies whose “disastrous predilection for tumult” mocked Pitt’s promise of internal tranquility. Rural “marauders” savagely resisted the pressures of capitalist agriculture, fighting the consolidation of holdings and the conversion of tillage to pasturage. In the process, they reinforced a British image of the Irish peasantry as a peculiarly turbulent, ignorant, and disloyal people “not influenced by the same feelings as appear to affect mankind in other countries.” The vast majority were accused of maintaining “a savage code,” and the difficulty of finding owners and occupiers willing to prosecute agrarian “terrorists,” or witnesses willing to testify, or jurors willing to convict, prompted a centralization of the forces of law that again distinguished Ireland from England. Ironically, the fact that the decision on prosecutions now rested with the attorney general in Dublin, that cases were conducted by Crown solicitors, and that a centralized system was put in place for the vetting of jurors, which as critics pointed out also facilitated jury packing, meant not only that the state was ever more closely identified with every failure of justice and every unpopular attempt to uphold the law, but that the Irish had been provided with an additional excuse to assail the “English Government.” The law now wore a “foreign garb.” But the seemingly endemic rural violence also encouraged a parallel centralization of the instrument of order, the police, which again marked Ireland off from England and Wales. Four provincial police forces were incorporated into a national constabulary in 1836, commanded by an inspector general directly responsible to the Executive. By mid-century, the force exceeded 12,000 men, and with the exception of the metropolitan forces of Dublin and Belfast, it was armed.10 The passage of a poor law similar to that introduced in England, but manifestly ill-suited to Ireland’s peculiar needs, was another on the Irish list of complaints skilfully exploited by the “Liberator” of the Catholic Irish. Daniel O’Connell marshalled dissatisfaction with the Union into a formidable popular force. Adapting the organizational model that had proven so successful in the emancipation crusade, he founded the Repeal Association to agitate for a dissolution of the constitutional marriage with Great Britain. For allies, he again turned to Catholic clergy, widely considered virtually irresistible in popular politics. Bishops and priests, their alienation from the Protestant state heightened by an aggressive and provocative Protestant crusade to convert the Catholic masses, were assured

10

The Fenian Problem

by O’Connell that a truly Irish parliament would be devotedly Catholic and ultramontane, and before long the Union appeared to be bereft of priestly support. The “gospel of nationalism,” when preached from the altar, promised to be especially effective in rousing an ill-educated peasantry, either too poor or too illiterate to read the nationalist press. O’Connell’s rejection of Britishness offered the Catholic Irish a satisfyingly response to the British dismissal of them as an “inferior and degraded caste.” The great majority of Irishmen had no need to invent or imagine the “subjective sense of discrimination” so “intrinsic to the construction of a separate identity.”11 Although O’Connell was careful to assert the Repeal Association’s loyalty to the Crown, there was no disguising the large measure of national selfdetermination he sought. If vitriolic assaults on the “English Parliament” and bitter criticism of the “Saxon” heightened ethnic consciousness and threatened to inflame racial antipathy, this divisive rhetoric created common ground between the Liberator and a new generation of nationalists. Young Ireland was an elitist and didactic movement that promoted the recreation of a distinctively Irish civilization and identity. Thomas Davis, its iconic spokesman, berated the English “Saxons” as a mongrel people guilty of a treacherous and savage rule of Ireland. The United Kingdom, clerical and secular nationalists instructed Irishmen, was alien to their ethnic and cultural identity and thus illegitimate and oppressive. This message the Nation, the propaganda organ of Young Ireland, hammered home every week to a readership that far exceeded its impressive circulation. The poor were able to read it, and the illiterate have it read to them, in the reading rooms set up by the Repeal Association. The state’s response to the nationalist challenge did little to enhance its liberal reputation. The monster meetings being staged by O’Connell were suppressed, magistrates sympathetic to repeal were dismissed from the bench, a restrictive arms bill was rushed through Parliament, and O’Connell along with Gavan Duffy, the editor of the Nation, and several others were indicted on charges of seeking to dissolve the Union by means of intimidation and of conspiring to excite popular discontent, class hatred, disaffection in the army, and contempt for the institutions of justice. The Liberator’s conviction was reversed after fourteen weeks of “martyrdom.”12 Robert Peel, the Conservative prime minister, did embark on a more sophisticated effort to disrupt the nationalist agitation. By demonstrating that Catholics might “practically reap the advantage of their nominal equality as to civil rights,” he hoped to conciliate at least a sizable portion of the Catholic middle classes together with the moderate minority within

The Liberal State and Irish Nationalism

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the hierarchy. Nevertheless, his reform package was vituperatively rejected by a disturbingly disparate band of critics. Ultra-Protestants on one side of the sectarian divide and the ultra-nationalists of the hierarchy on the other reviled as “Godless” the three non-denominational university colleges established to provide the middle classes with higher education. The more generous public funding that Peel provided to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth inevitably encountered organized and semi-hysterical Protestant opposition but was also excoriated by one of the most widely admired members of the hierarchy, John MacHale, who characterized it as a crude bribe. Yet the legislative program, while it ultimately shattered the unity of the Tory party, did achieve its principal objective of disrupting the “formidable confederacy” against the British connection. Within the hierarchy, the nationalist majority was soon at the throats of the three moderates who wished to work with the government, while O’Connell broke with the Young Irelanders. The latter were angered by the episcopal denunciations of Peel’s conciliatory measures, finding in them a return to sectarian politics, and were driven to fury by clerical condemnation of the Nation as un-Catholic and un-Christian. The newspaper’s sin was its promotion of writers whom the priests considered antithetical to the traditions and faith of Catholic Ireland. Thomas Davis and John Mitchel were Protestants. O’Connell’s siding with the bishops led Young Irelanders to accuse him of putting church before nation. They were equally critical of his personal conduct. His vanity, his vulgarity, his demagoguery, and his nepotism appalled and disgusted them. He was tarnishing the shining cause for which they were crusading. O’Connell responded by expelling the Young Irelanders from the Repeal Association and banning the Nation from its reading rooms. His excuse was the their refusal to repudiate any possible resort to physical force. They could not bring themselves to abandon the inherently revolutionary character of their nationalism or give ironclad guarantees to the British.13 Death on a massive scale breathed fresh life into the national cause. The cautious if not callous and inevitably inadequate response of the British government to the Great Famine invited harsh Irish criticism. Ireland was being treated like some foreign farm, O’Connell complained. Had she had her own parliament, then Irish foodstuffs would have been kept at home to rescue the starving people. The Nation was soon levelling the accusation that became an article of nationalist faith: “The potato blight is the dispensation of Providence – the famine is the work of a foreign government.” Adding its powerful voice to the chorus of bitter criticism, the hierarchy savaged the relief program as inhumane and unjust and laid famine deaths

12

The Fenian Problem

at Westminster’s door. Nevertheless, there was some acknowledgment in Ireland of the partial responsibility of fellow Irishmen for the tragedy. Farmers, merchants, millers, bakers, and provisions hucksters were profiteering during the crisis. But as one senior relief administrator warned the Treasury, by the “scantiness of relief” it was leaving itself open to the charge of “slowly murdering the peasantry.”14 This charge was brought by John Mitchel, one Young Irelander radicalized by first-hand observation of the famine. Ulster Protestant by birth, lawyer by profession, and literary firebrand by avocation, he concluded that the British had seized the opportunity of this human tragedy finally to subjugate the Irish. His fervent hatred of all things English was reflected in the columns of the Nation, for the tone of the movement’s weekly became incendiary and violent during his temporary occupation of the editor’s chair. The Young Irelanders as a body, following their expulsion from the Repeal Association, had organized the Irish Confederation to achieve Ireland’s legislative independence “by the force of public opinion, by the combination of all classes of Irishmen, and by the exercise of all political, social and moral influences within their reach.” Its more radical elements, to which Mitchel adhered, spoke of restoring Ireland’s national integrity by force of arms. He announced, in January 1848, a new newspaper with the meaningful masthead of the United Irishman, in which he argued that physical force was the only means by which freedom could be won. On the other hand, he cautioned against an attempt at rebellion while Great Britain remained at peace. Her involvement in a foreign war, or the distraction of a serious domestic upheaval, should serve as the signal for an Irish rising.15 The Whig government, led by Lord John Russell, responded with the prosecution of several leaders of the Irish Confederation for seditious libel. When they escaped conviction, thanks to hung juries, Mitchel was brought to court charged with the new non-capital offence of treason-felony. He was convicted by a jury of sectarian peers, but it was his harsh sentence of transportation for fourteen years that outraged fellow nationalists and many other Irishmen not associated with the cause. Meanwhile, to ease the business of arrests, a habeas corpus suspension bill was rushed through Parliament. The ease with which this temporary negation of the rule of law made its way onto to the statute book provided radical nationalists with fresh ammunition against constitutionalists, primarily the phalanx of elected Repealers now led by the late Liberator’s son. They failed to mount an effective opposition to the coercive measures. All the while, the Whigs increased the pressure. They leaked to the press their decisions to

The Liberal State and Irish Nationalism

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reinforce the military garrison and the naval stations, to proclaim illegal the political clubs formed by the confederation, and to sanction police and military sweeps in search of caches of weapons.16 The repressive measures galvanized elements of the Irish Confederation into a “defensive” action that proved Mitchel’s point about the timing of a rising. The men who rallied to the gentleman revolutionary Smith O’Brien at Ballingarry, County Tipperary, on 29 July 1848, surrendered to a modest detachment of police after a brief skirmish. Yet this “cabbage-patch” rebellion, as the British press scornfully dismissed it, prompted an investigation of the role of priests. A number of them, amidst the terrible suffering of the famine, had declared void the social contract between the British government and the Irish people. Some had acted as organizers of the confederation’s political clubs, which quickly established a reputation for radical nationalism, and one revolutionary nationalist later affirmed that it was frequently difficult to determine “where the clergy’s dislike of Protestantism ended and their loathing of England began.” Senior figures in the hierarchy privately admitted that priests had been guilty of promoting the excitement that ended so ingloriously at Ballingarry, and Smith O’Brien may well have been convinced that nationalist clergy would rally to him and bring a peasant army with them. A rudimentary opinion survey circulated by the Irish Executive among the magistracy in the rising’s aftermath offered some support for bitter rebel complaints that priests had encouraged subversive organizations only to desert them at the critical moment. Thus the magistrates agreed that the Catholic clergy had ultimately ensured the rebellion’s failure by counselling the peasantry not to become involved. This last-minute stand was the product, in part, of a lingering suspicion of Protestant influence on the Young Ireland movement; of late news from Paris of “red revolution” and the murder of its archbishop; of the threat to the pope’s temporal authority from Italian nationalists; and of the certainty that a rising at this time was doomed.17 In 1848, the leadership of the failed rebellion had looked for assistance to the Irish nation in “exile,” those countrymen who had settled overseas. This was not surprising, since not only had the Irish emigrated in huge number but nationalism had emerged as an enduring feature of the diaspora. The pace of the emigration was breathtaking, with two million quitting their native land during the years of the Great Famine alone. Although British North America had during the early nineteenth century been the first choice of most emigrants, the swelling human stream had gradually been diverted to the United States. Other emigrants got no farther than Britain, where the Irish population, exclusive of the British-born children

14

The Fenian Problem

of immigrant parents, was put at 800,000 in 1861. The far smaller number who made it to Australia, long the depository of felons and political dissidents, such as Young Irelanders, still formed a significant minority of the population there.18 The trauma of emigration, involving as it did the leaving of family, friends, familiar places, and customs, was all too frequently worsened by the terrors of the voyage. Imperfect laws governing the carriage of passengers, the inadequate enforcement of those rules that were in place, the failure to screen out the sick before vessels set sail, insufficient provisions, inattention to personal hygiene, and primitive sanitary facilities ensured that disease was a fellow passenger. Although statistics suggest a low death rate over the extended period of mass migration, there were more than enough “coffin ships” on the Atlantic run to leave another tragic imprint on the Irish historic memory. The unseemly and bitter ethnic and sectarian squabbles that frequently erupted among the passengers undoubtedly strengthened the Catholic Irish conviction of their distinct and separate identity from the British. The Catholic Irish also acquired a reputation for carrying as part of their baggage both “undying love” of their native land and “vehement hatred” of Great Britain, which led them into conspiracies seeking revenge for what they considered centuries of English persecution and oppression. This was certainly a central theme of The Irish in America, published in 1868 by John Francis Maguire, the owner of the nationalist Cork Examiner and Liberal member of Parliament for the city.19 Young men and women, the genders frequently almost evenly balanced, provided a high proportion of Irish emigrants. The pull of hope was usually stronger for them than the push of despair, and their experiences had much in common wherever they made their new homes. While many men did enter the middle classes, via the professions, commerce, or journalism, the vast majority occupied one of the lowest rungs on the occupational ladder. They joined the ranks of unskilled labour. Overwhelmingly products of an agricultural economy, they worked the land when that was possible. Thus, in Australia they scattered across the land, though they also gathered in number in Sydney and Melbourne. Similarly, in British North America they laboured on farms and farm holdings but were a conspicuous presence in the colonies’ burgeoning cities, such as Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec. In the United States and Britain, industrializing and industrial economies respectively, they collected in manufacturing centres, mill and mining towns, large and small. There, alongside the native born, they occupied the hovels and rookeries denounced by reformers as a disgrace to any civilized nation. But the Irish were accused of making

The Liberal State and Irish Nationalism

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the deplorable and unhealthy slum conditions worse by engaging in a form of animal husbandry that disregarded basic sanitation and provided breeding grounds for diseases. Residential clustering, whether in areas of cities, in “paddy camps,” in American mill towns, in Irish streets or an Irish courtyard, or simply in a collection of Irish houses, meant that the Irish lived cheek by jowl with the non-Irish poor. However, “enclave consciousness” saw the Irish maintain social distance. Family migration, kinship, common place of origin, similar occupation, the ability to marry within their own ethno-religious community, and the fear of being defiled or corrupted by association with peoples from whom they differed in morals, manners, customs, habits, and religion, all helped to explain the self-segregation, the drive to form a community within a community. This strengthened in turn their political influence in societies with a liberal franchise. In British North America, their politicization was encouraged by a number of priests and by a group of editorpoliticians seeking to build careers on their ethnic affiliation, such as Thomas D’Arcy McGee. Gavan Duffy, the former editor of the Nation, made a melodramatic appeal to the same constituency following his emigration to Australia. He remained an Irish rebel to the very core, he declared, but then went on to build a very successful political career entirely within the colonial context. In Great Britain, prior to the second Reform Bill, Irish political activity was largely restricted to involvement in radical movements, such as Chartism. Only in the United States, where universal, white manhood suffrage was steadily being adopted, did the Catholic Irish emerge before mid-century as a truly formidable political force.20 At a time when politics appeared to “enter into everything” in the American republic, Irishmen discovered they were well equipped to capitalize. A great many of them had a command of English, were functionally literate, had participated in or observed Daniel O’Connell’s extraparliamentary agitations for Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Union, and had become familiar with the “Eatanswill” carnival of elections. The minority who had been members of the agrarian secret societies had the additional advantage of a grounding in the more sinister arts of political persuasion and the rewards of loyalty and obedience. Not surprisingly, American politicians, especially Democrats with their tradition of welcoming immigrants, saw in the Irish the means of broadening their party’s popular base. Irish Americans quickly became important cogs in big-city political machines, much to the chagrin of many of their American hosts. American “nativists” complained that long subservience to British rule had produced in the Catholic Irish habits of servility and dependence that

16

The Fenian Problem

were making them willing tools of unethical American politicians. They also excited animosity, an Irish priest admitted, with their “disorderly conduct, absurd prejudices, [and] half-civilized and intemperate mode of life.” Their unsavoury reputation for drunkenness and violence, their identification with epidemics of disease, their “clannishness,” their driving down of wages in the labour market, and their dependence on public relief told heavily against them in British North America and Australia as well as the United States. Host hostility reinforced their self-segregation, and it was this visibility that made them such an easy target of detractors. “If they only blended harmoniously with the population among whom they are located, no one would have any right to complain of their presence,” an English newspaper observed. It conveniently overlooked the extent to which they were shunned.21 Denigration of the Irish acquired a more sinister aspect in both the United States and Britain with the emergence of “scientific racism.” Massive Irish immigration occurred just as the American intellectual world introduced the new science of ethnology and dabbled in such associated pseudo-sciences as phrenology. Much of the mental energy was dedicated to the task of establishing, “scientifically,” Caucasian supremacy over persons with darker skins. By mid-century, few American ethnologists disputed the existence of a hierarchy of races at the peak of which sat Anglo-Saxons. The immensely popular novels of Walter Scott and an American edition of Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons, issued four decades after its first appearance in England at the opening of the century, helped to convince many Americans that the innate endowments for which the Anglo-Saxons were being celebrated – love of liberty and liberal institutions of government – were those that their own nation exemplified. It was the English, however, who transformed the myth of a chosen people into a doctrine of racial supremacy. George Combe, who asserted that national character was shaped by the capacity of the skull, identified the Teutons as worthy of peculiar praise but singled out AngloSaxons as the dominant members of the “race.” Although phrenology suffered a serious loss of intellectual credibility with the discovery that the brains of some criminals had been larger than those of some professors, it continued to enjoy a measure of popular acceptance. But scientific racism received another powerful impetus with the publication in 1850 of Robert Knox’s The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations.22 Knox had been a successful Edinburgh anatomist, but his professional career had been fatally damaged by his innocent association with William

The Liberal State and Irish Nationalism

17

Burke and William Hare, two men who may have murdered as many as sixteen people to sell the bodies to Knox’s students for dissection. Reduced to “hack journalism and lecturing,” Knox made a new career elaborating on the “racial traits” he had emphasized in his biology lectures. “Race is everything,” he continued to teach, “literature, science, art – in a word civilization depends on it.” This was the central theme of his book, and his “racial determinism” was so widely circulated in the press that he accused the editor of the Times of plagiarism. Another follower was James Hunt, who quit the Ethnological Society in 1862 to found the Anthropological Society. He and his colleagues believed the Irish problem was one they could solve by allowing the deceased Knox to instruct them from the grave. The “anthropological doctor,” as Hunt dubbed him, had published an article in the Medical Times shortly before the Great Famine in which he dilated on the “congenital inferiority” of the Irish. The Celt, according to Knox, was a paradoxical amalgam of virtues and vices, but the latter greatly outnumbered and outweighed the former. So the presence on Britain’s soil of three divisions of the Celtic race was a source of national danger. The Welsh and Scottish Celts were sufficiently quiescent and too few in number to present a serious problem, but their numerous and turbulent Irish brethren were to be dreaded. England’s security demanded that this “race” be driven from her soil, and by whatever means necessary. All of these messages were delivered by the press and by the likes of the muscular Christian Charles Kingsley to the middle classes.23 Many influential Britons scorned “ethnocentric prejudices.” T.H. Huxley, noted Darwinian and leading light of the scientific community, rejected the Punch description of the Irish immigrant as the evolutionary chain’s “missing link” between the “Gorilla and the Negro.” Matthew Arnold was even more positive, finding much to admire in the Celtic personality and literature, though he supported neither the preservation of their languages, Welsh and Gaelic being mutually unintelligible, nor Irish demands for greater political autonomy. His solution for the Irish problem was the development of a British race that united the best qualities of Anglo-Saxon and Celt. The press, meanwhile, continued to refer to the “aboriginal Celt,” and it urged members of the Aborigines Protection Society to visit Britain’s Irish slums, or “Kraals,” before discussing the rights and wrongs of Africans. Then, in 1862, John Beddoe provided readers of his Races of Britain with an “Index of Nigrescence” based on hair type. The Celts were “darker and more melanous” than persons of Saxon or Scandinavian origin, he concluded, and those of western Ireland were “Africanoid.” In short, at least to their own satisfaction, the English press considered that the

18

The Fenian Problem

“immense and self-evident” English superiority over the Celts had been scientifically confirmed and racially explained. And while large elements of the British working class were also invested by middle-class observers with “mental primitivism,” the Irish stood apart as “unreformable savages.” An important reason for this was their religion. Catholicism, Thomas Carlyle announced, was “the faith of the racially inferior because the racially inferior embraced it.”24 John Henry Newman, one of the Church of England’s most notable defectors to the Church of Rome, identified anti-Catholicism as a first principle of his fellow countrymen, but he might have lengthened the indictment to embrace the nonconformist Welsh and the Presbyterian Scots. Most Britons and Americans considered Protestantism the very basis of their respective civilizations. Similarly, in distant Australia, immigration quotas were promoted as an essential means to prevent the subversion of British character by Catholic Irishmen, who were denounced as doubly alien, Irish in a British land and Catholic in a Protestant one. Protestants accused the Catholic Church of withholding from its members the true word of God, the unedited Bible; they fulminated against the broad range of priestly intercessory powers; scorned the confessional as another instrument of clerical power and a source of immorality; deplored celibacy as unnatural, a denigration of marriage and perhaps a spur to homosexuality; levelled accusations of idolatry and superstition; charged the papacy with megalomania and centuries of persecution; denounced it as an ally of despotism and tyranny; and thus convicted it of being an obstacle to human progress. Bishops summoned to Rome in 1862, to celebrate the canonization of Japanese martyrs, reportedly heard a diatribe against freedom of worship, while the Syllabus of Errors issued by Pius ix two years later was widely read as a condemnation of “religious liberty and freedom of conscience.” Moreover, the strength of ultramontanes within national hierarchies provided Protestants with fresh ammunition in the battle to prove that ordinary Catholics could not be trusted politically. They were unworthy of the rights of a liberal state because they gave their first allegiance to the pope and were not honour-bound to keep faith with “heretics.” Sectarian demagogues, among them unfrocked priests, took these messages to the streets with predictably riotous consequences. There were sectarian clashes in Britain, British North America, and the United States, where lodges of the Orange Order, hailed by Robert Knox as a Saxon confederation for clearing the land of papists and rebels, endeavoured to counter Catholic influence.25

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It was the dramatic growth of the Roman Catholic Church following the arrival in their midst of the Irish in unprecedented numbers that unnerved Protestants almost everywhere. By mid-century, the Irish constituted fourfifths of the membership of the English branch of the church, and this transformation coincided with the emergence of a more “aggressive and exclusive” Catholicism that would eventually have excited controversy even without the “hibernization” of the laity and the pope’s re-establishment of a hierarchy in England and Wales. Elsewhere, in several of the British North American and Australian colonies, as well as in the United States, the clergy was progressively hibernized. This development intensified the criticism of, and opposition to, the Catholic Church and its seemingly ever-expanding influence. It prohibited marriage outside the Catholic Irish community, fostered “enclave consciousness,” and rejected public education at a time when it was seen in British North America and the neighbouring republic as an essential instrument of immigrant integration and assimilation. Catholic bishops demanded public funding of denominational schools in order to provide the young with the “repellant strength against the insidious workings of Anglo-Saxonism and all its soul killing tendencies.” Thus did the church embrace its faithful in a network of “personal relationships, parish organizations and ethnic institutions” that provided them with greater homogeneity. However, it was far from being the vast monolith of fevered Protestant imaginations.26 The English Catholic Church, for example, was riven by differences, suspicions, and ethnic tension. “Old Catholics” distrusted converts; ultramontanes were disliked by clergy who preferred “English habits of belief and devotion” and insisted on the need for an English face; Liberal Catholics resisted submission to priests, who demanded they “reject the results of modern political and social science”; English Catholics, clergy and laity, despised the Irish immigrants as members of a “savage nation” and were angered by their political preoccupation, and that of many Irish priests, with events in their homeland. Much the same story was told in Scotland. Similarly, ethnic differences bedevilled the church in British North America, where Irish clergy were often at odds with the dominant FrenchCanadian hierarchy. In the American republic, the hierarchy’s Irish complexion was resented by Catholic Germans, who had entered the United States in considerable numbers, and by some native-born Americans, who no less than the English and the Scots desired a church in their own national image. The pragmatic solution to this multi-ethnic puzzle was the creation of national parishes, and they proved to be one of the

20

The Fenian Problem

Catholic Church’s significant contributions to the development of emigrant Irish nationalism.27 In the “ethnic villages” of North America, the Catholic Church created an environment ideal for the cultivation of nationalism. Men familiar with O’Connell’s campaigns, and with the involvement in them of the priesthood, imported the identification of faith and fatherland as part of their mental baggage. Denominational schools, especially those staffed by Christian Brothers, perpetuated Irish identity and used textbooks that dwelt upon a history of oppression suffered at the hands of the English. St Patrick’s Day celebrations were enlivened by sermons deploring the “tyrannical oppression, unjust taxation, iniquitous ejectments and robbery” draining Ireland of bone and sinew. An ethnic press, often closely associated with the church, exploited the motif of involuntary Irish emigration, or exile, and demanded repeal of the Union. In the British territories, however, bold expressions of Irish nationalism were usually confined to colonies with a Catholic majority or to cities where the Catholic Irish formed substantial communities. The ethnic rivalry of French Canadians and Catholic Irish; the determination of a French-Canadian hierarchy to distance itself from fellow Catholics whose loyalty to the state was suspect and for whom several bishops expressed profound contempt; the Protestant preponderance in most colonies; and the strength of colonial nationalism, all helped to ensure that the Catholic Church in British North America did not act as an institutional promoter of Irish nationalism. But one bishop in Canada West was an exception to this rule.28 John Joseph Lynch, born and largely educated in Ireland, ordained at Maynooth, had seen brief service in his homeland during the early months of the Great Famine before being despatched to the United States as a missionary. Having distinguished himself as an educator and an administrator, he was appointed coadjutor with right of succession in the Diocese of Toronto. To that city he brought the conviction that Catholic Irish Canadians owed a primary loyalty to their unhappy homeland. He publicly urged Irish-American associations to combine and stretch “a helping hand across the ocean” to their “persecuted and impoverished brethren,” the victims of penal laws and tyrannical oppression. He smiled broadly upon the intensely nationalistic Hibernian Benevolent Association; revived the St Patrick’s Day celebrations and parades, which his predecessor had halted because of the disturbances accompanying them in a city where Irish Protestants had also settled in large numbers; and sat on the reviewing stand while the association’s leader, Michael Murphy, delivered impassioned denunciations of British tyranny. By his very presence, let alone his

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own controversial remarks on occasion, Lynch appeared to be lending support to radical Irish nationalism. Indeed, one of his young priests complained of his “extreme national views.” They were more commonly held and expressed by the members of the American “hibernarchy.”29 Although the archbishop of Baltimore was the formal primate of the American church, John Hughes quickly emerged as the hierarchy’s dominant figure and Catholicism’s chief spokesman. Appointed bishop of New York in 1842, he presided over the nation’s largest Irish community and strove to mould his charges into “an ethnically exclusive, militantly Catholic body.” In the process, he alienated German and black Catholics. Aggressive, arrogant, argumentative, adversarial, he flayed Protestantism, public education, mixed marriages, and even those fellow priests who entered into ecumenical association with “heretics.” He was an Irish nationalist and an anglophobe. He instructed his fellow countrymen that they had been crushed by “an apostate nation” and were martyrs of their faith. He repeated the refrain of several members of the Irish hierarchy that there had been no genuine famine in Ireland. Instead, the heartless enforcement of a political philosophy had left the Irish too poor to purchase the food they produced and encouraged its shipment to England. A heavily Irish clergy that had long exhibited anti-English sentiments willingly followed this lead. Across the land, St Patrick’s Day celebrations rang with clerical affirmations of passionate nationalism in which hatred of England often appeared to outweigh love of Ireland. Nationalist clergy were loudly supported by a powerful Catholic, ethnic press, of which the Boston Pilot and New York Irish American were the most influential, though most editors glorified the Irishman’s “religious and racial distinctiveness,” emphasized the strong bond between immigrant and homeland, provided extensive coverage of Irish affairs, published Irish stories, and advocated an aggressive, uncompromising nationalism.30 That a strident nationalism took root among the Irish communities of Britain was somewhat more surprising, given native control of the Catholic Church in both England and Scotland. Yet many of the conditions favourable to its growth existed there. Immigrants to Britain, as those to the United States and British North America, had a mindset in which religion and nationalism were already one. The Catholic parish in Britain served much the same function as it did across the Atlantic. It encouraged “a fervently nationalist piety” and provided an alternative to assimilation into the host society. In short, even in Britain, and however unintentionally, the church created an environment in which the milk of nationalism on which so many of the Irish had been nursed at home would continue to

22

The Fenian Problem

be a source of nourishment. Visiting Irish priests, such as Patrick Lavelle, a notoriously radical nationalist, urged the Irish of Britain to form “an exclusive foreign colony” with its separate nationality. Those priests who arrived to help to staff the rapidly expanding church – and they were a significant minority in both London and large areas of Lancashire – sought to replicate the parish activities with which they were familiar at home. Among the most controversial of these was an involvement in nationalist politics, which dismayed English and Scottish superiors and profoundly irritated the native laity. Bishop Goss of Liverpool fully understood the opposition of his fellow Lancastrians to the appointment of priests who came “from a country where nationality seems to override every other feeling.” In Wales, the bishop of Menevia suspended an Irish priest for arousing his Irish parishioners against the English, whereas Bishop Brown of Shrewsbury expelled from his diocese an Irish priest who had not only indulged in such rhetoric but also praised revolutionary nationalists. “From all I hear,” Brown wrote to the president of All Hallows, Dublin, the seminary for the training of missionary priests destined for Britain and overseas, “this anti-English feeling is very much fostered amongst your men. The other Bishops find the same, and it will require your serious attention, if you would render your Students fit for the English mission.” The same complaint was lodged by a succession of vicars apostolic in Scotland’s Western District, where so many Irish had settled. The habits, ideas, customs, manners, and “violent political feelings” of Irish priests were unacceptable to the Scots population, the bishops declared, and any who wished to pursue their vocation in Britain had to consider themselves “sent by God to preach the Gospel to Foreign nations, in place of preaching to them Irish politics.”31 With the encouragement of priests, of newspapers that catered to Irish immigrants, such as the Glasgow Free Press, and of British Radicals, such as Ernest Jones, a leading Chartist who endorsed not only greater Irish political autonomy but also the use of physical force, Catholic Irishmen living in Britain rallied first to branches of the Repeal Association and then to the Irish Confederation. Confederate clubs sprang up in London and a number of industrial centres. The middle-class Confederates made good use of the surviving oath-bound network of Ribbonmen earlier established by Irish labourers, for Catholicism was an essential qualification for membership and “national independence through rebellion and violence” a professed objective of a movement that had begun life in Ireland as an agrarian secret society. An elaborate conspiracy appears to have been hatched in Liverpool in 1848 involving a campaign of arson on the docks,

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23

the opening of an ironmonger’s shop for the sale of inexpensive weapons, a raid on nearby Chester Castle to seize its arsenal, the despatch of agents to the United States to raise funds, and the launching of a local expeditionary force to aid rebels in Ireland. The authorities crushed the conspirators. Thousands of citizens were enrolled as special constables, 500 dockyard workers were dismissed for refusing to be sworn as guards, gunboats patrolled the Mersey, and local Confederate clubs were raided and the leadership arrested. Ten of the detained men were placed on trial, of whom nine were convicted and sentenced to short terms of imprisonment. However, this incident had underscored the difficulties in a liberal state of thwarting political conspiracies. The law was defective, one well-placed observer complained, for it hampered searches for arms given the legality of their possession, denied the police entry to private residences where subversive clubs were suspected of meeting, and did not permit the gaoling of men who were preaching what amounted to rebellion.32 In the United States, middle-class immigrants and second-generation Irish Americans took the lead in organizing branches of the Repeal Association. They forwarded tens of thousands of dollars to Dublin. Far larger sums were raised, and even more virulent criticism of Britain expressed, during the Great Famine. Belligerent talk of creating an arms fund, of boycotting British goods, and of marching on Canada, found a clearer focus with the organization of local “Directories” affiliated with the Irish Confederation. Large sums were raised, and plots were hatched to invade Canada in coordination with rebellion in Ireland. Against the backdrop of an extended Canadian political crisis, Lord Elgin, the governor general, took seriously the reports in 1848 of Irish Canadians taking secret oaths in preparation for an “outbreak” in alliance with Irish Americans. After all, branches of the Repeal Association had been organized in the Atlantic colonies and in Canada West. However, it was soon apparent that the far more radical Irish Republican Union, which Elgin believed the Americans had planted in the province, was languishing, while the introduction of Irish politics into Canada was being denounced by “respectable” Repealers. John Hughes, on the other hand, publicly excused the use of violence in Ireland and personally donated $500 to the cause. This the Confederation of United Friends of Ireland cited as proof of the church’s approval of rebellion.33 The Irish rebels who fled to the United States, where their blaming of the priesthood for the ignominious failure of the rising saw an embarrassed Hughes excoriate them, were determined to reinforce the republican separatism of Irish Americans. They strove to sustain revolutionary nationalism

24

The Fenian Problem

by rooting it ever more deeply in hatred of England, and this was a cause to which John Mitchel devoted himself. Through the columns of the Citizen, which he launched in New York not long after his arrival there in 1853 following his escape from Van Dieman’s Land, through his Jail Journal, which was first published in serial form in the newspaper, and then in his series of public letters that were later distributed in book form as The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), Mitchel proudly paraded his pathological anglophobia. He offered readers a catalogue of English crimes and tyrannies, and claimed for himself the distinction of proving that nationalists had no option other than violence in Ireland. Indeed, with the charge of genocide that he brought against Britain, he provided his countrymen with the most profound justification of its employment. This call to arms, and with it the abandonment of the constitutional pursuit of constitutional change, resonated in Ireland and the United States, where social and political violence often seemed endemic.34 Among the veterans of the 1848 rebellion who remained committed to physical force was James Stephens. Son of a petty bourgeois Catholic family, briefly a seminarian before selecting civil engineering as his professional career, connected on his mother’s side to the United Irishmen, whose rebellion had precipitated the Union, Stephens claimed patriotism as a family inheritance. His service as an aide to Smith O’Brien, the rising’s hapless leader, had taught him several hard lessons of insurgency – the folly of challenging the state without resolute leadership, the necessity of most thorough planning and careful preparation, and the need to reject any over-scrupulous adherence to “strictly honourable tactics.” His escape to Paris placed him at the intellectual centre of revolutionary nationalism. There dissident Poles, Hungarians, Germans, and Italians were already gathered. There, it is claimed, the words socialism and communism were first used. There the importance of the press as a vital weapon of mass mobilization, which both the United Irishmen and O’Connell had recognized, was reinforced, though the warning issued by Chateaubriand, that regimes that rise by the press are likely to fall by the press, ought to have been kept in mind. There also he received instruction in the fundamentals of conspiracy – commitment to secrecy, the enforcement of hierarchical discipline rooted in absolute obedience to superiors, the enrolment of the conspirators in a brotherhood, thereby symbolically embracing them in a fraternity with its implied commitment to the equality of men, and the necessity of violence as an instrument of freedom. The Italian Carbonari provided one organizational model, and Stephens appears to have been especially influenced by Auguste Blanqui, who as a member of the French

The Liberal State and Irish Nationalism

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version of the secret society argued for, in the first instance, an exclusive concentration on the overthrow of an illegitimate government and for a form of revolutionary elitism with respect to leadership, which sat well with Stephens as a former Young Irelander.35 Stephens returned quietly to Ireland in 1855 and two years later met with Irish-American emissaries bearing promises of men and money in support of rebellion. He set two conditions for any understanding: first, a regular and assured supply of adequate funds; and second, his absolute control of the organization. On 17 March 1858, a small group of men, among them Thomas Clarke Luby, Charles Kickham, John Devoy, and John O’Leary, swore an oath of secrecy and obedience to superior officers. The Irish Revolutionary (later Republican) Brotherhood’s objective was the overthrow of “English rule” and the creation of an independent Irish republic, to which end it would “teach republican principles and revolutionary action.” Its structure was cellular, composed of units called “circles” of which the largest held 800 members. Within this large circumference sat a series of smaller circles, the smallest containing perhaps a dozen men at most, each supposedly hermetically sealed. In reality, members of one circle often knew those forming others, with the result that the Brotherhood was never as secure as it was designed to be.36 Disappointed with the miserable sum brought back by the first fundraiser despatched to the United States, Stephens crossed the Atlantic himself in the autumn of 1858. He was not impressed either with the republic, its capital, and its president, to whom he was introduced at a reception, or with Irish-American nationalists. Mitchel, for example, he dismissed as lacking deep knowledge of the Irish people and too self-centred to be a genuine patriot. Exempted from this catalogue of negativity was John O’Mahony, the former fellow rebel, former companion in Paris, and fellow critic of Irish-American “tinsel patriots.” O’Mahony’s admiration for Stephens’s courage, humour in adversity, and indifference to physical suffering was undoubtedly a factor in earning him the hero’s encomium as the first transatlantic patriot of the Irish race. So, having extracted from the Irish Americans an acknowledgment of his absolute control of the new revolutionary movement, Stephens appointed O’Mahony the chief of its American wing. The latter, as a cultural as well as a political nationalist, named the wing the Fenian Brotherhood, an allusion in all probability to the legendary Fianna, who had defended ancient Ireland from invasion. Stephens accepted the distinct name, which was subsequently applied to members of the conspiracy on both sides of the ocean, as an affirmation of the entire movement’s fundamental principles – Ireland’s natural right to

26

The Fenian Problem

independence and the necessity of violent revolution – rather than as an assertion of the American wing’s independence.37 The friendship of the two men did not endure. Stephens’s autocratic behaviour and sharp tongue alienated O’Mahony, bitterly reproached as he constantly was by the self-described “provisional dictator” for the failure to maintain an assured and generous flow of Irish American funding. What Stephens refused or failed to recognize was the impact of an economic recession on a community still heavily dependent on various forms of labour for its livelihood. The outbreak of the American Civil War in the spring of 1861 dashed any lingering hopes that Fenians and cash would soon be flooding across the Atlantic, yet as disruptive as it was to Fenian plans, and as costly in young lives, the war ultimately worked to the Brotherhood’s long-term advantage. It gave military training and battlefield experience to tens of thousands of Irish Americans and caused a sharp deterioration in Anglo-American relations. As one sergeant in a regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers put it, the war was a school of instruction for Irishmen who hoped one day to strike a blow for their homeland’s freedom. If that was to be achieved, he added, “the means to accomplish it must come from the shores of America.” Fenian recruitment was facilitated by the Union’s War Department, which permitted Stephens and Luby, among others, to move freely through the army’s ranks, swearing men into the revolutionary nationalist organization. Moreover, the American Civil War legitimized violence as a solution to political problems and reinforced its utility as an instrument of national identity.38 In Ireland, Stephens had been recruiting a revolutionary force. To this task he brought a charismatic personality that more than compensated for his somewhat unprepossessing physical appearance. His intellect, “selfcontained and dignified bearing,” attractive musical voice, “luxurious habits and refined delicate tastes,” “dogged patience,” and immense selfconfidence, one journalist wrote, endowed him with a “wondrous gift of winning over young men.” He approached the Ribbonmen, some of whom responded positively, but had greater success with local associations of nationalists, such as the Phoenix National and Literary Society of Skibbereen. The dominant local figure was Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. He and Stephens met and within a month fully nine-tenths of the society’s members had been sworn as Fenians, but their military drilling saw a handful of the leading figures arrested. The first trial on a charge of conspiracy to raise an insurrection ended in a hung jury, but the retrial of one of the members, a master of a national school, resulted in a conviction by a jury from which Roman Catholics had been excluded. Heavily criticized for

The Liberal State and Irish Nationalism

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jury packing, the Irish Executive eventually accepted a plea-bargain arrangement whereby the other accused, among them O’Donovan Rossa, were discharged on probation in exchange for entering a formal plea of guilt. Six months later, the convicted man was released from prison on licence, and his sentence was subsequently commuted. But Stephens also turned for recruits to branches of the Catholic Young Men’s Society, founded in 1849 by Father Richard O’Brien, later dean of Limerick. The society expected members to make confession and take Holy Communion at least once a month and to steer clear of party politics. O’Brien resigned as its president general when he made the disheartening discovery that members were not only joining the Brotherhood but were also collecting money for the purchase of weapons.39 To attract recruits, as distinct from co-opting them, Stephens converted the reburial in Ireland of the remains of a former Young Ireland rebel, Terrence Bellew McManus, into a publicity extravaganza. Disinterred by the San Franscisco Fenians, in whose city he had died impoverished and largely forgotten, McManus’s body was shipped to New York, where the now Archbishop Hughes officiated at a Solemn High Requiem Mass and delivered another passionately nationalistic address. When the casket finally reached Ireland, Stephens’s men seized control of the proceedings and staged an impressive procession through the streets of Dublin that fully met the Fenian leader’s requirement that the crowds outnumber those that had turned out only three months earlier to greet Queen Victoria on her private visit. That same month, November 1861, saw John Hughes visit his homeland on his way to Europe, and he returned there on his way back to the United States the following summer. During a meeting with an Irish delegation, which the journalist present faithfully reported, Hughes criticized bishops who supported the government and voiced respect for activists like McManus who, however “rashly and imprudently,” struggled for a “righteous cause.” He then reiterated the three doctrinal grounds on which Catholics might justifiably rebel – the existence of tyranny, a popular conviction of “intolerable oppression,” and reasonable hopes of success. And while he counselled patience, he did suggest, in an apparent allusion to the deteriorating Anglo-American relationship, that events were certain to bring the “wrongs, the miseries, the sufferings of the Irish people under consideration elsewhere.” Little wonder this visit engendered a popular belief in Fenian “power and audacity” that was reinforced first by the publication in 1862 of a model Fenian constitution for an independent Ireland and then by the launch in 1863 of a Fenian newspaper.40

28

The Fenian Problem

Stephens expected the Irish People quickly to achieve a substantial circulation, not only in Ireland but also in Britain and the United States, thus confirming popular support for revolutionary nationalism while generating an income that would compensate for the disappointing sums being forwarded from the United States. While the newspaper never attracted as many subscribers or sold as many copies as Stephens had predicted, A.M. Sullivan later complained that it almost “annihilated” the British circulation of his Nation. It was read by far more people than the bare figures suggested, and served as an effective instrument of propaganda. Thoroughly “national ideas,” the first of which was the necessity of violence to gain genuine national independence, were propagated. All of Ireland’s problems were laid at Britain’s door. Priests, or more accurately those considered opponents of revolutionary nationalism, were instructed to withdraw from politics. Small farmers were assured that they were the rightful owners of the soil of Ireland and that a Fenian republic would in all likelihood be a land of peasant proprietors. Constitutional nationalism in its various guises – the National League founded by the former Young Irelander John Martin, the National Association inspired by Archbishop Cullen, and moderate individual nationalists, such as A.M. Sullivan – was held up to scorn and their meetings disrupted, often by gangs led by O’Donovan Rossa, now the manager of the Irish People. Constitutional agitation was excoriated as “debasing and delusive” and its promoters ridiculed as backers of mere piecemeal reforms. The one exception to this rule was the National Brotherhood of St Patrick, founded in 1861, which had the declared objective of uniting all nationalists within “legal and constitutional lines.” Stephens tolerated it because the vice-presidency was held by the infamously nationalist Father Patrick Lavelle, and the organization may, unknown to its prominent constitutionalist sponsors, have always had a secret intent to look to revolution and foreign assistance for the winning of Ireland’s independence. Certainly, Fenians had little difficulty first infiltrating and then transforming that Brotherhood into a front organization.41 If the Irish People gave “new life and colour” to Irish Fenianism by assiduously cultivating that sense of injustice, deprivation, discrimination, and frustration that generated greater popular support for a resort to physical force, this propaganda asset was at one and the same time a fiscal and a security liability. The newspaper lost money and publicized a secret body committed to the forcible overthrow of British rule. The likelihood that its offices were under police surveillance renders inexplicable and irresponsible the frequent presence there of Patrick “Pagan” O’Leary. He

The Liberal State and Irish Nationalism

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had been tasked by Stephens to implement the policy of subverting the very large Catholic Irish element of the British military garrison. His arrest in mid-November 1864 provided the Irish Executive with the evidence of this disturbing activity.42 The Irish People was widely read by the Irish living in Britain, and thus could claim a full share of the credit for a Fenian organization there that impressed the investigators sent by the American Brotherhood in 1865. The National Brotherhood of St Patrick had established reading rooms, and it was here that the Irish poor either read or had read to them articles from the Fenian newspaper or from the Irishman, another organ of radical nationalism. There was also the small but growing number of British publications promoting immigrant nationalism. The Glasgow Free Press was edited from 1862 by a former student of the College of Propaganda in Rome who made it a strident voice of Irish nationalism in Scotland. In England, the Irish News proclaimed as its purpose a “national regeneration” among the Irish of Britain. This, the Catholic archbishop of Westminster believed, was “simple Fenianism.” The Universe, the only cheap voice of British ultramontanes, was by 1863 proclaiming revolution the only means of averting the “continuous evil” of poor Ireland being swamped “under the benign sway of the British Government.” That same year saw the London branch of the National Brotherhood launch the Irish Liberator to advocate national independence and its pursuit by “the most peaceful means possible.”43 The rapid growth of the National Brotherhood in his diocese, and its reputation as the constitutional mask of Fenianism, alarmed Bishop Goss of Liverpool. He urged those among the city’s considerable Irish population who believed they had been wronged to seek redress “in the way sanctioned by the Constitution.” There was no government more liberal than Britain’s “in allowing the oppressed to lay open their grievances,” he insisted. Fenians were especially to be abhorred, he warned, because they exhibited “the avaricious cupidity of Communists.” In their pursuit of a redistribution of property and Irish independence, they rivalled in wickedness the followers of Garibaldi who had sought to rob the pope of his territories in the name of Italian unity. But the task of discouraging Irish clergy and laity from joining such organizations was hampered in Britain, as in Ireland, by Patrick Lavelle’s charismatic campaigns on behalf of the National Brotherhood. His advocacy was cited as proof that the National Brotherhood was not universally anathematized by the church and that the “infection” of young Irish priests was one of the “worst features” of revolutionary nationalism. Other priests had been intimidated. They

30

The Fenian Problem

remained mum on the subject of Fenians out of fear. They had no wish to be denounced as agents of the government and accused of driving “unfortunate men out of the Church altogether.”44 James Stephens found the work of recruitment going well in those industrial centres of Northern England visited by him during the spring of 1865. A British agent operating within the American Fenian headquarters put the number of sworn Fenians in Britain at 18,000, of whom perhaps 40 per cent were in England and primarily clustered in Liverpool, Manchester, and a number of mill towns. Meanwhile, newspapers carried alarming reports of the members of the National Brotherhood exercising their “social rights” to drill in the use of arms, and of their gaining access to weapons by enlisting in the Volunteer Artillery and Rifle Corps formed to resist any French invasion. Such stories began to fray an uneasy public’s nerves, and ethnic brawls suddenly had the label “Fenian” attached to them. John Bull, the Irishman mockingly observed, was “getting up his usual periodical panic.”45 Would the government, in the face of mounting public concern over the manifestations of revolutionary nationalism, respond by seeking aggressively to suppress the Fenian Brotherhood?

2 The Liberal State Responds to Fenianism

Keen to obtain reliable information on the transatlantic allies of domestic subversives, following the exposure of the “Phoenix Conspiracy,” the Irish Executive despatched an experienced officer to the United States to investigate. The great body of New York’s Irish Americans had no immediate intention of crossing the ocean to engage in an insurrection, he reported in the summer of 1860, for most of them were convinced that rebellion could only succeed if the United Kingdom was at war with either France or the United States. He identified the Fenian Brotherhood as a potential future threat to Ireland’s peace, and before long British consuls at several cities with large Irish-American populations were drawing the attention of the Foreign Office to its significant growth. The outbreak of the American Civil War in the spring of 1861 interrupted Fenian recruitment, but in threatening Canada as a means of discouraging British meddling in the conflict, William Henry Seward, the new American secretary of state, was in the opinion of the British minister in Washington able to calculate with some confidence that any inroad on the province would be effectively aided by the Irish-American secret societies. As for the growth of the Brotherhood in Ireland itself, one informant subsequently claimed that it was active in every county and had a membership of 70,000.1 Dublin detectives attended the large dinner meeting of the National Brotherhood of St Patrick, held at the city’s Rotundo on 17 March 1862. At the head table sat John Martin, former editor, former transported Young Irelander, and a current constitutional nationalist. Seated with him were Father John Kenyon, a stridently nationalist priest, and the publishers of two nationalist newspapers – the Irishman and the Tipperary Advocate. The speakers, several of whom described the people of Ireland as slaves whose

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The Fenian Problem

only hope of freedom was “the strength of their right arms,” had difficulty making themselves heard over the din created by waiters clearing the tables and squabbling with one another, the popping of soda water bottles, brawls among the diners who had consumed the stronger libations on offer, and the collapse of tables under the weight of intoxicated, impromptu orators. The “decorously behaved” spectators in the gallery, perhaps 900 strong, drifted away once they understood that neither Father Patrick Lavelle nor The O’Donoghue, two of the more compelling nationalist orators, was going to put in an appearance.2 On other occasions, Lavelle’s wild rhetoric, his reviling of the present government as so corrupt “that revolution was justified and that the Church could not refuse to sanction it,” raised the issue of freedom of speech. Chief Secretary Robert Peel, son of the former Conservative prime minister, who had already revoked the priest’s licence to carry arms, thereby initiating a vitriolic public exchange, was incensed by the lecture. He considered it an incitement to “treason” and an outrage to society, but his desire in this instance to draw more narrowly the boundaries of liberal permissiveness was frustrated by his senior civil servant. Thomas Larcom had deep knowledge of Ireland, having served as a census commissioner, as a member of the national ordnance survey team, and as deputy chairman of the Board of Works during the Great Famine before being appointed undersecretary. He patiently explained to his choleric chief the advantage gained from permitting priests of the Lavelle stamp to criticize the state. Their unpunished language, despite its “very violence,” contradicted their criticisms. Moreover, a number of priests had begun to denounce the revolutionary strain of nationalism that violated their “system” of keeping the country in “perpetual unsettlement to the very verge of the law, but no further.” So, with the viceroy’s backing, Larcom upheld the policy of treating such effusions with “supreme contempt.” However, reports that Lavelle and several other men of the cloth had continued to make inflammatory statements saw a frustrated and furious Peel return to the issue. This time his desire for prosecutions was thwarted by the Irish attorney general. Differing accounts of what precisely had been said made a successful prosecution well-nigh impossible, Thomas O’Hagan observed, and a failure in court would give such admittedly “violent and illegal language” the “undue importance” it was currently denied. Furthermore, Peel needed to bear in mind the strong public opposition to “prosecutions for mere words” and Parliament’s strong disposition to place “strong restrictions” on such prosecutions. To be considered seditious in a liberal state, language needed to have “a direct tendency to encourage the hearers

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33

to some immediate violation of the law, such as resistance to Government, destruction of property, or violence to the person.”3 The impassioned commentaries of the nationalist press were another source of Executive concern. Lord Carlisle, who, as Lord Morpeth, had been an extremely popular chief secretary more than twenty years earlier and was now a liberal lord lieutenant, raised with his law officers the possibility of bringing legal action against a number of publishers. Solicitor General James Lawton favoured action, listing a fistful of popular weeklies that both enjoyed a “wide circulation” and fostered a “widespread spirit of disloyalty.” These publications, he fumed, declared that Ireland was enslaved, her people starved and murdered by England, and urged the seizing of the first realistic opportunity to gain freedom and independence. Hence, it was his opinion that the policy of “doing nothing with respect to these disloyal men” had failed: “They have been suffered to go on too long with impunity, and I think public opinion will approve of a determined move on the part of the Government to put an end to a system which checks all social progress and improvement in this country.”4 Thomas O’Hagan again rose to the challenge of skilfully and successfully defending the concept of the liberal state. A Belfast-born Catholic from a commercial family, he had attended the city’s famous Academical Institution despite its Presbyterian ethos. An experienced journalist, having occupied two editorial chairs, he had made his name and reputation at the Bar. Widely admired for his “great attainments” and “irreproachable life,” he had been appointed an assistant barrister in 1847 and took silk the following year. Astutely, he made no blanket objection to prosecutions but insisted on careful investigations, on the gathering of “sufficient” evidence, and on trials conducted “according to the ordinary course of criminal law.” There could be no turning of the clock back to 1848, when the suspension of habeas corpus had allowed the state, without much regard to legal right, to suppress journals considered seditious, imprison their proprietors, and seize property. Public feeling in both Britain and Ireland would no longer tolerate legal assaults on the press. Why reinvigorate a “moribund” agitation by inducing many to rally to it out of concern for the freedom of opinion? “We should pause,” he cautioned, “before we stir into action the slumbering element of popular passion and political strife.”5 Peel had already concluded that it would be pointless to attack the seditious press without a simultaneous pursuit of the “ribald priests” who poisoned the public mind. But, early in 1864, he thought he had at last found the target to which no advocate of the liberal state could object. The Irish People was brazenly urging “patriots” to prepare for an Irish

34

The Fenian Problem

revolution. Although Lawson and O’Hagan were in agreement that this amounted to sedition, both advised against any immediate criminal prosecution. They did so for very different reasons. Lawson considered a solitary strike “very bad policy” and urged a more general assault on the seditious press. O’Hagan’s opposition was tactical. Why give a formerly obscure publication increased “standing,” and the spirit of disaffection a fillip, by seeking to make an example of it? No matter the care with which jurors were empanelled, he predicted defeat in court. This would be a public relations disaster. So the Irish People was permitted to continue publishing, and the law officers’ suggestion that its offices be kept under surveillance was not immediately acted upon because a member of the staff, Pierce Nagle, had already turned informer. He was ultimately to pay with his life. A new identity and employment in England failed to protect him from a Fenian assassin.6 The Irish Executive’s urging that a close watch be kept on suspected subversives operating in England initially made little impact at the Home Office. Both in Liverpool and London the local police forces confidently reported the absence of any active Fenian organization. The English press was similarly sanguine. Fenian stories, such as that of the Dublin cobbler accused of seeking to administer the Fenian oath to a policeman in the constabulary canteen, only to fortify his defence by tottering into the Magistrate’s Court “somewhat under the influence of drink,” were inserted for the summer amusement of readers. The young men reportedly engaged in military drilling were dismissed as “idiots,” victims of another “small epidemic of diluted cabbage-garden disaffection.” With the approach of autumn, there came a grudging acknowledgment of a powerful Irish “feeling of discontent and disaffection with the English government.” The arrival, by almost every Atlantic steamer, of young Irish-American veterans of the recently concluded civil war deepened the uneasiness. “See your countrymen who return from America and who left Ireland in poverty,” one Fenian flyer circulating in Dublin proclaimed. “They return with the appearance of men who know themselves. They have got independence without bravado, manliness without subserviency. They are Republicans. If you wish to be like those men, and live in your native country, you must win your independence.” If the raw material for an insurgent army was to be Irish, one English newspaper nervously concluded, the leadership, weapons, and funding would be American.7 The task of countering the growing Fenian threat had fallen to an unusually youthful lord lieutenant. Carlisle’s death in 1864 had brought the thirty-eight-year-old Lord Wodehouse to Dublin. Neither he nor his

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35

Irish wife impressed the monarch whom they were to represent, but Lord Palmerston, the prime minister, stoutly defended the nominee as a man of “easy and social manners,” “unquestioned ability,” and a “very good speaker” who was “conversant with business.” Several stints at the Foreign Office as undersecretary and his term as British minister to Russia immediately following the Crimean War had developed his political and diplomatic skills. Intensely ambitious, Lord Wodehouse grasped the viceroyalty as a prestigious substitute for the high ministerial office that he believed had been unfairly denied him. Although he privately ridiculed his ceremonial duties as “absurdities” and “comical,” he was determined to be the power in the Executive. He brought to the office those “Liberal principles” he had embraced while still at school: liberty was “the engine of England’s progress”; the educated and the propertied had a duty “to lead society”; and necessary reforms, of which Ireland stood in particular need, should be pursued “within a stable and legal framework upholding the rule of law and the sanctity of property.” However, he believed it would be a long time before Ireland could be governed “according to English principles.” A far greater measure of state intervention was unavoidable there if matters were to be kept “tolerably straight” between bitter sectarian factions. A moderate churchman, he deplored the provocative triumphalism of the Orangemen and abhorred not only Roman Catholicism but also the political activism of the Catholic clergy. Nevertheless, moderate Catholics welcomed the youthful viceroy as “a man of ability with a will and ideas of his own.”8 “Governing Paddy has never been a hopeful or pleasant task, but it is a duty which Englishmen must perform as best they can,” Wodehouse privately observed with a characteristic amalgam of aristocratic English noblesse oblige and ethnic prejudice. He quickly took the measure of his staff. Thomas Larcom was an “out and out bureaucrat” but a “keenwitted,” “thoroughly practical,” and able public servant. There was less to admire in his chief secretary, of whom it was said that “vulgarity and insolence seem to contend with folly in the direction of his mind.” Peel’s inexhaustible capacity to alienate the Irish merely eased the viceroy’s marginalizing of him. Once securely in control of the Executive, Wodehouse looked for partisan advantage in policy decisions. Thus public investment in agricultural improvements would answer Irish complaints that they were receiving less than a fair share of national expenditures and generate popular support for the Liberal Party. His denials of any wish to spend public money for “political purposes” were disingenuous, and he defended the proposed expenditures as a response to Tory efforts to outflank him by holding out “promises and inducements.”9

36

The Fenian Problem

Wodehouse soon had more serious concerns. The great bulk of the Irish population struck him as “disaffected by British rule” and long likely to remain so. The Fenians, he quickly recognized, were seeking to recruit the peasantry and subvert the police and military, but he remained unconvinced, initially, of their ability to do more than keep the “embers of disaffection” alive. The spring of 1865 brought a successful visit by the heir to the throne, and he was soon followed by a pair of former Young Irelanders, Gavan Duffy and Thomas D’Arcy McGee, both of whom urged Irishmen to seek constitutional solutions to problems and grievances. All the while, Wodehouse was receiving an unintentional helping hand from the Fenian chief. The American Brotherhood, assured by the investigators it despatched to Ireland that Fenianism was at a “fever pitch,” issued the “final call” to insurrection early in August 1865. But Stephens continued to procrastinate. Haunted by memories of 1848, perhaps hopeful of a further deterioration in Anglo-American relations that would preoccupy and distract the British government, and bitterly critical of the funding provided by Irish America, he was understandably loath to launch a doomed, quixotic rising.10 While Stephens dithered, Wodehouse acted. A constantly updated map, kept at Dublin Castle, was a daily reminder of the worrying growth of Fenianism. Although “quite prepared to run the risk of exceeding the law, if necessary,” persuaded as he was of his countrymen’s lack of sufficient imagination to “perceive coming evils” – their inclination being to wait for a disaster to occur before consenting to “strong measures” – the viceroy preferred to act on the basis of solid evidence of “treasonable designs.” Fortuitously, it came to hand in the form of a letter written by Stephens and stolen from an inebriated Fenian courier by a government agent. Additional revealing correspondence, lost by a visiting Irish American, was recovered by the police. Protected by these written proofs of the conspiracy from the charge of acting with “undue alarm and precipitation,” Wodehouse, Larcom, and James Lawson, the last named having replaced O’Hagan as attorney general when the Ulster Catholic accepted a senior judgeship, decided to raid the offices of the Irish People and detain leading Fenians in Dublin and Cork. The raids and arrests on 15 September netted several of the Brotherhood’s leading lights and another treasure trove of “treasonable correspondence.” Here, at last, were the “conclusive proofs of conspiracy.”11 The suppression of the Irish People was condemned by the more radical elements of the English press as “needless, unconstitutional and unjustifiable.” Reynolds’s Newspaper, the “most successful and enduring” of these

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organs, and one distributed in Ireland, assailed the Irish Executive as a “Constabulary despotism” rooted in a “tyranny of paid spies and informers.” Ireland’s need was for reform not suppression, it declared. The Church of Ireland, serving the spiritual needs of a mere fraction of the population, should be disestablished and the liberated wealth expended on a broad range of educational and charitable measures. Legislation to protect tenants from a “rapacious landlordism” was another priority. But British radicals also saw in the Irish problem a means of attracting greater Irish support for parliamentary reform. The Reform League had been founded at the beginning of the year to agitate for adult, male suffrage and the secret ballot, and it promised that enfranchisement of the working classes of Britain would result in better government of Ireland and the speedy redress of her grievances.12 Sensitive to the accusation that he had ridden roughshod over a principle of the liberal state, alive to the “ticklish condition” of English opinion, and confident that he had put “the worst fellows in a strait waistcoat and taken due precautions against the madmen still at large,” Wodehouse was keen to ensure that his “salutary measures” did not become unpopular as a result of being “carried too far.” Hence his fury when, during an absence in London to attend a family funeral, the editor of the nationalist Connaught Patriot was arrested and charged with the publication of a treasonable article. The suppression of the Irish People, whose office doubled as the Fenians’ headquarters, had been the exception to the rule that editors not be gifted the “crown of martyrdom.” Indeed, the Cabinet had been dissuaded by the English law officers from applying to Parliament for greater restrictions on the nationalist press. In line with that advice, Wodehouse made no move to shut down the Irishman, which under the guidance of the somewhat unsavoury Richard Pigott was seeking to capture the former readers of the suppressed weekly by puffing Fenianism and printing “strident denunciations of all forms of constitutional activity.” The viceroy also chose to ignore the “treasonable” but “non-Fenian” content of the Nation, unwilling as he was to risk driving its talented and influential contributors into the arms of the Brotherhood.13 Palmerston’s death in October 1865, just two days short of his eightyfirst birthday and barely two months after leading the Liberals to another general election victory, resulted in only minor changes to personnel and Irish policy. If the octogenarian had the final good fortune to close his career “like the sun in the Tropics, without a twilight,” his septuagenarian successor was less blessed. The diminutive John Russell, whose size had always made him an inviting and cruel target of cartoonists, now returned

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to the sunlight of the office he had last held thirteen years earlier. He could not expect to bathe long in its warmth. The editor of the Times, perhaps prompted by Wodehouse, who was privately critical of the number of important ministers sitting in the Lords, among them Earl Russell, whom he had recently found “very deaf and slow of apprehension,” argued that William Gladstone ought to have succeeded Palmerston. Indeed, the viceroy favoured a period of Opposition therapy for the Liberals during which the “deadwood” at the top of the party might be retired. And he was not unaware of the personal hostility with which much of Catholic Ireland regarded the new prime minister. Russell’s previous government was still blamed for the appalling suffering of the Great Famine, and he had introduced the widely despised Ecclesiastical Titles Bill in an illconsidered and poorly framed response to the pope’s re-establishment of a hierarchy for England and Wales. One way to offset this anti-Catholic reputation in Ireland, one influential Liberal suggested, was for Russell to practise a form of affirmative action. Only four Catholic Irishman held positions in the government, all of them minor, which was neither right not politic when nearly one-quarter of the nation’s total population was Roman Catholic.14 Russell made one important change to the Irish administration, which pleased Catholic Liberals. He replaced the unpopular and tactless Peel with Chichester Fortescue. A member of the Church of Ireland, heir presumptive of his brother, Lord Clermont, Fortescue was an experienced politician and efficient administrator, having served as undersecretary at the Colonial Office in both Palmerston administrations. He was appropriately liberal on important Irish issues, and not least on the need for “a sweeping reform” of the Church of Ireland. Although Wodehouse declared the appointment the best possible, describing Fortescue as agreeable to him personally and generally popular with his fellow Irishmen, he had no intention of playing second fiddle to him. His resolve to maintain a “real office” was strengthened by the reputation and behaviour of the chief secretary’s wife. Frances Countess Waldegrave, as she still insisted on being addressed, was “rather good looking,” he admitted, a good conversationalist, invariably good natured in her dealings with most people, “wonderfully courageous and energetic,” but a chronic meddler in politics, an assiduous cultivator of journalists who fed her “overweening conceit,” and “bitter as wormwood” against those who had denied il care sposo a portfolio that would have automatically given him a seat in the Cabinet. Thus Wodehouse risked a vendetta with this notoriously ambitious, wealthy, and vengeful extrovert when he informed Russell of his intention

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to resign should Fortescue be admitted to the Cabinet as chief secretary. The lady’s revenge took the form of glittering receptions, large dinner parties, and bi-weekly balls that outshone the viceregal receptions. “Lady Waldegrave has done more to upset the Viceregal form of government than any Fenian conspirator,” one malicious visitor gleefully remarked, “and has quite snuffed out H. R. H. Lord Wodehouse and lady.”15 Within a fortnight of the suppression of the Irish People and the arrest of a number of the Brotherhood’s senior figures, the viceroy was obliged to proclaim in a state of disturbance large areas of three counties. For his failure to snuff out the Fenian threat he blamed the young Irish Americans who were roaming the countryside armed and well supplied with funds. Their discretion with respect to incriminating documents and behaviour made difficult their control within the law, so Wodehouse improvised. Magistrates and policemen boarded the vessels arriving from the United States, examined the passengers, and detained suspected Fenians; a “special branch” was created to coordinate the information arriving at Dublin Castle; and customs officials at the principal port of entry for suspect weapons, Cork, were investigated with a view to transferring any who had been in contact with persons of doubtful loyalty. However, after consulting the new military commander, Sir Hugh Rose, Wodehouse decided not to apply to London for additional troops for fear their sudden arrival would increase loyalist alarm. He did apply to the Treasury for funds to improve policemen’s pay in order to retain and add to the armed constabulary, which had fallen well below its approved strength. When William Gladstone at the Exchequer proved unsympathetic, Wodehouse reminded him of the peculiar problems he faced – a “spirit of hatred of English rule and English laws” and the constant risk of sectarian violence. He had no desire, he added, to return to the “old and vicious system” of employing soldiers as policemen. But his failure to win immediate approval of the funding request suddenly seemed less important. His policy to demoralize the Brotherhood by depriving it of leadership had scored a belated success with the capture of the man Wodehouse described as “the soul of the plot in Ireland, and a really clever conspirator.”16 James Stephens was taken on 11 November 1865. Speedily committed for trial, he was held in Richmond Bridewell. The governor placed him and several other Fenians in a row of cells on a short corridor that had locked doors at both ends. In their midst he placed a “trusty” equipped with a gong which he was to strike as an alarm in the event of suspicious activity. On hearing Stephens’s cell door being opened with a key on the night of 24 November, he chose to mind his own business. A rescue party

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organized by Captain Thomas Kelly, an Irish-American member of Stephens’s military council, spirited the Fenian chief out of the Bridewell and deposited him at a safe house close to Trinity College. Informed of this “disastrous event” while on a visit to Waterford, a “sorely crestfallen” Wodehouse nobly completed his viceregal functions. He inspected a pig slaughterhouse and bacon-curing establishment, a model school, the local gaol and a lunatic asylum before hurrying back to Dublin. The involvement of members of the prison staff in the escape was obvious but difficult to prove, and one prime suspect, John Breslin, a hospital steward and a member of a large family of Fenians, two of them Dublin policemen, quietly sailed for the United States a few weeks later.17 The report of the official inquiry, even in the heavily edited published version, made mortifying reading, telling as it did a sorry tale of lax discipline, slipshod management, and utter incompetence. Not that these were unique to Richmond Bridewell, as a cursory examination of the staff conduct book at the city’s principal penal institution, Mountjoy, would have revealed. Low pay made joining the prison service a job of last resort for many men. Daniel Byrne, the night watchman left effectively in charge of the Bridewell at night, had an appalling record of cautions, reprimands, and fines for persistent and gross dereliction of duty. Nor did the governor’s conduct measure up. He had rejected a proposal to beef up the external guard of the prison, had failed to order senior staff to witness the locking of prisoners in their cells and to make surprise inspections at night, and had given permission for Stephens to be brought down to his house to meet with friends. Infuriated and mortified, not least by the revelation that the Executive itself had unaccountably ignored warnings of the untrustworthiness of members of the prison staff, Wodehouse dismissed the governor, reasserted viceregal control over staff appointments, tightened discipline, and modified the membership of the prison’s supervisory board in an effort to ensure greater continuity and more frequent inspections of the institution. But there was no avoiding further acute embarrassment when Byrne was eventually sent for trial on charges of membership in the Fenian conspiracy and complicity in Stephens’s escape. The presiding judge, William Keogh, in his summation, was scornful of the free and easy conduct of the prize prisoner’s detention; emphasized the inability of senior officers to swear that the Fenian had been securely locked in his cell on the night of the escape; reminded jurors that two warders who had held whispered conversations with him had been neither suspended nor charged, whereas no evidence had been produced of any contact between Byrne and the prisoner; dwelt upon the farcical condition of the prison

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padlocks, all of which could be unlocked with a single key and most with “two smart taps on the back”; and noted the inexplicable inattention to the safekeeping of the keys, which greatly simplified their counterfeiting. Finally, referring to the copy of the Fenian oath found in Byrne’s room, the judge reaffirmed a principle of the liberal state. “It would be dangerous to the liberties of the subject,” he declared, “to convict a man from the simple fact that a treasonable document was found in his possession.”18 The “escape undoes all we have done, and the Fenians will probably be more active than ever,” an angry viceroy admitted. However, he hoped to limit the damage and recover some lost ground through the speedy trial, speedy conviction, and exemplary punishment of the leading Fenians still in custody. This drama might deter those who remained at large. So, less than a week after Stephens’s escape, these men were brought up before a special commission instead of being held for the next fixed date on the judicial calendar. The process allowed the Crown to expedite justice and handpick the presiding judges. Two of the “youngest and most able” members of the bench were selected, although neither choice was devoid of controversy. William Keogh, once regarded by Archbishop Cullen as the repository of many of the rarest human virtues, now stood condemned by him as “the worst enemy of Catholicity we have under the name of Catholic.” Equally objectionable, at least in some eyes, was John Fitzgerald. As a member of the Privy Council he had been a party to the arrest of the men now to be brought before him in court. How then, critics asked, could he conduct their trials fairly and impartially?19 Thomas Clarke Luby, to the consternation of many nationalists, freely admitted to the fairness of his trial. Charged with the non-capital crime of treason felony, for Wodehouse steadfastly refused to try men for their lives in the absence of a rebellion, Luby listened to the overwhelming evidence of his “plotting the deposition of the Queen, levying war against her and inducing foreigners to invade her realm.” Articles from the Irish People, of which he had been co-editor, calling for the shedding of blood, the rejection of “false delicacy” in ridding the island of the “respectable classes,” the implementation of policies easily misconstrued as “socialism,” and an end to the “[p]rostitution of ecclesiastical influence” were read out. “Les évêques à la lanterne,” Keogh jotted in the margin of his notebook. His summary of the evidence was scrupulously fair, as was his conduct of the trial of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. He allowed the newspaper’s former business manager “extravagant latitude” when he dismissed his counsel and decided to represent himself in a deliberately provocative and disrespectful manner. Keogh instructed the jurors that in order to convict

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they had to be convinced “beyond a doubt” that O’Donovan Rossa was a “deliberate, active member” of the conspiracy. Similarly, in the trial of John O’Leary, Judge Fitzgerald stressed several “conspicuous weaknesses” in the prosecution’s case and the unreliability of informer testimony. In all, thirty-six of the accused were convicted and five acquitted by juries that had not been packed in the crudest sense of the term. There were simply too many men in the pool, of whom several hundred eventually served in the multiple trials, for the Crown to be in total control of the selection process. The British press, with radical exceptions, concluded that the “criminal justice system had operated in a manner that, if not unblemished, was reasonably fair.” Nevertheless, it betrayed uneasiness over the harsh sentences handed down. Luby and O’Leary, editors of the Irish People, were each given twenty years, while O’Donovan Rossa, having been granted a conditional release under the terms of the earlier plea bargain that brought the Phoenix Society prosecutions to an end, received a life sentence. Nationalist organs quickly went to work generating public sympathy for these men. O’Donovan Rossa’s bravura performance, his insolence, his “saucy and offensive language,” his reading into the trial record of edition after edition of the Irish People, thereby disseminating “treasonable and revolutionary doctrines,” and his pithy prediction that he would receive a trial but not justice, played well to the public gallery.20 Learning from his recent bitter experience, Wodehouse took a keen interest in the secure confinement of the convicts. The back walls of their cells at Mountjoy Prison were reinforced with iron sheeting, which would also act as an alarm should an attempt be made to penetrate it; the staff was thoroughly vetted, and night guards were issued with revolvers. Nevertheless, the prisoners’ continued presence in Dublin prolonged the “undesirable excitement,” and Sir Hugh Rose warned that a rescue attempt by a determined band of Irish Americans, aided by treachery within, would probably succeed. Such a sensation would increase Fenian influence and demoralize loyalists, so Wodehouse arranged the prisoners’ gradual transfer first to Pentonville Prison in London and then on to English public works prisons. To avoid any impression of panic, they were to follow the normal passenger route across the Irish Sea but via the small Welsh ferry terminal of Holyhead rather than Liverpool, with its large Irish population. Six of the more prominent Fenians were quietly escorted out of Dublin on the eve of Christmas. The governor of Pentonville had arrived the previous evening to supervise the operation, of which his Mountjoy counterpart was kept in ignorance until the very last minute, while back in London

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the Irish-born were weeded out of both Pentonville’s staff and the police patrols responsible for prison’s exterior security.21 Accusations of ill-treatment and cruelty were soon flying in the Irish nationalist press. When the ambitious young Irish Tory, James PopeHennessy, who had acted as an informal intermediary in the Phoenix case several years earlier, sought access to the prisoners, his application was denied. The home secretary cited the regulations prohibiting visits to convicts during the first six months of penal servitude and revealed that the Fenians were to be “treated in all respects like other prisoners under the same sentence.” This statement brought immediate outcries from Irish nationalists and some British radicals. To treat these political prisoners and gentlemen as common criminals made a mockery of Britain’s claim to be a liberal state, they protested, and was at odds with the withering British indictment, published barely a decade earlier, of the Neapolitan monarchy’s harsh treatment of its political prisoners. Indeed, an early warning of how emotive a public issue the treatment of the Fenian prisoners was likely to become in Ireland was provided by the nationwide success of a raffle of ladies ornamental attire, organized by Mrs James Stephens, to raise funds for the families of the “martyrs.”22 One prominent Irishman unmoved by the prisoners’ plight was the archbishop of Dublin. Paul Cullen had welcomed the suppression of the “villainous” Fenian newspaper and was duly impressed with the evidence presented in court of the convicted men’s “wicked sentiments.” In this sense, the trials had been a qualified propaganda success for the Executive and represented a modest step forward for a counter-insurgency policy. The proceedings had created, at least in the minds of elements of the Irish middle classes, the unfavourable image of an anti-clerical, socialistic Fenian leadership. That was certainly Cullen’s reading of Fenianism, which he denounced as a “compound of folly and wickedness wearing the mask of patriotism.” However, the savage sectarian disturbances that had scarred Belfast a year earlier appear to have driven him to the bizarre conclusion that Orangeism was one of the parents of the Brotherhood and that the rank and file members were either Protestants or infidels. But other members of the hierarchy were far less hostile to the Fenians. John MacHale, archbishop of Tuam, refused to denounce men who were to be tried, he claimed, by apostate judges and packed juries. Bishop Keane of Cloyne admitted to being impressed by their “[e]xtraordinary influence,” their strength of faith and morals, and their willingness to die for country and creed. Hatred of England, the enemy of country, creed, and pope, was in

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his opinion making Fenians of schoolchildren. A member of the faculty of St Colman’s, Fermoy, appeared to speak for a segment of the Catholic clergy in general when he represented Fenianism as an “uprising of the Irish race against Saxon domination,” which by smashing the “first heretical power on the globe” would destroy the “great bulwark of the devil.” In short, the silencing of the Irish People’s selective attacks on clerical interference in politics freed “more nationally minded” priests to exhibit Fenian sympathies and acknowledge the prisoners as “heroes and martyrs.” A visit by John Mitchel to the Irish College in Paris, where he was cheered to the rafters by the assembled students, did not bode well for the future.23 The obstacles remained formidable if not insuperable to effective cooperation of Protestant state and Irish Catholic hierarchy in the struggle to prevent a Fenian insurgency. Cullen, for all of his denunciation of revolutionary nationalism, continued to counsel constitutional resistance to the English “oppressor.” This, together with his public recalling of past massacres and sectarian persecutions, nourished British suspicions that he was deliberately fostering “a widespread feeling of disaffection” among Ireland’s lower orders. He did have in mind an address of loyalty to the queen, which he proposed to circulate among the clergy, only to be dissuaded by his fellow metropolitan, Patrick Leahy, who warned it would be badly received in most parts of the country and reveal “a scandalous division” that enemies would cite as proof of the disloyalty of “the body of the Catholic clergy.” Nor did the archbishop of Cashel overlook a second and more frankly political reason for them to keep their distance from the current government. The hierarchy had received precious little from the Liberals, and he doubted their ability long to hold on to office. In his opinion, Irish Catholics would be well advised to look to another set of men for justice.24 A number of Irish Liberals urged the government to conciliate Cullen by granting a royal charter to the Catholic university he had founded, only for the bishops to doom negotiations with the demand for ecclesiastical domination of the institution. One leading Liberal, and presumptive future leader, did fly a promising signal of future conciliation with his admission in the Commons of the Church of Ireland’s “unsatisfactory” condition. Gladstone’s remark deepened Conservative suspicions, and surely raised Irish hopes, that he intended eventually to align himself with the advocates of its disestablishment. After all, the political advantages were obvious. Many of the Nonconformists seeking an end to church establishments were natural liberals, and as organized in the Liberation Society, they had entered into an uneasy alliance of convenience with the Catholic hierarchy.

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There was also growing press support in Britain for taking up the church and land questions as the basis of a “just and generous” Irish policy. Through wise and noble legislation, prosperity would be delivered to Ireland, thereby enlisting the Irish middle classes as active supporters of the government and thus producing political contentment. As a result, the Fenians would be reduced to a minority as contemptible as “the physicalforce Chartists” of England in 1848. Here was a constructive counterinsurgency policy.25 Wodehouse and Fortescue sought to promote it. Speaking at Dublin’s Mansion House banquet at the end of January 1866, shortly before the new session of Parliament, they declared that it was not enough to suppress Fenianism. The sources of discontent had also to be dried up by removing “every excuse, every shadow of excuse, that the most distempered and disordered imagination can conceive.” Privately, viceroy and chief secretary impressed upon the Cabinet the need for action. Confident that Fenianism would incline Parliament “to consider favourably any proposed remedies for Irish discontent,” Fortescue outlined a reform agenda that Wodehouse broadly endorsed. It included a measure to compensate evicted tenants for improvements they had made to their holdings; a charter for Cullen’s Catholic university; and a committee to investigate national education. On the very sensitive issue of the Church of Ireland, Fortescue proposed yet another commission to inquire into the problem and prepare the ground for legislation. A more forthright Wodehouse spelt out for the Cabinet the stark choices. The Established Church might be reduced to dimensions proportional to the requirements of its comparatively small membership, but this would not satisfy Roman Catholics. Concurrent endowment of the Catholic Church, or “levelling up” as some of its backers preferred to describe it, might be introduced, but this would not be accepted by Dissenters, Presbyterians, and “hot” Protestant churchmen. The Catholic hierarchy might have been added to the list. The option “most likely to succeed” was the most radical – disestablishment – but “one of the hardest parts of the problem” would be the distribution of the liberated revenues.26 The government had other priorities, such as the cattle plague and parliamentary reform. “Nero’s great solo on the fiddle whilst Rome was in flames is the companion picture to the introduction of a Reform Bill whilst Ireland is rumbling with revolutionary projects,” a mordant observer remarked. The refusal to give Ireland the attention the Executive had assured the Irish she would receive was also influenced by Russell’s overconfidence that the “nasty smell” of Fenianism would “soon be

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extinguished” and Ireland “more and more consolidated with England.” Unimpressed with the Fenian threat, he allowed his irritation with critics in the neighbouring island to determine his political agenda. Resentful of the “intemperate” Irish tone of complaint, their “wilful misrepresentation” of the condition of their country, their “indiscriminate” references to “[s]even hundred years of oppression,” and ceaseless talk of a “country groaning under tyranny,” he approved a Throne Speech that devoted a mere three lines “to Ireland in its Fenian aspect, and was studiously silent on measures of redress.” The “meagreness” of these comments spoke volumes to the Irish, who had been led to expect so much more. The Executive was authorized merely to draft a modest land bill, make minor concessions to the hierarchy on education, and anticipate public assistance in aid of railway development.27 The message was driven home by Gladstone, who as the Liberals’ leader in the lower house offered the Irish little more than “vague hopes of future benefits.” The government’s first objective in Ireland, he made plain, was to uphold the authority of the state. In the absence of an eye-catching legislative agenda, the Irish Executive experienced a deepening sense of unease. Even the welcome news of the bitter squabbling over personalities and tactics within the American wing of the Brotherhood, which resulted in schism and the resolve of the majority faction to concentrate on an attack on British North America, brought little relief. Irish Americans would continue to contribute liberally “towards bringing about insurrection in Ireland,” the British consul at New York reported. An even more pressing viceregal concern was “the defiant manner” of the peasants. Their “vague and irrational, but genuine desire to found an insular independence on the ruin of British dominion” made them an “easy prey to the villain brood of agitators.” The discoveries of caches of arms, newspaper stories of firearms and other weapons being shipped to tradesmen of known Fenian sympathies, a sharp rise in gun sales to Protestant Northerners and the rapid growth of gun clubs in Ulster, the suspicion that Orangemen intended to exploit the developing crisis, and reports of the stockpiling of weapons, together with the training of trusted servants in their use, by nervous country gentlemen, all added to Wodehouse’s worries. There appeared to be a very real danger of a Fenian rising that would be accompanied and complicated by Unionist vigilantism.28 Wodehouse’s first response to the deteriorating situation was to try again to bring the police establishment up to full strength, warning Russell that it would continue to melt away without an increase in pay. All he secured in the short term was the promise of a modest rise in allowances, and it

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was not until an investigating commission reported its findings in midMarch that approval was given for a substantial increase in the funding of the Irish Constabulary. Before then, Wodehouse had equipped the Dublin force with cutlasses and enlarged the disturbed area of the countryside proclaimed under the provisions of the Peace Preservation Act. All the while the Constabulary Office was revising upwards its estimates of the hundreds of young men “imbued with Yankee notions, thoroughly reckless, and possessed of considerable military experience acquired on a field of warfare.” As before, their caution continued to make difficult, if not impossible, the gathering of sufficient evidence to justify arrests. Hence the viceroy’s mind turned to an extraordinary measure, the suspension of habeas corpus. At first the Cabinet balked, perhaps impressed by General Rose’s itemization of the obvious objections. Suspension was a clumsy, temporary, and partial instrument, and one certain to encounter fierce opposition in Parliament, excite ill will throughout Britain, remove a fundamental constitutional right from loyal Irishmen, and generate sympathy for the detained. However, Rose changed his mind on being reassured by Fortescue that even “advanced” British Liberals now favoured this radical response and on learning that hundreds of Irishmen were arriving from Britain.29 Wodehouse backed his application, which was made on St Valentine’s Day, with Rose’s belated endorsement of the suspension. In addition, he provided evidence that “regular manufactories” were at work turning out pikes and ammunition, that the Fenians were continuing with their efforts to seduce soldiers from their loyalty, and that the areas of popular disaffection were still expanding. The government had no option other than to accede to the request, the home secretary concluded, and Russell adopted the same tactic he had employed in response to the Young Ireland insurgency. The legislation was to be driven through all of its stages in a single day. There was surprisingly little effective opposition in Parliament. The Tories considered suspension long overdue, while the most famous Radical member of the Commons, John Bright, lamented the suspension of “the civil rights of the Irish people” but conceded its current necessity. John Stuart Mill, recently returned as a Radical member for Westminster, did criticize the legislation, but in a performance so curiously inept that it led one unsympathetic listener to infer that his rhetorical training in the Political Economy Club, where he was always listened to as an oracle, had ill-equipped him for the hurly-burly of a Commons debate. He lacked the voice and manner to impress members and was mockingly dubbed the “windmill” because of his apparent loss of self-control “when actually engaged in political conflict.”30

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Given a full twelve hours’ notice of the bill’s introduction and pressed by the Home Office to do everything in his power to prevent revolutionary nationalists escaping to Britain, Wodehouse and his advisers launched a pre-emptive strike. The roundup of suspects began in the early hours of Saturday, 17 February, long before the queen had happily signed into law this bill to deal with her “misguided [and] hopelessly incorrigible and unreliable Irish subjects.” Although many of the arrests, which totalled several hundred, were made without warrants in hand, the Irish lord chancellor assured the viceroy that those issued under the enacted bill would plug this legal loophole. Lord Clarendon, who had replaced Russell at the Foreign Office, impressed upon his former undersecretary the importance of avoiding a “wrangle” with the United States over indefeasible allegiance at a time when relations were already severely strained. Wodehouse announced his willingness to give careful consideration to the early release of native-born Americans, as distinct from the naturalized, on condition they returned immediately home, but resisted any “peculiar indulgence” for Irish Americans arrested for complicity in a conspiracy dedicated to revolution in Ireland and invasion of British North America. The American government, after all, openly tolerated the Brotherhood. Nevertheless, “entirely as a matter of courtesy and not of right,” the American consul in Dublin was given access to all of the detained American citizens.31 The suspension of habeas corpus in Ireland caused some disquiet in Britain, as Rose had predicted, and the misgivings were not restricted to those Radicals who laid charges of “constitutional despotism.” Certainly, neither this coercive response to Fenianism nor the treatment of the detained men was enhancing Britain’s reputation as a liberal state. Irish newspapers alleged that the imprisoned men were subjected to virtual solitary confinement and constant observation, their cells lit by gas lamps at night; that they were on occasion denied the two hours of daily exercise to which penal regulations entitled them, and when exercised at Mountjoy it was in a railed cage where absolute silence was enforced; and that they were denied contact and communication with family, legal representatives, and friends. Could so severe a regime be justified, given that these were men who had not been tried, let alone convicted, of a crime? Wodehouse immediately ordered its relaxation. The men were allowed weekly visits by family or friends and were given permission to have food brought in at their own expense, while the return of their clothes ended the indignity of prison garb. Nevertheless, this controversy continued to simmer and promised to give fresh impetus to the unresolved debate over the treatment in prison of political offenders.32

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Even as he eased the rigours of prison life for the men taken under the suspension bill, Wodehouse learned that the “salutary effect” of this radical measure was proving transitory at best. Widespread disaffection still appeared only to lack an opportunity “to show itself actively.” The police reported the conspiracy’s worrying penetration of the farming class and detected signs of Fenian sympathies among Dublin’s working classes. Then came word of Stephens’s arrival in Paris and his boast not only to have remained in Dublin for weeks following his escape from Richmond Bridewell but also to have moved about the city freely and to have met with a large number of the Brotherhood’s senior figures. This claim revived doubts of the loyalty of the city’s police. Foreign Secretary Clarendon, a former lord lieutenant, was convinced of “some official treason,” and Wodehouse contemplated a covert investigation of the Dublin force by English detectives. Fortescue dissuaded him. Word of it was certain to leak out, he argued, and the effect on the police and Irish public opinion would be “very bad.” Meanwhile, in an embarrassing excess of diligence, a detachment of Ulster’s Protestant constabulary entered the Catholic cathedral at Armagh and searched the crypt for weapons. A Catholic sub-inspector was hurriedly sent north to take command of the local detachment.33 The crisis began to take its toll, psychological and emotional, on both Wodehouse and Larcom, overwhelmed as they were by “business connected with the arrests” and frustrated as the viceroy remained over the Liberal government’s inattention to the Irish problem. Convinced that conciliation must be the companion of coercion if the Irish were to be reconciled to the British connection, he was exasperated by a group of Liberals, among them Robert Lowe and Robert Peel, whose opposition to “doing right things for Ireland” encouraged Cabinet inactivity. The attempt by Sir John Gray, a prominent Protestant Irish member of the Commons, publisher of the Freeman’s Journal, and advocate of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, to reopen that question was successfully resisted by the government, which put up Fortescue to announce that British opinion was not ready for this debate. Yet even the Times described as indefensible the usurping of the “whole religious endowment” of Ireland by an “insignificant minority.” The chief secretary did introduce his land bill, not as “an antidote to Fenianism” but as a “measure of justice and a safeguard of national unity” that would permit tenants on quitting a property to claim compensation for some of the improvements they had made to it. Passage of this modest measure turned on the government’s survival of the bitter struggle over parliamentary reform.34

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The “vice-queen” burst into tears on learning of the government’s initial decision not to resign despite several reverses on the Reform Bill. She was concerned for her husband’s well-being. Frayed nerves had excited his private expression of profound ethnic contempt for the Irish, which a week later he withdrew as “unfair and unjust.” But he was “weary to death” of Ireland and sought only a “decent pretext to get away.” Personal tensions with Fortescue and his sedulous spouse were merely increasing the nervous strain. Wodehouse’s elevation to an earldom, now Kimberley, and the assurance of high ministerial office whenever an opportunity presented itself, encouraged the chief secretary and his ambitious lady to entertain the false hope that the viceroy would finally take the “handsome and friendly course” by waiving his objections to Fortescue’s admission to the Cabinet now struggling to pilot franchise reform through Parliament. Radicals were generally supportive of the Reform Bill, without being overly enthusiastic, linking it as they did with the pacification of Ireland. Once Britain’s working men were adequately represented, the neighbouring island would be rendered “happy and prosperous.” Unfortunately, ministers misjudged the response of both the official Opposition and a body of their own supporters.35 The government was confident of carrying second reading largely because it assumed that the Tories would not wish to form an administration in the face of a Liberal majority on all other questions, or to appeal to the country following the defeat of reform. However, the Conservatives found allies in a band of Liberals led in debate by the brilliant and caustic Robert Lowe. They were memorably mocked by John Bright as troglodytes skulking in the “Cave of Adullam.” Following the bill’s narrow defeat, at least one senior member of the Cabinet, Clarendon, considered reform so unpopular except among the disenfranchised that he and his colleagues might remain in office. His inspiration was the most notoriously cynical French politician in living memory, Charles Maurice de TalleyrandPerigord, who had summarized his own career with the observation that loyalty was merely a question of dates. In this instance, the foreign secretary thought they ought to be guided by the Frenchman’s injunction, “pas trop de zèle.” However, after some debate and confusion, ministers resigned. That sealed the fate of the land bill. With the collapse of the Liberal government at the end of June, the advance of the liberal state appeared to have stalled in one sector of the political field of battle but to have made surprising gains elsewhere.36 Sir Hugh Rose, the new military commander in Ireland, had been born in Berlin in the year of the Union. His first extended tour of duty as a

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young officer, having received military instruction in Prussia, was in Ireland. A period of service in the Near East, where he combined diplomatic duties with military responsibilities, equipped him to act as a British liaison officer at French headquarters during the Crimean War. Rewarded with a knighthood and promoted to the rank of major general, he secured a command during the Indian Mutiny. An “imperious manner,” a fondness for the sound of his own voice, displays of “arrogance, vanity and selfishness,” “meanness,” and an air of “ape-like malice and cunning” did not endear him to subordinates or superiors alike and probably explain his lack of friends and a spouse despite handsome features and an elegant if not dashing figure. But he emerged from the mutiny with a greatly enhanced military reputation, having exhibited “all the qualities of a great commander – quickness of perception, boldness, decisiveness, physical courage, determination and thoroughness, and luck.” That he had made his name in a single short campaign against “an indifferent foe” failed to discourage politicians at home, especially Conservatives, from saluting him as “our best general.”37 There were dark stains on Rose’s career. At Sehore, he had staged a macabre drama. More than 140 sepoys were hauled before Drum Head Courts Martial, thus permitting him to dispense with the formality of a written record of the proceedings. The accused mutineers were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in a single day. Although every proceeding concluded with an acknowledgment of a “palliating circumstance” – the men had abetted mutiny through fear – Rose was not moved to mercy. He equated fear with cowardice, which when it led to misbehaviour remained punishable by death. The doomed men, blindfolded and hands bound behind their backs, were compelled to kneel while a like number of individuals from the European Infantry took up position behind them. They placed the muzzles of their weapons close to the sepoys’ heads and fired. According to officials of the East India Company, in several instances the shot failed to be immediately fatal, so the wounded were finished off with sabres. Incredibly, three of the victims still managed to escape. Not only did Rose survive this “unseemly spectacle,” justifying his conduct with arguments commonly the property of barrack-room lawyers, but he was promoted to overall command on the subcontinent.38 A martinet at heart, Rose had convinced himself that nothing short of capital punishment would prevent “mutinous and insubordinate conduct.” This an unfortunate member of a European regiment learned. He paid with his life for participation in a mild demonstration to protest a delay in the troops’ promised discharge. Little wonder Rose’s reputation as an

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officer of “ruthless sternness” followed him to Ireland, and it was one the Fenians clumsily sought to embellish by circulating the legend that he had ordered the shackling of sepoy mutineers to the mouths of cannons and the weapons fired. But his cavalier disregard of the rights of the accused, and his zeal for capital punishment, caused the judge advocate general to scrutinize with equal zeal the conduct and findings of the Irish courts martial that tried soldiers accused of Fenianism.39 Rose quickly grasped on arrival in Ireland that “an essential object” of the Fenians was “to seduce the soldiery, the Militia and the constabulary.” Yet he briefly considered Fenianism a “positive good,” confident as he was that the opposition of some priests to revolutionary nationalism was driving a large wedge into the ranks of the “anti-English party.” The desirability of reaching an understanding with the Catholic clergy, which he facilely thought possible with a “little tactful management,” loomed ever larger in his mind as his distrust grew of the Irish lower classes who had fallen prey to a “vicious nationality” and made up almost one-third of the regular army’s rank and file.40 The English press contributed to the sense of crisis, describing the conspiracy within the army’s ranks “the worst part” of the Fenian business, and Rose proposed that all of the men suspected of contact with Fenians be transferred elsewhere. With the strong backing of the viceroy, he urged the relocation of the five depot battalions to the less disaffected areas of the island. The duke of Cambridge, the army’s royal commanderin-chief, eventually consented to this arrangement. Next, Rose and Wodehouse recommended the removal from the roster of service in Ireland any regiment considered especially vulnerable to subversion. Recognizing that the “mixed composition” of the army made it next to impossible to avoid stationing Irish soldiers in their native land, Rose pressed for the adoption of the principle that, whenever possible, the task of suppressing “dangerous Irish disaffection” be assigned to non-Irish soldiers.41 Cambridge was reluctant to concede the existence of a serious Fenian problem. Even infected men would, when push came to shove, do their duty, he insisted. “The fear of their Comrades would prevent them committing themselves more than word.” Unswayed by Rose’s opinion that Catholic soldiers inspired little confidence among “the loyal and wellaffected” and excited little fear in the disaffected, the duke convinced ministers and monarch to back his refusal to tinker with the roster. Several of the regiments scheduled for service in Ireland were heavily Scottish or English in complexion, he revealed, while to pass over the one that was largely Irish would “be a confession to the whole Army” that Irish soldiers

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could not be trusted. Adherence to the published rotations would be the lesser evil. He was to enjoy a measure of vindication in 1867 when regiments which Fenian recruiters boasted of having subverted played a prominent role in the suppression of the attempted rising. By then, however, there had been a systematic effort to identify and punish severely both corrupters and corrupted.42 The task of detection was police work, but the poking of civilian noses into military affairs ruffled the feathers of military peacocks. Investigations were being conducted “without any communication” to him, Rose complained to the Horse Guards, the army’s headquarters, a claim that so irritated the viceroy that he threatened to reject all responsibility for the island’s security if the police investigation was discontinued. The War Office hastily assured him that it was seeking nothing more than his full consultation with the general. However, the army soon had its own force of investigators in the field. They were commanded by Colonel Percy Feilding of the Coldstream Guards, the assistant adjutant general, Dublin Division. He had purchased his first commission at the age of eighteen, and then successive promotions to the rank of lieutenant colonel during the Crimean War, in which conflict he saw extensive action and distinguished himself. Ten years later he was promoted to a full colonelcy by royal warrant. As his deputy, Feilding selected an Irishman, Captain William Whelan. Born in Rathglass in 1833, he had entered the army at the age of twenty-three, having purchased his commission as an ensign of a regiment of Foot. He had seen service in India during the mutiny, been twice promoted, and was judged a “very zealous, good officer.” He effectively served as the head military detective, while Feilding established a network of informers and agents and acted as the supervisor of operations.43 Neither colonel nor captain entirely trusted the Dublin Detective Department, some of whose members they suspected of warning Fenians earmarked for arrest. Rose even suspected its head, Superintendent Daniel Ryan, of lacking enthusiasm for the work. The Fenians had penetrated the Dublin force, but it was the evidence of military subversion gathered by Ryan and his men, the reports of the army’s own informers and agents, and doubts of the loyalty of their men harboured by officers of regiments thought to be of “perfect trustworthiness” that sapped Cambridge’s confidence. Particularly disturbing was the alleged involvement in the conspiracy of several non-commissioned officers, for they were peculiarly well positioned to “corrupt” those around them. Fenianism would not now be a problem had nationalist disaffection in the ranks been eradicated in 1848 instead of being quietly ignored, Rose believed.

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He did not intend to repeat the mistake. Soldiers who joined the Brotherhood were guilty of a double act of treason, first as citizens and then as men who had sworn an oath of allegiance. Given his faith in the efficacy of capital punishment, he responded predictably to “such grave crimes.” He planned a little terror of his own, only to be frustrated by a law officer of infuriatingly “refined scruples.”44 Thomas Headlam was a son of the rectory. Called to the Bar at the Inner Temple at the age of twenty-six, in 1839, he had taken silk a dozen years later. Magistrate, deputy lieutenant of the North Riding of Yorkshire, chancellor of the dioceses of Ripon and Durham, member of Parliament “in the liberal interest” for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, author and editor of law texts, he had been appointed to the office of judge advocate general by Palmerston in 1859. He believed devoutly that there had never existed a constitution better adapted than Britain’s “to the government and wants of an enlightened people.” In their nation, he proudly informed his constituents, there was more genuine freedom – “freedom in the highest sense of the word, freedom of action and thought” – than in any other. In short, background and belief had produced a man with a profound concern for the moral as well as the legal course of action. He demanded respect for due process, even in the face of subversion, and was determined to see that the military observed the rule of law in the conduct of trials.45 Soldiers arrested by the police were handed over to the military authorities, in large part because convictions were more easily obtained in courts martial. But the wisdom of entrusting essentially political trials to tribunals commonly believed to have less exacting standards of proof, and to be less preoccupied with legal niceties, was questioned. Headlam infuriated Rose by initially declining to sanction the military trial of any man on a charge of “treasonable conduct” against whom the civil authorities had considered the evidence insufficient. Perhaps under ministerial pressure, the judge advocate modified his position early in the New Year with an announcement that he did not doubt the competence of the military authorities to try those of its men accused of “traitorous or seditious language.” Nevertheless, Cambridge cautioned Rose only to press ahead where the evidence was strong and the corroboration of witnesses adequate. Acquittals, he warned, would “do more harm than anything that could have happened.” Of course, conviction was not the final word. A sentence had first to be confirmed by the appropriate senior authority – and in Ireland that was Rose – and then examined for “irregularities or excessive punishments” by the judge advocate general. Headlam was to find no shortage of both.46

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Most of the accused, given the ambiguity of the Mutiny Act, could be charged only with “coming to the knowledge of an intended mutiny” and of failing to give that information to their commanding officers. This was still a capital offence, hence Headlam’s insistence on fair procedures and convincing proof of guilt. He required the involvement of at least two soldiers for a charge of intended mutiny to be laid and the production of proof that left “no reasonable doubt unsatisfied.” Thus, for a single soldier to have discussed with a civilian plans to seize a military barracks, or to have attempted to persuade colleagues to join the Fenian Brotherhood, or to have stated that he would lay down his arms rather than fight against Ireland, was “inadequate to sustain the charge.” Furthermore, Headlam dwelt upon the danger of a miscarriage of justice inherent in “trying a soldier on a capital charge on the evidence of a single witness deposing to one conversation.” The witness might have fabricated the evidence, but the proof of this would be difficult to establish. Even remarks made to a group of people were liable to be misunderstood or misinterpreted, “and this would be still more likely if the alleged words were spoken in the course of a miscellaneous conversation.” In short, Headlam made no secret of his resolve to challenge convictions and resist executions if the evidence of the crime was in his opinion unsatisfactory.47 Headlam’s concern for justice saw him question the propriety of trying a soldier before a presiding officer who had already voted to convict another on essentially the same evidence. He urged convening officers to avoid creating the impression that a case had been prejudged. His concern to protect an accused’s right to a fair trial explained his outrage over the conduct of Feilding when the latter appeared as the prosecutor in one important case. The colonel informed the court that the Irish Executive was in possession of a letter that amounted to an admission by James Stephens of the existence of the plot of which the soldier stood accused. Pointing to Feilding’s failure to introduce evidence of the reception of such a letter, which he observed would have been of doubtful admissibility anyway, Headlam assailed the statement as a grave error calculated “in a serious degree to prejudice the case against the prisoner.” Military prosecutors needed to be forcefully reminded “that moderation and carefulness of the Prisoner’s rights” formed an essential element of their duty. They should “anxiously abstain” from introducing anything that fell short of “legal evidence” and from making statements that could not be “made good by legal proof.” As it happened, the document in question was no more than a copy of a despatch from the British consul at New York reporting the claim of an informer to have overheard Stephens’s remarks.48

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Headlam eventually drafted a set of rules prescribing “the legal and just method of judicial enquiry” that ought to be observed “as carefully by military as by civil tribunals.” While mutinous conduct might properly be regarded as a capital offence under the 36th Article of War, “the mere utterance of words, though they might be evidence of such a crime,” were “totally inadequate to prove so grave a charge.” The law, he forcefully instructed the Irish command, regarded accusations of treason with jealousy. It required an overt act and the testimony of at least two witnesses. Yet it was on the strength of the dubious and inadequate evidence of a single informer that a non-commissioned officer had been convicted and sentenced to death. The regular courts had long been reluctant to convict solely on the word of an informer, even for lesser sentences, he reminded the military, and while there was no hard and fast rule on the subject, judges invariably cautioned jurors against acting on such evidence and not infrequently declined to send cases to the jury in the absence of corroboration of an informer’s story. Corroboration did not need to be identical to the testimony of the informer, but it had to establish the identity of the prisoner “and to confirm the statement of the informer in such material points as to render his evidence – which is otherwise worthy of little or no credit – sufficient for the purpose of supporting a conviction.” Headlam quoted approvingly and extensively from the remarks of Justice Fitzgerald in one of the recent civilian Fenian trials. They were not to accept as conclusive the word of a solitary informer, Fitzgerald had instructed jurors, nor should they accept as corroboration the testimony of another “tainted witness.” The judge’s definition of reasonable doubt was one Headlam wished to see guide members of courts martial. Sound policy and the principles of mercy demanded caution of a jury, Fitzgerald had explained, because the prisoner himself could never be heard: “His mouth is shut in a criminal court, and because his mouth is shut and because he is not permitted to be examined as a witness the law is this that if on a fair consideration of the evidence the Jury by whom the Prisoner is tried have any reasonable doubt of his guilt they are bound to acquit him.”49 Headlam, who saved the convicted soldier from the gallows, recommended that cases be submitted to him in the first instance so that he could frame the charges “instead of advising upon them” after they had been brought by a military prosecutor. He made no secret of his intent to ensure that military courts adhered as closely as possible to the standards of civilian courts. There needed to be searching investigations to identify and punish any soldier concerned in “so heinous a crime” as the subversion of his fellows, he agreed, but the dangerous nature of the crime and the

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severity of the punishment demanded proceedings conducted with “scrupulous legality and justice, and why no person should be convicted, or even brought into jeopardy of trial, except on evidence reasonably sufficient.” He established three requirements for a sound conviction: that there was proof of an intended mutiny, that the accused had knowledge of it, and that he had failed to inform his commanding officer. Nor did Headlam shrink from delivering an implied warning to the army command. Presiding as he did over the administration of military justice, he was “bound to watch well that in this emergency the bounds appointed by the law [were] not in any way exceeded.”50 Rose bitterly protested Headlam’s rules, claiming they made virtually impossible the successful prosecution of soldiers for the “rank treason” of Fenianism. The judge advocate general was laying down “abstract principles of civil law,” he informed the Horse Guards, which rendered the “practical carrying out of the Articles of War in the spirit of legal equity allowed to Military Tribunals, impossible.” Members of courts martial were being denied the right they had always possessed “to judge the credibility of witnesses and evidence.” If Headlam’s principles were adopted, he added ominously, the discipline of the army would receive a fatal blow in one of its essentials, allegiance to the sovereign. This barrage of complaints galvanized Cambridge into renewed action. Examples needed to be made of the disaffected within the ranks, the duke wrote to the secretary of state, “and if at every step we are to be met by the ‘refined scruples’ of the Judge Advocate, there is an end to all hope of getting things put right again.” He could no longer be held responsible for military discipline, the commanderin-chief announced, if the conviction of any soldier of “mutinous and seditious conduct under that name” continued to be made impossible.51 The Cabinet debated on St Patrick’s Day, 1866, the wisdom of sanctioning the execution of Irish soldiers found guilty of involvement in the Fenian conspiracy. A majority of ministers saw no political reason to veto a resort to the ultimate punishment if Cambridge insisted it would have a “salutary effect,” but a minority strongly dissented. Severity would excite sympathy for the doomed men within the ranks of the army and would probably spark public demonstrations on behalf of all Fenian prisoners, they countered. Divided, the Cabinet procrastinated. A fortnight later Cambridge obliged ministers to revisit the problem with yet another complaint against Headlam. On this occasion he had recommended to the queen, without prior consultation with the duke, that she decline to confirm a sentence of penal servitude for life imposed on another senior non-commissioned officer. “Of course one cannot wish that a man should be convicted on

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insufficient evidence,” the secretary of state for war observed, “but there is no doubt that it places the Duke and Sir Hugh Rose in a very difficult position if the decisions of Courts Martial are upset in this manner.” In an effort to finesse the problem, the Cabinet resolved to instruct Headlam to consult the English law officers before submitting his advice to the queen. As double insurance, it agreed to advise the monarch to refer to the same law officers all “questions relating to the loyalty of soldiers accused of treasonable conspiracy.”52 Before implementing these decisions, the marquis of Hartington as the responsible minister sought the lord chancellor’s opinion. The Fenians appeared to be content merely “to secure the assistance and support of certain soldiers in each Regiment and not to employ them as Agents or to place them in any position in which it is likely that they will be amenable to the Civil Law,” he informed the senior law officer, “and if Mr. Headlam’s opinion is to be taken as decisive, I fear that until an open mutiny takes place it will be impossible to bring them to justice.” To Hartington’s surprise, Lord Cramworth strongly backed the judge advocate general’s demand that on a charge as necessarily vague as that of inciting to mutiny, the court act only on testimony “above all suspicion.” He also admitted to sharing Headlam’s difficulty in understanding the “precise nature” of some of the charges the army wished to lay against soldiers accused of Fenianism. This opinion abruptly put a stop to ministerial efforts to pressure Headlam into abandoning his “scruples.”53 The decisive test of wills on the enforcement of capital punishment came with the trial and sentencing to death of Colour Sergeant McCarthy. A long-service non-commissioned officer with a distinguished record, he was accused of planning to deliver the Clonmel Magazine of munitions into the hands of the Fenians. Headlam declined to approve the initial set of charges laid against McCarthy and three alleged associates, but when Rose protested yet again to higher authority, a weary secretary of state finally declared himself “most adverse” to interfering with the judge advocate general. Headlam was a lawyer and was responsible for the advice he gave in such cases, Cambridge was reminded. Rose, on the other hand, was not a lawyer, had no clear idea of legal questions, and presented arguments that were occasionally difficult to follow. Thus he should be instructed to be guided by the opinions of the judge advocate general. Although Headlam framed an indictment that still carried the death penalty, Rose continued to complain to the viceroy.54 Wodehouse came under persistent military pressure during the last few weeks of his viceroyalty to endorse the marching of at least one Fenian

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soldier to the gallows. The “diabolical and bloodthirsty nature” of the Clonmel plot, which would have resulted in the cold-blooded murder of non-Fenian personnel, fully merited the ultimate punishment, Feilding argued on behalf of the high command. No less important, an execution would prove to the rank and file that the Mutiny Act and the Articles of War were not dead letters, that the higher the rank of an accused the greater the culpability, and it would “form examples for the future guidance” of the rest of the army. Furthermore, a timely example of one or more of the men involved might induce other subverted soldiers to turn informers in an effort to save their own skins, placing the authorities in the happy position of being able to convict civilians on the evidence of soldiers, and soldiers on that of civilians, thereby destroying mutual confidence between them. Finally, Feilding slyly suggested to the harassed Wodehouse that enforcement of the most extreme penalty in this case would finally lay to rest the idea that the Irish Executive dare not execute Fenians for fear of exciting rebellion. “I need not say,” he concluded, “how injurious it must be to all principles of justice and government that such an opinion should be allowed to remain in the mind of this excitable and imaginative race.”55 The army had in this instance the support of the influential Times. Recalling what it described as one of the great lessons of the Indian Mutiny, that insurgents even of an “inferior race” possessed the formidable power of military discipline, the newspaper warned that the spread of disaffection among the men of the Irish garrison was certain to result in “bloodshed and devastation which several generations might fail to repair.” McCarthy had forfeited all claim to mercy, it asserted, having been false to his flag and his uniform, and it denounced the application submitted by Isaac Butt, Irish politician and barrister, for the removal of the case to a civilian court on the grounds that McCarthy was for all intents and purposes being prosecuted for a crime a court martial was not competent to try – high treason. The application was rejected. Military tribunals had sometimes “incurred just discredit,” the Times admitted, but in this case condemnation by a military court would have an especially “salutary effect.” McCarthy was duly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, having declined to call a single witness in his defence.56 A distracted viceroy was loath to intervene, while Rose in London on leave celebrated the sentence. Nothing could be worse than McCarthy’s crime of “deliberate deeply planned treason,” while the fact that British soldiers were volunteers, not conscripts, made their treason, in Rose’s opinion, more egregious. Hence his fury when on Headlam’s advice the death sentence was commuted. Yet again the judge advocate general had

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reined in the army command. By demanding respect of the rights of the accused and adherence to established rules of evidence, especially in capital cases, and with his courageous advice to the queen challenging and effectively vetoing sentences, Headlam obliged the army to respect the principles of a liberal state. Rose’s plan to strike a little terror of his own into Irish soldiers tempted by Fenianism, through summary military trials and capital punishment, had been scotched. The pace of courts martial did quicken, and there was a subtle change of emphasis when the Tories returned to office in the summer of 1866. John Mowbray exhibited greater anxiety to facilitate prosecutions, confirmed longer sentences of penal servitude, and sanctioned proceedings against several of the men whose prosecution Headlam had declined to approve, but he did not reverse his predecessor’s legal opinions. No executions took place.57 The Fenian crisis within military ranks had not been resolved at the expense of the concept of the liberal state. Rather, the rule of law, one of its cornerstones, was increasingly governing military prosecutions. Equally, the rule of law had been upheld in the civilian trials of the men convicted of planning an insurgency, though their harsh sentences of penal servitude promised to emerge as an emotional public issue in Ireland. Similarly, in the trial of the night watchman accused of complicity in the escape of James Stephens, and in whose possession Fenian literature had been found, the judge had instructed the jury that it would be “dangerous to the liberties of the subject” to convict a man “from the simple fact that a treasonable document was found in his possession.” Suspension of habeas corpus marked a temporary retreat from the rule of law, but a viceroy acutely sensitive to the suspicion and opposition this radical measure aroused did take steps to ensure it was not cavalierly abused. Freedom of speech and the freedom of the press had been challenged, but they had survived relatively unscathed. Provocative priests, such as Patrick Lavelle, had not been silenced, and with the exception of the Irish People, which was a special case, nationalist newspapers had been neither suppressed nor intimidated. Nor had the Irish Executive plumped for “firm government.” Both viceroy and chief secretary had recognized the necessity to “dry up the sources of discontent” if the subversives were to be denied popular sympathy, but they failed to persuade the Russell government to implement this counterinsurgency strategy. Nor were they able to find common ground with the Irish Catholic Church in the struggle to contain Fenianism. How would the government respond, however, when the Fenians finally took to the field?

3 Invasion and Insurgency

John O’Mahony’s commitment to action in Ireland divided American Fenians. A faction led by William Roberts, an Irish-born, politically ambitious, highly successful dry goods merchant, advocated the seemingly simpler and more practical strategy of invading British North America. Fenian invaders were assured of considerable local support by Michael Murphy, the Brotherhood’s Canadian leader, who boasted of a membership in excess of 125,000 and the penetration of every British regiment stationed in the province. The confused state of American politics in the immediate aftermath of the civil war, and the republic’s tense relationship with Britain, also appeared to point firmly northwards. The assassinated Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, locked in the increasingly bitter political struggle with Congress for control of the reconstruction of the former Confederate States, and with an eye to the large Irish vote, had reportedly voiced his willingness to recognize “accomplished facts” should the occupation of a portion of British territory be followed by the proclamation of an Irish republic. Moreover, there did not seem to be much point in continuing to focus exclusively on rebellion in Ireland. James Stephens complained incessantly of the insufficiency of the funds reaching him from the United States, and his reputation suffered another heavy blow when O’Mahony despatched John Mitchel to Paris as his financial agent. The firebrand nationalist contemptuously dismissed Stephens as a liar whose Irish organization was a sham and a fraud. Meanwhile, the suppression of the Irish People, the trials and severe sentences of several leading Fenians, the escape of Stephens from prison, and the mass detentions of Irish Americans following the suspension of habeas corpus created a “terrific state of excitement” in Irish America. A strike against British North America would provide it with a satisfying release.1

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The Canadian authorities were alive to the Fenian threat, both domestic and American, thanks to reports from the British minister in Washington, from the British consuls in cities where the Brotherhood was most active, from an agent despatched to New York, and from the special detective force concerned with the Fenian problem. By the end of 1865, seventeen “circles” had been detected in Canada West, though the heaviest concentration was in and around Toronto and the membership modest in number. Anticipating trouble on St Patrick’s Day, the provincial government called out 10,000 volunteers and despatched detectives to patrol the border opposite Detroit. The authorities received a helping hand from Bishop Lynch of Toronto, who had a reputation as a supporter of Irish nationalist “extremists.” At the prodding of D’Arcy McGee, the most prominent IrishCanadian politician, he issued a circular deploring any invasion by “lawless men pretending to remedy the evils of Ireland.” Canadian Catholics had a duty, Lynch declared, to repel invasion, defend their homes, and behave themselves on St Patrick’s Day. If this document appeared tepid when placed alongside the full-blooded denunciation of Fenianism issued by Bishop Farrell of Hamilton, it probably contributed to the calm on the day. Soon afterwards, the Canadian government received reassuring news from the New Brunswick border with the United States, where the O’Mahony group, seeking to steal some of the thunder of the Roberts faction, launched an invasion of its own. Poorly conceived, ineptly organized, it was repulsed with humiliating ease, and the temptation now to ridicule Fenianism proved irresistible in Canada. The governor general, Lord Monck, an Irishman, unwisely interpreted the belated action of the American authorities as proof they would never permit an invasion of Canada to be launched from their soil. This confidence grew with the Americans’ seizure of large quantities of Fenian arms and was further bolstered by reports from Canada’s own agents that the crisis had passed. The “Fenian war may be considered over,” the province’s dominant politician, John A. Macdonald, concluded.2 The Canadian government was therefore caught off guard only a few weeks later, on 1 June, when the Fenians again invaded. Roberts and his associates had planned an ambitiously broad, enveloping, three-pronged campaign, but it went off half-cocked. The left wing of the attacking force failed to take to the field. In the centre, the Niagara River was crossed, and the invaders defeated the hastily assembled Canadian volunteers and established a beachhead. However, when neither supplies nor reinforcements arrived, the Fenians beat a retreat. Meanwhile, the right wing had also crossed the border, briefly entering the Eastern Townships of Canada

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East, but a presidential proclamation enforcing the American neutrality laws and ordering the arrest of the Fenians, together with the failure of expected local help to materialize, prompted another speedy withdrawal. The Canadian Parliament suspended habeas corpus, but Macdonald’s fear that arbitrary arrests would either drive the Catholic Irish into the arms of the Fenians or out of Canada ensured that this form of harassment was quickly discontinued.3 The Canadian press demanded the speedy trial and exemplary punishment of the captured raiders. But the possibility of executions alarmed Britain’s newly installed Conservative government, though the objections were pragmatic rather than philosophical. Any “unusual severity” would have a “mischievous influence” on the already tense AngloAmerican relationship, the foreign secretary, Lord Stanley, explained to his Colonial Office counterpart, Lord Carnarvon. They needed to bear in mind the Johnson administration’s desire to hold on to the large Irish vote. The “hard working” and “capable,” if occasionally “rash,” Carnarvon immediately sent off a public despatch to the governor general recommending a “policy of moderation,” and explained its necessity in an accompanying private letter. Monck sought to calm imperial concerns. The legal proceedings would be delayed, he assured London, in order to allow tempers to cool and the current congressional session in Washington to close. He also gave assurances that the Fenians would not be charged with the capital crime of treason and would be tried in the criminal courts. But Carnarvon’s confidence in the Canadian government was quickly shaken, first by Monck’s telegraphing for troop reinforcements, only to admit later that he had never considered the province in peril, and then by the newspaper reports of the “gross neglect of duty” by, and habitual drunkenness of, provincial ministers. The “principal delinquent” was the indispensable Macdonald, yet he was a pivotal figure in the movement to create a British North American federation. This was a project to which the Fenian invaders had unintentionally given a fillip. For its part, the imperial government, keen both to prevent the absorption of British territories into the republic and to impress upon the colonials the need to cease being “miserable municipalities” if they expected either “consideration” from the United States or protection from the mother country, actively promoted confederation. The probability that Macdonald’s removal from office would bring down the government formed to carry this ambitious project served to dissuade Carnarvon from taking action.4 When the Fenian trials finally opened in Toronto in October 1866, Monck’s earlier assurances briefly proved of little value. The presiding

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judge announced that British-born raiders would be charged with treason, and the first major trials, those of Robert Lynch and Father John McMahon, resulted in convictions and imposition of the ultimate penalty. Eventually, twenty-four Fenians were sentenced to death. Bishop Lynch privately protested that much of the evidence used to convict the first pair had been suspect and the conduct of the trial less than fair. One prosecution witness, an accomplice of the accused, had been described by his own mother as a “congenital liar,” while the prosecutor had been permitted to “jog” the memory of other witnesses and even suggest their answers to his questions. In declining to interfere in the judicial process, Macdonald reminded Lynch that the evidence of turncoats, that is, accomplices who became prosecution witnesses, was widely accepted in European and American courts, and in the present cases “no dispassionate person” could doubt that their evidence had been fully corroborated. Thus one standard of British justice had been maintained. Then, piously reaffirming the rule of law in a liberal state, he silenced the bishop with an implied threat: “It is unusual and held to be irregular to anyone to interfere in the course of justice, with those who are concerned in its administration, and your communications, if known to the public, might render your course liable to such misconstruction.”5 The imperial government’s resolve to prevent executions had been strengthened by the Johnson administration’s reverses in the congressional elections and its consequent inclination to “flatter the Fenians.” Stanley was in no mood to “consider” the opinions of the Canadians, for knowing that Britain must defend them they were “practically irresponsible.” Colonial politicians, in his opinion, did not understand moderation, abhorred compromise, and did not worry about quarrels in which they were unlikely to suffer in purse or person. Secretary of State William Seward’s peremptory tone in seeking both mercy for the condemned men and transcripts of their trials was a reminder of just how sensitive an international issue their punishment was likely to become. Not that the American’s bluster ruffled Stanley’s feathers, designed as it clearly was for domestic consumption. Meanwhile, Carnarvon authorized Monck to make public the imperial government’s wish for the death sentences to be commuted only for the Cabinet to reject as far too lenient the governor general’s suggestion that the terms of imprisonment be no longer than five years. Ministers insisted on terms of twenty years. Just as it would be “unwise to lose the advantage of past clemency” by sanctioning executions,” the prime minister observed, “so it seems undesirable to carry the punishment to a point which can be represented if not felt to be one of

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great severity.” Although a Fenian raider was to die in prison, not one of the others served out his sentence. They were gradually released between 1867 and 1872, with McMahon being set free in 1869 and Robert Lynch two years later. The latter’s freedom was delayed by McMahon’s conduct on returning to the United States, where he delivered a series of incendiary speeches against the Canadian authorities.6 The damaging impact of Ireland’s “chronic state of discontent” on AngloAmerican relations had prompted the British minister at Washington to propose to Monck that they make a joint submission to the home government in favour of the redress of Irish grievances. Reform was the only sure way to take the wind out of the Fenians’ sails, he suggested. The governor general did not agree. The “present treatment” of his native land had little if anything to do with the current disaffection, he replied. The Fenians would never be satisfied, nor would their hostility to England ever be tempered, through the redress of “alleged injustice.” Fenianism had in Monck’s opinion no hold on those of his countrymen who had anything to lose in disturbances or revolution. Stern repression was therefore the only sound response, and it was one that would command the “assent of the middle classes and all religious denominations.” Many a Tory instinctively agreed that the Irish masses were indifferent to the actions of the united Parliament because Fenianism had put issues such as tenant right and disestablishment “out of joint.” What “Pat” wanted was “Ireland for the Irish and his own Parliament.”7 The formation of the Tory government had proven a time-consuming and controversial task. The unusually long hiatus between governments was caused not merely by the difficulties of Cabinet making but also by the queen’s refusal to cut short her holiday at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. For this her Highlander gillie, John Brown, was held responsible, and the scandal of their suspected intimacy was, as Oscar Wilde would have quipped, “gossip made tedious by morality.” Meanwhile, the earl of Derby was seeking to broaden the base of this his third minority administration first by making advances to a pair of prominent Whig Liberals, which were rebuffed, and then to the Adullamites. Their excessive ministerial demands compelled him to look exclusively to his own party, in which there were “more sucking, or would-be sucking pigs than the old Conservative sow” had teats. Derby appointed his son and heir to the Foreign Office, but with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. Nevertheless, Edward Henry Stanley had travelled widely abroad, had served as an undersecretary of foreign affairs in his father’s first government, and was considered a safe pair of hands. Benjamin Disraeli, who would lead in the Commons, created

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additional tension with his unsuccessful effort to exclude the former foreign secretary, Malmesbury, from the Cabinet. Admittedly, his previous tenure of the office had been undistinguished, but his enduring unpopularity was in some sense the result of his having succumbed to Disraeli’s pressure to revive something akin to the spoils system with respect to diplomatic appointments. Spencer Walpole returned to the Home Office he had occupied in both of the previous Derby governments, but in the humiliating knowledge that he was the third choice and did not inspire confidence as the general supervisor of Irish affairs. His “pensive qualities of mind fit him so much better for sitting among the hierarchy of the Ecclesiastical Commission, and assessing the large expenditure on Bishops’ palaces, and adding sixpence to the stipends of hardworking Curates, rather than the strategy necessary to meet even a rough-and-tumble Irish outbreak,” one organ of middle-class opinion condescendingly remarked.8 Derby’s reputation did not suggest that the Tory government’s “general political tone” would be sympathetic to Ireland. His “unswerving dislike of Catholicism” had seen him traduce “Popery” as “religiously corrupt and politically dangerous” and oppose more generous public funding of the Catholic seminary of Maynooth with the argument that it had conspicuously failed to produce a “loyal and enlightened priesthood.” Little wonder the Catholic Standard named him an enemy of the Catholic Church. His leader in the lower house was somewhat more difficult to typify. Clever, cynical, cunning, opportunistic, resourceful, and at times rancorous, Disraeli had as a young Radical supported Catholic emancipation, voiced admiration for Daniel O’Connell, and advocated reform of the Church of Ireland. Only following his leap to Toryism had he “vehemently opposed” Irish demands for radical reforms and aligned himself with the cause of “popular protestantism.” But as a parliamentary tactician operating in a Commons of fractured parties and unstable majorities, he appreciated the potential influence of Catholic Irish members and was mindful of the electoral significance of that minority of English Catholics who belonged to the gentry and the middle classes.9 In selecting the Irish Executive, Derby reversed the imbalance of the previous administration. The viceroy was reduced to a figurehead in the person of the marquis of Abercorn. Chief of the historic house of Hamilton, stepson of one prime minister and spouse of the half-sister of another, a favourite of the late Prince Albert, his wife an intimate of the queen, the owner of vast estates in Tyrone and Donegal, praised by Orangemen, Abercorn possessed the wealth appropriate to viceroyalty and the manner to match. His entry into Dublin was carefully staged, lest the city’s Catholic

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residents gave him a hostile reception. The streets were lined with troops, and military bands were stationed at intervals to play popular Irish tunes. Considered weak and non-political by senior Tories, he stood in need of a strong chief secretary, who came in the person Lord Naas. Heir to the earl of Mayo, he traced his lineage to the eleventh century. A member of Parliament for almost two decades, he was the party’s acknowledged expert on Irish affairs, and unusual in an Irishman, at least in Disraeli’s opinion, he combined “eminent judgment with complete knowledge” of the island. He united “the solid good sense of an English gentleman,” one admiring colleague remarked, “with the geniality and humour of the best sort of Irishman.” Within Cabinet, he had a reputation for making his points simply, directly, and even memorably “through some stroke of wit, or unintended quaintness of expression.” An astute manager of constituency politics, intelligent, shrewd, hard working, he had an “easy, natural and unpretending style” of debate that won him admirers on both sides of the House. Although he would have preferred the Indian viceroyalty, or some similar dignity, he selflessly agreed to return to Ireland because the office promised to be “more difficult than ever” and his personal experience would enable him “to get on with more success than a perfect stranger.” With Nass as its “actual head,” the Irish Executive seemed certain to play an even larger role than usual in the formulation of policy.10 When they met on 4 July to discuss the transition at the Foreign Office, Clarendon had surprised Stanley by stressing the seriousness of Fenianism as a problem in Anglo-American relations. Three days later, at the Cabinet’s first meeting and with all of Europe watching with amazement if not apprehension Prussia’s rapid military defeat of Austria, Fenianism was high on the agenda. After all, the Tories had from the Opposition benches accused the government of attempting to “play with Irish turbulence, and try to soothe it down with silly nostrums of Liberal pharmacopoeia.” This “cowardly, wavering, irresolute and unsystematic” policy they had attributed to “intrusive misgivings” rooted in English self-reproach for the errors and injustices of the past. Yet Britain’s apparent inconsistency in supporting European nationalist movements while seeking to suppress Irish nationalism was a source of some intellectual uneasiness. Where was the guiding principle “in judging of the doctrine of nationalists,” a thoughtful critic asked. “One is very anxious that Venice should belong to Italy, SchleswigHolstein to Germany, and then why should not Ireland be free?” Where was the line between “a just resistance to oppression and rebellion”?11 Henry Manning, who had succeeded Nicholas Wiseman as archbishop of Westminster, made much the same point when he met with the new

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foreign secretary. England had helped to create the nationalist monster now threatening the Union, he argued, through her support of Italian unification. But many Britons flattered themselves that an Ireland denied their influence and presence would quickly descend into the horrors of sectarian savagery. Their moral duty to uphold civilization therefore trumped mere ideological consistency. Equally, the supposed Fenian objective of a “pure Celtic Republic” was dismissed as an utterly inappropriate expression of ethnic nationalism in what was a multi-ethnic society. “Saxon and Celt have intermarried in Ireland as elsewhere,” went the rejoinder, “and the Irish people cannot be sharply distinguished by a line which would mark them off into two distinct races.” If Irishmen were unlikely to be swayed by this opportunistic argument advanced by Englishmen more often heard spouting Anglo-Saxonism, it was Frederic Harrison, “Positivist philosopher and liberal journalist,” writing in the Commonwealth who prophetically warned that the principle of national independence, having done such great service to liberty, was, in the “bastard form of exclusive nationality,” about to inflict a “fatal wound on progress.” To “limit and degrade this great cause down to a frantic cry of race,” he added, was to “prostitute the name of Nation.”12 The Tories’ influence over Irish Protestants, who were regarded as the chief obstacles to reform, led the press to conclude that a “wise” Conservative government could more easily deal with this latest Irish problem. Liberal measures, it was still assumed, would dry up the Fenians’ popular support by lessening the discontent on which they were currently feasting. In short, there was an instinctive recognition of the need to isolate potential insurgents from the mass of the population. A dismantling of the Church of Ireland, and a “proportionate” distribution of its liberated revenues to Ireland’s sects, which would deliver at least two-thirds of this windfall to Roman Catholics, together with a charter for Cullen’s Catholic university, would surely conciliate the influential Catholic clergy. Land reform was needed to pacify the island’s legions of tenants, but Derby was disinclined to trespass on property rights and risk losing the support of the landed gentry, without whom, he remarked, “we are gone.” Nor was he well disposed to denominational education, having as chief secretary more than three decades earlier founded the national schools. An ardent defender of the Established Church, he would never woo even moderate Catholic opinion at the expense of alienating Ireland’s Protestants.13 Coercion was more to the taste of Conservatives, who had never wearied of boasting of Derby’s speedy suppression less than a decade earlier of the infant Fenians of the Phoenix Society, and Disraeli gave notice in mid-

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July of an impending renewal of the suspension of habeas corpus. Naas, who had been welcomed back to Dublin by Thomas Larcom with the advice to give early consideration to the “Fenian business,” found that several hundred men were still being detained. Information was continuing to pour into Dublin Castle from magistrates, police, and the small army of informants paid from a secret service fund, which his Liberal predecessor had increased substantially, and the chief secretary recognized the need for someone to organize and digest it. This vital task was given to Robert Anderson, a self-described “Anglicized Irishman of Scottish extraction.” Only twenty-five years of age, a lawyer by profession, a son of the former Crown solicitor, an office now held by his older sibling Samuel Lee, the younger Anderson had “special knowledge of the Fenian movement,” having been privy to the confidential documents reaching his brother’s desk. Thus it was a well-briefed Naas who at the beginning of August moved the renewal of suspension.14 The chief secretary made a straightforward case. Suspension would give confidence to the loyal, who had undoubtedly read of James Stephens’s promises to return home before the end of the year and lead a rebellion, and it would induce many Fenians to flee the island, enabling Naas to negotiate from a position of strength with the 320 men still in custody. The threat of continued detention would persuade the detainees to agree, as the price of freedom, either to quit Ireland or to put up substantial bail for their good conduct. Naas then assured the Commons of the Tories’ intention to deal with Ireland in a “liberal and generous spirit,” but this failed to appease critics of continued suspension. John Francis Maguire, the member for Cork, who insisted that the Fenian organization was “utterly broken down,” protested the making of so grave a demand “upon so futile and miserable a case.” He was supported by an English member, R.B. Osborne, a long-time resident of Ireland and large employer there. “The British Constitution, which is here the great sun of our political system, is only shown to Ireland under an eclipse,” he sardonically observed. The suspension of habeas corpus had become almost commonplace, while royal visits were conspicuously rare. How could Irishmen be expected to feel an interest in the British monarchy when they saw it “only in its most disagreeable form – in the form of Judges when they go to the assize”? But the suspension bill had the backing of the Liberal leadership. The attack on Canada had demonstrated the “virulence and malignity of Fenianism,” Gladstone declared. Kimberley was similarly supportive in the upper chamber, warning that Fenianism was beginning to infect the minds of Ireland’s farmers and thus posed a danger greater than any since 1798.15

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A number of the detainees were released on the condition they immediately left Ireland. Irish Americans able to pay their passage home were escorted to the dock and placed on board departing transatlantic steamers. Similarly, men who had come over from Britain were escorted to the cross-channel ferries. However, the explanatory memorandum forwarded to Spencer Walpole did little to still his uneasiness over the return of these men. They were comparatively harmless rank and file, Larcom assured the home secretary, only to add with unintentional menace that the recently reorganized Brotherhood wished them to remain in England and Scotland and create diversionary disturbances whenever Stephens’s long-threatened rising took place. That outbreak suddenly seemed imminent, Naas advised Derby in mid-October, for “we hear every day something that shows us that the Brotherhood have by no means given up the intention of doing something soon.”16 The cool popular reception given John Bright and his message during a visit to Ireland just a few weeks later added weight to this ominous reading of the situation. He denied that Ireland’s troubles were rooted in some national character defect, he acquitted the Roman Catholic clergy of responsibility for the island’s state of chronic disaffection, and he reminded his listeners of the recent desolating famine that was their land’s sad and unique distinction among Christian countries. If his prescription for what ailed Ireland included the familiar remedies of disestablishment and land reform, Bright had radical therapies in mind. He proposed to “secure to the tenant the property which he has invested in his farm” and called for a parliamentary commission equipped with the power to purchase the estates of English absentees and resell them in affordable units on “proper terms” to the tenantry. Far-reaching reforms could be achieved constitutionally, he was arguing, and to that end Irish members of Parliament needed to unite. Insistent that enlargement of the electorate would promote this essential unity, generate British political sympathy, and thus ensure justice for Ireland, he made “almost universal” suffrage the central theme of his speech at the Mechanics’ Institute on 2 November. As residents of one of the less populous and less powerful regions of the United Kingdom, the men of Ireland had “by far the strongest interest in a thorough reform of the Imperial Parliament.”17 Reports of the seeming indifference of the Dublin working men to Bright’s radical rhetoric, of their lusty cheering of every mention of the United States and yells of “never” when Bright expressed hope for a new friendship between Ireland and England, were read in Britain as troubling evidence of the extent to which the mass of Irish labourers had “their

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heads full of an Irish republic, of the Irish tanists, of tribal rights, [and] the repartition of the land.” Here was fresh proof of the folly of accepting the votes and wishes of the multitude as a safe guide in the conduct of public affairs, the Manchester Guardian warned, for nothing short of independence would suffice to appease the Irish masses. Similarly disturbing and ominous was the Irish rejection of an English popular leader “because he is an Englishman.” But the Commonwealth censured Bright for largely ignoring Fenianism in his Dublin speeches. After all, of the “untold number of conspiracies and secret organizations” that testified to the “tyrannical misrule” endured by Ireland’s people, none had “ever taken so firm a hold on the minds and affections of the masses as this last movement led by Stephens.”18 The Foreign Office assumed the Fenian chief was planning to create the semblance of an Irish civil war in order to permit the American Congress to take ironic revenge on Britain for her recognition of Confederate belligerency. The Brotherhood would then be entitled to license American privateers to ravage British commerce on the high seas – hence the determined effort to track Stephens’s movements. From Lloyd’s Underwriters, the government obtained a list of steamers scheduled to depart the United States for the United Kingdom and Europe between mid-November and early December. All disembarking passengers were to be scrutinized, but since the Fenian chief was little known to British policemen, several “good” Irish officers familiar with him arrived to help them. Two others accompanied English detectives to the French terminals of Brest and Le Havre, but no formal approach was made to the French government for fear it would demand reciprocity. Britain’s reputation as a liberal haven for political refugees, many of them opponents of the Second Empire, was a source of national pride, and to admit French agents to keep watch on them would excite popular indignation. Subsequently, an Irish resident magistrate, whose name suggested francophone antecedents, discreetly established a network of agents to keep watch in Paris and at the principal French ports.19 Although Derby was sceptical of Stephens’s intention to put in an appearance, he responded positively to the Irish Executive’s request for military reinforcements in the belief that their arrival would check “a very unnecessary panic.” In addition, troops were re-equipped with modern breech-loading rifles, marines were put on alert, small naval vessels maintained regular patrols of the coast, and Naas made an early return to Dublin from London. Larcom advised that the time had come for “the actual head of Government” to be on the spot, and on his arrival the chief secretary ordered the arrest of known leading conspirators. He was happy to allow

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the “small Fry” to take to their heels. The presence of the military commander was no less desirable. Sir Hugh Rose, however, now Lord Strathnairn, wished to remain in London. He enjoyed the social life of the capital and was the chair of a committee investigating military administration. No sane rebel, lacking cavalry, artillery, ammunition, and organization, would take to the field in a difficult terrain against a well-equipped army, he reasoned. But the pressure on him to assume personal command became irresistible as panic tightened its grip on many a loyal Irish mind. The discovery and seizure by the police of a substantial quantity of weapons and ammunition in Cork brought a demand from local magistrates for the stationing of a larger military force there. In Dublin, the appearance of artillery in Phoenix Park, presumably to protect the Viceregal Lodge and the residences of the chief secretary and the undersecretary, the erection of stockades on the approaches to Dublin Castle, and the throwing up of earthworks around the magazine fort fuelled the popular excitement. Nor was it dampened by press reports of “greatly augmented” police patrols, of troops being constantly drilled in “street tactics,” and of the interception of cases of muskets sent from the United States via Liverpool.20 An anxious Spencer Walpole hurried down to the library of the House of Commons personally to study the legislation that allowed for the embodying of the militia in the event of insurrection or rebellion. He concluded that a resort to these powers in this instance “would expose the weakness of many regiments – and that would create unnecessary alarm.” But naval vessels took up highly visible stations in Bantry Bay, the mouth of the Shannon, and at the ports of Waterford and Dungarvan. However, offers by loyalists to form mutual defence associations, or to be enrolled as special constables, were firmly but courteously declined. Ireland’s “sectarian and political rancour” discouraged any resort to these expedients except in the “last extremity.” Yet, as Naas knew, the Irish Constabulary was under-strength and unsuitably armed with a single-shot, muzzleloading Enfield rifle that took time and skill to reload and, in close-quarter situations, was all too easily snatched from their hands. They needed handy, easily reloaded weapons, such as “really good revolvers.” The fact that there was little immediate likelihood of their receiving handguns contributed to an ill-tempered tussle within the Executive over the deployment of the troops.21 Already miffed over his enforced early return to Dublin, Strathnairn was furious with his second-in-command for agreeing during his absence to send out small military street patrols to perform tasks he considered the duty of policemen. To make his point, he submitted a string of excessive

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requests to the Horse Guards. He sought “mountain artillery,” which could be transported on sturdy ponies; he applied for mortars, which he indicated he intended to set up in churchyards and gardens; and he gave notice that his men would not be ordered to storm buildings occupied by rebels believed to be in possession of “liquid fire.” They would be held back while the light artillery destroyed barricaded buildings. This alarmingly destructive vision of urban warfare may have influenced the decision to deny him the ordnance he sought, but the lack of it provided Strathnairn with a ready-made excuse to refuse to station squads of his men in positions he considered “isolated and dangerous.” The upshot was an acrimonious test of wills and influence with the civil authority.22 Naas assumed that elements of the reinforced garrison, which by the end of November 1866 numbered 22,500, would be deployed wherever loyal citizens required protection. The “strategic” concentration of the troops that Strathnairn envisaged was in Naas’s opinion unnecessary to deal with undisciplined mobs bent on plunder or the destruction of police barracks. Convinced that disaffection was largely confined to the lower class of the towns and that the great mass of rural smallholders were only likely to join an insurgency enjoying some success, Naas considered the prevention of any such impression vital. Committed to prevention as opposed to suppression, he and Abercorn expected the army to help in its implementation. The presence of troops in a neighbourhood would allow businessmen, merchants, and farmers to operate normally, encourage the gentry to remain on their estates, and convince the peasants of the hopelessness of rebellion. For proof of this, Naas had to point no farther back than 1848. The troops would also ensure the protection of the policemen scattered in vulnerable barracks and “second to none in her Majesty’s service for discipline, fidelity and courage.” Strathnairn’s soldiers, better equipped than those on hand during the Young Ireland rebellion and aided by modern communications, could be placed in positions far more defensible than those occupied by the troops almost two decades earlier. He was not seeking indiscriminate postings all over the country without regard for defence or ease of support, Naas emphasized, merely a “general scheme” for “military occupation of the most disloyal portions of the country.” As his Liberal predecessor explained privately to the editor of the Times, the immediate objectives were to check conspirators and reassure “loyalists and waverers by that ocular demonstration of force and preparedness which even a few red-coats afford.”23 Given Strathnairn’s refusal to distribute his men as the Executive proposed, Naas considered it “absolutely necessary” that a decision be

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reached at once on which course, prevention or suppression, was to be pursued. He referred the matter to London, where only a rump of the Cabinet was sitting. Stanley, Walpole, and Disraeli, the last being “very strong and decided in his views on this vital matter,” unexpectedly sided with the general. They feared Strathnairn would throw up his command in high dudgeon if overruled by civilians, but were convinced his retention was essential. The chief secretary made no effort to mask his chagrin at this rebuff and pointed out to his colleagues in London the fallacy in Strathnairn’s reasoning. In a country as small as Ireland, troops were never truly isolated from reinforcement. Moreover, it was “cowardly” of the military to leave the police and loyal citizens to the mercy of gangs of marauders. Naas differentiated the disaster of flight by the gentry and the defection of farmers from the “infinitesimal” risks and “enormous” advantages of a military deployment sufficiently widespread to “prevent isolated acts of pillage.” Derby, anxious to patch up the differences in Dublin, devised a compromise. A reserve force was held at the Curragh to act as a flying squadron, while squads of troops were detached to occupy places where they could be speedily supported.24 There was a perceptible easing of tension in Ireland as the festive season approached without any sign of Stephens. Strathnairn, ever quick to trumpet his own acumen, boasted that the Irish administration had come around to his opinion that there had never been any likelihood of a rising. Vanity prevented him, presumably, from recognizing how inexplicable this made his refusal to deploy his men as the Executive had desired. For their part, Naas and Abercorn vetoed a suggestion originating in the Horse Guards, army headquarters, that the Irish garrison be reduced in the spring.25 With the restoration of habeas corpus under discussion in Cabinet, they were determined to retain as many troops as possible until well after the loss of that coercive instrument. Meanwhile, Naas prepared for the reopening of Parliament and the probability of Liberal and Radical charges that he had overreacted to the Fenian threat. His arrest of fifty alleged leaders of the Brotherhood, among them eleven Dublin “Centres,” compared favourably with Kimberley’s detention of some 700 suspected Fenians. These selective arrests had effectively decapitated the organization in the Irish capital and thus seemed certain to inflict severe damage on the morale of the rank and file. Furthermore, the fact that very few of the arrested men were farmers contradicted both Kimberley’s worrying assessment of farmers’ increasing sympathy with Fenianism and the “silly argument that the unsettled state” of the “Land Question” had created and fostered revolutionary nationalism. Sillier still was Naas’s argument that

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a royal visit to Ireland, once the excitement had subsided, might deliver the coup de grâce to Fenianism.26 Although justifiably proud of the restraint with which he had made use of the extraordinary powers of detention, Naas, together with Abercorn, was inclined to respond aggressively and illiberally on occasion to the challenge of subversion. The viceroy wished to call a halt to the correspondence of imprisoned Irish Americans with American politicians, full as these letters invariably were with charges of ill-treatment. The legality and wisdom of a ban were questioned by Walpole, but it was vetoed by Stanley. “Let them write as they please,” he sensibly responded. “Statements refute themselves, and if stopped you have an outcry.” He was more aghast at a second recommendation originating in Dublin Castle, one which Naas admitted would be “a very strong measure.” A discriminating exclusion order might have had merit as an element of a policy designed to counter the insurgency that Irish Americans were known to be organizing, but the procedure the chief secretary had in mind would effectively allow the police to arrest “every one who comes from America, unless he can give a good account of himself,” and detain them at the viceroy’s pleasure. The propriety of such “indiscriminate proceedings,” which turned upside down a fundamental principle of the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, was clearly doubtful in a self-professed liberal state and would almost certainly have led to international complications. In the face of the strong objections to this “wild” proposal, Naas and Abercorn denied any intent to make “indiscriminate arrests.” Nevertheless, a door leading to them would certainly have been left ajar had they gotten their way. Instead, they agreed to arrest only those visitors actually engaged in “mischief.”27 Across the Atlantic, where Stanley hoped the Johnson administration was persuading the Fenians to expend their “superfluous energy” in a Mexican foray, James Stephens had been ousted from the leadership of the Brotherhood by a group of impatient Irish Americans. Tiring of his reluctance to initiate the frequently promised rebellion, they replaced the “provisional dictator” with his former chief of staff, Thomas Kelly. The new chief, having organized Stephens’s sensational rescue from Richmond Bridewell, had been lavishly praised by him for “sublime” devotion and “superhuman” dedication to the cause of Irish independence. Kelly was determined to stage a rising as soon as possible, and before long another wave of Irish Americans began breaking on Ireland’s shores. Even before news of these worrying developments reached Dublin, the Irish Executive had sensed fresh trouble, and this might well have prompted Naas and Abercorn to look anxiously to the Catholic hierarchy for help.28

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The “important and beneficial influence” of the Roman Catholic clergy and their potential as allies in the countering of Fenianism were recognized by the government’s more liberal supporters. Paul Cullen had sternly reproved “the preachers of Fenianism ”in his most recent pastorals, insisting that Ireland’s many and great grievances could only be redressed through lawful and peaceful means. Nevertheless, mutual distrust and dislike made unlikely any cooperation between Tory government and Irish hierarchy. The scorn publicly expressed by a number of Conservatives for the policy of clerical conciliation associated with the Liberals was matched by Cullen’s bitter references to the Tories. He assailed them as Orangemen who saw in Fenian violence an opportunity to renew the penal laws, and he accused the Fenians of “giving an occasion to those who indulge in Orange orgies to trample on the rights of the country, and to uphold Orange ascendancy.” Relations soon worsened following a bloody incident at Dungarvan during a by-election. Troops despatched to protect Conservative voters from intimidation sought to disperse a mob, and Cullen was quick to denounce the bloodshed. The Lancers had “charged the poor people, killing one and wounding nineteen,” he declared. This was followed by a by-election in Wexford, which saw Cullen offer a peculiarly tasteless and mordant description of the successful Tory, Arthur Kavanagh, as “a very fit representative” of the county. Kavanagh’s life had been an inspirational and triumphant struggle to conquer the appalling physical disability of being born without either arms or legs.29 Behind the conflict on the hustings lurked profound differences on such intensely political questions as religion and education. The Conservatives increasingly saw in concurrent endowment a means to maintain the Established Church while appeasing Catholic opinion. This was a delusion, for even partial Protestant endowment remained unacceptable to the “rational Irish nationalists” of the hierarchy led by Cullen. Education was another bone of contention. Convinced of the hierarchy’s resolve to substitute denominational for mixed education, the Cabinet manoeuvred to evade both confrontation and concession. A royal commission was always useful to a minority administration, for it postponed a difficult question and effectively quietened at least some opponents. In this instance, ministers believed a commission would be acceptable to Protestants and might at the same time convince at least some moderate Catholics of the Tories’ desire to deal fairly with them. All the while Naas was hard at work drafting a very modest tenant bill. If there was scant likelihood of it satisfying land reformers, it might draw some of the sting of their criticism. The Cabinet also confirmed the decision to restore habeas corpus, but kept this

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news a “dead secret” to allow Naas time to persuade the remaining “scoundrels” to accept deportation to the United States or removal to Britain in return for their freedom.30 Industrial and recreational tragedies, and bitterly cold weather, rather than Irish revolutionary nationalism, commanded the public’s attention in the weeks preceding the opening of Parliament. An explosion at a Barnsley colliery on 12 December 1866 killed hundreds of men and boys, while more than a dozen would-be rescuers lost their lives. A second pit disaster, this one near Newcastle under Lyne, cost almost a hundred lives. The Christmas season, marked as it was by unusually mild weather, offered a brief respite from disasters, only for the new year to open with a heavy snowfall followed by severe drifting under the force of a powerful east wind. Roads and railway lines were blocked and trains halted, their wheels clogged with snow and their drivers and guards blinded by blizzards. Several days of severe frost compounded the existing problems and dealt another harsh and even fatal blow to the poor, especially the very young and the very old. Tragedy struck again when thousands of Londoners ventured onto the ice covering the lake in Regent’s Park. Weakened by a bright sun and the action of staff in breaking it around several small islands to aid the wildfowl, the ice suddenly gave way and forty persons were drowned or died of hyperthermia. Several months later, the vast mass of soil being excavated during construction of the extension to the Metropolitan Underground Railway was dumped into the lake, making the shallower water less of a hazard. But winter catastrophes did not entirely banish the Irish problem from the public mind. Why had Britain made the mistake, which she had largely avoided in the empire, of imposing the Anglican Church on an overwhelmingly Catholic country? The answer: “Paddy makes a poor rebel, and the country is within four hours’ steam of our sabres, breech loaders and cannon balls.”31 As they prepared for the formal reopening of Parliament, Tory ministers had little reason to fear imminent defeat in the Commons. The Opposition, though a majority, remained in disarray. Long threatened by “individual crotchets,” the Liberals’ fragile unity had collapsed under the by no means heavy weight of their modest Reform Bill. Their uncertainty was obvious in their decision to forego the customary meeting shortly before the new session and wait instead for the Tories to lay out their agenda. Anything would be better than “a premature move,” one senior figure observed, “and without some further consolidation of the party, I do not see how we can venture to overthrow the Government.” Irish Liberals quickly fell into line, and it was 26 February, three weeks into the session, before the

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great majority of the party gathered at Gladstone’s residence in Carlton Gardens. The choice of meeting place appeared to symbolize Russell’s final transfer of the leadership to the former chancellor of the Exchequer, while the ensuing discussion suggested a renewed willingness to paper over the bitter internal divisions. As for their immediate strategy, the Liberals gratefully left franchise reform to the Tory government and searched for an issue around which they might reunite. They soon found it in Ireland.32 Parliament was opened, as it had been the previous year, by the queen. Victoria’s aversion to public engagements had brought loud complaints that the nation had nothing of royalty but expense, while insolent Radicals mockingly proposed the conversion of Buckingham Palace into lodgings for honest working people. Nor was the royal family’s public standing helped by the persistent “ugly rumours” concerning the queen’s relationship with “Balmoral Brown,” her heir’s excesses – food, drink, smoking, “gambling and whoring” – and the similarly disreputable reputation of her second son, Prince Alfred, duke of Edinburgh. Hard drinking and a pathological addiction to lying were believed to be two of his weaknesses. Persuaded to be present in the upper chamber on 5 February, and thus demonstrate a willingness to perform her constitutional duties, the queen again delegated to the lord chancellor the labour of reading the Throne Speech. No doubt she was especially attentive when he reached the passage dealing with the Fenian conspiracy, for only three weeks earlier she had complained of the home secretary’s failure to keep her informed on this and other matters of special interest. Walpole’s response, that reports on Fenianism had been too vague and uncertain to be passed on to her and that anything material was to be found in the press, was surely resented. The head of state did not expect to rely on newspapers for her information.33 The consular office in New York had reported the departure early in the new year of some fifty prominent Fenians, among them Thomas Kelly and John McCafferty. An informer working with the Liverpool police, John Corydon, revealed that a group of Irish-American officers in London had formed a “Directory,” and a week later he reported the visit of one of them to the port to advise the local leadership of plans to launch a coordinated campaign of violence in London, Liverpool, and Ireland. Hard on his heels came a second member of the Directory, who ordered his fellow Irish Americans to be ready for an imminent move to Ireland. Corydon “says fighting is positively intended,” the informer’s police contact notified his superiors. This was only days after the Throne Speech in which Fenianism had been dismissed as a foreign conspiracy defeated by a firm Executive

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and the hostility of “men of all Classes and Creeds,” and the announcement of the intention to restore habeas corpus.34 The confidence that the danger had passed was misplaced, for the optimists disregarded the accumulating contrary intelligence. The discovery during the raid on the offices of the Irish People of the British addresses of members of the Brotherhood; reports of “notoriously strong” Fenian organizations in Liverpool, Birkenhead, and London; Superintendent Daniel Ryan’s alarming assessment that there was scarcely a town in England with a sizable Irish population in which Fenians were not to be found and that Liverpool’s dock labourers were believed to be involved in the conspiracy; the persistent claims of informers that Fenianism was “rampant” in Lancashire and Scotland; the reports of Fenians enrolling in the Volunteer Rifle Corps; the discovery that many of the men released from detention in Ireland, on condition of returning to Britain, had given false or fictitious addresses; and the large number of municipalities to which the Home Office distributed descriptions and wherever possible photographs of these men – all were evidence of a serious Fenian threat in Britain.35 The handful of Irish policemen stationed in British cities were in no doubt of the extensive nature of the conspiracy, and their reports prompted the inspector general of the Irish Constabulary to urge the despatch of experienced London detectives to the provinces, and especially to Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow. Commissioner Mayne, never an enthusiast of detection, suspected his Irish counterpart of seeking to dump the “dirty work” on his men, and he had the support of Spencer Walpole, who feared that so “unusual” and “improper” an arrangement would result in “endless difficulties.” The home secretary had no wish to establish “a general system of espionage” and considered it “fruitless” and “impolitic” anyway. Evidence, not mere suspicion, was required before legal action could be taken against individuals, he observed, having seemingly shut his eyes to the usefulness of surveillance as a source of intelligence. But the chief secretary’s rejoinder that he had the Fenians “completely in hand”; his insistence that the keeping of a close eye on the Fenians in Britain’s urban centres was a matter of vital national importance, for without decisive action there fresh trouble was certain in Ireland; his reminder that the detainees recently returned to England and Scotland were under orders to engage in a destructive diversionary campaign on hearing news of a rising in Ireland; and the ability of an informer to direct the Liverpool police to a cache of “combustibles” finally convinced the prime minister to act.36

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London detectives were despatched on an investigative mission to Liverpool. Mayne gave the task to one of his most experienced officers. Inspector Adolphus Frederick Williamson, son of a former senior policeman, possessed the detective’s essential attributes. He was hard-working, phlegmatic, dogged, obstinate, courteous, upright, and analytical. Accompanied by a sergeant, he travelled north and quickly concluded that the “Fenian spirit” was present in the port, but he uncovered little if any evidence of an extensive and active organization. He did inquire into the discovery there of forty rifles and several other weapons issued to the Irish corps of the London Volunteers, and accepted the custody sergeant’s explanation of drunkenness for the loss of the register, without which it was impossible to identify the individuals to whom the weapons had been issued. But Richard McHale, one of the pair of Irish policemen temporarily stationed in the port, found in this incident “proof” of the Brotherhood’s “extensive and deep-rooted” presence in the capital. Careful inquiry had convinced him that the great majority of Irish labourers in large urban centres were “strongly impressed with the spirit of Fenianism” even if they were “not actually enrolled members.” Even more alarming was his finding that Irishmen in “comfortable and easy circumstances, carrying on a successful and prosperous trade in various ways,” were Fenian sympathizers and would in all probability join with the Brotherhood in the event of a rising. When an informant finally provided details of an extensive Fenian organization in Liverpool, even Mayne was convinced of the seriousness of the problem and recognized the importance of intelligence. He now began to act as paymaster of a network of informers, but intelligence gathering remained unsystematic and poorly coordinated.37 The new year of 1867 brought a fresh string of disturbing reports of an expanding Fenian organization in Britain. Claims that the membership now exceeded 70,000, that greater sums were being raised in Britain than in the United States, that the weekly subscriptions of members had been doubled to maintain the Irish Americans awaiting the call to arms, that all the regiments of regulars save the Guards and some Highlanders were tainted with Fenianism, and that the Fenians were drilling nightly in cities such as Manchester and were being issued with body armour in the form of metal back and breast plates led Daniel Ryan to repeat his warning of the conspiracy’s greater activity in Britain than in Ireland. Thomas Kelly was known to have arrived in London from France late in January, and safe there from arbitrary detention, he had formed a “Provisional Government of the Irish Republic” but had postponed until early March the rebellion originally set for mid-February. The Directory, in which the

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charismatic John McCafferty was a dominant figure, objected to the delay. McCafferty had briefly been detained in 1865 on being found in possession of a pair of revolvers, ammunition, a supply of gold, and papers of a “treasonable character,” one of them a Fenian commission. Impetuous, headstrong, schooled in the less than rigorous code of military discipline observed by Confederate irregulars during the civil war, he was determined to press ahead with a raid on Chester Castle as part of a larger scheme to arm Irish rebels. The attraction was the 10,000 stands of arms, 4,000 swords, 900,000 rounds of ammunition, and a large quantity of gunpowder stored there. This treasure trove of munitions was lightly guarded by a garrison of sixty men from the 54th Regiment, headquartered in Manchester. Very few of this detachment were believed to be truly loyal. As for the city’s police, they numbered a mere three dozen. Having concentrated a large body of Fenians drawn from across Northern England, McCafferty planned to raid the castle, commandeer a train on which to load the weapons, steam to Holyhead, seize a ferry, and ship the booty to Ireland for distribution. Whether he was attempting to duplicate one of his civil war exploits or was inspired by a similar Young Ireland scheme in 1848, he would brook no opposition from Kelly, who considered the enterprise harebrained.38 Corydon warned the Liverpool police of what was afoot late in the evening of 10 February, and while sceptical of the information, Head Constable Greig forwarded it by special messenger to Chester. This enabled local and central authorities to respond rapidly to the danger. A company of regulars made the short journey by train from Manchester, 200 militia and pensioners were called to duty, two troops of Yeomanry were held in reserve, 500 special constables were sworn in, 120 men of the Cheshire constabulary were quickly concentrated around the city, armed guards were posted at banks and goldsmiths, and a battalion of Scots Fusilier Guards were despatched from London by express train only for it to be delayed by the “many night luggage trains” already on the tracks. By the time the Guards arrived at Chester Station the Fenians, variously estimated to number between 600 and 1,500, had dispersed.39 McCafferty and a group managed to get to Ireland, where they were arrested as they entered Dublin harbour, and their arrival coincided with a rising in the remote southwestern county of Kerry. The local Fenian commander had not received word of the rebellion’s postponement. His small force, numbering perhaps 200, seized weapons from a coastguard station guarded by a solitary sentry, wounded a police despatch rider, and cut the telegraph wires that were the extension of the transatlantic cable. They prudently abandoned a

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planned attack on a police barracks on learning that the defenders had been reinforced by marines from one of the naval vessels patrolling the coast, and then melted away in the face of the troops rapidly concentrated in the area, though a handful of Irish Americans were still active there a week later.40 The Chester incident provided the proof long demanded by sceptics of “the extent, power and secrecy” of the conspiracy in England. Nevertheless, Britain’s most popular newspaper described the sudden assembling there of so many Irishmen an elaborate hoax to distract police from an illegal prize fight being staged on the nearby border with Wales. Similarly, the Kerry episode was read as reassuring evidence of the pathetic nature of Irish disaffection.41 Ministers took a rather more sombre view of the situation. The Fenian “spirit” was clearly extensive and “unquenched,” and Derby for one fully expected outbreaks, if merely of partial and isolated character.42 Walpole, who had long clung to the reassuring belief that the conspiracy was on its last legs for want of money, was now inclined to believe the reports that the Fenian leadership was meeting regularly in London’s Bloomsbury District and that the Brotherhood’s headquarters had been transferred from New York to the British capital. But neither Thomas Kelly nor his associates, all of whom were now “under constant surveillance,” could be touched in a liberal state without evidence sufficient to warrant their arrest. It would be “madness to take up either him or anyone,” Walpole patiently explained to the impatient Naas, “unless we were able to get him committed for trial.” Elsewhere, in Sunderland, Carlisle, and Whitehaven, for example, the local authorities were keeping an increasingly nervous eye on their Irish residents. A gunboat was ordered to the port of Whitehaven, but the application by the chief constable of Cumberland for the arming of his men was rejected. Then came word of a second attempted rebellion in Ireland.43 Undaunted and undeterred by the botched operations in Chester and in Kerry, Kelly prepared for a full-scale rebellion. From “Little Baldy,” as he now derisively dubbed Stephens, he had inherited a French but naturalized American commander-in-chief of the Fenian revolutionary army. Gustave-Paul Cluseret, a graduate of a French military academy, had seen service under several flags, the French and those of Italian nationalism and the American Union. Tall, with a “coarsely handsome face” and a checkered reputation in matters of personal honesty, he infused “revolutionary thinking with the knowledge of modern, mass warfare,” and his “advocacy of violent means for visionary ends was based on the belief that a social rather than a national revolution was approaching” – hence

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his enthusiastic backing of Kelly’s approach to those British Radicals who had expressed admiration of European nationalists struggling to throw off “the tyranny of alien rule.” Charles Bradlaugh was a key member of the Reform League and an ardent republican whose avowed sympathy for Ireland had prompted a Stephens overture to him in 1865. Now Kelly and Cluseret came knocking on his door, only to hear him declare: “You are married to us, and we are married to you.” A constitutional connection between Britain and Ireland was essential for the former’s security and the latter’s welfare, Bradlaugh insisted. He envisaged a federated United Kingdom. Nor ought they to have been surprised when he deleted appeals to Celticism and Roman Catholicism from the draft proclamation they showed to him, for Bradlaugh considered “papists” the inveterate enemies of public liberty. Nevertheless, the version of the proclamation published on 8 March 1867 implied that Fenianism was a social as well as a national movement. It described the Irish as victims of an alien tyranny, ground down into poverty by an alien aristocracy, and driven by suffering to take up arms. What it promised was a democratic republic in which Irishmen would secure “the intrinsic value of their labour,” regain possession of the soil of Ireland, and be assured of “absolute liberty of conscience, and the complete separation of Church and State.” Finally, with an eye to generating sympathy among Britain’s working-class Radicals, Fenianism urged them to join the struggle against the common oppressor – “aristocratic locusts.”44 A few British Radicals, to the dismay of the likes of John Bright and John Stuart Mill, did use the language of physical force. Deliberately misconstruing such talk, Kelly reassured wavering colleagues that the “Reform League have expressed sympathy with our movement, and will give us something more if we only keep up a front.” Ironically, he was soon sounding like an echo of the discredited Stephens with his complaints of a lack of means “to organize active work.”45 Naas had crossed to Dublin on learning of the events in Kerry and was followed by Strathnairn, who, much to the irritation of the Cabinet, was located in Scotland hunting foxes instead of in Ireland hounding Fenians. Returning quickly to the Commons, the chief secretary introduced a bill to extend for an additional three months the suspension of habeas corpus. This disappointing necessity was followed by the disappointing reception given the land bill he had drafted. Having only the previous year stigmatized as communism Fortescue’s modest measure to compensate tenants for some improvements made without the prior approval of their landlords, Naas was now proposing that the Board of Works loan money to tenants to make those improvements for which their landlords’ sanction

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was no longer considered necessary. Critics mocked his about-face or denounced the measure as a disguised gift to landlords. Nor were tenants satisfied, for they were still denied compensation for a range of necessary and basic improvements completed without the proprietors’ prior consent. Furthermore, the regulations governing the loans were bewildering. His bill was hopelessly trapped between “the stolid ignorance and fatuity of the Tory landlords and the absurd demands of the Radical Party,” a furious and frustrated chief secretary complained. Naas was also under attack by “all” of the Conservative Party’s “strong Protestant friends” for his proposal to remove the remaining “Obnoxious Oaths” that excluded Roman Catholics from the senior offices of state. Yet receiving “scant thanks” from “the Romans,” he angrily impressed upon Derby the necessity to “stick” to Protestantism as an essential qualification for the lord lieutenancy. But overlaying the Cabinet’s Irish problems were those created by Disraeli’s introduction of a liberal Reform Bill. Three senior ministers resigned in protest, weakening the government. Two days later, on 5 March, the Fenians staged a second rising in Ireland.46 Daniel Ryan had provided the Chief Secretary’s Office almost a fortnight earlier with “unimpeachable information” of what the Fenians were planning. On 27 February, Corydon supplied the date of the rising, midnight, 5 March, and this Ryan subsequently confirmed. A veteran of the American Civil War, Patrick Condon, who was calling himself Godfrey Massey, commanded the rebels. Cluseret, having made a personal reconnaissance of Britain’s arsenals and depots, and learning that only half the number of men he considered essential for success would take to the field and that their armament was insufficient, revised the operational plan and retreated to Paris, where he was subsequently to acquire notoriety during the Commune. He would have fled even sooner had he been aware of the quality and precision of the government’s intelligence. The authorities had time to consult the law officers on how troops should go about the task of suppressing an insurgency. The law would not “sanction shooting men down, who [might] be easily overmastered and arrested,” they replied, but it would not be “very nice in this respect, if the traitors in open arms [were] numerous and threatening.” Arrests ought to be made in the presence of a magistrate or a common constable, though this was not mandatory in the face of rebellion. A refusal by a rebel when challenged to lay down his weapon amounted to a direct levying of war and high treason, and under these circumstances the law would sanction “any force necessary to arrest and disarm, capture and disperse the insurgents.” All the while Strathnairn was making his preparations. Reinforcements were

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despatched to strategic places, garrisons strengthened, the guard at Dublin Castle bolstered, and troops assigned positions that they were to occupy at the first sign of trouble. A supremely confident Naas remained in London on 5 March, casually informing a Cabinet colleague over dinner of the rebellion’s imminence.47 The Fenian plan called for guerrilla strikes as a prelude to regular military operations, while a large concentration of men outside of Dublin was to be the bait to draw troops out of the city and thus facilitate rebel operations within it. By holding Dublin for as long as possible, Kelly hoped to give Irish America time to come to his aid and provide the United States with the opportunity to take diplomatic revenge on Britain for her conduct during the civil war. The always remote likelihood of success, which Kelly recognized, became even more distant as a result of Massey’s eleventhhour decision to substitute his own plan for that drafted by Cluseret. The resultant confusion was compounded by a succession of incoherent orders and a last-minute reassignment of officers. Massey then set off for Tipperary, which was intended to be the principal theatre of provincial operations, only to be taken into custody by waiting troops as he alighted from the train at the strategic Limerick Junction. The Fenians did take to the field and in considerable number. In Cork, where as many as 4,000 turned out, they captured a coastguard station. Elsewhere, they targeted police barracks, only invariably to be seen off by the numerically inferior defenders. Meanwhile, troops organized in “Moveable” or “Flying Columns,” and accompanied by magistrates, mopped up Fenian stragglers, scoured disturbed districts, penetrated even remote mountainous areas where troops had rarely if ever been seen before, and provided the security for the police searching for insurgents and arms.48 A cautious Thomas Larcom inelegantly likened the defeated Fenians to “a burglar which [sic] you hold by the throat, but as soon as you relax up it [sic] springs as strong as ever.” There remained, in other words, ample grounds for concern. The refusal of a clerk at a railway station to send a telegraphic message for the military at the height of the crisis on the grounds that it was the Sabbath – the clerk cited the company’s written policy on the matter – brought a demand for the rescinding of such an “absurd and fatal order” and fed a suspicion that Fenian sympathizers occupied many such sensitive positions. The huge crowds that turned out in Dublin to cheer Fenian prisoners as they were marched through its streets were visual and vocal evidence of popular if passive sympathy for the rebels. Moreover, not even the poor performance of the Fenians in the field could entirely obliterate their considerable achievement in launching

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so extensive a rising, extending from Drogheda in the north to Cork in the south. They had demonstrated both “administrative strength” and skill, and the lesson was not lost on the Executive. Dublin’s unarmed policemen began to receive training in the use of modern, breech-loading carbine rifles, and troop reinforcements arrived from Britain. Naas now insisted on the stationing of troops in those areas of the country where nervous country gentlemen were continuing to stockpile arms and ammunition in their homes in order to equip loyal servants in the event of a Fenian attack. One entrusted his wife with an enormous jar of vitriol strategically placed at a window immediately above the entrance to their home. She was to ladle it over any Fenians attempting to break down the door. The earl of Shannon, who flattered himself that he knew the people so well, and was on such good terms with them, that they spoke frankly to him, warned of extensive disaffection. Convinced of the need to impress upon them the danger of playing at rebellion, he urged the imposition of martial law.49 Although the Cabinet had no intention of sanctioning so extreme a measure, it favoured stern punishment of the Brotherhood’s leadership. Kelly would have been the prize catch, but the Metropolitan Police had lost track of him. The inadequacy and uncertainty of punishment was contributing to Ireland’s ruin, Strathnairn growled. The Fenian rank and file ought to be treated with the lenity Britain customarily exhibited towards “white rebels,” this veteran of the Sepoy Mutiny added, but the time had come for her to suppress that instinctive “reluctance of a free Government to press hardly on political criminals.” She needed, in particular, to overcome the “special disinclination” to risk controversy with the United States. The Irish-American leaders of a rebellion against a government “based on liberty” should now pay a severe and exemplary price. The Derby administration, keen to prove its “vigour,” promptly signalled its intention to follow at least part of this advice. The rebels were to be speedily brought to trial before a special commission.50 Strathnairn, whose political advice commanded as much Cabinet respect as his military reputation, did not consider the gibbet a substitute for reform in the battle with insurgency. The correction of ancient evils would provide an offset to contemporary severity. By the same token, a priesthood drawn principally from farming families in an agricultural society needed to be reconciled to British rule. David Moriarty, the bishop of Kerry, briefly revived the hopes of a new era in church-state relations with an extraordinarily forthright censure of the Fenians, which he delivered from the pulpit of his cathedral following the Kerry fiasco. That only two days later Paul Cullen and the bishop of Limerick attended the inaugural banquet

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for the new lord mayor of Dublin was another seemingly encouraging straw in the wind. They were the first Roman Catholic prelates in two decades to put in an appearance, which undoubtedly explained the absence of any representative of the Church of Ireland’s episcopal bench. Viceroy and cardinal sat either side of the mayor. In his speech, Abercorn singled out Moriarty for his contribution to the decline of the “moral pestilence” of Fenianism and alluded to the government’s desire to redress Irish grievances. Cullen then spoke. He deplored the fact that “love of country often degenerated into a false patriotism, and turned into a great moral wrong to the country.” A few days later, Abercorn sent him word of his “desire to please the bishops,” and invited him to the castle. Cullen politely declined, fearful of losing his popular influence and of being denounced as a “Castle hack,” but privately assured the viceroy of episcopal support in return for “justice for Ireland.”51 With an eye to reaching an understanding with the hierarchy, Naas had paid the Catholic clergy an extravagant compliment following the Kerry incident. He told the Commons that he knew of not a single priest who had failed to “exercise the whole of his influence,” either directly or indirectly, to dissuade the people from taking part in the conspiracy. This was a roseate depiction of clerical conduct and opinion. Moriarty’s passionate condemnation of the rebels had been repudiated by a number of his own clergy, several of whom actively gave aid to the Fenians. One of Cullen’s correspondents, writing shortly after the more extensive March rising, expressed his fear that “the foolish unguarded talk of some young Priests” had done great mischief. “Since 1848 I have heard but too many of them speaking of war & physical force as the only means of righting the country & scoffing at O’Connell & his peaceful policy,” he reported. For his own part, in a series of pastorals, Cullen traduced the Fenian leadership for their “Mazzinian and Garibaldian affinities,” hailed the peasantry, the rural “bone and sinew of the country,” for their refusal to resist authority and violate the law, and even spoke warmly of the government, the military, and the police. He also stressed the duty of allegiance to constituted authority and the obligation to seek redress of grievances through constitutional means. But he did not endorse Moriarty’s forthright censure of the Brotherhood. Instead, he privately wished Moriarty “could be called to an account for it” and suddenly discovered merit in the public tongue-lashing of the bishop of Kerry by his own clerical traducer, Patrick Lavelle. Moriarty refused to be intimidated. Both “people and priests say they accept lawful authority, but that English power in Ireland is not lawful,” he remarked. And he had not missed the “dangerous” statement of one priest who declared: “I have no more right

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to say that obedience is due to our government than I have to decide on the organization of the French army.”52 The Fenians had surprised and impressed Cullen with both their organizational ability and conduct. They “did not rob or injure anyone,” while the wounded “sent for a priest at once and received the sacraments.” They had behaved in the “civilized” manner their former leader had repudiated. Not that this altered the archbishop’s opinion of the rebellion as a “piece of consummate folly.” He could not “conceive how any man of commonsense could embark in such an enterprise with a powerful army within three miles of the spot where the standard of revolt was to be raised.” The “national shame” of the Fenians’ military performance when confronted by mere “handfuls of policemen,” the folly and sinfulness of a movement to substitute a republic for a monarchy, something which had already been attempted in Rome, and the need for a patient and constitutional pursuit of national justice were prominent features of Patrick Leahy’s pastoral. There remained, however, a characteristic ambivalence to the archbishop of Cashel’s observations. To rebel without any prospect of success was “a grievous sin in the eyes of Heaven,” he instructed the faithful. “So long as England is the power she is,” he wrote, “a Fenian insurrection, instead of doing any good for the country, could only make bad worse.” Here were comments that might be interpreted as a summons to greater nationalist realism. And he reminded his flock that they were victims of centuries of English misgovernment and were the worst clothed, worst fed, and worst housed people in Europe.53 Some members of the hierarchy undoubtedly agreed with the bishop of Ferns, who dismissed as “almost useless” any attempt “to address the lessons of Moderation and prudence” to men who had “centuries of wrong” of which to complain and nothing to lose. This stress by “patriotic” bishops on Ireland’s grievances was warmly applauded by the Irishman. Meanwhile, the Irish News was reassuring the Irish of Britain, dedicated as it was to the promotion of their “national regeneration,” that “no Council, no National Synod, no Papal document” had as yet “condemned Fenianism by name.” John Pope-Hennessy, an ambitious Tory about to abandon “the uncomfortable stage of Irish politics,” forwarded to his party’s leadership an alternative explanation of the apparent failure of the Irish people to heed episcopal denunciations of Fenianism. These very same bishops, “and especially Cardinal Cullen,” he wrote, had taken “a leading part in the promotion of the very spirit of distrust and disaffection” that was “the life and soul of the Fenians.” Flaming pastorals enabled the Fenians to claim that they were merely pushing “to their logical conclusions

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the premises laid down by the Roman Catholic Bishops.” What was alarming in this was the evidence that bishops were more loyal than parish priests, and they in turn more loyal than curates. Or as Britain’s most popular newspaper informed its readers, priests whose hatred of Fenianism was very well known “decline, most assuredly, to join the insurgents, but they decline as positively to exert themselves in any way to aid in the suppression of the revolt.” At best, they were adopting a position of “armed neutrality between government and rebels.” David Moriarty went further. He suspected that many clergy would declare lawful any rebellion that appeared to have a fair chance of success.54 The Times, reputedly Britain’s most influential newspaper, initially took a surprisingly favourable view of the conduct of the priesthood. The editorial staff was instructed, immediately following the March rising, neither to abuse the hierarchy nor accuse its members of complicity with Fenianism. However, the prospects of an alliance between Protestant state and Catholic Church in defence of the Union did not improve. Cullen remained as profoundly suspicious as ever of those members of his own church, such as Moriarty, whom he disparaged as “government Catholics.” They and “liberal Protestants would be glad to get us under government patronage, not to increase our influence but to lessen it,” he devoutly believed. He viewed with jaundiced eye both Tories and Radicals, especially on the issue of disestablishment, believing they would always “contrive to maintain the status quo rather than endow” Catholics. He dismissed Naas’s tenant bill as worthless, he doubted the Tories’ sincerity with respect to promised improvements in the system of national education, and he suspected them of planning to establish a mixed, non-denominational Queen’s College in Dublin. Hence his perverse satisfaction on learning that twentynine National School teachers had been arrested as members of the Fenian conspiracy. Here was timely proof that education without religious control promoted revolution. Or as the bishop of Down and Connor put it in a pastoral, the exclusion of religious and “civilizing” influences from education, “by making men atheists, had deprived them of the power of distinguishing between right and wrong.” For the redress of Irish grievances, Cullen looked not to closer cooperation with the British government but to the deteriorating international situation. “Things are looking very warlike on the Continent,” he wrote to Leahy in the spring. “Perhaps fear may influence [the British], where justice has little force.”55 If the Fenian crisis brought no appreciable warming of the unsatisfactory relationship between Protestant state and Irish Catholic Church, it did concentrate British minds on the Irish problem. The oft-repeated charge

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that their government of Ireland amounted to tyranny was indignantly rejected by most Britons. The Irish Executive and Irish patronage were in Irish hands, and Irishmen shared in the official honours and emoluments of the empire, they pointed out. The “almost unchecked liberty of speech, writing and action” permitted or tolerated during a crisis that threatened the United Kingdom’s “national existence” was in many British minds proof of the state’s fundamental liberalism. That Ireland had suffered in the past from oppression and misrule much of the press acknowledged. It was also willing to concede that the great majority of the Irish people were passively alienated from a government that had foolishly permitted them to be brought up both to hate “Saxon rule” and to demand emancipation from its “thraldom.” Some newspapers were prepared to admit that Fenianism was the symptom of a “diseased constitution.” Had Disraeli’s prescription for Ireland’s ills – a strong Executive, just administration, ecclesiastical equality, and an improvement in the physical and moral condition of her people – been filled when first presented decades earlier, the Daily Telegraph observed, the present generation might have heard little of Fenianism. “Now, unfortunately,” the “disease” was far worse, and more searching remedies were required, but “with less hope of a cure.”56 The initial challenge of the Fenian insurgents, in both Ireland and England, had been seen off without any serious additional curtailment of the freedoms associated with the liberal state. The suspension of habeas corpus had been extended in Ireland, but Naas had used its power selectively. Indeed, the Executive was criticized not for making arbitrary arrests but for its generosity with respect to releases. Of the 961 persons detained since the passage of the Liberals’ suspension bill, the Times reported, almost four-fifths of them had been released on a promise of good behaviour. Of the more than 200 men still in custody, two-thirds of them had been imprisoned following the March rising and many of these were in the process of being brought to trial. There was a similarly self-congratulatory tone to press accounts of the toleration exhibited by the state during the crisis. There had been no tampering with the liberties of “speech, writing and action” despite the evidence that the Fenian spirit lived in Britain as well as in Ireland and North America.57 The Irish Executive had been tempted to resort to restrictive measures not unlike the notorious exclusion orders of a century later. But the proposal had been rejected by ministers appalled at the thought of massive and indeterminate detentions of suspected Irish-American subversives, which would certainly complicate further the already tense relationship

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with the United States. Diplomatic considerations had plainly governed Stanley’s response to the possibility of Fenian raiders being sent to a Canadian scaffold. If a combination of overconfidence and inadequate intelligence explains the failure of the Canadian government to anticipate the Fenian invasion in June of 1866, the Irish authorities were better prepared to counter the insurgency. Informers were one source of important intelligence, but the Irish police, obliged as they had been by the Irish penal system to keep watch on released convicts, were far more experienced than their British counterparts in the techniques of surveillance. That these were readily adaptable to political ends was demonstrated by the division of Dublin police commanded by Daniel Ryan. Moreover, the Irish Executive had taken the first halting steps towards the coordination and analysis of the intelligence. However, in Britain, surveillance was associated with an excessive centralization of power and an invasion of a citizen’s liberty, and the Tory home secretary declined to sanction a domestic “espionage system.”58 The need to isolate subversives from the general population through a redress of grievances had also been widely recognized, but the minority Conservative government was too weak and lacked the will to embark on an ambitious and controversial Irish policy. The conciliation of the influential Catholic clergy was not going to be effected through the half-measure of concurrent endowment, or levelling up as Tories preferred to call it. Similarly, financial assistance to undertake a restricted number of farm improvements was not going to pacify the legions of tenant farmers. Would the British government show a greater willingness to tackle Irish grievances, and would it continue to uphold liberal principles, if the Fenian struggle was transferred to Britain?

4 The Struggle Transferred to Britain

The Irish Executive had reason for continued vigilance despite the swift and successful suppression of the insurgency. Several of the Fenian Brotherhood’s “working men” were still industriously recruiting future rebels, and Thomas Kelly was whispered to be in Dublin. Daniel Ryan’s confirmation of the earlier reports that the elusive Fenian chief had devised “a system of retaliation” in the form of an “assassination circle,” to deal with Crown officials, policemen, jurors, witnesses, informers, and the likes of Condon (Massey), who had turned Queen’s evidence following his capture, merely added to the overworked Thomas Larcom’s worries. He ordered the extraordinary precautions that were taken to protect Corydon and Condon when they were despatched to Cork to give evidence in a series of Fenian trials there. A pilot train preceded their express to ensure there were no explosive devices on the tracks, all telegraphic communication between Dublin and the southern city was interrupted for seven hours, and on arrival the pair were housed in a local police barracks. Nor did tension within the Executive ease when Strathnairn declined to provide a mounted military guard for the police vans carrying the Fenians to court. Narrow streets were no place for cavalrymen, he continued to insist, and offered foot soldiers instead. By marching at a “funereal pace,” they would give mobs ample time in which to assemble, Larcom sarcastically commented.1 There was a similar sense of unease in Britain. Corydon warned the local authorities in Liverpool of a Fenian plan to celebrate St Patrick’s Day by putting the torch to dockyards and vessels. At a hastily summoned crisis meeting, it was decided that police patrols should be increased and a force of a hundred dock gatemen stationed on dock bridges with orders to raise them if a Fenian “mob” approached. Magistrates were to be armed with

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printed copies of the Riot Act; the directors of gasworks, the engineer of the waterworks, and the superintendents of the railway stations were urged to adopt “prudent and precautionary measures”; 300 marines were to be held in readiness aboard a naval vessel on the River Mersey; and the weapons of the Volunteers were to be moved to more secure locations. The arrival of three companies of the 54th Regiment of Foot from Manchester and their billeting in a district notorious for its “rowdies” may not have entirely reassured those officials familiar with the doubts of the troops’ loyalty. The fear that Salford with its large Catholic Irish population was another Fenian target saw a local garrison placed on alert, the Fire Brigade called to duty, a military guard mounted at the Volunteers’ armouries and the town’s gasworks, and strong police patrols sent onto the streets. The residents of Bradford, Sheffield, Shrewsbury, and Glasgow were also reported to be on edge as 17 March approached. Nor was this simply a case of popular hysteria. Fearful of being left with too few men to protect towns in which there were both “many Irish Fenians” and “large Government Establishments,” the duke of Cambridge discouraged the Irish Executive from seeking additional troops.2 The time had come to make a deterrent example of a Fenian, much of the press chorused. Thomas Bourke, the unrepentant naturalized American commander of the only body of Tipperary insurgents actually to engage Strathnairn’s regulars, was one possible choice. He and a fellow Fenian, Patrick Dolan, had been convicted of treason, only for Bourke to respond in the best rebel tradition: “I have nothing to recall, nothing that I would undo, nothing that I feel that the blush of shame should mantle my brow.” Yet the prescribed punishment for treason – hanging, decapitating, and quartering – was a source of some embarrassment. “The civilized world is generally abolishing the punishment of death for purely political crimes,” Britain’s most influential newspaper noted, and the reasons “are nowhere so strong as in this country, which still retains the barbarous forms of antiquity in this matter.” And as the days passed, there were signs of public misgivings about enforcing the penalty in the cases of the three Fenians under sentence of death – Bourke, Dolan, and John McCafferty.3 The readiness of the Liberal Party, England’s permanent political majority, to right Ireland’s wrongs made Fenian treason peculiarly “wanton and wicked,” the Daily Telegraph declared. But speaking for Liberals worried both by the prosecution’s heavy reliance in the trials on the testimony of former accomplices of the accused and by the sectarian composition of the juries that returned the guilty verdicts, the newspaper urged commutation of the death sentences. Press anxiety was all the greater because of Britain’s

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long avoidance of political executions. The rebels of 1848 had escaped the gallows, as had Fenian invaders of Canada. Why add these three names to the roll call of “Irish martyrology” and thus fan into flames, both at home and abroad, the current embers of revolutionary nationalism? Would it not be wiser to commute the sentences to lengthy terms of penal servitude, thereby satisfying justice while divesting rebellion of romance? Incarceration with common felons would surely leave the Fenians “entirely destitute of historical glory” or sentimental grace. Not that the influential Times wished the convicted traitor to be treated as a mere felon. It recommended total solitude, causing him “to disappear almost as completely from among his fellow men as one already numbered among the dead.” The Fenians would thus be “effaced by the clemency of the Power they attacked.” There was a fallacy in this reasoning, which the petition presented in the Commons by John Bright exposed. It described the Fenians as political prisoners who, misguided but “free of dishonour,” should not suffer imprisonment of a “disgraceful nature.” Already, elements of the Irish press were vehemently protesting their “wantonly harsh and cruel treatment.”4 “We shall have a most anxious question about those wretched traitors,” Naas predicted once the date of the executions was set. “I see that a tremendous effort will be made to save their lives.” Public meetings in support of clemency were held in Ireland, petitions were forwarded, including one presented in the Commons by John Bright, where a motion was introduced calling for the exemption of all political offenders, save those guilty of murder, from capital punishment, and ninety members of Parliament appealed to the viceroy. Naas forwarded the memorials to Chief Justice Whiteside, as the trial judge, and requested a speedy response. Then, with Abercorn in attendance, the Cabinet agreed on 22 May “that as a question of justice, there could be no doubt of [their] right to enforce the law: it was a question of policy only.”5 The case for clemency was made by Naas, with the support of Stanley, Walpole, and Marlborough – the conspiracy had collapsed, the Irish public recognized the futility of rebellion, and executions would in deepening Irish bitterness make more difficult a return “to the ordinary administration of law and justice.” Whiteside, who had delivered a five-hour summation in the Bourke and Doran trials, during which he poured scorn on the “approver” (witness) Condon, gave Naas and the others a timely helping hand by stressing in his report a clutch of mitigating factors – the condemned men had abstained from acts of violence and outrage; not one of them had been implicated in assassinations; and their offences were virtually indistinguishable from those of the three fellow rebels convicted

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of the non-capital crime of treason-felony. The legal niceties that had allowed a distinction to be drawn between the two groups, the chief justice cautioned, would never be understood by the general public, thus further eroding its confidence in the rule of law. Seizing on this cautionary observation, the chief secretary argued forcibly that capital punishment was an “absolute evil,” especially in political cases, unless “sanctioned by the almost unanimous voice of public opinion.” The majority of his colleagues, on the other hand, worried that a blanket grant of mercy would undermine the morale of the loyal Irish, who needed the reassurance of “firm” government, and might lead Tory backbenchers to conclude that their leaders were fearful of the United States. So the Cabinet decided to make an example of Bourke only, an Irish American and the worst offender.6 As the day set for the execution approached, so the pressure on the government to spare Bourke’s life mounted. Deputations, civic and religious, met with the viceroy and more petitions were presented to him. The signatories were an eclectic mix of the professional middle classes, which strongly suggested that the advocates of clemency included Conservatives and “loyal” Irishmen. The Church of Ireland’s archbishop of Dublin and the archbishop of Canterbury forwarded pleas. Sir William Harcourt published another of his Historicus letters in the Times, making the case “with extraordinary passion against the death penalty for political offences” and reminding Britons of the merciful conduct of the American Union at the close of a civil war in which hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost. Finally, fifty-two members of Parliament called on Lord Derby at his London home in St James’s Square. The prime minister gave no hint of a change of heart, informing the delegation that the issue had been fully discussed in Cabinet. There did not appear to be anything in Bourke’s case, he added, that would “withdraw him from the extreme penalty of the law.” Within a few hours, he had changed his mind.7 The unfavourable comparison of their response to the feeble Fenian insurgency with the conduct of the United States at the end of the American carnage acted as a brake on Tory ministers. So did the “strong and decided” parliamentary and public sentiment in favour of mercy. The Liberal Party, a number of Tories, and much of the press opposed execution. Fearing a “storm” in the Commons and aware that they would be deeply if not fatally embarrassed should Whiteside’s report see the light of day, the Cabinet beat a retreat. Disraeli informed the Commons of the last-minute decision to spare Bourke’s life. He performed the embarrassing about-face with characteristic aplomb, but while the Liberals cheered, the men sitting behind the Treasury bench remained stonily silent. Some undoubtedly

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disagreed with the decision, whereas others were surely dismayed by their leaders’ inept handling of the issue. The “appearance of indecision might have been avoided,” Stanley smugly remarked, had his colleagues accepted the arguments for clemency almost a week earlier. The monarch agreed. The decision to commute the death sentence, the wisdom of which she disputed, “would have had less the appearance of being yielded to external pressure” had it been taken before the refusal of the eleventh-hour pleas for mercy, the queen grumbled.8 Convinced that the public had on this occasion been right to oppose an execution and that a “great national danger” had been avoided, Naas awoke the next day “with a lighter heart.” Not that his Fenian worries had vanished overnight. Kelly was still believed to be in Dublin, while the “assassination committee” was believed still to be stalking its targets. A strong clue as to the latter’s identity had been found in the documents carried by Michael Cody – later identified as the leader of the assassins – at the time of his arrest for attempting to stab one policeman and shoot another. The names and addresses of the judges presiding at the Special Commission were listed, as were those of the prosecuting counsel, the jurors, and the prosecution witnesses in the Bourke trial. Another of the chief secretary’s nagging concerns was the secure custody of Fenian prisoners. A pair of turnkeys at a provincial gaol had been dismissed for supplying Fenian detainees with brandy, whiskey, and copies of the inflammatory Irishman, while several warders at Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison were suspected of membership in the Brotherhood. Hence eighteen Fenian convicts, among them Bourke, Dolan, and McCafferty, were removed to Portland Prison in Southern England. Similarly disquieting was the riot sparked in Waterford when more than two dozen Irish Americans who claimed to be emigrants en route to Brazil or Buenos Aires but driven ashore “by want of necessities,” yet without luggage, were arrested and marched through the town under police guard. That 5,000 people subsequently walked in procession behind the hearse of the rioter killed in the disturbance was considered proof of Fenianism’s continuing viability. An even surer sign of danger ahead was the “general sympathy” being shown imprisoned Fenians by a “comparatively respectable class of the south Irish population.” Had the time come to halt the growth of that sympathy through the introduction of progressive counter-insurgency measures that would redress Irish grievances?9 The Conservative government had much else on its mind and agenda during the late spring and early summer of 1867. The most important item of business was the Reform Bill, and Spencer Walpole was an early casualty

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of the struggle. Someone had to pay for the administration’s clumsy response to a huge reform demonstration in Hyde Park, a vast open area of grass and trees covering almost 350 acres and described by a French visitor as a “‘country gentleman’s park transported to the heart of the capital.’” As home secretary, Walpole prohibited the organizers from using the royal park for political meetings and backed the order with a display of military and police force. The Reform League, determined to resist any curtailment of the long-established rights of assembly and demonstration, called the government’s bluff. Humiliated, a “lugubrious,” lachrymose Walpole fell upon his sword with astonishing alacrity. As Isabella Walpole explained to Derby, her husband’s “very sensitive temperament” had reached breaking point under the strains of office, which had become unbearable with the fatal illness of the permanent undersecretary and the decision of the parliamentary undersecretary to accompany his ailing wife back to Ireland. She begged the prime minister to accept the resignation. Walpole did remain in the Cabinet as a minister without portfolio, however, in order to ensure that he would bear no “stigma” and to protect his colleagues from the accusation of making him a scapegoat of the Hyde Park fiasco.10 The new secretary of state was Gathorne Hardy. Son of a successful and wealthy barrister and Tory member of Parliament, he had dutifully followed in his father’s professional and political footsteps. He stood unsuccessfully for his father’s old seat of Bradford in 1847, but his financial inheritance on his father’s death and the bitter disappointment at being denied a silk gown saw him abandon the law for public life. Returned first for Leominster in 1855 and a decade later for the University of Oxford, he had served as Walpole’s parliamentary undersecretary in the second Derby administration, and his ambition with the formation of the earl’s third government was to secure the Home Office. Instead, after indignantly declining another junior position, he entered the Cabinet as president of the Poor Law Board. There, he impressed Stanley as “honest” and “sincere” but lacking “breadth of mind.” More generally, he was regarded as shrewd, “humane and painstaking,” with an abundance of “good commonsense.” He spoke well and debated with the “trained ability” of the successful barrister, but it was his “hot, vehement and rather personal style” in partisan exchanges that won him so many admirers on the back benches, along with his fluent expression of the opinions shared by inarticulate country gentlemen. Critics detected “the loutish rural mind” in his “squirearchical intelligence,” yet even they conceded, if somewhat patronizingly, his skill in presenting “commonplace Conservatism” as articulately “as anything so poor could be.” Ardent defender of the Church of England,

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of the sanctity of private property, and of the rule of law, he believed that the best and most viable way to preserve society as presently structured was to rid it of the most obvious evils and improve the functioning of essential institutions.11 Hardy’s intense pride on becoming “first of the five Secretaries of State” did not blind him to the challenges he faced. In addition to general responsibility for Ireland, he was responsible for the maintenance of public order, effectively chief constable of the capital, answerable for the errors and indiscretions of judges and magistrates, and the custodian of the prerogative of mercy. Hardy soon came under pressure on all counts. A Royal Commission on Trade Unions had heard astounding admissions by leaders of the Sheffield Sawgrinders’ Union. Immunized against prosecution, they described in great detail the “terrorist” tactics they had employed against rivals and non-union artisans. The shocking evidence of coldly calculated violence shook the faith of some observers in the law-abiding character of British society, as did a parallel investigation of the Manchester brickmaking industry. In speaking of Ireland as the only land of the United Kingdom dominated by a class code of sanguinary violence, the Times observed, Britons had done it a great injustice. The miserable Irish peasant who, having been ejected along with his family from cottage and land, took a chance shot at the agent of his misery was far less culpable than these “infamous and atrocious criminals” who attempted to keep up wages by blowing up houses.12 A fortnight after the Hyde Park demonstration, which had brought Hardy to the Home Office, Disraeli accepted a Radical amendment to the Reform Bill that quadrupled the number of men it enfranchised. For Conservatives such as Hardy, the bill was welcomed principally as a source of Liberal disunity. John Bright was furious with Russell and the Whig peers for their willingness to accept an “unfairly” small representation of the nation’s great industrial cities. He warned Gladstone of the “increased disaster to the Liberal Party” from such “imbecile” and “ruinous” leadership, and those members of the party who wished it to be more combative and more committed to reform were increasingly inclined to dismiss the former Peelite as no “natural Liberal.” Tories gleeful at Gladstone’s discomfiture found much to admire in Disraeli’s astute management of the bill. He artfully consolidated Conservative strength in the shires, while even in a number of large urban centres the “respectable” enfranchised working men were being enrolled in Conservative and Constitutional Associations committed to the defence of the “glorious constitution in Church and State.”13

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Even before the Reform Bill received royal assent, problems related to Ireland had emerged as Hardy’s most formidable challenge. William Murphy, the “Gospel Garibaldi,” was proving a chronic and painful headache. An Irishman, Murphy had followed his schoolmaster father first in a conversion to Protestantism and then along a path that led from schoolroom to public platform. By 1862, at the age of twenty-eight, he had moved to England and become an itinerant missionary of the Protestant Electoral Union and Evangelical Mission. This organization circulated leaflets, tracts, and pamphlets, and sponsored public meetings and lectures. Murphy quickly developed into its star performer, touring the country and invariably bringing trouble with him. His audiences, heavily drawn from the lower middle and working classes, heard him traduce the pope as the “greatest ‘rag and bone-grubber in the world,’” defame Catholic priests as “murderers, pickpockets, cannibals and liars,” and then add a large helping of sexual spice to this sectarian dish with extensive readings from The Confessional Unmasked. This salacious pamphlet required a belief “in the utter profligacy of all women professing Roman Catholicism, and in the systematic villainy of the priesthood.” Were Murphy not antiCatholic, the Universe noted with some justice as well as asperity, “he would be scouted as ribald, profane, and obscene; but when he speaks against the Church, his beastliness is not only forgiven but approved of, and applauded.” The violent protests of enraged Catholics, who were overwhelmingly Irish, provided English roughs with an additional incentive to put in an appearance. They could brawl in the guise of defenders of free speech.14 Birmingham’s municipal authorities, fearing disorder and damage to persons, property, and civic reputation, attempted to discourage Murphy from lecturing in their community. They denied him use of a large hall, but he simply erected his own temporary tabernacle. When the Catholic Irish initially got the better of the resultant street confrontations, an English mob marching to the tune of John Brown – the American abolitionist martyr, not the queen’s gillie – went on a wrecking mission to Irish areas of the city. Here was reason enough for the Home Office to give careful consideration to local government requests for the authority to prevent Murphy from speaking. But how was a sectarian demagogue to be silenced in a society that prided itself on freedom of speech. He posed one of the conundrums of the liberal state. Did the freedom to utter ethnic and sectarian abuse take priority over the freedom from such abuse? That the Catholic Irish found Murphy’s insults “unendurable” was readily conceded by much of the English press, which had noted his habit of carrying

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“Protestant bigotry” into areas heavily populated by his Catholic fellow countrymen, who could not be expected to listen patiently to this apostate assailant of their creed. His “mercenary eloquence” was an outrage to public decency, the Times admitted. Yet, to hold him largely responsible for the “grievous occurrences” did not draw a clear line of demarcation between the rights of the citizens of a liberal state to free speech and assembly and the right of every section of the community to protest against outrages “perpetrated upon them in the names of liberty and religion.” Even Murphy had the right, critics acknowledged, to be protected from brutal violence. Could any group of citizens be permitted to suppress speech, however offensive, with bludgeons? The fact that the Irish more often than not were the initiators of the violence led many Britons to complain of “mob dictation.”15 There being no process at law by which Murphy could be banned from lecturing, the Home Office had urged local authorities to dissuade him from speaking. If he insisted on going ahead, they were to attempt to discourage disturbances with massive and intimidating parades of force. The limitations of deterrence were soon displayed in Birmingham. There, 400 troops and almost 1,000 policemen and special constables could not prevent mobs numbering in the tens of thousands from gaining control of the streets. But the central government’s caution may have been influenced by political as well as constitutional and legal considerations. Tories were not above exploiting anti-Catholic Irish sentiment in an effort to attract English working-class support. The Tory candidate in a subsequent Birmingham by-election dramatically increased his minority share of the vote by shamelessly exploiting the emotions aroused by Murphy’s destructive visit to the city. Simple people, a Liberal newspaper claimed, were persuaded that in voting Conservative “they were doing God and their country service by recording a useful and necessary protest against the progress of Popery.” As for Murphy’s most provocative prop, The Confessional Unmasked, Hardy initially hesitated to take action despite his personal belief that it was “a work of the most unspeakable filthy character.” Local magistrates in Wolverhampton had ordered its seizure, only for the decision to be overturned in a higher court on the grounds that the pamphlet’s purpose was merely to expose and end those Catholic practices the authors considered evil. Another year was to pass before the chief justice condemned the pamphlet as an obscene publication. In the interim, Hardy’s not unreasonable excuse for inaction was the probability that in a trial to suppress it the jury would be guided by the reversal of the seizure.16

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Although several of Murphy’s sponsors received threatening letters signed “Fenian,” the Home Office remained sceptical of any Brotherhood involvement in the violence. Then a rash of alarming reports refocused attention on Ireland. Were weapons being imported in quantities sufficient to rearm the conspirators? How extensive was the “very shadowy form” of drilling that a startled viceroy came upon while out for a canter in Phoenix Park? Should action be taken, as Strathnairn recommended, against the “evil” nationalist press, with its extravagant descriptions of Ireland’s wrongs and misfortunes and ceaseless advocacy of “violent and illegal” remedies? Was “a large portion of the middle classes, such as shopkeepers, artisans, ‘second-rate’ civil engineers, clerks, some of the young clergy, and a good many farmers and farmers’ younger sons,” growing more sympathetic to Fenianism? Was the aversion of the “the higher agriculturalists” and senior clergy to revolutionary nationalism attributable to the Brotherhood’s threat to their respective interests, not to its hostility to the British connection? With an eye to future trouble and the need to harden the most obvious targets of insurgents and terrorists, the Irish Executive gave orders for the conversion of constabulary barracks into small fortresses. They were to be equipped with bullet-proof doors, sheet iron to case the shutters of lower windows in order to protect against incendiary devices, and projecting, angular iron shutters complete with loopholes at upper windows through which besieged policemen might fire down on attackers.17 The British press, meanwhile, continued to fret over the damage the Irish problem was doing to the nation’s standing as a liberal state. The suspension of habeas corpus, which exposed citizens and visitors alike to arbitrary arrest, was something of a self-inflicted black eye. Those Britons who declared “a fair, and just, and thorough union” the “best and happiest thing for Ireland in the long run” were virtually conceding Irish complaints that a “real union” of countries and peoples had never truly existed. The national independence to which the Fenians were committed continued to be rejected as morally irresponsible, however. Ireland’s “rank, intelligence, wealth and industry” could not be left to the tender mercies of her peasantry and demagogues. But Fenianism did point to the necessity of immediate concessions if popular sympathy for it was to be eroded, and high on most lists of remedial measures was disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. After all, perhaps four-fifths of the population was Catholic. Unfortunately, a great many Britons, citing papal intolerance of the small number of Protestants resident in Rome, opposed any arrangement that would give “revenues, status and [additional] influence” to the

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Irish hierarchy. The Irish Catholic bishops ought not to be armed with “independent money power,” declared the very popular Lloyd’s Weekly, otherwise an advocate of reform of the Church of Ireland, nor should priests be granted even greater influence, which they might be tempted to use against the government.18 A pamphlet written by David Moriarty, in which he proposed a division of the property of the Church of Ireland between Protestants and Catholics, together with an article in the Tablet, calling for a form of Catholic Establishment and efforts in Parliament by Irish members to promote a dramatic expansion of the glebe lands held by priests and place all of the property acquired by the Catholic Church under the control of the hierarchy, nourished Nonconformist suspicions of Catholic designs on a form of concurrent endowment. Although Gladstone later privately admitted that his own leanings had been in the direction of Moriarty’s proposal, he was too conscious of Britain’s large Nonconformist electorate to become identified with it. Instead, he left the impression that as leader of a Liberal government he would introduce “a practical scheme” for solving the problem. He and his senior colleagues had been privately discussing the future of the Irish Church since the beginning of the year, confident that Ireland would emerge as the “paramount” political question once parliamentary reform was settled. But Gladstone’s evolving position struck critical observers as opportunistic. He was now contesting arguments in defence of the church that were “once his own without seeming to feel that there had been any want of consistency in his career,” a sardonic Manchester Guardian observed, because he saw this as the issue that would reunite his party.19 Earl Russell, with an eye to embarrassing the Tory government, introduced a motion in the upper house designed to open the road to concurrent endowment. The peers agreed to his proposed commission to investigate the property and income of the Irish Church, but declined to instruct it to conduct the enquiry with a view to a more equitable Irish distribution of the church’s revenues. Ironically, the Tory Cabinet was being urged to move in the same direction by Strathnairn. Citing Moriarty’s pamphlet as an example of the “best opinions” among Catholics, he denied that these moderates were seeking the abolition of the Protestant Church. The task at hand was to separate them from “the violent, the extremes, of the Roman Catholic clergy at whose head stands Archbishop Cullen.” Unlikely as it was that these “extremists” would ever be reconciled to “English interests,” concurrent endowment might enable the government to win over an important element of the Catholic clergy. Such a success would at least

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reduce the number of those who “by eloquent and bitter language against Ireland’s so-called oppressors” made an “appeal to passions which found a too ready [popular] echo,” the general argued.20 If a resolution of the Irish Church issue seemed likely to await a new Parliament returned by the new electorate, the current session had seen a gain for Catholics. The abolition of the Declaration against Transubstantiation had removed the sectarian barrier to the office of Irish lord chancellor. On the other hand, Protestantism remained an essential qualification for the viceroyalty and sectarian intolerance continued to raise its ugly public head. Lecturers of the National Protestant Institute were still touring Britain, bellowing forth “the most disgraceful and filthy balderdash.” Murphy made a return visit to Birmingham and the national spotlight in August 1867. Prudently, he and his associates were carrying revolvers and were thus able to hold a furious Catholic Irish crowd at bay until rescued by the police. In Ireland, the mobbing of a Wesleyan evangelist while street preaching and prosecutions of both Roman Catholics and Orangemen for breaches of the Party Processions Act served to heighten sectarian tensions there. “This is an infernal country to manage,” a weary and exasperated Naas moaned. “Impartiality is impossible – Statesmanship utterly out of place. The only way to govern is the old plan (which I will never attempt) of taking up violently one faction or the other pitting them like fighting cocks and then backing one.”21 The Fenians were to blame for the economy’s current stagnation by discouraging investment, Abercorn insisted in his speech at the annual banquet of the Irish Royal Agricultural Society in late August. This explanation did not silence critics, who retorted that the Irish problem would only be settled by the creation of a happy and prosperous peasantry through “courageous, just, and unflinching amendments of the laws.” But as senior members of the Reform League discovered when they arrived in Dublin shortly afterwards, promises to work for a “perfect understanding” between the British and Irish, and to redress Ireland’s “monster” grievances, did not guarantee an enthusiastic reception. Like Bright earlier, they spoke to apathetic audiences in half-empty chambers; Ernest Jones, the former Chartist, was hissed when he dwelt upon the need to obey the law, whereas a call from the audience for an Irish republic produced “round after round of frantic applause.” Only when Jones alluded to the plight of the political prisoners was he warmly applauded. This long-simmering issue was threatening to boil over, reheated as it had been by the ongoing transfers of convicted Fenians to English prisons and the death from heart disease of one of the Fenians awaiting trial. The bereaved family of the

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dead man insisted his end had been hastened by “over rigorous treatment” in prison. Some 30,000 people marched in his funeral procession through Belfast’s principal thoroughfares, and almost half of them accompanied the hearse to the cemetery. “The deceased was regarded as a martyr to the Fenian cause,” a senior policemen reported.22 Fenian activity in Britain also remained deeply worrying. Daniel Ryan warned early in June 1867 that a very important meeting was to be held in Liverpool to effect a reconciliation of the Brotherhood’s squabbling factions. The news that the Fenians had settled their differences and were planning to coordinate their respective activities against Canada and in Ireland, and would seek the support of Britain’s “advanced reformers,” initially failed to trigger alarm bells. Instead, the arrest of Octave Fariola, Cluseret’s former chief of staff, as he walked down London’s Oxford Street on a Saturday in mid-July fostered the illusion that the police were finally gaining the upper hand in the struggle to locate and detain the Brotherhood’s leadership. Then, in mid-August, Thomas Kelly was reported to be in Manchester, where, according to an Irish policeman stationed in the city, local Fenians were very active and the local constabulary seemingly oblivious to the danger. Robert Anderson, Naas’s coordinator of intelligence, hurriedly drew the activity to the attention of the Home Office and urgently recommended that the city’s authorities be impressed with the need for police vigilance. An instruction to this effect was issued on 2 September, and barely a week later Thomas Kelly and a colleague were arrested.23 The 150 delegates who attended the Manchester gathering confirmed Kelly as their chief executive and agreed to weekly membership dues to fund the “Home Organization” and maintain the Irish Americans awaiting the call to action. Indeed, Americans were to serve as the intermediaries between the local branches and the central command, and several civil war veterans were assigned important regional commands. Thus Ricard Burke was responsible for southern England and was to assume overall command in the event of Kelly’s arrest. James Murphy was placed “in general charge of Scotland,” and according to the police received his communications through the office of the Glasgow Free Press. The organization in and around Manchester was led by Edward O’Meagher Condon, who had been active in Canada before serving in the Union Army, from which he was invalided out in 1864. It was he who organized the Manchester convention, but it was Kelly’s decision in its aftermath to use the city as his headquarters that immediately backfired. In the early hours of the morning of 11 September, Kelly and three colleagues were spotted by a policeman patrolling the Smithfield Market area of the city centre.

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Believing them to be burglars, he summoned assistance and managed to detain two of the four – Kelly and Timothy Deasy – who were formally arrested under the provisions of the Vagrancy Act. It empowered a policeman to “apprehend [persons] whom he shall have just cause to suspect of any evil designs.”24 The pair’s possession of loaded revolvers, American accent, and claims of American citizenship fed suspicions of their involvement in Fenianism. Kelly’s identity was established with the aid of a photograph sent over from Dublin and confirmed by one of the Irish policemen stationed in Liverpool. The earl of Mayo (Naas having succeeded to the earldom with his father’s death) immediately telegraphed Richard Mayne in London: “Information has been received from Manchester that our suspicions are correct – case important – great care must be taken.” Three days later, on 17 September, he excitedly informed Disraeli: “We have caught the leading Fenian of them all.” Corydon, now employed on a weekly retainer, arrived in Manchester to testify to the role of the arrested men in the conspiracy. Inspector Williamson, Mayne’s senior Fenian hunter, was despatched from London to keep an eye on proceedings. At a magistrates hearing on 18 September, during which Williamson testified that he had reason to believe the men were Kelly and Deasy, they were remanded in custody for a further week. This was necessitated by the embarrassing absence of a legal warrant for Deasy’s arrest even though he was wanted for involvement in the March rising. To pack Kelly off to Ireland alone might expose this oversight, perhaps resulting in Deasy’s release on a writ of habeas corpus.25 Following the hearing, the two Fenians were held in the court’s basement cells, for almost five hours, until the police van had a full load for the return journey to Bellevue Prison. Long before its departure, the Irish Executive had at Robert Anderson’s prompting telegraphed both the Home Office and the Manchester police to urge the taking of every precaution to ensure the safe custody of the prize catch. Anderson had every reason for his uneasiness. Attempted rescues of prisoners were by no means uncommon, and he had probably received intelligence of what the Fenians were planning. Unfortunately, the telegram addressed to the Home Office was not sent as a “Government message.” Instead, it was “carelessly” sent as a private communication from the lord mayor of Dublin to the new permanent undersecretary. In his absence from the Home Office that day, it passed from hand to hand, department to department, “with great slowness and carelessness besides,” before reaching the desk of the parliamentary undersecretary, James Ferguson. As a result, the police van had set

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off for Bellevue a full hour before Ferguson read the telegram. He did as the Irish asked, telegraphing the authorities in Manchester to impress upon them the need for additional precautions. By the time the telegram was delivered, Kelly and Deasy had been rescued, but Ferguson had assumed that the men on the spot, one of whom was Williamson, would on their own initiative have reinforced the guard on the police van.26 The Manchester police, long accused of making light of the Fenian threat, were not held in high regard by the Irish Executive. The force was supervised by the Watch Committee of the Town Council, which body of worthies like their counterparts elsewhere favoured ex-military men as police commanders. Former army officers were valued for their experience in handling men and commitment to stern discipline. William Henry Palin had only recently been appointed chief constable, and at the relatively tender age of thirty-two. He had resigned a commission in India to accompany his ailing wife back to England, and may have owed his selection from the 120 applicants for the position of chief constable to his father-inlaw’s connections as a prominent and influential Manchester merchant. Handsome, affable, and gentlemanly, Palin was also “shrewd” “keen,” and “quick of apprehension.” He persuaded the Watch Committee to increase the strength of the force and approve-morale boosting improvements in pay and conditions. The committee had also sanctioned organizational changes “with a view to increase its efficiency as a Detective Force.” The small Detective Department was now located in the Chief Constable’s Office, but Palin used it more as a statistical branch than an investigative unit.27 “Are the prisoners lodged in gaol – Have every precaution taken for their safe custody – Let extra guards be provided if necessary – consult Williamson – Telegraph reply.” This was the message sent to John Maybury as chief of detectives, presumably because it was known in Dublin that the new chief constable was on leave. A thirty-year veteran, Maybury had climbed the many rungs of the promotion ladder and been designated superintendent of police commanding the Detective Department in the recent restructuring. Absent from his office when the telegram was delivered, he was not to return for almost three hours. The Head Office did not as a result come to a complete standstill, as critics later charged. The telegram was brought within a few minutes to the attention of an inspector who had come to report to Maybury that three persons who had carried food to Kelly and Deasy in Bellevue had been spotted in the crowd outside the Magistrate’s Court awaiting the prisoners’ departure. The inspector rushed off with the telegram in search of a more senior officer,

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who duly ordered the arrest of the three suspicious individuals. As it happened, one had already left in a cab to inform a Fenian rescue party that the police van was about to set out for Bellevue, while another escaped. Meanwhile, ten additional police officers were added to the normal guard of the van, inside of which Kelly and Deasy were manacled and locked in two of the cells.28 The officer in charge of the van was Sergeant Charles Brett. A veteran in late middle age of more than twenty years’ service and a man of “steadiness and sobriety,” he belonged to “E” Division, the detectives and uniformed men connected to the police courts. Not for Brett the drudgery of the beat or the excitement of the chase. His was the relatively undemanding and comfortable duty of ferrying prisoners to and from the courts, and bringing them up from the cells for examination before the magistrates. On this day, the heightened security saw him travelling inside the cramped and fetid van, nicknamed the “Black Maria” in an allusion to the Black Hole of Calcutta, instead of on the back step. Although Palin later loyally defended as reasonable his officers’ decision simply to bolster the police guard, explaining that “the probability of an armed attempt to rescue did not present itself to the minds of the superintendents,” it ought to have occurred to them given the rescuers’ commitment to revolutionary violence. An armed escort of troops would have been a prudent precaution.29 The Fenians had purchased ten revolvers in Birmingham with cash raised from local “circles.” Ricard Burke had come down from London to help plan a rescue, and the final planning meeting took place on the eve of the remand hearing. Michael O’Brien, another Irish American long involved in building the organization in Britain, was present, as was John McAuliffe, whose task was to assassinate the informer Corydon. However, McAuliffe got cold feet and contrived to get himself arrested outside the courthouse by pulling a knife during the scuffle with the police. The principal planner was Edward O’Meagher Condon, who adapted the scheme he had intended to employ the previous year to liberate the Canadian Fenian leader, Michael Murphy. It had been unused, for Murphy escaped from prison. Condon’s Manchester plan called for the ambushing of the van by three dozen men as it passed beneath a railway viaduct on the last leg of its journey of more than two miles from courthouse to prison. Armed men would shoot the horses to halt the van, hold the unarmed police at bay, relieve Sergeant Brett on the back step of his keys, and then cover the escape of Kelly and Deasy. That Brett was locked inside the van and refused to surrender the keys prevented the operation going off swiftly as planned. Onlookers quickly gathered, some clearly willing to intervene, and warders

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could be seen rushing down from the prison. The firing of the revolvers became ever wilder, wounding policemen and civilians alike as desperate attempts were made to smash open the van. Only when shots were fired into it, killing Brett, were the keys given up by one of the prostitutes who had been standing alongside him in its gangway. The van and cells were opened, and Kelly and Deasy spirited away. Several of the rescuers and rearguard were pursued and captured, among them the young man believed by many of those present to be the gunman who had fired the fatal shot. The pair who had halted the van were also taken, and a short while later Condon was arrested by detectives.30 The immediate if not entirely consoling thought of the press was that this attack “could only have been possible under such a system of free and orderly Government as prevails in these islands.” The occasional escape of “a great culprit or atrocious criminal” was part of the price Britons paid for their liberal state in which liberty of the subject was preserved “from the system of espionage practised abroad.” But it was the dark cloud looming over their “vaunted” system of law and order, not its liberal silver lining, that captured the attention of most commentators. The “stupidity” of the “blundering” Manchester authorities, who had failed to respond adequately to the timely warnings, and the ineffectual performance of the police were responsible for the “national humiliation of seeing the law frustrated again and again, justice made a laughing stock, and the wild schemes of seditious conspiracy invested with a sort of negative importance.” The indiscriminate arrests of Irishmen following the escape, with more than seventy detained, of whom all but twenty-three were rapidly released, did little to restore the reputation of the police in Liberal and Radical eyes. Such “political arrests ‘on suspicion’” called into question the state’s liberalism.31 Criticism of the police provided an outlet for the deepening anxiety of Britons. “The Fenians have declared war against our institutions and have carried it into the very heart of the country,” the Times gloomily observed. Irish Americans were accused of importing into Britain one of “the most audacious practices of American rowdyism,” the free use of firearms. “If the statistics of the United States included the lives lost in paltry brawls, by having revolvers at hand,” the Anglo-American Times noted, they would show “what a price American citizens pay for the privilege.” However, a number of fatal accidents had made the “dangerous [British] practice of carrying loaded firearms about the person” an issue of public concern and had prompted demands that they be “placed out of the reach of persons” unaccustomed to handling them. Here was an allusion to the members of

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the lower classes, for the “Yankee Irish” identified as the ringleaders of the Manchester incident could have achieved little without the assistance and sympathy of an immigrant Irish community all too familiar “with outrage and murder for the furtherance of the objects of political conspiracy.” The Fenians had clearly established their organization in those large British towns where the Catholic Irish were bound together by those “clanlike ties” that kept alive “Irish sentiments of hatred against ‘Saxon’ supremacy.” Britons had now to face up to the unpleasant fact that they were “constantly in the presence of an armed enemy.”32 The response of the Irish press to the incident did not ease the ethnic tensions. It toasted the Fenians’ “daring,” “clever,” and “bold” adoption of the tactics of Scipio by carrying “the battle into the very camp of the enemy.” Popular celebrations of Kelly’s escape, skirmishes between troops and the “lower classes” in Limerick, and the massive martyr’s funeral given in the same city to a suspected Fenian who died shortly after his release from detention were cited as proof of the Fenians’ “secret control” of the Irish population. The Nation revelled in the thought of the English no longer feeling safe in their towns and cities and perhaps being subjected to “that system of police rule and military display” with which the Irish were all too familiar. In England, Murphy reappeared on the scene to foment and exploit ethnic hostility. In this volatile climate, acts of vigilantism were predictable. A young Irish man working in factory warehouse in Barnsley was put on mock trial and sentenced to death by his fellow workers for voicing Fenian sympathies. He was then near-hanged, only being cut down when he had gone black in the face. His tormentors escaped with a derisory fine of ten shillings each. Here was a timely notice to Britain’s Irish residents of the “ebullitions of vengeful wrath” they faced if they supported Fenianism.33 English minds were being filled with “cowardly apprehension” and their worst passions aroused, the Nation charged, in order to “excite their animosity in the bitterest intensity against the Irishmen charged with having assisted in rescuing Colonel Kelly.” But the Daily Telegraph argued for the speedy trial and severe punishment of the accused not only to deter “Irish settlers” from open defiance of English law but also to forestall revenge attacks on them. No claim of political motivation could obscure the fact, it observed, that the rescuers of Kelly had committed a murder of the most dangerous kind by killing an officer of the law. The publication of a menacing letter, apparently signed by the Fenian chief, threatening reprisals if his rescuers were not treated as prisoners of war simply threw fuel on the flames. “No murderer, however atrocious, can hereafter be

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hanged,” an unusually sober Punch responded, “if traitors convicted of murdering a policeman in the discharge of his duty escape the gallows.” In short, the rescuers were to be criminalized.34 Calls for the capital punishment of the Fenians responsible for Sergeant Brett’s death reflected a fear that Britain, and England in particular, was now the centre of the conspiracy and the target of its new strategy of “harassing the Government at home, and bringing rebellion to its own hearth.” A disastrous explosion at the Woolwich Arsenal, which left several boy employees dead and others horribly disfigured, further frayed nerves. So did the shooting of two policemen in London, rumours of Fenian plans to assassinate a number of prominent citizens of Middlesborough, and of shots being fired at the queen near her Scottish summer retreat of Balmoral. The “Fenian mania” was fed by the reported disclosure of an alleged Fenian plot to sabotage Manchester’s gasworks in order to facilitate the plundering of a darkened city, as well as by newspaper reports of an attack on the armoury of the 12th Norfolk Volunteers, of an attempt to blow open the door of the armoury of the Harrow Volunteers, of an attempted bombing of the Chester police station, of the arrest of a group of men engaged in military drilling near the important railway junction of Crewe, of trains being kept ready at York, with steam up, to transport troops quickly to wherever they were needed in Northern England, and of the arrest of an Irishman for attempting to derail the limited mail on the London and North Western Railway. There was little evidence, however, that any of this was making the British more receptive to repeal of the Union let alone to the establishment of an independent Irish republic.35 The news that the Liverpool police had suddenly become far more energetic in their pursuit of Fenians failed to mollify Mayo (Naas). Nor did the dismissal on “grounds of incompetency” of the Manchester police clerk who had held on to the telegram for a mere ten minutes before handing it to a senior officer. The clerk was the scapegoat. After a decent interval, Maybury was permitted to retire on the grounds of ill health. His successor was, at the Watch Committee’s insistence, a more “responsible officer” with “experience in the detection of crime.” What was needed in Britain to counter the threat of Fenian terrorism was an effective system of national policing, instead of the existing hodgepodge of local forces answerable to local authorities. As a first step in that direction, Mayo recommended that the police of Liverpool, Manchester, and other large northern towns be instructed to concentrate on the Fenian problem. Why not create a “Fenian Police department,” he asked, perhaps headed by Williamson and dedicated to the investigation of subversive activities.

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Scotland’s inspector of constabulary, John Kinlock, offered much the same advice. The small squads of detectives operating there, as in much of England and Wales, had “very little acquaintance, if any, with Fenians or other political agitators,” he acknowledged. He proposed the formation of “a small staff of intelligent detectives” who would be “maintained by the Government” and located in Edinburgh or Glasgow but “whose services should be made available to the provinces when required to assist the less experienced local police in important and difficult cases.”36 Hardy agreed that the “subdivision of police into so many independent bodies renders it difficult to find trustworthy and prudent people to communicate with and secrecy which is so important becomes almost impossible.” His poor opinion of the “supine” English police was not improved by news of Deasy’s escape to Europe, despite his having aroused the suspicions of the railway authorities and a police superintendent at the London Bridge Station, and of the incompetent surveillance of a house in north London suspected of being a Fenian munitions warehouse. He was determined to promote “better police arrangements” and ensure they gave more attention to “the Fenian matter.” He opted for a “general and rapid system of information” rather than the establishment of a national force of detectives, which would be expensive to maintain and controversial in a nation that despised Continental police practices. Chief constables of counties and head constables of boroughs were called upon to keep a constant watch on suspected Fenians and transmit the intelligence to the Home Office. If this amounted to little more than a summons to the many existing forces to prove their efficiency “by meeting this novel danger,” Hardy was inching towards a more coherent information-gathering system essential to the countering of the Irish revolutionary nationalists.37 But the ferreting out of the Fenians and the discovery of their plans continued to be hindered by the poor relationship of the local police with the Irish policemen temporarily stationed in British cities. The condescending attitude of the former was bitterly resented by the latter. “They know as little how to discharge duty in connection with Fenianism, as I do about translating Hebrew, or marshalling troops to fight a battle,” one of the frustrated Irishmen remarked, “but of course a Dublin officer is only an officer from Dublin, and London leads the way.”38 Even as he struggled to improve police effectiveness, Hardy was confronted by a second “very nasty business.” The shooting of a soldier in the Holborn district of the capital was assumed to be the work of a pair of Fenians. And while one government minister thought the incident would rouse John Bull’s indignation and produce an “excellent” spirit in

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the nation’s towns, a horrified monarch demanded to know what was being done to protect her faithful English subjects from “those horrible Fenians.” In Victoria’s opinion, stringent measures were desperately needed either to “preserve peace and to increase the police force or to make the detectives more efficient.” The Home Office posted a reward for information leading to the discovery and convictions of the two men reportedly involved, and let it be known that the man who did not fire the shot would be pardoned if he gave up the gunman. But neither Hardy nor his deputy had time to catch their breath before evidence came to light of a Fenian plot to attack the military barracks in Berwick on Tweed. The Fenians there “wanted to do something as good as their friends in Manchester,” James Ferguson surmised.39 Fears of a Fenian “outbreak” sparked another spate of precautionary measures. Troops were despatched to a number of cities and towns, the weapons of Volunteers were more heavily guarded, naval vessels patrolled the Mersey and the Clyde, the guards on prison vans were doubled and armed, and thirty-five local authorities made successful applications for revolvers with which to arm elements of their police forces. The guns issued were usually the large, heavy, and cumbersome horse pistols carried by cavalrymen and thus of little real use to policemen on foot patrol. With Britain’s unarmed policing tradition in mind, Hardy sought to ensure there was no “general and incautious use” of the weapons. They were sent only to those local authorities that had good reason to suspect the existence of a Fenian organization, and the policemen authorized to carry them were to be selected with care and were not to be armed “while doing ordinary police duty.” The revolvers were for officers “engaged in a service of danger,” though it was left to the local authority to decide whether a service was one of danger. And Liverpool’s head constable promptly provided an example of the wisdom of the decision. A leading Fenian and his associates had been taken with unexpected ease, Major Greig reported, once they understood that the arresting officers were armed. But other Englishmen were profoundly suspicious of a decision which they saw as the first step towards the forcible suppression of political dissent. Thus George Howell, secretary of the Reform League and the dominant figure in the largest of its several factions, considered Fenianism merely the convenient peg on which the authorities were hanging this controversial action. So the league’s executive urged the more than 400 branches throughout the country to protest it.40 The league’s leadership was aware that its Irish sympathies, its criticism of Britain’s “cruel” and “unjust” treatment of Ireland, risked its tarring with the brush of Fenianism. Whigs and Tories, astonished and alarmed

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by the length of Disraeli’s leap into the dark with the Reform Bill, and frightened by the evidence given to the Royal Commission on Trade Unions, were already accusing the labour organizations of a “Fenian willingness” to resort to murder. George Howell’s admiration of the courage and cohesion of the Fenians operating in Britain, though he described their plan as “ruin,” promised to arm the league’s detractors with another bludgeon. Realizing this, the league president, Edmond Beales, who had earlier issued an address to the peoples of Europe in which he stressed the power of “united moral force” and damned the evils of “physical force and revolutionary violence,” now sent a letter to his executive assailing the Fenians for abandoning the path of constitutional agitation and change. Violence only became justifiable when all peaceful means had been exhausted, he wrote, and the Fenians’ “sanguinary” and “wholly abortive proceedings” had aroused a “spirit of animosity and hostility” that threatened to retard political and social advances.41 The letter produced a bitter debate within the executive, where it was received but not approved. This response was damned by a hostile press as an implied endorsement of physical force as the remedy for Ireland’s grievances. The “Fenian” sympathies of several members of the executive had done the league “great harm” and cost it a number of friends, Howell privately admitted. Seeking to stem the flow of resignations, he persuaded his colleagues to repudiate “emphatically and indignantly” any sympathy “with Assassination or Secret Organizations for political purposes.” But a thousand handbills advertising this resolution had to be printed and distributed because the national press chose to ignore it. Thus, as part of a broader campaign to discredit working-class Radicals, the home town of one member of the executive had been placarded with posters branding him “an emissary of assassination.” But a government aware of the existence of a Fenian “shooting” or “assassination circle” could ill afford to disregard the potential threat it posed. The boast that Britons considered assassinations “cowardly” and a “dastardly evasion of the rules of fair conduct,” and that they disapproved strongly of the international secret societies spreading “terror and guilt” in Europe, did not ring entirely true. Twice in the space of five years English juries had acquitted persons accused of involvement in conspiracies to assassinate Emperor Napoleon III, notwithstanding seemingly conclusive evidence of guilt. The legislation introduced by the first Palmerston administration to appease the angry French had proven so unpopular that it helped to topple the government. Now the British faced a domestic conspiracy committed to the disruption of the “existing order” through violence and thus terror.42

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The Irish People had railed against “false delicacy” in ridding Ireland of the so-called respectable classes. John Mitchel, one of the most notorious Irish nationalists, had repudiated any commitment to “‘civilized’ warfare,” claiming for the Irish a right “to strike at England anywhere or anyhow, in Canada, in Ireland, in London, by steel, or gunpowder, or firewood.” Or as John McCafferty was later to put it, terrorism was “the lawful weapon of the weak against the strong.” The letter calling for assassinations found among Thomas Clarke Luby’s belongings two years earlier and introduced at his trial; the intelligence gathered by the Irish police; the testimony of the informer Corydon at the recent trials; the arrest of Michael Cody and the detailed information on apparent targets found in his possession; the threatening letter published over Kelly’s name; and the shooting of a prosecution witness in a Fenian trial and the fatal wounding of two Dublin policemen all quelled any lingering doubts of the existence of a shooting circle, or “Committee of Safety,” as one self-confessed member later dubbed it, dedicated to a “sort of terror.” Reportedly, it held thirty desperate and reckless men. Mayo hastily improvised measures to discourage Dublin’s citizens from carrying firearms. Policemen armed with cutlasses or revolvers, and patrolling in pairs, were ordered to stop and search suspicious persons both on the streets and in public houses. This response would undoubtedly be controversial, the chief secretary admitted, but he was determined to make “the practice of carrying revolvers in the town very difficult.” Both he and Hardy were believed to be two of the intended targets of Fenian assassins, and the home secretary’s staff urged him to discontinue walking through St James’s Park on his way to the office. He declined to alter his routine, relying on “fair precautions” and Divine providence to protect him. More sensational still, and certainly more difficult to believe, were the reports of Fenian plots either to kidnap or to kill Queen Victoria.43 The mayor of Manchester advised both the Home Office and the royal household in mid-October of information he had received of an audacious plot to seize the monarch and hold her as a hostage for the release of Kelly’s rescuers. The story was consistent with the word that Victoria’s secretary, General Grey, had received from a private source. Additional intelligence originating in Liverpool suggested that the Fenians were plotting her assassination. Victoria, Derby, and Hardy considered the alarming reports one more element in a Fenian plan to harass the authorities, but they could not be ignored. “However wild and improbable the various schemes reported to us we know that some of the Fenian body are so utterly reckless,” Hardy reminded the prime minister, “that they may conceive an

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attempt to execute any rash plan and we are obliged therefore to take precautions as if the information was true.” The Cabinet agreed.44 The military force patrolling the approaches to Balmoral, the queen’s Scottish retreat, was reinforced. A dozen London policemen, two of them detectives experienced in Fenian surveillance, arrived along with weapons for their use in the event of an attack. Backed by a squad from the Aberdeen constabulary, they were to watch for suspicious individuals, while the royal estate’s gamekeepers were to keep their eyes open for strangers as well as poachers. But in conversation with General Grey, the two London detectives expressed their belief that Fenianism was still growing in Britain and that the execution of any of the men accused of killing Sergeant Brett would produce additional desperate Fenian acts. Nothing short of a suspension of habeas corpus, which would permit the Metropolitan Police to swoop down and seize the almost 400 men they suspected of Fenianism, would in their opinion check the Brotherhood effectively. Although this was enough to convince a nervous queen of the wisdom of a suspension, her ministers were even more strongly convinced of public resistance to such an assault on the freedom from arbitrary arrest. Similarly, the Cabinet resisted the queen’s demand, which her secretary had again inspired, for the introduction in Britain of those restrictions on the carrying of firearms already in place in Ireland. There, Grey pointed out, no man was allowed to carry a revolver without a licence, and gunsmiths were required to provide the authorities with details of their sales. It was an idea “subversive of all society,” the general observed, for a man to be permitted “to trust to his own arm to protect his life and property instead of looking to the legal authorities.”45 Victoria cooperated with her guardians to the extent of limiting the distance she travelled into the surrounding Scottish countryside on her daily carriage drives, and her agreed route was patrolled by the police. But she increasingly resented their “irksome” presence, and her irritation found expression in the protracted negotiation over her long rail journey back south to Windsor Castle. Ministers were mindful of the fact that “nothing could give the Fenians a greater triumph than to be able to boast that from fear of them the Queen, in moving from one part of her Dominions to another, was obliged to do so secretly, and as it were surreptitiously.” Only after a struggle was she persuaded to modify her traditional schedule, agreeing to set off from Balmoral late in the evening instead of during the day. This change ensured daylight passage through the manufacturing districts of Northern England with their large concentrations of her Irish subjects. Policemen rather than soldiers travelled with her as escorts to

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avoid any “outward manifestations of extraordinary precaution.” Of course, the heightened security could not be completely disguised. A pilot engine preceded the royal train to guard against explosions and derailment, the public were excluded from the stations along the route, the station masters were kept in ignorance until the last minute of the train’s arrival, and at Wolverhampton, with its substantial and suspect Irish population, where the engines were switched, the tracks were lined by a large force of railwaymen. At Windsor, a strong force of police was much in evidence.46 Although the queen’s journey went “smoothly” and without even a hint of trouble, Hardy was convinced that uneasiness was well founded in those parts of the country where the Irish were to be found. Public panic over the Fenians’ activities and alleged plots found an echo of sorts in the authorities’ concern lest the execution of any of Kelly’s rescuers ignite a full-scale campaign of revolutionary terror. “England might now be looked upon as the centre of the conspiracy. It was daily becoming more formidable there, and was carried on upon an extraordinary scale,” the Dublin police warned. So squads of Metropolitan policemen were to be observed by passers-by practising cutlass drill at the Wellington Barracks, a short distance from Buckingham Palace. Hardy, suppressing his scruples, secretly authorized the interception of the mail of suspected leading Fenians, but the chief constables charged with this sensitive task were cautioned only to open letters and forward a copy of the contents to the Home Office if they had first obtained a warrant. Absent that legal authority, postmasters might only permit senior police officers to make external examinations of the mail addressed to suspects in order to familiarize themselves with the handwriting and the postmarks.47 If the opening of the mail of suspected subversives represented a small erosion of the freedoms of the liberal state, at least such interceptions required legal sanction. Moreover, the Tory government resisted the temptation to resort to extraordinary measures in the face of what they believed to be a campaign of terror. Assassinations and arson appeared to be the Fenians’ chosen tactics, and the resultant public nervousness was not lessened by an ineffectual if not incompetent police response. The failure of the Manchester force to keep a secure grip on Thomas Kelly, despite the timely warning of a rescue plot, was a source of deep embarrassment and concern. A large number of local authorities were provided with handguns for the use of selected policemen in an emergency, and while the weapons actually distributed were of marginal utility, their availability violated the unarmed tradition of British policing. Senior officers were

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instructed to maintain that surveillance of suspected Fenians that had earlier been rejected as an “espionage system,” and the Manchester incident had been followed by seemingly indiscriminate mass arrests of Irishmen. The rule of law quickly saw the great majority of the detainees released, for the Cabinet rejected the idea of suspending habeas corpus in Britain. Similarly rejected was a proposal to emulate another Irish example by requiring the licensing of firearms. Nor was there any move towards the creation of a national police force or a special Fenian department. This may have reassured those fearful of the creation of a gendarmerie or who abhorred the thought of domestic spying, but it was a shortcoming with respect to counterterrorism. Fenianism was diagnosed in the press as a specific and acute form of a chronic disease from which Irishmen would continue to suffer until Britain accepted the challenge to deal with their land’s social and political problems. Repression would not suffice, since Britain was not dealing with a handful of conspirators but a nation she could not coerce into obedience. The trouble was that a “just” settlement was as ever simpler to advocate than to effect. Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and land reform dominated most public agendas, but there was no consensus on what to do about the church. Tories and some Whig/Liberals were clinging to some form of concurrent endowment, justifying it in utilitarian language. “‘The greatest good to the greatest number’ is the end of all sound government,” one Conservative provincial newspaper declared, “and by this maxim we should test our schemes for the bettering of Ireland’s condition.” However, the Irish hierarchy’s blunt rejection of “levelling up” was enthusiastically endorsed by the Liberation Society and Nonconformists, while political Radicals urged disestablishment somewhat more dispassionately.48 Uncertainty on how to approach the Irish problem, together with the agitated state of official and public opinion, did not bode well for the men about to be brought to trial for their involvement in the Manchester rescue. Here was another challenge to due process and the rule of law. Would the accused receive a fair trial, or would corners be cut in a rush to ensure their conviction and severe punishment?

5 The Rule of Law: Murderers and Martyrs

Most members of the Cabinet were too preoccupied with an Abyssinian punitive expedition, for which popular enthusiasm was waning as the costs swelled, to concentrate on Britain’s Fenian problem. Moreover, they had Strathnairn’s assurance that, absent some understanding with the trades unions and the Reform League, the Fenian Brotherhood would engage in little more than isolated “coups de main” in an effort to create an illusion of strength that might see troops withdrawn from Ireland and Irish-American purse strings loosened. However, Irish America and the American government could be expected to follow closely the case of the alleged Fenians arrested several months earlier near Dungarvan. Mayo had not changed his mind that “trumpery pirates” were not worth a squabble with the republic. Only the principals were to be prosecuted, and early in October William Nagle and John Warren were committed for trial on a charge of treason-felony. Nagle, as a native-born American, then escaped prosecution because of the Crown’s inability to empanel the mixed jury of aliens and Britons to which he was entitled. Before being released, he was obliged to admit that he had crossed the Atlantic on a vessel carrying munitions for the Fenians. Warren, a naturalized American of British birth, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years penal servitude. In seeking to finesse the diplomatic problem likely to arise with the United States over the doctrine of indefeasible allegiance, the Irish Executive and the central government had the advantage of reading William Seward’s plain text cables to the American minister in London. These a cooperative official of the transatlantic telegraph company was confidentially forwarding to the chief secretary. One intercept instructed Charles Francis Adams to seek clemency for O’Brien and Condon. Surprisingly, Mayo professed

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ignorance of either name even though both men had recently been convicted of the murder of Sergeant Brett.1 A deepening public belief that lawlessness was pervading all classes of society, the fear that a frightened public would revive the “old and always evil habit of the carrying and frequent use of offensive weapons,” and a perception that Fenians never paid the full price of their “crimes” provided the government with powerful incentives to make a speedy example of Kelly’s rescuers. “There ought to be a Special Commission to try the Manchester Fenians and hang the murderer or murderers of Brett at once, if the crime were brought home to them,” one minister growled. But the formal notice of the establishment of such a commission was delayed to avoid any appearance that the committal proceedings had been prejudged. The announcement was further delayed because a pair of “puisne Judges” were not immediately available, for Hardy opposed lending great dignity to the proceedings “in the shape of the Chiefs.” Delay was also advisable given the certainty that defence counsel would seek an adjournment in order to prepare their case. It would be far easier to refuse their application if they had already had several extra weeks in which to complete their work.2 Pretrial hearings were conducted by magistrates, whose task it was to consider the prima facie case for the prosecution. In many respects, these proceedings were prejudicial to an accused, despite legislation enacted almost two decades earlier to lessen their prosecutorial character. The introduction of a formal caution to allow a prisoner to avoid selfincrimination, his right to hear the witnesses testifying against him and to call his own witnesses, whose examination and depositions became part of the official record, and his representation by an attorney, if he could afford to retain one, had not rebalanced the scales of justice. Given the very strong likelihood that he would be committed for trial, an accused was well advised at this stage to “reserve his defence.” He was similarly at a distinct disadvantage at the coroner’s inquest held to investigate all suspicious deaths. Although the great majority of coroners at this time were lawyers, rather than medical men, harmful legal errors still occurred, while a finding of murder or manslaughter by a coroner’s jury effectively indicted the alleged culprit.3 Neither the preliminary hearing conducted by Robinson Fowler nor the inquest into Brett’s death proved helpful to the accused killers. The intense public interest in the case was evident on 19 September, when a large crowd crammed the streets in front of the heavily guarded Albert Street

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police station to witness the transfer of the prisoners to the courthouse for a remand hearing. The twenty-nine prisoners, who had been “recognized” by witnesses at rudimentary identity parades that would have been comical had they not been so prejudicial, faced a full bench of magistrates. Fowler, the stipendiary, opened the hearing with a tribute to the policeman, and having listened to several witnesses, he formally remanded all the prisoners. Those who loudly protested their innocence were assured they would be given every opportunity to prove it at the preliminary hearing. Four days later, another nine men were remanded. For two of the men, William Allen and Michael Larkin, even these brief hearings were damaging. Allen was identified as the person who had “deliberately put a pistol to the van and fired,” and Larkin as one of the pair of rescuers who had stopped the vehicle, by seizing the horses and shooting one of them, before shooting at one of the policemen riding on top of the van. The remarkable agreement of this unchallenged eyewitness testimony inevitably influenced the press coverage and, presumably, the attitude of the newspapers’ readers, who undoubtedly included jurors.4 The inquest had opened a few days earlier, on 20 September, when the coroner announced that a detailed examination of witnesses would be delayed until after the preliminary hearing. This procedure had been introduced, he explained, to ensure that the two inquiries did not interfere with one another. It also benefited the accused to the extent that they were able to be physically present at both. That was no impediment to prejudicial testimony, however, as Allen discovered. During this brief session, a policeman first identified Allen as the gunman who fired into the van and then, in response to a question from a member of the coroner’s jury, declared that Allen must have known Brett to be inside the vehicle because someone had shouted: “He is in the van.” The very next day saw an impressive civic funeral staged for the slain officer, the route from his home to the cemetery lined by an estimated 15,000 people. Less than a week later, with emotions still running high, the preliminary hearing opened. The men stood accused of murder, a criminal not a political offence. The dock was not large enough to accommodate all of them, so the majority were seated in two rows immediately behind counsel. Unusually, they were manacled, despite the extraordinary precautions to prevent escape or rescue. The courthouse was ringed by troops and police, and passes were required for admission to both the building and the courtroom.5 Ernest Jones and William Prowting Roberts, who represented several of the accused, were national figures long associated with radical causes. Both men had educations befitting their backgrounds. Jones’s father had

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served the duke of Cumberland as an equerry, while Roberts had been born into the relatively affluent middle class. Both had turned to the law for their professions. As the youngest of five brothers, Roberts had opted for the less costly qualification as a solicitor, whereas Jones, having studied at the Middle Temple in 1841 under a friend of the duke of Cumberland, achieved the more prestigious and remunerative status of barrister. Both men had experienced financial difficulties, which in Jones’s case proved to be chronic, and these may have contributed to their conversions to Radical politics. Both had earned reputations as fearless and indefatigable warriors in the cause of the working classes; both had been imprisoned for that commitment, although Jones, anxious for a measure of martyrdom, tended to exaggerate the severity of his suffering; both had acted as powerful spokesmen for militant Chartism, on occasion sharing the same platform; and both had supported the alliance of Chartists with Irish Confederates. Jones was arguably the more controversial of the pair, having publicly acknowledged the collective right of the Irish to “freedom and independence” and by implication their right to employ physical force.6 As the briefing solicitor, Roberts crafted the strategy for the preliminary hearing. The first objective was to secure a delay in the proceedings in the hope that the passage of time would allow a cooling of the public passions so prejudicial to his clients. Fowler’s denial of the application was useful in the development of Roberts’s second line of argument, that the hearing was being conducted in manner highly prejudicial to the accused. The manacling of their clients was doing them legal injury, he and Jones forcefully argued, for it effectively prevented the accused from communicating with counsel in writing. Although Fowler ordered the handcuffs to be loosened, the fact that they were not removed allowed Jones to indulge his taste for the melodramatic gesture. He threw up his brief and quit the hearing in protest. His abandonment of his clients was deplored by both the Law Times and the Solicitor’s Journal, but it did allow the accused, with Roberts’s connivance, to make something of a monkey of the stipendiary. They briefly reduced the proceedings to the level of farce over the distinction between barrister and solicitor, which mystified many a layman, yet this was a risky tactic given the absence of public sympathy for them. Nevertheless, another of the accused, Edward Condon, brought laughter from the public gallery with his ironic observation “that he had supposed that Mr. Roberts appeared for him, but he was gradually becoming more learned in the law, and found he was mistaken.”7 Defence counsel were on secure and well-trodden ground with their challenge to the credibility of the eyewitnesses to the tragic incident. The

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Law Times had long sought legislation to ensure that juries did not convict exclusively on such evidence, and the identification of the prisoners in this case had been “most unfairly performed.” Witnesses saw the accused several times, were permitted to consult one another, and perhaps had memories freshened and tongues loosened by the beer provided by the police, who also gave “the finishing touch” to imprecise recollections. Hence Allen’s sarcastic interruption when a witness was asked to point him out. “Oh, there’s no need to ask him,” he shouted. “He has been told who I am often enough.” Michael O’Brien, meanwhile, despite having taken the precaution of giving the police – and thus being charged under – a false name, Gould, was identified as the man arrested the previous year in Liverpool for having in his possession the weapons issued to the London Volunteers, only then to escape prosecution on a technicality.8 Fowler’s finding that a prima facie case had been made out against the accused saw their counsel launch a public relations strategy with an eye to influencing jurors when the men came to trial. They sought to publicize several of the weaknesses in the prosecution’s evidence. Was it not strange that the only trained observers present during the rescue, the police, had been unable to identify more than a couple of the prisoners? Then there was the remarkable physical resemblance of several of the accused, especially that of Larkin and another of the prisoners, which raised the possibility that actions had been mistakenly attributed. And while Roberts admitted the involvement of several of his clients in the incident, he fiercely denied any intention to take Brett’s life. The policeman’s death had been an accident, yet twenty-three of the accused had been committed for trial on a charge of “wilful murder.” The discharge of a handful of the prisoners was the one small victory for the defence. The coroner immediately announced, following the committal of the twenty-three on 8 October, that there was no need to repeat the evidence heard by the magistrates. His jury immediately returned a verdict of wilful murder against Allen and persons unknown, and that same day brought the announcement of the Special Commission.9 The press roundly criticized Roberts for his conduct during the preliminary hearing. It accepted the duty of defence council to blur the “boundaries between truth and false,” but accused him of grossly exceeding it with his “repeated imputations of injustice, partiality and inhumanity.” Nor was an already inflamed popular opinion dampened by the concerts staged in several Irish communities to raise funds for the defence, as a Wigan mob demonstrated by rampaging through the houses of Irish families. The publication of another of Kelly’s letters further aggravated the situation.

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An English republican brotherhood dedicated to the overthrow of the monarchy and its attendant “vampire aristocracy” had been established within two miles of Buckingham Palace, the Fenian leader boasted. On the other hand, there were stern critics of the conduct of the preliminary hearing. Reynolds’s Newspaper denounced “the infamous system of police tutorship” evident in the identical testimony of several eyewitnesses, and then rounded on those of its contemporaries that had named Allen as Brett’s killer. This was “most unworthy of a great and civilized people,” it protested, “whose proudest boast is that no man shall be condemned unheard, and without the observance of [the] solemn forms of judicial procedure.” More critical still was the Irish nationalist press. It predicted the accused’s “ceremonial conviction” by the Special Commission. This charge was repeated forcefully and persuasively following the embarrassing collapse of the Holborn case.10 The police were satisfied that in John Groves they had found the gunman who had shot a soldier, a bandsman, in the Holborn district of the capital. An Irishman, a sergeant in the London Irish Volunteers, a frequenter of Fenian haunts, and a suspected member of the “shooting circle,” Groves was believed to have mistaken the unfortunate bandsman for the informer Corydon. A search of his lodgings had turned up “Fenian literature” and a revolver, but there was little if any direct evidence against him. A gunsmith testified that the bullet that had fatally wounded the soldier could not have been fired from the seized revolver, while the dying victim had failed to identify Groves as his assailant. Press scepticism deepened with the revelation that a cabman who gave crucial evidence was one of those “regular witnesses” always “forthcoming to confirm a theory suggested by the police.” Testimony that the gunman had a beard saw the police produce first a hairdresser who sold false beards, only for him to decline to identify Groves, and then an eyewitness who claimed to have seen Groves go up a dark street clean shaven and return shortly afterwards wearing a false beard. She also swore that she had seen Groves and a companion follow three men from a public house and, on hearing a shot, had rushed to the scene and heard the accused boast of shooting a man. An embarrassed Treasury counsel subjected her to relentless questioning during which she stood revealed as unstable, unreliable, and in all probability a serial perjurer. The Crown admitted there was insufficient evidence to try Groves for murder. Convicted of affray, he was sentenced to six months imprisonment.11 The Holborn case had been scuttled in a sea of police misconduct and perjury, and this threatened to reinforce the doubts about the reliability of

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eyewitness testimony so diligently sown by the defence at the Manchester preliminary hearing. “No indulgence should be shown to perpetrators when detected, but let us be satisfied that they really are detected before we begin,” an uneasy Manchester Guardian commented. Police procedures were plainly and seriously flawed, if not “worthless and untrustworthy.” Similarly evident, given the current climate of public opinion, was the importance of the impartiality of British justice being above suspicion “in all matters connected with Fenianism.” But as the Irish press was quick to point out, that would be difficult if not impossible given the “present overheated state” of the Manchester residents from whom the jury would be drawn. “Every Irish Catholic must be a Fenian and every Fenian is a potential assassin” was how Ireland’s most respectable newspaper summarized English attitudes. Meanwhile, the possibility of Fenian intimidation of prosecution witnesses saw the Home Office authorize the mayor of Manchester to provide witnesses with secure accommodation and “such maintenance as is suitable to their condition in life, not exceeding their usual earnings.”12 The prime minister fancied that the Special Commission was “just the place, and the occasion, at which an attempt at a rescue” might be made. So a hundred Lancashire policemen were on hand to preserve order in the court, while a special squad formed of three Irish officers, a pair of London detectives, and several members of the Manchester and Liverpool constabularies kept an eye open for known Fenians. All persons admitted to the court were checked for concealed weapons, no person was permitted to leave it hurriedly, and plainclothes policemen mingled among the spectators in the public gallery. Some 2,000 troops were quartered nearby, and many more were held a short rail journey away in Liverpool. As for the accused, they had been transferred from distant Bellevue to the New Bailey Prison in Salford. It was scarcely a mile from the assize courthouse, and on the daily short trips the police van was guarded by a large military force and accompanied by magistrates to ensure that in the event of an attempted rescue the troops acted under legal orders to support the civil power.13 Throughout the pretrial manoeuvring, Hardy had rejected Roberts’s repeated applications for a postponement of the proceedings until after Christmas. The solicitor sought the delay to allow passions to cool and to make it possible for him to interview the accused, brief the barristers, complete depositions and analyse the many on record, and investigate the character of witnesses. The prosecution had added to its list twenty-five persons who had not testified at the preliminary hearing, and as Roberts angrily informed the press, the depositions of the evidence they would

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have given had not been forwarded to him as then promised. The trouble was that the defence had “no right to witness statements taken postcommittal,” and this large loophole was frequently exploited by prosecutors. Hardy delivered another blow to the defence with his denial of its request for public funding. The Prisoners’ Counsel Act of 1836 had established an accused’s right “to be fully represented and defended by a lawyer,” and judges, in the interests of humanity and fairness, often assigned counsel to the poor in capital cases. However, in the absence of statutory obligation that judges do so, poor defendants might still face judgment without benefit of barristers. Monies from the public purse had helped to fund the defence of the Fenians tried in Ireland two years earlier, but in this instance a similar arrangement was declared unnecessary, since Roberts reportedly had “money in his hand for his purpose.” The refusal did not sit well with observers who recalled the recent case of an aristocratic colonel accused of murdering one of his sergeants. With the assistance of influential connections, he had secured public funds to cover his legal expenses.14 If Hardy’s decisions complicated the task of the defence, the prosecution had problems of its own. As was increasingly the practice in difficult or sensitive cases, the Treasury solicitor prepared the briefs. He delegated the work in this case to Henry Poland, a prominent lawyer, who, on reading the depositions and the record of the preliminary hearing forwarded by Robinson Fowler, identified “infinite points of objection” that the defence might raise at the trial. The most serious of these related to the lawful custody of Kelly and Deasy at the time of their rescue. Had their examination and remand in Manchester been a technical violation of procedure? Ought they have been remitted instead to the jurisdiction of the magistrate who had backed the warrant charging them with felony in Ireland? That this problem would affect only the charge of rescue, not that of murder, as Hardy’s parliamentary undersecretary argued, was an opinion that the counsel for the accused were unlikely to share.15 Mr Justice Mellor formally opened the Special Commission on Saturday, 26 October. The following morning, a typical late autumn Sunday in Manchester, its sooty buildings washed by a cold rain, he and his colleague, Colin Blackburn, added a splash of colour to the drab day. Attired in their full regalia of long wigs and scarlet gowns trimmed with ermine, they ceremonially attended divine service at the cathedral. They were considered by the Home Office the best possible choices to conduct the potentially controversial proceedings. Although Blackburn appeared the older of the pair, he was in fact four years Mellor’s junior in age, at fifty-four, and two

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years his senior on the bench. Given his lack of a silk gown, Blackburn’s elevation in 1859 had raised many an eyebrow, and the Tory lord chancellor of the day had felt compelled to deny any “private intimacy” with him or knowledge of “the colour of [his] politics.” What Blackburn did possess was a reputation “as a sound, good and able lawyer” and noted legal scholar. Logical, disciplined, and learned, he had established a reputation for “inexhaustible patience” that in the opinion of admirers “made his decisions as nearly as possible infallible.” Not that he lacked for critics. Reynolds’s Newspaper, for one, disparaged him as “the hanging judge par excellence.” His colleague, John Mellor, a Lancastrian by birth, had openly combined law with politics, taking silk in 1851 and entering the Commons eight years later as a Liberal. He had resigned his seat on appointment to the Queen’s Bench in 1861, and trained observers detected in his face a “cold fixed expression.” These were not judges to warm the hearts of the defendants.16 The assize courthouse, where the trial finally got underway on Monday, 28 October, was “the handsomest and most commodious building of its kind in England.” Fourteen huge windows and the absence of heavy draperies ensured good ventilation and light in the courtroom, even without the unusually bright sunshine on this particular morning. Fittings and furniture had “a striking and yet graceful simplicity,” and the engraved commandment beneath the principal gallery, facing the witness box, seemed peculiarly apt on this occasion: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” At 10:00 a.m. precisely, the two judges took their seats, with Blackburn in the senior of them. A grand jury was empanelled, and its task was to find a true bill of indictment. Care had been taken to ensure that the responsibility of foreman was exercised by a Roman Catholic gentleman, Sir Robert Gerard, and to expedite matters the Crown had selected for immediate trial five men against whom it considered the evidence particularly strong – Allen, Larkin, O’Brien, Condon, and Maguire.17 In his instructions to the grand jurors, Blackburn posed a pair of questions. First, who had fired the fatal shot? He mentioned the strong evidence that pointed to Allen as the gunman. Second, had the men who assisted in this crime also committed murder? Persons who aided or assisted in the perpetration of an unlawful act, having agreed either expressly or tacitly to resort to violence known to be dangerous to human life, were, when death resulted, “equally guilty of murder with the particular person who committed the act itself,” Blackburn explained by way of an answer. This was the “implied malice” test of the doctrine of

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“constructive murder,” and it embraced all of the men who had participated in Kelly’s rescue because they could not have believed that the police would shirk their duty to maintain custody of the prisoners. In short, all of the rescuers knew they would have to employ dangerous violence, and their use of firearms confirmed their intent to do so. However, the indiscriminate nature of the doctrine remained controversial. Where was the justice in several men perhaps paying with their lives for a crime committed by only one of their number? Even Mayo initially assumed that only the man who had actually fired the fatal shot would go to the gallows. Indeed, public uneasiness had undoubtedly contributed to the decision taken in 1861 not only to limit the death penalty to cases of murder and treason but also to search for a more restrictive definition of capital murder. This pressure, together with a growing scepticism of the deterrent value of public executions, had brought the appointment of a royal commission in 1864.18 Public executions were macabre and disgusting spectacles during which “cool and impenitent behaviour” by the condemned frequently generated popular admiration and occasionally transformed the criminal into a popular martyr. Aware of this, London aldermen had moved executions from “Saint” Monday to midweek, when fewer working people would be able to attend, and recommended they be held in private. For opponents of the death penalty, the carnival atmosphere provided a powerful argument for its abolition. Greece, Romania, Belgium, and the German states had all struck down the penalty, while executions had effectively ceased in the Netherlands. Carl Mittermaier’s classic comparative study of capital punishment, first published a quarter of a century earlier, had recently been reissued in a revised and updated edition. He had demonstrated that abandonment of the death penalty did not lead to any noticeable increase in the crimes for which it had been the prescribed punishment. Abolitionists also pointed to the frequency with which executions were bungled, and the public hangman, William Calcraft, inspired neither respect nor confidence. A small man of “sallow complexion,” “dead fish eyes,” and “shuffling gait,” he had “the decrepitude of age, but none of its sweet, benevolent characteristics.” His faith in a short rope saw many of his victims survive the drop, obliging him to complete their strangulation by hanging on their backs or yanking on their legs. It was also his unseemly and mercenary custom to sell small pieces of the ropes used to hang notorious criminals.19 The retentionist majority on the royal commission appointed in 1864 favoured the adoption of the American practice of distinguishing premeditated from unpremeditated killings. Murders that involved “express malice

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aforethought” and homicides “committed in, or with a view to, or escape after the perpetration, or attempt at perpetration of any of the following felonies: – murder, arson, rape, burglary, robbery or piracy,” ought to remain, in the commission’s judgment, capital crimes. When this recommendation was debated in the House of Lords, the lord chancellor, on the advice of judges, further broadened this category to include felonies of “great enormity” and the killing of a policeman or peace officer in the performance of his duty. But all attempts to frame a law acceptable to both Houses failed, and Hardy, who had been one of the retentionist members of the royal commission, was content with the transfer of executions from the public stage to the comparative privacy of the prison yard. As a result, “constructive murder” remained the law of the land when Blackburn instructed the grand jury.20 As soon as the grand jurors retired, the names of the petit jurors were called. Of the one hundred men who had been summoned to attend, several endeavoured to evade the duty with the traditional pleas of ill health or poor hearing. Others failed to answer their names, though when threatened with fines they protested their inability to get within earshot of the court officer because of the “exceedingly vigorous security” in and around the court. By the time the grand jury returned with a true bill, a provisional jury had been empanelled. The five men were now put up in the dock. Allen was smooth-faced and callow; Larkin was small, even undersized, with a billygoat tuft on his chin and sunken eyes; O’Brien was of medium height, with a ready and radiant smile that surprisingly scarcely left his face; Condon mature and well built; and Maguire looked the part of the sturdy marine. They presented a sharp contrast to their portly counsel. Digby Seymour, qc, and Sergeant O’Brien led the defence. The former, paired with Ernest Jones as his junior, represented Allen, O’Brien, and Condon. Sergeant O’Brien and John Cottingham represented Larkin and Maguire. Roberts again acted as the principal solicitor. The rumour that Kelly had provided the greater part of the funds needed to retain such “eminent” and expensive advocates was another blow to the public image of the defendants. Seymour was granted a single day’s postponement during which to consult his colleagues, meet with his clients, and examine the fresh depositions of prosecution witnesses. He advised them all, one of the accused later recalled, to plead guilty and throw themselves on the mercy of the court. This they refused to do. Seymour, an Irishman who sat in Parliament for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was something of a controversial figure, having attracted heavy press criticism two decades earlier for his forensic ingenuity in defending a client accused of murder by

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naming another person as the culprit. In his silk gown, he took pride of place among the defence counsel. O’Brien, as a sergeant-at-law in his distinctive wig, stood a step lower on the barristers’ ladder.21 The defendants were entitled to the presumption of innocence and “the benefit of every reasonable doubt.” This obliged a juror to vote for acquittal “unless he be so convinced by the evidence that he could venture to act upon that conviction in matters of highest concern to his own interest.” The accused, in criminal cases, were not permitted to testify under oath, and attempts to make them competent had been frustrated by fears that it would expose them to the “prosecutorial terror” the English associated with the French system of justice; would prompt judges to intervene more frequently and as an antagonist of the prisoner; would encourage perjury; and would see adverse inferences drawn if an accused chose to exercise the right to remain silent. The five men in the dock might speak “at the time of pleading to the indictment” and might make a personal statement during the presentation of the defence. However, not made under oath, any such statement was unlikely to carry much weight in court yet was subject to review by the prosecutor in his closing address and by the judge in his summation of the evidence. A wise defendant kept silent, but on conviction he had the right to address the court before the judge passed sentence.22 The first order of business when the trial resumed on Tuesday, 29 October, was a defence application for a change of venue to the Old Bailey. The trial of an infamous poisoner, Dr William Palmer, had only a few years earlier been transferred from Stafford to London on the grounds of local prejudice, while aristocratic and wealthy homosexuals rarely encountered difficulty in getting their cases removed from the Old Bailey to Westminster, where the offence was “likely to be regarded with a less violent abhorrence” than it was “by the less fashionable juries of the East end.” Their request denied by Blackburn and Mellor, counsel for the accused challenged as many jurors as possible who were residents of Manchester. With a jury finally selected, the attorney general opened the case for the prosecution. Sir John Karslake emphasized the careful planning of the attack on the police van, sketched the details of the rescue, identified Allen as the gunman who had fired the fatal shot, and reminded the jurors that under the law the four men beside him in the dock were equally guilty of murder because their participation in the rescue would be proved “beyond a doubt.” He endeavoured to pre-empt the most obvious defence strategy by declaring inevitable “slight” discrepancies in some of the eyewitness testimony. He then called a parade of witnesses to establish that two men

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had escaped custody, only for Blackburn to weary of its passing. The court required evidence of the prisoners’ participation in the tragic incident, the impatient judge interrupted.23 On cross-examination, Seymour and O’Brien exposed significant rather than slight differences in the witness testimony and noted how some of the evidence had “improved” since first given at the committal proceedings. This, they implied, was connected to the reward offered for the conviction of Brett’s murderers. But Blackburn intervened time and again to the detriment of the defence, accusing Seymour and O’Brien of splitting hairs and of taking earlier statements out of context. Seymour’s exposure of the unreliability of one witness, who had at the preliminary hearing positively identified as an attacker a man who then produced the perfect alibi – he was in the city gaol – Blackburn dismissed as of little importance. When Seymour protested the calling of surprise witnesses for the prosecution, Blackburn reminded him that he had no legal right to prior notice. He did admit, however, that counsel ought to have been advised of the dramatic and damaging testimony of one such witness in particular – the policeman who had arrested Kelly and Deasy. He now identified the prisoner O’Brien as one of the men seen in their company on the night of 11 September. Little wonder an exasperated Seymour effectively charged the judge with taking “an unfair part” against the prisoners. It was a protest certain to resonate in Irish communities.24 Karslake sought, before closing, to plug the technical loophole identified by Poland. He put an inspector of the Manchester police on the stand to swear that he had given to Brett a remand paper for Kelly and Deasy, that it had carried the signature of a local magistrate, and that he had recovered it following the rescue. As for his inability now to produce it, he claimed he had torn it to pieces because he knew a fresh warrant would be needed. Under cross-examination by the sceptical defence counsel, he confessed that he had never before behaved in this extraordinary way. Additional witnesses, among them Inspector Williamson, testified that properly signed warrants for the two prisoners were in hand on 18 September, though the London detective admitted that he had not produced them in the lower court. Building on this foundation, the defence opened by arguing that the absence of properly endorsed warrants meant that Kelly and Deasy, being illegally detained on 18 September, had every right to call on persons to assist in their liberation. Whenever imprisonment was groundless or irregular, Seymour read to the jury from one legal text, a party breaking his prison, or strangers who aided him, were excused prosecution. If greater violence or roughness was used than was strictly

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lawful in civil proceedings, the person responsible for a death was liable to a charge of manslaughter but those who took no actual part in the killing were not culpable. This led logically an attack on the doctrine of “constructive murder.”25 Blackburn’s response fully justified the government’s confidence that he would concede nothing to the defence. With Mellor’s support, he insisted that Kelly and Deasy had been in legal custody at the time of the incident notwithstanding the fact that the documents were to some extent “irregular and contained informalities.” The magistrate had acted within his power when he remanded the men on the sworn testimony of a police officer that he had warrants for them, the judges announced, while Sergeant Brett was under an obligation to obey the direction of a magistrate. Even had the custody been irregular and illegal, other persons who used dangerous violence to effect a release, as a result of which a death occurred, were liable to be tried on a charge of murder. To the argument that only the person who fired the fatal shot was culpable, Blackburn forcefully restated the existing law. The only concession made to the defence was the assurance he and Mellor now gave of their willingness to consider additional arguments on these legal points following their return to London after the trial.26 The case for the defence was quickly concluded. The overwhelming evidence of Allen’s participation in the rescue saw no alibi witnesses called on his behalf, while those who came to Condon’s aid were far from convincing. Nor was O’Brien helped by the witnesses who swore he was elsewhere at the time of the rescue, for all of them were connected to Henry Wilson, the suspected receiver of stolen property in front of whose shop Kelly and Deasy and allegedly O’Brien himself had first been spotted on 11 September. Serious doubt on Maguire’s involvement was cast, however, by a parade of witnesses led by his sister. In closing, both Seymour and Sergeant O’Brien focused yet again on the contradictions in the eyewitness testimony. There had been disagreement on the number of attackers, on the number of revolvers used, and on the number of shots fired. Only one of the policemen had identified Maguire, while the cab driver who picked him out had been a good thirty yards from the scene and the driver of the police van had not given evidence. Indeed, Seymour reminded the jurors that since most of the policemen had taken to their heels when the first shots were fired, they were ill-positioned to offer useful testimony. Moreover, he did not overlook Blackburn’s protection of prosecution witnesses from aggressive cross-examination. Next, he urged the jury to distinguish between the armed rescuers and those who merely threw bricks,

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and to accept that the revolvers had been carried to intimidate, not to kill. He reminded them that a policeman had agreed that Allen had fired into the lock of the van’s door and that not all of the witnesses agreed on which shot had been the fatal one. Allen took part in the rescue, Seymour admitted, but had not done all that was attributed to him, nor had he done anything that merited execution. Similarly, in the case of Larkin, Sergeant O’Brien conceded that he had been present and armed, but disputed his deadly intent. He had shot only a horse.27 As attorney general, Karslake had a right of reply. Defence counsel traditionally made much of the inevitable discrepancies in eyewitness testimony, he observed, before denying they substantially altered the facts in this case. Equally invalid was the distinction Seymour had drawn between the armed and the unarmed rescuers, for everyone who took part in the attack had made up their minds “to kill or wound all who opposed them.” But Blackburn’s summing up was far more harmful to the defendants. He and Mellor again rejected the contention that Kelly and Deasy were being illegally detained on 18 September, and declared themselves fully satisfied that the “foolishly and clumsily torn up” warrant had been sufficient to take both men to prison. It would be “monstrous,” Blackburn observed, if, when Brett was morally justified in having custody of the prisoners, their friends, who had access to the law and courts for redress, could kill him and afterwards claim as mitigation some informality of procedure of which they could have known nothing. The evidence indicated an intent on Allen’s part to kill Brett, the judge continued, for the very fact that the door lock had not been shattered disproved the claim that he had fired into it. However, all the rescuers were liable for the policeman’s death, since all had been resolved to release Kelly and Deasy and all had agreed to use whatever deadly force was necessary. Only on one matter did Blackburn betray uneasiness. He was far from convinced of Maguire’s involvement in the tragic incident. The prosecution had failed to produce any evidence of his possession or use of the conspicuous white hat that had been crucial to his identification by several witnesses. Equally, despite ample opportunity to investigate the marine’s alibi witnesses, the prosecution had failed to discredit any of them. But the judge left in the jury’s hands the decision on which set of witnesses to believe.28 The Maguire issue was in the opinion of several experienced court observers the reason the jury was out for more than an hour. It returned with a verdict at 7:30 p.m. The five prisoners were put up in the dock, where they suffered the torment of a protracted delay while the judges were summoned from their rooms at the other end of the massive building.

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Then, “amidst breathless silence,” the foreman announced that all had been convicted of murder. Blackburn asked the doomed men whether they had anything to say, only to cut Allen off when he embarked on a review of the evidence. “We can only take the verdict as right,” he informed the young man, “and the only question is why judgment should not follow.” Allen then expressed regret at the death of Brett and protested his innocence of the crime. Scorning a plea for mercy and likening himself to Robert Emmet and Thomas Bourke, he defiantly avowed he would die “proudly and triumphantly in defence of republican principles and the liberty of an oppressed and enslaved people.” Larkin admitted involvement in the rescue, denied that he had been armed, and added his regrets to Allen’s. When his turn came, Michael O’Brien admitted to his own name, denied that he had carried a firearm, assailed the American minister to the Court of St James’s for failing to come to his aid as a naturalized citizen of the United States, and then read from a long paper that dwelt upon the tyranny of England and the miseries of Ireland. He would die on the scaffold as a soldier, a man, and a Christian, he concluded. Edward O’Meagher Condon also revealed his true name, claimed American citizenship, asserted his innocence, insisted he had not been present at the rescue, denied he had received a fair trial, portrayed himself as a victim of anti-Irish hysteria whipped up by the English press, and made an implicit admission of membership in the Fenian Brotherhood. Then, in a memorable peroration, he declared: “I have nothing to regret, or to retract, or take back. I can only say, God Save Ireland.” Three of the others immediately repeated the cry, but not Maguire. Instead, he stood as far apart from the rest as was possible and declared himself a victim of perjury.29 The judges then donned black caps, and in the hushed court Mellor pronounced the sentences of death. The “condign punishment” of these men was essential, he declared, if the queen’s subjects were to have confidence in the security of their lives and property. Although they had not entertained any personal malice against Brett, all of them “had resolved, at any risk, and by any amount of dangerous violence and outrage” to accomplish their object. The policeman was murdered “because it was essential to the completion of [their] common design that he should be.” As they descended the steps of the dock to the holding cells below, manacled for the first time in this court, four of them defiantly shouted, “God Save Ireland.” That these men had received swift trials and exemplary punishment was a basic element of the government’s evolving policy to counter what it perceived to be terrorism. Here was a stern response that promised to satisfy an agitated public’s demand for action

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and protection while also serving to deter other potential terrorists. But there were inherent dangers. Was the government in its haste exposing itself to the charge of rushing to judgment and denying the alleged terrorists fair trials? Was the government about to create yet another group of Irish nationalist martyrs?30 It was widely assumed that five sentences of death would satisfy every appetite for “condign punishment.” Hence the surprise when a second batch of alleged rescuers was immediately put up in the dock charged with murder. This time the defence had much greater success excluding local residents from the jury and then comprehensively discrediting two of the principal witnesses. All of the prisoners were acquitted of murder, and an embarrassed attorney general withdrew all the remaining indictments for murder and felony. Thus, of the more than two dozen men committed for trial, five had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death, seven were subsequently convicted of assaulting the police, and fourteen were discharged.31 But the “terrible fallibility” of the evidence in the second trial came as manna from Manchester to the many Irish critics of the first. The fierce assault on British rule and the quality of English justice launched by the Irishman saw irritated ministers briefly toy with the idea of prosecuting the newspaper, but they concluded that risk of failure far outweighed any possible benefit of a court victory. Moreover, they would be honour bound also to take action against other national organs, led by the Nation. Wife murderers and child murderers, parricides and fratricides, bestial wretches who murdered their paramours, all found apologists amongst the English public and obtained recommendations for mercy from English juries, the Nation fulminated, but “for Irishmen charged with a political offence there can be found no extenuating circumstances, and for them the hand of the law is to smite and to spare not.”32 In Britain as well as in Ireland, Maguire’s conviction was cited as proof of a “panic-stricken” Manchester jury’s determination “to convict and hang every person placed in the dock alongside of Allen.” That the national and provincial reporters covering the trial had presented a memorial to Hardy effectively affirming their belief in the marine’s innocence provided the critics with additional ammunition. Ernest Jones spoke at a public meeting in Manchester that demanded the pardoning of Maguire, but the general lack of public sympathy for the other condemned men dissuaded even the executive committee of the Reform League from taking a stand on their behalf. The editor of Britain’s premier daily dismissed as “criminal weakness” any disposition to spare the lives of men who had “shed innocent blood in the prosecution of an enterprise which aggravates

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the guilt of murder itself,” while Conservative leader-writers deplored “morbid sympathy with individuals convicted of the basest crimes, and a mawkish dread of inflicting capital punishment.” Fears of an epidemic of violence, which the revelations of trade union “terrorism” in Sheffield and Manchester did nothing to quell, led even a Radical periodical to endorse in this instance a policy of severe and decisive repression rather than run the “great risk of encouraging the commission of common crime under the cloak of political motives.” A number of Liberal organs floated a trial balloon marked “moral discrimination,” suggesting that Allen as the gunman should mount the scaffold alone, only for it to be immediately punctured. Thus a government that earlier in the year had reluctantly commuted the death sentence imposed on Bourke was assured in this instance of broad political and popular support for the enforcement of the “extreme penalty.”33 The Cabinet approached the problem of the Fenians’ fate deliberately, for ministers were alive to the danger of creating instant Irish nationalist martyrs. On the other hand, they had to bear in mind the recent shootings of policemen in Dublin, the repeated threats of reprisals published over Kelly’s name, the immunity granted to the authors of the brutal and deadly industrial violence in Sheffield in exchange for their testimony to the investigating royal commission, the attempted murder of a policeman by a young female “intimate” of one of the condemned men, as she lay in wait to kill a principal witness at his trial, and the monarch’s complaint that to spare these men’s lives would prove a “very mistaken mercy.”34 Of one mind “that it would not be possible to avoid carrying out the capital sentence to a certain extent,” the Cabinet resolved to wait for the trial judges’ report and then establish “the comparative amount of guilt of the several prisoners.” Blackburn forwarded a “straightforward and manly” interim report to Hardy the very next day, 6 November, in which he summarized the “irresistible” evidence against Allen, Larkin, O’Brien, and Condon. Allen had fired the fatal shot, Larkin had been extremely active in the rescue and had used a revolver, while the other pair had been the “heads” of the crime. He dismissed their claims of American citizenship as “nothing in law,” but left to the politicians the decision on whether to make an example of Irish Americans in order to banish the notion that they would always escape the severest punishment. Blackburn did admit to strong doubt of Maguire’s guilt. The alibi evidence and the marine’s powerful personal statement of innocence, even before the subsequent discrediting of a principal witness against him, would in Blackburn’s opinion have secured his acquittal had he severed his defence from that

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of the others. Coincidentally, the treasury solicitor, John Greenwood, submitted a report to Hardy on the very same day. He omitted any discussion of the case against Maguire because of his serious doubts of the marine’s involvement in the rescue, but named Allen, Larkin, and Gould (O’Brien) as the most prominent actors in the tragedy, identifying the last named as the “most odious in manner,” “the worst man of all,” and a “determined offender.” Gould had earlier escaped prosecution on a technicality, he reminded Hardy, when found in possession of the weapons belonging to the London Volunteer Regiment. Condon, as the organizer of the attack, was “one of the most blamable of the lot” but unfortunately this had not been established in court. The information had been provided by John Francis MacAuliffe, the conspirator who contrived to escape involvement in the incident by engineering his earlier arrest outside the courthouse. He had turned informer to escape prosecution. If the choice of the men to go to the scaffold was based exclusively on the evidence given at the trial, Greenwood concluded, “the 3 worst [were] Allen, Gould [O’Brien] and Larkin.” The Cabinet quickly settled Allen’s fate, agreed that Maguire’s conviction was “probably a mistake,” and were inclined to spare Condon’s life, since he had not used a deadly weapon. The final decision on the fate of Larkin and O’Brien was deferred until receipt of the judges’ final report.35 Hardy had already forwarded to Mellor the memorial presented to him by the reporters. In his reply, the judge admitted to his own and Blackburn’s misgivings about Maguire’s conviction. Indeed, immediately following the verdict, he had written to the attorney general to request that additional inquiries be made, and he had assumed the results would be communicated to the home secretary. The case for a pardon, which Robinson Fowler was strongly recommending, had been reinforced by the subsequent discrediting of a second principal witness against the marine, and it was one Mellor made personally to Hardy on his return to London. Hardy’s order to release the “drunken marine” prompted the queen to deprecate “in the strongest manner any appearance of irresolution or weakness in dealing with the outrageous crime.” The very next day, 15 November, Blackburn submitted the judges’ report, in which he and Mellor again summarized the compelling evidence against three of the men. Allen had killed Brett, wounded another policeman, and had fired repeatedly into a crowd of civilians, wounding one of them. O’Brien had shot the horses, and a “[p]reponderance of evidence” pointed to him as the person who had wounded a second policeman. “He did not actually fire the fatal shot but in point of law there is no distinction between the actual perpetrator and

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those aiding and assisting him,” Blackburn and Mellor reminded Hardy, before expressing their anxiety “that this principle should not be impugned.” As for Larkin, he had rivalled Allen in the use of firearms and only a lack of proficiency or nerve explained his failure to kill. He was “morally and legally as guilty as Allen.” The doctrine of constructive murder thus doomed both O’Brien and Larkin, and would still have done so had the Home Office admitted at this time, as it was quietly to do four months later, the possibility of the fatal shot being fired by a rescuer who had evaded capture. Both judges found “a shade of distinction” in Condon’s favour, since he had been armed only with stones. Moreover, they were satisfied that three executions would suffice as a “public example.” But the sparing of one Irish American life may have been influenced by a desire to appease the United States.36 Counsel continued to encourage the doomed men to hope that they might yet escape the gallows. By getting the cases referred to the Court of Crown Cases Reserved, Seymour and O’Brien might have the convictions reduced from murder to manslaughter. The court, which had been established in 1848, marked a significant improvement of the earlier haphazard procedure whereby a judge, uncertain on a point of law in criminal cases, might informally consult his colleagues. Now, five judges, including one of the chiefs, sat in public, heard arguments, and gave reasons for their decisions, which might include a declaration of innocence. Nevertheless, the court fell short of a genuine court of appeal. Only points of law might be referred to it, and they exclusively by the trial judge. Efforts to establish a right of appeal had foundered largely on the opposition of a judiciary overly impressed with the protections an accused already enjoyed – freedom from torture and involuntary confessions; the requirement that an indictment pass through the filters of the preliminary hearing and the grand jury; the ability to employ counsel; the requirement that guilt be proved beyond a reasonable doubt; and the necessity for jury unanimity in support of conviction. Some judges feared that juries would be more willing to convict in questionable cases if they knew that the defendant could appeal against the verdict, while others argued that a genuine court of appeal would slow the judicial process and thus undermine the deterrent effect of a very brief delay between sentencing and execution. If cost was another consideration, for it seemed obvious that counsel would have to be provided to the poor who sought to exercise a right of appeal, so was the danger that if the appeal door were to be opened to defendants, it could not be kept closed to disappointed prosecutors. This would undermine another fundamental principle of English law – the finality of acquittals.37

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Blackburn and Mellor did listen in London to further argument on the question of whether Kelly and Deasy had been in legal custody, but following consultation with colleagues they reaffirmed their trial ruling. Seymour’s immediate request for a referral of the points to the Court of Crown Cases Reserved was not as desperate as it might appear, Blackburn cautioned Hardy, for all the counsel had to do was to raise such doubt in the mind of either himself or Mellor to justify the avoidance of “a painful responsibility.” Four days later, he and Mellor refused to reserve any points. The last hope of the condemned men was the royal prerogative of mercy, which was exercised in approximately half the capital cases. The review was a duty and process over which Hardy as home secretary agonized. He had permitted two executions to go ahead barely a month earlier, one of them that of John Wiggins. Despite being pinioned, he had managed to cling briefly to the noose above his head and scream his innocence. The incident made a deep impression on Hardy and public alike, but the Cabinet had to all intents and purposes made up its mind to send Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien to the gallows.38 In a last despairing gamble to save the lives of the three, Seymour published the legal arguments he and his colleagues had made to the judges along with Blackburn’s reply. This led, as no doubt Seymour intended, to a brief skirmish in Parliament, which had been opened only two days earlier, on 19 November, primarily to debate and vote funding of the ever more costly Abyssinian Expedition. John Francis Maguire and a handful of members called on the government to reserve the case to the Court of Crown Cases. Hardy responded that he had neither the power nor the right to do so, but it was Gladstone who terminated the discussion. He backed the execution of three men “prepared to murder any policeman that did his duty, and who belonged seemingly to a school that intends to assail England and Ireland too by making war upon private life or upon the persons of those whose duty it is to execute the laws.” The judges’ refusal to make a referral made the judgment final, he explained to the House, and this a sheepish Karslake confirmed. “Mr. Gladstone made a speech which the Attorney General ought to have made; but the general result was satisfactory,” Disraeli reported to the queen. The Liberal leader had given ministers “a moral sanction” that rendered them “impregnable” on the issue. Both major figures in the previous Liberal Irish Executive also favoured enforcement of the death sentences, though Chichester Fortescue was less of an enthusiast than Kimberley. Being an Irishman, the former chief secretary was more sensitive to the inherent danger of sending to an English scaffold three Irish Roman Catholics for a crime that

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the majority of Irishmen considered political in its origin. He feared an intensification of national hostility and suspected the execution of the Fenians was intended, in part, to exhibit the government’s determination “to put down general lawlessness” in Britain. Unfortunately, he wryly noted, “the Irish don’t see it in that light.” The former viceroy, on the other hand, was convinced the government had been guilty of an “enormous error” in failing to hang both some of the Fenians who raided Canada and Thomas Bourke. “Can a Govt. which allows men who come over from a foreign country and raise an insurrection to escape the extreme penalty, inspire that wholesome fear which will deter others from similar attempts,” he asked himself. He replied: “I think not.”39 There was a public movement afoot to secure the commutation of their sentences, and it showed signs of gathering momentum. Much of the “enormous” correspondence arriving at the Home Office in support of clemency – Hardy declined to receive deputations – was founded on the troubling implications of Maguire’s pardon. Members of the Catholic hierarchy, parish priests, vicars of the Established Church, Dissenting clergy, the monthly meeting of the Society of Friends in Brighton, five members of Parliament, a number of magistrates, the Cork Chamber of Commerce, several lawyers, and the Reform League were among the numerous petitioners. So also was the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, which labelled the scheduled executions an act of “political revenge.” More eye-catching still were the public meetings.40 The crowds that gathered on Clerkenwell Green attracted the attention of the press. Charles Bradlaugh and William Roberts had cameo roles, but James Finlen took centre stage. An Irishman and avowed republican, a former Chartist, a former co-worker with Ernest Jones on the People’s Paper, a former lecturer for the Reform League, and a former member, as that organization’s leadership hurriedly announced, Finlen described himself as a representative of the “advanced Democracy of the City of London and the Borough of Finsbury.” He extolled Fenianism as patriotism and numbered Fenians among freedom’s heroes. His rhetoric was unlikely to generate broad-based British sympathy for the men under sentence of death. No more helpful was his staging of an impromptu “indignation meeting” in an ante-room of the Home Office when Hardy declined to meet with the delegation he headed. The incident revealed just how accessible to the public the highest offices, if not officers of state, were. A furious home secretary could clearly hear the commotion from the neighbouring room in which he was working, while England’s most popular daily warned that the bulwarks of English justice would suffer irreparable damage were

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ministers to be “influenced in any degree by clamour and intimidation.” Even a Radical press scornful of the attempt to suppress Fenianism “by the gibbet” was appalled by this drama, fearful as they were that Conservatives would cite it as evidence of the wage class’s lack of “universal respect for the law” and thus unfitness to be enfranchised.41 The meetings in support of clemency had already sparked counter-demonstrations and fresh eruptions of ethnic and sectarian violence. Then, in a last desperate effort to dramatize the plight of the doomed men, a delegation from yet another Clerkenwell Green meeting travelled to Windsor on the eve of the executions to petition the queen personally for mercy. All such appeals had to be directed to the Home Office, they were informed, before being obliged to flee the town in the face of a hostile crowd.42 The scaffold to which Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien took their final walk on Saturday, 23 November, was erected atop the forbiddingly high wall that enclosed Salford’s vast New Bailey Prison. Drizzling rain and a heavy mist, which, providentially, threatened until the last minute to shroud their final agony, provided an appropriately sombre setting. The belief that 30,000 Irish were living within walking distance of the prison prompted extraordinary security measures. The mayor of Salford and his counterparts in neighbouring communities urged the well-disposed to keep away; a number of Catholic priests scheduled special services for the appointed time of execution; barricades went up around the prison, removing “the crowd to a distance beyond pistol shot of the drop”; a large area beneath the scaffold was filled with several hundred policemen; a force of more than 2,000 special constables, almost all of them “big, brawny [Englishmen] from the mills and factories,” was on hand; the offices of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, whose tracks ran along the north side of the prison, together with the New Bailey Street viaduct, which had on earlier occasions been occupied by an “unruly mob,” were closed, as was the local station, while the tracks had been illuminated overnight and guarded by scores of the railway’s employees; troops were discreetly posted at nearby stations and in the prison yard; the fire brigade was placed on alert; mounted police patrolled outlying areas of the borough; and the houses opposite the scaffold were searched, the names and addresses of the occupiers taken, and the residents ordered to forward to the Chief Constable’s Office the names and addresses of any persons who intended to view the executions from their windows.43 The crowd was orderly, smaller than expected, and plainly hostile to anything smacking of sympathy with Fenianism, as one person who attempted to address those present discovered. There were mingled hoots

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and jeers when the black door behind the gallows opened and the three men appeared, but the hubbub subsided into near silence for the final act of the tragedy. Standing beneath the noose, a “pale and visibly trembling” Allen kept looking in the direction of the railway line as if expecting an attempt at rescue to be made from there. O’Brien bravely sought to comfort his young companions, only for Larkin to faint as he reached the final steps to the scaffold. He was held upright by the hangman’s eponymous assistant, Armstrong. Calcraft, dressed in a seedy black suit, his black skullcap framed by his long white locks, was plainly very nervous. His hands trembled, perhaps as a result of the threatening letters he had received, and he again bungled his gruesome task. All three men failed to die instantly despite his use of a longer drop than usual in hopes of rupturing the spinal cord. They were strangled. Allen quickly ceased to struggle, but not the other pair. Larkin’s convulsions were so violent they caused the entire scaffold to shake, but its black draperies screened this final torment from the curious onlookers.44 Word of the executions was flashed around the country by the three telegraph companies with offices in Manchester, they having agreed among themselves to divide the traffic and share the profits. Morning newspapers published second editions and evening papers early editions. The Manchester Examiner alone printed more than 190,000 copies, catering to the public’s morbid, even ghoulish, fascination with detail. The British press in general rejected Irish accusations that the executions were politically motivated. The three Fenians had been hanged for murder. Lending some credence to Chichester Fortescue’s reading of the situation and seizing on Kelly’s recent statement in Tinsley’s Magazine that the Fenians would not respect the law until Ireland was independent, newspapers declared the hangings necessary to demonstrate that brute force would not prevail in British society and to deter “English roughs” from imitating the lawlessness of “Hibernian confederacies.” If this justification smacked of politics, the Spectator, a Radical periodical, made no bones about the motivation. Political dreamers and visionaries who unsettled everything without putting anything in its place, it warned, were the “most dangerous anarchs in existence.”45 Britain’s Irish communities reacted emotionally to the executions. There was an especially heavy attendance at Manchester churches on the following Sunday, and mourning cards extolling the dead trio’s “profound love of ‘poor old Ireland’ and the Fenian cause” were quickly snapped up. Later in the day, several thousand children and adults, accompanied by a drum and fife band playing mournful music, silently wended their way through

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the streets of the city centre, halting as a mark of respect before Allen’s former residence and then at the home of Larkin’s widow. In Birmingham, some 5,000 Irishmen paraded to a cemetery, where the rites of the Roman Catholic Church were symbolically performed. A mock funeral was also held in London’s Hyde Park, attended by a crowd that had marched from Clerkenwell Green. The behaviour of the participants “strongly touched” several of the journalists present. “We cannot sympathize with Fenianism,” one of them remarked, “but there is that in these poor Irish folk which is not in our more materialistic race, a sort of capacity for mournful poetry of feeling, akin to that betrayed in their own tunes.”46 That the men had been sacrificed to the mob “solely and entirely” because they were Fenians and Irishmen quickly became the received truth in Ireland. If conviction was unsafe in one case because jurors had been blinded by “excitement, prejudice and passion,” then it was equally unsafe with respect to the other four. Heart-wrenching accounts of the execution; graphic and propagandist depictions of a degenerate English crowd feasting on the deaths of three idealistic and patriotic young Irishmen, who went to their end not only with unwavering courage but as devout Catholics still professing their innocence of murder; and reports of their burial in quicklime and unconsecrated ground immediately saw them venerated as nationalist martyrs. T.D. Sullivan of the Nation, an avowed constitutional nationalist, seized upon their cry from the dock, “God Save Ireland,” to write the emotive and plaintive lyrics of a song in praise of revolutionary nationalism, set to the tune of an American Civil War march. It rapidly became the unofficial Irish national anthem. The following year, the Sullivan brothers published Speeches from the Dock, and they devoted a large section of this immensely popular book to the trial and “martyrdom” of these “three gallant sons of Ireland.” However, it was a fellow nationalist who ironically observed that the free expression of such “hatred” and “malice” by much of the Irish press contradicted the claim that the “English Government” was a “detestable tyranny.”47 Publication of the “Dying Declarations of the Manchester Victims” further fuelled Irish admiration and anger. Allen denied shooting Brett but confessed to participation in the rescue, while Larkin denied using a revolver and O’Brien denied being present. All depicted themselves as victims of false witnesses, Allen likening himself to Christ in this regard; all turned the other cheek, forgiving their enemies; and all affirmed their devout Catholicism. Mock funerals far more elaborate than those which had already taken place in England were soon being staged in Ireland. That 20,000 Dubliners “should on a cold, dark, wet day trudge six miles

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through muddy streets exposed to a pelting rain” demonstrated the depth of feeling. At Glasnevin Cemetery, the mourners first visited the grave of Terence Bellew McManus, a Young Ireland rebel, the return of whose remains to Ireland from the United States in 1861 had been a Fenian propaganda triumph. The crowd then moved on to the spot selected for the erection of a memorial cross to the three Fenians, where John Martin, a surviving Young Irelander and chairman of the funeral committee, delivered a highly emotional address. He described the executions as “legal murder” of “pious men, who feared God and loved their country,” by a nation that had “through jealousy and hatred” and by “fraud and force” destroyed Ireland’s independent parliament. In association with the Irishman, Martin took the lead in launching fundraising campaigns to aid the families of the “martyrs.” One campaign list was opened by John MacHale, archbishop of Tuam, while other priests took far more prominent roles in this charitable and nationalist endeavour.48 The Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales actively discouraged the mock funerals, fearful they would galvanize popular hostility to Ireland and the church. In Scotland’s Western District, Bishop Gray permitted a Requiem Mass for the hanged men as an offset to his prohibition of a funeral procession, only for one angry Scots Catholic to denounce the masses as political demonstrations “against the Queen’s Government under the hypocritical disguise of praying for the dead.” Another more opportunistic and hypocritical critic was Gray’s Irish nationalist coadjutor, who took this opportunity to damage the bishop’s reputation with Cullen. “I look upon this mixing up of our sacred rites with the present political movement as little short of sacrilege,” he maliciously observed. But episcopal disapproval of the honouring of the executed men failed to dissuade individual priests, such as Father Rodolph Suffield of West Hartlepool, from speaking out. Sympathy for the executed men, he declared, was a product of doubt whether Kelly and Deasy were in legal custody on 18 September, of the belief that Brett’s death was an accident, of reports that the gunman was now living safely in the United States, and of a conviction that the evidence that sent the three to their deaths had been either bought or perjured and was as inaccurate and discredited as that given against Maguire.49 Members of the Irish hierarchy had sensed that Kelly’s dramatic escape might work to the their church’s advantage by encouraging apprehensive Tory ministers to show Ireland’s Catholics “some justice.” With this thought evidently in mind, the Irish bishops at a Synod early in October, having repeated earlier warnings against “secret societies or open insurrection,”

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had declared that peace and prosperity could never be permanently achieved in Ireland until the Protestant Church was “totally disendowed, education in all departments made free, and the fruits of their capital and labour secured to the agricultural classes.” Concurrent endowment was explicitly rejected for the umpteenth time as a solution to the church problem; both of the Catholic bishops nominated to the Royal Commission on Education were induced by their colleagues to resign; and a pair of resolute opponents of mixed education were appointed to treat with the Tories on the question of a charter for the Catholic University. Cullen then circulated another of his “flaming pastorals.” He excoriated the English press as licentious and infidel, and assailed Protestant bishops as abusers of “the inspiration of Scripture” whose deviations from the truth had produced trade union violence and the “general irreligion of British manufacturing districts.”50 There was a strong whiff of Schadenfreude in Cullen’s private reaction to the Fenian panic in Britain. He considered it “a just retribution” for the support the English had given to Italian nationalism. “Now as they have done to others, so it is done to themselves,” he smugly observed. The three Fenians hanged at the New Bailey Prison were in his opinion “not half as bad as the Garibaldians” whom British ministerial “vipers” had “praised to the stars.” However, he had made no personal intervention on behalf of the Fenians, even though he was one of the many who believed that lengthy terms of penal servitude would quickly see them forgotten. He had no desire to see the killers of a policeman canonized, or their elevation to the rank of heroes. This would only benefit Fenianism. Private prayers for these penitent Catholics were perfectly proper, but Requiem High masses and mock funerals were banned in his diocese.51 David Moriarty was of a like mind, but beyond the diocesan boundaries of Kerry and Dublin, priests continued to participate in mock funerals and officiate at commemorations of the “Manchester martyrs.” From pulpit and in the press, priests denounced the executions. Father Murphy at Youghal, who had argued from a public platform in late September that political agitation was useless, thus by implication sanctioning a resort to physical force, now publicly endorsed the charge that Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien had gone to the scaffold simply because they were Fenians and Irishmen. He celebrated a Mass for them, as did the priest in Kanturk, while another delivered the eulogy at the funeral demonstration in Limerick. Dean O’Brien of Limerick, attended by fifty clergy, celebrated a Solemn Requiem Mass in his own parish of Newcastle West, and John MacHale attended that held in Tuam. His nationalist protégé,

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Patrick Lavelle, who only a few weeks earlier had denounced the Irish administration as a reign of terror worthy of Marat and Robespierre, published another inflammatory letter to the editor of the American Irish People, in which he hailed the “strangled” and “murdered” trio. The meaning of all of this seemed clear to John Pope-Hennessy. “The truth is,” he informed the senior member of the Derby administration, “that the priests belong to the same class as the Fenians, and they share practically in the same political sympathies.” If this was too simple a social and political equation, leading Fenians did represent the masses and prayers for the executed men as yet further evidence of the church’s approval of the cause for which the “martyrs” had given their lives.52 The Irish Executive had received from its law officers a far from definitive opinion on the legality of the funeral demonstrations. This explained Mayo’s initial unwillingness to act, naturally reluctant as he was to provide nationalists with additional backing for their argument that the law was administered differently in Britain and Ireland. Moreover, he doubted there was sufficient force at hand to enforce a ban should it be violated. Then again, both he and Derby had earlier announced in Parliament that under “the present state of the law” funeral demonstrations could not be stopped in the absence of sworn depositions from independent witnesses stressing the likelihood of riot, disturbance, and intimidation. Not a single individual had come forward in Dublin to swear to this. Thus, if a collision took place and the authorities were not clearly in the right, the legal consequences were likely to be deeply embarrassing. The “difficulty of adapting the British Constitution to the ordinary administration of Irish affairs is almost insurmountable,” the weary chief secretary mordantly remarked. However, the anger of Northern Protestants at the toleration of the mock funerals while Orange parades were banned under the Party Processions Act; the alarming reports of a doubling of Fenian recruitment; the eradication of “the wholesome effect of the Manchester examples,” which the police attributed to the mock funerals; and the inventiveness of Liverpool’s magistrates, who declared the green crepe and ribbons sported by participants in the funerals those badges and emblems prohibited under the provisions of the Party Processions Act, all galvanized the Irish Executive into discarding “forbearance.” On 12 December, the Irish Privy Council banned two imminent processions. The proclamation was carefully and astutely modelled on the document with which Sir Robert Peel, a generation earlier, had halted Daniel O’Connell’s campaign of monster repeal meetings. They had acted at precisely the right time, Mayo assured Disraeli. Just as further “forbearance” would have cost the government the support

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of their loyalist friends, so a premature ban of mock funerals would have been denounced by the Liberal press.53 The rescuers of Kelly and Deasy had been criminalized. They were convicted of murder, not of a political crime. They were put up in a regular court, in the shape of a special commission, presided over by regular judges, the case presented to a regular jury, and the accused ably defended by experienced and successful barristers who had been briefed by a skilful solicitor. The decision to send three of them to the gallows was made at the highest level of government and on the basis of the evidence given in court. The rule of law had not been violated and due process had been respected, yet the trial immediately excited bitter Irish accusations of a grotesque miscarriage of justice. In part, this was a result of the state’s refusal to acknowledge the political motivation of the men as a mitigating factor; in part, of the increasingly controversial law of “constructive murder”; in part, of the refusal either to postpone the trial to allow local anger to subside or to move it to a distant location; in part, of the belief that the police had manipulated the identification of the accused; in part, of the heavy reliance on notoriously unreliable and frequently untrustworthy eyewitness testimony; in part, of the pardoning of one of the men although all had been convicted on essentially the same evidence; and in part, of the less than impartial conduct of the judges. Yet the state’s toleration of the furious condemnation of the judicial process by the Irish press served, as one Irish nationalist implicitly conceded, to reinforce its liberal reputation. But the Manchester incident nourished fears that the Fenians were committed to a campaign of terror in Britain.

6 Fear of Terror

The Tory government’s Irish policy was disparaged by the Opposition as neither fish nor fowl, neither “rigorous repression” nor genuine “conciliation.” Only Liberals, one leading member of that party claimed, could prevent the Irish people from taking the “wretched Fenians at their word, and believe that no measures of redress [would] be of any avail.” The British needed to consent to policies for the people of Ireland that “they would not choose or permit for themselves.” There remained scant likelihood of the Derby Cabinet introducing reforms of this nature, especially with a general election in the offing. The church and education questions had been deferred with the appointment of royal commissions, while the desire of Radicals of the John Bright stamp to effect something of an social revolution through land reform, in the belief this would transform Fenian sympathizers into political moderates, held no appeal for Conservatives traditionally identified with the landed interest. Was not the right of property a cornerstone of the liberal state? Moreover, to break up estates to create peasant proprietorships would in their opinion revive the economically regressive small holdings of the pre-Famine era.1 The government’s preoccupation was state security. Arms, and particularly revolvers, were reportedly being imported into Britain in large quantities. Were the weapons to find their way into the hands of the disaffected residents of industrial towns, let alone those of the Fenians, the police would, in a worried Hardy’s opinion, be hard pressed to maintain control. That he lacked the legal means to halt this trade and that his Cabinet colleagues blocked his proposal to require the registration of firearms, convinced as they were that the measure could not be carried in Parliament without the disclosure of the government’s confidential sources of information, simply added to the home secretary’s uneasiness. He was in no

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doubt of the seriousness of “this terrible Fenianism.” A rash of threatening letters and the reported despatch of a Fenian desperado from Dublin “with bad intentions to the Prince of Wales” saw the queen, the prince, Derby, and Hardy placed under a strengthened police guard. The monarch quickly balked at the invasion of her privacy, refusing even to permit an equerry to accompany her when driven around Windsor Great Park by John Brown. Two armed members of her suite did follow the couple, but at a distance more discreet than protective. Advised that the Fenians were “never more determined in wickedness,” warned that only a small minority of the Irish residents of the textile districts remained “loyal,” and fearful of a full-scale terror campaign in Britain, Derby sanctioned the establishment of a special investigative unit. Colonel Feilding, the “quiet, sagacious and plucky” hunter of military Fenians, was invited to serve as its head, with the authority to select his own staff. At first he declined, for as an officer and a gentleman he was acutely sensitive to the danger of being tarred with the brush of a spy. A temporary posting to the Home Office eased his concerns, for it protected his reputation and promised to smooth relations with the various police forces. On what proved to be a fateful Friday the 13th of December, he accepted this temporary command.2 Almost a month earlier, Ricard Burke had been arrested. “The leader of assassination projects taken after all our failures, a grand coup,” Hardy excitedly commented. Born into a Cork professional family less than thirty years earlier, Burke had never fully awoken from adolescent dreams of adventure and military glory, and while he chose engineering as a career, he arrived in the United States on the eve of the civil war and immediately volunteered for the Union army. He survived the hostilities unscathed only to be slightly wounded by one of his own inebriated men celebrating the Union’s victory. An early member of the Fenian Brotherhood, he had been an active organizer within the Union army and an associate of both O’Mahony and Kelly. Following his arrival in Britain, he had quickly come to the attention of the authorities. He had purchased arms for the Brotherhood, had been a designated area commander in the 1867 rising, was known to have been a leading plotter of Kelly’s rescue, and was considered a “very successful” leader of the Fenians of London and Southern England. One of Commissioner Mayne’s most skilful and intelligent detectives, James Thomson, accosted Burke and a companion, Joseph Casey, in Woburn Square, Bloomsbury. Following a brief running struggle that ended when Thompson drew his revolver, he and the local policeman, who was fortuitously pounding that part of his beat, bundled the Fenian into a cab. They took him to Bow Street Police Station, where he was charged with treason-

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felony. Casey, who had followed them, made such a nuisance of himself that he was detained as well and charged with seeking to help the Fenian escape arrest. On 30 November and again one week later, both men were brought up before London’s Irish chief magistrate, Sir Thomas Henry. The informers Condon and Corydon, together with several Birmingham gun dealers, identified Burke as a leading Fenian and a purchaser of its weapons. He and Casey were remanded to the Clerkenwell House of Detention.3 Clerkenwell took its name from the holy well where parish clerks had performed miracle plays during the medieval period, but by the midnineteenth century the well, having been sealed with the discovery of the water’s pollution, was a metaphor for the community. This former verdant village retreat of the capital’s aristocratic residents was now industrialized, impoverished, and densely populated. The industries were largely small and domestic, such as watchmaking, which demanded “cunning fingers and contriving brain.” Those gifts contributed to Clerkenwell’s infamous reputation as “one of the great dunghills on which society rears criminals for the gallows.” The workhouse had become a national byword for harsh, callous treatment and immoral mixing of the casual poor. Clerkenwell was similarly notorious for its green, which had long since been paved over. An elegant sessions house adorned its lower end, but the green was now principally a place of assembly for protest meetings associated with radicalism and republicanism.4 The Clerkenwell House of Detention was the third penal institution to be erected in but a biblical lifespan on a site where once there had stood a seventeenth-century Bridewell. Unfortunately, the dramatic urban growth of the surrounding area had severely compromised security. The top of the prison’s outer wall, forbidding as it surely appeared to the passing pedestrian, might almost be touched by the occupants of several neighbouring houses. Within its boundary, in excess of 300 prisoners might be confined, though a great many cells were unoccupied on 13 December 1867. The inmates, as yet untried, escaped prison attire, were excused all forms of labour, might have meals, refreshments, and bedding brought in to them, and were permitted to receive two visitors every day of the week during the first two hours of the afternoon. To administer and control them, Governor Codd commanded a staff formed of a chaplain, surgeon, nurse, matron, clerk, and thirty-one warders and sub-warders, of whom ten were female. A priest catered to the spiritual needs of Roman Catholic prisoners and controlled their access to reading matter.5 Codd, alive to the possibility of an attempted rescue of Burke, had approached Mayne seeking the temporary stationing of a force of policemen

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at the prison. The commissioner refused. Nor did the governor make any headway with his request for a telegraph line to the nearest police station. Thus he submitted to the visiting justices, who oversaw the administration of the institution, a series of proposals to enhance security. He wished the chief warder, or in his absence his deputy, to be a resident officer; he urged the whitewashing of the interior of the prison wall up to a height of ten feet and its illumination at night by gas lamps; he wanted eighteen breechloading carbines and an ample quantity of ammunition to be on hand in the prison; he suggested instructions be issued to the local superintendent of police to respond immediately and in force to any request for assistance and a signal gun be acquired with which to alert warders and police outside the prison of an emergency; and he advised that all warders should live close to the prison and a concealed doorway be cut into the prison wall to facilitate their rapid return in the event of a crisis. The visiting justices, with an eye to costs, did not approve the acquisition of a signal gun and postponed a decision on the construction of a concealed emergency doorway, but did sanction the purchase of a dozen carbines, ordered the chief warder, or his deputy, to sleep in the prison, and authorized the whitewashing of the wall, so long as it was done by prison labour, and the purchase of six gas lamps. However, this work remained to be done on 13 December. The governor was also worried about his inability to monitor the prisoners’ meetings with their visitors, suspecting as he did that an escape plot was being hatched by Burke. But his proposal to have a plainclothes police officer furtively listen in on the Fenian’s conversations was again frustrated by Mayne, although the commissioner did at least agree to strengthen police patrols around the prison.6 Burke was indeed plotting to escape. James Murphy, the Fenian leader in Scotland, with the assistance of a member of his own group, Michael Barrett, and several London Fenians, among them Casey’s brother, acted as coordinator. Murphy was well known to the police, having been first arrested at the offices of the Irish People in September 1865, only to be released following the intervention of the American consul. The suspension of habeas corpus saw him detained again. He was handed over to the military authorities when identified as a deserter from the British Army, but he succeeded in casting sufficient doubt on the identification to win acquittal. He then brought a suit for wrongful imprisonment against both Colonel Feilding, as the military prosecutor, and the governor of the military prison in which he had been confined, and eventually accepted £100 in an out-of-court settlement. Deported from Britain in December 1866, he soon returned and assumed command of the Fenian organization in

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Scotland. Quickly rearrested, he was released apparently in the hope that he would lead the watching police to the other members of the organization. Instead, they lost track of him and he travelled unobserved to London.7 Burke’s plan had the virtue of simplicity. His rescuers were to obtain a barrel of gunpowder; place it, during the prisoners’ daily exercise period, at a spot where the wall had been weakened as a result of earlier sewage works; and throw a white ball over the wall into the exercise area as the signal of an imminent explosion. Burke would retreat a safe distance and then flee through the breach. Outside, transportation was to be waiting along with a change of clothes and a wig. As one of the principal planners of Kelly’s rescue, Burke surely calculated that his escape in so dramatic a manner would create a far greater sensation. Fear and alarm were certain to be sown among an already agitated public, maximum publicity gained for the Fenian cause, the morale of the Brotherhood further bolstered, and the government provoked, perhaps, to adopt repressive measures that by further alienating the Irish community would promote Fenianism within it. On Thursday, 12 December, as the prisoners were exercising in the late afternoon, a white ball came over the wall and Burke withdrew to the most distant point, explaining to the curious warders that he had a pebble in his shoe. But the fuse failed and there was no explosion. The bombers casually wheeled the barrel away, observed by a warder and unhindered by any of the policemen on patrol, and resolved to try again the following afternoon.8 Public confidence in the Metropolitan Police had already been severely shaken by a sense that serious crimes were being committed with impunity, that policemen made up for investigative failings by “concocting evidence,” that they supported one another with “hard swearing” whenever their own interests were involved and were guilty of “culpable harshness” in their dealings with the poor. Organizationally, the capital’s force was absurdly top-light with only three “superior officers” – the commissioner and his two assistant commissioners, Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Labalmondière and Captain Harris. Mayne, having held his post for almost four decades, was criticized as too old, too inflexible, too unwilling to delegate, and too averse to accepting advice. Thus a Home Office committee that examined the force concluded that the Detective Department was “wholly inadequate” to the requirements of the metropolis and particularly deficient in the structure and training necessary to deal successfully with “conspiracies and secret combinations.” This assessment led to the formation of a special anti-Fenian force commanded by Feilding. The committee recommended an enlargement and reorganization of the

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detective establishment, whereas Mayne remained committed to the uniformed constable. However, being both arduous and poorly paid, policing failed to attract many men of above average education and intelligence. Mayne did introduce education tests for promotion and provided for educational instruction of the ambitious; he created three additional police districts, bringing the total to twenty, added a chief inspector to the Detective Department, and was working on a plan to create a system of divisional detectives. Meanwhile, Gathorne Hardy was seeking to add 1,000 men to the capital’s force, for whose pay and equipment the government would accept responsibility.9 Daniel Ryan forwarded to London on 11 December, and in remarkable detail, Burke’s plan of escape, though it was noon of the following day before the information reached the Home Office. The permanent undersecretary, Liddell, immediately summoned Assistant Commissioner Labalmondière and handed him a copy. He sent off another to the chairman of the Middlesex Sessions, who was to ensure that the visiting justices immediately ordered additional precautionary measures at Clerkenwell, such as the separate exercising of Burke and the keeping of a close watch on the prison “at such times.” Labalmondière hurriedly returned to his office to draft instructions for Superintendent Gernow, in whose division the prison was located. Gernow, who as luck would have it soon arrived at headquarters for a pre-arranged afternoon appointment with Mayne, assured the assistant commissioner of the respectability of the residents of the neighbouring streets and thus of the unlikelihood of any attempt to “mine” the prison wall. But Mayne’s absolute command of operations, down to the pettiest matters, discouraged the exercise of initiative. So Labalmondière, Gernow, and Inspector Thomson, who had been about to escort a witness to Clerkenwell to identify Burke, all trooped into the commissioner’s office at 2:00 p.m. Labalmondière handed to his chief a copy of Ryan’s intelligence along with a set of instructions he had already drafted. Mayne, forgetting his own prudent maxim, that it was always right “to act as if a Report, however impossible, were true,” rejected out of hand the notion that the Fenians would exhibit such “extraordinary daring” or adopt such “undisguised measures.” This was in his opinion just another of those fantastic and incredible plots reported to the police “every two hours.” So he vetoed Labalmondière’s proposed large-scale deployment of men around the prison, authorized Gernow to add two constables to existing patrols, and instructed Thomson to notify Codd of the alleged plot and to impress upon him the wisdom of exercising Burke and Casey at irregular hours and separately from other prisoners.10

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That it was late in the afternoon of Thursday, 12 December, before Gernow returned to his headquarters explains the absence of strengthened police patrols around the prison when the barrel of gunpowder was first wheeled into Corporation Lane. Gernow claimed a few days later that he had ordered a doubling of the policemen on duty early the following morning, 13 December. Three months later, he insisted he had given the order immediately on his return to his station, and then on the following morning had met with the three plainclothes officers who were about to form the surveillance team outside the prison. Their assignment was to identify and follow any of Burke’s visitors whom they considered suspicious. The uniformed patrol around the prison remained at double strength, while constables walking their regular beats were to be on the lookout for persons loitering in its vicinity. Yet when all was said and done, only five additional policemen were on duty on the afternoon of 13 December, and one of them was posted in the Porter’s Lodge to observe visitors. His task was to signal his plainclothes colleagues whenever persons of interest left the gaol, so that they might be followed. Thus a woman who claimed to be Burke’s sister was placed under surveillance by the second of the three, while the two uniformed men on patrol were too preoccupied with loiterers to pay close attention to the men who wheeled a barrel up to the prison wall and covered it with a tarpaulin. The third plainclothes officer, who had been keeping an eye on them, chose to follow the men who then left rather than investigate the barrel. There it sat for several minutes. One policeman assumed it was a delivery, perhaps of beer, to a house only a few feet away on the opposite side of the very narrow street. A dairyman did draw it and a man fiddling with it to the attention of a constable on his regular beat, but as Constable Moriarty advanced at a measured pace the man ran off. Seeing flames spurting from the barrel, the prudent policeman beat a hasty retreat. Discretion again proved to be the better part of valour. As it was, the force of the explosion ripped Moriarty’s overcoat from his body.11 More thorough precautions had been taken within the walls. Frederick Pownall, chairman of the Middlesex Sessions, had hurried first on the afternoon of 12 December to the House of Correction, Coldbath Fields, where he gave orders for six of its warders to reinforce the staff of the House of Detention, and had then visited Clerkenwell to discuss security with the governor. Codd had already been verbally warned by Thomson of what the Fenians were believed to be planning, but still fuming over Mayne’s earlier uncooperative attitude, he now took further offence at his failure to communicate with him in writing. He acidly rejected the

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commissioner’s unsolicited advice on how to ensure that Burke remained securely in his custody and testily established a rigid division of responsibilities. He would take care of internal security, but he left the guarding of the prison’s exterior entirely to the police and appears to have verbally requested the establishment of a police cordon around the prison. In any event, the normally crowded exercise yard was empty on the afternoon of 13 December. All the prisoners had taken their exercise earlier in the day, using one of the interior yards normally restricted to female inmates, while Burke had been exercised separately. As additional precautions, the Fenian had been shuttled between cells following the departure of the last visitor of the day; all cells were double locked, as were the prison gates, while several warders were armed. One of these was stationed in the octagon tower atop the central block, with its commanding views of the surrounding area, and had orders to fire a signal shot if he observed anything untoward.12 Thomson returned to the House of Detention on Friday afternoon in the company of another potential witness in the Burke trial, and was informed by Codd of the measures he had taken. The uneasy inspector decided to go to the divisional headquarters in King’s Cross Road to suggest a further strengthening of the police patrols, which amounted to an implied admission of the insufficiency of the force on hand. He had barely left the prison when he heard a “terrific explosion.” Rushing back he saw a huge breach in the prison wall, so raced off to King’s Cross Road to summon reinforcements and telegraph Mayne. The explosion and resulting concussion blew out the skylights on the prison roof, damaged most of its windows, burst open doors, sent bricks flying across the exercise yard into the basement of a male wing, where windows shattered and ceiling plaster came crashing down. The heavy damage to cell doors was primarily the work of panic-stricken occupants attempting to smash their way out. Codd’s immediate concern, as the dust settled, was the curious sightseers. They were persuaded to keep their distance from the shattered wall by armed warders who fired warning shots over their heads. Three-quarters of an hour later, the police reinforcements arrived from the local division, and they were followed soon afterwards by Labalmondière at the head of a much larger force. The policemen assumed responsibility for external security and were soon busy dealing with thieves seeking to relieve unwary spectators of their valuables. By early evening, troops were on the scene, with a hundred Scots Fusilier Guards in place and a detachment of the Household Cavalry on standby. In the meantime, Codd had quickly restored order within the prison. Not a single prisoner had either escaped

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or been injured, he later reported with legitimate pride. The story outside the prison was quite different.13 The explosion predictably brought death and destruction to Corporation Lane. The terrace of tall houses at the back of the prison absorbed much of the impact. Two were destroyed and ten others severely damaged. At one time the residences of the well-to-do, the houses had long since been converted into dingy, overcrowded apartments. Thus the human toll was high. Local doctors and surgeons from both nearby hospitals, St Bartholomew’s and the Royal Free, were quickly on the scene as firemen and policemen frantically pulled survivors from the debris. The work went on well into the night by the improvised light of large pipes attached to the gas mains. The great jets of flame “roared and flicked in the wind, and cast over every object a ghastly glare – on the pale faces of the mob, on the great breach in the wall, and on the wrecks of the houses.” Three bodies were quickly recovered, though seven deaths were subsequently attributed directly to the explosion. The victims included the young, the middle-aged, and the old. Excluded from this count were the three stillbirths and the three miscarriages that occurred within a fortnight of the disaster and the death, the following February, of an elderly woman who, in the judgment of a coroner’s jury, had never recovered from shock and “died from paralysis, accelerated by the explosion.” A twelfth person died in March, during an especially painful premature delivery of a stillborn child. She was another victim of shock, the surgeon concluded. The dozens of injured, many maimed or disfigured, were ferried in cabs, or simply carried, to the hospitals and the dispensary of the local workhouse. Scores of the prison’s other neighbours lost furniture, clothing, and, in an area of domestic industry, notably watchmaking, tools and precious materials, such as gold dust. Some 200 houses had suffered damage of some kind, and three times that number of families were in need of assistance.14 Hardy, Mayne, and several members of Parliament visited the scene of devastation early on Saturday morning, along with reporters, authors, and artists. The wreck of the houses was “fearful,” Hardy informed the queen. Moreover, although many of the injured were soon making a physical recovery, doctors warned of serious and lingering consequences from “the shock of the brain.” To its credit, the government immediately launched a “counter-explosion of prompt and delicate charity.” Disraeli despatched his private secretary, Montagu Corry, and Assistant Commissioner John Lambert of the Poor Law Board with a supply of gold and silver coin taken from the Treasury to be distributed as emergency aid. Lambert was an inspired choice. A solicitor by profession, the first post-Reformation Roman

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Catholic mayor of the cathedral city of Salisbury, he had helped to organize the relief program for the textile operatives during the Cotton Famine of the American Civil War and had more recently conducted a sympathetic investigation of Ireland’s dispensary system of outdoor medical relief. With Britain’s notoriously unhealthy industrial areas in mind, he considered this Irish model “admirably adapted to the exigencies of large and densely populated communities.” Now, hand in hand with Corry, he doled out small sums of cash to Clerkenwell’s desperate families. Informed by his private secretary that a great many people were in a “stupefied state of shock,” Disraeli authorized the despatch at government expense of a specialist, Dr Henry Berry, to aid them. The interesting differences in the nervous disorders of victims were to be explained, he concluded, in their prior state of health. And while he adhered to his usual practice of charging very small fees for consultations and treatment in poor neighbourhoods, the fact that his final bill exceeded £200 suggested the extent of the psychological problems.15 Although widely praised for the speed with which assistance was provided to victims, the Cabinet “only contemplated the mitigation of the more urgent and pressing distress of those who [had] been injured in person or property.” Ministers still looked to “private agency” for the efficient delivery of longer-term relief. To launch and administer a relief fund, Disraeli naturally turned to the incumbent of St James’s Parish Church. Robert Maguire was an Irishman, an evangelical, and a former organizer of the Irish Society’s missions in Cork. Following his arrival in England in 1852, he had joined the Protestant Institute of Islington, an area of the capital with a substantial Irish Catholic population. His proselytizing soon saw him engaged in a bitter pamphlet war with the Catholic priest selected by Cardinal Wiseman to save the Irish of the area “from Protestant guile.” It was a task for which Frederic Oakley seemed peculiarly well qualified and suited as a convert from the Church of England. He mingled “appeals to Irish religious nationalism with a heavy-handed Hibernian authoritarianism.” Then, in 1857, Maguire sought the living of St James’s in nearby Clerkenwell. Unusually, this was an elective incumbency and there ensued an unpleasant and protracted electoral campaign. The parish’s leading vestryman strove to ensure the victory of his personal nominee, only to see him defeated by the popular Maguire, who quickly went on to gain a measure of national prominence. He belonged to that minority of Anglican clergy who saw in teetotalism a means to end “the estrangement of the lower orders from organized religion.” Drunkenness emptied churches, alienated the people, fed vice, nurtured crime, and

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promoted poverty and nakedness, he taught. He also found time to crusade against the “papalizing” of Britain, and in the explosion’s aftermath, he repeatedly emphasized that the perpetrators were not members of the “Protestant Church” and called on the government to withdraw the earlier concessions made to Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, this proselytizer possessed the passion and communication skills needed to launch the Clerkenwell Explosion Relief Fund.16 Maguire immediately wrote to the editor of Times appealing for donations. By the time the public meeting to launch a formal relief effort was held in the parochial school rooms on Monday evening, 16 December, he had already received pledges to the value of £400. The relief fund account was formally opened the following day at the London and County Bank, Clerkenwell, and by month’s end donations approached £10,000. Even more would have been donated, Maguire believed, had not the fund’s disbursements been publicly criticized as lavish. He chaired the supervisory General Committee, staffed by the local elite, that had ultimate responsibility for the distribution of funds. It divided the devastated and damaged area into nine sections. Each section had its own subcommittee on which sat representatives of the General Committee and “honorary visitors.” Subcommittee members visited every house and family, inquired into losses, cases of sickness and deprivation, and provided relief for immediate wants. Following the investigation of claims, the subcommittees placed orders with local tradesmen, who submitted accounts when these had been filled. However, the General Committee exhibited a healthy scepticism about the accuracy of many of the estimates of losses, especially of furniture and clothes, and made settlements that usually amounted to no more than one-quarter of the claims. Moreover, fully half of the £10,000 eventually raised was set aside for the forty-three most seriously injured victims. Adults were granted annuities or weekly allowances, while small trust funds were set up for minors.17 Although the former residents of the ruined houses in Corporation Lane received the most liberal compensation, the relief fund could not cover the cost of rebuilding the street or of repairing the many other houses seriously damaged in the explosion. Indeed, the owners, as distinct from the occupiers, quickly aroused suspicions of profiteering by grossly inflating the value of their properties. When their legal action to secure compensation from the county failed, for the court placed the strictest literal construction on the wording of the law, which limited claimants to those who had suffered damage as a result of “riotous or tumultuous proceedings,” the government did step in. It wisely despatched its own assessor

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to Clerkenwell and subsequently granted a little more than £6,000 in compensation for property damage. This was less than half the sum the owners had sought.18 The psychological shock of the Clerkenwell explosion reverberated throughout the land. The scene of devastation was prominently featured in illustrated newspapers, and photographs of ruined Corporation Lane were on display in the windows of many of the capital’s shops. Fenianism stood unmasked in the eyes of many Britons as an inhuman conspiracy. The killing of policemen in the performance of their duty had now been followed by a slaughter of innocents. Indeed, that slaughter would have been greater still had the explosion gone off as planned with the exercise yard full of the prisoners awaiting trial. The belief that the Fenians had embarked on a campaign of terror saw panic tighten its grip on an already nervous public. Newcastle-upon-Tyne was rocked by a “calamitous explosion” only four days after the Clerkenwell incident. Prominent among the seven fatalities were the sheriff and the town surveyor. This tragedy was not another act of Fenian terror, but rather the result of a reckless attempt to break open with shovels nine cans of nitroglycerine and dump the peculiarly unstable explosive on the town moor. Discovered by an Italian chemist twenty years earlier, nitroglycerine had been aggressively marketed as safe by the Swedish entrepreneur and inventor Alfred Nobel. Unfortunately, its tendency to become ever more capricious and volatile as it aged was as yet little understood. Nevertheless, the well-publicized death of a Welsh miner who had been using a canister of the explosive as a football, the destruction of Nobel’s laboratory and two of his plants, with the loss of several lives, and his suspension of production in favour of his own more stable invention, dynamite, ought to have induced greater caution in its handling. Nor was a jittery public reassured by the revelation that the cans had been stored in a cellar next to the local office of the Bank of England.19 The explosion of a powder mill at Faversham in Kent, the mooring of a barge loaded with gunpowder adjacent to a London gasholder, and the discovery of another stockpile of the explosive a short distance from the Finsbury gasworks were further reminders of lax security in the handling and storage of dangerous materials. The Thames Conservancy Board belatedly tightened the regulations governing their transportation on that river, but their acquisition remained disturbingly easy. In Sunderland, the police confiscated and dumped at sea a substantial quantity of the explosive being stored by an Irish beer seller in his cellar. Newspaper reports of plots to bomb railway stations, mine Millbank Prison, where several prominent

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Fenians were being held, and attack the Woolwich Arsenal heightened the tension. The explosion of a London gasholder only two years earlier, in which ten men died and many others had been horribly injured, appears to have convinced much of the press that “gasometers” were the likeliest Fenian target. Hence the prominence it gave to the political ramblings of an inebriated Irish labourer employed as a coal heaver at the Imperial Gasworks in London; to the arrest of a pair of Irishmen observed behaving suspiciously in the immediate vicinity of the New Gas Company’s works in Leeds; to the sighting of another pair of suspicious individuals near the wall of the Leamington Gasworks; and to an apparent attempt to sabotage the works at Warrington. The Warrington company’s dismissal of fourteen Irish employees, as well as the warnings issued by insurers to large manufacturers that continued coverage depended on the discharge of Irish workers, did little to calm the public mind.20 Britons determined to protect property, suppress riotous proceedings, and guard gasworks, armouries, dockyards, and public buildings volunteered in their tens of thousands as special constables. Government departments, fearing arson, sanded their floors, kept chemical fire retardants on hand, and multiplied the number of portable fire engines. Metropolitan Police stations, including the headquarters at Scotland Yard, were reportedly being fortified much like Irish police barracks. The British Museum’s chief librarian was “horribly afraid that one of those Celtic-Yankee monsters would bring in quart bottles of nitro-glycerine and blow up themselves and their more studious companions.” As a precaution, readers were no longer permitted to leave their book bags with the curators at the entrance of the magnificent Reading Room completed only a decade earlier. The “explosive letters” – packages containing phosphorus – reportedly mailed to public figures were read as further evidence of the Fenians’ intent “to inspire terror and produce upon the public an exaggerated impression of their numbers and power.” Fortunately, according to the press, all of the “letters” were intercepted by the alert employees of the Post Office.21 If the Clerkenwell incident was, in the opinion of one cold-blooded senior Tory, having a “very good effect on English opinion,” it inevitably intensified traditional working-class hostility towards the Irish in Britain. There were isolated outbreaks of ethnic violence. English colliers at a mine near Bishop Auckland “condemned the whole body of Irishmen for the diabolical actions of a few Fenians,” and one Irish pitman was severely beaten. In Haslingden, Lancashire, the Irish community’s organization of a ball to raise money for the Larkin family saw an English mob invade

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their area of the town. From other centres came reports of Irish hands being thrown out of employment. A number of newspapers, prominent among them the Times, appeared to be stoking the fires of ethnic antagonism with intemperate commentaries and threats of a war of extermination against the “Fenian Irish” of Britain unless the government acted firmly to suppress terrorism. Punch both reflected and fostered this dangerous sentiment, depicting a malevolent Fenian sitting atop a barrel of gunpowder with a lighted taper in one hand, a pistol in his belt, and a fuse burning away beneath him, while angelic young children and a nursing mother surround him. Into this highly charged environment stormed the Gospel Garibaldi, launching a new sectarian crusade in mid-January 1868. William Murphy opened in Stalybridge, while a pair of acolytes carried his disruptive word into several other mill towns of Cheshire and South Lancashire. Ethnic brawls and full-scale riots were his familiar companions.22 Political and social leaders spoke out against the mob violence and the dismissals of Catholic Irish employees. To throw them onto the streets would probably facilitate Fenian recruitment and surely dislocate those industries and public services heavily dependent on inexpensive labour. In short, national self-interest dictated restraint. “Crusades are barbarous and obsolete,” the Liberal Daily News declared, “but a crusade to be conducted in the interior of a civilized society would be the most barbarous of all.” The advocates of reason and self-control received timely assistance from the Irish themselves. The week following its depiction of a sinister and murderous Fenian, Punch portrayed a group of clean-cut, ruggedly handsome Irishmen enrolling as special constables. No suggestion here of the prognathous Hibernian. After all, hundreds of Irish were attending well-publicized gatherings to proclaim their loyalty and commitment to constitutionalism. Digby Seymour took the lead in circulating among the London Irish an address to the Queen. It expressed heartfelt sorrow and indignation over a tragic incident “perpetrated by certain evil disposed and misguided persons,” gave an assurance of “unaltered [Irish] devotion” to the monarch’s person and throne, and declared the resolve of the 22,000 signatories to support her government “against all treasonable attempts to disturb the peace of the realm.” But the work of calming the British was not helped by the news from Ireland.23 There, the nationalist press had initially denied Irish involvement in the Clerkenwell disaster, only to be contradicted by Thomas Kelly’s public admission of Fenian responsibility. In another of his letters to the press, Kelly characterized the perpetrators as latecomers to the Brotherhood who had contravened the policy of seeking allies among the British working

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classes. Redirecting their fire, Irish newspapers first attacked the Metropolitan Police for its failure to respond effectively to the warning from Dublin, but then concentrated their salvos on the “hysterical” English reaction to the incident. The dismissals of Irish workers from their jobs and the accompanying “misery and destitution” were given full coverage, as were the anti-Irish articles in the British press, which the Nation assailed as a far greater crime than the explosion. Comments such as this merely turned up the heat beneath the already simmering pot of ethnic prejudice, as did Patrick Lavelle with his inflammatory rhetoric. From the altar, continuing to hail the men executed in Salford as martyrs to the cause of “their country’s resurrection,” he prayed that their “innocent blood” would prove to be “the seed of Christian patriots destined at no distant day to redeem an enslaved people.”24 In Britain, as well as in Ireland, the Metropolitan Police were charged with gross incompetence. Robert Maguire had in his sermon two days after the explosion criticized the authorities for failing in their duty to protect the public, and neither he nor his parishioners could have been either appeased or reassured by the explanation offered by the police for their failure to prevent the disaster: namely, that the men on duty had been too preoccupied with suspicious characters loitering near the prison’s main gate to keep a close watch on its rear. The belief that, notwithstanding the information they had received, Mayne and his subordinates had sent insufficient men to guard against a disaster was indirectly confirmed by Inspector Thomson during his testimony at one of the ensuing inquests. Little wonder the coroner’s jury considered this a tragedy that might well have been avoided had the “police at headquarters” taken proper precautions. Meanwhile, persistent and trenchant critics of the current organization of the police in Britain, such as Edwin Chadwick, viewed the incidents in Manchester and Clerkenwell, as well as the trade union violence in Sheffield, as further proof of the need to consolidate the many local constabularies into a national force. Unless this was done, Britain’s police would remain inadequate for “extraordinary emergencies” and “insufficient for much important ordinary service.”25 The loss of confidence in the police as effective instruments of counterterrorism nourished a panicked public’s demand for the swift and “condign punishment” of the terrorists. Executions would surely deter others, while the “very atrocity” of the Clerkenwell crime would just as surely deny the enthronement of the bombers alongside the Manchester martyrs in the Irish nationalist pantheon. Nonetheless, there needed to be “clear and absolute proof” of the alleged perpetrators’ guilt. There must be no

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repetition of the embarrassing developments that had exposed the recent Fenian executions to such persistent criticism – the pardoning of one of the convicted men, the acquittal of the second batch of prisoners charged with murder, and the discrediting of several important prosecution witnesses. William Gladstone spoke to these issues during a tour of his South Lancashire constituency. There could be no greater calamity than to permit the purity of justice to be sullied, he declared. The temptation “not to be so particular about the proof” must be resolutely resisted. But on conviction, the conspirators had no claim to “the partial immunities and leniency of treatment that ought to be granted to offences properly political.” His remarks produced loud and prolonged applause, as did his dismissal of the sympathy expressed for the Manchester trio. Such misplaced sympathy he attributed to “erroneous statements of the case, and groundless imputations on the administration of justice.” On the other hand, recent events had not in his opinion weakened the case for a more liberal Irish policy.26 Gladstone’s Irish formula – church reform, “full and perfect equality in education,” and the compensation of tenants for improvements – still lacked popular backing in Britain. His hope was that the Fenian panic, the damage Irish complaints of oppression were doing to Britain’s international reputation, and the threat an alienated Ireland posed to national security as international tensions rose yet again on the Continent would make the public more receptive to significant reform. Half measures would no longer suffice. John Bright agreed. Speaking in Rochdale, he provocatively asserted that “nothing has been done in Ireland except under the influence of terror.” The time had come to isolate the terrorists from the Irish population and erode the sympathy with which it viewed them. But the damage the Clerkenwell explosion threatened to inflict on the cause of reform was illustrated by the response of the Reform League, whose Irish branch decided to suspend “its constitutional labours at this critical juncture.” Already under attack for alleged Fenian sympathies, the league loudly deplored the tragedy as a “crime of monstrous depravity.” An attempt by the league executive’s more radical elements to add repeal of the Union to the league’s Irish agenda was quashed, but its Irish subcommittee did outline a program of “thorough and speedy change.” It recommended disestablishment, the withdrawal of all parliamentary grants to religious bodies and institutions, the establishment of a free trade in land, the protection of tenants from arbitrary eviction, and the sale of church property at public auction in lots to suit the convenience of purchasers of no more than modest means. However, for the league,

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the essential first step remained the election of a truly democratic Parliament in which Ireland’s representation was proportionate to the size of her population.27 Irishmen had almost given up looking to England for justice, Henry Manning informed Gladstone, and the influence of their clergy, to whom they looked for guidance, was being undermined by the praise the British were lavishing on Irish bishops for their opposition to Fenianism. The irony inherent in this observation appears to have escaped the archbishop. Moreover, the Vatican’s refusal to issue a specific denunciation of the Fenian Brotherhood was permitting a “large body” of the faithful to deny that it was a secret society and allowing many Irish clergy to offer its members absolution “without the smallest scruple.” Equally unhelpful, as a member of the Catholic hierarchy admitted, was the archbishop of Tuam’s ostentatious contribution to the fund for the dependents of the Manchester martyrs. “In the present excited state of the English mind,” this donation “must necessarily make a very unfortunate impression,” he privately observed. From within MacHale’s ecclesiastical fiefdom, John MacEvilly, bishop of Galway, deplored the ongoing cycle of Requiem High masses for the executed men as a form of pandering to the mob, who in some parishes were exerting “moral compulsion” by threatening to withhold the priests’ supplies. Other clergy, such as Father Jeremy Vaughan, the parish priest of Barefield, Ennis, needed no such incentive. In a published letter of thanks to John MacHale, he repeated the charges of British tyranny and despotism and suggested that a “strong arm,” rather than “talk, talk,” and “brawling agitation,” was the only sure means of Ireland’s “national regeneration.” Meanwhile, the less belligerent Dean O’Brien of Limerick, a constitutional clerical nationalist, was circulating a “Declaration of Right and Resolve” that called for the restoration of the Irish Parliament and the “concession of Ireland’s nationality.”28 The “Limerick manifesto” was not welcomed by Cullen or other Repealers within the hierarchy. They feared it would retard the important remedial measures currently under discussion in Britain, where there was bipartisan opposition to any dismantling of the Union “at the bidding of shopmen, mechanics and warehouse clerks, even in alliance with the ruffianly scum of a disbanded army of aliens.” Liberals, such as the former viceroy, Kimberley, were convinced that repeal of the Union would be a long step towards the giving up of Ireland and the onset of a sectarian civil war in which Britain would be compelled to intervene to save the Protestant minority. No less disquieting was the belief that an independent Ireland would be hostile to a Britain engaged in a foreign war. Hence there

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was a bipartisan British resolve to keep a firm grip on her. Recognizing this, clerical Repealers of the Cullen variety thought it more prudent and expedient to concentrate on more attainable measures. Yet the vast majority of priests, if left to themselves, were likely to endorse the manifesto. This made all the more surprising and puzzling Cullen’s failure to follow the advice he received to seek episcopal unity on the document. Instead, he issued another “flaming pastoral” in which Freemasons, Orangemen, Ribbonmen, and Fenians were all denounced and the “unparalleled sufferings and miseries” of the Irish people were traced to bad government. Less than a fortnight later, the clergy of Tralee issued a set of resolutions in which they were similarly “unsparing and unflinching” in their denunciation of British “tyranny and injustice.”29 In Britain, where the recent restructuring of the Austrian Empire had been lavishly praised, the declaration’s signatories, who soon numbered 1,600, were suspected of seeking a dual monarchy along the lines of that finally negotiated between Austria and Hungary. Not that it was the only model being proposed for the United Kingdom. A true federal union had its enthusiasts, while a distinguished academic, Goldwin Smith, envisaged somewhat more restricted local autonomy. If neither of these systems of government promised to satisfy a large segment of Irish nationalist opinion, the disdainful British dismissal of Irish nationalism did not preclude the introduction of important reforms. The Fenians were compelling the British to pay closer attention to Ireland’s grievances, and the disease of revolutionary nationalism would continue to infect Irishmen until therapeutic measures were adopted, the Radical Spectator warned. But it overestimated the proportion of British political society ready to make significant sacrifices to gain “a genuine Irish loyalty.”30 Many Tories and a segment of the Liberal Party continued to deny that Ireland had been wronged and misgoverned, and they held the Catholic clergy responsible for this “false impression.” The true cause of her comparative poverty and of her people’s discontent was the absence of AngloSaxon industry and the want of “the ennobling and civilizing tendencies of Protestantism.” Clearly, there was no British consensus on the nature of the Irish problem or how to tackle it. Even the generally more sympathetic Liberals were betraying signs of uncertainty. Gladstone was coming under friendly fire for his “very ill-timed” remarks on the Church of Ireland in the last session of Parliament and for his failure during his speaking tour of South Lancashire to accompany a diagnosis of Ireland’s ills with a “definite prescription” for their cure. Listeners had been left in doubt, one normally supportive Welsh newspaper observed, whether he would pull down

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the Protestant Church, reform tenancy relationships, and endow the Catholic University. Would Ireland dominate the parliamentary agenda?31 Speaking at Bristol shortly before the opening of the new session, Lord Stanley dashed any lingering hopes of a more liberal Tory policy. Personally confident that the “ridiculous” Fenian panic was subsiding, yet aware of the deeply rooted disaffection in Ireland, he challenged Cullen’s description of a poverty-stricken, poorly clothed, and undernourished people. The foreign secretary’s Ireland was unusually prosperous, and this roseate contention was adorned with statistics. Turning to the Limerick manifesto, he declared to loud cheers that Ireland and England were “inseparable now and forever.” The church question and tenant right were two great difficulties, he allowed, but the current “moribund” Parliament was not the body to address such sensitive and complex issues. And while the Cabinet supported the compensation of tenants who had made bona fide improvements to their holdings, it had no intention of acceding to their demand for legal recognition of their property right in the land; nor would British legislators ever establish so revolutionary a precedent in tenancy relations. The Conservatives’ only idea “for healing the wounded spirit” was “to fill empty stomachs,” the Spectator observed, and this could never satisfy the Irish hunger “for a soil which they [could] genuinely call their own, and feel themselves possessors of.” Ireland was becoming republican, Manning warned Gladstone – American republican, not red.32 Several members of the Cabinet were too fixed on the apparent threat of Fenian terrorism to enter into a debate on Irish reforms. The Home Office was being flooded with alarming reports. Informers claimed that 155 undetected Fenian and republican clubs were operating in London; that plots had been hatched to blow up the Houses of Parliament, to rent domestic dwellings, fill them with combustibles, and then ignite them simultaneously; and that arsonists intended to target theatres packed with patrons. Panic had ensued at one Christmas pantomime when the cast ran across the stage as part of the performance yelling fire. No less alarming were reports that members of the assassination circle, or “Committee of Safety,” were still stalking the queen, the prince of Wales, the prime minister, the foreign secretary, and the home secretary.33 Ministerial decisiveness, essential to the successful combating of terrorism, was in this instance hindered by personal tensions and distrust. Peeved at not being consulted over an emergency deployment of troops, Hardy was angered by the failure to pass on to him, prior to a Cabinet meeting, the information delivered to Disraeli of an alleged Fenian plot to raid the Bank of England. The latter, as Tory leader in the Commons, was

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suspected by one of his Cabinet colleagues of advocating “strong measures” in the belief that by “exciting panic” he could divert attention from internal party squabbles and make the work of the government easier during the session. On the other hand, in the aftermath of Clerkenwell and despite doubts of the veracity of the informers, no information, however bizarre or suspect, could be ignored. Three arson attacks in London served to concentrate minds. Although Derby ignored the threats to his own life, he did believe the Fenians were seeking “to excite general alarm and create confusion by a reckless destruction of property and life if necessary for their object.” The mayor of Warrington, together with the local member of Parliament, presented Hardy with persuasive evidence of Irishmen mustering and drilling just outside the borough barely an hour before the discovery of the attempt to sabotage the local gasworks. The presence of a “very large” and “very low class” of Catholic Irish in the area, many of whom were active in a local branch of the National Brotherhood of St Patrick, saw the establishment of a temporary military garrison in the town. Troops were also despatched to a number of other towns, while an Irish detachment whose “language and bearing” had caused alarm was withdrawn from one community. The apparent welcome that the prime minister, in this volatile context, privately gave to the idea of British working-class vigilantism as an effective restraint on “cowardly scoundrels” was all the more irresponsible given the ethnic clashes already taking place.34 The police remained the first line of defence against both Irish terrorists and English mobs. Selected men from each of the capital’s police divisions were issued revolvers and given training in their use. The warders of the prisons in which Fenians were being held were to be equipped with short carbines or revolvers if there was reason to fear an attack. A military guard was mounted at Millbank, and the prison was connected by telegraph to the nearby Wellington Barracks. Indeed, Hardy wanted all of London’s military barracks to be linked in the same way to army headquarters. The special constables were called together in local detachments to elect the officers for their different districts, which corresponded to police divisions, and the commanders were given detailed instructions on the responsibilities of their men in the event of an emergency. This “Metropolitan Plan,” drafted by Colonel Ewart, a military engineer, was circulated as a model to the principal cities and towns of the country. Ewart was also asked to make the capital’s massive network of sewers more secure, for the Fenians were reported to be planning to use them as subterranean highways to the royal palaces and public buildings they intended to destroy. Policemen

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accompanied by sappers were to inspect them regularly, while servants of the Board of Works were under orders to exclude strangers and to keep a sharp lookout for intruders. A proposal to flush the system suddenly and irregularly was rejected because the discharge of untreated sewage into the Thames would contravene legislation to promote the river’s purification. Instead, Ewart designed and supervised the installation of “intercepting gratings” to prevent extensive, unhindered movement through the system. Concern that the Fenians might sabotage the water mains to guarantee the success of their arson attacks saw the water companies put on their guard. Railway companies whose lines ran into London were similarly warned of the dangers. The possibility of the capital being thrown into darkness by a Fenian attack on its gasworks prompted a military investigation into whether temporary lighting could be provided in its centre. One imaginative proposal called for the placing of massive batterypowered lamps atop Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, but the inability to locate more than nine lamps and 210 battery cells prevented it being put to the test.35 The monarch was another of her ministers’ problems. Canada’s governor general, Lord Monck, reported the recent departure from New York, aboard a Danish vessel, of a party of thirty men allegedly intent on assassinating the queen and members of the Cabinet. The government had little alternative but to treat this information as credible, for it was consistent with a number of similar reports. Furthermore, Monck had never been “an alarmist in Fenian matters.” The coastguard, customs officers, and police in the neighbourhood of the Bristol Channel were alerted in case assassins sought to slip ashore there, while the guard on the queen at her retreat on the Isle of Wight, Osborne House, was reinforced. Troops and police patrolled the grounds, only for some of them to wander into one of the ground floor rooms from the garden, much to the monarch’s displeasure. Detectives kept an eye on persons taking the ferry across the Solent, and naval vessels patrolled the island’s coastline. However, the queen proved no more cooperative here than she had been at Balmoral and Windsor. While she demanded additional precautions, she also complained of the “irksomeness of being constantly watched and surrounded.” She disregarded warnings that at Osborne she was peculiarly vulnerable, since a handful of determined and reckless men would be able to take advantage of the fact that the local population was “thin and scattered,” large woods offered concealment, and there were all too many places where under cover of fog or darkness boats might put ashore. She rejected the advice to return to Windsor, expressing royal distaste for its “many nasty people,” its

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“foggy, damp and unwholesome” air, and the proximity of the unruly and noisy town, which did such damage to her health and nerves. The victim of a string of physical and mental disabilities that may have been related to the porphyria gene, though many of her critics were inclined to regard her complaints as hysterical, and standing, as she put it, on a pinnacle of “lonely grandeur,” Victoria considered herself peculiarly in need of quiet and liberty.36 The queen’s petulance and inconsistency irritated Hardy. On the one hand, she affected an indifference to personal dangers, lecturing him on the “injurious” consequences of any sign of panic or fear. Despite being shot at three times and even being knocked on the head on one occasion, not to mention the many threatening letters, “we never changed our mode of living or going on,” she boasted, before foolishly adding that an Irish rebellion would be preferable to the current “system of keeping the whole country in hot water.” On the other hand, she demanded – almost with the next breath – both the removal of all Irishmen from her military guards and full reports on any suspicious persons in the vicinity. The information was to be handed to the ubiquitous John Brown, who could be relied upon to relay it in the least startling manner. She was equally insistent on the mounting of a stronger police guard on Prince Albert’s mausoleum at Frogmore. All of this proved too much for the harassed Hardy when she began to “crow” following the discrediting of the Canadian report of an assassination plot. He tartly reminded her that the police and troop reinforcements had been sent to the Isle of Wight at her insistence.37 “What is the use of trying to stop these outrages without strong means to enable us to punish these horrible People,” the queen asked the home secretary. She continued to favour a limited suspension of habeas corpus in Britain. Hardy and Disraeli now expressed some support for this drastic step, only for their colleagues to veto it. Members of Parliament would never consent to “so serious an infraction of the liberty of the whole people for the sake of punishing a few desperate conspirators,” the Cabinet majority countered. England differed greatly from Ireland, Derby reminded the monarch, for in the former the great mass of the people were loyal and actively hostile to the Fenians. Nor had he any wish to find himself obliged to disclose, in support of suspension, the full extent of the government’s knowledge of Fenian activities. This would imperil vital sources of intelligence. Consequently, at their meeting on 19 December 1867, ministers adopted several less controversial measures. They agreed to strengthen the Metropolitan Police, to increase the number of detectives, and to look to the temporary special anti-Fenian force that Feilding commanded.38

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The increase of 1,000 men to the metropolitan force, which Hardy had proposed a month earlier, promised at least to lighten the burden on dispirited men who were currently denied a single day of rest. The home secretary believed the augmentation would make possible a considerable enlargement of the Detective Department, and he was hoping for the recruitment of more-skilful men to lead the hunt for terrorists. Mayne agreed to add three inspectors and nine sergeants to the existing detective force, roughly doubling it in number, but intended to adhere to the current policy of promoting deserving men from the lower grades. The occasional appointment to superior rank of persons of special aptitude – Thomson, for example – would remain very rare exceptions to this rule, although the commissioner was willing to tempt experienced men from other forces. Hardy could not have welcomed the news that almost one-fifth of the Detective Department’s budget was to be allocated to a “system” of paid informers made up of persons “either unwilling or unfit to become members of the Police Force.” Mayne’s refusal to create the large and skilled detective force he envisaged explains the home secretary’s appropriating the pair of “courageous” men sent over by Monck from Canada. They had been intended for the Irish Office. “We want them more than Mayo,” Hardy explained.39 Nothing effective could be done to control the Fenians, Disraeli believed, unless Mayne was removed from office. He had an ally in Hardy, who mocked the “absurd” management structure of the Metropolitan Police, likening this large force, with its three “educated” officers, to an army without an officer corps. The failure of both Mayne and the director of convict prisons to forward to him the information they had received, before the Clerkenwell incident, of a conspiracy to spring Fenians from Millbank was another of his grievances. He was moved to fury by the release of the governor’s maid, despite her identification as the courier between prisoners and their would-be rescuers. “Such stupidity is worse than treachery,” he fumed, before demanding a list of all Millbank warders who had Irish names or were of Irish extraction. He had moved Burke and Casey to that prison following the explosion. Now, convinced that several of the staff were “tainted,” he ordered the transfer of the two Fenians to Warwick. Yet, for all of the criticism of Mayne, Tory ministers could not bring themselves to force the aging commissioner to resign. After so many years of service, he had become something of an institution.40 Mayne’s animus towards the new anti-Fenian force commanded by Feilding was an additional black mark on his well-blotted copy book. His refusal to place three of his own small force of detectives under the

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colonel’s command suggested that a bureaucratic power struggle was in danger of compromising the hunt for terrorists. But Mayne’s manoeuvres to establish overall authority over the new intelligence group were doomed to fail. The “universal superintendence” of Feilding’s men, for they collected intelligence from all over the United Kingdom and the Continent, provided ample reason to detach them from Mayne’s control, since his sway “technically extended” only to the limits of the capital. Moreover, Feilding declined to act with a policeman who he was sure “would thwart everything.” But the existence of two separate and instinctively competitive organizations inevitably led to problems, highlighted by the farcical arrest of one of Feilding’s agents by Mayne’s policemen for acting suspiciously. He was shadowing a suspected Fenian at the time. Yet the small intelligence unit soon proved its worth. Feilding was rejoined by Captain Whelan, who was recruited with the promise of a future appointment as a resident magistrate in his native land. One of the group’s first tasks was to investigate the connection, of which the British ambassador in France, Lord Lyons, had been informed, between the Fenians and “foreign anarchist societies.” A French newspaper, Le Nord, reported early in January the discovery of a Fenian headquarters in Paris and the seizure of a treasure trove of documents. The documents soon found their way to London and provided “a good deal of Continental information” indicating a close relationship between the Fenians and red republicans. Lyons was authorized to purchase information and forward it in cipher to Stanley, who would immediately pass it on to Hardy, but the ambassador exhibited a gentlemanly disdain for covert activities. “I am a terrible bungler about everything of this kind,” he informed the Foreign Office, “and most particularly dislike having anything to do with the sort of people who give secret intelligence.” One of the informers was a Polish woman whose truthfulness was doubted. So Lyons initially delegated to his private secretary the unpleasant task of dealing with such people, but with Feilding’s arrival in Paris an effective surveillance system was quickly established with the cooperation of the French secret police. Some of their reports were forwarded to the British ambassador on the direct orders of Napoleon III. Here was an inexpensive way for the uneasy emperor to place the British government in his debt at a time when there was reason to worry over the future of his regime. He had reason also to worry about his personal safety, informed as he soon was of an assassination conspiracy hatched allegedly by the French section of the International. It provided the excuse to arrest socialists and suppress radical newspapers. Napoleon discussed personally with Lyons the information forwarded by Tsar Alexander of plots to blow

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up palaces and public buildings in England – hence Ewart’s “Metropolitan Plan” – and seize the queen and the royal family, who were then to be “put aboard a vessel in the Thames and ‘disposed of.’” Meanwhile, Feilding had appointed a link man with the embassy. He was E.B. Trelawny, who installed himself at the Grand Hotel de Castille in the Rue Richelieu, where he interviewed the persons who approached the diplomatic staff with offers of information, and endeavoured to test its truth and accuracy before payment was made. Another source of intelligence was Rome, where the unofficial British representative, Odo Russell, had “plenty of writing and copying” to do about the Fenians for the police at home, thanks, presumably, to the Vatican or to some of the visiting Irish bishops.41 Feilding worked closely with Robert Anderson, who had moved at Mayo’s suggestion from Dublin to the Irish Office in London. There, he was amused to find nervous ministerial aides carrying revolvers as protection against Fenian assassins when they were at far greater risk from the capital’s pea-soup fogs. Then, in the spring of 1868, Anderson was transferred to the Home Office as assistant in Irish affairs. He and the colonel were the beneficiaries of an intelligence windfall. Thomas Beach, visiting his family after several years in the United States, volunteered his services as an agent within the American branch of the Fenian Brotherhood. He had served in the Union army under the name of Henri Le Caron, and at the civil war’s end he renewed a friendship with John O’Neill. Soon after his return to the United States on a British secret service retainer, Beach began a rapid climb into the senior ranks of the wing of the Brotherhood now commanded by O’Neill. Another of the valuable sources developed by Feilding and Anderson was Octave Fariola. This former chief of staff to Gustave Cluseret had turned informer following his arrest in London in July. He provided the government, in Disraeli’s words, with “the only complete account of the plans and resources of the Fenian conspiracy” in Britain, allowing Hardy to inform the queen of the arrest of three men for using threats of assassination against members of the government. Before long, an excited chief secretary predicted, they would be in the middle of the Fenians’ secret councils.42 Feilding and Anderson had created the well-organized, thorough, and coordinated system for the gathering of the foreign and domestic intelligence so essential in counterterrorism. Warrants were obtained to intercept the mail of twenty-four suspected leading Fenians; correspondents of the Fenians on remand were discreetly investigated; the mayors of those cities and towns in which the Brotherhood was believed to be active (the total eventually numbered forty-six) were instructed to forward to the Home

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Office the names, addresses, and meeting places of persons in their communities who there was good reason to believe were engaged in subversive activities; the Home Office, in turn, provided the local authorities with the names of suspects who had come to its attention; a file of Fenian photographs was opened and prison administrators were instructed to photograph, if possible, Fenians on remand and those committed for trial, while a fresh picture was to be taken when convicted men were shaved on entering prison; copies of all letters received by the various police forces offering or providing information on Fenianism were to be forwarded to the Home Office; and senior police officers throughout the land were confidentially instructed by Hardy to keep Fenians under surveillance but not to make arrests unless some overt and violent act was committed. By having the Fenians watched and shadowed, Feilding and Anderson hoped the entire organization would be detected and rolled up. Thus, word of a meeting of Fenian commanders, or “head centres,” set for the first week of January 1868 inspired an elaborate if somewhat comical effort to trace their movements. The Fenians were followed to railway stations, and their destination ascertained by discreet questioning of ticket office clerks. To trace their recent movements, detectives dressed as railway employees and equipped with wet sponges lifted the old labels from their luggage.43 The discovery of copies of the inflammatory Irishman and “seditious” songs during police searches of the lodgings and haunts of a group of Fenian suspects arrested in Merthyr Tydfil prompted renewed discussion in Cabinet on how best to deal with sedition in all its forms. Ministers did not shy away from action in Ireland, even at the risk of arousing the defenders of such core liberal values as free assembly and a free press. Three leading figures in the mock funeral demonstration in Dublin were charged with participation in an illegal procession. They had sported emblems, or “party” badges, several policemen testified, thereby violating the Party Processions Act. A shorthand writer produced his account of John Martin’s passionate remarks at the cemetery, prompting the old Young Irelander to protest from the dock that a man might now be charged, and even convicted, “for doing that and using words which the vast majority of his fellow countrymen approve.” Equally incensed was A.M. Sullivan, who discovered he was listed as a prosecution witness. Because of the abuse and embarrassment he had suffered at the hands of the Fenians during the Phoenix Society prosecutions less than a decade earlier, when they had accused him of being a “felon-setter,” he suspected the authorities of naming him as a witness in order to do further damage his nationalist reputation.44

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Sullivan need not have worried, for he soon found himself in the dock alongside Martin and two other prominent participants in the demonstration. They were committed for trial as “malicious, seditious, and illdisposed persons … intending to disturb the peace and tranquillity of the realm” by assembling “seditiously.” Martin and Sullivan chose to represent themselves, but counsel for their co-defendants ridiculed the contention that the wearing of green items constituted a “party” badge. The jury, following a trial which Sullivan admitted, without obvious irony, had been conducted “with singular impartiality and judicial dignity,” announced its inability to reach a verdict, and all four men were discharged. Meanwhile, the military authorities were encountering similar problems in their proceedings against servicemen who had participated in mock funerals. The courts martial came to naught in the face of the junior members’ refusal to vote for convictions. A furious president of the military courts, recalling that the senior officers to whom the evidence had been shown before the trials had to a man considered it sufficient to convict those charged, urged Strathnairn to impress upon these obdurate officers the error of their ways. They were threatening both discipline and “the good order of the service,” he spluttered.45 The focus soon shifted to the Irish nationalist press. Three newspapers, in particular – the Irishman, the Nation, and the Weekly News – were under attack for exploiting “some hasty utterances” of the Times to “indulge in acrid recriminations and very silly threats.” However, it was Oliver Moriarty, younger brother of the bishop of Kerry and frequent visitor to the palace in Killarney, who finally prodded the Irish Executive into action against “seditious” journals. A resident magistrate and source of much valuable Fenian intelligence, Moriarty sent to Mayo a clipping from the Irishman containing Father Jeremiah Vaughan’s recent “effusions” on the nationalists’ need to have “a strong arm.” Men preaching revolt, together with the newspapers giving them influence far beyond their locality, needed in the younger Moriarty’s opinion to be dealt with firmly. This was no easy task. Although Mayo regarded Vaughan as representative of a number of “dangerous and disaffected” priests who had done “a vast amount of mischief” since the executions of Kelly’s rescuers, he recognized the difficulty of moving against him in this instance. Richard Pigott, editor of the Irishman, would almost certainly decline to provide proof of Vaughan’s authorship of the offending published letter. As for nationalist newspapers in general, which Mayo held at least partially responsible for the unsatisfactory state of the country, they were careful to publish their most provocative comments as extracts reprinted from the American press.

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This would provide them with a defence in the event of a prosecution. The Irish Executive decided, therefore, to send the issue back to London.46 Newspapers that whipped up public sentiment in support of “nationality,” let alone Fenianism, went in Hardy’s opinion “beyond all bounds.” The lord chancellor, to whom he forwarded a copy of Vaughan’s remarks, concluded that the priest had encouraged the people to prepare for an armed struggle against the British “[t]yrants & invaders of their country.” And while he left to the Irish Executive any decision with respect to prosecution, the senior law officer made plain his support of a court action. The attorney general, on the other hand, cautioned that the letter was sufficiently ambiguous to make the winning of a conviction in an English court doubtful at best. Undeterred, Hardy pressed for action in Ireland, and Derby gave his endorsement after Mayo had thoughtfully forwarded to him a string of selected “gems” from the Irishman. Pigott was served with a summons for seditious libel, as was A.M. Sullivan less than a fortnight later. Sullivan later boasted that his publications – the Nation and the Weekly News – “were among the most violent in expression of the prevalent emotion” aroused by the Manchester hangings. Quickly convicted on this charge, Sullivan’s sentencing was postponed pending the outcome of the mock funeral case. Meanwhile, Pigott was tried and convicted. Three days later, on 22 February 1868, Sullivan, having avoided conviction in the other case, was sentenced to six months imprisonment. On release, he was to give security “in five hundred pounds and two sureties in two hundred and fifty pounds each, to be of good behaviour for a period of two years.” Pigott’s sentence was twice as long, the judge having concluded that the articles published in the Irishman “were calculated and intended to aid and afford encouragement to the Fenian conspiracy.”47 In England, the prosecution of the “Irish Revolutionary Press” excited some uneasiness. The right of a “freely organized” state “to put down forces dangerous to its own existence” was acknowledged, but Liberals proud of Britain’s reputation for having “on all political subjects by far the freest [press] in Europe” voiced disquiet over the pursuit of the two Irish editors. Even the Irish Executive, which flattered itself that the prosecutions had at least induced other newspapers to modify their tone and temper their language, exhibited no voracious appetite for further action. Print runs of both the Cork Examiner and the Cork Weekly News were scrutinized, only for an Irish law officer to conclude that it would be extremely difficult to convince people that letters and articles critical of British rule “overstepped the liberty allowed to a journalist.” The immediate promotion of Pigott and Sullivan to the rank of political martyrs was another

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reason for restraint. The Irishman, with a cavalier disregard of the truth, claimed the two were obliged to wear prison dress, were placed on a prison diet that respected medical authorities considered inadequate for good health, were subjected to degrading prison discipline, and were being held in virtual solitary confinement. Instead, as both men later acknowledged, they had “nothing to complain of beyond simple detention.” They had books to read, tobacco to smoke, were treated by the entire prison staff with “respect and kindliness,” and were both released on the halfcompletion of their sentences. Nevertheless, the imprisonment of two such prominent nationalist editors, together with the ongoing detentions under the authority of the habeas corpus suspension act, provided grist for nationalist mills. The state was accused of seeking to suppress national discontent through “a complete system of terrorism.”48 The British government was undoubtedly convinced that it was fighting Fenian terrorism, and this was not merely another case of a state labelling as terrorists those of its political enemies who resorted to violence. Wodehouse had by the spring of 1866 identified “[c]owardly assassinations” as a serious problem and quickly abandoned the consoling thought that when conspirators became assassins, they ceased to be “politically formidable.” Instead, his belief that a system of terrorism had been organized to prevent information being given to the government was confirmed by the prison warders who claimed to have overheard a pair of Fenian prisoners discussing assassinations, not as acts of revenge against informers, witnesses and policemen, but as “deliberately planned operations.” The formation of an assassination circle, a number of murders and attempted murders, Kelly’s published letters threatening retaliation, the alleged plots to assassinate public figures, reports of “explosive letters” and of a campaign of arson directed against gasometers, and then the bombing of the Clerkenwell House of Detention gave the government ample reason for concern – hence the mixture of delight and relief with which the authorities greeted news of the arrest of Patrick Lennon. Thanks to Superintendent Ryan’s “wonderful” source within the Brotherhood, he was picked up on 8 January 1868. Lennon had led one band of insurgents during the failed rising on 5 March 1867 and was believed to be the “chief of the Assassination Committee in Dublin” and thus “the worst desperado among the Fenian assassins.” Two officers smartly bundled him into a waiting cab, where they relieved him of a pair of loaded revolvers, a large dagger, a copy of the Fenian oath, and some “military notes.” When searched more thoroughly at the police station, he was found to have been branded with the letter “D” as a deserter from the 9th Lancers. The

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evidence pointed to the chief secretary as his intended victim, and Lennon appears to have lain in wait for Mayo at Dublin Castle’s main gate the previous evening. As luck or fate would have it, he decided to go hunting instead of to his office that day. Lennon was held in Kilmainham under a heavy military guard. Following a preliminary hearing there, he was sent for trial on charges of treason felony and the attempted murder of a policeman. Convicted on the first but acquitted of the second, he was quickly transferred to England aboard an overnight steamer on 6 February. He reached Millbank early the following evening to begin his lengthy sentence of penal servitude.49 Despite this signal success, “plenty of desperate adventurers” remained at large “ready to risk their lives for a chance of making mischief.” An attack on a Martello tower only a few miles from Queenstown, a raid in broad daylight on a gunsmith’s shop in Cork, and the theft of half a ton of blasting powder from a local magazine were worrying incidents. The authorities initially surmised that the first two had been staged either to cover up or to further crimes devoid of political inspiration. The two members of the Coast Brigade manning the tower were suspected of the illegal sale of the materiel they were guarding, while the gunsmith was suspected of seeking to defraud his insurers. On reflection, however, this series of events took on a more sinister colouring. Robberies of arms, ammunition, and explosives indicated the continued existence of a “formidable organization” and were plainly the work of an audacious gang whose members would not be easily run to earth in what was considered the most Fenian region of the country. “The antagonism to the Law, right or wrong, and sympathy with those who violate it, seems to be inherent in the lower class of the Irish,” Derby raged. They were too disaffected and the respectable classes too cowardly to provide investigators with “active cooperation.” Moreover, the ability to stage daylight robberies of arms in an already proclaimed district cast an “unpleasant light” on the performance of the local police and revived suspicions of collusion. The uniformed branch in Cork was understaffed, with barely two-thirds of the detachment fit for duty. The local detectives were similarly weak in number and ill-organized, while the head of the entire force had only recently arrived from the North following his suspension there for misconduct. Nor was morale improved by “English questioning” of their qualifications and abilities. If persons in high authority in England “would have a little more confidence in me and my men,” the inspector general of constabulary remarked to Mayo, “I think they would have no reason for complaint.” The police could scarcely be held responsible for the robbery of the powder

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magazine given its lamentable lack of security. No one slept on the premises, no one kept watch at night, no one was on duty until shortly before midday, and the key was entrusted to a young lad of sixteen who handed over purchases to customers. He, presumably, had loaned it to the Fenians. This incident demonstrated anew the need of a counter-insurgency policy that kept weapons and explosives out of the hands of subversives.50 The leader of the raiders operating in and around Cork was quickly identified. William Mackey would continue “a system of outrage and crime” so long as he remained at large, Mayo wearily concluded, for his objective was the prolongation of the state of alarm in order to enhance the Brotherhood’s influence. This analysis led, in turn, to renewed strains between Strathnairn and Ireland’s civilian leadership, which was another obstacle to an effective counter-insurgency policy. The general thought “more of the safety of his troops than the safety of the country,” Thomas Larcom continued to grouse, and Mackey’s arrest early in February brought no immediate easing of these tensions. Strathnairn was “equivalent to the neutralization of 5,000 men,” the undersecretary sarcastically remarked. Mackey, whose full name was Lomasney, went to trial on 10 March for the murder of a constable fatally wounded during his arrest. Although the Irish attorney general travelled down to Cork to conduct the prosecution, Mackey was acquitted. A mordant Larcom expressed incredulity at the verdict and began to fret lest policemen now took the law into their own hands rather than trust to the courts. The Executive summoned Corydon from England when Mackey was sent for trial again, this time charged with the non-capital crime of treason-felony. Fears of an attempt at rescue prompted stringent security measures in the court, which included the searching of three women attending the proceedings. One of them was the accused’s sister-in-law, and all three later successfully sued the constabulary “for unnecessary annoyance given in the search.” Although Mackey was convicted at this second time of asking and sentenced to twelve years penal servitude, he excited general admiration with a “touching speech” admitting the fairness of the trial and sentence but defiantly proclaiming his unrepentant nationalism. This was clearly a man of “a high, almost poetic character,” an English weekly acknowledged, and it was on account of these very qualities that the state was compelled “to treat him as a public enemy.” Mackey followed other prominent Fenians across the Irish Sea to an English prison.51 Fenianism was a “terrible” and serious business. The Manchester and Clerkenwell incidents confirmed ministers and public in the not unreasonable opinion that they were confronted by unscrupulous political

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revolutionaries who had embarked on a campaign of terrorism. The development of policies effectively to counter this threat was hindered by a loss of confidence in the police, and in the Commissioner of the metropolitan force, and by tensions within Cabinet. But a reasonably effective and rational counterterrorism policy did evolve, despite the prime minister’s apparent sympathy with popular vigilantism and the monarch’s pressure for suspension in Britain of habeas corpus. The Cabinet rejected “so serious an infraction of the liberty of the whole people for the sake of punishing a few desperate conspirators.” There was no resort to arbitrary arrests in Britain. Instead, the capital’s police force was substantially strengthened, its Detective Department modestly enlarged, tens of thousands of public-spirited citizens were enrolled as special constables, and a temporary anti-Fenian unit went to work gathering intelligence and maintaining surveillance on suspected revolutionary nationalists. A measure of its success was the disruption of the home secretary’s sleep. Hardy was woken in the early hours of the morning to read an important telegram from Paris, which he immediately sent on to Mayne.52 Fenianism compelled the British to give greater thought to Irish grievances, though in Ireland the liberal state remained a promise only. Habeas corpus was still suspended there, prosecutions were attempted for seditious assembly, and action was taken against elements of the “seditious press.” Hence the complaint of one major Irish newspaper that the Derby government was the first in modern times to criminalize Irish nationalism. Furthermore, although the Dublin police developed a wonderful intelligence asset, an effective counter-insurgency policy was impeded by slipshod measures to prevent weapons reaching the hands of subversives and the ongoing tensions between the civilian leadership and the military command. Meanwhile, the public panic in Britain, and the popular support for capital punishment as a deterrent to terrorism, was again bringing to the fore the issue of the rule of law. Would it be respected in the pursuit of the alleged Clerkenwell bombers?

7 The Quality of Justice

Three persons who had been observed loitering near the Clerkenwell House of Detention were detained by the police immediately following the explosion. One of them, Anne Justice, had earlier that day visited Casey, ostensibly to deliver a meal at the request of his mother. A second, Jeremiah Allen, claimed to be working for the police, while the third, Timothy Desmond, was already known to the police. A Soho tailor, he came from an Irish community believed to be deeply infected with Fenianism. That Justice attempted suicide once behind bars strengthened the suspicion of her involvement in the conspiracy, suspicion an informer had sown with a claim that she and her Fenian husband had transported ammunition to Ireland in March for the rebels. The following afternoon, 14 December, all three were formally charged in police court with being concerned with others in the wilful murders of three of the victims. Police testimony with respect to the trio’s suspicious conduct before the explosion sufficed to secure the desired remand, and they were hustled off to Millbank Prison. Two days later, a large crowd, alive with wild rumours of Fenian plots, watched their return to the Bow Street court. Justice’s evident fragility and the unavailability of several hospitalized witnesses saw the magistrates order a further remand.1 These preliminary hearings were briefly overshadowed by the inquests into the Clerkenwell deaths. Physicians were increasingly insistent that they alone were qualified to preside, since medical technicalities needed to put into language readily understood by a jury of laymen. The coroner for Central Middlesex, Dr Edward Lankester, met this professional standard and was frequently to be heard at the Kensington Museum lecturing on everyday topics such as food. He opened proceedings at the Royal Free Hospital on the afternoon of 17 December, but constant postponements to

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await “more evidence” saw matters progress at a funereal pace. Meanwhile, a second inquest conducted at St Bartholomew’s by the City of London coroner, Mr Sergeant Payne, was rushing ahead at breakneck speed. The jurors, having declined an offer of anonymity as a protection against possible Fenian reprisals, first viewed four of the “contorted and hideous” corpses and then listened to accounts of the destruction in Corporation Lane. On learning of the timely warning given to the authorities, they condemned as utterly inadequate the measures adopted, and returned verdicts of wilful murder against Jeremiah Allen, Timothy Desmond, and Anne Justice. Yet the evidence against the three was by no means “absolutely clear,” for they had not been “distinctly identified” as having had “a share in the explosion.” Indeed, one witness had emphatically denied that any of them detonated the explosives. Evidently, the principal culprit remained at large.2 The inquests were dramatically eclipsed, in turn, by a sensational development in the police court. On 20 December, James Vaughan took the stand. He admitted to being a Fenian, named Timothy Desmond as the member who had sworn him into the Brotherhood, and confessed to involvement in the planning of Burke’s rescue. He named four co-conspirators – Nicholas English, Patrick Mullany, William Desmond, and John O’Keefe. The intention to blow a large breach in the prison’s wall had only been revealed to him and his wife on the day of the bombing by a tipsy Timothy Desmond, Vaughan testified. He identified Anne Justice as the person who discovered the time at which the prisoners were exercised, named O’Keefe and William Desmond as the pair who were to do “the trick,” claimed that English and Desmond had admitted to him their “personal share in the explosion,” and further alleged that the former had during a session of heavy drinking suggested they assassinate Derby, Stanley, and Hardy. Vaughan’s dramatic testimony was suspect, being the uncorroborated word of an accomplice, yet several newspapers, in their anxiety to see someone pay for the Clerkenwell crime, argued that in this terrible instance scruples should be set aside. Although the four men were remanded on a charge of treason-felony, Vaughan’s credibility soon underwent a battering. At the next hearing, on 23 December, counsel for Mullany and Timothy Desmond subjected him to a withering cross-examination, as did the other three men representing themselves. Vaughan was forced into a series of compromising admissions: that he had only come forward on learning of the hefty reward for information leading to the conviction of the bombers, that he had been court-martialled while serving in the army, that he was a deserter, that he was now entirely dependent on the police for financial

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support, and that he had been considered insane on admission to the local workhouse. But he did not give ground on the essentials of his sworn testimony. So Mullany and O’Keefe were again remanded on a charge of treason-felony, whereas English and William Desmond joined the three already charged with murder. Nevertheless, misgivings grew about the worth of Vaughan’s “wholly unsupported” evidence. Elements of the popular press, recalling the perjured testimony in the Holborn case, repeated the adage that it was far better ten rogues went free than one innocent man was convicted. Were the heavily criticized police making the case against “dupes” instead of pursuing a Fenian leadership seemingly committed to a sinister campaign of terror?3 When the Clerkenwell five were again put up in the Bow Street dock a week later, the police officers who had arrested English and Mullany at a known Fenian haunt, on the basis of Vaughan’s information, testified that the two had frequently been observed there in the company of the Desmonds and O’Keefe. By this time the authorities were aware that the biggest fish, James Murphy, had escaped their net. He had stolen away to France along with one of the Caseys. The government did intend to seek their extradition but required information sworn before a magistrate upon such evidence as would produce a remand in England. In the event, the request was subsequently refused by the otherwise cooperative French government. Similarly, the purchasers of the barrel of gunpowder had sailed for the United States before the disastrous explosion. There was also a nagging suspicion, which the home secretary harboured, that two of the policemen on duty outside the prison had been “really implicated in a very disagreeable way.” Constable Moriarty, his name suggesting Irish antecedents, was strongly criticized for his failure to act decisively and courageously when the barrel was drawn to his attention. Another witness alleged that the policeman had spoken to the man who wheeled the barrel against the prison wall and lit the fuse. However, the notorious unreliability of much eyewitness testimony had again been displayed at the hearings and inquests. Allen and Timothy Desmond were both identified as the man who threw matches to the person lighting the fuse, an identification with respect to Allen specifically contradicted by a third witness. William Desmond and English were both named as the man who lit the fuse, only for two of the witnesses subsequently to retract their statements. Nevertheless, the identification of O’Keefe as the person who had been at the barrel on 12 December, when the fuse had spluttered out, was enough to see him added to the handful of prisoners charged with “wilful murder.”4

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William Desmond was further compromised by the discovery of a letter in which he appealed to one of his shop mates to fabricate an alibi for him. If this confirmed Hardy’s “private information” of the man’s involvement in the conspiracy, the home secretary was not convinced of his active participation in the bombing. But the odds on a successful prosecution of the accused were shortening dramatically. One of them had concluded that self-preservation was the better part of loyalty. Patrick Mullany, in return for immunity from prosecution, now volunteered information extremely damaging to his fellow conspirators. Although Robert Anderson privately expressed contempt for him as the most “worthless and shifty of the lot,” it was Mullany’s willingness to squeal the loudest and promise the most that was his attraction for the state. In a pair of voluntary statements, the first made on 10 January and the second four days later, Mullany claimed that a man from Glasgow calling himself Jackson, but whose real name he believed to be Barrett, had set off the explosion in Corporation Lane.5 As it happened, the day before Mullany’s second statement two men were taken into custody in Glasgow. They gave their names as Michael Barrett and James O’Neil and were suspected of discharging a firearm on the green. Although they were released when found to be unarmed, the lodgings where they shared a room were nevertheless searched. No weapons were found, but a police officer later deposed that on the table where Barrett and O’Neil were eating supper, and close to the former, he had seen three items of interest – a pocketbook, the receipt for a registered letter addressed to a James Stewart at a Paris hotel, and a receipt for a parcel express to the same addressee. The pair were immediately rearrested and were interviewed separately the following morning by Superintendent Alexander McCaul. His decision to question Barrett first may have been prompted by a telegraph from London urging him to be on the lookout for someone named Barrett or Jackson or by suggestive talk in the local Irish community. Barrett’s evident nervousness and inability to account convincingly for his whereabouts during the period which covered the Manchester rescue and the Clerkenwell bombing led McCaul to order a more thorough search of the pair’s lodgings and to obtain their further remand. He also telegraphed the Home Office and Scotland Yard to ask whether either man was being sought in connection with the two incidents. On seeing the telegram, Anderson ensured an immediate reply was sent recommending the continued detention of the two men. Commissioner Mayne responded with similar urgency, advising the Glasgow police of the imminent arrival of Chief Inspector Williamson and two other officers

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armed with warrants. They reached the Scottish city on Friday, 17 January, and on the strength of Mullany’s information escorted both men to London. In the interim, one of Mullany’s apprentices had come forward with additional “strong evidence.” A man known to him as Jackson had arrived at his master’s place of business “very black” late in the afternoon of 13 December, he alleged, and had washed and changed his clothes there. Given Mullany’s assertion that Jackson and Barrett were one and the same, Hardy was confident that “the lighter of the fuse” was at last in custody.6 The public present in the Bow Street court on 20 January heard the prosecution announce the addition of Michael Barrett and Patrick Mullany to the indictment for murder. The naming of the latter was clearly a tactic to increase the pressure on him to appear as a witness, or “approver,” rather than remain a confidential informer. Thus the actual testimony now given concerned Barrett and O’Neil. The former was identified as a person seen frequently in the company of Burke and Casey before their arrest, as the man who lit the fuse on 13 December, and as the man known as Jackson who had washed a blackened neck and changed his trousers at Mullany’s place of business late in the afternoon of 13 December. But the hearing did not proceed quite as smoothly as the prosecution had expected, for one witness identified O’Neil as the man who had fired the barrel and Barrett as the person who had thrown matches to him. Although O’Neil announced his possession of a cast-iron alibi, he was remanded along with the others.7 The enlarged cast of accused duly reappeared in the dock a week later. Observers were briefly puzzled by the fact that they were now one fewer in number. That mystery was solved when Mullany entered the witness box, his stress and fear evident to all. He was “ghastly pale, trembling in every limb,” and spoke in so faint a voice that his testimony had frequently to be repeated. He confessed to membership in the Fenian Brotherhood and to having been a leader, or “Centre,” of the “tipsy tailors [recently] on strike in St. Giles”; he identified English as the Fenian who, shortly before the explosion, had collected the weapons and ammunition stored at his premises; he swore to Barrett’s presence at a meeting in Holborn, about a week before the explosion, to raise money with which to purchase gunpowder, and at a second gathering held at William Desmond’s house on 11 December; he named Barrett as the conspirator who had reconnoitred the House of Detention a couple of days earlier and who then, following the failure on 12 December, had promised there would be no slip-up the following day; he identified Barrett as the man who lit the fuse on 13 December; and he testified that following the explosion Barrett had

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shaved his whiskers, changed his clothes, and hurriedly returned to Scotland. Mullany’s denial of any knowledge of O’Neil served to enhance his credibility when Barrett’s companion was able to substantiate his claim to an alibi.8 Additional witnesses placed Barrett at the address to which the barrel of gunpowder was delivered and as one of the men who placed it against the prison wall, while the young boy who had identified him as the man who lit the fuse now did so again. Corroboration of this crucial testimony by Henry Bird, who had been delivering milk at the time of the explosion, was less convincing. He had earlier identified O’Neil as that man. Nevertheless, there was growing public confidence that “with the aid of the new Queen’s Evidence four or five [of the accused] may be convicted.” Distrust of such evidence was suppressed by a press that reported that Mullany’s testimony merely corroborated “the case which the police had independently constructed against the ten or twelve persons now charged with the Clerkenwell murders.” However, the case against Barrett was daily becoming stronger. His carefully worded letter to a Glasgow friend – he knew that all correspondence was read by the prison governor – in which he ostensibly detailed his actions and movements in and about the Scottish city immediately before and after the Clerkenwell explosion – they included his reading a newspaper report of the incident to a group of bootmakers in their shop – contained the rudiments of an alibi. Such evidence had a “bad name,” especially when provided by the Irish, for in their homeland “aliboy” was “a synonym for false witness” and William Desmond had already been caught seeking to manufacture one. Legal reformers had long wished to make acceptance of this evidence conditional on it being fully revealed by a prisoner at the preliminary hearing. Unlike O’Neil, who had informed the magistrates of his possession of an alibi, Barrett had then made no such claim. He now appeared to be concocting one. Furthermore, subsequent to his arrest, the Glasgow police had intercepted at his lodgings a letter addressed to a “Willy Jackson.” It came from a James Stewart in Paris. When forwarded to London, Mayne quickly established that the handwriting of the letter was identical to the script of James Murphy, then under surveillance in the French capital by Feilding’s team. Thus the letter not only tended to corroborate Mullany’s assertion that Barrett and Jackson were one and the same, but also served to connect Barrett to the known organizer of the bombing. Moreover, the prosecution received an even greater windfall. Another of the accused, Nicholas English, made three voluntary statements in the evident hope of following Mullany’s path from dock to witness box.9

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He and Mullany had met Murphy and Barrett at a public house in Hanover Square some eight days before the explosion, English revealed. At this and subsequent meetings and spurred on by Thomas Kelly, a rescue plan was devised. He named Burke as the mastermind of the scheme to blow down the exterior wall of the exercise yard, the details of which were smuggled out of the prison with the aid of a solicitor. He had himself first heard them at William Desmond’s house, English stated, and he named one of the two men who had hauled the barrel from Gray’s Inn Road to the House of Detention on 12 December. English claimed to have encountered Barrett in central London shortly after the misfiring, when Barrett had angrily accused the “damned fools” not only of failing to prepare the fuse properly but also of turning the wrong end of the barrel to the wall, thereby greatly increasing the danger to the residents of the very narrow Corporation Lane. Barrett’s apparent awareness of the likelihood of innocent casualties and English’s statement that Barrett promised to do the job properly the following day promised to be very damaging to his defence when he was brought to trial. As for English’s own and William Desmond’s absence from the scene of the explosion on 13 December, he revealed that James Murphy had not wanted married men to be present for fear they would be inhibited by concern for the future security of their families. The sole exception was Murphy himself, who waited nearby ready to spirit Burke off to a “safe house” known only to him and Barrett.10 English confirmed the intelligence gathered from other sources that the rescue had been ordered by Kelly, designed by Burke, organized by Murphy, and the improvised bomb detonated by Barrett. For good measure, English gave the names of several other prominent Fenians, including that of the gunman in the Holborn incident, who was subsequently charged, tried, and acquitted. That English was volunteering to turn “approver” was leaked to the press, which then announced that the state’s repugnance at dealing with such “a bad fellow” had led it to reject him. The true and closely guarded reason for his rejection, however, was the Irish Executive’s insistence that his statements be kept out of court in order to protect the identity of perhaps the government’s most valuable agent. She was surely the “wonderful” source who had provided the details in advance of both the Manchester and Clerkenwell rescue plans. Her name, perhaps deliberately difficult to decipher in the correspondence between the authorities, may have been Johnson or Johnston and her Dublin home was a Fenian meeting place. According to English, she was privy to the Fenians’ plans; maintained a vital line of communication, via emissaries and in person, between the Brotherhood’s most senior officers; and was

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one of the few people who usually knew of Kelly’s whereabouts. Were any of this to be introduced as evidence, an awkward question would undoubtedly be asked: Why she was not being charged at the very least with complicity in the conspiracy? How long would it be before the Fenians and reporters concluded that she was a double agent? Her protection at all costs was a recognition by the state of the primacy of intelligence in a struggle against terrorism.11 As the Clerkenwell case was being prepared, a legal postscript was written to the Manchester rescue. The revolvers used in that incident and recovered by the police had quickly been traced to a Birmingham gun maker. He had sold them to a pair of Irishmen, but the mayor of Manchester’s delay in returning the weapons to the Midlands city for positive identification gave the suspects the opportunity, which they took, to disappear. However, acting on the basis of “information received,” the Manchester police arrested a young man at one of the city’s principal railway stations on 29 November. He gave his name as William Pherson Thompson and in a strong Irish accent claimed to be a Scot born in Greenock. At a remand hearing on 18 December, Thompson was identified by a police officer as a member of the attacking party who had rescued Kelly the previous September. The wife of the gun maker swore that she had seen both Thompson and William Hogan, an insurance company executive also under arrest, in her husband’s showroom on 17 September, and the gun maker testified that he had sold them seven weapons. Nevertheless, the magistrates considered the evidence against Hogan insufficient for a committal and he was released. Thompson was less fortunate. He was sent for trial on a charge of murder and was soon joined in the dock by Patrick Melody, whose transfer from Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison to Manchester had less to do with his identification by Corydon as one of Burke’s companions than it did with his boasts to have been involved in the Kelly rescue.12 At the South Lancashire assizes in March 1868, Thompson’s counsel did not dispute his client’s purchase of the revolvers used in the fatal attack on the prison van, but both defendants produced alibis for the time of the incident. In summing up the evidence, Mr Justice Lush described Thompson’s as the most consistent and compact alibi he had ever known, while Melody’s, if less satisfactory and less reliable, still merited the jury’s serious consideration. In addition, Lush noted the unsatisfactory nature of much of the evidence for the prosecution. This, he observed, might well have raised reasonable doubts of the prisoners’ guilt even had they not possessed alibis. Hence the general surprise if not astonishment when, having deliberated for no more than forty minutes, the jury found both

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men guilty of murder and made no recommendation for mercy. It was St Patrick’s Day, and the executions were set for the morning of 4 April. Irish criticism of the verdicts was predictable, but the trial was also condemned as something of a travesty in England. In their appeal to Hardy for clemency, counsel for both men detailed the evidentiary weaknesses, stressed the prosecution’s failure to tie Melody to the guns, emphasized the strength of Thompson’s alibi, and expressed incredulity at the jury’s astonishing disregard of the judge’s advice. Nor did Lush mince his words in his response to the home secretary’s formal request for his opinion. “I was not satisfied nor am I now upon the evidence that he was at the place or that he formed one of the attacking party & I could not have concurred in the verdict had I been on the jury,” he commented on Thompson’s conviction. Although marginally less sceptical of the evidence against Melody, he judged it “hardly strong enough to make the verdict entirely satisfactory.” The verdicts were not evidently “wrong,” he concluded, but were “not so clearly right” as to justify executions. He recommended the lives of the men be spared.13 Hardy immediately granted a “respite” and two days later received a surprising note from the foreman of the jury. Samuel Griffiths, Bolton manufacturer and general warehouseman, epitome of the successful middle classes, explained that he and his fellow jurors had not believed either alibi but were convinced, if somewhat belatedly, that the royal prerogative of mercy ought to be exercised. The sentences were commuted to penal servitude for life. Both prisoners promptly petitioned for release on the grounds of wrongful conviction. Their identification by the thief and prostitute Emma Halliday, who had been travelling in the well of the police van with Sergeant Brett, was certainly suspect, while Melody’s alibi had been reinforced following his conviction. An actress had come forward, in response to a newspaper advertisement, to swear that at the time of the incident she had seen him in the house where they were both lodging. Hardy again turned to the judge. Lush, noting several inconsistencies in the new alibi evidence, observed that Melody’s conviction still turned on the credibility of the workmate to whom he had allegedly boasted of his involvement in Kelly’s rescue. Although during the trial Lush had stressed the improbability of a man making such an admission to a virtual stranger, he now felt constrained by the jury’s acceptance of the evidence. “Unless this witness is discredited,” he wrote, “I cannot advise any further interference with the sentence.”14 Inspector Williamson was instructed to interview Melody’s employer, a coach builder named Bedford, and investigate the crucial witness,

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Graham, who happened to be the coach builder’s nephew. Bedford insisted that Melody and his nephew had been extremely friendly, thereby implying a relationship in which confidences might be exchanged. He and several other persons attested to his nephew’s truthfulness, and he observed that the Irishman’s conversation and reading of the Irishman were suggestive of Fenian sympathies. On reading Williamson’s report, Hardy rejected both petitions. Thompson, whose true name was Daniel Darragh, died in Portland Prison two years later. His family were permitted to disinter the body from the prison cemetery and carry it back to Ireland for reburial once they and the officiating priest had given assurances that there would be no political or public demonstrations. Eight years later, on his release from prison, Melody gave an interview to an American reporter during which he flatly denied that either of them had participated in the Manchester incident. Indeed, Melody summarized accurately and succinctly Darragh’s misfortune. He had supplied the Fenians with arms used in the rescue, but that was not the indictment on which he had been convicted. Hardy, it would seem, was determined to see him punished. Had he allowed him to be imprisoned for a crime of which in all likelihood he was innocent in order to expiate his alleged guilt of another for which he had not been tried? If so, this was rough justice rather than the rule of law, and the episode illustrated anew the necessity of a genuine court of appeal.15 Before the trial of the alleged Clerkenwell bombers got underway, tragic and sensational overseas news threatened further to prejudice popular and thus jury opinion against the defendants. D’Arcy McGee, the most prominent Irish Canadian and former Young Ireland conspirator, had been murdered. The Montreal St Patrick’s Society immediately came under suspicion, having been bitterly critical of the slain politician’s withering public criticism of Fenianism, and the police quickly claimed to have uncovered a Fenian organization in the city to which the accused assassin had belonged. The governor general certainly concluded that McGee’s denunciations of the Brotherhood had probably cost him his life. On the other hand, Monck did not believe either that the Fenians were “very large” in number or that the assassination had been authorized by the leadership. The alleged killer was swiftly tried, convicted, and executed, while a suspension of habeas corpus to facilitate the detention of suspected Fenians was quickly reversed lest Catholic Irish Canadians persuade themselves they were as much ill-used in Canada “as ever they were in Ireland.” But the McGee murder was soon followed by similarly sensational news from the other side of the world. In Australia, a gunman who

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boasted of being on a revenge mission for the Brotherhood attempted to assassinate Prince Alfred, duke of Edinburgh.16 Two former senior Fenians had arrived in the colony as settlers in 1862 but do not appear to have made contact with any local branch of the Brotherhood. While the police suspected “‘the poorer and most ignorant of the Irish Roman Catholics’” of Fenian sympathies, the governor of New South Wales, Lord Belmore, an Irishman and former undersecretary at the Home Office, was confident on the eve of the visit by Prince Alfred that there was no cause for alarm. The Brotherhood had been excoriated by perhaps the colony’s most influential Irish priest as a creation of Yankee politicians seeking to feather their own nests and careless of “‘the misery inflicted on the Irish people.’” Although the prince’s earlier visits to Melbourne and Brisbane had been marred by ugly sectarian confrontations, neither incident unnerved him. His reception was generally and reassuringly enthusiastic, which back home was read as proof of “the loyalty of the British subject” even “under the democratic institutions of the colonies.” Yet Edinburgh’s personal conduct left much to be desired, and stories of his “disreputable life,” “going to bed drunk, keeping low company etc,” were soon making the rounds. Patrons of Australian taprooms were reportedly regaling one another with accounts of his “‘horizontal refreshment,’” only for him soon to be horizontal for another more painful reason.17 Word of the Fenians reaching “the heights of their infamy” at Clerkenwell promised to discourage any embarrassing Australian exhibitions of Irish nationalism, so it was a confident prince who walked the streets of Sydney in “a most open way” and declined the services of bodyguards when attending a picnic on 12 March in support of the Sailors’ Home, Clontarf. Here, ironically, was a place name that rang through Irish history. Aborigines were brought in “to make sport for the beholders,” 500 of whom took lunch with prince beneath a large tent. Following the meal, Edinburgh set off on a royal walkabout and was shot almost immediately. He fell forward crying out, “My back is broken,” although a doctor who happened to be on hand examined the wound and pronounced it far from life-threatening. The ball, having entered the back at an angle, had fortuitously followed the line of the rib cage around the torso to lodge just beneath the skin of the chest. The news failed to comfort the victim, who grew “rather hysterical” at the pain when he sought to breathe. Indeed, he was to complain of “sympathetic pains” long after the ball’s removal in a relatively simple operation performed by a pair of naval surgeons two days later.18 The gunman, Henry O’Farrell, had been born in Dublin, one of eleven children of a butcher who had moved first to Liverpool and then had

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emigrated to Victoria. That the father transported his family unassisted suggests he possessed means, and he certainly prospered in the colony. Henry’s life, however, was filled with disappointments and illness. He abandoned an apprenticeship in law to enter a seminary, only to be denied ordination. This rejection, together with the disgrace, ruin, and flight of his brother Peter, largely as a result of his acting as solicitor of a Catholic bishop, may explain his “‘vindictive hostility towards the whole body of the Catholic clergy.’” The failure of his several business ventures saw him seek to drown his sorrows. Delirium tremens, epilepsy, a neurotic determination to test the strength of his commitment to a life of celibacy, and heavy personal indebtedness all took their toll on his mental health. He sought relief from depression, paranoia, and suicidal impulses in a manic espousal of Fenianism, even writing to the editors of two of Ireland’s leading nationalist newspapers to inform them of his plan to shoot the duke. While any warning the Sullivans and Richard Pigott might have forwarded to the authorities would have arrived too late to change the course of events, their failure to do so may have indicated “the extent to which even moderate Irish nationalists such as the Sullivans were alienated by British rule in Ireland.”19 O’Farrell declared himself a Dublin man acting on orders from the Fenian organization, and in a succession of voluntary statements, he claimed to be the chosen avenger of the three Fenians put to death for the murder of Sergeant Brett. In shooting him, Edinburgh informed his mother, the Fenians were seeking to frighten all at home by demonstrating the Brotherhood’s worldwide reach. Governor Belmore was also inclined to accept the existence of a Fenian conspiracy, and he ordered an immediate search throughout the colonies for O’Farrell’s alleged accomplices and the posting of substantial rewards for their capture. Far more sceptical was an important member of the prince’s household, who in a private letter to the editor of the Times urged him to publish a “strong” article allaying fears of a global Fenian murder plot. There was no evidence of any such conspiracy, Lord Newry advised John Delane, nor any corroboration of O’Farrell’s statements. On the contrary, the “poor devil” was evidently of “unsound mind,” a victim of “hard drinking” and “monomania” who had convinced himself that the Irish were unfairly treated and “trodden down.” This sound diagnosis did not alter the Irish peer’s opinion that the “brute” ought to pay with his life. O’Farrell was not mad enough in Newry’s opinion to escape the scaffold.20 The public reaction to the incident offered the prisoner little comfort. Processions being organized to honour the memories of the Manchester

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martyrs were either abandoned or banned in the face of mass declarations of “unswerving loyalty to the British Crown.” Richard O’Sullivan, a sibling of the brothers who published the Nation, speedily distanced himself and the Sydney Freeman’s Journal from an earlier expression of sympathy with revolutionary nationalism. Both Gavan Duffy and Kevin O’Doherty, the latter a transported Young Ireland rebel who had settled in Queensland, where he entered the Legislative Assembly, urged rejection of Fenianism. Professions and exhibitions of loyalty were encouraged by the government of New South Wales, which for partisan advantage irresponsibly fed fears of a worldwide Fenian conspiracy. A Treason Felony Act, similar to that recommended to the colonies by the imperial authorities the previous December, was now rushed through the legislature. The use of “language disrespectful of the Queen,” a refusal to join a loyal toast to the queen, and the publication of treasonable language were now felonies. However, of the fifty men eventually arrested, “all were either discharged or convicted of minor offences such as drunkenness and obscene language.” No evidence came to light of a massive Fenian conspiracy, and O’Farrell remained the only person charged with the attempted murder of the duke.21 When the trial opened at the end of March, the prosecution anticipated an attempt to persuade the court of O’Farrell’s insanity. His able barristers, a pair of famed Catholic lawyers engaged by the local Freeman’s Journal, detailed their client’s mental decline and cited the English precedent of a “self-proclaimed political subversive” who, having fired at the queen, “was found not guilty by reason of insanity” and committed to an asylum. But the prosecutor in the O’Farrell case was James Martin, the colony’s premier, and he convinced the jury of the defendant’s mental competence at the time of the crime. In short order, O’Farrell was convicted of attempted murder, still a capital offence in the colony, and sentenced to death. The doomed man then “expressed sorrow for his crime and said he had no associates.” Indeed, the authorities had been unable to corroborate his claim of membership in the Fenian Brotherhood. Another surprise was the failure of O’Farrell’s family and friends to mount a strong campaign for commutation of the death sentence. A local abolitionist did intervene, as did O’Farrell’s sister, though Governor Belmore believed her to be driven more by concern for the family name than by concern for her brother’s fate. Edinburgh also interceded, for attempted murder was no longer a capital crime back home, and he recommended postponement of the execution until London had been consulted. This advice was politely rejected, and O’Farrell was hanged on 21 April. He left behind a “dying confession”

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in which he admitted to lying about the existence of a Fenian organization in New South Wales.22 First word of the attempted assassination did not reach London until three days after O’Farrell’s execution. The initial telegram had taken an inordinate length of time to reach its destination and, having been “roughly handled” in transmission, was “almost unintelligible.” Six hours of labour at the Admiralty saw enough of the text deciphered to excite “utmost alarm.” Several hours later, the colonial secretary received an “open” telegram in which the nature of the duke’s wound was revealed. He hurried down to the Isle of Wight to inform the anxious queen. Nevertheless, the murder of McGee and the attempted murder of Edinburgh appeared to contradict the Conservative government’s recent claims that the weakness of Fenianism in Canada and Australia was proof of its limited spread overseas. Fortunately, led by the Times, the press in general reacted responsibly to the Australian incident. It expressed doubt that this latest “dastardly crime” made up “a component part of Fenianism as an organization.”23 The dramatic news from the other side of the world found British and Irish eyes fixed on the Old Bailey, where the accused Clerkenwell bombers were on trial. The proceedings had opened on the day before O’Farrell’s execution, with the lord chief justice and Baron Bramwell presiding. The court was a suitably grim stage, notorious for its poor lighting and inadequate ventilation. Notoriety was a companion of the lord chief justice, Alexander Cockburn. He had enjoyed one of his greatest triumphs a quarter century earlier while still a successful barrister, when he effectively established the so-called McNaghten Rule as the test of an accused’s mental competence. Did he or she know at the time of its commission that the act was wrong? Cockburn had gone on to make his political reputation as an able defender of Palmerston’s controversial foreign policy in the Don Pacifico debate of 1850. His reward was the office of attorney general. Short and slight, he earned an enviable if louche reputation. Whenever he went on circuit, wags remarked of this gay bachelor, he was accompanied by a different “Lady Cockburn.” A scandalized queen, informed of his fecund intimacy with the wife of a Cambridge greengrocer, denied him the customary peerage on his appointment as chief justice in 1857. However, he soon succeeded to his uncle’s title. If more than a little vain, Cockburn was widely admired by his peers for his intelligence, analytical skills, “exquisite courtesy,” generosity, dignity, and sense of decorum. His attitude as a judge was perhaps best captured in his observation that “we must remember that whilst it is the business of judicial action to protect innocence,

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so on the other hand, it is the duty of the judge to take care that the guilty do not escape.”24 The possibility of some of the guilty escaping conviction was very much on the minds of the prosecuting counsel in the Clerkenwell case. The evidence was insufficient to convict English – “the worst man of the lot, after Barrett, the actual perpetrator” – unless his several voluntary statements were introduced into evidence. This the Irish Executive continued to veto, a decision that also promised to benefit William Desmond and act as something of an offset to the defendants’ inability to afford “eminent counsel.” W.P. Roberts had written to Hardy on behalf of Anne Justice to stress the injustice inherent in her lack of means to retain a barrister. All requests for public funds were rejected. Denied public assistance, the accused were at a marked disadvantage with respect to both the pretrial preparation of materials and the calling of witnesses once proceedings began. Although collections were organized by Glasgow’s Irish Catholic Banner and several other newspapers that catered to the Irish immigrant community, the monies raised restricted the prisoners to the services of “some raw, if clever juniors.” This was a sorry commentary on the liberal state, the Law Journal noted, for in several other countries the accused in such important cases were assured of representation and provision made for suitable public remuneration of counsel.25 In the opinion of the journalists present in court, Anne Justice possessed the good looks of “hundreds of women to be seen at court-entries and gin shop doors in the poor neighbourhoods of hidden London,” and her attractiveness was brought into sharper relief by the stolid “female turnkey sitting behind her.” William Desmond was an imposing “well-built fellow,” with a “large head and brow, well topped by a shag of hair, and a very bushy sandy beard,” and struck experienced observers as the most intelligent of the accused. Timothy Desmond seemed a weaker character, while the pockmarked O’Keefe appeared almost “characterless.” The “ruggedlooking” English had a similarly “objectionable appearance,” whereas Barrett was better looking, better dressed, attentive, watchful, confident, and brisk in his bearing. Moreover, his muscular body gave him a dominant physical presence.26 In the absence of English’s voluntary statements, much was going to depend on the credibility of the two men who had turned Queen’s evidence, Mullany and Vaughan. The attorney general, with the assistance of the solicitor general and three other counsel, methodically constructed the case for the prosecution. Mullany was called to the stand, where he remained for the better part of two days. He cut a sorry, even “abject,”

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figure – a ghastly pallor, sunken eyes appearing all the more so because he stood with his back to the light, nervous fingers that closed halfconvulsively around the brass knobs on the rail of the witness box, restless feet. His voice was so low and husky that he was frequently chastised for failing to speak audibly, but when he attempted to comply, he stammered in a broad Irish accent. All of the while he strove to avoid looking at the openly contemptuous accused but was unable to resist the occasional glance, “as if fascination [had overcome] and conquered shame and selfcontempt.” His testimony was damaging to the defendants. He identified Barrett, English, and William Desmond as active participants in the conspiracy to free Burke, he named James Murphy as the man who had failed to explode the barrel on 12 December, and he identified Barrett as the man who had lit the fuse the following day. James Vaughan followed Mullany into the witness box and repeated essentially the same evidence given in the police court. He implicated the Desmonds, English, and O’Keefe in the planning of the bombing, adding snippets of alleged conversation clearly designed to indicate their callous lack of concern for the inevitable human suffering. Having surprisingly made no mention of Barrett during the preliminary hearing, he now testified to seeing him in the company of English.27 The prosecution detailed the purchase of the gunpowder and its delivery to a house where both lodgers and neighbours swore to seeing Barrett, William Desmond, English, and O’Keefe. Other witnesses placed English, Timothy Desmond, and O’Keefe, and less positively Barrett, in Corporation Lane with the barrel on 12 December. Several policemen testified to the suspicious behaviour of Timothy Desmond, Ann Justice, and Jeremiah Allen on the following afternoon. A clutch of witnesses identified Barrett as the man who had “lit the barrel.” Two of Mullany’s employees partially corroborated their master’s statements by naming English, William Desmond, Barrett (Jackson), and Murphy (Hastings) as visitors to his place of business, and one of the pair, the apprentice Henry Morris, repeated his earlier testimony of seeing Barrett wash his blackened neck and change his trousers shortly after the explosion. The prosecution rested its case on 23 April. The evidence against Justice was too “slight” to be sent to the jury, the lord chief justice intimated. The charge was withdrawn and an acquittal formally entered. She reportedly kissed Barrett’s hand before leaving the box. At the opening of the following day’s business, the attorney general announced the abandonment of the case against O’Keefe. Three of the remaining prisoners, the Desmonds and English, had been closely tied to the bloody and devastating explosion only by the testimony

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of Mullany and to a lesser extent that of Vaughan. Yet the two witnesses were at odds over whether they knew one another, the latter claiming an acquaintanceship the former denied. In the absence of English’s voluntary statements, Mullany’s claim only to have turned Queen’s evidence on learning of English’s intention to do so, or “split,” seemed as feeble and self-serving as his denial of knowledge of the rewards posted for the capture of the bombers. He had been permanently drunk from the evening of the explosion until his arrest, he maintained. His denials of having encouraged the bombing were contradicted by the admission that he “gave a half-sovereign towards buying the powder” and was privy to the plan to blow up the prison wall. The credibility of the other “approver,” Vaughan, was even more suspect. The defence naturally made much of his mental history and of his admissions that the police were now his sole means of support and that he expected to receive a share of the rewards if the prisoners were convicted. Jurors surely asked themselves why Jeremiah Allen, now an acknowledged police agent, or informer, had not been summoned to give evidence against Anne Justice and Timothy Desmond. Other eyewitnesses had picked out the alleged culprits with the greatest difficulty, and even then only with the help of photographs and descriptions provided beforehand. Moreover, the natural gloom of a London late afternoon in mid-December, darkened by smoke from a mass of chimneys, and the wearing of tall hats by several of the alleged bombers raised reasonable doubt as to the reliability of positive identifications. Under cross-examination, one of the juvenile witnesses admitted he had initially failed to recognize Barrett but had identified him when taken back for a “closer” look by a policeman. Defence witnesses, among them the owner-editor of the Irish Catholic Banner, Peter McCorry, testified to Barrett’s presence in the Scottish city at the time of the fatal explosion. They repeated the account given in his letter, that he had read a newspaper report of the tragedy the very next day to the staff of a local bootmaker. The scepticism that a last-minute alibi inevitably excited was heightened in this instance by the attorney general’s aggressive examination of the witnesses and by the testimony of Superintendent McCaul of the Glasgow Police. O’Neil’s alibi appeared to have been adapted to Barrett’s need.28 In summing up, Cockburn reminded the jurors of the need for credible corroboration of the testimony of an accomplice or an informer. He then explained the law of constructive murder. Barrett thus had good reason to look “wretched” as he listened “with a look of dogged, hardy endurance to words which drew the sure rope tighter and tighter about his neck.”

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Only when Cockburn noted the improbability of his alibi and commented on his failure to claim it at the preliminary hearing did Barrett grow agitated and dash off a note to his counsel, Baker Greene. When the barrister rose to make his client’s point, which may have been an explanation of his earlier silence, he was unceremoniously ordered to sit down before he could utter a word. Soon after the jury retired, the rumour swept through the court that Barrett alone had been convicted, and this was confirmed when the jurors returned two and one half hours later. The Desmonds and English were discharged and left the dock with faint bows to judges and jury. Asked why sentence should not now be passed on him, Barrett initially made no reply. However, when the chief justice donned the black cap the Irishman exercised his right to be heard. He spoke for thirty minutes, “making a remarkable speech amid profound silence.” He heaped scorn on Mullany, excoriated the police and informers, treated with “infinite derision” the attorney general’s “corroborative evidence,” and protested his innocence. There was one surreal exchange with Cockburn: when Barrett referred to his alibi, the judge, who had misheard him, observed that he was glad Barrett was not attempting to repeat the defence that he had been in Glasgow at the time of the explosion. The doomed man then delivered a deeply affecting peroration. “‘If it is murder to love Ireland more deeply than life, then indeed I am a murderer,’” he declared. Sentence of death was then pronounced.29 The British press judged the verdict “right” but was critical of the number of culprits who evidently remained at large, leaving Barrett “to expiate alone the crimes of all his accomplices.” With the accused who had been acquitted in mind, several observers decried as “subversive of all the principles of law and order” the “absurd supposition” that “indubitable and complete evidence [was] requisite to justify a jury in convicting a criminal.” Juries only required a body of evidence that raised “a moral certainty in the mind of a reasonable man,” they argued. Here was an alternative and less rigorous definition of reasonable doubt. Still others hailed the five acquittals as proof of the quality of British justice, flattering themselves that the evidence judged insufficient or tainted in the Old Bailey courtroom would have sufficed across the Channel to see the five incarcerated for life. Nevertheless, there was a strong current of opinion in favour of a thorough investigation of Barrett’s alibi before any execution took place. Elements of the Irish press were forcefully arguing its strength, charging that an innocent man was about to mount the scaffold. A voice of the immigrant Irish in Britain, moreover, assailed as a mockery of justice a trial in which the conviction had been secured on the word of “informers,

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spies, and interested children, taught to lie and perjure themselves by the police, whose interests they subserve.”30 The evidence against Barrett was far stronger, of course, than that presented in court. The withholding of English’s voluntary statements had allowed English himself and William Desmond to walk from the dock. Aware as he was of this, Hardy quietly fumed over the Irish celebrations of the acquittals. Anne Justice returned to Lower Pulteney Street, “a low Irish place,” to be feted by a large crowd. She appeared at a window, according to one report, clapping her hands and shouting, “‘Great Victory for the Fenians,’ or something to that effect,” a sentiment which the Home Office feared would have “mischievous effects.” Hardy was also aware of the general public’s impatience to see the convicted bomber punished. Assuming the verdict to be just, he saw no reason to interfere with the “due course of the law.” Hence it was to his credit that he quickly authorized an extraordinary review of the case. The power to commute death sentences was effectively exercised by the home secretary. The usual procedure was for him to examine any memorials, to consult the trial judge and request his report on the evidence presented at the trial, and to ask his opinion of any new evidence or facts that had subsequently come to light. Legal reformers continued to criticize the decisive role of the trial judge in weighing the value and relevance of new evidence, while the “procedural defects” of the Home Office review were so “glaring” that Cockburn’s companion on the Old Bailey Bench, Baron Bramwell, had described them as “objectionable.”31 Hardy, anticipating a strenuous effort to save Barrett’s life, resolved to sift the details of his alibi “to the utmost.” As it happened, the Glasgow Herald had published the previous day, 2 May, a piece of investigative journalism under the heading “Falsity of the Glasgow Alibi.” Interviewed by a reporter, David McHoul, the employer of the bootmaker who had sworn to Barrett’s presence in the city on 13 and 14 December, disclosed that this employee had told him that O’Neil could not have been involved in the explosion because he had been in his house at the time. However, the bootmaker had denied knowing Barrett. On being informed by the newspaper’s editor of the story, the Home Office immediately contacted McHoul. He replied that the report was “substantially correct.” But that very same day saw the Morning Post publish a disturbingly critical analysis of the testimony on the strength of which Barrett had been convicted: “Never for many years, has such conflicting evidence been offered in a court of justice in respect to the identity of one accused of a capital crime, [and] never at any time have more painful doubts been excited respecting

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the cogency of the evidence on which the fatal verdict has been made.” The government had a duty to make inquiries to establish on which side the truth lay. The impact of this leading article on the Derby government was all the greater because the Morning Post, once regarded as Palmerston’s mouthpiece, had recently been moving into the Tory camp.32 Two days later, a delegation led by John Bright and The O’Donoghue called on Hardy to deliver a memorial that bore a striking similarity to the editorial and was drafted by Barrett’s counsel. Could the testimony of an admitted accomplice be believed? Other prosecution witnesses had not alleged that Barrett attended Fenian meetings, and not a single policeman claimed to have seen him in London before he was brought there in January from Scotland. His identification as the bomber was suspect. Neither of the persons who had been standing in a doorway very close to the barrel had been called because they had identified O’Neil and William Desmond respectively as lighters of the fuse. Similarly troubling was the fact that Mullany’s employees had only come forward to testify following their master’s decision to turn Queen’s evidence. How was it that Mullany swore he had not seen Barrett immediately following the explosion whereas his apprentice, one of the pair, insisted that Barrett had come to Mullany’s house and washed his blackened neck. How could someone be blackened by an explosion without being injured? Why was Mrs Mullany not called? Baker Greene submitted thirteen affidavits supporting Barrett’s claim to have been in Glasgow at the time he was supposedly visiting Mullany in London. This powerful and closely reasoned document concluded with a request for a “respite” so that the facts could be weighed and established.33 Cockburn’s trial notes and accompanying comments, delivered as they were to Hardy on the same day as the memorial, were less than reassuring. The lord chief justice identified several “mistakes” in Mullany’s evidence and acknowledged its improbability on certain points. He noted the “unsatisfactory” character and nervousness of several other important witnesses. With Barrett’s execution set for 12 May, Hardy forwarded everything relating to the case to Cockburn and formally requested his opinion as the trial judge whether he should grant a respite to permit “further inquiries.” Cockburn immediately recommended a delay. The documents indicating communication with Stewart in Paris, which had been found at Barrett’s lodgings, were “of the greatest importance.” That these were his lodgings needed to be definitively established, and it was important to determine whether anything was known there of a person

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calling himself Jackson. “It is much to be regretted,” Cockburn concluded, “that these documents were not produced from the commencement.”34 More reassuring were Bramwell’s views on the case, which he forwarded unofficially. There were three questions that in his judgment required positive answers. Was there a person calling himself Jackson? Was that man guilty? Was Barrett that man? Allowing that an “approver” made “a doubtful witness,” Bramwell inferred Mullany’s truthfulness from his failure to give evidence against Anne Justice, Timothy Desmond, or Allen. It would have been far safer, he reasoned, to bring a false charge against them. Further, Mullany’s two employees were persons against whom nothing could be said “except that they may have been influenced by the hope of reward.” They had not broken down under-cross examination, and although they differed on some particulars, they had not been shown to be untruthful. He accepted as trustworthy the brother and sister who lodged at the house to which the explosives had been delivered, both of whom had identified Barrett as Jackson. He ridiculed the notion that the witnesses had entered into a vast and elaborate conspiracy to commit perjury. They may have been mistaken in their identification of Barrett, he allowed, but this would have supposed two men “exactly alike, both Fenians and both recently shaved.” “The thing is impossible,” he remarked and noted that the defence had not called Mrs Martin, to whose house the gunpowder had been delivered for storage, or Mrs Mullany, or Anne Justice, or O’Keefe as witnesses. The reason, he suspected, was the lack of time in which to prepare a persuasive piece of perjury. As for the alibi, Bramwell naturally fastened on the Glasgow bootmaker’s denial of knowing Barrett when first questioned. He stressed the improbability of Glasgow cobblers being ignorant of a disastrous explosion in the capital until Barrett read an account of it to them from a newspaper. They would surely have seen the newspaper placards announcing the tragedy, he argued, and Barrett’s reference to their ignorance of the incident in his prison letter was in all probability a result of the fact that absent from Glasgow he had not known of the placards. Finally, Bramwell observed that no “unselected” witnesses had come forward from where Barrett worked, lodged, or took his meals. “They are all Irish, and probably all Fenians,” he commented, neither judicially nor judiciously, “and I doubt not as many could be found to commit perjury to liberate him, as were to commit murder to liberate Kelly, and the other, in Manchester. I have no doubt, not the least, of his guilt.”35 The Home Office shared Bramwell’s opinion that Barrett’s alibi had been “got up for the occasion” and was being supported “by the grossest

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perjury.” Should he escape punishment, “which is by no means improbable,” one official remarked, “justice will be entirely defeated, and encouragement thus given to defy the law.” Henry Poland, one of the juniors on the prosecution team, was despatched to Glasgow to investigate. Any hope that this decision would muffle, if not stifle, Irish criticism of British justice was quickly dispelled. The Irish Catholic Banner waxed indignant. Important witnesses for the defence had been too afraid to come forward, it charged, and those that travelled down from Glasgow had, along with relatives, been thrown out of work on their return. Poland, it reminded readers, had been a member of the prosecution team and was receiving the full assistance of the Glasgow authorities, while the gathering of depositions in support of the alibi was being deliberately frustrated by the appointment of a single official to record them. The respite was merely a trick, in other words, “to gull the public into the belief that the Crown was anxious to do justice for justice’s sake,” and the publication of the memorial drafted by Baker Greene lent additional weight to the claim.36 Depositions that undermined the alibi were also being collected and perhaps more assiduously. The Glasgow bootmaker’s evidence and character were challenged and compromised. The assertion by the owner/ editor of the Irish Catholic Banner, Peter McCorry, that Barrett had attended the christening of the child of a Glasgow friend on 8 December, when trial witnesses had placed him in London planning the attack on the House of Detention, was contradicted by the officiating priest’s dating of the ceremony a week earlier. This confirmed for Superintendent McCaul the existence of a “barefaced and impudent Conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice.” Nevertheless, Poland was unable to locate anyone who could prove that Barrett had ever gone by the name of Jackson. However, when Hardy referred the new material to the lord chief justice for a “report on the whole case as it now stands,” Cockburn wanted proof not only of Barrett’s use of the name Jackson but also of the “cardinal fact” on which the whole of the case rested, that the Stewart in Paris was indeed James Murphy. In response, Hardy claimed to be in possession of information, “the details of which it would not be expedient to divulge,” an allusion, perhaps, to Feilding’s surveillance operation in the French capital, that satisfied him that the two were one and the same. He did offer two confirmations, however, in the form of an intercepted letter from Stewart and an affidavit in which Massey (Condon) swore that the handwriting was identical to Murphy’s.37 The unlikelihood of Cockburn submitting his report well before the revised date for Barrett’s execution, 19 May, saw the condemned man

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granted another respite. As it happened, to avoid further delay, the chief justice forwarded his report in “a very rough state” that very day. It ran to 114 manuscript pages. He had made it so elaborate, he explained, in case Hardy wished to release it in order “to satisfy the public mind on the subject of the conviction.” He considered it “complete,” “conclusive,” and “exhaustive.” He had been satisfied with the trial verdict at the time, he wrote, having judged “the positive evidence” of the prisoner’s guilt “too strong” to be countered by the alibi friends had “set up on his behalf.” The alibi witnesses, he argued, had committed “wicked perjury.” Skirting his earlier doubts, he now fully accepted Mullany’s testimony with respect both to the conspiracy to liberate Burke and to Barrett’s active involvement in it. Cockburn’s reasons were essentially those already given by Bramwell. The jury had been cautioned against convicting on the word of an accomplice, but “very strong” and “trustworthy” corroboration of Mullany’s testimony had been provided by two of his employees and most convincingly by the apprentice. He had come forward to give evidence against his master, not to assist him. Similarly, the brother and sister who had lodged at the house to which the gunpowder was delivered, and where Barrett was so frequently seen that they assumed he was their landlady’s intended, were “credible witnesses.” As for the inevitable discrepancies in the testimony with respect to Barrett’s personal appearance and the length of time he was in London, Cockburn attributed these to understandable confusion. He rejected as beyond belief the notion that Barrett was the victim of a gang of perjurers bent on his destruction. On the other hand, the evidence of the eyewitnesses who put him at the scene of the explosion was admittedly less than satisfactory. Yet even this served, in the chief justice’s mind, to strengthen the case against Barrett because it established that a man corresponding in appearance with him “had taken an active part in the circumstances connected with the explosion.”38 Cockburn put little store in the alibi or in its supporters. The credibility of the bootmaker, the principal witness to Barrett’s presence in Glasgow from the day before to the day after the Clerkenwell explosion, had already been fatally compromised. As for the condemned man’s alleged attendance at a meeting held in a Glasgow hotel on 13 December, to express sympathy for the three rescuers of Kelly who had gone to the scaffold, and his taking tea afterwards with a handful of people in a private room, Cockburn noted the remarkable absence of any mention of these events in the prisoner’s letter from prison on 24 January outlining his alibi. It was “inconceivable,” he observed, that in writing “to procure evidence to prove him to have been at Glasgow on the 13th of December, [Barrett] should have omitted

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all reference to circumstances, which, if true, afforded the most complete answer to the charge, and which were within the immediate knowledge of the party to whom he expresses this hope.” However, it had been Barrett’s failure to claim the alibi at the preliminary hearing and his inability to call a single witness from his lodgings to attest to his continuous presence in Glasgow, together with his failure to call as a witness the woman who had received the gunpowder, for she could have contradicted the brother and sister who testified to Barrett’s intimacy with her, that had caused Cockburn to reject his alibi during the trial. Nor was he impressed by the new depositions in support of the alibi, for not one of them had been sworn by the more than fifty persons who had been present at the meeting in a hotel on 13 December. In reaching his decision on the safety of the verdict, Cockburn saw nothing inappropriate in the use of evidence “which though it would not be admissible against the prisoner if on his trial, is yet entitled to great moral weight in determining our judgment.” The voluntary statements of Nicholas English fell into this category. Yet the witnesses to Barrett’s alibi were numerous and might have influenced the jury Cockburn conceded, and since there had been no opportunity for the defence to cross-examine the additional deponents for the prosecution and since the original voluntary statements by English and Mullany had not been given under oath, he would as the trial judge have recommended “under the very special and peculiar circumstances of this case, that the matter should be submitted to another Jury, by trying the prisoner on another charge in respect of one of the other deaths caused by the explosion.” But “there are other facts, as to which I conceive no answer or explanation can be given,” he quickly added, “and which are so conclusive of the guilt of the convict, that I do not think such a course can be necessary.” Reduced to its essentials, the case against Barrett was that under the name of Jackson he travelled to London with Murphy to free Burke from the House of Detention and took a leading part in the scheme to engineer his escape by blowing a breach in the prison wall. Evidence of a correspondence under the name of Jackson with Murphy shortly after the explosion would remove any reasonable doubt of his guilt, Cockburn argued, and in his opinion this fact had now been established “beyond any possibility of doubt.” The receipt for the registered letter sent to Stewart in Paris, the parcel invoice of a shipment from Jackson to Stewart, and the “strong” and “conclusive” evidence that Stewart and Murphy were one and the same brought him to this conclusion. Mullany’s association with Murphy had been confirmed by his knowledge of the £100 the

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latter had been paid to settle his action in Ireland for false arrest. Murphy had been identified by Mullany, Massey, and Colonel Feilding from the photograph taken while he was being held in Mountjoy. Further, Feilding had confirmed that since January 1868 Murphy had been residing at a Paris hotel under the name of Stewart, and Stewart’s handwriting had been identified as identical to Murphy’s script. No less damning was evidence of Barrett’s use of the name Jackson in his correspondence with Murphy. As the case now stood, “the verdict of guilty was right and ought to stand.” However, acknowledging that his examination of this case was less the traditional report by the trial judge and more by way of a judicial inquiry; expressing regret that the additional evidence had not been given at the trial, for in his opinion its introduction would have prevented any attempt to set up an alibi; and uneasy over the late production of these facts, Cockburn recommended that Barrett be given the exceptional opportunity through his counsel to explain the additional damning evidence away and time to prove any credible explanation.39 Invited to the Home Office, Baker Greene received extracts from Cockburn’s trial notes, a copy of the letter from Stewart to Jackson, a description of the other items that strongly suggested communication between the two, and an affidavit signed by Feilding identifying the handwriting of Stewart and Murphy as one and the same. Cockburn, who at Hardy’s request conducted the meeting with the barrister, appears to have shown him a copy of his long report on the case. Baker Greene then went to Newgate to consult his client. Barrett denied all knowledge of the new damaging material and feebly sought to tie it to a stranger named Jackson who had called at O’Neil’s lodgings. Baker Greene, in reporting this, did his best to aid the condemned man by seeking to open related issues – why had the police officer who discovered this important evidence not been called before the Bow Street magistrates, and could anyone suppose that the documents found at O’Neil’s lodgings had not been forwarded to the police authorities in London because from Feilding’s affidavit it was evident that Stewart was under surveillance in Paris? Barrett did produce at this last minute the name of a friend, Charles Campbell, with whom he claimed to have lodged in Glasgow while allegedly in London and who pleaded lack of means as the reason for his failure to travel to London to testify during the trial. The difficulty here was Barrett’s failure to mention any of this to his counsel during the trial. To overcome this problem and explain his client’s general reticence, Baker Greene revealed that Barrett had privately admitted to being a minor figure in the Brotherhood and along with O’Neil had probably “dabbled in treason.” The reluctance of

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his fellow Fenians to testify and his reluctance to put them at risk had prevented him from clearly and immediately establishing his presence in Glasgow at the time of the explosion in London. On the basis of his own “rigid examination” of his client, which lasted for a full three hours, Baker Greene expressed his belief in Barrett’s innocence.40 The explanations failed to sway the judges, while another provocative intervention by the belligerent Peter McCorry only did harm to the condemned man. He telegraphed the home secretary on 25 May claiming that an additional twenty-five witnesses were willing to support Barrett’s alibi. He demanded an open hearing on the case or another trial and made an implied threat to Hardy’s safety should the minister fail to take one of these options. The home secretary ignored him and undoubtedly felt vindicated by a subsequent report from the Glasgow Police concerning the sudden disappearance from the city of several alibi witnesses, evidently fearful of prosecution for perjury. Hardy also had the satisfaction of reading in the press praise of his unusual behaviour in extending to Barrett almost a “second trial,” conducted by the lord chief justice. In the Commons, John Bright did rise to complain with some cause that Cockburn had confirmed the trial verdict partly on the strength of evidence that, while allegedly in the possession of the prosecution, had inexplicably not been introduced at the trial. He deplored any irrevocable action while “the least doubt lingered in the public mind.” But this ardent opponent of capital punishment and his fellow abolitionists had already lost the larger battle with the passage of a the bill that ended public hangings. Michael Barrett was the last person to suffer that final indignity in Britain.41 A mobile scaffold was hauled out of the yard of the Old Bailey at six o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, 26 May, and wheeled to its position “in front of a small iron-barred door … in the middle of the blank wall of Newgate Prison.” Workmen secured it as the crowd assembled, and a reporter who had been following the case from the very beginning was startled to spot the Desmonds, English, and O’Keefe. He saw them “kneeling, bare-headed, on the steps of the Old Bailey in front of the scaffold” praying “silently and earnestly” before slipping away. City police lined an area around the scaffold, and armed colleagues were “drawn up close beneath the shadow of the drop.” Out of sight of the crowd, the authorities were sparing Barrett’s feelings. Very few persons were permitted to witness his pinioning, and he was led by a private way to the public gallows.42 Barrett went to his death with the same composure he had exhibited throughout. There was no hint of bravado, merely a “self-contained, calm and dignified” demeanour. He mounted the steps to the drop “coolly and

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boldly,” the only obvious sign of strain his “marble” complexion. He remained firm, erect, composed, and still while Calcraft went about his “grisly duties.” The executioner fastened the strap about Barrett’s feet, drew a thin white cap over his face, adjusted the halter around his neck, and then trudged down the steps to draw the bolt. There was some disagreement among reporters over the quickness of Barrett’s end, perhaps as a result of the recent innovation, which the Newgate mob had loudly protested, of so draping the scaffold in black cloth that only the head of the hanged person was visible. Horribly apparent to those closest to the body was a “convulsive heaving of the chest and shoulders and the quick motion of the feet.” The scene was rendered all the more macabre by the collapse at the fatal moment of one of the attending policemen, who suffered an epileptic fit. The response of the spectators served to confirm the wisdom of moving all future executions within prison walls, for such was their admiration of Barrett’s courage that they appeared to forget “the murderous outrage” for which he was put to death. That the Metropolitan Police had not been forgiven for its two great failures, first to prevent the Clerkenwell tragedy and then to bring to justice more than one of the conspirators, was evident from the abuse showered on the detachment that came to witness the hanging.43 Another postscript to the Clerkenwell trial had been written before Barrett’s execution. The preliminary hearing of the case against Burke and Casey had gone ahead despite the prejudicial decision of their first counsel to withdraw on the grounds that the persons who had retained him might reasonably be supposed to sympathize with the bombers. Burke protested, and the press condemned this act of professional cowardice. If the prisoners’ friends were involved in the outrage, the Daily Telegraph argued, that was no reason to withhold legal services from them when being held on a completely different charge. Replacement counsel were soon appointed, and there followed a string of hearings and remands. Then, on 28 December, Henry Shaw, alias Mullidy, joined Burke and Casey in the dock, and all three were committed for trial at Warwick on 9 January 1868. The prison there was new and thought to be more secure than Millbank, but the more important consideration was legal. The chief acts of which the three were accused had principally taken place in and around Birmingham. Hardy was confident of Burke’s conviction and appreciated the personal information about the prisoner discreetly forwarded from the American legation in London by its secretary, Benjamin Moran.44 Burke’s counsel applied for a change of venue. Sectarian and ethnic clashes in Warwickshire were grounds for concern that a fair trial was

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impossible in this environment. No one had forgotten the conduct of the jury in the recent cases of Thompson and Melody. The fact that a majority of the witnesses came from London made the capital a far more convenient and helpful venue given the limited funds at the disposal of the defendants. Equally, removal of the trial to the Old Bailey would permit them to select counsel from the entire Bar not merely the Midland Circuit. Cockburn, sitting with three colleagues, agreed. When the trial opened on 28 April, Burke, Casey, and Shaw were charged that they “did feloniously, wickedly, and unlawfully compass, devise, and intend to depose Our Lady the Queen from the style, honor, and royal name of the Imperial Crown of the United Kingdom … by certain overt acts.” In a physical sense, the proceedings seemed simply an extension of those against Barrett and his five companions. The same stuffy court was used, Baron Bramwell presided, with the assistance of Mr Justice Keating, and the same team conducted the prosecution. As for the defence, W.P. MacDonald and Ernest Jones appeared for Burke, while Messrs Lewis and Pater represented Casey and Shaw respectively.45 Of the three accused, only Burke impressed observers. He was more reminiscent of a commercial traveller than a revolutionary, and his conduct in court was appropriately methodical and businesslike. He occupied the corner of the dock recently vacated by William Desmond, a stack of law papers in front of him, carefully checking the evidence of witnesses against their earlier depositions, sending notes to his counsel, or occasionally bending over to whisper to them. Ernest Jones, citing Burke’s status as an alien, immediately applied on his behalf for a mixed jury, offering as proof of his citizenship a passport together with the testimony of an American lawyer. Unfortunately, that attorney was known to the American legation as a “notorious swindler.” The application was rejected, since Burke was British by birth. The case against him was well constructed. Three notorious Fenian informers – Corydon, Massey, and John Devane – identified him and testified to his prominence in the Fenian organization. They were followed in the box by a string of witnesses who identified Burke as the purchaser and shipper of arms to Fenians in Ireland. The verdict was never in doubt. Although the case against the hapless Casey was withdrawn, Shaw was convicted along with Burke. Then, much to everyone’s surprise, Bramwell refused to permit either man to speak to their motives. Undoubtedly, it was a decision influenced by the impact of Barrett’s statement. Bramwell was not going allow another condemned man “carry off the apparent honour of the contest between him and the law.” The prisoners were instructed to confine themselves to remarks in mitigation of the

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sentence. But as the press pointed out, a good motive could go far to mitigate a sentence and a man could not “explain his political motives without some license for his tongue.” Burke still managed to accuse Bramwell of acting like a prosecutor, to which the judge responded with a sentence of fifteen years penal servitude. The length reflected his belief that Burke had been largely responsible for the “Clerkenwell outrage” and had designed the Fenian tactics of “armed insurrections, arson and murder.” “He deserves his fate,” Benjamin Moran privately commented, “and I am surprised he was not sent for 20 years.” Shaw was sentenced to seven years and was led away defiantly shouting that he would happily serve twenty years more for Ireland.46 More than ten weeks after the sentencing of Burke and slightly less than seven weeks after the execution of Barrett, there was a post postscriptum to the Clerkenwell trials. The reward monies were distributed. The Kensleys, brother and sister, who placed Barrett at the house to which the explosives were delivered, were awarded £25 each. Similar sums were granted, somewhat surprisingly but perhaps with a view to encouraging diligence, to the pair of Glasgow policemen who had originally arrested Barrett for disturbance. The man who led the police to Mullany’s apprentice, Henry Morris, was another recipient of £25, even though the boy’s father had in fact already taken him to his local police station. The boy received £100 under terms designed to secure the money for him “free from the interference of his father who [had] not made a favourable impression.” Another £100 went to the informer James Vaughan. His fellow and more important “approver,” Mullany, was initially excluded from the list of beneficiaries. In the opinion of the Treasury solicitor, his pardon and free passage to Melbourne, Australia, was the “utmost to which he was fairly entitled.” But following the intervention of Robert Anderson, Mullany received £90 to assist his relocation. Of the informers, Massey (Condon) received an immediate payment of £300 to help him settle somewhere or to emigrate, and a life annuity of £200 with provision for his wife should she survive him. Corydon’s life annuity was also set at £200, paid quarterly, while Devane was initially granted the more modest sum of £50, to which was added a supplementary annuity of £75 for a period of five years. He was promised free passage to, and outfit in, any colony of his choice, along with a one-time payment of £100 on arrival there.47 The series of Fenian trials had seen the rule of law respected, but that has never prevented occasional miscarriages of justice. Reliance on the testimony of former accomplices was considered unsound, but in the aftermath of the Clerkenwell disaster, judges and juries were not inclined

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to demand corroborative testimony of the highest quality. Moreover, as the Thompson/Melody trial demonstrated, a jury of angry men was quite capable of ignoring the instructions delivered from the bench. Happily, in that instance, the jury did intervene privately through the foreman to save the men from the scaffold to which it had condemned them. The episode illustrated a serious weakness of the judicial system, the absence of a court to which the convicted had a right to appeal. Nor was it entirely fair to deny a convicted man the right to speak to his motives, for they might mitigate the sentence he was about to receive. However, the decision was consistent with the policy of criminalizing the Fenians. Even more extraordinary was the review of the conviction of Michael Barrett and the investigation of his alibi. The jury’s decision in this case would have been less open to challenge had all of the evidence in the possession of the prosecution been presented, but it was withheld in order to protect the identity of perhaps the state’s most highly prized agent. In short, the liberal state plainly recognized the vital importance of intelligence in the battle against terrorism, even to the extent of permitting several of the accused to be formally acquitted and walk from the court. That the violent act in which Barrett was deeply involved ought not to be dismissed as no more than an unfortunate mistake made by men unfamiliar with the destructive power of explosives is no less evident. The plan was the work of a professional engineer and soldier who surely had some knowledge of a material so widely used in construction projects, especially blasting for canals, railroads, and tunnels, as well as in war. The caution demanded of powder mill workers was well known, illustrated as it frequently was by disasters. Some of the evidence introduced at the trial, if believed, indicated an awareness, at least on Barrett’s part, of the very serious danger to the innocents living in the houses only a hop, skip, and a jump from the prison’s wall. And had the detonation gone off as planned, many of the prisoners awaiting trial, and taking their exercise, would have been casualties. It was, then, an arbitrary use of violence certain to create panic among the population at large. This truth was later admitted by a leading Fenian. “It was unfortunate that innocent people suffered,” Thomas Clarke Luby told a gathering in New York in hailing Barrett as an unsung hero of the cause, “but this was the fortune of war – war was no child’s game. All those things struck terror into England.”48

8 The Efficacy of Violence

When Parliament reopened early in February 1868, Fenian violence threatened to shape the political agenda. Lord Frederick Cavendish, a younger son of the duke of Devonshire, admitted to his wife, a Gladstone relative, that it was making him think much of Ireland’s rights and wrongs. He favoured disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and a land reform that would give tenants an interest in the soil and security of tenure. John Stuart Mill made a similar case in his pamphlet England and Ireland. The true significance of Fenianism, he wrote, was the evidence it provided of the hardening of Irish discontent into “distrust of English rule altogether.” Prompt action was vital if the breakup of the Union was to be avoided, and Mill considered the free grant to the peasant of all he might gain by revolution the only secure foundation of a permanent settlement. An ironic Lord Dufferin, Irish landowner and politically ambitious Liberal, credited the pamphlet with bringing people to their senses. “It has thoroughly frightened a great number of persons who I know had almost made up their minds to go to great lengths in the hopes of pacifying Ireland,” he informed the Tory viceroy. Not content with the role of private critic, Dufferin published a pamphlet of his own in which he disputed Mill’s analysis of conditions in Ireland and dismissed his solution of the land problem as one sure to “bring injury rather than relief to the country.” The Edinburgh Review heartily agreed. Uneconomic “petty holdings” would multiply and be sublet, it predicted, the population would quickly outgrow the “existing means of employment and subsistence,” and Ireland would return to that condition “which had contributed to the disaster of the Famine.” Clearly, many Liberals, as well as Tories, were opposed to farreaching land legislation.1

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The need for action remained pressing, however. Were Parliament to grow old without some broad enunciation of Irish policy, Henry Manning warned Gladstone, then the Irish people would become a grave danger to Britain. The British had to abandon “contemptuous, satirical, disrespectful, defiant language in speaking of Ireland and the Irish people” and establish true religious equality. The Church of Ireland was “the fountain head of bitterness which poisons the relations of life, and estranges Protestants and Catholics.” Earl Russell’s public advocacy of concurrent endowment as the instrument of Ireland’s “permanent peace” and “real union” with England saw him privately flattered by the archbishop for taking a “first step” towards a “just and adequate policy.” At the very same time, Manning was quietly urging the Irish hierarchy to make even more explicit their rejection of the proposal. There was in his judgment, however, an even deeper and sorer cause of Irish discontent and unrest. The “intolerable grief” of the tenants was the motive power that had driven “hundreds of thousands to America there to bide the time of their return.”2 Public discussion of the Irish problem served to underline the want of a consensus on what needed to be done. The “great body of the English people” was not as yet prepared for the “sweeping changes proposed by men whose good sense [was] worked by an exaggerated appreciation of injustice,” the special correspondent of a major Canadian newspaper reported. Tories scoffed at “claptrap liberality,” pointing to an improving economy and diminishing suffering and discontent. They would never allow themselves to be led, by the “natural and laudable desire to conciliate opposition,” into a betrayal of the “Saxon and Protestant” minority that held Ireland fast to the British connection. Neither land reform nor “church destruction” would appease the Fenians. Instead, disestablishment would weaken Britain’s control of Ireland by alienating her friends. The unlikelihood of the minority Conservative government acting boldly was increased by Derby’s failing health and consequent lack of physical stamina. Nor did his decision to resign and enter into a “benign conspiracy” with the monarch to deliver the leadership of the government to Disraeli promise a dramatic change of course. There were simply too many Tories who would have happily greased the pole to prevent him reaching its top for the new prime minister to carry within his own ranks measures likely to satisfy the Irish and thus isolate the Fenians from the general population.3 Some Americans saw in Disraeli’s elevation the triumph of that selfmade man more commonly associated with their own country. “Brains,” “ability,” “unconquerable courage,” “tenacity,” “the power of resistance to odium and unpopularity,” “calm insensibility to the biting jibes of

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adversaries,” but a “frightening capacity for wounding sarcasm,” were the new prime minister’s strengths. A number of Liberals were naturally far less admiring of his character. Disraeli has “dragged English gentlemen through the dirt & will drag them through more still until too late their eyes will be opened to their miserable folly & baseness,” Kimberley privately railed. The Radical John Bright was more generous and less snobbish. “A great triumph of intellect and courage and patience and unscrupulousness, employed in the service of a party full of prejudices and selfishness and wanting in brains,” he remarked. “The Tories have hired Disraeli, and he has his reward from them.” Or as the member of the Wellesley family now serving as the British ambassador to France admitted, “It is impossible not to admire the daring by which [his elevation] has been accomplished.”4 Disraeli merely tinkered with the Cabinet. The vacant Exchequer was filled by Ward Hunt, “enormous in size and bulk” but a competent administrator. Hardy, flattered that he was indispensable, set two welcome conditions for remaining in office – a promise of no tampering with the Church of Ireland and the seating of Sir Hugh Cairns upon the Woolsack. The Northern Irishman’s appointment as lord chancellor provided extra insurance on the church question, for he was widely reviled by Irish Catholics as a man who had “No Surrender” written on his life. Indeed, Disraeli was planning to make defence of the Established Church as a “national institution” a central plank of his party’s platform in the general election he would soon have to fight. Similarly, as the head of a “land-owning and High Church party,” he was unlikely to introduce legislation to enhance the rights of tenants. Only the previous July, he had poured scorn on a proposal to extend so-called Ulster Custom to the remainder of the island. Yet his current conservatism appeared at odds with the radical diagnosis of Ireland’s ills he had made a quarter century earlier – a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien church, and the weakest executive in the world. The traditional remedy for this state of affairs was revolution, he had then observed, but it was denied the Irish by virtue of their connection to a far more powerful country. Therefore, an “English” minister should “effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would do by force.” Liberals happily taunted the new Tory leader with these words, for his conclusion was much the same as that currently reached by the Radical Mill.5 On the eve of the first meeting of the Disraeli Cabinet, which was to be devoted to “the whole question of Irish policy,” John Lambert submitted a “Confidential Memorandum on Legislation for Ireland.” This English

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Catholic, thus a member of a denominational body which the prime minister considered potentially politically influential and instinctively conservative, had returned to England from his investigation of Ireland’s dispensary system convinced that her “real evils” were “traceable to the peculiarities of race.” He summarized the Irish “celtic characteristics” as “indolence,” “indifference to comfort and cleanliness,” “primitive notions of the rights of private property” (which appeared to prevent them from “separating ownership from occupation”), and the inability “to regulate and manage their local and domestic affairs in a discreet and orderly manner.” What was needed, therefore, was the gradual modification of the Irish character through the “amalgamation of the English and Irish races.” As a first step, it was essential to convince the Irish that they were no longer “in the humiliating position of a conquered people.” The Church of Ireland was the most visible badge of conquest, and concurrent endowment the means of achieving “proximate” religious equality without wrecking the institution. Moreover, Lambert outlined a scheme that he believed would finesse the inevitable opposition of the Irish hierarchy and British Dissenters to this solution. As additional steps, he proposed the repeal of the despised Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, the grant of a charter to the Catholic University, and acceptance of a national system of denominational education.6 A pair of “unusually well managed and orderly” Cabinet meetings debated Irish policy on 2 March and again the following day, though most problems were fudged. Decisions on material improvements were deferred until a commission on Irish railways reported, and consideration of primary education was postponed until the commission investigating the national system submitted its recommendations. Ministers did agree to recommend a charter for the Catholic University but only on the terms that Derby had believed acceptable to their Protestant friends. The university was not to be endowed out of public funds, and its governing body was to have a lay representation large enough to ensure that the university did not become a “mere sacerdotal institution.” A modest land bill, intended to encourage landlords to grant contracts to tenants and compensate them for “unexpired” improvements, was approved in principle, and yet another commission was sanctioned, this one to revisit the land problem. Revealingly, one of the most persistent advocates of such an investigation, the editor of the Times, saw it as a device for exposing the “hollowness of the tenant grievance.” The Cabinet also approved repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act. Finally, on the Irish Church, ministers opted for evasion dressed up as principle but manifestly a garment of transparent expediency. So grave and novel a question, the government intended to announce, ought

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to be reserved for a House of Commons elected under the more liberal franchise of the recent Reform Bill.7 Cullen despatched two members of the hierarchy, Patrick Leahy and John Derry, bishop of Clonfert, to London to open negotiations with Disraeli in the hope of wresting concessions from him before he made any public commitments on the university question. Not that the cardinal truly expected any useful outcome. The Tory Cabinet contained three Irishmen – Mayo, Cairns, and Lowry-Corry at the Admiralty – whom he considered “very hostile to Irish claims,” and the prime minister declined to meet with the Irish prelates before a measure had been introduced in Parliament. “I fear that the pride of England will not give us any concession,” an angry Cullen consoled his fellow metropolitan. “We are weak and they gratify their vanity by trampling on us whilst they are obliged to humble themselves before America and every other powerful nation.” In short, there was little likelihood of the Disraeli government finding an ally in the Irish Catholic Church as it battled against Fenianism.8 One person with whom a tactful Disraeli did quickly establish an excellent relationship was the monarch. His detailed account of the first two Cabinet meetings was acclaimed by the queen’s private secretary “as one of the best, clearest, and most practical and intelligible explanations of what the Government proposes to do” that had ever been submitted to her. Keen to exploit the prime minister’s advantage, the Irish Executive urged him to use his growing influence at the palace to secure the queen’s approval for a royal visit to the island. Aware of the prince of Wales’s sybaritic tastes, Mayo and Abercorn dangled a number of pleasures before him. Their emphasis on “diversions” irritated the queen. The visit would simply strengthen the public impression that “amusement” was Edward’s chief object in life, she complained. Nor did she shrink from voicing her opposition to the possible establishment of a permanent royal residence in Ireland. No one went there for “health and relaxation,” she asserted. Nevertheless, the combined lobbying of the prime minister and her private secretary overcame Victoria’s hostility at least to a brief royal tour. The island’s tranquilization was “the most difficult and at the same time the most important subject with which Your Majesty’s Government has at present to deal,” Disraeli patiently explained. Grudgingly, she withdrew her objections on the condition her heir was accompanied by his princess. Her presence might at least keep him out of the arms of another Irish “actress.”9 Meanwhile, a Commons debate provided the government with an opportunity to make an authoritative statement of Irish policy. John Francis

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Maguire, the member for Cork, in what Disraeli derisively dismissed as a “Celtish rant of two hours,” attributed the current quiet of his native land to the heavy presence there of spies, policemen, and government officials. In short, Ireland remained an anomaly in the liberal state. In response, Mayo acknowledged the existence of Irish dissatisfaction with and disloyalty to British rule, but identified the United States as the source and stimulant of Fenianism. He denied that Ireland was an oppressed nation ruled by a foreign power, pointing to Irish domination of the Executive, the judiciary, the civil administration, and the police force. She had a significant parliamentary representation, he reminded the House, her municipalities were elected on a “wide franchise,” her system of poor relief was controlled by local guardians nominated through “a very wide franchise by ratepayers,” and the teachers in the national schools were named by patrons fully two-thirds of whom were priests. In short, it could not be truthfully said that there was “an unnational element” in Ireland’s government and administration. Mayo went on to detail the state’s extensive investment in public works as a counter to nationalist claims that Ireland had derived little material benefit from the Union. He quoted an academic who had characterized the record of reform in Ireland since Catholic emancipation as “the largest peaceful revolution in the history of the world,” and he seized upon the apparent absence of tenant farmers from Fenian ranks and the recent decline in agrarian outrages to deny that Irish tenants were entirely dissatisfied with their lot. There was certainly no need to create peasant proprietors.10 Mayo “really broke down” during this four-hour marathon, prompting Disraeli repeatedly to urge him to get to the policy. This he eventually did with a sketch of the decisions taken in Cabinet, and Disraeli assured the monarch that they had been “favourably received.” Yet the measures on offer were neither courageous nor genuinely constructive. The proposed land legislation was much the same as that first introduced the previous year, when it had been heavily criticized for leaving tenants essentially at the mercy of their landlords. As for the promised land commission and inaction on the Church of Ireland, these laid bare the dilatory character of the entire policy. That the government was “finessing for delay” was all too apparent, “staving off every really critical question as long as they can, offering bribes where they dare, the hope of distant bribes where they dare not, and where their minds are really and finally made up, veiling their thoughts in the language of delusive hesitation and provisional promise.” Punch’s Disraeli was a bemused swineherd unable to drive his charges in a common direction.11

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A sense that the threat of Fenian violence in Britain was receding allowed the Tories the luxury of procrastination. Thus a copy of an address recently adopted in Manchester by the Brotherhood’s Supreme Council contained a condemnation of the Clerkenwell incident as the unauthorized act of individuals completely ignorant “of the terrible power of the agency they employed.” If the meeting and the document represented an attempt to reinvigorate a movement paralyzed by the recent spate of arrests, it did not appear to be succeeding. Fenianism was “pretty well extinguished” so far as any active expression went, one senior Home Office official confidently concluded, though he conceded its “latent existence” in the “heads” of the Irish. The “special machinery” to deal with the subversive organization appeared to be functioning well. The revolutionary nationalists’ “desperate plans” were “all found out and frustrated,” Hardy’s parliamentary undersecretary boasted. Whatever government “is here will know better where to look for the chief movers” should the “dormant” revolutionary organization again become active, he claimed, “for we have a pretty considerable list of the local heads, upon whom hands could be laid.”12 Many of the counter-Fenian measures were progressively relaxed. Colonel Feilding returned to his military command, troops were withdrawn from cities, Volunteers regained custody of their weapons, and the legions of special constables, who ultimately numbered in excess of 113,000, were disbanded. Unfortunately, the already low public confidence in the Metropolitan Police as a counterterrorism force was further undermined by Hardy’s frank admissions in the Commons of its appallingly inept performance at Clerkenwell. The calls for the commissioner’s head increased both in number and volume, but Hardy moved quickly to dent the complaint that there were insufficient rank and file to police and protect the capital’s ever swelling population. He announced the recently approved and substantial increase in the existing establishment. One thousand constables and 120 sergeants, inspectors, and superintendents were to be added to the force. Out of the public eye, he launched “a kind of departmental inquiry” into its organization and administration. Of course, the minority government’s uncertain future meant that there was little likelihood of any of its recommendations being “further dealt with at present,” and in the Commons its Irish policy was under Liberal attack at its most vulnerable point.13 Those “good men” counting on Fenianism to convince the English to introduce “thoroughly reformatory [Irish] legislation” looked to Liberals and Radicals for leadership. John Bright did not disappoint them, delivering a speech on the third evening of the debate that even Disraeli privately

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admired for its “vigor and versatility,” “adroit conciliation,” and seductive moderation. Why was it proper for the state to loan money to tenants, as the Tories proposed, to finance improvements but improper to provide the assistance that would enable them to purchase their farms, Bright asked. “Ownership in the soil could only make the people steadily loyal,” he asserted, before fastening on the Established Church as “the root of every other question in Ireland.” The Radical had never made a better speech in his hearing and the “poor Irish Church” had been “terribly knocked about,” Mayo mournfully admitted. His Cabinet colleague Stanley, no admirer of the institution, noted the total absence of defenders. Plainly, the Fenian troubles were transforming “a languid sentiment of disapproval into an active determination to get rid of the thing altogether.” This development distinguished the church question from land reform, since even members willing, however unenthusiastically, to enhance tenant right were resolutely opposed to the “projects of confiscation” advocated by Bright and Mill. Little wonder Liberals seeking to regain the political initiative focused on the Church of Ireland.14 While Earl Russell declared it to be the duty of Liberals to insist on prompt settlement of both questions, Gladstone was inclined to tread more carefully. Although he had repeatedly identified the Established Church as one of the Irish grievances requiring prompt attention, he worried the question might again take “the Liberal party to martyrdom.” Some of its members opposed disestablishment in Ireland lest it undermine the Church of England. Others, more tactically minded, considered their ranks still too disorganized to risk a major battle, which might give “Disraeli another opportunity.” Naturally, Gladstone denied so “selfish” a consideration. He was similarly cautious in his response to Russell’s calls for tighter controls on the often provocative if not inflammatory Irish nationalist press. This was no time to run the risk of being accused of eroding the fundamentals of the liberal state – freedom of expression and a free press – or to open the door to further limitations on freedom of speech. Confronted by journalistic “excess” and before the introduction of additional restrictions, the government was obliged in the Liberal leader’s opinion to prove that the existing law was not strong enough to restrain offenders. This proof was not currently forthcoming in Ireland, where juries had recently convicted Sullivan and Pigott.15 Denominational education was another of the issues Gladstone had good reason to evade, though Manning declared a “true, full, unimpeded catholic education” the only hope of “keeping Ireland from American anarchy.” But this was a peculiarly hazardous issue for Liberals, many of

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whom considered it the worst possible system of education. “We must make up our minds soon how far we will go in giving State support to Ultramontane Institutions,” one senior Liberal remarked. The knowledge that his party would never hold together behind “any scheme for lending State countenance or support to purely ‘sectarian’ education” saw Gladstone inform Manning that it would be “hopeless and impracticable” to propose the endowment of a denominational university out of the consolidated fund. This effectively left the Church of Ireland in the Liberals’ political spotlight, and one admirer assured Gladstone of its moribund state. Services were failing to attract the poor, he reported, while those persons present were scandalously “undevotional.” They lounged in pews, failed to kneel for prayers, and only half of them stood during the singing of hymns and the reading of the gospel. Why not seek to conciliate the Catholic Irish, therefore, and turn them into friends, by tackling the church question. Priests would be won over, Bishop Moriarty assured the Liberals, if they were made the equal of parsons, and they would bring the people with them.16 The census of 1861 had revealed that the membership of the Church of Ireland amounted to scarcely one-tenth of the population, which left the church with an income far in excess of its pastoral needs. Here was fresh ammunition for its numerous, inveterate, and formidable foes. In Ireland, they were led by the National Association, launched a few years earlier by Cullen as a constitutional alternative to Fenianism. In Britain, the Liberation Society directed a composite opposition of Nonconformists, utilitarian radicals, and Catholics. Its unpopularity and vulnerability made the Church of Ireland a tempting political target for a Liberal leader who had long been edging away from his youthful and absolute commitment to it. Charges of inconsistency were false, one correspondent assured Gladstone, for he had always been careful to disavow its support “under all circumstances.” This assurance played to one of Gladstone’s political strengths, his ability to square “ethical principles” with an “acute sense of the opportune.” Disestablishment of the Irish Church was thus a moral as well as a political imperative. Its political expediency could not be denied. It would unite the vast majority of his fractious followers, cement the electoral allegiance of the swelling ranks of enfranchised nonconformity, trump the Tories’ bid for Irish Catholic votes (a charter for the Catholic University), complicate Disraeli’s political life, move the discussion away from the treacherous education question, and conciliate Ireland’s influential Catholic hierarchy and priesthood. As for fearful Anglican Liberals, they were to be calmed with an assurance that action against the

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Church of Ireland would not lead to an erosion of the position of the Church of England.17 Gladstone met repeatedly during the early spring with a group of senior Liberals to discuss an Irish question going from “grave” to “awful.” They drafted policy and devised parliamentary tactics. He had reintroduced the Compulsory Church Rates Abolition Bill the previous November. Its steady progress was not only serving to rally Liberals disheartened by their leader’s ineffectual and at times intemperate leadership during the debate of the Reform Bill, but also consolidating Nonconformist electoral support. A move against Ireland’s Established Church would surely consolidate these gains, but to be attractive to Dissenters, the legislation would need to provide for disestablishment and deny to any ecclesiastical purpose the vast sums liberated as a result. Somewhat perversely, Gladstone recklessly dismissed those of his own South Lancashire constituents who did not favour this course. “This I suppose is the tendency which Fenian manifestations make on stupid men,” he contemptuously responded. However, his remarks on the church during the Commons debate were “admirable and decisive and had great effect.” On the land question he was far more circumspect, steering well clear of the “revolutionary” proposals advocated by Mill.18 Information on Liberal strategy was being slipped to Disraeli by his friend Lionel de Rothschild, as was word of Gladstone’s nervousness lest the Tories take the church issue “out of his hands and deal with it.” To the Liberal leader’s announcement of his intention to introduce a “specific motion” pledging the House to “the abolition of the Church of Ireland,” Disraeli made a characteristically artful and feline response. “Opposition sharpens men’s sense of justice wonderfully,” he mockingly observed in an allusion to the Liberals’ failure to address the problem while in office. More revealing of his tactical intentions were his comments placing the Church of Ireland within the context of all religious establishments, for the avowed objective of the Liberation Society was the disestablishment of the Church of England. Then, adhering to the dilatory line already agreed in Cabinet, Disraeli insisted that the opinion of the country needed to be taken on so important an action. Several observers, among them the queen, understood him to be threatening an immediate dissolution. This she opposed out of fear, in part, of sectarian conflict. But Disraeli thought the prospect of a general election would unite his own ranks and sow renewed “discordance and disaffection” on the more heavily populated benches opposite, where he had detected several distinct groupings. One cluster of members, while unfriendly to the government, opposed “violent

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measures” against the Irish Church. Another was composed of men doomed to lose their seats in a reformed parliament and for that reason opposed to an immediate dissolution. In short, Disraeli was prepared to gamble that many of the members willing to advance the cause of disestablishment in Ireland were not keen at this time to drive him from office.19 All of the while, he and Cairns were preparing to argue that at issue was “the whole question of national establishments” and thus the Irish Church was merely the stalking horse of critics who desired “the abolition of national establishments in the three Kingdoms.” They hoped to attract some Liberals with the “principle that the State should adopt and uphold religion as an essential portion of the Constitution.” Tactically, Disraeli decided to seek to amend any Liberal measure with a motion that would concede the need for reform of the Irish Church, would accept the desirability of providing for unendowed clergy, and would affirm the state’s first duty “to acknowledge and maintain the religious principle in an established form.”20 On 23 March 1868 Gladstone gave notice of three far-reaching resolutions, debate on which was set for a week hence. Kimberley, the former viceroy, considered them “stringent” and liable to alarm some “friends,” but timely. “We shall at all events unite all who are really Liberals,” he believed, and “what is much more important we shall now have a plain object in view worth fighting for.” Much of the English press had reached a similar conclusion with respect to the Liberals’ motives. After all, the great majority of the estimated 1,250,000 men enfranchised by the Reform Bill were believed to be Nonconformists. Thus, in Wales, increasingly a land of Dissenters as well as of song, the fact that only one member returned from the principality had spoken up on the subject of the Established Church was spurring a demand for the people to “exercise more discernment in the choice of parliamentary candidates.” But what of the Fenians? Could they truly claim the credit for the sudden British commitment to the redress of Irish grievances?21 The politician who made an unavoidable concession before its necessity was generally recognized would earn both public gratitude and a “return,” Gladstone believed, though he drew the line at bowing to “terror or extreme pressure.” Yet his motions were widely read as a reaction to Fenian violence. Just as free trade had come out of the potato blight, so would “Free Churchmen come out of the Fenian conspiracy,” the Nonconformist declared. By touching the “conscience of the community,” the Brotherhood had drawn attention to the “heretofore neglected wrongs of the sister kingdom.” The danger in this perception was quickly on parade in Ireland. Constitutional agitation had nothing to do with Gladstone’s “Showing of

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the White Flag” on the Irish Church, the Irishman trumpeted. The British Parliament was acknowledging the efficacy of violence, and thus the triumph belonged to James Stephens.22 Disraeli saw the opening. Fenianism neither controlled events nor affected the plans and policies of his government, he declared. A church establishment in place for centuries should not be unsettled “under the influence of panic.” It was a line with which he still hoped to capture in a division the votes of those former Whigs who were widely believed to be far less enthusiastic than Liberals for the strike against the Irish Church. There were also those members of the Opposition who were worried about the safety of their seats and thus reluctant to press the issue to the point of dissolution. Perhaps they would absent themselves when the division bells rang. Disraeli could also depend on the support of the monarch, who considered the resolutions a contradiction of her Coronation oath to protect the church. She spoke openly of her need to be formally relieved of the commitment before being called upon to agree to the destruction of its Irish branch. The queen was extraordinarily friendly to the present government and did not wish to see it fall, Hardy assured Disraeli, who chose to believe that her Protestant spirit was reflective of national sentiment. The forthcoming general election would undoubtedly see the “No Popery” cry “revived with terrible earnestness” in the parliamentary boroughs, Disraeli observed to her, while in the counties clergy and gentry could be relied upon to rally to the time-honoured principle of church and state. “It is perhaps providential,” he mused, “that the religious controversy should have arisen to give a color to the character and a form to the action of the newly enfranchised constituencies.”23 The likelihood of sectarian violence set off alarm bells in the royal household, for Gladstone’s resolutions seemed certain to evoke a “No Surrender” response from those Ulster Protestants whose “superior intelligence” and “station in life” made them, at least in the queen’s opinion, more dangerous than “the ignorant peasantry in the South.” So, while holding Gladstone responsible for the heightened social tension, and the increased danger of violence, Victoria cautioned Disraeli not to make the “fatal mistake” of exploiting sectarianism. The assurance he gave was somewhat belied by his conduct in Parliament. Stanley had been selected to move the “dilatory” amendment to Gladstone’s resolutions, which if adopted would defer consideration of the church question until the election of the new Parliament. Although Stanley was the second-ranking member of the party, his choice may well have been dictated by the desire to demonstrate Cabinet unity. The foreign secretary was known to be a far

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from enthusiastic defender of the Church of Ireland. In the event, he was acutely conscious of the “extreme delicacy” of the problem, but his speech was something of a disaster in both delivery and content. His pedestrian manner was a reflection of his resolve not to say anything that might subsequently prove embarrassing either to him personally or to his party, for he was convinced that the great majority of the men on the benches behind him accepted that “some great change must take place in the status of the Irish Church.” Moreover, he may have been privy to Disraeli’s tactical musings that if Gladstone was beaten only narrowly on the resolutions, a frightened Tory rank and file would be more willing to accept an arrangement that would satisfy the Irish. Finally, Stanley was confident when he rose to speak that the Liberals’ resolutions would amount to little because of the certain opposition to them by the Tory majority in the Lords.24 The spirits of fellow ministers and Tory backbenchers who were dismayed by Stanley’s “frigid and written discourse,” which he failed even to read well, were lifted the following evening by Gathorne Hardy’s stirring defence of the Irish Church. However, Disraeli’s speech three days later, just before the vote on the Tory amendment, was another embarrassment. He became progressively more “confused and maudlin” with each glass he downed of a straw-coloured liquid that looked suspiciously like brandy and water. He then startled listeners with the bizarre accusation that Gladstone was “the Representative of a combination of Roman Catholics and Ritualists to seize upon the supreme authority of the Realm.” When the House divided, the government suffered a crushing defeat. Not that Disraeli had any intention of immediately resigning, having again been informed by his confidential source of the Liberals’ reluctance to bring forward a confidence motion. Instead, they had resolved to win the public’s confidence before putting an end “to the present reign of trickery.” Or as Kimberley privately admitted, “A premature attack would spoil all.”25 In preparation for an electoral appeal to Protestant sentiment, Disraeli finally broke off the negotiations with the Irish hierarchy on the charter for the Catholic University. His excuse was the complete episcopal control of the institution envisaged by the hierarchy. This was “irreconcilable” with the government’s desire for “an institution which, altogether denominational in character, would be thoroughly independent, self-governed, and free from external influence, either political or religious.” Clearly, no matter the price in Ireland, Disraeli was not about to abandon the dangerous and cynical strategy of exploiting Protestant sentiment. This was Easter, after all. All places of business were closed on Good Friday, with

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the exception of bakers selling hot cross buns and fishmongers catering to the traditional demand for salt cod. Churches were filled, and theatres opened only to stage productions of sacred music, such as Handel’s Messiah. Easter Monday was another holiday, but one honoured in a more secular fashion. London’s museums and galleries were crammed with visitors, while trains carried excursionists to the countryside of the southwest or the beaches of the south coast.26 Hardy was one minister loath to play the Protestant card too aggressively for fear of losing the rubber. Sectarian sentiment must not be encouraged too actively, he agreed with the queen, “as it would be very dangerous, and might cause a most alarming feud.” Nevertheless, as Gladstone’s resolutions steadily made their way through the Commons, Disraeli continued to exhibit less discretion and fewer scruples. He circulated with the aid of the Tory press the absurd charge that High Church ritualists and Roman Catholics not only were in league to overthrow the Church of England as well as that of Ireland, but were also conspiring to re-establish papal supremacy in Great Britain. He was further emboldened by early indications of his strategy’s electoral benefits. The Conservatives made an unexpected gain in a Bristol by-election, where the Liberal candidate was “well known as a strong dissenter and energetic assailant of the Established Church in England as well as in Ireland.” They won another by-election with an unexpectedly handsome majority in East Kent, where parsons gave “breakfasts” to their parishioners before sending them to the polling booth. These twin successes were grasped as favourable sectarian straws in the wind. Less could be made of the Conservative gain in the small borough of Cockermouth, for it was less an expression of popular will than the result of a shift in the opinion of a pair of large magnates. However, as the hour of the passage of the church resolutions approached, these spring poll results were read as proof that the forthcoming general election would see a “severe” struggle.27 Disraeli hoped by clinging to office to allow a maturing of “the real feeling of the country on the threatened revolution.” More than 4,000 petitions deploring the resolutions and carrying an estimated 500,000 signatures had been laid on the table of the House by the end of April. There was a “national sentiment astir which is very grave and significant,” he assured the monarch. He rallied those members of his Cabinet inclined to resign, given the defeat on the church, with an emotional plea to stand fast in defence of royal supremacy and the union of church and state. Conservatives were honour bound to resist a revolution that amounted to “an entire abrogation of the English Constitution.” Disraeli’s sly suggestion

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in the House that the sovereign had given him carte blanche on dissolution did provoke Gladstone into a furious response, only for the Tory leader to rescue the situation with an exhibition of “extraordinary tact, temper and ability.” He clarified his earlier remarks, explaining that his advice to the queen had been to dissolve Parliament when the state of public business allowed and to do so on the basis of the new constituencies, and then mocked the Opposition’s refusal to introduce a confidence motion. The Liberals reluctance to engage in a decisive test of strength appeared to confirm the rumours of Gladstone’s inability to secure promises of support from old Whig warhorses. They had discovered, it was said, that a Liberal administration would be staffed by “new men.” Certainly, the Liberal leader was quietly asking himself whether he commanded a majority on issues other than the Irish Church. Moreover, he did not wish to force the Tories out of office on a vote with a smaller majority than that on the Irish Church resolutions. “This would be equivalent to a defeat,” one Liberal strategist suggested. “Dizzy would dissolve at once appealing to the country against the factious conduct of the opposition.” The Liberals decided to wind up the outstanding business in both Houses and then appeal to the country on the basis of the new constituencies.28 Business had been wound up by late July. An amended version of the Church Rates Bill had been passed, but Gladstone’s resolution calling for the temporary suspension of Irish ecclesiastical appointments in order to furnish proof of Parliament’s “liberality” and commitment to “Ecclesiastical Equality” had gone down to the expected defeat in the Lords, prompting the Irishman again to dilate on the “futility” of constitutional agitation in a legislative body dominated by the English. Meanwhile, the Reform Club, acting as “the Liberal Party organization,” was keeping a close eye on Liberal members of Parliament. Those whose support of the disestablishment of the Irish Church appeared to be weakening were reportedly being threatened with the loss of the party’s nomination. In a pitch for Dissenter and Catholic Irish votes, Liberals staged enthusiastic gatherings all over the country to discuss Ireland’s grievances, especially the need to disendow all of her religious sects. More than 7,000 people crowded into the Metropolitan Tabernacle on 22 April, with another 2,000 unable to get into the building, to listen to John Bright denounce the Irish Church as a “standing and gigantic insult to the majority of the people of Ireland.” A similar meeting at the Guildhall two months later broke up in disorder when defenders of the church stormed the platform. The opponents of the resolutions were being organized in associations and gathered in assemblies, of all of which Disraeli was keeping a careful count.29

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Conservative voters were urged to stand “firmly together” and inform “renegade, half-hearted Protestants” and “Church-hating Radicals” seeking to pander to the violent “Fenian children of the Pope” that they would not be represented by men who had proved themselves to be “traitors to the most vital principles of the constitution.” Inflammatory rhetoric, placards offering the people a choice between “‘The Queen or the Pope’” or calling on them to assert their rights as freemen were always likely to incite disturbances, and Liberals naturally held Disraeli and the Tories responsible for them. The prime minister had not ceased to deplore at full volume the “confusion” that disestablishment was certain to bring to Ireland, to claim its advocates had as their ultimate objective the overthrow of the English Church, and to predict in the event of a Liberal victory the eventual “absorption of all sects in the Church of Rome.” Such “sensational and oracular utterances” were singularly inappropriate coming from the mouth of a man whose patriotism, Liberals responded, was that of a Jew who looked to Palestine as the home of his affections. These appeals to latent anti-Semitism were on occasion curiously leavened with a strong dose of anti-Catholicism. Thus some Liberals identified ultramontanes as admirers of Disraeli. As evidence they might have cited a recent editorial in the Tablet, which applauded the Tory leader for vindicating and maintaining those Conservative principles that were part of a Catholic’s creed and for opposing those principles of liberalism that threatened “the subversion both of religion and civil society.”30 In the struggle to capture the votes of the newly enfranchised, the Conservatives enjoyed several advantages – they had piloted the Reform Bill through Parliament; they were critics of the laissez-faire radicalism of the Manchester school, which numbered John Bright among its graduates and prompted his opposition to legislation that would restrict to ten hours the normal working day; they were “less dismissive of robust popular culture than the Liberals”; and they were actively seeking to construct a “mass movement” out of the building blocks of ethnicity and religion. Intense dislike of the Irish and hatred of Catholicism were inseparable in large areas of industrial Britain, and William Murphy and his “disciples” were again at work. He and they were accused of arousing fanaticism by “the basest appeals to religious animosity,” and in the ensuing disturbances, the Liberal press found fresh evidence of “the large and increasing degree of antipathy manifested by a very considerable proportion of the English operative classes towards those of Celtic origin.” This “hatred of race,” the Daily News charged in a widely reprinted article, was rooted in the long association of the Irish with depressed wages, which the severe distress of

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the previous winter had inevitably revived, in their reputation as strikebreakers, and in the sectarian enmity with which Catholic Irish and Protestant English regarded one another. Nor had Fenianism ceased to act as a serious ethno-religious irritant. It continued to excite “an almost hysterical fear and near-pathological hatred of the [Catholic] Irish in Britain,” who were popularly believed to be protecting the Fenian activists.31 Fenianism within the Catholic community gave a fillip to the Orange Order. Unlike their unruly Irish counterparts, English Orangemen “very quickly internalized a wider, more mainstream and politically conservative ideology, avowedly defending the principles of the established church and the Tory Party.” But the mutual baiting of Orange and Green frequently degenerated into street brawls, causing some Tories to distance themselves from such excesses. The tendency of Murphy and his associates to visit in the run-up to the general election those towns with a substantial Irish population where Liberal principles were supposed to be “on the ascendant” – especially Radical constituencies – appeared to be no coincidence. In Rochdale, the “Gospel Garibaldi” staged his rally almost opposite the home of John Bright, and his crusade quickly acquired an even more marked partisan colouring. He invariably visited areas where the Tory interest was depressed, one provincial newspaper noted, “and where, if it could be raised on any terms, even on the sacking of a few scores of poor Papists’ houses, the advantage would be cheap at any price.”32 The disturbances had begun early in the year but steadily gathered momentum. Murphy was blamed for a succession of riots that erupted first in Ashton-under-Lyne but soon cursed other industrial towns of South Lancashire and neighbouring Cheshire. In Dukenfield, the spark was an attack by a group of Catholic Irish on a party of people returning from a lecture by one of Murphy’s assistants. In response, several hundred young men, many of them teenagers, assembled in Stalybridge and then marched on the nearby town, where they smashed the windows and vandalized the interior of the Catholic chapel. In this volatile atmosphere, another explosion was almost inevitable, as Ashton-under-Lyne painfully discovered. An anti-Catholic meeting, graced by the presence of Dublin’s most notorious if aging Protestant demagogue, the Reverend Tresham “Trashy” Gregg, and attended by a large number of people sporting Orange favours, was attacked by more than 200 Catholic Irishmen. Two days of rioting ensued, during which two Catholic chapels, two priests’ residences, a school, a hall, 110 houses, and the shops in streets where the Irish were concentrated were all sacked and several persons shot. For many in England, the disturbances were simply fresh proof of the alien and

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peculiarly violent character of the Irish, who declined to fight fair like an English mob but resorted to “the cowardly practice of arming with murderous weapons, from a scythe to a revolver.” Further disturbances in Oldham, Bolton, Huddersfield, and Haslingden – and in the last named town the young and armed Catholic defenders of their chapels were organized by Michael Davitt, soon to be appointed the successor to the imprisoned Ricard Burke as the Fenians’ arms agent in Britain – kept ethnic and sectarian tensions simmering and occasionally boiling over throughout the summer.33 The Tory government’s failure to act promptly and decisively against the “No Popery rioters” may have reflected a belief that, unlike the Fenians, they “did not seem to threaten the established order.” Then again, local disturbances fell within the purview of local authorities and any attempt to silence Murphy and his ilk raised the emotive issue of freedom of speech. Tory newspapers dutifully laid the violence at the door of those magistrates who, in “places where Liberal principles [were] ascendant,” either sought to prevent Murphy from speaking or failed to guard against disruption whenever he succeeded in delivering his lectures. The “Stalybridge lads” who had marched on Dukenfield were portrayed as defenders of “their favourite lecturers” against “a fanatical Irish mob, and a truculent votepurchasing-at-all-costs magistracy.” But evangelicals joined the Tories in their criticism of Irish Catholic attempts to silence the provocative Murphy. “Romanists,” who were reminded they had been permitted to establish themselves in the midst of British Protestants, to build chapels, and to “organize and direct all the forces of religious propagandism,” now stood accused of being determined that no one should be heard “on the opposite side but at the risk of having his head broken or something worse.”34 Murphy’s appeals for protection were given a cool reception by the central government. He was advised to apply to the local magistrates. Replying to a Catholic member of Parliament who had charged the government with a failure to maintain order and with effectively shielding Murphy, Hardy expressed sympathy with the member’s “indignation” but explained that he was obliged “to look to legal measures and consequences” and could only act following a request for assistance from a local authority. All had been done which the law allowed, he insisted. Thus Murphy’s “filthy pamphlet,” the Confessional Unmasked, was already before the Queen’s Bench for a judicial decision on whether its dissemination could be prevented as an obscene publication. That question soon received a positive answer. From the mayor of Stalybridge the Home Office demanded both an explanation of the local authority’s tardy response to

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mob attacks on Catholic chapels and schools and a report on the measures now in place to ensure no recurrence of “such outrages.” A similar demand went to the mayor of Ashton following the rioting there, and this heralded a somewhat more assertive and interventionist government policy. The mayor was instructed to attempt to discourage a planned Orange procession through the town on Whit Friday. In the event it went ahead, the police were to be placed in a state of readiness, specials were to be sworn, an application was to be made to the military command in Manchester for troops in aid of the civil power, local magistrates were to be reminded of their power to ban processions that threatened to result in a breach of the peace, and a notice was to be published announcing the banning of this demonstration on that ground. Two months later, Bolton’s magistrates were advised by the Home Office that while they had no power to prevent Murphy from delivering a lecture in a private room, they should caution him that he would not be permitted to speak in the streets or in any other public place and that in the name of public order “all necessary steps” would be taken “to prevent him doing so.” This firmer line reflected, in part, a deepening suspicion that the Fenians were beneficiaries of the ethnic enmity that Murphy fostered and exploited. “I know some Fenians here that are very glad that Murphy is coming,” an Irish policeman later reported from Manchester, “because they hope that he will be able to rise [sic] the passions of the Irish Catholics and cause them to hold fast to Fenianism and make men join who kept back before.”35 Against the backdrop of the destructive disturbances in the textile towns and acrimonious skirmishing in Parliament over the Irish Church, the prince and princess of Wales embarked in mid-April on their goodwill visit to Ireland. Fortunately, the shocking news from Australia did not arrive in time to reinforce the queen’s revived opposition to a visit she considered ill-timed given the recent Fenian outrages and the notorious disloyalty of the Irish. The Irish Executive’s concern for the royal couple’s safety and fears of a hostile reception in Dublin were eased by Superintendent Ryan. Fenianism was in a depressed state, being low on funds and receiving precious little monetary assistance from Irish America, he reported. As additional insurance against “unpleasantness” in Dublin and to “create a good spirit,” Mayo began “gradually letting out the Habeas Corpus Prisoners and getting nearly all the worst of them off to America.”36 With an eye to the visit’s popular success, the prince’s dress was carefully designed to flatter the Irish. He wore a green cravat and sported a rose surrounded by shamrocks on the breast of his blue frock coat. Dublin Castle was temporarily transformed into a royal palace; St Patrick’s

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Cathedral was “superbly decorated” in preparation for the prince’s installation as a Knight of St Patrick; quays and public buildings were lavishly ornamented with flags, streamers, and mottoes; and triumphal arches spanned the streets of the royal route. “Everything has gone off splendidly – Enormous crowds and the Prince and Princess cheered to the echo,” Mayo informed Disraeli, though as he admitted to Hardy that “there was a little hissing occasionally but it was quite drowned in a moment by the cheers.” Since the route from the castle to the cathedral went through the “Liberties,” where “narrow and bad streets” were filled with “bad and now disaffected people” who might seize this opportunity to express “bad feeling,” it was lined with troops. Thanks to Cullen’s decision to permit Catholics, including priests, to attend the cathedral ceremony, following an assurance of its simple and essentially non-denominational character, the event was another public relations triumph. Edward then passed an agreeable two days at the Punchestown Races, where he was received “with great cheering” by the immense crowd. He also unveiled a statue of Edmund Burke at the front gate of Trinity College and paid a visit to the Catholic University. Welcomed by Cullen as chancellor, sitting beneath a large portrait of Pius ix and between the cardinal and the viceroy, the heir to the throne greeted a line of Catholic dignitaries. Finally, he and the princess attended a military review and a Grand Ball carefully arranged so as to appear an entirely spontaneous affair.37 To Disraeli, who had belatedly doubted the wisdom of the visit in the context of the sensitive church question, Mayo suggested that its evident success would “act to some extent on your government if not in gaining votes at least in softening asperities.” The Nonconformist, on the other hand, credited Gladstone’s church resolutions for the cordial reception given the royal couple. The success breathed fresh life into the issue of a regular if not permanent royal presence in Ireland. Victoria continued to resist anything beyond frequent visits by “different” members of her family, but the pressure was mounting for greater royal attention to Ireland. Support for an Irish royal residence was growing in Parliament, Disraeli advised her. The loyalty of the Irish and their attachment to the Crown would be strengthened and the threat of Fenianism lessened by additional visits, especially by the sovereign, the duke of Cambridge agreed. He had been a member of the royal party. Mayo considered the question of a royal residence of such moment that he wished Abercorn to join him in making the case to Disraeli, backed by a threat of resignation. The prime minister might then inform the queen of his inability to “resist a demand made by the Irish Government backed by the whole voice of the Irish people.”

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Indeed, the establishment of an “Irish Balmoral” was taken up by the British press. Punch depicted prince and princess in the year 1869 attending an Irish hunt in the company of contented natives. Edward indicated that his income of £100,000 a year barely sufficed to maintain the dignity of his present position and would need to be increased by a full 50 per cent if he were to maintain a residence in Ireland. So generous a supplement received the cautious support of the Times, which asked why the prince should not, with additional fiscal help from Parliament, spend several months of each year among his mother’s Irish subjects. Erin would prove “as easy to please as Scotland ever was” once she was persuaded that Britain regarded her as a member of the family and not merely a foster child or “pensioned alien,” the influential Freeman’s Journal promised. However, mere “gewgaws” that caused the Irish merely to be “momentarily oblivious of the disadvantages of their position” would never suffice to pacify the island and secure popular acceptance of the Union. What was required was “a really remedial policy,” and this Gladstone promised to produce if the Liberals won the general election.38 The sweltering summer of 1868, with temperatures in July consistently reaching the mid-80s Fahrenheit and topping 100 degrees on the 21st of the month, temporarily diverted attention from the approaching electoral battle. There was some discussion in the press of a dramatic change in the British climate, with suggestions that for relief gentlemen wear wet cabbage leaves inside their top hats. Less affluent Londoners found a modicum of relief by promenading along another of Joseph Bazalgette’s engineering wonders, the recently opened stretch of the Thames Embankment. Hailed as “the handsomest pavement in the world,” it covered the “last of his great intercepting sewers,” a duct for water and gas mains, and a tunnel for an extension of the underground railway. Standing on Westminster Bridge, pedestrians might look down on the “Mother of Parliaments” and up at Big Ben with its thirteen-ton bell. Passengers on stuffy trains, meanwhile, were promised relief from tobacco smoke. Special carriages were at last to be set aside for smokers, who had previously exercised “no small degree of moral terrorism over anyone daring to object” to their “filthy habit.” Tobacco terrorists were in no way to blame, however, for the horrifying rail tragedy in mid-August at Abergele in North Wales. The Irish Mail, one of the fastest services in the kingdom and popularly dubbed the “Wild Irishman,” exploded into a “burning fiery furnace” following a collision with wagons carrying petroleum. Among those who escaped the inferno were several members of the Irish viceroy’s immediate family, but thirty-three other passengers perished in the flames.39

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The news from Ireland was similarly sombre. The enduring land problem had been tragically highlighted by a bloody incident in Tipperary, where William Scully, having purchased land from Lord Derby, reduced security of tenure to a cruel farce and personally supervised the eviction of thirty families. Encased in “body armour,” foolishly acting “the part of Bailiff,” surrounded by policemen, he escaped assassination, but several of his protectors were less fortunate. The employment of policemen as bodyguards was considered another severe error of judgment, for there was no absolutely secure protection from determined gunmen. Thus the Scully incident was unlikely to reassure “the well-disposed” or “inspire fear into the violators of public peace.” The “Caliph of Bagdad” could not have committed a greater injustice than that of which Scully was guilty, Strathnairn remarked, yet nothing could excuse “planned, deliberate and organized assassination.” If many reform-minded Liberals recognized organized lawlessness and intimidation as chronic Irish problems, they seized upon the “deplorable tragedy” in Tipperary as fresh proof of the necessity for the next Parliament to protect “the interests of the occupiers of the soil of Ireland.”40 The Fenians’ readiness to exploit “every occasion of Riot & Disturbance” simply made the need for reform more pressing. The attempted murder of a senior policeman in County Limerick; arms robberies in County Cork; the gathering of forty Fenian leaders in the Yorkshire city of Leeds, reportedly to plot mischief during the general election; and a “sort of Fenian outrage” in Paris, which saw an Irishman shake his stick at a passing member of the British royal family and yell “down with the English” all sapped the confidence of officials that the Brotherhood had effectively been “put down.” Hence the decision to permit the police forces of those communities where the Fenians were believed to be well organized to retain for the time being the revolvers distributed following the Manchester incident. However, as the Home Office was at pains to impress upon police commanders, the weapons were not to be used in election riots unless there was clear evidence of Fenian involvement. Meanwhile, the Irish Executive was in a state of flux. Abercorn had at last realized his lifelong ambition of elevation to a dukedom, and Mayo, the real power in the administration, had finally resigned as chief secretary. Mayo’s initial intention was to succeed Monck in Canada, only to be frightened off by the dominion’s decision to economize by slashing the governor general’s salary. Even though the Colonial Office promptly vetoed the action, considering it impossible for “a Man of Mayo’s position” to hold the office “with anything like dignity” on a mere £6,000 a year, Mayo still declined

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to go to a country where his salary was likely to be a topic of public discussion. He accepted the Indian viceroyalty instead.41 The selection of a new chief secretary created a small difficulty, for Mayo’s tight rein on the viceroy had been bitterly resented by members of Abercorn’s family. The departing chief secretary was not impressed with the lord lieutenant’s work ethic, and he advised Disraeli that if his successor was to carry on the Irish business successfully, he needed to be a member of the Cabinet. Neither Mayo nor Disraeli considered any of the Irish Tories in the Commons up to the job, but the prime minister’s choice of John Wilson-Patten surprised many onlookers. Personally popular and widely respected “as a gentleman of great Experience of Parliamentary work,” having sat for North Lancashire since 1832, Wilson-Patten had never shone in debate or shown any great interest in Ireland. Nor did he inspire confidence in his ministerial colleagues, for he was transparently “very nervous at the prospect of what [lay] before him.” He doubted his ability to master Irish policy and did not relish crossing swords with Gladstone. Disraeli sought to put his mind at rest. He would handle all questions of public policy, leaving to Wilson-Patten the secondary task of substantiating, explaining, or enlarging “‘upon what had been previously said.” But the news of Thomas Larcom’s retirement as undersecretary saw the prime minister make an even more puzzling and controversial appointment to the Irish Executive. He filled the vacancy on the very eve of the general election, much to the indignation of the Liberals who were confident they would form the next government. His choice was Sir Edward Wetherall, a career military administrator whose ignorance of Ireland and her problems exceeded even that of the new chief secretary.42 If, following the Clerkenwell tragedy, Fenian violence began to influence the political agenda, there was a lack of consensus on a program of action. More liberally inclined Britons favoured remedial measures in the form of greater respect of the Irish people, the establishment of genuine religious equality, and land reform. But little leadership was provided by a minority Conservative government committed to the defence of the Church of Ireland and representative of the landed interest. Even the Tories’ willingness to grant a charter to the Catholic University was hedged by terms drafted with their Protestant supporters in mind. Indeed, they plumped for show over substance. The heir to the throne and his wife were despatched on a visit to the troubled land in the sentimental belief that this would promote “loyalism” among a people only too aware of the local shortcomings of the liberal state in which they lived. But the Liberals, desperate to get back into office, fastened on the disestablishment of the

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Church of Ireland as the issue that would unite the party and carry them to victory in the approaching general election. They also saw it as a means of gaining the confidence and support of the influential Catholic clergy, who it was hoped would bring the people with them and thus help isolate the Fenians from the population. Gladstone was seeking “to make the Irish choose between constitutionalism and Fenianism and to express their choice by support for the Liberal party.” The Tories, on the other hand, stood as the champions of the union of church and state and of the royal supremacy, and they accused the Liberals of cravenly allowing Fenianism to determine their policy. But the politicization of the future of Ireland’s Established Church was inevitably accompanied by ethnic and sectarian violence that promised to benefit the Fenians.43 Simmering in the background and occasionally threatening to boil over, at least in Ireland, was the problem presented by the members of the Brotherhood who were sentenced to long terms of penal servitude. They saw themselves as political prisoners and demanded special treatment as such. The state declared that they had been prosecuted and convicted of crimes and thus were ordinary criminals.

9 Politics and Political Prisoners

“Disraeli is surprisingly sanguine about the Elections. I confess I am not. I think there is a foregone conclusion in the mind of the country that Gladstone should have a turn now but I think he will have a fall over the Irish Church,” one parliamentary undersecretary admitted to another. What was best for the interests of the party was for him “always the same as the country,” the prime minister responded when questioned on the wisdom of appointing Protestant firebrands to vacant preferments. His election address, effectively the party’s manifesto, was similarly sectarian. The Tories would maintain Protestant institutions and defend the rights of property, he promised, whereas the Liberals, as Gladstone’s church resolutions revealed, would seek to dissolve the essential union between church and state. Conservatives would meet all such measures with “an uncompromising resistance,” Disraeli vowed, because the connection of religion with the exercise of political authority was “one of the main safeguards of the civilization of man.” The breaking of that bond in Ireland would not only invite religious rancour but also diminish the security if not sanctity of private property. Disestablishment, in short, was a contagious disease that would be spread rapidly from Ireland to England.1 This provocative electoral strategy enjoyed neither the unwavering cooperation of the monarch nor the unanimous support of the Cabinet. The queen, fearing accusations of partisanship and perhaps privately critical of the “narrow” spirit of the defence of the Established Church, declined to approve all the honours Disraeli wished to shower on politically useful persons. Fearful that Stanley, another of his critics, would feed the queen’s doubts, the prime minister begged the foreign secretary not to “stab” him in the back either privately or publicly. Disraeli did have in Cairns a loyal Cabinet ally, and he could depend on Tory newspapers and the largest

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agent of their distribution. The owner of W.H. Smith & Son, quick to recognize the demand for reading material by rail passengers, had paid handsomely two decades earlier to become “official bookstall contractor to the London and North Western Railway,” and from there he extended his monopoly to all the other principal termini. Smith’s joining the Conservative Party was rumoured to have been the result of his suffering the humiliation of being blackballed when nominated for membership of the Liberals’ Reform Club, but for whatever reason Tory newspapers were more prominently and accessibly displayed than their more numerous Liberal competitors on railway platform newspaper stalls.2 Gladstone’s church resolutions were assailed by Tories as a panicstricken Liberal response to the “terrorists,” who were not seeking the dismantling of the Irish Church but “the abrogation of the Act of Union, and the establishment of an Irish Republic.” By late September, this election strategy appeared to be enjoying some success. Party managers put at 330 the number of Tories likely to be returned to Parliament, a figure confirmed a month later by an eminent Manchester solicitor widely reputed to possess “the most accurate & extensive electioneering knowledge in England.” If these predictions seemed optimistic, given the fact that considerably more Liberal candidates than Conservative were standing unopposed, Disraeli admitted to no doubt of their accuracy. Even colleagues who did not rule out a Liberal victory believed the Tory party would at least emerge from the campaign so strengthened in Parliament that the Liberals would either be deterred from “supporting or countenancing any extreme measures” or be unable to enact them into law. However, the reunited Liberals were plainly tightening their grip on the Roman Catholic population of the Celtic periphery. “Not a Catholic will be with us,” Disraeli had conceded from the outset. More disturbing was the mounting evidence of the failure of so many Nonconformists, Scottish, Welsh, and even Northern Irish, to harken to his siren call. They had stabbed him and his party in the back, he bitterly complained in late November.3 Gladstone had introduced the church resolutions with Nonconformist and Catholic voters in mind. He was receiving the support of Archbishop Manning, who assured him that disestablishment would speed the reconciliation of the two “races” and make everything else much easier. The righting of this “great wrong” would be less a leap in the dark and more a “step onward into light.” But one former Irish viceroy issued a caution. This measure, he warned, would almost certainly fall “stillborn” among the Catholic Irish unless it brought them some material advantage. On the other hand, legislation that left churches, parsonages, and glebes in the

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hands of the Church of Ireland and gave their equivalent to Roman Catholics and Presbyterians would so closely resemble a concurrent endowment that Liberal unity would be jeopardized and Nonconformist support forfeited. The Wesleyans made plain their alarm at statements that appeared to suggest Gladstone’s intention to appropriate a portion of the property of a disestablished Church of Ireland “to the endowment of Catholic Schools in which the Popish religion [would] be taught – in many cases by Friars and Nuns.” At their general meeting, held as fate would have it in Ireland, this important segment of the Nonconformist community passed a resolution protesting any “endowment of Popery.” That an estimated 150,000 Methodists were now on the electoral registers illustrated the political danger, and Liberal managers feared the loss of “‘many, many seats’” should Gladstone follow “too ‘Catholic’ a line.”4 The Liberal leader’s decision not to visit Dublin, pleading exhaustion, may have been a response to the managers’ concern, though his choice of the often bleak North Wales coastal resort of Penmaenmawr as his holiday haven was passing strange. Somewhat closer to the mark was his questioning of the “moral effect” or political advantage of an Irish excursion that “would seem to be and would be denounced as agitation.” Certainly, even Liberal Irish landlords had been unnerved by his comments on the Scully incident. They thought he was sailing too “near the wind as to the rights of property,” while a leading candidate for a seat in a Gladstone Cabinet fancied Liberals had enough on their hands “in the immense questions connected with the Church settlement.” They must avoid raising expectations that could only be satisfied following a struggle tantamount to a revolution, the duke of Argyll remarked. The furthest that he and another potential Cabinet minister, Robert Lowe, appeared ready to go was Chichester Fortescue’s earlier land bill. Cautioned, Gladstone focused on the church. He aimed to be “clear, full and systematic” without putting out “a full creed” or providing “much reasoning for delicately trained palates.”5 The East Kent by-election, where the church resolutions had failed to pay the expected electoral dividend in the currency of the “Irish or Catholic vote,” had been a bitter disappointment to Gladstone. But more recent signs were more encouraging. Tory talk of “levelling up” invited Catholic ridicule, because no one expected to see members of the Irish hierarchy seated in the House of Lords or provisions made for Catholic cathedrals, palaces, and princely episcopal incomes. The Tablet, which had been Conservative in its political sympathies, was purchased during the campaign by Henry Vaughan, a future archbishop and cardinal. He installed

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Edward Collins of the Hull Advertiser as editor, and the journal immediately endorsed an Irish policy of disestablishment, disendowment, tenant right, and “purely and strictly denominational education.” In response to a request from one of his priests for political guidance, Bishop Goss of Liverpool replied that the church had “no politics” but was conservative in what it found − “constitutionalism in England, absolutism in Rome, republicanism in America.” Nevertheless, on election day, Catholic voters in the port were reportedly assembled in church schools and escorted to the poll by their priests. Ireland was an even greater electoral prize, and Chichester Fortescue assured Gladstone of the overwhelming Catholic support both for him personally and the Liberal Party.6 Ireland’s most influential Catholic was no great admirer of the Liberal leader, whom he privately described as treacherous on Irish issues. The introduction of the church resolutions had caused the collapse, Cullen believed, of the negotiations with the Tories on a charter and endowment for his Catholic University. Moreover, his congenital distrust of the English remained as strong as ever. He considered both major political parties equally hostile to Irish Catholics and only inclined to aid them if they gained something in the process. In this frame of mind, he continued to issue “flaming” pastorals that dwelt upon “the unparalleled sufferings and miseries of the people of Ireland from bad government.” Meanwhile, David Moriarty was cautioning leading Liberals that disestablishment of the Church of Ireland alone would not “remove disaffection and make Irish people contented and loyal.” The education question needed to be settled, legislation enacted granting security of tenure to the island’s tenantry, and more frequent visits made to Ireland by members of the royal family. However, disestablishment would be an important step towards the conciliation of the “utterly disaffected” Catholic clergy and thus the mass of the people whose minds they controlled. But Gladstone ignored the bishop’s advice to endorse some form of concurrent endowment, being more anxious to court the Nonconformist vote in Britain and persuade Cullen that he was as one with his “Eminence’s way of thinking.” Recognizing that all hope of securing a charter for the Catholic University from the Tories had gone, his self-confidence and self-esteem swollen by the flattering attention he was receiving, not least the precedence accorded him during the visit to Dublin of the prince of Wales, and seeing in disestablishment a severe Protestant defeat and a Catholic triumph, Cullen finally committed himself and the hierarchy to the Liberals in the general election.7 Another force was John MacHale, the octogenarian clerical nationalist, who issued a characteristically provocative address in which he accused

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landlords of forcing their tenants to vote against their consciences. John MacEvilly, bishop of Galway and a loyal Cullenite within MacHale’s ecclesiastical fiefdom, was similarly determined to prevent the return of any candidate who would vote for Disraeli and “his Orange gang.” The “death knell of Toryism has tolled for ever in Galway,” he was soon boasting, while in Limerick Dean O’Brien was also urging Catholics to unite behind Gladstone. Priests were going to “blameable lengths in the same direction” throughout the island, an angry Strathnairn informed London. The “political ascendancy” of the Catholic clergy had reached unprecedented proportions. Candidates and voters were reportedly being denounced from the altar if they failed to declare their support for disestablishment and disendowment of the Church of Ireland. Inflammatory references to the Cromwellian conquest and the Battle of the Boyne, appeals to ethnic hatred of the “Anglo-Saxons,” and dire warnings of the imminent arrival of marauding bands of Orangemen rallied Catholic voters and non-voters alike. The disenfranchised were employed to intimidate those voters who could not be persuaded to vote Liberal, and the despatch of troops to every part of the island to maintain order inevitably led to bloody confrontations. The Liberals gained an additional ten seats in Ireland.8 In England, the Dissenters’ “remarkable” enthusiasm for Gladstone’s “Irish Church policy” found one expression in the Liberation Society’s generous funding of Liberal candidates. The party was, in turn, secretly subsidizing the Reform League’s efforts to mobilize the newly enfranchised workingman. For its part, the league was expected to dissuade Radicals from standing in constituencies where they would divide the anti-Tory vote. That some Liberals viewed this arrangement as a one-way street was apparent in Manchester, where Ernest Jones had secured a Liberal nomination for one of the city’s three seats only for his prospects to be sabotaged by middle-class suspicion of this “fearful blackguard, socially, domestically and politically.” Mitchell Henry came forward as an “independent” Liberal, and while he withdrew from the poll at the very last minute, he still attracted sufficient votes to allow a Conservative to defeat Jones. “A political career that might have done something has been stopped,” the defeated candidate lamented. And while he topped the poll in an extraordinary party contest to select the Liberal candidate for the by-election necessitated by the discovery that the successful Tory was ineligible to sit in Parliament, Jones succumbed to pneumonia within days of this last victory. Another Radical and defender of Fenians who found his ambition for a parliamentary career blighted was W.P. Roberts. News of the solicitor’s intention to stand in Finsbury precipitated a savage personal assault by a local Liberal

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organ. “All those who approve of the Manchester murder and the Clerkenwell massacre will no doubt vote for … the Manchester solicitor who defended the Fenian assassins,” the North London Advertiser observed, but all “true Englishmen” would rally to Gladstone’s banner and thus enable him to complete the work of Irish pacification.9 The Liberals, as expected, did very well in heavily Nonconformist Wales, where the Reform Bill had given only the smallest increase to the principality’s representation in Parliament. The award of a second seat to Merthyr Tydfil brought the total to thirty-three, but the effective enfranchisement of the urban working classes doubled the number of voters nationally while multiplying them tenfold in Merthyr. The Liberals’ platform appeared “tailor-made” for the electorate, and led by the Baner ac Amserau Cymru, the Welsh-language press accused an English-speaking, Anglican, and Conservative-voting aristocracy of tyranny in their relations with tenants. Radicals likened the principality’s predicament to that of Ireland, prompting at least one alarmed Tory to warn of a “‘Welsh Fenian movement against the owners of property.’” For others, the political activism of dissenting clergy was all too reminiscent of the conduct of Irish priests. Nonconformist ministers helped to generate an “extraordinary enthusiasm” for Gladstone, whose campaign also profited from the very close relationship of the Liberation Society and the local Liberal Party organization. Liberals won twenty-three Welsh seats, but in Merthyr a prominent Liberal clearly marked for high office was surprisingly defeated.10 Henry Richard’s topping of the poll was no surprise. He was secretary of the Peace Society, a Nonconformist minister, a prominent member of the Liberation Society, a passionate defender of things Welsh and Welsh culture, a scourge of an anglicized and Anglican gentry, and an avowed sympathizer with the working classes. The surprise was the failure of Henry Austin Bruce to capture the second seat, having represented the town for the past fifteen years. Instead, it was taken by Richard Fothergill, a local ironmaster and another churchman. His support of mine inspections, opposition to the hated double shifts, and advocacy of the secret ballot made him a more appealing figure to the working classes than Bruce, who had denounced striking colliers, opposed legislation to reduce the workday of children, declined to pledge himself to ballot reform, held up to ridicule the notion that Welshness and Nonconformity were essential qualifications for the principality’s representatives at Westminster, was no enthusiast of denominational education, and denied “the existence of any specifically Welsh problems.” Thus he failed to benefit from an incipient

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Welsh nationalism that induced a number of fellow Liberals to describe themselves as “Welsh” candidates. The anglicized Bruce, who privately fumed that Fothergill represented “the low, selfish political morality of the majority,” was presented with a safe Scottish seat. When ennobled years later, with fine if unintentional irony he selected Aberdare as his title. This was the very section of the constituency that had ensured his embarrassing defeat in 1868 by voting overwhelmingly for Fothergill.11 The Merthyr setback was overshadowed by the embarrassment suffered by leading Liberals in Lancashire. Milner Gibson, who had served in the Palmerston and Russell Cabinets, went down to defeat in Ashton, and Hartington lost in North Lancashire, where one of the Devonshire family’s estates, Holker Hall, was located. A “rather alarmed” Gladstone quickly learned of his own defeat in South Lancashire. “The truth is, Lancashire has gone mad” and the contest reduced to “one of race, Saxon against Celt,” a senior party official observed in response to these “heavy blows.” The large number of Irish in the county were disliked, and in rallying to him to a man in Ashton, Milner Gibson concluded, they had effectively made him a candidate of the “Irish Catholic interest.” This, he was in no doubt, had “alienated a number of English voters” whose ethnic animosity had been fed by Orangemen and “No Popery” Murphy. Liberals suspected the “Gospel Garibaldi” of being an agent of the Tory party, and anti-Irish sentiment and religious bigotry told “fearfully” in several constituencies. Hartington attributed his “licking” to the “strong Protestant feeling” of the county, and Gladstone found a partial explanation of his own reverse in the conduct of the Anglican clergy. They had, he complained, exploited their control of day schools to indoctrinate an entire generation with “State Churchism and Toryism,” persuading tenants of Liberal landlords to renege on promises of support.12 The heavier than usual political involvement of clergy suggested that Britain was following the same path as Ireland. The activism of Nonconformist ministers in Wales was matched in parts of England, but especially in Kent and Lancashire, by that of parsons politicized as rarely before by a threat of disestablishment. They set up a cry of “‘No surrender, no robbery, no spoilation [sic].’” Evangelical clergy were accused of employing Sunday school teachers as Tory canvassers, sending them into homes to ask heads of the households whether they intended to vote for queen or pope. Parish churches were placarded Tory blue, and at the conclusion of services the national anthem replaced the recessional hymn. The reports of violence also had a familiar Irish ring. Disturbances plagued Liverpool,

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Bolton, and Wigan, while gangs of men attacked each other in Blackburn “with bars of iron and bludgeons,” resulting in two deaths. There were similar reports from Wales.13 The contemporary assessment of the campaign and its unexpected outcome in Lancashire has generally been endorsed by historians. As Fothergill demonstrated in industrial Merthyr, many enfranchised factory hands remained vulnerable to the pressures and influence of their employers. Lancashire’s operatives may also have been attracted by Tory paternalism or repelled by the non-interventionist ideology of Liberal employers. The Conservatives with their Working Men’s Associations were simply better organized than the Liberals in a number of industrial centres, but dislike of Catholicism and the maintenance of Protestant supremacy in Ireland proved surprisingly potent rallying calls. The response of English working men, not known for diligent church attendance, suggests they were motivated by ethnic rather than religious sentiment. No act of union has ever been passed between England and Ireland so far as the people of Lancashire are concerned, the Ashton under Lyne News admitted. “The Irish are hated and treated worse than aliens.” Their presence was the “greatest mainstay of the Conservative party,” a modern historian has concluded. Religion, ethnicity, and an undercurrent of class antagonism were the ingredients of a Tory populism. “The corruption, bribery, compulsion and tumult of this election have probably never been exceeded,” John Bright wrote to Gladstone, and he cited the disgraceful and shocking scenes as proof of the urgent need for ballot reform.14 Nevertheless, when the Liberals emerged from the election with a truly handsome majority, Disraeli took the unprecedented step of resigning immediately instead of waiting for the meeting of the new Parliament. The certainty of defeat on a vote of confidence, the knowledge that they would be overmatched in debate, the avoidance of any need to declare a “future policy,” sensitivity to the criticism that they had clung unbecomingly to office for much of 1868, which made even less attractive the thought of now being driven from it, and the likelihood of foreign troubles, all played a part in the Tory Cabinet’s unanimous decision to step aside. The queen had also to be considered. Since a change of government was inevitable, she wished it to be completed as swiftly as possible in order “to allow her to go to Osborne as usual.” Nor were the Tories unmindful of the difficulties they might create for Gladstone by suddenly springing on him the task of forming a government. In resigning so precipitously, taking everyone by surprise, the Cabinet had been motivated “not so much from any sentimental feeling of personal honour which would not bear

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discussion,” Disraeli assured his predecessor as Tory leader, “but from a conviction, that the course was more advantageous for the party.” Hence he would have relished, had he known of it, one political adversary’s admiration of this “wise and dignified act.”15 Gladstone, having been safely returned for Greenwich, did encounter problems forming a government representative of his party’s disparate elements while “filling many gaping mouths.” Hartington declined to be parked in Ireland as viceroy, even on the understanding that he would eventually be called back later to London to fill a senior office. He regarded the posting as a form of social and political exile. The Irish viceroyalty along with a seat at the Cabinet table was next offered to Halifax, the former Sir Charles Wood, but he found multiple reasons to decline it. He was clearly peeved by the knowledge that he was at best the second choice. Moreover, he was unwilling to incur the heavy personal expense of the office, was conscious of the hostility with which the Irish, including members of Parliament, still regarded him as the miserly chancellor of the Exchequer who had guarded the national purse during the Great Famine, and was disinclined to contend with Chichester Fortescue and his formidable spouse. Bitterly disappointed at his reappointment as chief secretary, for he wanted a more senior and less demanding portfolio, Fortescue objected to sitting alongside a viceroy in the Cabinet. Kimberley, who had more than two years earlier denied Fortescue a place at the political high table, accepted the office of lord privy seal. John Bright, widely regarded as sympathetic to Ireland, also entered the Cabinet after some cajoling and with the assurance of a warm royal welcome from a monarch appreciative of his kind public comments about her. Bright had already outlined to Gladstone his personal reform agenda – disestablishment of the Irish Church, less expenditure on defence, “the secret or free vote, & a scheme of education.” By placing him at the Board of Trade, where Bright gratefully assumed he would have “little or nothing” to do, Gladstone expected him to be “muzzled” and thus “far less powerful and dangerous [than] if acting independently.” Taken as a whole, the new Cabinet was not “a very revolutionary body.” A majority of its fifteen members were either peers or the heirs of peers, and the remainder, with the exception of Bright, were men of moderate ideas but immoderate wealth. Gladstone was likely to find himself “breathing a comparatively Conservative atmosphere,” and this impression went far to explain the disappointment of the Radical press.16 The importance of Irish policy made the choice of home secretary a matter of even greater import than usual. After a brief hesitation, Gladstone

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selected Henry Bruce. He was widely regarded within the party as the best-qualified candidate for the demanding office, having served a fouryear apprenticeship in the Palmerston and Russell governments during which he had been frequently flattered as the most quoted undersecretary in Cabinet. Moreover, at a time of mounting public concern about violent crime, he had a reputation for dealing sternly with criminals. He would halt its spread, he promised the voters of Renfrewshire, “first by cutting off the source of its supply, and next by devising a good system of punishment.” True to his word, he was soon to introduce the Habitual Criminals Bill, which tightened penal discipline, sought to strengthen “the deterrent force of sentences,” especially for repeat offenders, and greatly expanded police supervision of the “criminal classes” following their release from prison. As for Ireland, a month-long visit in 1865 had made a deep and lasting impression upon him. “You would be surprised to see how different things are here from England,” he wrote to his daughter. “It is like a foreign country, and in fact no foreign people in Europe are more utterly unlike the English in their views and habits of mind.” For this he held the British partly responsible. Not content with subjecting the Irish to “centuries of misgovernment,” they had compounded this “ignominious” blunder by attempting “to introduce Protestantism by force or fraud.” On the other hand, a meeting with Cullen convinced him of the cardinal’s “narrow and impracticable views.” Yet he considered him “all-powerful,” enjoying as he did the support of the Propaganda in Rome, whose head Bruce described as virtually the Vatican minister for Ireland. But he was impressed with “several excellent and liberal” Roman Catholics, particularly Thomas O’Hagan and David Moriarty, and believed a Liberal government would find reliable political allies in a Roman Catholic gentry “kicking against the tyranny of the priests.” These “best specimens” of Roman Catholic feeling needed to be conciliated. Hence the need both to abandon the old policy of political distrust of Catholics and their exclusion” from office and to dismantle the Established Church. “There can be no sincere loyalty where there is inequality of treatment,” the new home secretary believed, and the continuation of the Protestant supremacy in Ireland would amount to a “gross partiality in which no high-spirited people ought to acquiesce.”17 The “personal element” was peculiarly important in Ireland, a member of the viceregal staff later remarked, because it was the governors rather than the government who represented authority to the people. Moriarty urged Gladstone to admit two Irishmen to the Cabinet, naming Fortescue and William Monsell as the worthiest candidates, and take full advantage

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of the Tories’ removal of the sectarian barrier to the office of Irish lord chancellor. A “Catholic Chancellor presiding over the Magistracy of the country” would “do much to inspire confidence in the administration of the law which is Ireland’s greatest want,” the bishop argued. The president of Maynooth joined him in recommending Thomas O’Hagan for the office. Fortescue, who opposed that appointment, did press Monsell’s claims. Son of a Unionist family, English educated, a convert to Catholicism, a close friend of Moriarty’s, he was the “unofficial leader of the Catholic Whigs, a sub group of the Irish Liberal Party which combined Irish patriotism, Unionism and Liberalism.” A Liberal Catholic, he urged his church to reconcile itself to “parliamentary government, freedom of thought and worship, and religious toleration.” But he was denied a place at the Cabinet table, even when he succeeded Hartington as postmaster general. Gladstone did offer further proof of the Liberals’ abandonment of “distrust and exclusion” by appointing Sir Colman O’Loughlin to the post of judge advocate general. When the queen asked for information on him, for they would necessarily have “frequent personal contact,” Gladstone succinctly described O’Loughlin as “a gentleman of kindly nature, and quick intelligence, a Roman Catholic, much respected in the House of Commons,” whose only liability was an Irish accent.18 The O’Hagan appointment had historic significance, for he was the first Catholic to hold the office of lord chancellor in two centuries. Widely admired for his legal ability, sound sense, tact, eloquence, and “beautiful voice,” which mixed with “fire and earnestness” made him a peculiarly effective speaker, he was credited with considerable influence within the Irish branch of the Liberal Party. Significantly, he did not enjoy Cullen’s full confidence. “He is very good but weak on mixed education,” the cardinal grumbled. He may also have been too moderate a nationalist for the cleric’s taste. Both Ireland and Scotland had suffered enough “from the action of excessive centralization,” O’Hagan had informed the Social Science Association the year before. Both countries needed to maintain those local institutions which counteracted “the tendency of the elements of national life to withdraw themselves from the extremities of the empire, and gather at the centre of power and wealth” in London. Meanwhile, Gladstone was still seeking a head of the Irish Executive. Dufferin had influential backers who wished to see one Northern Irishman succeeded by another, but he was rejected, much to his disappointment, as “too yielding & not ‘great man enough.’” He was appointed to the Duchy of Lancaster but without Cabinet rank. The viceroyalty went instead to Earl Spencer, an Englishman for whom some Irish members of Parliament had reportedly

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expressed a preference. He was well connected socially, being related by marriage to Mrs Gladstone and by blood not only to one of the prime minister’s closest colleagues, Earl Granville, but also to the Roman Catholic Church. His uncle George had converted to Catholicism and at the time of his death, four years earlier, had been the superior of the Passionists. Nor could anyone question Spencer’s claim to be a “great man.” Owner of vast estates centred in Northamptonshire, a master of hounds, and president of the National Rifle Association, he was an “Englishman to the backbone.” His height, “his willowy figure, and his stately bearing made his presence peculiarly effective,” but there were lingering doubts of his ability and intellectual fitness for the office. To these misgivings the jealous Dufferin assiduously drew attention. However, the rapid advance of modern communications served to calm such concerns. “Thanks to the electric telegraph and the speed of trains and steamboats,” one newspaper reassuringly noted, “the importance of the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin is social rather than political.”19 Both Spencer and Fortescue wished to be rid of the ill-qualified, lastminute Tory appointment as undersecretary, Sir Edward Wetherall. They suggested he be packed off to the colonies. Wetherall resisted but then died suddenly in the spring of 1869. His replacement was Thomas Burke. The most efficient and impressive of the chief clerks in the Chief Secretary’s Office, he was currently acting as Fortescue’s private secretary and had probably been passed over at the time of Larcom’s retirement because of his Roman Catholicism and Liberal sympathies. What he brought to the position was “complete knowledge of Ireland and the work required of him,” and he promised to be especially useful if “strong measures” became necessary. “The way such measures are received,” a leading Liberal observed, “will depend much on the character for fairness and sympathy with the people, of the man who will have to carry them out.”20 The new government was fortunate in one other personal tragedy. Sir Richard Mayne, “worn out with incessant duty,” died in December. Clerkenwell had remained a dark stain on his record, while renewed complaints of a rising level of crime in the capital and declining police efficiency, together with demands for a reorganization of the “detective police,” were carried personally to the new home secretary by a delegation headed by three members of Parliament. Bruce had already mentioned to the queen a scheme of decentralization that would see the metropolis divided into four districts, each under a head responsible for the discipline and disposition of his men. The objective was to leave only the force’s general superintendence to the commissioner, thereby lightening the self-

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imposed burden, which included decisions on the most trivial breaches of discipline, under which Mayne and his two assistant commissioners were judged to have laboured so ineffectively. This was one of the principal recommendations of the “private official committee” tasked by Hardy to examine the organization of the London police, whose full report he had discussed with his Liberal successor. Both men recognized the inadequacy of the current top-light command structure.21 Bruce did not act hastily, taking time to master detail and develop a plan. Meanwhile, Douglas Labalmondière was serving as acting commissioner. As for Mayne’s permanent successor, who would surely wish to be involved in any reorganization of the force, the home secretary quickly settled on a set of qualifications. “We want a man of energy & decision, with a faculty for ruling, & a good legal understanding, altho’ not necessarily a lawyer,” Bruce informed former prime minister Russell, who was still advocating the national integration of England’s multiple police forces in order to combat terror. A centralized command if nationally funded might reconcile local authorities to the loss of power and patronage by relieving them of costs, Bruce conceded, but he saw little immediate likelihood of his Cabinet colleagues agreeing to the introduction of so radical and controversial a change. Nor would it be wise to press ahead, he believed, without “some previous testing & preparation of the public mind.” So he concentrated on the search for a commissioner and eventually named Colonel Edmund Henderson. A former comptroller of convicts in Western Australia and currently chairman of the Directors of Convict Prisons, Henderson possessed vigour, ability, and an appetite for reform. He was the man, Bruce believed, to reorganize the metropolitan force and introduce measures “for the detection and repression of crime.” Appointed in February 1869, Henderson promptly augmented the detective branch. Headed by a superintendent, Fred Williamson, it now boasted three chief inspectors, one of them Thomson; three inspectors; and nineteen sergeants, six of them first class. Four months later, Henderson gave orders for the appointment of a squad of detectives in each metropolitan division, but Williamson’s wish to appoint detective inspectors to supervise them was frustrated by superintendents fearful of losing authority within their commands.22 The public demand for greater police efficiency was spurred by the law officers’ perceived inability both to prevent acts of political terror, despite excellent intelligence, and to reduce crime. The belief that the “criminal classes” formed a formidable army, perhaps more than 150,000 strong; the imminent closing of transportation to Australia; the introduction of lengthy sentences of penal servitude, moderated somewhat by conditional releases

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under the so-called ticket of leave; a deepening public suspicion that these tickets were issued to relieve prison overcrowding rather than to reward the reformed criminal; and a conviction that prisoners free under licence were responsible for the wave of “garottings” in the capital and that recidivism was on the rise, with as many as one-quarter of the released prisoners reoffending, went far to explain a terrified public’s demand for a harsher penal regime, as well as a more efficient police force. In “no department of public affairs has the Government of England shown a more wretched and mischievous indecision and fickleness, than that of convict management,” the Edinburgh Review charged. Its Tory rival, the Quarterly Review, agreed. The entire criminal class should be identified and watched as in Ireland, the periodicals argued, incorrigibles should be sentenced to long terms of penal servitude, and every convict forcibly impressed with the need to mend himself in order to mend his condition.23 Dual investigations in 1863 of prison discipline and the system of penal servitude resulted in a raft of stern proposals. Prisons ought to be places of “terror to those without” and of punishment as well as reformation to those within, the investigators concluded. They called for greater uniformity in the treatment of the incarcerated. Inmates should be worked long and hard. The treadmill was recommended, despite the “intolerable pains in the legs and spine” that it caused in the formerly sedentary. So also was stone breaking, as it promoted energetic exercise in the open air and thus was good for health as well as discipline. Picking oakum – the fibres from old unravelled ropes – fell into the category of hard labour whenever a prisoner was assigned a large daily quantity under threat of punishment should he fail to complete it, while mat making was not the pleasant pastime some assumed it to be. These “industrial occupations” might form part of a prison’s disciplinary regime, it was allowed, but “the more strictly penal element of that discipline [was promoted as] the chief means of exercising a deterrent influence.” The prisoner’s life needed to be much less comfortable. Hammocks ought to be replaced by the sloping planks on which the residents of some workhouses were required to sleep. When a prison inspector questioned the wisdom of so Spartan a regime, he was informed by the aristocratic investigators that any man who had been engaged in truly hard labour during the day would fall asleep fast enough on a plank. Another concern was prison diets. Inmates should only receive enough food “‘to maintain health and strength at the least possible cost.’” Other things being equal, “cheaper food should always have preference over dearer.” Meals, one medical expert testified, “ought to promote the

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first object of imprisonment, the punishment of the criminal, by being unattractive without being positively repulsive.”24 The findings of a royal commission that penal servitude was insufficiently dreaded because prison conditions were too comfortable to serve as a deterrent to crime, that sentences were too short, and that police supervision of prisoners released under licence too loose reinforced the findings of the other inquiry. Penal policy had long been a topic of intense and contentious debate between the partisans of two distinct systems, the “silent” and the “separate.” The expense of enforcing a regime of total silence among prisoners quickly unnerved “economical administrators,” while that which amounted to a form of solitary confinement soon threatened to charge too high a psychological price. In the latter system, prisoners were to spend all of their time in their individual cells, save for brief periods of exercise and attendance at chapel. Even there, they were to be denied physical or eye contact with one another. In combination with the certainty of hard labour, its enthusiasts argued, this prospect would surely deter the lower orders from lives of crime. They appeared to have carried the day with the opening of a new model national prison, Pentonville, in 1842.25 Millbank was the first national penitentiary. This massive, deliberately forbidding, and frighteningly expensive cluster of buildings on the north bank of the Thames was barely a stone’s throw from the Palace of Westminster. Opened in 1816 but not completed for another five years, it proved to be notoriously unhealthy. “If an epidemic visit London,” a contemporary remarked, “Millbank Prison is one of the first places in which its presence is detected.” Ostensibly dedicated to the reform of the criminal before transportation to a penal colony, the regime of the institution represented a characteristically confused British amalgam of disparate penal theories. On admission, inmates underwent solitary confinement to learn submissiveness. Once judged “tractable,” they were divided into six classifications, with each classification assigned a separate room to prevent “contamination,” and there they worked in silent association. Much thought was also given to diet, with critics assailing as excessively generous the quantity of food provided, but Millbank’s cramped, dark, cold, ill-ventilated underground punishment cells, where the only furniture was a board for a bed and a water closet and the diet one of bread and water, surely satisfied the most ardent advocate of severity. This “mixed system” came under attack for its cost and ineffectiveness as the level of recidivism rose. So, with the opening of Pentonville, built on the Caledonian Road in 1842, Millbank served primarily as a depot and punishment centre.

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Convicts were held there for up to nine months to determine where they were to serve out their sentences, and persistent violators of prison rules elsewhere were returned there for another spell in the punishment cells.26 Designed by Colonel Joshua Jebb of the Royal Engineers, Pentonville was an investment in “social engineering” and was to serve as “the blueprint for most of the world’s prisons in the nineteenth century.” Its four radial wings were each three storeys high, and each floor was divided into 130 individual cells. Prisoners spent eighteen months in absolute seclusion as preparation for transportation. Sleeping, working, and eating in separate cells, they exercised and worshipped separately, wore hoods when moving about the prison, were known by number not name, and had no conversation with the guards, who wore padded shoes to maintain the institution’s eerie silence. This was not a terrifying system of total isolation, apologists insisted, because inmates were visited by chaplain, schoolmaster, and trade instructor. Nevertheless, evidence from the United States strongly linked this “dreadful punishment” to suicide and insanity, and during Pentonville’s first eight years of operation, the rate of insanity “was ten times as great as the normal rate for gaols in the rest of the country.” The Times referred to it as the “‘maniac making system.’” Another more material complaint was the escalating administrative costs, which were estimated at £50 per inmate per annum. These concerns did not prevent an additional fifty prisons on this model being opened between 1842 and 1848, but with the end of transportation to Australia already on the horizon, there needed to be some adjustment. Following a period of probation at Pentonville, convicts were to serve their terms of penal servitude at one of five public works prisons – Portland, Portsmouth, Dartmoor, Chatham, and Woking.27 The construction of the public works prisons was accompanied by an ongoing quest for greater uniformity within English penal institutions. The appointment of a national inspectorate in 1835 had been the initial step, with England following the path trodden by Ireland the previous decade. Scotland created its General Board of Directors four years later. A second large English step was the mid-century establishment of the Directorate of Convict Prisons. Three English directors, chaired by Joshua Jebb, were handed responsibility for Millbank, Pentonville, special sections in eight local gaols, the old men-of-war or naval hulks in which several thousand prisoners were incarcerated in “wet, dark and verminous” conditions, the new public works prisons, and the juvenile facility at Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight. The directors proceeded to mitigate the severity of the separate system with the introduction of a “progressive” one. First came separate confinement for a period that in 1854 was reduced to nine

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months, then transfer to a public works prison where convicts worked together in silent association on “arduous tasks that would benefit the public.” The final step was conditional release on the increasingly controversial tickets of leave. The idle, the ill-disciplined, and chronic violators of prison regulations were removed from the “‘comforts’” of the public works prisons and returned to Millbank or Pentonville for heavier doses of separation or another stretch in the dark cells. In short, the system was used to “punish and terrorise.” This was the regime that by the 1860s investigators condemned as too mild.28 “The object of the penal element is more to deter others than for the effect on the individual subjected to the punishment,” Jebb and his successor as chairman accepted, and the Prison Acts of 1864 and 1865 implemented many of the recommendations of the recent inquiries. The criminalization of the Fenians meant that they would experience the rigours of the new penal regime succinctly summarized as “hard labour, hard fare, hard bed.” The intent was to create “an extremely, almost minutely, regulated environment.” Five years was the minimum term of imprisonment for criminals sentenced to penal servitude, although the bar was raised to seven years for repeat offenders. Convicts sentenced to life imprisonment were now required to serve twenty years, instead of twelve, before any review of their cases; “good conduct” was redefined as merely the abstention from “acts of indiscipline and irregularity,” and sentence remissions were conditional on “industry” determined solely by the rate at which the prisoner earned marks for tasks assigned to him as a duty. Moreover, remission provisions became even less generous. A prisoner now had to complete at least three-quarters of his sentence at a public works prison instead of two-thirds.29 Having worked in silent association all day, quarrying Portland stone or constructing roads, fortifications, breakwaters, or dock facilities, a convict returned to a cell that “‘was nothing but a small corrugated iron kennel, with stone or slate floor. There was not so much as a bit of wooden grating on the floor, so that a prisoner, when his boots and stockings were off, had to tread the icy-cold flags. The only articles of furniture in it were a wooden stool, a very diminutive flap table, and a hammock and bedding rolled up on a shelf or ledge in one corner.’” Hammocks and flock mattresses were replaced by wooden boards, while severe reductions in the size of meals led to a brief prisoner strike. Heavy, unpalatable bread and a mug of cocoa was standard breakfast fare. Supper was invariably a “thin gruel.” Dinner varied. Twice a week the convict received five ounces of meat, five potatoes, and bread. Twice a week he was served “a pint of something called soup”

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and bread. On two other days the meal was essentially suet pudding, while on Sundays he was fed bread and cheese. An earlier ban on the use of the diet as an “instrument of punishment” was rescinded, while the use of heavy restraints, such as handcuffs and leg irons, was approved, although the sanctioning of this form of punishment remained in the hands of governors and the visiting directors. Each prison was required to employ a medical officer and every prisoner was to be examined regularly, but the incidence of sickness remained high, with boils, carbuncles, diarrhoea, and bronchitis especially prevalent. Most medical staff found the explanation for this either in the poor health of the convicts on entering prison or in malingering, for prisoners were known to ulcerate minor wounds by applying lime or washing powder to them. These conditions served to give extra weight to the contentious question posed by the Fenians. Was it acceptable to treat “political prisoners” as common criminals?30 That lengthy terms and harsh condition of imprisonment were unlikely to deter men motivated by ideology was recognized on the Continent, where Austria, Tuscany, and especially France had established reputations for the humane treatment of political prisoners. The succession of regime changes in France, culminating in the creation of the Second Empire, generated an abundance of political detainees. The French struggled with a clear definition of political offences, but liberals had demanded in 1830, with the overthrow of a reactionary Bourbon monarch, the separation of political prisoners from common criminals and the assignment of special quarters to them in ordinary prisons or the construction of special prisons. Sainte-Pélagie, in the Latin Quarter of Paris, became the model political prison. Political inmates were housed on its Red Corridor in large, warm, adequately furnished rooms, and they were permitted to import all of the comforts of home. They enjoyed free association during the day, were excused work, retained their own clothes, employed maidservants, and received visits from family members. Considering it “barbarous” to deny a political prisoner the consolations of a “tender spouse,” the authorities permitted conjugal visits and eventually the admission of young women engaged in the sex trade. Not surprisingly, when a new building was constructed for political prisoners, it was quickly dubbed the pavilion of princes. Following Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, there was initially a greater element of inconsistency in the treatment of political prisoners. Some were transported, although they were rarely treated as ordinary felons. Meanwhile, the inmates of Sainte-Pélagie continued to enjoy an extraordinarily comfortable imprisonment. This the authorities decided to regularize and define in February 1867. The special political section of the

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prison was reserved for detainees sentenced to terms of less than a year and a day, and the director halted the importation of luxury meals, cut in half, to a single litre, the prisoners’ daily wine allowance, transferred family and other visits from the prisoners’ rooms to a parlour, and limited their duration to four hours a day. However, the remaining regulations were those that had been in place since the July Monarchy. Violators of the rules were to lose the privileges of free association and communication with the outside world.31 The British liberal state had failed to develop a coherent and consistent policy on how to treat politically motivated offenders. Exceptional treatment had frequently been accorded “high-status” offenders, and for much the same reason as the distinction had been recognized by Roman Law. Punishment was assumed to fall harder “on a person of the upper classes” than on one “more used to life’s hard knocks.” The suspected Jacobins detained on the orders of William Pitt the Younger during the 1790s had been held separately from felons, probably in large measure to prevent their “political contamination” of common criminals, but this decision had, by implication, acknowledged “the political nature of their incarceration.” Under Radical pressure, a later government of the day had relaxed prison regulations in the cases of several of the more gentlemanly political radicals. Nevertheless, public sympathy for imprisoned Chartists and petitions protesting their degradation behind prison walls led to several investigations of their plight that resulted either in early releases or the relaxation of sentences to hard labour. Here was a warning to future governments.32 The treatment of the Young Ireland dissidents and rebels had been similarly pragmatic. Thomas Carlyle, the prominent historian, intervened on behalf of Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel, urging the viceroy to step in to ensure they were not treated as “ordinary” convicts. Following Michel’s conviction of treason-felony, he enjoyed a superior berth on his passage to Spike Island, superior accommodation, conditions, and food while held in a hulk at Bermuda, and similarly liberal treatment during transportation to Van Dieman’s Island. His brother-in-law, John Martin, along with a handful of leading rebels, had few complaints of their treatment while still in Ireland. Exercise in the prison governor’s garden, liberal access to a wide range of reading material, the ability to communicate freely with one another, even to convert the turnkey’s parlour into a day common room, meant they were “comfortably enough arranged.” On board the ship transporting them to Australia, they were “very snug and comfortably accommodated,” with an attentive steward. The officers were civil, even genial, and the political prisoners were allowed on deck until late evening,

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were provided with an awning under which to shelter from the tropical sun, and dined well. On arrival in Sydney, they were excused the detailed public medical inspection to which ordinary convicts were subjected. Their examinations were private and cursory. Having belonged “to a superior class in society,” they were excused hard labour, since in their cases banishment and forfeiture of fortune and station were regarded as heavy inflictions. The quality of their lives was illustrated by Thomas Meagher’s marriage to a local girl, Mitchel’s sending for his family to join him on a livestock farm, Kevin O’Doherty’s practising of medicine in Hobart, Terence Bellew McManus’s financing the existence of a gentleman farmer with money drawn from his Liverpool business, and Patrick O’Donohoe’s establishment of a newspaper whose general tone was captured in its masthead – Irish Exile and Freeman’s Advocate. Even so, the plight of the exiles in general, and that of Smith O’Brien in particular, was in Ireland successfully depicted as “‘a species of political torture disgraceful to the British name.’” He and the other Young Irelanders who had not escaped to the United States, together with three Chartists, were granted pardons and allowed home in the mid-1850s.33 The Fenians were less fortunate, perhaps because their commitment to violent change appeared all the more reprehensible during a time of relative peace and prosperity so unlike the Famine-era backdrop to the Young Ireland rebellion. They were considered criminals, and their lives behind bars, even for those of them evidently gentlemanly members of the middle classes, such as Luby and Kickham, were certain to be very unpleasant. Worse still was the plight of the soldiers convicted of Fenianism and sentenced by military courts to lengthy terms of penal servitude. They were guilty of violating the oath of allegiance to the monarch taken when they enlisted, and this may have prompted the instructions to the Directors of Convict Prisons, following their transfer to England for security reasons, to treat them as “ordinary convicts.” They were liable to flogged for disciplinary infractions, were stripped and searched several times a day, and were confined in peculiarly unpleasant cells.34 The crowded condition of the public works prisons, the significant numbers of Catholic Irish held in them, and the ability of the men on the works to communicate “with their friends outside” saw the directors suggest that the Fenians be transported to Western Australia before the colony closed its doors to this class of immigrant. When that solution was rejected by the government, the directors next recommended their transfer to the convict prison on Gibraltar, which could provide the safe custody and segregation from other prisoners that no English institution was able to

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guarantee. Built on the Rock but entirely separate from the fortress, this prison’s position meant that there was never any need for prisoners to enter the town and consequently little danger of a rescue being attempted. Colonial Office objections to this proposal turned minds back to transportation, since a number of Fenians, including several leading figures, had expressed a willingness to go out to Western Australia. Gathorne Hardy welcomed the proposal as “a convenient mode of disposing of the whole of the Irish Treason Felony convicts, who are likely to be a source of trouble as long as they remain in this country,” but once again the Colonial Office raised objections. It opposed the transportation of any man capable of organizing resistance in such an “out-of-the-way and defenceless territory.” In short, Fenian leaders were to be excluded. However, among the 62 Fenians who with almost 220 convicts set sail aboard the Hougoumont from Portland Roads for Freemantle in the late autumn of 1867, there were several senior men and at least one former member – Thomas O’Malley Baines – of the assassination circle. The 17 military Fenians were treated as ordinary convicts, but not the civilians. They were accommodated in a separate compartment and neither associated with nor even spoke to the other convicts. They considered the food “pretty good” but complained of the quantity, they were permitted to organize and stage a series of concerts, and they published a newspaper whose masthead – The Wild Goose – was an allusion to an earlier generation of political exiles.35 Meanwhile, Irish allegations of severe mistreatment of the Fenians imprisoned in Britain had become a source of government embarrassment, contradicting as they did the assumption that once behind bars the men would be quickly forgotten and “much bad feeling against the Government” prevented. The Irishman had long accused the British authorities of illtreating Irish nationalist prisoners, but its voice was by no means the only one raised in protest. “They are not felons save in a mere legal sense; they are not robbers, ravishers, murderers – they are political prisoners, the victims of heated imaginations and ill-directed patriotism – and not men branded with moral infamy,” John Francis Maguire’s Cork Examiner had been insisting since 1866. The Ulster Observer had been equally critical. The treatment of the prisoners had excited the “horror and loathing of every manly breast,” it declared, converting the men into political “martyrs.” John Pope-Hennessy, whose application to visit the Fenians in order to determine the truth of their treatment had earlier been rejected, drew attention to their alleged plight in a letter to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and subsequently in a paper of “considerable length” delivered at the Social Science Congress of 1866.36

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Political prisoners were happily little known in the United Kingdom, Pope-Hennessy admitted, but he insisted that their right to be treated differently from ordinary felons was “an established principle of jurisprudence.” By way of illustration, he contrasted the earlier treatment of Daniel O’Connell and a number of leading Chartists with the current plight of the Fenians, whose suffering in his opinion was greater than that inflicted in modern times “upon political offenders in any part of the civilized world.” Men of gentlemanly background, artistic distinction, and physical frailty were being compelled to pick oakum and engage in shoemaking and tailoring. Victims of the heavily criticized “separate system,” their diet was in the judgment of a leading medical journal, the Lancet, so inadequate it might drive a man to lunacy and death. John Lynch, whose delicate health had broken under this harsh regime, was named by Pope-Hennessy as the first political prisoner of the century to die while incarcerated. All of this was not merely illiberal but also impolitic, he warned, for stories of the Fenians’ hardships were not only further alienating the Irish but also damaging Britain’s international reputation. English politicians of a liberal state, so critical in the past of despotisms for their abuse of political prisoners, stood condemned of failing to practise what they preached.37 The problem was somewhat more complex than Pope-Hennessy’s presentation to the Social Science Congress suggested. This several members of his audience pointed out. Did not the inevitable loss of innocent life in an attempted rebellion make somewhat more difficult the drawing of a clear distinction between political and criminal offences. This went to the heart of the widespread official and public reluctance in Britain to admit that the Fenians were political prisoners. They were criminals being punished for breaches of the law, not for their political convictions, but the connection between breaches and convictions went largely unacknowledged. Meanwhile, the claim of unprecedentedly harsh treatment of the Fenians was being publicly contested by Radicals normally sympathetic to the Irish cause. The sufferings of English political prisoners had matched those of these Irishmen, George Holyoake contended, while Ernest Jones, ever disposed to dramatize and exaggerate his personal suffering, loudly denied that his incarceration as a Chartist had been any “less severe” than that of the “Irish prisoners of the present day.”38 The transfer of another batch of Fenians to English prisons in the summer of 1867 had prompted Reynolds’s Newspaper to argue that they deserved to be treated with sympathy for overcoming the reluctance of English politicians to deal with Irish grievances, but this remained very much a minority opinion in

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England. After all, there was plainly a greater likelihood of recidivism among men motivated by ideology.39 Relations between the governor of Portland Public Works Prison and the Fenian inmates rapidly deteriorated. He was soon complaining of their inclination “to give much trouble.” They were “quite unmanageable,” a visiting Cabinet minister was later informed. Difficulties were inevitable, for while they had not been treated as “ordinary convicts,” having been removed from Pentonville long before the completion of the regulation nine months of separate confinement, they rejected their formal designation as criminals and organized strikes when the governor, with the backing of the directors, rigidly enforced regulations. Spencer Walpole intervened when Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s wife was refused permission by a director to write an exceptional additional letter to her husband. The then home secretary reminded the directors of the peculiar hardship of this decision, given Mrs O’Donovan Rossa’s difficulty, as a resident of Ireland, in visiting the prisoner at the intervals the regulations permitted. Indeed, O’Donovan Rossa was increasingly at the centre of the Fenians’ conflict with prison authority. Visited by his wife and baby at Portland, he had been given permission by Walpole to hold the infant. Much to the governor’s displeasure, who happened to be absent from the prison at the time, the senior deputy governor, Captain Buller, kindly permitted O’Donovan Rossa to sit together with his young wife. This was a breach of the regulations, and other Fenians demanded the same concession during visits by their family members. O’Donovan Rossa was also one of the several Fenians who exercised his right to carry his ever-lengthening list of personal grievances to visiting directors. Indeed, he drafted an “extraordinary petition” to the home secretary, “preferring charges against the Superior and Subordinate officers” of the prison and the visiting Catholic priest. As well, he was one of the prisoners discovered surreptitiously circulating letters, in one of which he described the obliging Buller as “the only gentleman” among the senior officers. This compliment appears to have fed the governor’s suspicions of his deputy, who was transferred to the staff at Millbank. Ordered to the “separate cells” as punishment, O’Donovan Rossa not only refused to salute the governor when he appeared on his rounds, but added insult to insolence by loudly voicing his “contempt” for him. Then, on 21 December 1866, the governor received instructions to treat the Fenians “in every respect as ordinary Prisoners.” With an exquisite sense of timing, he selected Christmas Eve as the day on which to remove them from their ward to “the new Penal Class Prison for security,” only for the new year to bring the discovery of another bundle of illicit Fenian letters.

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They were found hidden in the wall of the shed in which the men sheltered and worked during inclement weather. Finally, in February of 1867, the governor was relieved of his most persistent tormentor. O’Donovan Rossa was returned to Millbank to undergo another extended period of disciplinary confinement in the “dark cells.”40 The situation of the great majority of Fenians was in the opinion of a former inmate far from pitiable. “They took rank between the ‘Aristocs’ and the ‘Democrats,’” he wrote, “and formed an ‘Irish Brigade.’” They brought to an end the practice of one prisoner reading aloud to men at work, by organizing a Roman Catholic protest first to the choice of Macaulay’s History of England as the text and then to an article entitled “Thief in the Confessional.” These successes may not have endeared them to the many other prisoners who welcomed the diversion of the readings, but the significant improvement in the prison hospital diet following their arrival undoubtedly did. The Fenians enjoyed the privilege of exercising by themselves, they were eventually permitted to write to friends more often than “ordinary convicts,” and the censorship of their letters was believed by other prisoners to be far less “severe.” But the focus of the Irish press was exclusively on the Fenians’ privations, such as humiliating medical examinations, strip searches, and the rigours of quarrying. The prisoners complained of skin blistered by the sun, hands ravaged by tools, injuries suffered breaking stone, and work days of eighteen hours. Two of them proved unable to take the gruel that was a staple of the diet, while most meals lacked nutritional value. Charles Kickham, the frailest Fenian, was packed off to the hospital prison at Woking. “The present way in which the English treat political prisoners,” Karl Marx had earlier written to Engels, “is really worse than anything happening on the Continent, except in Russia.”41 The barrage of Irish press criticism, the questions and charges of Irish members of Parliament, and the private notice given by an Irish Liberal of his intention to raise the subject because it was “so important that misrepresentations with regard to the treatment of political prisons at Portland should not be circulated” prodded Spencer Walpole into ordering an investigation. Alexander Knox, a police magistrate, and Dr George Pollock, of St George’s Hospital, London, conducted a month-long inquiry beginning in the second week of May 1867. They inspected Pentonville and Woking, as well as Portland, where they remained for three days. They interviewed the directors, prison administrators, staff, and prisoners, including O’Donovan Rossa at Millbank. O’Donovan Rossa had little of which to complain, they rapidly concluded, having brought his difficulties

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upon himself. They seized upon O’Leary’s unwise venture into irony, quoting his comment that he found the state of things “almost relatively perfect happiness,’” and delivered an appropriately anodyne judgment: “We know that these men have a better diet, sleep in better beds, are more cared for in sickness, have lighter labour than the bulk of the labouring classes in the three kingdoms, and that the stories of their ill-treatment are simple falsehoods.” That “the meanest and poorest labourer in the empire would scarcely change places with them” Knox and Pollock freely acknowledged, but then penal servitude was always intended to be a terrible punishment.42 Despite the report, elements of the Irish press continued to galvanize public sympathy for these imprisoned men of “heart and brain, of noble dispositions, kindly and genial in their nature, of upright character, and spotless integrity, [who] are clothed in garb of the felon, treated as criminals of the lowest dye, and condemned to suffer every indignity that can be conceived.” By 1868, the Irishman was waging an unrelenting propaganda campaign in the form of letters ostensibly from the men transported to Western Australia. They complained of being dressed in the “felon’s garb,” housed in miserable “bush” huts, tortured by mosquitoes, condemned to associate with common criminals, and compelled to break stones or build roads in the scorching sun. Meanwhile, Mrs O’Donovan Rossa was carrying to the United States the cause of the men imprisoned in England. At her public appearances, she was affectingly attired in a suit of national mourning – “a black dress trimmed artistically with bright green ribbons, a handsome green sash stretched transversely from right to left across the skirt” – and escorted by Irish American luminaries. She then plucked expatriate heart strings, describing the “pure, manly, chivalrous, brighteyed, high-hearted, noble-souled” Irish youths languishing in “English dungeons.” These men were indeed Irish “martyrs.” Editorials in the Freeman’s Journal and the Cork Examiner, the address adopted by the Cork Corporation, the formation during the run-up to the general election of the Irish Liberation Society, later known as the Amnesty Committee, which urged Irish voters to seek a pledge of support for amnesty from men standing for Parliament, were evidence of rapidly deepening public interest in the cause. In response, a group of Liberal candidates, led by John Francis Maguire, issued a circular promising that victory for their party would be swiftly followed by an amnesty. In effect, they were making amnesty the acid test of the sincerity of Gladstone’s promise of justice for Ireland.43 The passing of that test would not be easy, given the general acceptance in England of the findings of the pair of investigators. The Fenians were

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criminals, should be treated as such, influential and popular newspapers declared, and should “gain no advantage from any man’s political sympathies, and no disadvantage from any man’s political antipathies.” Portland’s governor reported a marked improvement in the prisoners’ conduct following the publication of the inquiry’s conclusions. O’Donovan Rossa remained an exception. Neither punishment diets, periods of confinement in the “dark cell,” removal of his bedding, nor a resort to handcuffs could discourage him from vandalizing the special cell prepared for him at Chatham on the order of the chairman of the Directors of Convict Prisons. He assaulted wardens, sang loudly in his cell, refused to pick oakum, refused to work alongside common felons, and inspired three of his Irish American fellow inmates to be similarly disruptive. On visiting the Irish Americans in November, the American chargé d’affaires, Benjamin Moran, was impressed with Chatham’s “gentlemanly” acting governor and judged the treatment of Fenians remarkably liberal. Working separately from other prisoners, they were assigned such light work as tying up parcels of firewood, were provided with shelter from the elements, had cells larger than those of ordinary convicts, were housed in a different part of the prison, and were allowed to talk to one another. “Silence is the great punishment of the place,” Moran noted in his diary, “but these men do not appear to appreciate the privilege given them to talk, except [Ricard] Burke.” As for O’Donovan Rossa, the American was disgusted to learn that in the original “dirty protest” he threw his ordure over passing warders.44 When obliged to sanction investigations of official conduct, governments usually name investigators in whose respect for authority they may safely trust. The case of Daniel Reddin stood as an example. Sentenced to five years penal servitude for participation in the Manchester rescue, his disruptive conduct ensured he served his full term. When finally released, he brought sensational charges of torture against two members of the penitentiary’s medical staff. Their response to a painful paralysis of his arms and legs, he alleged, had been to drag him along floors, prod him with needles, burn him with red hot irons, and subject him to painful electric shocks from a battery in the name of electro-magnetic therapy. To inquire into these allegations, in preparation for the court case, the Directors of Convict Prisons named Dr William Guy. He was professor of hygiene at King’s College, London, vice-president of the Statistical Society, and an advocate of the smallest possible diet consistent with the health for convicts. Having reviewed the Reddin file, Guy endorsed the prison doctors’ assessment of the prisoner as a malingerer and a clumsy one at that. The Fenian’s knowledge of the symptoms of the disease from which he

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professed to suffer was imperfect at best, the professor concluded. Nor would he have altered his assessment, he admitted, had Reddin on discharge from prison experienced paralysis. A frequent sufferer from syphilis and identified by prison staff as an addict “to the baneful practice of selfabuse,” he was in Guy’s expert opinion always at risk of losing the use of his limbs. Fortified, the Home Office instructed counsel to represent the two doctors in question. The case was eventually dismissed by Colin Blackburn, with costs against the plaintiff.45 Although the Tories had campaigned in the 1868 general election as Protestant defenders of church and state, and had flayed the central plank of the Liberals’ platform as a panic stricken response to Fenianism, they were defeated. But as monarch and some ministers had feared from the outset, they succeeded in stoking the fires of sectarian and ethnic animosities. Gladstone’s victory ensured the introduction of legislation to disestablish and disendow the Church of Ireland, a cause that had united his party, attracted Nonconformist voters, and offered an assurance to the Irish that a reformed and Liberal Parliament would grapple with Ireland’s undoubted problems. Moreover, Gladstone immediately signalled the abandonment of the old exclusionary policy with respect to the appointment of Catholics to some of the highest offices of state. The prime minister, with an eye to lessening Irish popular sympathy with Fenianism, intended to redress Irish grievances, but the plight of the Fenians serving long periods of penal servitude in English prisons was emerging as a deeply emotional popular issue. Britain, after all, was at odds with other nations, such as France, in her treatment of “political” prisoners, though French liberalism was not to survive the Paris Commune. But the government and much of the English press insisted that in this instance the inmates had been charged, tried, and convicted of criminal offences. A Tory attempt to silence Irish criticism through a brief inquiry, which duly reported it had found no evidence of mistreatment, was immediately dismissed as a “whitewash.” As a result, the problem of the prisoners threatened to blight Gladstone’s hopes of reconciling the Irish to the Union and thereby effectively counter Fenian insurgency and terror.

10 The Policy of Conciliation

William Gladstone was approaching the end of his sixtieth year when he finally formed a government in December 1868, and he surely foresaw neither the length his political career had yet to run nor the extent to which it would be dominated by the Irish problem. Although he commanded a large majority in the Commons, there was a suspicion it would not be “very manageable.” If much depended on his “tact in leading,” he now appeared to be better equipped to provide it. He struck observers as calmer, more moderate, and less excited than he had been earlier. Highly intelligent, immensely energetic, a powerful speaker, a devout churchman, he exuded moral certainty. Indeed, his sanctimonious manner irritated many contemporaries. It was less the ace up the Liberal leader’s sleeve to which he objected, one sourly remarked, more the suggestion that the Almighty had placed it there. Ambition and ruthlessness were other aspects of his personal armoury, while it was the belief of a former colleague, who was now a political adversary, that the passion with which he took up an idea made “him utterly reckless of the consequences.” Gladstone had taken up the idea of Ireland, and it was entirely in character that he avowed a “mission” to pacify that unhappy land.1 As one of his more elegant recent biographers has observed, Ireland was for Gladstone “a preoccupation, not an interest, an embarrassment, not an intellectual attraction.” Significantly, another decade was to pass before he visited the island. Nevertheless, he was acutely sensitive to foreign criticism of British rule there. Keen to erase this stain from his nation’s international reputation, he did not shrink in public from giving Fenianism a portion of the credit for focusing British minds on the Irish problem. Still, it was an admission only to be made cautiously. In his opinion, unwise concessions to political dissidents, like unwise resistance to the redress of

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legitimate grievances, were all too likely to be productive of evil. The way to avoid revolution, he reasoned, was to implement quiet and unostentatious reforms. Of course, a balanced and measured policy provided no guarantees of social and political stability, given the Fenians’ objective of an independent Irish republic. Nor was Gladstone unmindful of the peril of introducing and implementing reforms in the face of violence, for there was always a danger of them being misinterpreted as evidence of weakness or a product of fear. However, he was instinctively leaning towards a course of action associated with modern theories of counterterrorism. To address the real grievances of the general population was one way to starve the Fenians of recruits, isolate them from the people, and reduce the social acceptance of political violence.2 By no means were all of the members of the Gladstone Cabinet as passionate as he about reform, nor were they convinced that Britons needed to atone for the past by grappling with Ireland’s present problems. He could count on John Bright’s support, but the two former viceroys were less than enthusiastic. Clarendon had a low opinion of the Irish in general and of Cullen in particular. He considered the cardinal “a bitter and pertinacious enemy of the English Government.” Kimberley, whatever his views of Ireland’s most senior Catholic, doubted the pacifying effect of remedial legislation. “Hitherto the Irish have feared England, tho’ they have hated her,” he admitted to himself, and by “this fear we have been enabled to keep some order in Ireland.” The question he asked himself was how were the Irish to be governed by the British if they neither feared nor loved them. Another reform sceptic was the duke of Argyll, who had no intention of sitting “‘in perpetual sackcloth and ashes’” because the Irish were “‘violent and disaffected.’” He and Robert Lowe, the new chancellor of the Exchequer, were probably representative of a substantial body of Liberals. The latter, a former leader-writer for the Times, now charged with the administration of the nation’s finances, considered the debits and credits of the Anglo-Irish relationship finally to be in balance, satisfied as he was that undoubted wrongs and injustices of the distant past had recently been offset by Britain’s rescue of Ireland from the “‘fearful and ruinous calamities’” of the wreck of property and credit, from the threatened horror of civil war, and from the possibility of subjection to some foreign power.3 One pressing issue was that of a Fenian amnesty. John Francis Maguire warned the prime minister that Irish Liberals strongly favoured a pardon. If it became a “hot issue” in Parliament, it might cast a dark shadow over Gladstone’s planned reforms, he added with a hint of menace, for however

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“grand and comprehensive or daring” they might be, they would not satisfy a public disappointed in its hopes of an amnesty. Fortescue had already requested from Samuel Lee Anderson a comprehensive list of the imprisoned men. There were eighty-one names on the final list, for the Crown solicitor had excluded twenty-four military Fenians and the baker’s dozen of civilians serving short sentences in Irish county gaols. Ten of the men might in his opinion be immediately discharged, while he identified a further thirty-three to whom “clemency might be safely shown” – they were among those recently transported to Australia – and thirteen whose sentences might be reduced. This batch included several prominent Fenians, led by Thomas Bourke, the infirm Charles Kickham, Thomas Clarke Luby, and John O’Leary. He named a dozen Fenians who did not merit clemency. This group included those who had attempted to subvert troops, together with the alleged leader of the assassination circle, Patrick Lennon, and the defiant O’Donovan Rossa.4 The lord lieutenant, Earl Spencer, and his senior law officers, Lord Chancellor O’Hagan and Attorney General Edward Sullivan, were open to a timely act of clemency so long as the government was not generally supposed to be acting from fear. Equally, the trio were determined to avoid fostering the notion that conspiracy carried no risk of stern punishment. Was the Fenian organization still active, had the prisoners suffered punishment enough, would releases be of practical benefit or would they provide the subversive organization with the leaders it currently lacked? These were all questions to which the cautious viceroy sought answers. The Brotherhood remained at a virtual standstill, he was advised, but the fire of rebellion still smouldered and might well burst into flame under “favourable circumstances.” This unwelcome possibility and the absence of any hint of contrition or expression of repentance by the political prisoners convinced the Irish Executive of the necessity to keep behind bars those of them judged capable of revitalizing Fenianism. However, it did recommend that, in accordance with the “usages of former times” and the practices of Continental nations, they be confined “on other rules of discipline than are applied to ordinary convicts.”5 William Monsell, when consulted as a leading Irish Liberal, doubted that a “partial release” would check the growing popular sympathy for the imprisoned nationalists. He favoured an amnesty large enough to include a majority of the prisoners. Indeed, he proposed the release even of the most dangerous men on the condition they go into exile for a number of years. With an eye to the reassurance of loyalist opinion that seemed certain to be angered, if not unnerved, by the freeing of Fenians, he

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proposed that the Executive grasp the opportunity presented by further agrarian disturbances to demonstrate its resolute commitment to firm government and the maintenance of law and order. There had been another sensational murder in Tipperary, and Monsell blamed the upsurge in violence on the county’s most notorious proprietor. Scully, since his personal brush with assassination, had granted extraordinarily generous leases to his tenants. Now other landlords were being presented with demands for similarly attractive terms of tenure. Lord Dufferin, on the other hand, held John Stuart Mill and his fellow “English philosophers” responsible for the spike in “troubles.” Their talk of “the inherent rights of the Celtic race to the soil of Ireland” was, he argued, playing into the hands of the “Nationalistic party” and those priests who wished to destroy the landlords because they alone disputed the “political ascendancy” of the nationalists and tempered the “spiritual monopoly” of the Catholic clergy.6 Political considerations persuaded Spencer to re-evaluate his position on a “partial clemency.” A “Great Amnesty” meeting in Dublin’s Rotundo, to which several members of Parliament and six members of the Catholic hierarchy had sent letters of support, gave added force to the recommendation of Monsell and other loyal Liberals, for a more generous amnesty which would embrace all but one-sixth of the prisoners. The viceroy recognized the desirability in this instance of doing “that which commands itself to the judgment of the party.” A failure to do so, as Maguire had impressed upon Gladstone, might very well undermine the good effect of the remedial measures in contemplation. Like the prime minister, Spencer also saw an amnesty as an important element of a counter-insurgency strategy. He was keen to appeal to those men who were currently giving their “indirect sympathy” to the Fenians, for the release of a substantial number of prisoners held promise of persuading them of the government’s resolve “to deal justly with the country.” In short, a large if “partial clemency” was one way “to promote the gradual extinction of the spirit of Fenianism and discontent” by separating the revolutionary nationalists from the great mass of the people. Furthermore, it could be implemented with greater security while the suspension of habeas corpus continued in effect and with greater political safety before the agitation for the prisoners’ release gathered even greater popular momentum.7 Fortescue favoured a more restricted amnesty, as did Henry Bruce. The home secretary had no wish to put back in circulation able, “irritated,” and “dangerous” men capable of reviving Fenianism, for this threatened to make “rebellion a ‘thing of naught’ in the estimation of the multitude.” Kimberley gave voice to his scepticism when consulted by Spencer before

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the issue went to Cabinet. “Nothing whatever will I believe be gained with the disloyal who will attribute their release entirely to fear and weakness,” he told the viceroy, “whilst all loyal Irishmen will be entirely disgusted and discouraged.” He preferred to wait at least until the recently renewed suspension of habeas corpus expired. Would this be followed by an upsurge in Fenian activity? Unlike Robert Lowe, however, who opposed an amnesty of any kind, the former viceroy was willing to see the old and the ailing freed and any others for whom some mitigating circumstance could be presented.8 The Cabinet nervously sanctioned a “discriminating amnesty.” Ministers feared making a gift of ammunition to the Tories, who had long accused Liberals of being soft on Fenianism. Hence the instructions to the Irish Executive to make the individual grounds of liberation as specific as possible. The actions and words of the Fenians of “greater ability and earnestness” were to be cited as the explanation of their continued imprisonment. Spencer recommended forty-five men for immediate release, named thirtythree who on no account should be set free, and left the decision in three doubtful cases to Fortescue. A proposal to provide free passage home for the amnestied men earlier transported to Australia was vetoed by a Home Office fearful that such generosity would almost amount to an admission that their rebellion had been “guiltless.” More important still, it “would make a difference between [the Fenians] and ordinary criminals which it would not be politic to stamp with official authority.” The criminalization of the Fenians remained government policy.9 Meanwhile, work was beginning on the first great Irish reform. The royal commission appointed by the Tories to inquire into the revenues and condition of the Church of Ireland had reported on the eve of the general election, only for its recommendations for a much slimmer establishment to be made redundant by the Liberals’ victory. Nevertheless, the information “collected with so much diligence, and set forth with such lucidity” promised to be of service “in arranging the details of disestablishment and disendowment.” Gladstone, one of his recent biographers argues, accepted the principle of religious pluralism but in practice “fought an effective rearguard action on behalf of the Church of England.” Unlike Conservative Anglicans, however, he was willing to abandon those outposts he considered “untenable.” If, as has been claimed, his Irish Church policy was driven less by a desire to satisfy “Irish national opinion” and more by general principles that he hoped would benefit both the Church of England and “the position of the lay liberal Catholics of Ireland, in relation to the ultramontanes,” he failed to make this clear to the Queen. “England would

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never be easy, and was alarmed, and Ireland must be tranquilized to secure peace,” she recalled him saying, and “this measure would do it.” Victoria did not agree. Land tenure was in her opinion far more important to the Irish, a people in whose truth and reliability she placed little trust. The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland would never keep “them quiet for long,” she predicted, given the “bad” conduct of the Catholic clergy.10 As head of the Established Church, Victoria made plain her wish for the preservation of the Irish Church’s “connection however slender with the Crown.” She requested a copy of the draft legislation before it was submitted to Parliament, only to be advised by Gladstone that he had allocated a full six months to its preparation. The “Heads of a Bill” were forwarded to Chichester Fortescue, who did not attend church on 27 December so that he could devote the entire Sabbath to reading and making notes on the proposed legislation. The following day he met with Gladstone, who had abandoned any thought of including a provision to fund glebes for Catholic priests lest this sunder Liberal unity. At the 29 December meeting of the Cabinet, of whose other members only Granville had seen the draft, the decision was taken to place the bill at the top of the legislative agenda. Over the course of the next three weeks, the detail was fleshed out by Gladstone and a small group of advisers gathered at his country retreat of Hawarden, on the Welsh border. Then, on 22 January 1869, the principal clauses were forwarded to the queen, along with a supporting document that placed the legislation firmly within the terms of the “plan of union” as conceived by Pitt and Castlereagh at the opening of the century. Although Gladstone and his wife spent two days at Osborne and his personal relations with the queen were as yet amiable enough, not only did Victoria continue to manifest a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for the measure but her political distrust of the prime minister was hardening into personal dislike. She preferred Disraeli, who, if clearly less earnest and in many ways less morally committed than the Liberal, was in her opinion a politician of larger mind and greater personal unselfishness. Gladstone is said to have returned the favour when shown a portrait of the monarch, allegedly remarking acidly: “She is as small in person as she is in mind.”11 The queen’s repugnance for the legislation was naturally shared by the leadership of the Church of Ireland. Even its “moderate party” refused meekly to accept disestablishment, despite Liberal threats to punish resistance by no longer “dealing tenderly with the Interests of the Church.” Gladstone, who had been hoping for a quiescent Irish episcopacy in the belief this would produce an acquiescent English one, angrily questioned

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the “sanity” of the Irish bishops. More surprising still was the initial response of Cardinal Cullen. While he had welcomed the Liberals’ election triumph as signalling “the destruction of the Protestant establishment” in Ireland and thus a great blow to Protestantism in England and elsewhere, his optimism was tempered as ever by a seemingly inextinguishable suspicion of English “treachery.” Any provisions with respect to glebes and parsonages for Church of Ireland clergy cut adrift by the measure would be entirely unacceptable, the Catholic hierarchy announced. Its members demanded total disestablishment and disendowment and warned of continued Catholic restlessness unless funding was included for a denominational system of education. Here was a “bitter pill,” Clarendon remarked, and one which if swallowed would be an “enormous gift” to the Tories and England’s “Ultra Protestants.” It was simply too bad of “this viper Cullen” to increase the government’s already formidable difficulties, he complained to his son-in-law Odo Russell, and he instructed the younger man, as the unofficial British representative in Rome, to impress upon the pope’s secretary of state and the visiting archbishop of Westminster the Liberals’ “utter disgust” with the Irish hierarchy. The “malignant and ungrateful” attitude of the Irish bishops, the foreign secretary growled, threatened to erode British public support of the bill. If such an “act of justice” was “to produce no good effect in Ireland,” the English people would question the need to “submit to a Church revolution that disturbs the minds of conscientious men and leads them to fear for the Church of England.”12 Cullen was soon singing from a different hymnal, perhaps in response to papal pressure. He gave a conciliatory speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in Dublin and followed this with a courtesy call on the viceroy. Spencer found him “most cordial,” if irritatingly laconic and evasive, but was somewhat reassured by Fortescue’s assessment of the cardinal. He was by nature “a very reserved and not prepossessing man,” the chief secretary explained, who while “intensely ecclesiastical in his views” was nevertheless a “true friend of ‘law and order’ and of the imperial connection.” Spencer reassured Clarendon in turn of Cullen’s “friendly” feelings and his apparent willingness, “as far as the Church Bill goes,” to place “complete confidence” in the government. Gladstone diplomatically forwarded a copy of the legislation to the cardinal shortly after its introduction in the Commons on St David’s Day. Cullen’s response was positive, and he now described the bill as well designed both to “promote the interests of Ireland” and “inaugurate an era of peace and prosperity.” He did object, however, to any maintenance by the state of twelve cathedrals for Protestant

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worship, and he proposed the return of one of Dublin’s pair of preReformation establishments to the Roman Catholic Church. It would also be better, he advised, if the lands surrendered by the Church of Ireland went to the small farmers in actual possession of them rather than to the landlord class. In this way, the “industrial classes” would acquire a stake in the country and thus be “more desirous to maintain peace and to preserve the rights of property.” Turning to the distribution of the proceeds of disendowment, Cullen insisted that this task not be given to those “nests of proselytism,” the local Grand Juries.13 The state would contribute to the maintenance of no more than a limited number of “great churches,” Gladstone soothingly replied, and only then for the sole purpose of easing passage of the legislation through an overwhelmingly Protestant Parliament. That same tactical concern made inadvisable the transfer of Irish Church buildings to the Roman Catholics. The public authority created to distribute the residue from disendowment, Gladstone assured him, would prevent any of the monies being used in the manner Cullen feared, but a bill would soon be introduced to provide loans to enable priests to acquire glebes and glebe houses. None of these assurances completely erased Irish Catholic suspicion of the ultimate intent of the legislation. Was it an artful Liberal device to “weaken the sway now wielded by the Catholic priesthood over the Irish people as a priesthood of an oppressed and persecuted faith”? After all, the British regarded the priests not only as the spiritual guides and masters of Irish Catholics but also as their “leaders in the chronic though usually passive conflict which they wage against English rule.” Punch depicted a prognathous Fenian and a porcine priest standing side by side contemplating the implications of the church bill. The measure was spoiling the Fenians’ trade, the priest concedes, but not his own. Evidently, elements of the English press foresaw no quick end to the “extortion, moral tyranny, and social intermeddling” of the Irish priesthood.14 The bill was making “extremely satisfactory” progress, Gladstone informed Spencer in April, for the occupants of the “front bench opposite” were not resisting it “to the death.” This had been the fear, given the standard under which Disraeli had fought the election and to which so many parsons had rallied. There was, however, some Tory indecision over tactics and strategy. Disraeli expected the upper chamber to be the decisive battleground. Under pressure from Hardy, he did oppose second reading, delivering a speech “wonderfully ingenious” yet lacking “real earnestness and conviction.” The former home secretary heartened Tory backbenchers, exhibiting the passion his leader failed even to feign. He repeated the

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accusation frequently hurled during the election campaign, that Liberals were driven by a craven fear of Fenianism, only for Gladstone to brush off the charge and pull the sting of much of the criticism by reserving approximately one-half of the proceeds of disendowment as a compensation fund from which to recompense clergy and others doomed to lose their livings. This act of pragmatic generosity was accepted with apparent equanimity by Cullen, who remained confident that the Protestant Church would be left with “very little indeed.” Moreover, the generosity had been extended to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, which received a handsome settlement for the loss of its annual state subsidies. The Presbyterians were similarly compensated. The remaining threat to the legislation was the Tory-dominated House of Lords, and it was a nervous Liberal leader there who summoned home the British ambassador to France to vote for second reading.15 The queen put aside her personal objections to the bill and gave the government a helping hand. She urged peers not to defeat on second reading a measure passed by so large a majority in the other place. Rejection would bring on a constitutional crisis and might prove “suicidal,” for the Speaker was warning that the Commons were capable of doing “anything” if the bill was thrown back in their faces. This concern did not silence the Lords. Derby denounced the measure, while a grim archbishop of Dublin delivered less a speech than a “funeral oration.” Nor were Tory peers dissuaded from attaching potentially crippling amendments to the bill. They reintroduced the contentious issue of concurrent endowment in the form of public funding of glebes for the clergy of all three denominations. This was an astute choice of battlefields, for ministers were holding back their own bill providing monies to priests in order to avoid an embarrassing discussion in the Commons, though a modified measure was to be introduced and passed the following year. Cullen naturally interpreted the Lords’ amendment as a device “‘to get an argument to defend the renewed endowment of the Protestant Church’” and to silence Catholics by throwing them “‘some crumbs.’” The Fenians would seize upon it as further proof that Ireland could expect nothing good from British legislation,” he informed the prime minister. Under severe strain, with Nonconformists staging protest meetings against the amendment and with the Cabinet fretting over the likelihood of constitutional deadlock between the two Houses, Gladstone may have briefly contemplated throwing up the bill in despair. He persevered. The queen indicated her willingness to see the legislation enacted so long as the largest sum of money possible went to the disestablished Church of Ireland, while ministers concluded

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that it would be possible to reject some amendments, water down others, and make sufficient concessions to enable the Tory peers to withdraw their provocative measure on concurrent endowment and still save face. The conflict suddenly resolved; everyone shook hands and swore eternal friendship. The exception was Gladstone, who, although now on a “pinnacle,” was confined to his bed with a severe bout of diarrhoea, perhaps the result of nervous tension. The compromise did not deter Cullen from indulging his taste for sectarian triumphalism. More unfortunate still was the impression Gladstone had given in debate that he had been “led to do justice to Ireland by the intensity of Fenianism.” No “Irishman could have made a stronger argument for the use of physical force,” one prominent Fenian later observed sardonically. This was not without significance, for a great many Catholic Irish viewed disestablishment as “simply the first of many concessions,” given that their “right to determine the nature of Irish institutions had [now] been conceded.” In Britain, on the other hand, the belief was hardening that all “‘pretence for our Irish fellow-citizens specially to complain, and for men of other countries to believe, or say that Irish complaints are just,’” had now disappeared.16 Doubts of the value of the policy of conciliation and irritation with the perennial Irish question were nourished by the annoying behaviour of a handful of the fifteen Fenians released in Britain – the additional thirtyfour liberated men were on their way home from Australia – and the reports of renewed agrarian violence. The “blackguard Fenians” had created “a very bad impression” with their inflammatory speeches, one Cabinet member observed, and he regretted their release. Additional embarrassment was caused by the mayor of Cork. The Tories had removed Daniel O’Sullivan from the magistrates’ bench the previous autumn for publicly denying that Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien had committed murder, only for his fellow citizens to nullify this disciplinary action by electing him the city’s chief magistrate. He immediately repeated his earlier indiscretion, extolling the three “patriotic Irishmen” who had upheld “the honour of their country on the scaffold at Manchester.” The Irish Executive initially ignored his “foolery,” which reportedly included flying the Fenian flag, but disdain quickly became more difficult to sustain. O’Sullivan welcomed to Ireland’s second city two of the most voluble of the liberated Irish-American Fenians, hailed the Manchester trio yet again as good Catholics and good patriots, reportedly described the attempted assassin of the duke of Edinburgh as both noble and patriotic, and then capped his performance by giving the entire credit for the Liberals’ conciliatory Irish policy to the Clerkenwell explosion. The man belonged in a lunatic asylum,

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Spencer fumed, but lacking as he understood it the authority to remove him from office, he turned to London for action. Gladstone did not minimize the seriousness of O’Sullivan’s indiscretions, representing as he did public authority in so important a city. Whatever licence might be permitted in a liberal state to private individuals, it was “intolerable that law should be insulted, and social morality outraged, from the Chair of Justice.” Determined to solve the O’Sullivan problem as speedily as possible, the Cabinet decided to introduce special legislation to remove him permanently from office and bench. Under this threat he resigned.17 Gladstone struggled manfully to bathe this episode in a favourable light, insisting that the Crown and the law had derived “an accession of moral weight and force from such an incident.” By implication, he was claiming this supposed benefit as a fruit of his bruised remedial policies. Turning to the conduct of the handful of Fenians who on release used “improper and seditious language,” he strenuously denied they demonstrated the failure of amnesty. The purpose of the releases was to draw a line between the Fenians and the people of Ireland and to make the people indisposed to cross it, he explained to a sceptical Victoria. Moreover, the policy of isolating the revolutionary nationalists from the people and reducing the social acceptance of political violence was one for the long term. The patience of years if not generations was required to repair the damage done over centuries, but he claimed for the church bill an immediate success in conciliating the most influential members of Irish society, the Roman Catholic clergy. The passage of additional remedial measures embracing the entire people would make them also a source of support of Throne and government, he reasoned, and would halt the production of Fenians. This proved to be an unfortunate hook on which to hang the hat of conciliation.18 The Fenian organization in Dublin was at a standstill, Daniel Ryan had assured his political masters in March 1869. This information, together with the news that expiration of the habeas corpus suspension bill had not brought the feared influx of suspicious strangers, briefly inflated Spencer’s confidence that an important corner had been turned. Not “for several years past has Fenianism been at so low an ebb,” he reported at the end of the month. Bishop Moriarty seemingly agreed, informing Fortescue only a few days later of the movement’s death agony. Yet disquieting evidence of continued Fenian activity in both Britain and Ireland had come to light before the public announcement of the release of the forty-nine prisoners. A “Fenian” concert and ball held in Liverpool at the beginning of February had attracted a republican crowd estimated to number 1,000. A Fenian

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gathering at Clonmel shortly afterwards was reported to have been attended by thirty-seven Fenian “centres,” while collections in aid of the families of the remaining Fenian prisoners were continuing in Catholic chapels. Even in Killarney, despite David Moriarty’s “loyal preaching,” the Fenian element was said to be “very general.” Consequently, confidence proved so frail a plant it withered before it could bloom. The Crown solicitor learned in mid-March of the re-election in London of the Fenian Supreme Council, and Henry Bruce forwarded to Dublin information given by a young Irishman who, about to be executed for murder, admitted to being a Fenian and revealed the imminent gathering in Leeds of the Brotherhood’s “Central Council” to draft a new plan of operations. Within a few weeks, the Fenians were, in the home secretary’s words, again “very active” in London and other large English towns. Hard on the heels of the discovery in the capital of a large cache of weapons came reports of a revival of Fenian drilling in Ireland, with as many as 800 men participating at a town in County Cork. Robberies of weapons were occurring with a distressing frequency, and Irish Americans were returning to the island. Spencer, struggling to remain optimistic, was inclined to trace all of this to the Fenians’ fear of the “soothing effect” of the church bill. It was an analysis Daniel Ryan endorsed, yet there could be no denying the Brotherhood’s existence. Against this background and with Spencer calling for increased surveillance of known Fenians and Fenian organs, Cabinet ministers were disinclined to respond favourably to the Irish clamour for the release of the remaining Fenian prisoners.19 Many of the homecomings given the liberated Fenians were not only in very “bad taste,” the viceroy grumbled, but they also gave fresh impetus to the campaign to secure the release of the men still imprisoned. The towns in which mock funerals had been staged for the Manchester martyrs tended to be the centres of the new round of demonstrations, because the sympathy generated for the executed men helped excite an emotional interest in the fate of the prisoners. Nor was the amnesty movement confined to Ireland. A British branch, founded in London, quickly spread to the provinces. The bulk of the thirteen petitions praying for the release of political prisoners and presented personally to the queen at a levee on 5 March, still came from Ireland, but two of them originated in Yorkshire. With an eye to the likelihood of further questions in Parliament on their treatment, Bruce assured Fortescue of the Fenian prisoners’ separation from common criminals. They were generally in good health and well-behaved, he added, with the exception of a few like O’Donovan Rossa who by constantly violating rules exposed themselves to punishment. Although John Francis

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Maguire postponed the question he had put down in the Commons, the issue remained an open sore. Edmund Henderson’s resignation as chairman of the Directors of Convict Prisons, to accept the position of Metropolitan police commissioner, brought no liberalization of the penal regime. His successor was a former protegé, Edmund Du Cane, another military man committed to discipline, order, and the deterrent value of stern punishment. In this he was as one with the home secretary. Also, the “exceptional leniency” of the Fenians’ prison lives had already become a target of Opposition critics and evangelical Protestants. The latter decried the appointment at Portland Prison of a Catholic chaplain and the conversion of an old mess room into a Catholic chapel. Fenianism, they railed, had served as “the pioneer of Popery in Portland Island.”20 The Home Office reluctantly granted Richard Pigott access to several of the prisoners. He was the defendant in an action for damages brought by A.M. Sullivan of the Nation following the publication in the Irishman of defamatory comments attributed to prisoners. However, the authorities considered Pigott’s application a pretext “for the purpose of concocting some plans for further mischief.” Already, John Devoy had submitted a formal complaint to the home secretary alleging “special cruelty” in the treatment of himself and his fellow Fenians. They had been subjected to the “studied insults” of staff, he charged, compelled to compete at work with “habitual criminals,” and confined in airless cells intolerably hot in summer and all the more unbearable on account of a diet that included “horrid porridge,” which made men “sweat profusely” and created “an amount of sulphurated hydrogen sufficient to pollute a much greater quantity of air than can find its way into a place where such precautions are taken to exclude it.” The complaints were ignored, made as they were by a notoriously disruptive and occasionally violent prisoner. Nor was Devoy’s request for additional visits from friends granted, for they were often used “for the purpose of giving some apparent authenticity to extravagant and mischievous falsehoods.” The interviews Pigott conducted were certainly open to that interpretation. He reported that for thirty-five days O’Donovan Rossa had been handcuffed with his hands behind his back, as a result of a succession of “unjust punishments” for minor infractions that had provoked him into an attack on a warder. Pigott’s statements were certain to have “considerable weight with many among the respectable and educated classes in Ireland” and be noticed in Parliament, Robert Anderson warned. Bruce hurriedly sought information on the prisoners’ behaviour, treatment, and punishments, and was assured they had been kept separate, as far as was possible, from common criminals. Whenever

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a Fenian working party included ordinary convicts, these had been carefully “selected from the most inoffensive.”21 In Ireland, meanwhile, the upsurge in agrarian violence was proving another Executive headache. A series of murders – and among the victims were two landlords and a pair of bailiffs working for the notorious Lord Leitrim, whose treatment of his tenants was described by Fortescue as “evidently monstrous” and feudal – attracted national attention and brought the usual British press demands for a “vigorous, prompt, severe” government response. At least one Cabinet member considered the rural outrages “very Fenianism in other guise,” but Spencer denied any connection to the revolutionary movement and reminded ministers that such terrible crimes had long predated Fenianism. Fortescue found their “immediate and main cause” in the “entire impunity and success” of the Scully outrage. For some observers, those landlords were to blame who, fearful the Liberals planned to enact “fixity of tenure,” were evicting tenants in order to ensure that fewer were in occupation whenever a land law took effect. Still others accused John Bright of “adding fuel to the fire” by talking of peasant proprietorships and describing landlords as partners “in a system of oppression and wrong.” Gladstone, on the other hand, artfully adapted the ongoing rural violence to his policy of conciliation. High political excitement had collapsed with the introduction of the church bill, he argued, and thus men who had earlier sunk their personal quarrels in the pursuit of “a general revolution” were now resuming “the idea of individual revenge.” The queen was not persuaded and was surely not alone in the belief that the identification, especially in Ireland, of the Clerkenwell explosion as the spur to the Liberals’ conciliatory Irish policy had convinced the Irish tenant that “acts of violence” were his “best chance of gratifying his desire to appropriate the land he occupies.” Greed for land was a driving force of the outrages, Spencer agreed, and “every case of hardship” further stimulated “the craving to deeds of violence.” There was, unfortunately, no lack of hardship following the poor potato harvest of 1868 and the raising of rents by landlords keen to profit from increased competition for grasslands.22 The inability of the police to bring to justice persons guilty of terrible crimes committed in “broad daylight within reach of many people who must have known what occurred” was an indirect link, Spencer acknowledged, between the rural violence and Fenianism. Police activity “during the Fenian business” had made the discontented more suspicious, he inferred, and had “separated more than ever the Constabulary from the people.” However, the murders and other outrages in Tipperary, Meath,

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Westmeath, and elsewhere were the work of Ribbonmen and might be temporarily if “insufficiently” halted by a combination of “coercitive Acts,” a well-organized “Detective System,” and truly qualified and energetic resident magistrates. Captain William Whelan, the former hunter of military Fenians, a deputy to Colonel Feilding, and now a resident magistrate whose jurisdiction embraced Father Lavelle’s former parish of Partry, had created his own rudimentary detective force. It did not impress Spencer as a suitable model for adoption elsewhere, the viceroy dismissing its members somewhat scornfully as “[d]isposables in plain clothes” who could be spotted a mile off. Moreover, the refusal of most victims of violence either to give statements to the police or appear in court as witnesses frustrated both detection and prosecution. Consequently, more in desperation than out of conviction, Spencer and Fortescue recommended local suspensions of habeas corpus to simplify the detention of leading Ribbonmen.23 The Cabinet greeted the proposal with “great repugnance,” fearful it would drive Irish Liberals to combine with the Tories to bring the government into “disfavour” and alienate the Catholic clergy wooed with the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. So Spencer and Fortescue were restricted to minor amendments to existing legislation, only for the sense of crisis to worsen with the fresh round of sectarian violence whipped up in England by William Murphy. The Home Office had striven to check his capacity for mischief by exerting greater pressure on local magistrates to ban him from lecturing either in the street or at any public place. In deference to liberal scruples, however, it declared that interference with such public gatherings ought only to be resorted to where magistrates were “persuaded of the urgency of the danger to the public peace and of the insufficiency of the measures at their disposal to prevent serious disorder.” In short, meetings were not to be stopped “simply because they [were] viewed with disapprobation.”24 Sectarianism was also abroad in Ireland, where Protestants of the Northern counties were infuriated by the popular welcomes given the released Fenians. They threatened to disregard the Party Processions Act and stage retaliatory Orange marches. Spencer, who reasoned somewhat speciously that the receptions given the Fenians differed “materially from the funeral processions [in honour of the Manchester martyrs], for they may be said to be partly in honour of an act of the Government,” was soon deeply embarrassed by riots in Londonderry during a royal visit to the town. The queen had been persuaded to permit Prince Arthur to make a brief tour of Ireland. The viceroy immediately proclaimed the area, thereby

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enhancing police powers, considering this “strong measure” essential in light of the weaponry known to be in the hands of both Protestants and Catholics. Nor was he unmindful of the possibility that final passage of the church bill would unfortunately coincide with the traditional Orange marching season. Neither Fortescue’s prediction that its second reading in the Lords would “damp the ardour of the Orangemen,” nor Thomas O’Hagan’s contemptuous characterization of these sectarians as “intolerably rampant in success” but “easily cowed in misadventure,” stilled Spencer’s fears. As 12 July approached, he struggled to maintain a posture of official impartiality but despaired of Ireland’s religious divisions. “The expense of preparations to keep the peace in Ulster is grievous, but cannot be avoided,” he lamented. “When will this hateful religious antagonism cease?” The arrival in Dublin of several Northern Catholic bishops to attend a meeting of the Maynooth board presented O’Hagan with an opportunity to impress upon them “the value of quiescence.” There should be no Catholic celebration of disestablishment, he emphasized, and Catholics would do well to stay off Northern streets. Instead, Cullen celebrated the end of the Established Church and 12 July saw both sides parade “unfortunate bigotry.” The serious rioting in Belfast was likened by Thomas Burke to the conduct of a pair of hostile Indian tribes, whereas the conduct of Lurgan Orangemen would in his opinion have disgraced “Maori savages.” They stormed the homes of “unoffending Catholics,” dragged their furniture out into the streets to fuel bonfires, and in one instance seized the bed of a pregnant woman nearing confinement, forcing her to rush half naked into the garden. “What a pleasant country we live in,” the undersecretary mordantly observed. He hoped the arrested Protestant rioters and arsonists would receive exemplary justice. Instead, their trials, which opened in September, were quickly to be brought to a halt by the local Orangemen, who kept up such an incessant and deafening pounding on Lambeg drums outside the courthouse that the proceedings were abandoned.25 The religious tensions encouraged renewed and often acrimonious discussion of the role of the Catholic clergy in the politics of nationalism. Their critics cited the conspicuous clerical support of the amnesty movement as proof that “the ‘faith of the felon’ was the Roman Catholic faith.” In fact, in the Diocese of Dublin, Cullen strenuously opposed the efforts of “the Fenian Committee” to solicit funds, while Archbishop Leahy banned collections at the gates of his cathedral in Cashel. He and Cullen feared that any expression of sympathy for the Fenians would provide the Tories with an opportunity to criticize the Catholic clergy, excite the English

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against Irish Catholics, and stall Liberal conciliatory measures. Another of Cullen’s allies within the hierarchy railed against the “very malignant and virulent” Irishman for publishing the sums in aid of the families of the prisoners raised in the different parishes, and deplored the “fatal example” set by the bishop of Limerick in sanctioning a diocesan collection. Many priests may have seen in the amnesty movement a means to recover popularity lost as a result of their opposition to Fenianism, but they also stood accused of involvement in the agrarian violence.26 A parish priest was reported in the press to have denounced a landlord from the altar. O’Hagan did not believe that priests in general were “suborners of agrarian crime,” but did admit that “in so large a body, so intimately bound up with the masses, from whom they spring, impudence and violence sometimes, unfortunately, display themselves.” Leahy and Cullen, on the other hand, were keen to keep the people “quiet,” and the former issued a pastoral strongly condemning the murders in Tipperary. These crimes, he warned, would be used to blacken the reputation of the Irish and alienate British public opinion from the Liberals’ remedial legislation. Those measures and O’Hagan’s influence had conditioned the Catholic clergy to be cooperative “if properly approached,” Spencer confidently asserted, but one of the former viceroys sitting at the Cabinet table remained profoundly sceptical of the priests’ trustworthiness. Having “with such continuous pertinacity educated their flocks in disloyalty to the Crown and defiance of England,” Clarendon remarked, they now found themselves powerless “to preach or to warn in a different sense.” Not that he credited many of them with making the attempt. They stood too deeply in fear of unpopularity to be trusted and were “producing very bitter feelings” with their “interference in all social questions particularly as between Landlords and Tenants.” Clarendon had made a private visit to Rome early in 1868, while in opposition. His purpose, several cardinals suggested, was to “beseech” the pope to use his influence against Fenianism. Now, with Gladstone’s approval and back at the Foreign Office, he gave to his son-in-law the delicate task of approaching the cardinal secretary of state, not with a British request for papal intervention, but with the object of leading Antonelli to suggest it himself. The cardinal’s response was encouraging, for he admitted that the state of Ireland filled him with “horror and distress,” that the Irish character was “incomprehensible to him [and] he knew no nationality so difficult, so hopeless, or so disagreeable to deal with.” The subsequent conduct of a number of clergy in employing their great influence “beneficially,” such as Cullen’s making crystal clear his disapproval of a proposed Fenian demonstration in

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Glasnevin Cemetery in July, was diplomatically attributed by Clarendon to the Vatican’s intervention.27 Few British observers deluded themselves that the church bill would conciliate Catholic Ireland. Punch’s Britannia was depicted innocently looking forward to “something like harmony,” having tuned the one string of the Irish harp “that made all the discord,” only to have her attention drawn by Hibernia to a second damaged string. This was an allusion to the land problem, and the following month found Punch harping on yet another discordant note. Cullen, gross and grim, was portrayed as a harsh sectarian who resorted to spiritual intimidation to keep ragged Catholic children out of non-denominational national schools. The hierarchy’s stand on education continued to anger the queen despite Gladstone’s best efforts to calm her by pointing out that, with respect to higher education at least, Cullen would be satisfied with what the Tories had recently offered him. But Clarendon remained another bitter critic of the cardinal’s pursuit of denominational education, excoriating him for his “splendid ingratitude.” Here was proof positive that the hierarchy “cared ten times more for getting education into their hands than for the abolition of the Church.” The priests would then be “the complete and unassailable masters of Ireland.” Another of Clarendon’s bugbears was the nationalist press. He accused it of planting a poison, for which there was no known antidote, in Irish minds by creating unreasonable expectations on the complex issue of land reform. He was convinced it was plotting along with priests to subvert property rights. “I knew all along that the agitators, the Priests and the national press were going in for socialism in its most dangerous form,” he growled, “and they are now throwing off the mask.” The land question was going to require “a great deal of nice steering” even within the Cabinet, the prime minister realized.28 Clarendon angered Gladstone by advertising his gloomy assessment of the land problem. Speaking at Watford, north of the capital and close to his home, he denounced both tenants and proprietors. The rights demanded by the first he assailed as “wild spoliation,” while he labelled “felonious” the conduct of many landlords. Such comments had gone beyond “strict justice” in the current “extremely delicate” circumstances, Gladstone complained. Since it was still unclear whether landlords or tenants would prove the greater impediment to settlement, ministers were under an obligation to exhibit “great reserve” and confine themselves to “mild and general phrases.” Clarendon immediately qualified his half-hearted apology with a sly mention of the letters of support he had received from several colleagues. Meanwhile, in Ireland, Spencer was struggling to

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suppress the agrarian violence. He moved additional police into any area where there had been a murder in the hope that their greater presence would produce greater effectiveness. The “rude response” of charging the additional costs to local residents, in the belief this would induce them to come forward with evidence against the perpetrators, resulted by his own admission in the innocent suffering along with the guilty. Nevertheless, he remained confident of its good “whole effect.” Firm government was one way to reassure the loyal and perhaps cow the violent.29 Somewhat surprisingly, tenant right did not immediately emerge as the captivating Irish public issue. Instead, the fate of the Fenian prisoners continued to be the principal focus of popular interest. George Moore, the member of Parliament for Mayo and an avowed nationalist, called to see Henry Bruce on the evening of 25 June 1869. He claimed to have it on excellent authority that there was more to O’Donovan Rossa’s claims of brutal ill-treatment than the prison administration had led the home secretary to believe. Bruce was uncertain what to make of this. Was Moore lying to him? Had he been provided with information by a disgruntled warder? Was he laying the ground to dispute Bruce’s recent reassuring statement in the Commons, “so making capital with his Fenian supporters”? Three days later a new Amnesty Association – one that had formed to challenge the Amnesty Committee, which since the general election had been effectively controlled by a “pro-Gladstonian clique” – staged its official launch with a well-attended public meeting in Dublin’s Rotundo. Control of this new pressure group was formally exercised by a body that included such traditional nationalist luminaries as John Martin and A.M. Sullivan, but the dominant figures were Isaac Butt, the association’s president, and John Nolan, its secretary. Butt was carefully rebuilding and reinventing his political career, having earned Catholic respect and admiration as defence counsel in a number of Fenian trials. His genuine sympathy for the prisoners’ plight was reinforced by political ambition, for he was seeking to create and to lead a new, broad-based, and constitutional nationalist movement. The Repeal movement was in the process of being reformulated as Home Rule, and together with Nolan, a Fenian and the association’s organizational mastermind, Butt reverted to Daniel O’Connell’s tactic of monster meetings.30 Rare was the weekend throughout the autumn of 1869 that did not witness multiple amnesty rallies. They offered a colourful and tuneful diversion from daily life. Flags, banners, and favours were on display, bands played popular national airs and comic songs, while placards

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conveyed an emotive message of “suffering brothers” in “English dungeons” whose only crime was that of being “faithful children” of Ireland. Priests were conspicuous and often dominant participants at the rallies, occupying the chairs at one-third of the gatherings and addressing fully half of them. Resolutions were passed deploring the “horrible treatment” of the prisoners and rejecting “the late miserable partial amnesty.” Many of those in attendance may have been seeking no more than entertainment, but they were counted as committed supporters of the cause. Trade societies, detachments of women, and on occasion columns of children from the schools of the Christian Brothers were also in attendance. As many as 500,000 people were expected to assemble in Dublin on 10 October 1869, and while those who actually turned out may not have reached half that number, they still represented a daunting concentration of amnesty sympathizers. Equally worrying for the Irish Executive were the reports of the marchers being under the “full command” of their leaders and exhibiting “astonishing sobriety.” The people, it seemed, had become “more defiant and confident.”31 The Irish Executive continued to resist the ever louder popular demand for a complete amnesty, fearful that to give way would excite anger in England and Scotland and dismay not only Ireland’s upper classes but also that silent minority of “quiet, law loving people, who would not venture to express their feelings.” As for the “many respectable people” reportedly in attendance at the rallies, Fortescue offered alternative explanations of their presence. They were either motivated by an understandable desire to see the matter settled – and thus “a cause of agitation” removed – or lacked the moral courage to absent themselves. Sympathy helped to drive the amnesty agitation, he allowed, but “got up by Fenians and Fenian sympathizers,” and exploited by “low politicians,” it was “a feeling of a most mistaken and mischievous kind.” By glorifying the imprisoned men as heroes, the leaders of the agitation were in effect denying the moral right of the government to enforce the sentence of law. The prisoners’ release, he reminded the prime minister, was being demanded “in the name of justice, whereas it ought to be beseeched in the name of mercy.” Or as a sarcastic Crown solicitor put it, were the government to yield to the pressure, James Stephens would probably seek and secure leave to return home from Paris. From magistrates and their usually less excitable stipendiary colleagues, the Irish Executive received pleas for the suppression of the gatherings. If allowed to continue, the justices of the peace predicted, the meetings would “lead to vast trouble and probably loss of

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life and property.” Thomas Burke agreed, for these “enormous gatherings” were bolstering the Fenians and threatening to weaken further the influence of the Executive.32 Spencer resisted suppression. The friendliness of his personal reception during viceregal tours he read as evidence of the superficiality of the popular support for amnesty. Even more important was his image of himself as one embodiment of the liberal state. “No free Government [could] object to public meetings for any legitimate object, short of running the risk of a breach of the peace,” he believed, and any prohibition on that ground would surely be suspect at a time when it appeared to be “the Policy of the Amnesty people to conciliate Government.” Far better to wait for the amnesty activists to engage in “nastier work” following the rejection of additional releases, for this would provide a far more convincing excuse for suppression of the agitation. So the Executive abandoned all thought of prohibiting the monster meeting set for Dublin on 10 October, but it did ban the procession through the city’s streets. The organizers had planned to follow the route taken by the “mourners” of the Manchester martyrs, but this the authorities disallowed on the grounds of the “serious inconvenience” it would cause to the public. The association then decided to assemble the massive crowd at Clontarf, perhaps because of its association with the collapse of the Repeal monster meetings a quarter of a century earlier. This plan was abandoned in the face of the strenuous objections of several local owners of property. The meeting was eventually held in fields at Cabra.33 Behind the scenes, leading Irish Liberals were pressing Gladstone for the release of the remaining Fenian prisoners. This concession would render the church bill “something greater and more sacred in the Irish mind,” John Francis Maguire flattered the prime minister before pinching a nerve with a prediction that without a complete amnesty even “a large measure [of land reform] would fail to propitiate a very considerable section of the community.” Gladstone’s son agreed, following a visit to Ireland. Clemency would “soften the popular feeling and facilitate the passing of a moderate Land Bill,” he reported. His father, keen “to prevent a general and permanent disturbance of the relation of landlord and tenant,” thought of incorporating several of the proposals emanating from Conservative and quasi-Conservative ranks with a number of those advanced by Liberals belonging “strictly” to the landed class. These were reconcilable, he convinced himself. However, amnesty offered, as his son indicated, another path to the same destination. Appeased by the release of the Fenians, the Irish might accept a definition of tenant right sufficiently

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modest not to excite the strenuous objections of the landed interest. Any hope of the Irish Executive following this lead was quickly dashed. “I wish I could think as Gladstone is trying to think that the amnesty were possible and would smooth the way for the Land Bill,” Fortescue admitted to Spencer, “but I cannot think it.” Perhaps in a last attempt to dissuade them from standing in his path, for he shied away from imposing a solution on an administration composed of “liberally-minded and upright men,” Gladstone agreed to reject the amnesty appeals if Spencer advised that a further discharge of prisoners “would be dangerous in its bearings upon public security and upon the authority of the law” and backed the advice with a detailed rebuttal of the arguments for clemency.34 The Irish Executive’s resistance to the release of most if not all of the remaining Fenian prisoners had the queen’s enthusiastic endorsement. The first amnesty did not appear to have produced such a “marked improvement in the behaviour of the Irish as would warrant a special exercise of clemency.” Why excite “indignation and alarm” in her “most sensible and moderate” subjects, given the absence of any evidence of the Fenians abating “in the slightest degree in their hostility to the Crown and Government.” Here was the difficulty confronting any government facing violent political dissidents, the need to show that progressive measures designed to isolate the insurgents or terrorists were having some effect. Thus, Gladstone strove to disabuse the monarch of the notion that the earlier amnesty had proven an “unconditional failure,” and to convince her that the passage of the church bill had “perceptibly improved” the feelings of the Irish people towards Throne and Parliament. He had little success. Disestablishment had merely convinced the Irish that intimidation was the only means of gaining anything from the government, she countered. The provocative statements made by two Irish members of Parliament, George Moore and More O’Ferrall, giving to the Fenians the entire credit for this “act of justice,” appeared to prove the point. It would never do to give way to the Catholic Irish in the vain hope of conciliating them. “They will take everything and not be grateful for it,” the queen contended. Indeed, to set Fenians free while the delicate problem of land reform remained unresolved would have the “disastrous” effect of reinforcing “the mischievous belief [of the Irish] in their own power.”35 The task of drafting the public letter, to be issued over Gladstone’s name, rejecting a second amnesty at this time fell to Fortescue. Spencer, O’Hagan, and the Irish law officers “generally concurred” in its contents. The chief secretary picked up on a suggestion made by Thomas Burke more than a month earlier, that the decision “not to let a single Fenian out at present”

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be softened by an assurance of their “milder prison treatment.” Information supplied by the Foreign Office substantiated the claim that Britain’s treatment of political prisoners was indeed “more rigorous” than that of most European nations. So Fortescue sensibly suggested a further extension of the existing difference in the treatment of the Fenians and common criminals. To make this more evident to the public, he recommended their transfer to a separate institution. A small military prison was about to become vacant and could be readily adapted to this purpose, thereby facilitating “exceptional treatment” without damaging discipline in the public works institutions. Perhaps the simplest means of effecting this, Fortescue added, was to give the home secretary statutory authority “to modify at his discretion the treatment of such prisoners.” But the chief secretary ignored Gladstone’s hint that the refusal of amnesty be tied to the ongoing agrarian violence, because that violence was leading him in another direction altogether. The “system of terrorism, directed against landlords, agents, jurors and witnesses” was threatening, he warned, to place the government “under the hateful necessity” of accompanying a land bill with yet another suspension of habeas corpus.36 Gladstone remained resolutely opposed to this illiberal response to the violence. His constitutional scruples were undoubtedly overlaid by the realization that so drastic an action would expose his policy of conciliation to withering criticism. Thus, the final version of the public letter gave no inkling of a possible suspension of habeas corpus but, at Bright’s suggestion, did dangle before the amnesty agitators the prospect of additional liberations at some more favourable date. Ironically, Spencer and Fortescue, having argued for a specific statement affirming the government’s intention to regard as a “great crime” both incitement to insurrection and the taking up of arms against the state, considered Gladstone’s denunciation of Fenianism in the previous draft “a little hard.” He willingly agreed to tone down the “sonorous anti-Fenian sentence.” Nevertheless, he declared Fenianism a crime without any just claim to immunity from punishment, reminded everyone that the Fenian Brotherhood was still active in both Ireland and the United States, insisted that the liberation of the prisoners would be inconsistent with the government’s duty as the guardian of public security and peace, and reaffirmed its commitment to the removal of Ireland’s real grievances. He also seized the opportunity, provided by the address forwarded from the Cabra meeting, to respond to those critics who contrasted his stand on the incarcerated Fenians with his passionate attack almost twenty years earlier on the government of Naples for its treatment of political prisoners. The cases were in no sense comparable,

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he argued. The Fenians had received free and open trials under a lawful government, and they had been convicted by juries staffed by their fellow countrymen. The Neapolitan prisoners, on the other hand, had been arrested and imprisoned without genuine legal process.37 Gladstone authorized Fortescue to confer with Bruce on the suggested removal of the Fenians to a separate and special prison. The home secretary declared himself personally amenable to the idea but shirked assuming responsibility for it. This was a question of such importance that it had to go to Cabinet, he replied. Perhaps he was aware of Kimberley’s general support of the confinement of the Fenians in a separate prison. “It is quite sufficient punishment to impress on them,” the former viceroy believed, “without inflicting on them the degradation of mixing them with ordinary convicts.” Bruce was more forthright in his endorsement of Gladstone’s rejection of amnesty. “It will do infinite good,” he assured the queen’s private secretary, “by reassuring those who suspected the Government of unworthy truckling to a popular cry – and by calmly and kindly putting the truth before the misguided Irish.” In this same frame of mind, he reacted sensibly to the challenge posed by the threatened monster amnesty rally set for London’s Hyde Park on 24 October 1869. Discreet rather than overt police and military precautions were taken, Bruce wisely observing: “It seems better to let the excitement expend itself at once than to prolong and aggravate it by interference and opposition.” Hence his satisfaction when no more than 3,500 people assembled. Although a far from insignificant gathering, the turnout was a far cry from the 200,000 the organizers had predicted. Not that the amnesty agitation showed any sign of losing steam in Ireland, where Gladstone’s letter was predictably misrepresented in the “Irish Fenian papers.” The Irishman published a series of savage articles excoriating the prime minister and assailing his administration as one committed to governing Ireland by “terror and torture.” Seizing on Clarendon’s infelicitous reference at Watford to “felonious” landlords, the newspaper implied that bad landlords merited hanging. “What must be the effect of such a diet as this on the excitable Irish mind,” Bruce asked himself, while his fellow ministers reconsidered the wisdom of prosecuting the inflammatory organ. A new nationalist newspaper, the People of Ireland, a less than subtle reworking of the masthead of the suppressed Fenian newspaper, published articles which Bruce read as offering “the clearest and strongest incentives to rebellion.” The mischief being done was “enormous,” he brooded. “The spirit and daring of the Fenians rises steadily and visibly with the forbearance of the Government.” Or as Fortescue, echoing Mayo, self-pityingly commented, “what a damnable country to govern.”38

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Spencer had assumed that the advocates of land reform would keep the Fenians quiet lest an increasingly bitter amnesty campaign endangered “a good land measure.” Instead, “Fenian roughs” broke up tenant right meetings. At Limerick, they tore down the speakers’ platform, danced through the debris singing rebel songs, and unceremoniously ejected a previously popular priest for attempting to speak on the land question. Other priests were drawing far greater attention to themselves by speaking out at the amnesty rallies. They said mass in the morning, one English newspaper reported, only to emerge later in the day as “green republicans” and “mouthpieces of sedition.” Denunciations of English “tyranny and oppression,” assertions that physical force alone would extract concessions from Britain, and ridicule of Gladstone’s gift to the people of Ireland of a “pauperized church” paled beside Father Lavelle’s latest missive to the Irishman. He again denounced Cullen for applying to the Fenians papal decrees directed against other organizations, and assured his fellow countrymen that Catholic doctrine recognized their right to resist a “‘foreign, grinding, crushing, murderous, exhausting, depopulating’” government. “We certainly live in extraordinary times, when those who should teach ‘every soul to be subject to the Higher Powers’ preach the very contrary and fling brands of sedition and anarchy unscrupulously about them,” one of the cardinal’s clerical correspondents observed. According to a member of Cullen’s staff, even the well disposed were “confused with the contradictory [clerical] teaching on the subject of Fenianism.” If able to justify “their resistance to authority by the example of a Priest who holds a position in his Diocese they are only too glad to follow his teaching and example.”39 Although Gladstone had been willing, at least by implication, to concede to Fenianism a measure of the credit for focusing British minds on the Irish problem, he had plainly hoped that the redress of grievances would starve the Brotherhood of recruits and reduce the social acceptance of political violence. Amnesty for the Fenian prisoners was another aspect of this policy, but the Irish Executive would consent only to a “discriminating” release of prisoners. The church bill was the first major piece of conciliatory legislation, but it had plainly failed to appease the priests, who were considered the most influential figures in Irish society. The deepening suspicion that disestablishment was failing to tranquilize Ireland, the popular receptions given the released Fenians, the provocative behaviour of one or two of them, and the upsurge in both agrarian violence and sectarianism conspired to discourage a second amnesty, despite the gathering momentum of the agitation for it in Ireland and the belief that the

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appeasement of this popular opinion would greatly simplify the tasks of securing parliamentary passage and Irish acceptance of a moderate land bill. Instead, Gladstone found himself under mounting pressure to agree to the very antithesis of his policy of conciliation, a return to “firm government” in the form of another suspension of habeas corpus.

11 Mission Failure

The Fenians were more active and better organized than at any time since the rising, Daniel Ryan reported as the winter of 1869 arrived. They had completed another internal reorganization. Power was concentrated in a Supreme Council, biennial elections were to be held for most offices, and members were to pay small but regular subscriptions. Greater financial self-sufficiency helped to make possible the launching of an ambitious scheme to import arms, and the rank and file, who may have numbered 40,000, included “thousands more with firm convictions on the subjects of physical force and republicanism than had ever followed James Stephens.” But in a reversal of the Stephens policy of scorning constitutional conduct, the Supreme Council encouraged members to seek local government offices in order to increase their “power and influence” with respect to the amnesty movement. Ireland was in a “very critical state,” Spencer recognized, and he foresaw a “troublesome winter ahead” during which a single spark “might set the whole people in a blaze.” Nor did the Brotherhood’s “Laws,” on which Ryan had managed to lay his hands, make for reassuring reading. They referred to a “Vigilance Committee” and a “Black List,” the latter presumably naming the targets of the former. Fenianism embodied not simply a desire for national independence but rather a determination to wreak “national vengeance upon England,” Chichester Fortescue concluded. In an effort to head off serious trouble and “obviate the necessity of more exceptional measures,” troops were moved into disaffected districts, the police raided the offices of the Amnesty Association, and the Crown solicitor prepared for a possible prosecution of the “poisonous press.” But the viceroy and the chief secretary were losing faith in halfmeasures. How were they to suppress Fenianism and Ribbonism and “avert insurrection and murder under the conditions of a constitution

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which [was] framed for Yorkshire and the Lothians,” Fortescue asked. Without increased powers, he warned, it would not be long before he and Spencer found themselves unable to govern Ireland.1 The placarding of Catholic church gates with posters advertising Gladstone’s reported comment that Fenianism had turned his attention to Irish grievances, the staging in several towns of mock funerals on the anniversary of the execution of the Manchester martyrs, and Fenian intervention in a string of by-elections increased the tension. At Waterford, they enforced voter abstention with “almost military discipline.” At Tipperary, they organized the nomination of O’Donovan Rossa, whose chances of topping the poll were improved by voter intimidation and the overconfident Liberal candidate’s indolence. The Fenian’s winning total amounted to a mere fraction of the electorate. With characteristic jaunty impudence, he applied for a transfer from Chatham Prison to Millbank, so as to be closer to the Commons. In the subsequent rerun of the election, following O’Donovan Rossa’s disqualification as a felon, the recently released Charles Kickham failed by less than a handful of ballots to top the poll. At Longford, the Fenians coalesced behind the candidacy of John Martin. Their principles and his might not be identical, a government agent noted, but they wished him to succeed “in the absence of a person more favourable to them.” Once again intimidation reared its ugly head, but Martin suffered as well as benefited from this and was heavily defeated. Whatever heart Spencer and his staff took from this by-election result was curbed by the evidence of an ever swelling amnesty agitation. In response, magistrates and police were instructed to disperse sudden meetings of a “seditious tendency” and to ban advertised mass gatherings. To demonstrate its “perfect neutrality,” the Irish Executive also stopped the traditional and provocative annual Apprentice Boys’ Parade in Londonderry. To ensure enforcement of these restrictions and deter the Fenians, additional troops were sent into disaffected districts, additional military posts were established, “flying squadrons” were organized, reinforcements arrived from Britain, and naval patrols of the coastline were increased. Surprisingly, the Cabinet now collectively turned its back on the proposal to pull the teeth of the amnesty movement by transferring the Fenian prisoners to a separate penal institution. Ministers plainly feared the nationalist press would trumpet the decision as an admission that the prisoners had been treated with “undue severity up to this time.” Not surprisingly, they increasingly viewed curbs on newspapers such as the Irishman essential if Ireland was to experience “solid permanent improvement.”2

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Nor were the Fenians in Britain overlooked. They were assumed to be plotting diversionary operations in the event of another rising. Clearly, accurate information was vital to the success of counter-insurgency. The Home Office’s star domestic agent, the “Darlington Man,” confirmed the existence of an organized system for raising Fenian funds and acquiring arms – especially the more easily concealed revolver – in those large towns such as Darlington where the Irish had settled in number. A worried Henry Bruce looked to ethnic animosity to restrain them. Jealousy of the Irish as “the ‘Bears’ of wages would excite the English populace to take strong measures against them if they gave them a pretext,” he predicted. But Spencer urged the recall of Feilding to duty as a Fenian hunter, for the colonel was back in London with the Coldstream Guards. Instead, his former military deputy, William Whelan, once assured his resident magistracy in County Mayo would be held open for him, agreed to return to England, tour the industrial North, and submit a detailed report on every town he visited.3 Spencer and Fortescue also endorsed Gladstone’s strategy of seeking to isolate the revolutionary nationalists from the population. They read the reports of Fenian disruption of tenant right meetings as proof of the Brotherhood’s fear that a “thorough” land bill would deprive it of the aid and sympathy of the farming classes. Here was the rub: far-reaching land reform was certain to encounter stiff resistance within the Cabinet. Gladstone had hoped to finesse this problem with a second release of Fenian prisoners, only to be frustrated by the Irish Executive – hence Clarendon’s glum assessment of land reform as a potential Cabinet-breaker. He suspected Fortescue of seeking to hustle his colleagues into agreeing to an extension across Ireland of the tenant right known as Ulster Custom, which the former lord lieutenant characterized as “pleasant to the agitators but fatal to ourselves.” British tenants, the foreign secretary believed, were currently only remaining quiet in order to help their Irish counterparts win “the utmost possible concession.” Once secured in Ireland, the same rights would be demanded in Britain. Earl Granville, a Cabinet member in whom the agitated Clarendon confided, considered this a problem that would not “smell sweeter for keeping” and thought it was up to the Cabinet to find the line “of doing not too much but enough.”4 With many frightened proprietors loudly demanding resolute government and with tenants claiming that genuine reform “would remove the causes of outrages,” Gladstone believed he had identified the great error of previous administrations. They had largely ignored those laws immediately affecting the lives of the agricultural masses, he reasoned,

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unless it was “to aggravate the mischief at its sorest point by the Landed Estates Act and the sale of the Tenant’s improvements over his head.” Having convinced himself that the current agrarian violence was happily devoid of the personal cruelties and wanton torture of the past, he saw no need for the local suspensions of habeas corpus sought by Spencer. A dismayed viceroy considered the prime minister deluded. The law was powerless and “terrorism” rampant in Mayo, Meath, and Westmeath, and the Fenian organization “widely extended” and “very formidable,” he responded. Unconvinced, Gladstone likened Fenianism to Satan in the Apocalypse, furious because he knew his final defeat was imminent. The “outpourings” of the Fenian press were certainly “loathsome,” providing fresh evidence of “the inveterate character of Irish evils,” he agreed, but they did not in his opinion cause fresh mischief. Offences “not carried into overt acts, nor directly intended to produce them,” were as a rule “less mischievous when tolerated than assailed.” As for the pair of Tipperary by-elections, they were to his mind reassuring evidence of a Fenian decision to embrace a constitutional “mode of action” and wage a “noble form of public war” as an alternative to terrorism.5 Perhaps at Gladstone’s prompting, Granville encouraged Clarendon to make a fresh approach to Rome. The Vatican had earlier been dissuaded from discussing the re-establishment of a Scots hierarchy with the argument that it might tip the balance of an English public opinion delicately poised between support of great things for Roman Catholics, in order to conciliate the Irish and win them over from Fenianism, and angry demands for severe measures to put down Fenianism and Irishmen. At this juncture, an “authoritative” papal declaration binding on “the consciences of the Priesthood as to the duty of obedience to the Civil power” might at least ensure that a majority of priests came out in opposition to the Brotherhood. The foreign secretary was not easily persuaded. All of the humbler priests, and especially the curates, were in his opinion “treasonable haters of English rule.” They encouraged opposition to it, “only not in the Fenian shape”; they hated the traitors, but not the treason. However, Spencer was asked whether he had cause to be dissatisfied with the conduct of the Irish clergy and whether there had been any improvement in its demeanour since the passage of the church bill. The Executive had received support from Cullen, Leahy, and Moriarty in its struggle against Fenianism and agrarian crime, the viceroy replied, but a minority of priests had delivered inflammatory addresses or written incendiary letters to the press. These were significant because “violent sentiments” uttered by priests, if uncontradicted by their superiors, were seen as representative of the opinions

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of the clergy in general. As for the church bill, it had not checked the priests’ “inveterate passion for politics.”6 The Irish Crown solicitor identified fifteen priests “who on thirty-three separate occasions had “uttered language either in support of Fenians or in favour of landlord violence.” On reading the file, Spencer considered the conduct in many instances “hardly so bad as to require special notice.” He forwarded only seven cases to O’Hagan, whose even lighter file, to which after some hesitation Spencer attached the damning police reports on the priests in question, was then sent on to the Foreign Office. These men of the cloth had been acting “in furtherance of treason,” Clarendon charged in his instructions to Odo Russell in Rome. They were agitating for the release of prisoners who had murdered, robbed, and attempted by intimidation “to disorganize the country and subvert the Government.” Only in Ireland, the foreign secretary angrily added, was Catholicism “in opposition to law and social order and the existing government.” Yet in no other nation did it enjoy “more complete freedom or abuse it more systematically.” Fenianism was in his opinion the “natural result” of forty years of rebellious teaching by the clergy, and thus Rome “ought to interfere” and prevent priests from running riot.7 Through the good offices of John Acton, a Liberal Catholic and Granville’s recently ennobled stepson, Odo Russell met with David Moriarty, the only Irish bishop whom he truly trusted among those now gathered in Rome for a Vatican Council. Subsequently, though, he did approach several other members of the Irish hierarchy, to lobby for the adoption of some practical measure against the revolutionary nationalists. Moriarty soon delivered the welcome news of the hierarchy’s decision – perhaps taken before the pressure from London was exerted – to appeal to the pontiff for authority to condemn Fenianism in his name. The bishops feared the Fenians’ capacity to cause “a great deal of trouble,” given that even the “well-disposed” among the faithful were confused by the contradictory clerical teaching on the subject. Dean O’Brien of Limerick had issued another of his circulars, this one calling for the release of the Fenian prisoners, and it was being signed by hordes of priests despite Cullen’s known opposition to it. Patrick Lavelle, whom John MacHale had recently rewarded by moving him to the choice parish of Cong, was still behaving provocatively. So, shortly before Christmas, the Irish bishops decided, over the opposition of MacHale and John Derry, bishop of Clonfert, to seek both an explicit papal condemnation of Fenianism and papal punishment of Lavelle. One week later, at a meeting from which MacHale and Derry chose to absent themselves, the bishops formally petitioned the Holy Office for that condemnation.8

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The document was naturally dated the day before Odo Russell’s audience with the pope, and Henry Manning impressed upon the diplomat the need for caution. Any hint of British foreknowledge of the papal condemnation would “weaken the authority of the Bishops over their flocks.” Those bishops, with Moriarty in the vanguard and with the exception of the “irreconcilable” MacHale, promptly sought reciprocal action by the Gladstone government in the form of a land bill. This, they claimed, “would break up fenianism and unite Her Majesty’s loyal subjects more rapidly and effectively.” They were similarly insistent that the government had a duty to suppress newspapers feeding the “rankest treason” to a poor people who, ill-equipped to resist it, found themselves punished as rebels. Freedom of the press was, of course, a fundamental principle of the liberal state, and with that in mind Moriarty as the bishops’ spokesman in this instance argued that “a sound Principle or Right rule of action” ought not to be abandoned merely because of its possible use elsewhere “for purposes of despotism and tyranny.” The release of the remaining Fenian prisoners was another concession sought by the bishops, and to overcome the ministers’ reluctance to free dangerous men, they suggested the releases be conditional. The Fenians might be asked to post bail as a guarantee of good behaviour, take an oath of allegiance, or agree to go into exile for a number of years. Odo Russell, indulging his taste for irony, reminded the bishop of Kerry that even the most paternal of governments – the papacy – “hesitated at all times to release conspirators from prison.”9 Ever the pessimist, Clarendon expected little from the pope’s “crushing condemnation” of Fenianism, whereas Spencer, an occasional optimist, hoped it would at least induce the hierarchy to issue more decisive instructions to priests on the need to exhort the people “to give up criminals and come forward as witnesses.” As for Gladstone’s hint and Moriarty’s proposal that amnesty be granted as a kind of quid pro quo for the pope’s condemnation of Fenianism, the viceroy declared it “quite impossible” at a time when “the conspiracy was never more complete or powerful” and the membership “very numerous.” To release the Fenians would alienate the “loyal and quiet people” and jeopardize remedial measures, and Spencer was assured of Clarendon’s support whenever the question was brought back to the Cabinet table. The foreign secretary now rued the earlier partial amnesty and expected the Tories to seize upon the “reign of terror” in Ireland and the omission from the Throne Speech of “some measure of coercion” to lambaste Liberal policy. As for the next major item on the government’s Irish legislative agenda, a land bill, Clarendon remained a severe critic of the “utter nonsense” of the Irish tenants’

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demand for fixity of tenure. He could see no good reason why tenants who had occupied land only since the Famine should be made “irremovable.” Instead, they should be provided with more effective protection from arbitrary or capricious evictions. However, the legislation eventually approved by the Cabinet was in Clarendon’s opinion well adapted to Ireland’s peculiar situation but not something any government could dare propose for England – hence the need to disabuse the Irish bishops of the notion that the Liberal government could be persuaded to make “more inroads on the rights of property.”10 The first serious Cabinet discussion of the land question had revealed, as Fortescue informed Spencer, that most ministers “had not that deep and lively sense of all that lies around us and before us in Ireland, which you and I must have, nor yet any full knowledge of the problems to be solved.” Sullivan, the Irish attorney general, whose highly valued services were soon to be lost when on a plea of ill health he escaped to the judicial bench, impressively expounded the possible extension of Ulster Custom to the entire island. But he was then subjected to a stern cross-examination by Cardwell, Hartington, and Lowe, while Argyll, as a large Scottish landowner, made plain his scepticism. Fortescue’s inability to impress this select jury compelled Gladstone to take the lead, but he initially made little headway with colleagues convinced that the expectations of Irish tenants had been raised so high that “reasonable” provisions – compensation for improvements and legal recognition of consensual “goodwill” payments by incoming to outgoing occupiers – would no longer satisfy them. They were clamouring for what no “honest government could concede,” Kimberley grumbled.11 Clarendon was satisfied with the principles of land reform on which the Cabinet finally agreed, although he knew the devil would be in the detail. An irritated sovereign who repeatedly complained of being obliged to rely on the public press for information demanded to see so important a measure before a final decision was taken. Gladstone duly forwarded an anodyne memorandum. The government’s aim, he wrote, was to give tenants a sense of security “in such a way as to create the smallest possible disturbance to existing arrangements, and to preserve, it might almost be said to restore, the essential rights of property.” He then sketched the essential provisions of the proposed legislation – statutory confirmation of Ulster Custom where it already existed; compensation of tenants for disturbance; the freeing of landlords from this obligation if they gave leases of “adequate length”; the presumption that improvements were the property of the tenant; and the creation of a special judicial enforcement authority. The

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queen considered the legislation unjust to landlords. In her opinion, security of tenure needed to be balanced by a refusal to countenance the tenants’ “lawless determination neither to pay rent, nor to suffer evictions.” Some Liberals, such as Lord Dufferin, agreed with her. Millions of pounds had been invested by proprietors in farm improvements, they contended, but the earlier absence of any obligation to register these expenditures meant that landlords would now encounter great difficulty proving that they had made them.12 The Irish were suspected of seeking the abolition of landlords, “not as a social inconvenience, but as a standing affront to nationality.” This suspicion was captured in a full page Punch cartoon. An Irish Caliban, his primitive garment adorned with four “isms” – “Ribandism, Orangeism, Fenianism and Ultramontanism” – informs a Gladstonian Prospero: “This Island’s Mine.” Judy, the Conservative comic weekly, offered much the same interpretation of the land bill, although it also implied, with an image that bore a striking likeness to Cardinal Cullen, that agrarian and political violence were linked to religion. It was a connection long since made by both of the former viceroys sitting in the Liberal Cabinet. “Wretched weakness in action, contemptible vapouring in speech, & cowardly assassinations seem to be the chief characteristics of the native Irishman. I had forgotten slavish bigotry which is another pleasant trait,” a sarcastic Kimberley wrote in his journal. There were exceptions to this norm, he allowed, but generations would pass before the “race” as a whole reached their level.13 In seeking to explain the ongoing violence in Ireland, which they suggested had a trade unionist and socialist colouring, Spencer and Fortescue insisted that “agrarianism” and Fenianism were “mutually exclusive.” They did not, however, exclude a link between revolutionary nationalism and Ribbonism. Fortescue examined the relationships in a Cabinet paper that sought to arm Spencer with the power to arrest and detain “suspicious” persons in those proclaimed districts where crimes were believed to be the work of illegal combinations of these or where a murder had been committed. Clarendon, Hartington, and Bruce all spoke up in favour of the proposal, and the absent Argyll wrote in much the same vein. The queen, convinced that the language of disaffection in Ireland had never before been so general or so generally applauded, lent it her support. But when the issue was put to a vote, only Hartington stood with the chief secretary. Gladstone carried the day with the argument that the situation in Ireland was no worse than at earlier times when exceptional powers had not been legislated. Other ministers, including those who

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believed matters were going from bad to worse and were unlikely to improve without a wholesale suspension of habeas corpus, accepted that as members of a reforming administration they could not at this moment recall Parliament to introduce a coercion bill that would almost certainly imperil the land bill’s passage. In obstructing the former, Irish members would halt the progress of the latter. No less unwelcome was the likelihood of Bright resigning as a protest against coercion. Fearful of the “aspect that would bear in Ireland,” Fortescue failed to press the Executive’s case forcefully. All he secured was authorization to introduce amendments to the existing Peace Preservation Act, so long as they were moved “without parade, and treated as a practical measure for the improvement” of the existing law.14 Hartington, angered by his colleagues’ denial of Spencer’s request for a “vigorous repressive measure,” proposed a joint resignation in protest. But concern over the fate of the land bill and a consoling assurance of the Cabinet’s willingness to take sterner action if the troubling state of affairs long continued, persuaded the viceroy not to spark a Cabinet crisis or give the Tories an opening. However, he refused to provide the prime minister with a statement to the effect that passage of the church bill had been followed by a “partial improvement” in Ireland. It would be manifestly untrue, for terrorism had increased in Mayo and had spread from there to Sligo. Armed bands were marching at night to intimidate “quiet people,” he informed the persistent prime minister. Resident magistrates, among them Captain Whelan, were targets of assassination conspiracies, and the shortage of police had necessitated a resort to military patrolling. Consequently, Spencer was privately dismayed when Gladstone nevertheless went ahead and publicly claimed that the situation was improving in Ireland.15 The land bill was finally introduced on 15 February 1870, and in deference to Bright, it included a very modest land purchase provision. Both Conservatives, who had feared that the “agrarian outrages” would see the introduction of a “stringent and revolutionary proposal,” and “timid ” Liberals were relieved to find so moderate a measure before them, Gladstone pointedly observed to Clarendon. It might be wise to persuade some landlords to abuse the legislation, Granville half-jokingly suggested, in order to convince “Tenant Righters” of its worth. Ironically, Spencer fretted lest the bill promoted violence. Would the concessions made to tenants tempt the disaffected to seek possession of a holding? How would the Fenians react, given the speculation that land reform would cost them “their game and ground”? Would they now be driven

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“to make some mad attempt”? The coincidental return to Ireland from Australia at this very moment of the Fenians released under the amnesty heightened his anxiety. Had the Brotherhood been gifted the leadership it previously lacked? The police were instructed to watch the offices of the Irishman, now serving as a Fenian headquarters, and place its editor and any “suspicious strangers” under surveillance. “We are fully prepared as we can be without a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act,” which as yet the Executive had insufficient evidence to justify, the nervous viceroy informed the sympathetic Clarendon.16 A murder in Dublin, believed to be the work of Fenians; a second Waterford by-election, which brought an avowed nationalist within a whisker of victory, his defeat being followed by a destructive riot labelled “of Fenian origin”; and the “distinct” challenge of Ribbonism in Meath and Westmeath convinced Spencer of the need for “fresh powers. When Gladstone publicly rejected any “great” coercive measure, the despairing viceroy threatened resignation, only for the prime minister to suggest that Kimberley return to Ireland to collect “all the materials of a judgment of this grave question.” Such a mission would “excite great distrust in the Irish Government at a crisis where it [was] most important that its credit and authority should be sustained,” the incredulous former viceroy, together with Fortescue and Spencer, immediately and energetically responded. Threatened with a resignation he could ill afford to accept if he was to keep his Irish policy of conciliation on track, and under mounting pressure from colleagues who insisted that the preservation of life was a duty the government had to discharge, “even at the risk of violating the constitutional liberties of Irishmen,” and that “Thor’s hammer” was needed, Gladstone compromised. He agreed to the establishment of a small Cabinet committee, composed of Kimberley, Hartington, and Fortescue and assisted by the Irish law officers, to draft the heads of a coercion bill “minus H. C. suspension.” Gladstone still resisted that unpalatable “extraconstitutional” measure.17 The dissatisfaction of tenants and rural labourers with the land bill, the latter bitterly disappointed by the defeat of an amendment that would have provided many of them with an acre of land each, promised no early end to agrarianism. The hierarchy drove home this message, prompting Gladstone to seek to convince Cullen of the extraordinary “legal shelter and legal privilege and immunity” now offered to Irish cultivators of the soil. However, with one eye on British tenants, he continued to reject “fixity of tenure” on the grounds it would launch “a social revolution throughout the three countries.” He did dangle before the bishops the possibility of a

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legislative amendment along the other lines they proposed, before issuing a warning. The “perverse and vengeful spirit” that seemed “to meet every pacific and just indication on the part of Parliament by a multiplication of outrages and extension of terrorism” would, if unchecked, disgust British public opinion and fatally alienate it from the policy of conciliation. Cullen, in holding Irish Americans responsible for the disorders, mused on the beneficial effect of the most recent suspension of habeas corpus. This had induced these disruptive visitors either to leave Ireland or to go to ground, the cardinal noted. He also revived the idea of an assault on elements of the press first scouted by Moriarty with Odo Russell in Rome. American money subsidized Fenian and other seditious newspapers, the cardinal claimed, and this made possible their low prices and thus their large circulations. Nothing good could be effected for Ireland, he repeated, until something had been done “to prevent the ravages of an infidel and revolutionary press.” Thus the dominant figure in the Irish Catholic Church was lending support to ministers who favoured coercive measures, such as the former leader-writer of the Times, Robert Lowe.18 The disciplining of the press was a prime objective of the Peace Preservation Bill that Fortescue, with curious insensitivity, introduced on St Patrick’s Day. The lord lieutenant was clothed with the “enormous power” to order “the seizure of the printing presses, engines, machinery, types, implements and people of any newspaper found to include seditious and treasonable material or incitements to commit crime.” In addition, the powers of magistrates and police with respect to the detention of suspects, the closing of public houses, and the charging to the residents of the area concerned the awards of compensation to persons maliciously injured were extended. “If we can’t get the suspension of H. C. we must try to bully the disturbers by such measures as these,” Fortescue wrote to Spencer. Although many liberals had grave misgivings about the legislation, a more general opinion was expressed by a Radical member who privately observed: “Madness requires unusual treatment, and the Irish are at this moment mad. The Bill is an outrage on liberty, and yet without it there would be no liberty.” Spencer agreed. A tour of Meath and Cavan had convinced him that the Fenians were encouraging the agrarian violence in the belief that the more the country was disturbed and the more the government was harassed, the better their ends would be served.19 The swift passage of this illiberal legislation bore out Gladstone’s fears of a deepening British “disgust” with the troubles of Ireland, where the papal condemnation of Fenianism appeared to be having little effect. In two dioceses, Tuam and Cloyne, the decree was not promulgated. A section

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of the congregation in the Pro-Cathedral walked out in protest during the reading of Cullen’s Lenten pastoral denouncing his version of the three “Fs” – Fenianism, Freemasonry and French plays. Some priests simply omitted to circulate episcopal denunciations of the Brotherhood or wrote to the press, over pseudonyms, to dissent from the pope’s “pronunciamento,” while seminary students at Maynooth gave a hero’s welcome to one priest who scorned subterfuge, Patrick Lavelle. Nor did the news of the Vatican Council’s endorsement of the doctrine of papal infallibility diminish British disgust, although one Cabinet minister located the cloud’s silver lining. This outrage committed on the common sense of mankind would surely bolster resistance to “the intolerable encroachments of the Church.” A Commons’ motion, seeking an inquiry into conventual and monastic institutions and into the law affecting charitable bequests for Catholic purposes, was “unexpectedly” carried in a small House by the Opposition and Scottish members. In the Lords, meanwhile, the “‘extravagant pretensions put forward by the court of Rome” called a halt to the repeal of the despised Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, though it was finally to be effected early the following year.20 Gladstone had reason to worry about the political consequences of the “extreme proceedings” in Rome at a time when he was obliged to resort to “something like menace” to keep the land bill on track in the Commons. The Catholic clergy made no secret of their determination to issue a “fiat” against the payment of rents “should their wishes on the land question not be complied with,” and a frustrated Odo Russell privately railed against the Irish episcopal “humbugs” who were gathered in the eternal city, “talking one way, writing another and acting a third – ignorant, cunning and deceitful like Neapolitans.” He was preaching to the converted, at least at the Foreign Office, where his father-in-law moaned that Gladstone inhabited a dream world in which his land legislation promoted the happiness of millions. Instead, the foreign secretary predicted, loving a grievance as they did, the Irish would quickly forget the bill’s benefits and take up the issue of denominational education with “terrible energy.” Were this to be conceded, repeal of the union would “be demanded as an act of justice” that could “no longer be deferred.” Clarendon’s predictions were undoubtedly influenced by the talk in Ireland of a new constitutional nationalist movement, which was formally launched in Dublin on 19 May 1870. The Home Government Association quickly attracted strong support from the likes of Dean O’Brien, Father Lavelle, and John Martin.21 The recent vindication of the American federal structure and the adoption of confederation in parts of British North America encouraged

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in the likes of Isaac Butt a belief that federalism was the definitive answer to the perennial Irish question. Here was repeal of the Union without separation. An Irish parliament would control domestic affairs but Irish representation in the imperial parliament would formally preserve “the unity and integrity of the United Kingdom.” Herein lay reassurance for conservative Irishmen fearful that the “terrors” of democracy and radicalism currently on display in the French capital would prove contagious. Here was a cause calculated to win the support of some of those Protestants alienated by disestablishment, the invasion of property rights, and the seemingly discriminatory enforcement of the Processions Act against Orangemen. At the other end of the political spectrum were the Fenians, who had already given this new movement a helping hand by providing the national cause with “martyrs.” The Brotherhood’s Supreme Council was urging supporters to win control of local bodies, such as the Poor Law Boards, and home rule agitation seemed certain to hold some attraction for those of them who recognized that constitutional political activity might, at least incrementally, advance the cause of national independence. Both Disraeli and Derby, Stanley having succeeded to the title with his father’s death, feared that the Fenians would give far more trouble as constitutional Repealers than as insurgents, because the law would no longer be able to touch them. What made this prospect even more alarming was the conviction, shared by leading Liberals, that “for all practical purposes a parliament for Ireland [was] equivalent to an entire separation of the countries.” After all, Butt admitted that separation from the United Kingdom might be the path the Irish people ultimately chose to follow. Not that this future possibility overcame the hierarchy’s initial suspicion of a movement in which Protestants were so conspicuous.22 It was the presence of Fenians, of course, that worried the Executive. In its opinion, and under the cover of Butt’s agitation for a federated British State, the revolutionary nationalists were plainly hoping “to propagate their own rebellious principles and to obtain the real and apparent support of persons who would shrink from a treasonable conspiracy.”23 The emergence of the Home Government Association, conceived as a club but destined to be transformed into a large political tent, coincided with a sharp statistical reduction in agrarian crime, for which Dublin Castle naturally credited the Peace Preservation Bill. A great many Fenians had bolted from Dublin, Spencer reported, while several score of the “worst fellows” in Meath and Mayo had also elected to make themselves scarce. Month by month, the returns landing on the undersecretary’s desk indicated a dramatic decline in agrarian outrages, but a careful analysis of this

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information produced several surprising facts. Although areas of eight Irish counties were still proclaimed, barely a handful of persons had been arrested for being out at night under suspicious circumstances. Similarly, the power to close public houses at sunset had been little used. Illiberal as it was, the legislation was evidently being enforced with a circumspection appropriate in a liberal state. Indeed, the police were under orders to avoid using their new powers in any “oppressive way,” while the viceroy was especially loath to curtail the freedom of the press. He received welcome assistance from an unexpected source when the most provocative nationalist newspaper, the Irishman, suddenly adopted a far more moderate tone. Richard Pigott evidently had no desire to repeat his earlier martyrdom. Moreover, in astutely proclaiming individual baronies within a county, thereby extending police powers and voiding all existing arms licences, the Irish Executive had hit upon a “very convenient” strategy for effectively disarming an entire county without having proclaimed it.24 Despite the apparent effectiveness of the Peace Preservation Bill, Spencer was convinced that he would ultimately need a suspension of habeas corpus. Fortescue’s inept attempt to strengthen the law with respect to processions, the bitter criticisms of the land bill for its failure to provide either absolute security of tenure or adequate protection from “capricious” rent increases, and Gladstone’s implied admission of the legislation’s failure to pacify Ireland with his claim of a moral victory, all gave the viceroy reason to worry about the future. Landlords did indeed nullify through sharp practice the limited protection afforded tenants, prompting one angry priest who was about to receive a bishop’s mitre to declare that evictions would only cease when Irishmen passed another land bill in their own parliament. The bill’s land purchase provisions were another source of acute tenant disappointment. Very few had the wherewithal to take advantage of them, as the purchase of less than 900 holdings demonstrated. Instead of giving satisfaction to the Irish, this remedial measure seemed more likely to increase their dislike of the British. Had Parliament “weakened confidence in the security of property to no purpose”? For while the tenants’ claim to a right of occupancy had by no means been fully recognized, the bill had “by making so substantial an incursion into normal principles of the English law of contract and property” gone far enough in that direction to encourage an ever more energetic pursuit of the claim.25 Irish Liberals, already under attack back home for their support of the land bill, made amnesty the price of their votes for the coercion bill. Gladstone had become interested in the possibility of conditional releases following Mrs O’Donovan Rossa’s disclosure of her husband’s willingness

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to quit the United Kingdom on being set free and not to return without prior permission. But Spencer continued to raise strenuous objections, even though he acknowledged the passionate popular sympathy for the prisoners and the possibility that their failure to hold out for unconditional release might weaken their popular appeal. He was sure another amnesty would be regarded as a confession of weakness, which would embolden the disloyal and discourage the loyal. Nor could the controversial O’Donovan Rossa be easily separated from the others. His involvement in the Phoenix conspiracy a decade earlier, his notoriously disruptive conduct in prison, and his recent victory at the polls had made his a household name. Exceptional treatment for him would be put down to his recent electoral success and thus have a very bad effect. Nevertheless, persistent questions in the Commons, further allegations by O’Donovan Rossa of degrading and brutal ill-treatment in prison, and an unsigned memorial sent to Bruce, which was then widely published in Ireland over the signatures of the wives of a pair of prominent Fenians, listing thirteen specific charges of prisoner mistreatment, prompted two announcements. The first was of the government resolve to hold the Fenians in prison until there was a change for the better in Ireland. The second promised a thorough investigation of the charges of ill-treatment. Gladstone, seeking to sugar the bitter pill of the Peace Preservation Bill, announced the inquiry on St Patrick’s Day immediately before the introduction of the coercive legislation.26 A five-man commission was established in April 1870. In the chair was the earl of Devon, widely regarded as a liberal Tory and recently president of the Poor Law Board. Two physicians sat with him. One was a noted Irish doctor, Robert Lyons, the other, Edward Headlam Greenhow, a Scot with an extensive London practice. They were joined by George Brodrick, a leader-writer for the Times and an unsuccessful Liberal parliamentary candidate, and by another Irishman in the person of Stephen de Vere. De Vere had a well-deserved reputation for social responsibility built upon his personal investigation of the conditions aboard vessels transporting Famine-era emigrants across the Atlantic. A subsequent and brief political career had been ended by ill health and an insufficiency of means, though he continued to serve as sheriff at the Limerick assizes. Significantly, the commissioners’ terms of reference were taken verbatim from the letter appointing Knox and Pollock three years earlier. They were to investigate the treatment, diet, and discipline of the prisoners and report whether the charges of unnecessary severity and neglect of the conditions essential for the preservation of health were justified. Had the prisoners been subjected to exceptional treatment, suffering hardships beyond those normally

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incident to penal servitude? To obtain answers to these questions, the commission was empowered to summon and examine any person whose evidence it considered relevant and to examine all prison records. One question it might have been asked to answer, but was not, was whether “political” prisoners should receive special, liberal treatment.27 The Home Office expected this inquiry, as had the earlier one, to be completed in short order. Instead, what had been envisaged as “a purely medical examination lasting for about a fortnight” developed into a protracted investigation that lasted more than three months. The commissioners signalled from the outset an intent to take an “altogether unanticipated course” by interpreting their terms of reference liberally. They appointed a secretary and a shorthand writer, obtained copies both of the printed evidence taken by Knox and Pollock and of the reports of the inquiries held the previous decade into the state of convict prisons and the prison diet. These, together with the most recent report of the Directors of Convict Prisons, made for a substantial file. They decided to visit all of the prisons where the Fenians were being held to check personally on conditions, and invited the prisoners to make oral, or submit written, statements. To encourage cooperation, the Fenians were assured of protection from possible retaliation by prison officials and staff. Equally revealing of the commissioners intent was the decision to despatch Dr Lyons to visit France to assess that nation’s treatment of “political” prisoners.28 The Amnesty Association applied on behalf of the prisoners’ families and friends to have a legal representative present at the proceedings, both to provide evidence and to cross-examine witnesses. Isaac Butt was their nominee. Only from the testimony of released Fenians, the association contended, could full and accurate information be obtained on prison conditions. Although the commission rejected the request, it agreed to take evidence from former prisoners, and from the friends of the imprisoned men, in the form of written and relevant statements and to give friends reasonable access to the prisoners to assist them in the preparation of statements. A proposal that the imprisoned men be permitted to confer with one another was predictably rejected, but the ability of the Fenians to communicate with one another on Sundays did provide opportunities for collusion. Finally, the commission gave an assurance that all evidence would be faithfully recorded and made public with its final report. Herein lay the likelihood of acute government embarrassment.29 The commissioners visited all of the prisons in which the Fenians were or had been incarcerated. In general, they did not observe “anything to justify charges of unnecessary severity or harshness, or a neglect of the

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conditions necessary for the preservation of health.” They were critical, however, of the current harsh prison regime legislated only half a dozen years earlier, and recommended its relaxation. Similarly, they urged that food rations be increased during seasons of unusual severity or at institutions that demanded heavy labour, and that prisoner complaints of its poor quality trigger inquiries by the medical staff. They were critical of the size and qualifications of such staffs, especially in the light of the need for more frequent and thorough physical examinations of inmates. Not surprisingly with two doctors on the commission, the members expressed concern about the inadequate ventilation and lighting of many cells and the insufficient attention to personal hygiene. They were especially critical of the practice of obliging several prisoners to bathe together, which had resulted in the diseased, including those covered in “syphilitic eruptions,” sharing water with healthy men. A medical officer’s testimony that none of the infected men had exhibited symptoms of “primary syphilis” failed to dispel their alarm. The labour demanded of inmates was another concern. The commissioners recommended the introduction of a more flexible standard, as a means both of accommodating men with less robust constitutions and of rewarding good conduct. On the controversial issues of discipline and punishment, they wished to see less discretion left in the hands of the prison administration with respect to an aggrieved prisoner’s right to appeal to the home secretary; they questioned the fairness of the policy that excluded the supporting testimony of a fellow inmate when a prisoner brought a complaint against a warder; they advocated a relaxation of the restrictions on a prisoner’s writing and receipt of letters and saw no good reason to use a prohibition on letter writing as a form of punishment; and they pressed for more uniform and carefully defined rules governing confinement in the punishment cells and the resort to restraints such as handcuffs. In their opinion, “28 days confinement in a penal cell, on bread and water, varied with penal class diet every fourth day, or penal class diet for six months, [could] hardly fail to be in some degree injurious to ordinary constitutions.” These criticisms promised on publication to excite fresh sympathy for the Fenians, even were the commission to conclude that they had not suffered peculiarly severe treatment.30 Edmund Du Cane, chairman of the Directors, and several prison governors had been quizzed about any special instructions with respect to the severity or leniency of the Fenians’ treatment. They all doggedly denied receiving any, although they said that they had been ordered to assign as guards only Protestant warders of unexceptional character and admitted to granting “small indulgences” to the prisoners. Their denials

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that these amounted to an implied recognition of the men’s special status were not entirely persuasive. After all, the Fenians had suffered shorter periods of solitary confinement than other convicts; their cells were usually superior to those of other inmates; they were issued with additional mattresses and blankets; they had a superior diet; they were granted more liberal access to books, more liberal letter-writing privileges, and more frequent visits from friends; they were allowed additional exercise time; they were kept together and usually separate from the rest of the prison population when labouring on public works, the initial decision to work them as hard as other prisoners having been quickly abandoned; they were worked more “easily,” escaped punishment for slacking, were often put to work inside rather than outside the prison, and when outside were provided with shelter from the elements; and their employment prior to imprisonment was often taken into consideration when labouring tasks were assigned. They were “virtually” able to talk freely to one another “from the mere fact of the impossibility of preventing them” without constant infliction of punishment. This accumulation of “small indulgences,” one governor finally conceded, did amount to exceptional treatment.31 Few Fenians cooperated with the commission, despite the opportunity to publicize their charges of ill-treatment. O’Donovan Rossa was one of a small group who did exploit it. The individual testimony of its members followed a common pattern. They charged that this commission, like its predecessor, had been set up “to whitewash the falsehoods of the public officials” who categorically denied any exceptionally severe punishment of the Fenians or their treatment as common criminals; they claimed they had suffered systematic degradation by being initially housed in a scullery next to a communal toilet where the sinks were used to carry away the “dirty water” of inmates and the stench was “sickening, belching up now and again, night and day, with a loud gurgling noise”; and they reported that they had been assigned the debasing tasks of cleaning water closets, urinals, and passages, that they had been the victims of persecution and verbal abuse by warders, and that they had been subjected to “a torturing and living death with every circumstance speedily adapted to render life miserable.” William Roantree, for example, afflicted with a severe case of hemorrhoids, accused the medical staff of callously instructing him to “shove them up.”32 The Fenians had little reason to complain of their cells, their diet, or the labour demanded of them, or of being obliged to associate with common criminals, the commissioners eventually concluded. Nor had they as a class been subjected to “exceptionally severe treatment.” On the contrary,

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the prison administration had sanctioned “from time to time certain relaxations of convict discipline in their favour.” These pragmatic arrangements persuaded the commissioners to stretch their mandate to consider whether men “convicted of a crime so exceptional in nature” should be “more completely separated from the general body of convicts.” Distinctions had been drawn in the past, both in England and Ireland; British politicians had exposed the cruel treatment of political prisoners in states such as Naples; and Britons were justifiably proud of the asylum granted by their nation to a broad assortment of foreign political refugees. One problem was the lack of a precise and established British definition of a political prisoner. Another was the assumption that a grant of special status to “political” prisoners would impose “almost intolerable strains on the penal system” by fostering the resentment of ordinary convicts. Acknowledging this, the commission proposed the setting aside, as in France, of a detached section of a convict establishment for this special class of inmates. Indeed, appended to the general report was one submitted by Dr Lyons following his two visits to France. It confirmed that a liberal French penal regime was enjoyed by men who were able to show they had acted only under the influence of their political opinions. However, those men who “under colour of political action” committed serious crimes received no “exceptional consideration.” The would-be assassin of the emperor had been treated as any other criminal convicted of attempted murder. Little comfort here for those Fenians convicted of involvement in the death of Sergeant Brett.33 The commissioners did examine in detail the four most notorious cases of alleged mistreatment. They were inclined to accept O’Donovan Rossa’s claim to have been handcuffed for thirty-four days, and they were critical of the use of the restraint as an instrument of punishment. They noted a significant improvement in that prisoner’s behaviour following an appeal to his “better feelings.” They faulted the governor who had accused O’Donovan Rossa of conducting a “love intrigue” with the wife of a fellow Fenian, suggesting that a more than cursory examination of the intercepted letter would have prevented so long an interpretive leap to this amatory conclusion. Clearly, the governor’s intent had been to sow discord among the prisoners. Turning to the case of the sickly Charles O’Connell, whose health and condition had plainly merited special attention, they were less than impressed with the quality of his medical treatment. William Roantree, on the other hand, had in their opinion received the appropriate medical advice for his painful complaint, and following his transfer to the hospital prison at Woking, he could hardly have been placed “under conditions

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more favourable to health.” Finally, they investigated the case of Ricard Burke. He had suffered a severe loss of weight after refusing to eat, claiming that his food was being laced with poison. The Chatham medical officer described him as “a strong, healthy man” possessed of “very remarkable intelligence” whose problems were the result either of malingering or of “hypochondriasis.” But the medical superintendent at Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum, who was twice summoned to examine Burke, had found him of “unsound mind.” This diagnosis the commissioners accepted, and they recommended, as in the case of O’Connell, that his “future location and treatment” receive immediate attention. In truth, Burke appears to have successfully feigned mental illness, for he was to make an astonishingly swift and full recovery following release.34 Both physicians attached reservations to the commission’s final report. Lyons was concerned with the O’Donovan Rossa case. He described the prisoner’s manacling as an “arbitrary and unjustifiable exercise of authority” and expressed alarm at the “very unusual” amount of punishment O’Donovan Rossa had suffered during his first three years of imprisonment – 123 days on bread and water, 231 days of penal-class diet, 28 days in an absolutely dark cell, and 39 days in handcuffs. He drew three conclusions. First, the powers of the Directors of Convict Prisons needed to be more clearly defined by Parliament. Second, warders in charge of refractory or imbecile prisoners required more regular and close supervision. Third, “the signal failure of all repressive measures” in this case furnished a “most forcible illustration” of the necessity to separate political prisoners from ordinary criminals. But the other doctor serving on the commission, Greenhow, dissociated himself from both the decision to examine the treatment of political prisoners and the criticism of the current penal regime. He applied the “free labourer” test to prison conditions and was in no doubt that the Fenians were better off than the labouring poor. O’Donovan Rossa’s lengthy manacling had been the unfortunate result in his opinion of a simple misunderstanding of verbal instructions. He defended the system’s medical officers, who he was satisfied had paid due attention to the prisoners’ complaints. Finally, he found in the weight gained by fully half of the prisoners following incarceration conclusive proof of their good treatment.35 Gladstone did not wait for the commission’s final report before reopening the amnesty question in Cabinet. Clarendon’s death at the end of June 1870 had necessitated a modest rearrangement of chairs. Granville went to the Foreign Office, and to the fury of Fortescue and his ambitious spouse, Kimberley took the Colonial Office. He was replaced as lord privy

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seal by Halifax, while W.E. Forster, regarded as the indispensable man in the Education Department, was given a seat at the table. Spencer, who arrived in London shortly after this ministerial reshuffle, discussed Irish affairs at some length with Gladstone. One topic was the seemingly perennial question of a royal residence in Ireland. The prime minister was worried that the royal family was frittering away its “fund of credit.” The monarch was almost invisible to her subjects, and her heir’s notorious personal conduct invited public censure. The prince of Wales had been called as a witness in one divorce case and was rumoured to be the corespondent in another. An extended annual residence in Ireland, perhaps effectively replacing the lord lieutenant, though all political and administrative duties would remain in the hands of the chief secretary and “a superior Resident Secretary,” might provide the prince with a sound grounding in his constitutional duties, improve his personal behaviour, demonstrate his public usefulness, and rescue his reputation. This was plainly a long-term strategy, for there was little prospect of Victoria speedily agreeing to any such arrangement. As for an early visit to Ireland by the queen herself, Spencer suspected it would spark renewed agitation for the release of the Fenian prisoners he still insisted should remain behind bars. Amnesty might be possible next year, he allowed, when a royal visit would be more effective and more popular. He did invite the prime minister to come, but that was a pleasure Gladstone preferred to defer, at least until the land bill had “stamped its success on the face of the country politically and socially considered.”36 The pair returned to the prisoner question in mid-July. The prime minister dismissed Fenianism as a “trifling” problem, insisted a “few miserable men” would “do no harm when let out” because the land bill would detach sympathizers from the movement, and suggested a second amnesty be announced the following month. The viceroy rejected this facile analysis. The massive number of mourners who had recently attended the funeral of Thomas Clarke Luby’s mother, large Fenian importations of arms, including breech-loading rifles, and the evidence of a Fenian organization that “spread like a web” over the island mocked Gladstone’s sanguine assessment of the situation. Even the crowds at meetings to express sympathy with France following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War were reported to be parading to the Fenian anthem “God Save Ireland.” But Gladstone continued to insist that the Peace Preservation Bill had armed the Irish authorities with adequate powers to ensure the security of life and property. Moreover, the recent slackening of the agitation provided an opportunity to implement amnesty without exposing the government

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to Tory accusations of a craven surrender to popular intimidation. As for Spencer’s fear that another release of Fenians would demoralize the loyal Irish, this the prime minister dismissed. “We must clearly not pay too great a regard to merely local opinion,” he remarked, “but endeavour to carry the question into that larger sphere to which it properly belongs.”37 Although Thomas O’Hagan favoured a prompt amnesty in the belief that it would promote popular acceptance of the land bill, the other leading members of the Irish Executive continued to balk. They remained grimly determined not to supply the conspirators “with the very men they want.” To this familiar argument against an opening of cell doors Spencer added two others. First, additional releases at this time would stultify the Devon Commission, which had yet to report. Second, the overthrow of the Second Empire in France and the establishment there of a provisional republic might spur Ireland’s revolutionary nationalists into greater activity. Already the Dublin police had reported the revival of a James Stephens faction within the Brotherhood. The Cabinet majority effectively sided with the Executive majority. Ministers agreed to wait to see whether the autumn passed quietly in Ireland before coming to a decision. Gladstone, who “seemed vexed at finding himself in a minority,” made plain his intention to revive the issue well before the year’s end.38 Gladstone’s desire to be rid of most of the Fenian prisoners only deepened as the autumn wore on. Irish pressure and advice continued to be exerted and offered. McCarthy Downing, an Irish member of Parliament whom the prime minister “especially respected,” presented the petition on which he had been sitting for some time. Carrying thousands of signatures, including those of clergy and magistrates, this appeal for clemency required a public response. Other appeals came from John Francis Maguire, another of the Irishmen to whom Gladstone listened, the Cork Town Council, and the Dublin Corporation. To delay until a far more strident popular demand was revived would put at risk the “grace” of an act of clemency, while “anti-Irish and ultra-Conservative feeling” would surely “utter much louder condemnation” of any prisoner release once that agitation resumed. French defeats in the war with Prussia had temporarily distracted the Irish public from the prisoner question and had lessened the danger of an amnesty being attributed to fear of difficulties with France. Then again, the improved prospects of a final settlement of Britain’s civil war difficulties with the United States were reducing the Anglo-American tensions on which so many Fenian hopes had been raised. Furthermore, to make releases conditional on the men quitting the United Kingdom promised to satisfy “all reasonable and right thinking

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men.” But the decisive factor in the drive for an early amnesty was the imminent report of the commission.39 “I fear the publication of the Report and evidence will supply a vast amount of food for the Irish press and concentrate Irish attention on the prisoners,” Fortescue informed the viceroy after reading an advance copy. The prison authorities had been cleared of “the monstrous charges brought against them,” but “the application of Penal Servitude to Political Offenders” was criticized as “full of difficulty” and inappropriate. Although several corrective measures with respect to medical care, sanitation, punishment, and work were already in place, these were unlikely to mollify critics. The Cabinet’s sudden alarm over the treatment of political prisoners as “ordinary felons,” its fears that the issue not only would be a “very awkward” one domestically if the men were still behind bars when the report was published, but would also do serious damage to Britain’s liberal international reputation, struck Spencer as ironic. As he reminded Gladstone, he had long since recommended different treatment of “Political Prisoners,” only to be met by a Cabinet refusal. Indeed, ministerial unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of political prisoners seemed all the more extraordinary in the light of the passage of the Extradition Act affording protection to persons whose crime was of a “political character.” But at least three Cabinet members dissented from the majority decision, taken on 11 November 1870, to release many of the imprisoned Fenians. The exact timing of the announcement was left to Gladstone and the Irish Executive. Cutting as little ice with the queen as it had with Spencer and several of her ministers was the prime minister’s contention that men imprisoned for several years “under circumstances of severity and degradation not recognized in other countries as befitting political offenders” and only released on condition of quitting the country had been punished enough and that the “aggregate power” of Fenianism had been greatly diminished by the government’s remedial measures. However, Gladstone made a small bow to the critics by excluding from the amnesty the men convicted of involvement in the Manchester incident, those who had attempted to subvert soldiers from their loyalty, and soldiers who had betrayed their oath of allegiance.40 The date of the prisoners’ release briefly became another bone of contention. Spencer wished to delay it until January 1871, at the earliest, and only then to go ahead if Ireland was tranquil. He quickly discovered his was now a solitary voice, for Fortescue’s belated embrace of clemency reflected the zeal of the convert, and so the viceroy finally acquiesced. But the Irish law officers immediately questioned the proposed terms of

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release. Fenians granted pardons might revive the legal suits brought against Kimberley and Larcom for their actions in 1865 and 1866, which only the Fenians’ convictions and imprisonment had halted. Another problem was that of drawing distinctions between the prisoners with respect to the terms of their release. Should a number of them be permitted to remain in Ireland under specific conditions? This suggestion, made by Spencer, was vetoed by Fortescue, who stressed the prospective difficulty of distinguishing between “ordinary” breaches of these conditions and those that would justify re-imprisonment. So, when Gladstone proposed that the sick and the disabled be permitted to remain, along with others able to find respectable persons willing to act as guarantors of their good behaviour, the viceroy objected. The condition of the sick and disabled would need to be medically verified, he countered, while no faith could be placed even in the public men of Ireland who might stand as security for Fenians. They were too “flexible” and lacked the “moral courage” to resist a popular demand. He was supported by Henry Bruce, who privately feared the amnesty would give an immediate, if short-lived, stimulus to Fenianism.41 Another unforeseen complication was the international crisis sparked by Russia’s abrogation of the treaty provisions governing the neutralization of the Black Sea. The Home Office worried that the possibility of war was breathing fresh life into the Fenian organization, and despite Gladstone’s belief that this should not be allowed to stay the amnesty, his more cautious Cabinet colleagues agreed that it ought to be coordinated with the announcement of a peaceful resolution of the crisis. By early December, with Granville confident of an early diplomatic settlement and with the international conference that would open in London on 17 December soon to provide a collective fig leaf to cover the Russians’ naked unilateralism, an impatient Gladstone was keen to announce the release of the Fenians. Plainly, he wanted to be rid of most of these men before the release of the commission’s report and wished for as lengthy an interval as possible between the two releases – of the report and of the prisoners – and the meeting of Parliament. In the event, the formal announcement was finally made on 16 December, and it carefully placed the decision within the context of those appeals for clemency devoid of “popular agitation or turbulent demands,” of growing Irish prosperity, of the absence of outrages, of the passage of reforms, and of the government’s desire to speed the healing process. Much to the irritation of Spencer and Fortescue, this letter was pre-empted by McCarthy Downing. Informed privately by Gladstone of the imminent amnesty, he telegraphed the news to the Irish press. As a result, the viceroy suffered

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the indignity of learning of the release from his wife, whose maid had seen the street placards announcing it.42 Several prisoners complained of the terms of their release, and five of them initially refused to leave the United Kingdom. They quickly came to their senses. Before being set at liberty, all the prisoners were required to sign statements to the effect that they had heard, read, and accepted without reservation the conditions under which they were being liberated, and one later violator of the terms, returning illegally in 1875, was arrested on the orders of the Cabinet. The released men were provided with clothing, a few necessary items, a small amount of cash, and free passage abroad. O’Leary and Luby travelled from Millbank to Dover, where they took a steamer to Antwerp, and in a final act of defiance, the former refused both free passage and the small cash allowance. He paid his own way. By the end of January 1871, nineteen men had been released and effectively deported. The great majority were escorted to Liverpool and placed aboard vessels about to cast off for the United States. The only excitement occurred when O’Donovan Rossa, Devoy, and three colleagues arrived by train from London. An ill-prepared Liverpool constabulary arrested two of the escorting warders on suspicion of being Fenians. Across the world, in Australia, Thomas O’Malley Baines, a former member of the assassination circle and a former subverter of Irish Catholic soldiers from their loyalty to the Crown, was released two months later.43 By the summer of 1871, barely a dozen civilian Fenians remained behind bars. Of the eight men convicted of participation in the Manchester rescue, only Edward O’Meagher Condon and Patrick Melody had been found guilty of murder and were serving life sentences. Fourteen former soldiers also remained in custody, though eleven of them had been among the Fenians transported to the penal colony of Western Australia in 1867. In September 1871, a Dublin meeting appealed for the release of the remaining prisoners. Bruce announced in his response the government’s acceptance of the principle that political offences should be treated with leniency, but he continued to deny that either the murder of Sergeant Brett or violations of the military oath of allegiance were political acts. The Gladstone administration had no intention of abandoning the criminalization of men it considered terrorists. Nevertheless, the agitation for full amnesty continued, as did allegations of the prisoners’ ill-treatment.44 Large crowds continued to gather in England to hear Isaac Butt call for amnesty. Appeals came from Ireland and the United States for a reconsideration of the Condon case, but this was again denied in December of 1873. The prisoner had “richly deserved to be hanged and was very lucky to

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escape,” the permanent undersecretary at the Home Office growled. Nor did he wish to lend any credence through early release to the claims of Fenian sympathizers that Brett’s death had been purely accidental, the tragic and unforeseen result of a shot being fired through the keyhole of the door of the prison van in an attempt to force the lock. In short, his principal concern was to avoid giving an impression “that the present Government had any doubt as to the guilt of the men that were hanged or of these men.” A request from an Irish member of Parliament in 1876 for permission to interview the Fenians about their treatment was also denied. Shortly afterwards came the news of the escape of six of the eight Fenians still being held in Western Australia, and most of the remaining prisoners were soon being released on tickets of leave. Gladstone, now back on the Opposition benches, favoured the release after a decade of the men involved in the fatal Manchester incident but was cautioned by Granville to leave this issue to the government. Thus Condon and Melody were required to quit the United Kingdom. This was a decision not without an element of irony, since Melody was not a Fenian but an imposter who had played no part in that tragedy.45 Barely a week after the announcement of the second amnesty, Gladstone was obliged to tinker again with the Cabinet as a result of John Bright’s resignation for reasons of health. The Board of Trade went to Chichester Fortescue, whose anxiety to escape the “most onerous post in the ministry” was as strong as ever. Following the amnesty and with the controversial education question looming on the horizon, he was keen to be out of the line of direct fire whenever the Opposition began flinging charges of Gladstonian “pandering to Fenianism and popery.” As for the office of chief secretary, there was general agreement that Hartington was the only suitable and available candidate, given the minimalist ministerial shuffle Gladstone had in mind. Unfortunately, the marquis, who disliked public office, was peculiarly reluctant to go to Ireland. Gladstone turned to Spencer for assistance, for he and Hartington were distantly related and the viceroy had been a close university friend of the marquis’s younger brother. He stressed the social amenities, such as a “charming house” and some of the “finest grass country in the world” over which to gallop, downplayed the social obligations, and assured this mighty aristocrat that he would overawe the Irish Liberals when it came to their management. But having sat in the Cabinet as Irish problems came to the fore and having fairly recently proposed to a harried Spencer that they jointly resign from the government, Hartington offered a stiff resistance that was not easily overcome. He had no wish to accept “banishment” from his friends and pursuits in England.

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His most intimate friend, following his successful amorous pursuit of her, was the stunningly beautiful duchess of Manchester, dubbed his “antient Egeria.” The liaison was finally to be legitimized with the death of her husband a quarter of a century later. Consequently, there was an element of romance in his complaint that as a bachelor he would find the post peculiarly “irksome.” However, having appealed to Hartington’s sense of duty and promised that the difficulties inherent in the question of denominational education would not be felt in their full force until 1872, and then would be handled by the “whole government,” Gladstone informed him that neither he nor the Cabinet would accept no for an answer. Thus was Hartington “bullied,” as he put it, into accepting the chief secretaryship. He did extract of pair of concessions. It was agreed that he would not be expected to remain long in this office and might reduce “to the least possible proportion” the time he spent in Ireland.46 The Irish Executive that Hartington joined had received encouraging news from North America several months earlier, where the Fenians had failed in another attempted invasion of British territories. Not one of the raiders had penetrated beyond a mile or had managed to stand for “half an hour” on British soil; nor had they gathered any support from domestic Fenians, the Colonial Office had learned. The murder of D’Arcy McGee, it seemed, had discredited the Brotherhood in the new dominion, and Hibernian societies had become “almost silent” there. Across the border, the American Brotherhood was in disarray. “Faction against faction and party against party has been the order of the day,” O’Donovan Rossa was advised almost as soon as he stepped ashore in the United States. Cautioned to be extremely wary of the various antagonists, O’Donovan Rossa and John Devoy concentrated on reuniting and reinvigorating Irish-American revolutionary nationalism. They did so largely unhindered by the papal denunciation of Fenianism. American bishops were “listless” if not “evasive” in their enforcement of the decree, and four years later, a priest in New York wrote to the Propaganda to inquire whether the condemnation was still in effect, since it had never been circulated to him. When they failed to reunite Irish-American nationalists under the umbrella of a revived Irish confederation, the exiles decided to expand the one secret society espousing Ireland’s liberation from British “tyranny” – the Clan na Gael Association.47 There was a guarded optimism in Ireland and Britain by the beginning of 1871 that Fenianism was finally petering out. Members of the Brotherhood appeared to be “losing all faith” in the American organization as a source of support, while the progress of Anglo-American negotiations to settle

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outstanding problems was diminishing the danger of a major American political party adopting hostility to Britain as an electoral war cry, thereby enhancing the political importance of the Irish vote. Was Gladstone’s policy of redressing grievances finally working, curtailing popular sympathy for the revolutionary nationalists? The bishop of Galway thought not, privately describing Fenianism as “very strong” and deeply rooted in a people nourished on “hatred of England.” A more visible display of enduring popular admiration for rebels was provided, much to Spencer’s disgust, by the dedication of a monument to William Smith O’Brien. The leader of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 “was in no way distinguished but as a rebel who grossly failed,” he observed. Rubbing a little nationalist salt into the wound, the Dublin Corporation allocated to the O’Brien statue the very site that had been denied to the promoters of a statue of the late prince consort.48 As Fenianism waned, so constitutional nationalism waxed. The presence within the Home Rule movement of a large number of disenchanted Protestants saw one enthusiast, keen to maintain the strong link between Catholicism and nationalism, seek to rally a leading member of the Catholic hierarchy with an assurance that there was “nothing in the theory of Protestantism to make Protestants bad Irishmen.” If this political campaign was to succeed where O’Connell’s Repeal Association had failed, it was important to keep the Protestants onside. However, the decision of a number of Orangemen to join the Home Government Association initially dissuaded members of the hierarchy from following suit. The lower clergy were far less cautious, as they demonstrated by helping tenant farmers unhappy with the land bill drive John Martin to victory in a Meath byelection. This Presbyterian lawyer and former publisher, brother-in-law of John Mitchel, merited his self-description as an independent nationalist. He had paid for the memorial to the Manchester martyrs erected in Glasnevin cemetery, had helped to launch the amnesty agitation, and had been in communication with the Brotherhood’s leadership since 1869, when the released Charles Kickham appears to have taken the chair of the Supreme Council. Martin had long and loudly denied “‘the hateful fiction that Ireland enjoys constitutional rights and is a freely governed country.’” A few weeks after his victory, a candidate running on a platform of “home legislation” and denominational education triumphed in County Galway. But education remained a ticking political time bomb for the Liberals and thus not one Gladstone was impatient to pick up. He left to Spencer the far from welcome task of informing Cullen, over dinner at the Viceregal Lodge, of the government’s decision to postpone the question

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out of fear of antagonizing its “English and Scottish supporters.” Yet the absence of a satisfactory education bill encouraged priests and laity to look to Home Rule.49 The more pressing and immediate problem for Spencer was the trouble in Westmeath. He detected in the continuing agrarian violence fresh and discouraging evidence of a Ribbon “terrorism” and feared an “utter collapse of the Law.” Since remedial legislation was failing to provide relief from the physical ravages of so insidious a “cancer,” the time had come to experiment with a more radical therapy. To protect life and uphold the supremacy of the state, which he regarded as the principal duties of any government, Spencer revived the request for suspension of habeas corpus but sugared the bitter pill with a proposal to restrict it to areas where Ribbonism was active. Liberty of the subject was frequently invaded or curtailed whenever the state was in danger, he reminded Gladstone, and that was indisputably the case when the social order was, as in parts of Ireland, “entirely upset, and at the mercy of a secret and impenetrable society.”50 Gladstone received the request with predictable “horror and dismay,” for suspension would almost certainly be cited as proof of the failure of his conciliatory policy. Nor did he want for Cabinet allies in his resistance. Several ministers were convinced that more might be done to counter “terror” under the law as it stood, so long as the police kept suspects under surveillance. Two senior Irish policemen were summoned to London to appear before the Cabinet, and O’Hagan was asked for his opinion. The Irish lord chancellor questioned the suitability of this “extreme measure” as a weapon in the battle to suppress agrarian crime. Unlike revolutionary activity, which might be paralyzed by the detention of its leadership, O’Hagan argued, this violence was the product of “individual impulse.” Furthermore, even localized suspensions of habeas corpus would be deeply resented and undo all the good work of the past two years. But the two Irish policemen impressed on ministers the persistence and virulence of the Ribbon violence in Westmeath. Alarmed, the Cabinet decided to recommend the striking of a Commons secret committee to investigate the problem and consider possible responses. Hartington, who had strongly endorsed Spencer’s application, accepted the committee as a means of overcoming Gladstone’s resistance and gaining additional ministerial support, for even Kimberley, who usually favoured strong medicine for Ireland’s ills, was increasingly uncomfortable at the thought of “arbitrary imprisonment” becoming “part of the ordinary system of Irish Government.” What was good for Westmeath would undoubtedly be considered good for any other county racked by agrarian violence, but constant suspensions

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of a fundamental principle of the rule of law would widen and deepen the stain on Britain’s reputation as a liberal state.51 Gladstone’s refusal to allow Hartington to reveal publicly the committee’s purpose or to hint at the possibility of a suspension of habeas corpus, together with the government’s abandonment of the proposal for a secret committee, created an unhelpful impression of Cabinet indecisiveness, an impression that was strengthened by a deepening distrust, if not personal dislike, of the prime minister, who was increasingly accused of lacking “temper, discretion and straightforwardness.” Then Hartington gave the Opposition an unexpected helping hand by ridiculing a suggestion that additional remedial measures would snuff out Ribbonism. This amounted to a repudiation of the policy with which his leader was closely identified. Disraeli deftly exploited the opening, delivering an “energetic speech” in which he took the Liberal administration to task. It had destroyed churches, shaken property to its foundations, and emptied jails, he sarcastically observed, only now to concede that Britain could not govern a part of the United Kingdom without the aid of a parliamentary committee. He was followed by Wilson-Patten. Speaking with the authority and knowledge of a recent chief secretary, he insisted that the Irish Executive must have known the identity of the “terrorists” and ought to be able to deal with them without waiting for the results of a parliamentary inquiry.52 The government was saved from acute embarrassment by Disraeli, who led fifty Tories out of the chamber just before the House divided. The membership of the committee was impressive, with Hartington in the chair and with the leader of the Opposition, two former holders of the seals of the Home Office (Sir George Grey and Gathorne Hardy), two former chief secretaries (Chichester Fortescue and Wilson-Patten), and two influential Irish members of Parliament (John Francis Maguire and William Henry Gregory) sitting around the table. The tone of much of the evidence was set by the very first witness, Captain George Talbot, a resident magistrate. He listed an entire catalogue of violent crimes in Westmeath, most of which had gone unpunished because of the “extreme reluctance” of witnesses to come forward. He stressed the inadequacy of the Peace Preservation Act as an effective countermeasure and urged limited suspension of habeas corpus. A dissenting voice was that of Thomas Nulty, bishop of Meath. He denied the existence of a Ribbon conspiracy and blamed a small group of “miscreants” for the disturbances. Committee members would have taken this testimony with an even larger grain of salt had they been privy to Cullen’s private denunciations of Nulty and the Meath clergy as “Fenian supporters.”53

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The inquiry convinced the Cabinet of the need for the “very severest measures.” The large powers granted the viceroy under the provisions of the Peace Preservation Bill were renewed and expanded. He might now order geographically limited suspensions of habeas corpus. Introduced in the upper chamber, the coercion bill predictably met little opposition there. More surprising was the lack of effective resistance in the Commons, where only John Martin resolutely opposed passage. The Protection of Life and Property Act, as the revised legislation was euphemistically titled, received royal assent in mid-June. It was no ornament of the liberal state. Only a “very liberal Government could so improve the British Constitution,” a former Tory minister, who also happened to be the owner of a large estate in Westmeath, caustically remarked, for the lord lieutenant might now imprison anybody “whom anybody else may suspect of having been in a district at a time when a Ribbon outrage was committed.” However, merely the threat of these extraordinary provisions appears to have had a welcome effect. The level of violence in Westmeath began to subside, thereby strengthening the argument of those politicians who insisted that “firm government” was indispensable to the success of counterterrorism.54 The Irish Executive was beginning to suspect a relationship between Ribbonmen and Fenians, and it had reason to worry about the availability of cheap weapons now that the Franco-Prussian War was coming to a close. The importance of intelligence saw Spencer fund with “Secret Service money” the department established by Kimberley several years earlier to coordinate the material pouring into Dublin Castle but for which the then viceroy had failed to secure a Treasury appropriation. Next, Spencer urged the Metropolitan Police to assign one or two Irishmen on the force to keep a close eye on Fenian leaders in the capital. He was especially interested in their contacts with gun dealers. But Commissioner Henderson, who had been obliged the previous year to station police guards at the offices of the Times and the Pall Mall Gazette, given the intelligence that the Fenians were planning to “destroy” them, had recently received the more reassuring information that the local Fenians had no definite plans to take to the capital’s streets. So, he saw no reason to mount a surveillance operation, which was certain to be controversial, perhaps exciting cries of domestic spying. In its place, he recommended a determined effort on both sides of the Irish Sea to seize Fenian weapons. He had the support of the home secretary, who was confident that a combination of a few years of international quiet and domestic prosperity would finally extinguish Fenian “hopes and manoeuvres.”55

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But the “revolutionary” Irish land bill; the evidence that republicanism was gaining ground with the impressive success of Charles Bradlaugh’s pamphlet, The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick; the daily reports from the French capital of turmoil, destruction, and death, including the summary execution of the archbishop of Paris by Communards; and then the slaughter of the “Red Spectre” during “La Semaine Sanglante” fed the wildest fears of England’s upper and middle classes. Commissioner Henderson did his best to reassure the nervous by emphasizing how few and insignificant were British sympathizers with the Paris Commune and how discouraging a setback the diplomatic settlement with the United States was for the Fenians. However, the election to Parliament of Patrick J. Smyth, a former Young Ireland rebel and recent Fenian, on a platform of Ireland’s full legislative independence, together with the vigorous aid he had received from the Catholic clergy of Westmeath, convinced many observers of the growing popular appeal of the new “repeal movement.” Against this background and that of mounting criticism of the royal family by spokesmen of the working classes, which brought dire predictions of the end of the monarchy with the death of Victoria, Gladstone decided to revisit the question of a royal residence in Ireland.56 At issue was the future of both Ireland and the Throne, he warned the stubbornly uncooperative monarch. The royal family needed to be connected in the public’s mind with “public functions and offices.” Victoria was offered two possible solutions. One involved the establishment of a residence by parliamentary vote, as well as funding to cover a portion of the living expenses of the royal occupant. The other would see the lord lieutenant replaced by one of the princes, who would be “wholly detached from the ministry of the day and from political responsibility.” The prince of Wales was still the preferred candidate, for he would be given something useful to do and the experience might divert him from the dissipation so damaging to his reputation. The queen’s response was inevitably influenced by her curious notions about Ireland’s climate and scenery, her dislike of its people, and her distrust of her heir. Edward’s “habits of amusement and excitement” would surely be given freer rein in Ireland. Moreover, she did not consider it wise for the future monarch to be closely identified with that troubled land. Prince Arthur, her third son, would be “much fitter for such a position” because of his “steadiness, tact and conciliatoriness,” she mused. Inevitably, nothing was settled. Victoria agreed only to consider the matter, though she did allow the prince of Wales to make another short visit to Ireland but only in the company of two of his siblings.57

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Edward admitted to his mother that the royal party was hissed in the streets of known Fenian areas of Dublin, yet the reception was friendly enough to persuade him that a permanent royal residence would do much good. Spencer pressed home the case with the queen and strove to allay her fears that residence in Ireland would be dangerous. Agrarian crime was diminishing and confined to a few districts, he reported, while political outrages were committed by a minority of “miserable unprincipled agitators” living in large towns. The great majority of the Irish people were loyal but lacked the moral courage either to speak out against disloyalty or to help put it down. A royal residence and frequent visits by members of the royal family would provide them with a focus for that loyalty. Unfortunately, Spencer’s optimistic assessment was promptly contradicted by serious disturbances in Dublin. Theses were sparked by the brutality with which the police suppressed a meeting called to demand the release of the last few Fenian prisoners. Supporters of the cause sought to gather in Phoenix Park, but that placed them close to the viceregal residence, where the royal party was staying.58 Although Spencer dismissed the demonstration and the disturbances sparked by the heavy-handed conduct of the police as the work of the now insignificant Fenians, Dublin’s lord mayor became an instant nationalist hero by declining in protest the knighthood the prince had planned to bestow upon him. More unpleasant still was the highly critical British response to the violation of so fundamental a principle of the liberal state as freedom of assembly. An angry viceroy declared his intention to resign if either the Cabinet failed to support him or Parliament passed a motion of censure. In the Commons, the opportunistic Tories complained of the absence of “equal law for Ireland” and called for an inquiry into the conduct of the Irish Executive. In a very thin house of less than one hundred members, the government carried the day. However, it felt obliged to give an assurance that in future there would be no interference with public meetings. Little wonder Spencer began privately to contemplate quitting his post before Christmas.59 Victoria wrote a postscript to the incident by procrastinating on an Irish royal residence. She did eventually veto the “larger scheme” on the far from unreasonable grounds that even a figurehead prince would inevitably attract odium and might prove a tempting target for assassins. What remained was the “minor plan,” which its enthusiasts continued to insist would see the royal family “win over the Irish to the English connection.” Ireland was “hard to reconcile,” for the seeds “sown by justice and reforms” were naturally slow of growth, W.E. Forster remarked to the queen, so

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why not “try the effect of personal relations on a people so impulsive and naturally loyal.” At the same time, the heir to the throne would surely learn and exhibit in Ireland the prudence necessary “to escape the venom of the licentious press.” When Victoria responded with a raft of additional conditions – a house should be leased, not purchased, in the first instance; there must be no fixed term of royal residence; and there were to be no prolonged visits – an exasperated prime minister threw up his hands in surrender. “It breathes the old spirit about Ireland and does not make your task easier,” he admitted to the disappointed Spencer. Whether or not an Irish royal residence would have altered the course of history it is impossible to say, given the deepening doubts of the people’s natural loyalty, but plainly it would have done little harm and might have done much good in improving the popular image of the Union.60 While the queen shirked her royal responsibilities, the cause of home rule continued to flourish. A Conservative victory in a County Monaghan by-election in July 1871, despite Isaac Butt’s last-minute nomination, gave only the briefest of fillips to Unionist hopes. Two months later, Limerick City returned the Home Government Association’s chief unopposed on a platform that also included denominational education, a charter for the Catholic University, and tenant right. Any candidate who wished to be listened to had to wave the banner of home rule, a glum Irish attorney general informed Gladstone. Ironically, this development was no more welcome to the nationalist resident of the archbishop’s palace in Dublin. Cullen had detected in the agitation a sinister combination of Protestants, Fenians, and Tories. Although he professed to believe that all the bishops and the overwhelming majority of clergy were keeping their distance from the new nationalist movement, two members of the hierarchy had already spoken up in its support. Moreover, his nephew and intimate, Father Patrick Moran, privately admitted that a great many young priests were rallying to the cause. Cullen responded as he had to Fenianism several years earlier. First, he waited to see if the “bubble” would burst of its own accord. When it did not, he offered Catholics an alternative political organization in the form of the “Catholic Union.” Gladstone was another interested observer who decided he could not ignore the association’s challenge. Faith was flagging in his government’s Irish policy. It was difficult to argue convincingly that his remedial policies had been the cause of the decline of Fenianism, since church and land reform had failed to conciliate the Irish and reconcile them to the Union. Instead, they were rallying to home rule and thus to a cause that was widely regarded in Britain as a euphemism for disunion. “If we are such fools as to assent to

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that,” Kimberley jotted in his journal, “we deserve to be kicked by every nation in the world.”61 Gladstone welcomed Butt’s return to Parliament. The Irishman was burdened with an unsavoury personal reputation that did little to broaden his appeal in the Commons, while his presence there made it possible for the prime minister to get to grips with the latest manifestation of Irish nationalism. What he was looking for, Gladstone told an Aberdeen audience, was a political demand “put into practical shape” so as to serve as the basis of a “candid and rational” debate. Butt was calling for the restoration of an Irish parliament with “domestic autonomy, and for a federated United Kingdom that would respect local needs while preserving the ‘one great Imperial State.’” Gladstone ridiculed as “wild,” “superfluous,” and “very unintelligible” the idea of maintaining the Union under the monarch while “breaking up” Parliament. Once granted to Ireland, could home rule be withheld from Scotland and Wales? Devolution of the United Kingdom, he went on, would amount to the disintegration of the nation’s great capital institutions for no other purpose than to make Britons “ridiculous in the sight of all mankind.” Ireland had been denied “nothing” by the reformed Parliament, which would soon also answer the question of education. As for the contention that his mission to pacify Ireland had been a failure, he avowed a commitment to a “higher law” than the “law of conciliation.” He was setting the law “right with the national conscience, with the opinion of the world, and with the principles of justice.” It was an astute performance, one commentator judged, for Gladstone had condemned home rule “strongly enough to satisfy English feeling” while “hinting at the same time at concessions to the priests on the subject of education.” But as government leader he was in no haste to make concessions on this issue, for they were certain to place Liberal unity under severe strain and alienate much of the electorate. The royal commission established by the Tories had issued a report highly critical of national and model schools, and this had encouraged a number of bishops to declare denominational education at all levels of instruction indispensable to the achievement of Ireland’s lasting peace and contentment.62 Spencer’s hopes for at least a little, if temporary, political peace and contentment were destroyed by a pair of dramatic by-election victories for home rule, which served to shatter his already brittle confidence that the nationalist agitation was making little headway. In Kerry, Bishop Moriarty entered the lists on behalf of the Liberal candidate but quickly realized he was overmatched in the joust. “Strange Fenians” poured into the county from Cork and Dublin to intimidate Liberal voters, who then received little

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protection from policemen infected with disaffection by “treasonable” and “mendacious” newspapers. Moriarty remained convinced that the “bad press” lay at the “root of the whole evil of Ireland” and that no authority, civil or ecclesiastical, could stand against it. But the county’s most prominent landowner acknowledged the “fascination” the “Home Rule cry” was exercising over every class of the community save his own. One reason for its popularity, he believed, was its “revolutionary” implications – “the transfer of powers and property from the present holders, and a severance of the British connection.” Another was the “unsurpassed energy” with which “a powerful section of the priests” supported it. For the home rule candidate’s victory in Kerry, Moriarty held Hartington largely to blame. In a widely reported speech to his Welsh constituents, the chief secretary had injudiciously accused Ireland’s Roman Catholic clergy of seeking to gain control of all levels of education. Those priests who had built schools at great personal sacrifice when landlords and parsons failed to cooperate with the National Board of Education considered these remarks an insult. “Your speech will make some and confirm many Home Rulers,” Moriarty chided the chief secretary. That assessment failed to dissuade the bishop from recommending a petition to have the election overturned on the grounds of voter intimidation. Gladstone declined to sanction this step, and he was soon vindicated by the disastrous consequences of a successful petition in Galway.63 The appointment of William Gregory as governor of Ceylon created a vacancy in the county’s representation. The standards of home rule and denominational education had proven flags of victory the previous year, 1871, and they were now raised by a Catholic landlord, John Nolan. The Tuam Herald exhorted the faithful to vote for the candidate of the “Priests and the People,” and Nolan’s victory was widely credited to the priests. One embittered landlord immediately amended his will to ensure that his body was not interred in the soil of Galway and that not one of his tenants touched his casket. The codicil proved timely, for he expired three weeks later. Even Cullen was scandalized by the reports, which the bishop of Galway confirmed, of priests resorting to “extreme measures” on Nolan’s behalf. Besides, they had been “utterly unnecessary.” The evidence of “spiritual intimidation” had been assiduously gathered during the campaign by agents of the defeated Conservative candidate, and the trial of the petition to unseat Nolan opened in April 1872. The proceedings, which dragged on for six weeks and saw more than 300 witnesses called to the stand, concluded with an astonishing, dramatic, sensational, provocative and pyrotechnical performance by the presiding judge, the increasingly

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unstable William Keogh. “‘At one time treading in furious form the narrow arena of the bench; at another, smiting the ambient air in the vehemence of his exuberant elocutionary elements,’” he lavished praise on Oliver Cromwell and poured scorn on prelates and priests. Keogh’s award of the seat to the member of the powerful Trench family proved no more than a temporary local setback for home rule. Nolan was to triumph in the general election of 1874. In the interim, the trials of Patrick Duggan, the new bishop of Clonfert, and twenty-three priests on a charge of exerting undue influence quickly collapsed. As for the judge, so many communities began to burn him in effigy that, in his own words, he might have travelled across Ireland at night by their light.64 The Home Rule movement continued to gather momentum with the aid the Ballot Act of 1872, which ensured that enfranchised tenants cast their votes out of sight of their landlords. As its more conservative and Protestant elements now began to abandon the Home Government Association, Butt was persuaded to transform it into a popular organization. The Home Rule League was founded in Dublin in November 1873, while the English branch of the movement, the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, was from the outset heavily infiltrated by Fenians such as John Ferguson. A Protestant Irish immigrant to Scotland, he helped to stage the first openly political celebration of St Patrick’s Day, established the Glasgow branch of the Home Rule movement, and persuaded Joseph Biggar to follow suit in Belfast. Ferguson was also one of the leading Fenians present in November 1873 who agreed to enter into “cordial cooperation” for a trial period of three years with Butt’s league. This did not amount to a repudiation of violence. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, as it was now increasingly called, remained committed to “‘the propagation of republican principles,’” the dissemination of Ireland’s right to “self-government and independent nationhood,” and the preparation of its members for the physical wresting of independence from Britain. A provision was written into its constitution calling for the support of a majority of the people of Ireland before the launch of another insurrection, but for financial reasons the Brotherhood was compelled to turn again to Irish America for aid. The Clan na Gael opposed the Fenians’ experiment with constitutionalism, while the radicalism of the Fenian-infiltrated Home Rule movement in Britain was a warning signal of trouble ahead. Home Rulers formed a clear majority of Ireland’s parliamentary representation by 1875, though for a number of them it was never more than a flag of convenience. However, Biggar and John O’Connor Power, Fenians both, had been elected, and they were soon joined in the Commons by Charles

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Stewart Parnell. Another victor twice over in Tipperary, although as a felon who had neither served his full sentence nor been pardoned he remained legally ineligible to sit in Parliament, was Ireland’s most radical nationalist, John Mitchel. The decision to disqualify him was taken, however, at the very highest level of the government. The majority of the Home Rulers formed themselves into a “new independent Parliamentary Party” chaired by Butt, but under pressure from the Clan na Gael many Fenians withdrew from the constitutional movement.65 One influential segment of Irish society still deeply involved in the home rule agitation was the Roman Catholic clergy. Gladstone’s faint hope of diverting them from the nationalist campaign rested with a settlement of the education question on terms acceptable to a hierarchy that stood pledged “to oppose any candidate in future elections who would not promise to support their demand for denominational education.” But Liberal ministers could see no easy way of reconciling the conflicting “pretensions” of Nonconformists and Roman Catholics. As leading Tories recognized, here was the issue that would “infallibly break up the Liberal party.” Hartington’s intense dislike of the drift of Cabinet discussions led him to threaten resignation. Were he to go, there was every likelihood of Spencer going with him. Appeased, he stayed on when Gladstone drafted a bill artfully designed to deflect criticism of a government “truckling” to the hierarchy. Under the proposed legislation, the University of Dublin would be separated from Trinity College, be governed by a multidenominational body, and be affiliated with a number of Protestant and Catholic colleges. Controversial subjects – religion, morals, history – would be left to the individual colleges. They would share in a central fund to which the richly endowed Trinity would make a substantial contribution. Unfortunately, the provisions antagonized Irish Protestants without satisfying the Catholic hierarchy.66 Cullen, having explained his objections to the viceroy, circulated a pastoral highly critical of the bill. He saw it as an attempt to perpetuate the system of mixed education to which the hierarchy remained unalterably opposed. Faculty dangerous to Catholics, such as “Trinity men,” might very well be appointed to lecture in seemingly non-controversial subjects, such as English literature, geology, and zoology. In the omission from the bill of any provision for direct public funding of his Catholic University, Cullen discovered a plot to use the rich endowments of Trinity and Queen’s Colleges to tempt poor Catholics “to desert their Denominational tutors.” Alarmed by the talk of Irish Catholic Members being “ordered to vote against the Bill by their masters the Bishops,” Gladstone raised the stakes.

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He made this “excellent measure” a matter of confidence. The result was a “cruel massacre.” Forty-three Liberals, among them the great majority of Irish Catholics, entered the Opposition lobby. Although the margin of defeat was very small, on a confidence motion Gladstone and his colleagues had no option but to resign. Spencer urged them not to seek a dissolution, warning that in Ireland a general election would see the Home Rule League gain in strength with the help of allies drawn from the ranks of the Catholic clergy. Far better to wait another year before going to the polls, thereby allowing the passage of time to soften feelings. So when Disraeli predictably declined to lead another minority government, despite the queen’s assurance of her friendly feelings and her offer to approve an immediate dissolution if that was what the Tory leader wanted, Gladstone returned to office. The Liberal ministry’s position was an unenviable one. “Our old programme is completely exhausted, we can hardly hope to escape discredit,” Kimberley privately admitted. With the same thought in mind, Disraeli and Derby busied themselves drafting a shortlist of candidates for posts in a future Tory government. Meanwhile, Robert Lowe’s implication in a Post Office scandal led Gladstone to take the Exchequer portfolio himself with the intention of using the large projected surplus, later confirmed to be £5 million, to deliver a vote-catching budget before going to the country. But the steady drumbeat of by-election losses forced him to appeal to the electorate with only a promise that a Liberal victory would be followed by the repeal of the income tax. His colleagues signed on to the cynical strategy, only to receive a nasty surprise in the ensuing general election.67 “The amount of revulsion of feeling was a surprise to all. Tories as astonished as other people,” one stunned minister commented. “There is a genuine Conservative reaction, and the other party must have their turn.” But with 1868 in the back of his mind, Disraeli was neither “sanguine” nor “eager” this time around. However, the Conservatives made striking gains in Britain, as did the Home Rulers in Ireland. With the Tories back in office, Butt and his colleagues introduced a motion at the end of June seeking an inquiry into the demand for home rule. Although Disraeli exhibited “courtly politeness” in yielding an additional day for the debate, only ten English members supported the motion. The following year saw Joseph Biggar inaugurate the obstructionist strategy, which Parnell was to refine, designed to compel the House to pay attention to Irish grievances. Then, in 1876, the Fenian leadership finally concluded that constitutionalism was at odds with the Brotherhood’s revolutionary objectives. However, its instruction to members to quit the Home Rule League was ignored by several influential

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figures. Impressed with the stunning setback that Gladstone and the policy of conciliation had apparently suffered in the general election, they continued their association with the movement led by Butt. Did the evident failure of Gladstone’s first self-proclaimed mission to pacify Ireland imply the success of Fenianism as an agent of Irish national resistance to the British connection and, somewhat paradoxically, as a goad to the redress of Irish grievances?68

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The strength of Irish nationalism lay in the quality of its leadership and the quantity of its “followship.” Politicians, professionals, publishers, pedagogues, and priests provided the officer corps and peasants the rank and file of the swelling army of Irishmen disillusioned with the constitutional structure erected in 1800. The decades-long struggle for Catholic emancipation allowed “explicitly nationalist ideas” to be advanced within a religious context, while its belated concession failed to eradicate the grievance of a Protestant Established Church in an overwhelmingly Catholic land. Daniel O’Connell’s subsequent Repeal Association was dedicated to a somewhat imprecise degree of home rule, and with the aid of the quintet of nationalist “missioners,” but especially the priests, it gathered mass support. An attempt by Young Irelanders to substitute a secular for a largely sectarian nationalism made little headway following their expulsion from the Repeal Association on the essentially contrived issue of the use of physical force, though in 1848 they stumbled into a pathetically ill-managed rising. A decade later, a pair of rebels, James Stephens and John O’Mahony, founded the Irish Revolutionary (later Republican and Fenian) Brotherhood. Their commitment to the creation of an independent Irish republic through the instrument of physical force was no aberration. The danger of a descent into violence born of frustration had lurked in the shadows of the Loyal Repeal Association, while Irish agrarian society had a culture of conspiracy and violence. There was also a culture of violence in the United States, where so many Irish emigrants and exiles had settled.1 Only a very small minority of Irishmen ever enlisted in the Brotherhood, but of those, and they were many, who were alienated from the British state, the vast majority remained essentially passive. They attended, or participated in, nationalist demonstrations, often with the encouragement

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if not the leadership of priests. A clergy that denied the legitimacy of the United Kingdom was often conflicted in its response to Fenianism. Cardinal Cullen, as the dominant figure in the Irish branch of the Catholic Church, was a case in point. He tended to view Irish revolutionary nationalism through the prism of his anti-British sentiment, which found a reflection in his profound distrust of British fellow religionists, but his anglophobia acted as a distorting mirror. He accused the British government of tolerating Fenianism in order to “‘weaken and discredit’ the Church,” having mistakenly concluded that Fenians desired to rob Irish Catholics of their faith. He even suspected the British of welcoming a rebellion as an excuse to reverse all the gains made by Catholics over the previous century, if not return to the era of the penal laws. Clerical nationalism, which obliged Cullen to abandon the idea of circulating a loyal address to the queen, along with mutual sectarian and ethnic hostility, as well as political mistrust, effectively blocked an alliance of Protestant state and Irish Catholic Church against Fenianism. Ironically, a profound aversion to revolutionary conspiracy, the legacy of his turbulent experience with Italian nationalists in Rome, found Cullen occupying much the same ground as his titular temporal sovereign, who rejected the notion that revolution was “justifiable in certain cases.” In words he might have echoed when pondering the tribulations of the pontiff as monarch of an earthly realm, Victoria observed that obedience “to the laws and to the sovereign, is obedience to a Higher Power Divinely instituted for the good of the people, not of the sovereign, who has equally duties and obligations.”2 Former Young Irelanders harboured a political distrust of priests born of the conviction that they had first encouraged and then betrayed the rebellion of 1848, and those rebels who went on to found the Fenian movement were mindful of the potential danger posed by the priesthood to their hopes of gaining mass support. The Fenian organ, the Irish People, espoused as a matter of principle the “absolute need for the separation of church and state.” If this was sufficient to convince Cullen of the Fenians’ anti-clericalism, he overlooked their acceptance of the support they received, whether implied or express, from clergy high and low. John MacHale, archbishop of Tuam, was remorseless in his criticism of the British connection and cooperated with a number of Fenian ventures without ever advocating rebellion. He protected Father Patrick Lavelle, whose widely reported lectures on the right of rebellion surely convinced many listeners that they would be justified in rising at a propitious moment. As vice-president of the National Brotherhood of St Patrick, which was speedily transformed into a Fenian front organization, Lavelle acted as an

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energetic recruiting officer. Nor was he unique in his insurgent sympathies, as Cullen well knew. Several members of the Irish hierarchy, contrary to advice from Rome, denied that either the Fenians or the National Brotherhood “fell under pontifical sanction, since while they plotted against the state they did not conspire against the Church.” Both conditions were required, these episcopal sophists contended, for an organization to be denounced and banned. Similarly, growing sympathy for Fenianism within the ranks of the Christian Brothers, and presumably in their schools, saw four brothers expelled from the order in 1870. Newspapers identified with the church, such as the Tuam Herald, often exhibited a certain sympathy with Fenianism without ever approaching the fervour of the Irishman. Alive to the power of the printed word, especially among the Irish masses, the cardinal, among other members of the hierarchy, urged the British government to be less respectful of press freedom.3 The government has been charged by historians with being slow to recognize and respond to the Fenian threat. Much the same charge has been brought against the Irish Executive, its failure being attributed to the incompetence of a foppish and frivolous viceroy. Lord Carlisle was no fool, nor was he ignorant of Ireland. As Lord Morpeth, he had been a much admired chief secretary. Neither he nor his staff ignored either the inflammatory rhetoric of Patrick Lavelle and fellow priests or the excesses of the nationalist press, led by the Irish People. Instead, the Executive long exhibited a becoming reluctance to trespass upon the liberal freedoms – assembly, speech, and press. It was also restrained by a pragmatic calculation that prosecutions of priests or publishers would fail before Irish juries and that this would be a public relations disaster. So, the Executive initially opted for a more cautious response. It kept an eye on the offices of the Fenian newspaper and on the Brotherhood’s principal figures and accepted the services of volunteer informers. It did not dismiss the conspiracy as little more than a leisure activity of young men seeking “‘fraternal association and communal expression,’” which their British counterparts found in “colliery bands and Association football.” The Brotherhood was recognized for what it was, a secret, subversive organization dedicated to the violent dismantling of the United Kingdom.4 Weaponry was being imported and smuggled into Ireland; men were drilling in its use, often under the direction of veterans of the recent American war; the militia could not be trusted, at least in Catholic Ireland; the regular army, in which a disproportionately high number of Catholic Irishmen served, was infiltrated by Fenians and a campaign of subversion was underway; there was evidence of extensive Fenian penetration of the

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expatriate Irish communities of Britain and North America, both of which were contributing funds and recruits; British North America was invaded by the American branch of the movement; a plot was hatched and barely frustrated to raid the military arsenal at Chester Castle and transport its weapons to Ireland; an insurgency was attempted in Ireland which, while it was put down with comparative ease, impressed the authorities with the Brotherhood’s administrative strength and skill; and one Fenian leader was spirited out of a Dublin prison, while his successor was freed from police custody by armed raiders operating in broad daylight in England’s principal industrial city. This latter incident, during which a policeman was killed and following which the rescued chief publicly threatened reprisals should any of his rescuers pay with their lives for the death of the policeman, strengthened fears that the struggle had been transferred to British soil and was going to be waged in an unconventional manner. Indeed, the Fenians’ first leader, James Stephens, had refused to be bound by “strictly honourable tactics,” while the nationalist firebrand, and briefly the American organization’s financial agent in Paris, John Mitchel, repudiated “civilized warfare.” He claimed for the Irish the right “to strike at England anywhere or anyhow,” because in his opinion she was a foreign oppressor. Only a few months later, a group of Fenians blew down much of a narrow street in an effort to free a leading organizer from the Clerkenwell House of Detention. The British government found in this tragic incident, which brought death and destruction to an impoverished area of London, ample evidence of a Fenian shift from insurgency to terrorism. Ireland was fertile soil in which to cultivate “insurgent terrorism.” It had an abundance of misery and discontent. It had a tradition of violence that went beyond specific acts to include “an ambivalence towards violence, an acceptance of the mystique of violence, and a belief that violence can lead to great political change.” Its revolutionary nationalists conceived of the world as one of stark and fundamental differences, both national and sectarian. Irishmen had long been taught by nationalism’s missionary quintet that the existing state structure and society were alien, illegitimate, unjust, oppressive, and even tyrannical. The need for radical change, and the necessity to resort to abnormal means to achieve it, was justified with the argument that there was no realistic hope of bringing about the ideal of an independent Irish republic by legal or “normal” activity. Constitutional agitation was ridiculed by James Stephens and mocked by the Irish People as “debasing and delusive.” In its editorials the Fenian organ denounced false “delicacy” in ridding Ireland of “respectable” classes. Nationalists in general and the Fenians in particular dwelt upon the humiliation, disrespect,

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and contempt the Irish suffered at the hands of the English. By deliberately fostering a “collective sense of unjust persecution,” they aroused a desire for vengeance. Terrorism, one of its many students has written, “springs from human discontent with and resentment of inequality and indifference and from widespread beliefs that violence is justified in the face of oppression and insult.” Lord Wodehouse, as viceroy in 1866, viewed as a calculated system of terror the measures adopted by the Fenians to prevent information being given to the government. This was confirmed, at least to his satisfaction, by the evidence introduced at the Luby trial of assassinations being recommended to the leadership, by the report of a pair of jailers who claimed to have overheard two prisoners discussing assassinations as “deliberately planned operations,” and by the information that an assassination circle had been formed and a black list drawn up. Moreover, the Brotherhood’s cellular organization and commitment to fraternity made it readily adaptable to small-scale violence in the name of the people. Similarly, the denial of the legitimacy of “English law” provided yet another justification for the murder of its officials.5 Some analysts have acquitted the Fenians of “deliberate acts of murder and terrorism,” of “pure political terror.” They “eschewed terror tactics and preferred the old-fashioned approach of open insurrection,” apologists argue. The planned raid on Chester Castle “had specific strategic ends”; the killing in Manchester was “accidental”; the Clerkenwell tragedy was simply a jailbreak that went “horribly wrong,” an “example of bungling and misfortune” that gave a “false impression” of the Brotherhood as a terrorist gang. But if the evidence introduced at the trial of Michael Barrett is to be believed, he and perhaps others had some understanding of the peril to the inhabitants in the very narrow street at the back of the prison. The author of the tragic incident, Ricard Burke, was a professional engineer and veteran soldier who surely had both knowledge and experience of explosives. He alone was to retreat a safe distance when a white ball was thrown over the prison wall, leaving the other exercising prisoners, all innocents until proven guilty, exposed to the deadly blast. This amounted to a cavalier if not cynical disregard of their safety. In short, as Thomas Clarke Luby later publicly declared, the suffering of innocents was unfortunate but a fortune of “war.” The apparent Fenian attempt to sabotage the gasworks at Warrington lent a measure of credence to the reports of Fenian plots to ignite “gasometers” and wage a destructively indiscriminate campaign of arson. The Metropolitan Police commissioner was convinced that the offices of Britain’s most influential newspaper, and those of one its leading contemporaries, had been targeted for destruction. Then

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there were the reports of “explosive” letters mailed to public figures, but happily intercepted at the Post Office, and the murders of informers, suspected informers, and policemen, which appeared to be “deliberately planned operations” consistent with the public threats of reprisals issued over Thomas Kelly’s name following the arrest, conviction, and execution of the men involved in his rescue. D’Arcy McGee was murdered by an alleged Fenian in Canada, and an the attempt was made by a self-avowed Fenian avenger on the life of the duke of Edinburgh in New South Wales. The stalking of the earl of Mayo, when chief secretary, by a member of the assassination circle and the alleged plots against the lives of the monarch and senior ministers left successive governments in little doubt of the seriousness or terrorist nature of the Fenian threat. Of course, the argument has been made that political assassinations ought to be excluded from the category of terrorism, at least in those instances where the victims, whether policemen or government officials, were in the minds of assassins agents of a despised or oppressive regime who therefore lacked innocence. Leaving aside the morality of such judgments, political murders serve the ends of terrorists. They demonstrate the “vulnerability of the rulers and the fragility of the socio-political order and excite widespread fear and create alarm and terror in the general population.” The willingness of prominent Fenians either to sponsor or engage in acts of terror was soon to be demonstrated anew by the involvement of Ricard Burke, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, and John Devoy in the Clan na Gael, by William Mackey Lomasney’s blowing himself up as he placed a bomb beneath London Bridge, and by John McCafferty’s acting as liaison with the “Invincibles,” who slaughtered, much as a butcher would a beast, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke in Phoenix Park. In the minds of all these activists, the cause of national liberation fully justified and excused terrorist violence.6 British ministers did not use the word “terror” carelessly or indiscriminately. For them, it meant the deliberate intent to excite terrifying fear and dread among the general population. In response, they progressively adopted measures that, being reasonably comprehensive without ever being formulated as a coherent counterterrorist policy, generally met the test of liberal acceptability in Britain. Although the Irish Executive and some Cabinet members persuaded themselves that Fenianism was an American-inspired, American-funded, and American-led revolutionary conspiracy, a mistaken belief that the arrival of Irish-American veterans of the American Civil War did nothing to dispel, Britain did not seek an understanding with the United States on the movement’s discouragement or suppression. The British Proclamation of Neutrality at the beginning

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of the civil war and the recognition of Confederate belligerency, the construction of Confederate commerce raiders in British yards, and the use of British North American territory as a base by Confederates who raided across the border into New England had embittered Anglo-American relations. Moreover, the intense postwar battle over the control of Reconstruction made the Irish-American vote even more valuable than usual. Neither Executive branch nor Congress intended to risk alienating that electorate and could find in the principles of the liberal state every excuse for inaction with respect to the Fenian Brotherhood. Another option was for the British government to discourage, or restrict, the entry into Ireland of Americans suspected of being agents of revolutionary nationalism. One impediment was the possession of dual nationality by many Irish Americans. Naturalized Americans born in the United Kingdom retained in the eyes of the British government their original nationality and could scarcely have been denied admission to their homeland. A second obstacle was the nature of the liberal state. When a harassed Irish Executive proposed to warn off suspected Fenians with the threat of indefinite detention without trial, or failing that to demand passports of visitors, Conservative ministers rejected so illiberal a response to the crisis. This rejection stands in sharp contrast to the provisions of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1974. Just as the Irish Executive a century earlier had intended to send officers aboard ships to warn off or detain persons they suspected of Fenianism, so the modern legislation authorized officials to board vessels and aircraft and to serve exclusion orders issued by the executive – in short, to engage in the arbitrary conduct rejected in the 1860s.7 Another interdiction acceptable in any liberal state is one on weapons suspected of being intended for subversives – hence the naval patrolling in the 1860s of the Irish coast, which did frustrate a number of armssmuggling operations; the investigation of the staff of the Cork Customs House, as most suspect shipments appeared to be entering through that port; and the licensing of weapons in Ireland. Mayo also sanctioned a police operation in Dublin, which saw the stopping and searching of persons for weapons in an effort to deter the carrying of them. In Britain, the weapons of Volunteers were made more secure but a proposal by the home secretary to establish an arms registry, given that their possession was legal, was rejected by his Cabinet colleagues, who feared it would be impossible to secure parliamentary consent without imprudently revealing the government’s sources of information. They recognized the vital importance of intelligence in the struggle to contain terrorism.

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The police, as the first line of defence, were likely to be the principal terrorist hunters. The division of the Dublin police commanded by Daniel Ryan proved to be an effective counterterrorist force, supplying their British counterparts with priceless intelligence, while the Royal Irish Constabulary had as a result of penal policy acquired considerable experience in the techniques of surveillance. The previously unarmed Dublin police were issued with cutlasses, and a substantial number of carbines were placed at their disposal, while the armed Irish Constabulary was reequipped with more modern and more useful firearms. The story was different in Britain, where there was no British Constabulary but a multiplicity of local forces. Furthermore, the surveillance of suspects, other than common criminals, was abhorred as a long step in the direction of a police state. In the capital, Commissioner Mayne and a succession of home secretaries had an aversion to anything smacking of domestic espionage. Indeed, the commissioner placed little stock in detection. However, the cost of preventing crime by putting large forces of uniformed men on the streets, along with the abject failure of the Manchester police and their Metropolitan counterparts to make good use of the detailed information on Fenian plans forwarded from Dublin, saw the pressure mount for a change of attitude. There were calls for the creation in Britain of the kind of national force that already existed in Ireland, but these were ignored by politicians who feared being charged with setting policing on the slippery slope to a gendarmerie. At the height of the crisis, some thirty-five forces were temporarily issued with weapons, and the Metropolitan Police received training in the use of the cutlass. More than one thousand men were added to that force, and while detective departments and plainclothes branches were greatly strengthened in both the capital and the provinces, they continued to be staffed by men more adept at tracking common criminals than political revolutionaries. Doubts of their ability to counter Fenianism effectively saw the establishment of a temporary “little department” for that very purpose under the command of the experienced Colonel Feilding, though it was jealously watched by Mayne and his men. It proved to be the precursor of the Special Irish Branch formed more than fifteen years later in response to another wave of Irish republican terrorism. The importance of reducing to some usable form the information gathered on Fenianism had been recognized by Kimberley while still lord lieutenant, but the office he created was not to be adequately funded until long after his departure from Ireland. Feilding, working very closely with Robert Anderson, a young Home Office official whose experience in anti-

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Fenian intelligence work had been gained in his native Ireland, put together an effective counterterrorist unit whose members gathered, organized, coordinated, and collated intelligence. The colonel travelled to Paris, where the suspicion that the Fenians were joining forces with “red republicans” helped to produce French assistance. Feilding established a surveillance system in the French capital, with the cooperation of the secret police, and made arrangements for the swift transmission of intelligence to London. Meanwhile, in Britain, warrants were being obtained to intercept the mail of twenty-four suspects; the correspondents of Fenians were discreetly investigated; the mayors of forty-six British cities and towns where Fenians were believed to be active were instructed to forward to the Home Office the names, addresses, and meeting places of suspects; the Home Office circulated descriptions and, where available, photographs of senior Fenians; and police chiefs were ordered to mount surveillance operations. In the capital, Commissioner Henderson was confident that throughout the provinces the Fenians were “all known and watched.” Before long, ministers were marvelling at the quantity and quality of the information being provided by this special branch. Had it not been closed down in the spring of 1868, when Fenian fears began to subside and concerns mounted that exposure would bring accusations of domestic spying, it “could have been the start of a proper domestic intelligence-gathering bureau in Britain.”8 Infiltration of subversive organizations is another of the legitimate counterterrorist measures open to the liberal state. The British authorities were able to infiltrate the Fenian movement and on occasion at the highest levels. Henry Le Caron (Thomas Beach) volunteered as an agent operating within the command structure of the American organization, while Daniel Ryan’s female agent, the provider of the detailed, timely, and tragically misused information on the Manchester and Clerkenwell incidents, was so invaluable an asset that to protect her identity several of the Clerkenwell plotters were allowed to walk free from the court. John Corydon, the informer whose eleventh-hour warning allowed the British to head off the planned Fenian raid on the armoury in the lightly guarded Chester Castle, was another valuable source. He, together with a handful of fellow Fenians who turned Queen’s evidence following their capture, appeared as witnesses for the prosecution in a string of Fenian trials. They were the “supergrasses” of the nineteenth century. Although Gladstone privately admitted to hearing with some sympathy the “hiss from the dock” when such “approvers” gave evidence, for he did not doubt that most of them were “base,” he nevertheless considered the state’s acceptance of their services “distinctly right.” But the trials, especially the earlier ones held in

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Ireland, were also exercises in state propaganda. The cases made out against Luby, O’Donovan Rossa, Kickham, and other leading figures were designed not simply to secure their convictions but also to shock and alienate from the Brotherhood much Irish middle-class opinion. The Fenians were depicted as extremely dangerous men, socially as well as politically, the enemies of private property and the Catholic Church. They exhibited, one member of the English hierarchy warned the many Irishmen in his diocese, “the avaricious cupidity of Communists.” Paul Cullen was another of the influential churchmen deeply impressed with the evidence introduced in court.9 Neither the Irish Executive nor the Home Office overlooked the need to strengthen the defence of the obvious targets of insurgent terrorists. Irish police barracks or stations were converted, as in the modern era, into fortresses. The weapons of Volunteer regiments were more securely stored; government departments were provided with firefighting equipment and materials to douse the flames of any Fenian arsonists; and elaborate precautions were taken to ensure that London’s sewers were not used by terrorists as subterranean access routes to potential symbolic targets such as palaces and ministries. From the outset, however, some Britons understood that success in countering first insurgency and then terrorism depended to a considerable extent on denying the subversives a friendly or sympathetic population. Speaking at the beginning of 1866, Chichester Fortescue declared that it was not enough to suppress Fenianism; the government had also to “dry up the sources of discontent” by removing “every excuse, every shadow of excuse, that the most distempered and disordered imagination can conceive.” It was not until the return of the Liberals to office at the end of 1868, however, that this policy was pursued enthusiastically and resolutely. Gladstone realized that the redress of historic grievances was essential to the delegitimization of Fenianism, but he also recognized that selecting the moment when remedial action would escape criticism as “concessions extorted from weakness by fear” was always a delicate task. If “soft measures” hold a prominent place in modern counterterrorism theory, they are always likely to take time to work and will never appease the most ideologically committed enemies of the existing state. This was Gladstone’s painful discovery following the passage of the church and land bills, just as it was to be for another British government that introduced a reform package in Northern Ireland exactly one hundred years later only to discover that the Provisional ira had already replaced equality of treatment with the legitimacy of the state’s existence as the “dominant force in Catholic politics.” Consequently, “hard” measures,

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or firm government, are often necessary if only to reassure the loyal that they will be protected. For the same reason, and in hopes that it will also act as a deterrent, the swift and sure punishment of terrorists was and is still seen today as another necessity. Modern Britain’s treatment of acts of terrorism as “essentially a law-enforcement problem and terrorists as criminals” has been judged a “qualified success,” but the mid-Victorian governments did not attempt to define terrorism as a crime but rather to pursue those they considered terrorists under existing domestic law. The criminalization of political violence, and especially the execution of those who kill policemen or innocents, smacks of “populist vengeance” and has dangerous consequences, as the British discovered in their response to Fenianism. The three men executed for the murder of the policeman during the Manchester incident were immediately transformed by Irish nationalists from murderers into martyrs. “The Victorian way of death, when placed in an Irish political context, became a resounding public and nationalist spectacle” that facilitated the shifting of the entire responsibility for Ireland’s ills from the Catholic Irish to the Protestant English.10 One Liberal Cabinet minister and former viceroy, referring to the Fenians, observed that a government that permitted men to come over from a foreign country to raise an insurrection needed to resort to the “extreme penalty” if it was to inspire “the wholesome fear which will deter others from similar attempts.” Yet the death penalty was always of doubtful utility as a deterrent to men inspired by a political ideology and willing to risk their lives in its name. Similarly misplaced was the confidence that terms of penal servitude and treatment as common criminals would deny “political prisoners” the aura of romantic sacrifice and were not the stuff of martyrdom. The examples of Chartist prisoners and Phoenix Society detainees ought to have served as a caution to later governments. Sympathizers of the imprisoned men had excited public interest and concern with harrowing tales of prison conditions. This tactic was repeated by radical Irish nationalists, led by the Irishman, who depicted the Fenians as living martyrs to their political idealism. The prisoners themselves vehemently protested treatment as ordinary convicts. Although they were granted a number of small privileges that distinguished them from common felons, the Fenians demanded some more formal recognition of their special status, and O’Donovan Rossa was the most persistent and aggressive pursuer of such recognition. He rode his notoriety to a sensational victory in a Tipperary by-election. Eventually, the government, compelled by a press campaign in Ireland alleging cruel mistreatment of the political prisoners, questions in Parliament, and the popular agitation for amnesty, established

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an inquiry and promised to publish its findings and the evidence on which they were based. These proved sufficiently embarrassing to speed in most cases the prisoners’ release.11 Strangely, British governments a century later, when faced with the terrorism of Republican paramilitaries, failed to learn from the Fenian episode. Having initially granted special category status to paramilitary prisoners, many of them having been interned without trial, the government of the day ended internment and withdrew special status. No distinction was to be recognized between political and criminal prisoners. The former, like the latter, were to be housed in ordinary cells, dressed in prison uniform, required to work, denied free association, and subjected to prison discipline. This represented a return to the conditions against which the Fenians had rebelled, including O’Donovan Rossa’s resort to what might be termed the first “dirty protest.” In the twentieth-century protests, there was a steady escalation. At first, men took to wearing nothing but a blanket; then they smeared their cells with feces; and then they engaged in hunger strikes that were only called off following a tenth death and a government promise of concessions. However, the government did not concede political status. In this stand, it had the backing of the European Commission on Human Rights, which in response to an earlier appeal from the “blanket-men” decided they had no right to political treatment under its Convention. But the tragedy of the hunger strike, the symbolic victory of the leading striker in a parliamentary by-election, much as O’Donovan Rossa had triumphed earlier, and the extensive domestic and international coverage of the hunger-strikers gave fresh life to the Irish Republican Army and launched the rise of its political arm, Sinn Fein. The Manchester martyrs and the ira hunger strikers were both examples of the “‘tyranny of the dead.’”12 How well did the liberal state cope with Fenianism? Did it, as Conor Gearty has suggested, set the table for the modern “firm government” response to terrorism? “In Britain,” one analyst of modern British antiterrorist policy has mistakenly claimed, “the use of terror by the Fenians (1865–67) led to the suspension of habeas corpus.” Ironically, in the midst of the Fenian crisis, the liberal state took a giant step forward with the Second Reform Bill, which dramatically increased the electorate, and the Redistribution Bill, which revised constituency boundaries. The subsequent passage of the Ballot Act finally offered voters the shelter of secrecy from coercion and intimidation, with the result that the general election of 1868 proved to be the last without that safeguard. Freedom of assembly, of speech, and of petition continued to be respected in the face of public

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meetings organized by Fenian sympathizers. A legal excuse was found to halt the mock funerals staged in memory of the Manchester martyrs, their cessation seen as necessary partly because they were producing Fenian recruits, but largely because of the threat of counter-demonstrations. These were certain to precipitate sectarian and ethnic street fighting if not fullscale riots. Similarly dangerous to public peace – and ultimately personally fatal – were the anti-Catholic antics of William Murphy. They touched upon both the freedom of expression and the freedom from hateful abuse. The Home Office sought to resolve the issue by pressing local authorities to discourage by a variety of means those gatherings they were unable legally to prohibit in the name of public order.13 Although England was the scene of two of the sensational “terrorist” incidents, there was never any danger of Britain’s descent into a police state. The temporary national distribution of firearms for possible use by policemen traditionally equipped only with truncheons did excite the concern of the Reform League, which feared the use of armed police to suppress reform movements, but the use of deadly weapons was strictly limited and they were not to be carried by constables engaged in their traditional duties. There was no integration of the many local forces, no truly centralized command, no national police, and no political police. Nor was there any suspension of habeas corpus, and the many Irishmen arrested immediately after the Manchester incident, essentially because they were Irishmen, were quickly released. There was no introduction, even after the Clerkenwell bombing, of the kind of “draconian” anti-terrorist legislation swiftly passed following the ira bombings of two Birmingham pubs in 1974. This legislation greatly extended the powers of the police, allowing them to make arrests on “reasonable” suspicion, but the suspicion did not need to be related to a specific offence. Thus police officers could make an arrest where no offence had been committed, where there was no suspicion that one had been committed, and where the person arrested was not suspected of having committed an offence. In 1867, a Tory home secretary had declined to detain the Fenian chief in the absence of sufficient evidence to bring him to trial. By way of contrast, the provisions of the modern Prevention of Terrorism Act have undermined habeas corpus as a protection against unlawful detention. Of the thousands of persons detained between 1974 and 1991 in connection with the violence in Northern Ireland, the vast majority were released “without any action being taken against them.” Convictions were rare. More recently still, the British government sought to extend the period of detention in Britain to ninety days but accepted

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the twenty-eight-day period that had long been in place in Northern Ireland – hence the suspicion that the act was used for the purpose of intelligence gathering and harassment.14 Throughout the Fenian crisis, the rule of law continued to be respected and due process followed in Britain. The Fenians were criminalized, most of them being charged with serious criminal offences rather than with political subversion. Remand and preliminary hearings were followed by regular trials, though to expedite the process the Manchester and Clerkenwell accused were hauled before Special Commissions. That is not to suggest that the scales of justice were perfectly balanced. The state had no legal obligation to ensure that poor defendants were represented by counsel, though sufficient monies were raised privately to ensure that the Fenians were skilfully defended. Nor was the prosecution under any legal obligation to reveal its full witness list to the defence. The Home Office declined to postpone the trials of Sergeant Brett’s alleged murderers to allow public anger to subside, and the judges rejected an application for a change of venue. Both decisions increased the danger of a rush to judgment. Trials were marred by police manipulation of rudimentary identity parades, by policemen embellishing evidence in order to enhance the prospects of conviction, and by the inaccurate if not false testimony by some witnesses. As a result, an innocent Manchester defendant was convicted. But neither the judges nor the briefing Treasury solicitor were convinced of his guilt, as they made plain in their separate reports to the home secretary. His life would undoubtedly have been spared even without the intervention of the experienced reporters covering the proceedings, but his pardon, the acquittals of a second batch of accused by a jury from which Manchester residents had been successfully excluded, and the discrediting of two of the witnesses who had given evidence at the first trial provided British critics and Irish nationalists with a fresh stockpile of ammunition. Here was their proof of a grave miscarriage of justice. That charge might reasonably have been levelled even more forcefully at a third Manchester trial, which saw a jury ignore the judge’s summation pointing out the deficiencies of the prosecution case. In the event, Home Secretary Hardy allowed a pair of men to be imprisoned for a crime of which they had been convicted despite reasonable doubt of their guilt in order to see one of them punished for an offence with which he had not even been charged. If this case illustrated the weakness of a system that lacked a genuine court of appeal, one of the objections to it was the possibility that it would open the door to disappointed prosecutors. The modern era has

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seen the erosion of the once fundamental principle of English law, the finality of acquittals. Equally, miscarriages of justice have been far more evident during the modern war on terror. In the Clerkenwell case, the judges’ decision to discharge two of the accused and the acquittals of three others by the jury revived accusations of a miscarriage of justice when a sixth prisoner was convicted. Unbeknown to the general public and the jury, the prosecution had in its possession voluntary statements that deeply implicated in the tragedy all three of the acquitted men, but they were not used so as to avoid any risk of revealing the identity of a highly prized agent or informant. The protection of a vital source of intelligence took priority over convictions. Only the case against Michael Barrett was strong enough, as it stood, to survive the test of reasonable doubt. In his trial report to the home secretary, the lord chief justice admitted to some doubt of the credibility of several witnesses, but neither he nor his companion on the bench questioned the soundness of the conviction. Then, in an extraordinary, detailed, and lengthy opinion, which amounted to a full reconsideration of the case, the chief justice cited evidence in confirmation of the verdict that had not been presented in court. However questionable this procedure, Barrett was twice respited while the Home Office investigated his alibi, despite the strong suspicion that it had been concocted by friends in a desperate effort to save his life. Furthermore, he was given an exceptional opportunity to provide an explanation of the additional, damning evidence. He was not rushed to the gallows, and his trial was by the standards of the time fair. One senior Liberal moaned that while prevention was undoubtedly preferable to cure, Englishmen lacked the imagination needed “to perceive coming evils” and consequently waited for some disaster to occur before consenting to “strong measures.” However, there was always a greater British openness to the adoption of such measures in Ireland. There, the challenges to both authority and security were far more brazen. Moreover, many Britons did not believe that the Irish merited the full enjoyment of the rights belonging to citizens of a liberal state. The Irish were judged ill-suited to those institutions that mankind in general considered best for all men; they were considered a “‘different race,’” possessed of a “‘different type of character,’” who were in a “‘different [and lower] stage of civilization, politically, socially and intellectually,’” and thus who stood in need of “‘a different regime.’” Hence the far higher proportion of policemen to the population in Ireland than in the other countries of the Union, the arming of the police, and the existence in Dublin of a division that concentrated on political dissidents. These civilian forces of law and order

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were backed by a large military garrison. Where did all of this leave the concept of a United Kingdom?15 The Irish Executive did resist for some considerable time infringements of basic liberal freedoms. There was no prompt prosecution of radical nationalist speakers or newspapers. Even the Irish People was permitted to go on publishing for two years. The mock funerals for the Manchester martyrs were only hesitantly prohibited, and little effort was made to stifle amnesty demonstrations or the receptions given the released prisoners. These were expressions of popular dissent in which many Catholic Irish whose alienation from the state was passive might safely participate. A processions bill was discussed, which would have banned demonstrations calculated to promote sedition and disaffection, in part to appease Orangemen constrained by the Party Processions Act, but any proposal to arm the viceroy with the “strong power” pre-emptively to proclaim a procession illegal seemed certain to be fiercely resisted in the Commons. Similarly, Isaac Butt’s Home Rule agitation progressed without much let or hindrance despite the belief in Britain that any undoing of the Union would signal her decline as a great power.16 Political meetings were more closely monitored in Ireland than in Britain. Shorthand writers were employed to attend and record the words of speakers for their possible “crimination.” The activities of spies and informers, as John Francis Maguire complained in the Commons, always threatened to have a chilling effect on public debate. Richard Pigott and A.M. Sullivan, two newspaper publishers, were eventually prosecuted successfully for seditious libel and suffered a gentlemanly form of imprisonment. Nevertheless, there was a liberal tolerance of an intensely nationalist press. Pigott’s Irishman was undoubtedly the principal target of the clause in the Peace Preservation Bill of 1870, which did grant the viceroy the “enormous power” to suppress seditious newspapers. Although applauded by Cardinal Cullen, extensive and effective use of this power was unlikely, given the inclusion in the bill of a liberal safeguard. The government was liable for damages should a jury find that it had “acted without sufficient justification.” In Ireland, this was a far from improbable verdict. Thus, of a provocatively hostile and incendiary press, only the manifestly subversive Irish People, which urged “patriots” to prepare for revolution and whose office was the centre of the Fenian conspiracy, was suppressed. Moreover, the brutal police suppression of a political meeting in Phoenix Park produced such an outcry in Britain that the government felt constrained to promise that, in future, law and practice would “conform in all things to the principle of equality” between England, Scotland, and Ireland.17

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Ireland had another unenviable distinction that went to the heart of the rule of law. Liberals were embarrassed by the repeated suspensions of habeas corpus. One testament to this was Gladstone’s dogged resistance, following the protection’s restoration, to another suspension, even in the face of the “excessively obstinate and virulent” agrarian terrorism in Westmeath. The danger, a prescient Liberal Cabinet minister with considerable knowledge of Ireland observed, was that arbitrary imprisonment would become “part of the ordinary system of Irish government.” When Gladstone eventually gave way to the pressure for local suspensions of habeas corpus, a former Tory minister, and large landowner in the most disturbed county, remarked ironically that only a Liberal government could so improve the British constitution. Yet these mid-nineteenthcentury curtailments of civil liberties pale in comparison with the emergency and “temporary” legislation of the late twentieth century. Constant re-enactment and extension have effectively transformed it into a permanent piece of law and allowed a “symbiotic relationship” to develop “between the ordinary criminal law and the emergency legislation.” Even in Ireland, the mid-nineteenth-century state showed itself less careless of its citizens’ liberties than its modern counterpart, and less “profligate in surveillance.” Equally, in the nineteenth century, a principled judge advocate general held in check the instinctive inclination of a commander of the Irish garrison, reputedly a glutton for capital punishment, to indulge his appetite at the expense of soldiers who joined the Brotherhood. Thomas Headlam courageously ensured that courts martial were not conducted in a manner crudely or blatantly unfair to the accused, as is now the danger with the creation of military commissions. He upheld the rule of law and went far to ensure that military courts applied the basic standards of British justice and followed established rules of procedure – adequate proof of a crime, corroboration of accomplice testimony, and reasonable punishment of offenders. No soldier was executed for involvement in the Fenian conspiracy.18 There was in Ireland a long history of jury packing that the adoption of measures to centralize and control the selection of jurors promised merely to perpetuate. Indeed, the vulnerability of the system was increasingly a source of embarrassment. Spencer was one viceroy convinced that this reputation damaged the strength of the law and encouraged an Irish distrust of legal remedies. He favoured the introduction of legislation that would demonstrate that the government was “perfectly impartial and above all tricks.” Another threat to the rule of law was intimidation. The government instituted rudimentary witness-protection schemes, such as

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secure housing and police guards, for jury trials continued to be held, despite the likelihood of “perverse” acquittals. There was in the 1860s no jettisoning of “long-established judicial procedure,” as was to be the case with the passage more than a century later of the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act. Intimidation of witnesses and juries and the danger of perverse acquittals now brought the suspension of jury trials for a broad range of offences and relaxation of the rules governing the inadmissibility of involuntary confessions. In certain instances, an accused was required to prove innocence. Under the provisions of this act, the night watchman tried on a charge of complicity in the escape of James Stephens from Richmond Bridewell would have been obliged to prove, given the Fenian material found among his belongings, that he was not a member of the Brotherhood. Instead, at his trial, the judge instructed the jury that it would be “dangerous to the liberties of the subject” to convict a man “from the simple fact that a treasonable document was found in his possession.” He was acquitted. Thomas Clarke Luby was one of the leading Fenians tried and convicted, but he publicly admitted the fairness of his trial. Similarly, A.M. Sullivan allowed that his trial for seditious libel had been conducted with “singular impartiality and judicial dignity.” It was less the judicial process that attracted harsh criticism than the lengthy terms of penal servitude to which the convicted were frequently sentenced. Remarkably, all of the rebels of 1867 escaped the gallows, despite the desire of the Tory government to make an example of at least one of them. The weight of public opinion obliged the minority administration to commute all the death sentences.19 It was also to the credit of the liberal state that it responded positively to the sensational charges of ill-treatment of the Fenian prisoners. The first investigation, brief and cursory, was immediately discredited by nationalists as a “whitewash,” but the second developed into an exhaustive examination of prison conditions. Against the backdrop of the amnesty agitation, the Devon Commission published not only its findings and recommendations but also, and in excruciatingly embarrassing detail, the testimony of the prisoners. If the report represented another propaganda coup for the Fenians, it also amounted to a vindication of the liberal state. Moreover, it could not be denied that the revolutionary nationalists had failed in their fundamental objective. Ireland remained within the United Kingdom, though some of the measures adopted in an effort to conciliate the Irish had prepared British minds, one prominent Liberal feared, “for many things that would formerly have been considered violations of the rights of property.” More to the Fenians’ taste was the notion that they had

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advanced the cause of an independent Irish republic. Fenianism had prevented the Irish from meekly accepting British rule, James Stephens boasted, and it had maintained the strength of Irish national feeling. This claim finds a modern echo in the interpretation of the Easter Rebellion of 1916 as an expression of the Fenian tradition. Unquestionably, Fenianism contributed to the “mutual political and social alienation of Ireland from Britain,” and it marked a further erosion of popular deference to the state and its institutions. Or as Isaac Butt put it, Fenianism had taught him “‘the depth, the breadth, the sincerity of that love of Fatherland’” that misgovernment had first “‘tortured into disaffection’” and then “‘exaggerated into revolt.’” The Fenians deserved well of their country and fellow countrymen, Richard Pigott later wrote, having risked “life and liberty for the general good,” having lifted the spirits of a “long suffering despairing people” by giving them “renewed and confident hopefulness that at long last the dawn of their deliverance from misgovernment was at hand,” and having compelled English statesmen to recognize that “they must govern Ireland – if they govern it at all – in accordance with its peoples wishes.” The irony in this was Pigott’s secret offer in 1872 to tell the authorities all he knew about Fenianism. Indeed, he was eventually to take his own life, having been exposed as the forger of the letters that sought to tie Charles Stewart Parnell to a later surge of Fenian violence. Yet leading Tories were convinced that the Fenians were more dangerous as constitutional Repealers than as insurgents or terrorists, because in a liberal state the law would no longer be able to reach them. It was a view to which Parnell’s parliamentary campaign was soon to lend some credence. Equally, just as the Fenians had concentrated British minds as rarely before on the Irish problem, so did they bequeath to the next generation of militant nationalists a frightening tactical legacy. Speaking at Rochdale in December 1867, John Bright declared that nothing had been done for Ireland except under the influence of “terror,” while one of William Gladstone’s correspondents reminded him of the dangerous lesson Britons had “perseveringly” taught the Irish. It was “the sudden apparition of Fenian assassins in the very bosom of our English society,” he noted, “which first brought home in the public mind with startling emphasis the truth, dimly realized and languidly acknowledged before, that there was indeed an Irish grievance which could no longer be trifled with.”20

Abbreviations

aab aad aah aat bl Bodl cha co csrop cua fo glo gmpm ho ina lcl lda Livro lma lro mcrl mepo na nli pcom pol

Archives Archdiocese of Baltimore Archives Archdiocese of Dublin Archives All Hallows College, Dublin Archives Archdiocese of Toronto British Library Bodleian Library, Oxford Devonshire Papers, Chatsworth Colonial Office Records, British National Archives Chief Secretary’s Office, Registered Papers, Irish National Archives, Dublin Catholic University of America, Washington, dc Foreign Office Records, British National Archives Glamorgan Record Office Greater Manchester Police Museum Home Office Records, British National Archives Irish National Archives Liverpool Central Library Liverpool Diocesan Archives Liverpool Record Office London Metropolitan Archives Lancashire Record Office, Preston Manchester Central Reference Library Metropolitan Police Records, British National Archives British National Archives (formerly pro) National Library of Ireland, Dublin Prison Records, British National Archives Liverpool Police Records

346 proni ra Somro sro ts wo wsro

Abbreviations Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast Royal Archives, Windsor Castle Somerset Record Office, Taunton Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich Treasury Solicitors, Records, British National Archives War Office Records, British National Archives West Sussex Record Office, Chichester

Notes

Author’s Note: Source citations relating to a given paragraph are gathered together under one note. Their order within the note reflects the chronology of the discussion. Where two or more citations involving the same depository appear consecutively within a note, the depository is identified in the first citation.

preface 1 Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York, 2004), xix. 2 Ed Molony, A Secret History of the IRA (London, 2002), 7, 74, 79; P. Tynan, Irish Invincibles and Their Times, with a new introduction by Charles Townshend, repr. (New York, 1983), vi. 3 Paul Wilkinson, ed., Terrorism: British Perspectives (Dartmouth, 1993), 320. 4 Bard E. O’Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare (Washington, dc, 1990), 2, 13, 71; Andrew Silke, ed., Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements and Failures (London, 2004), 3, 9; Cindy R. Webb, P.H. Liotta, Thomas Sherlock, and Ruth Bargolies Beitler, The Fight for Legitimacy: Democracy vs Terrorism (Westport, ct, 2006), 4; Wilkinson, Terrorism, 9–10. 5 Silke, Research on Terrorism, 3, 12; Leonard Weinberg and Paul Davis, Introduction to Political Terrorism (New York, 1989), 7–8; Conor Gearty, Terror (London, 1992), 1; Igor Primoratz, Terrorism: The Philosophical Issue (New York, 2004), 22. 6 Yonah Alexander and Alan O’Day, eds, Ireland’s Terrorist Dilemma (Dordrecht, 1986), 57; Gearty, Terror, 22; Alan O’Day, Dimensions of Irish Terrorism (Dartmouth, 1992), 124, 118; Wilkinson, Terrorism, 17; Fathali M. Moghaddam and Anthony J. Marsella, eds, Understanding Terrorism: Psychological Roots, Consequences and Interventions (Washington, dc, 2004), 108–11, 13; Andrew

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Notes to pages xiii−6

Silke, ed., Terrorists, Victims and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and Its Consequences (Chichester, 2003), 39–40, 44; Weinberg and Davis, Introduction to Political Terror, 25; Mitchel to Moynaham, 28 January 1867, Box 2/9, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua. 7 K.R.M. Short, The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain (Dublin,1979), 263; Tom Corfe, The Phoenix Park Murders: Conflict, Compromise and Tragedy in Ireland, 1879–1882 (London, 1968), 141, 196. 8 Guardian, 29 November 2005. 9 Wilkinson, Terrorism, 20, 23, 5; Jonathan Stevenson, Counter-Terrorism: Containment and Beyond (Oxford, 2004), 8, 108–9; Neil C. Livingstone, The War against Terrorism (Toronto, 1982), 155–67; Webb et al., Fight for Legitimacy, ix.

chapter one 1 Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (New York, 1974), 90; Times (London), 2 November 1858; Angus Hawkins and John Powell, eds, The Journal of John Wodehouse, First Earl of Kimberley for 1862–1902, Camden, 5th ser., 9 (London, 1997): 14; Julia Crick, “Pristina Libertas: Liberty and the Anglo-Saxons Revisited,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (TRHS ), 6th ser., 14 (Cambridge, 2004): 47–71; A.C. Grayling, Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggle for Liberty & Rights That Made the Modern West (London, 2007), 105; Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2006), 354; Jose Harris, ed., Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford, 2004), 59–60. 2 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 26 (1829): 819–20; Olive Anderson, A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics during the Crimean War (New York, 1967), 4, 31, 33, 47–8, 70, 91; Edinburgh Review 31 (1819): 548. 3 Grayling, Towards the Light, 134; Guardian, 7 March 2007; Anderson, Liberal State at War, 50, 70, 91; Times (London), 6 December 1858; Roger Price, The French Second Empire (Cambridge, 2001), 68–9. 4 Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain 1790–1988 (London, 1989), 17–18, 76–8; Philip Mansel, Paris between Empires: Monarchy and Revolution, 1814–1852, pbk ed. (London, 2001), 320–1; Harry W. Rudman, Italian Nationalism and English Letters: Figures of the Risorgimento and Victorian Men of Letters (New York, 1940), 61. 5 James Bovard, Terrorism and Tyranny (London, 2003), 106; Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War (London, 1982), 2; Grayling, Towards the Light, 278.

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6 D.J.V. Jones, “The New Police, Crime and People in England and Wales, 1829–1888,” TRHS , 5th ser., 33 (1983): 154–5, 157; David Taylor, The New Police in Nineteenth Century England: Crime, Conflict and Control (Manchester, 1997), 64–5; Police Order, 12 September 1866, mepo, 7/27, na; Steve Uglow, Policing Liberal Society (Oxford, 1988), 4, 10, 12, 16, 21–3, 30–2; Porter, Plots and Paranoia, 8–9, 16–17; Times (London), 2 November 1858; Carolyn Steedman, Policing the Victorian Community: The Formation of the English Provincial Police Forces, 1856–1880 (London, 1984), 31–2; Donald Rumbelow, I Spy Blue: The Policeman and Crime in the City of London from Elizabeth I to Victoria (London, 1971), 174–5; E.C. Midwinter, “Law and Order in Early Victorian Lancashire,” Borthwick Papers, no. 34: 38–9; Anthea Todd, “The Policeman and the Lady: Significant Encounters in Mid-Victorian Fiction,” Victorian Studies 27 (1984): 437–41; Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge, ma, 1976), 45, 52, 55, 96–105. 7 Grayling, Towards the Light, 278; Harris, Revolution, 343; Joyce Lee Malcolm, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Cambridge, ma, 2003), 4, 83, 86, 95, 109. 8 John Prest, Lord John Russell (Columbia, 1972), 235; Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843–50 (Dublin, 1999), 207; Edinburgh Review 84 (1846): 267. 9 The Speeches of the Right Honourable William Pitt in the House of Commons, 4 vols (London, 1806), 4:71, 369; Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan, eds, Acts of Union: The Cause, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union (Dublin, 2001), 24; James H. Murphy, Ireland: A Social, Cultural and Literary History, 1791– 1891 (Dublin, 2003), 25; K. Theodore Hoppen, Ireland since 1800 (London, 1989), 62–3; Edinburgh Review 41 (1825): 356–7. 10 W.E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, vol. 5: Ireland under the Union: 1: 1801–1870 (Oxford, 1989), 81–2; Michael Beames, “Peasant Disturbances, Popular Conspiracies and Their Control: Ireland, 1789–1852” (phd diss., University of Manchester, 1975), 16; Liverpool to Peel, 28 January 1816, bl Add. mss 40,181, Peel Papers; Michael de Nie, “Curing ‘The Irish Moral Plague,’” Eire/Ireland 32 (1997): 81, 85; Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder, eds, Policing and Prosecution in Britain 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1989), 427–56; Galen Broeker, Rural Disorder and Police Reform in Ireland, 1812–1836 (London, 1970), 128–59; Stanley Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 1988), 243–4; Donal O’Sullivan, The Irish Constabularies: A Century of Policing in Ireland (Dingle, 1999), 42, 15, 99–100, 115–16. 11 Brian Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State: From Repeal to Revolutionary Nationalism (Montreal and Kingston, 2006), 56–9; Maurice

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13

14

15

16

Notes to pages 10−13 O’Connell, ed., The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, 8 vols (Dublin, 1972–81), 7:155–60. Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 46, 65; Lawrence J. McCaffrey, Daniel O’Connell and the Repeal Year (Lexington, 1965), 26–8; Richard Davis, The Young Ireland Movement (Dublin, 1987), 242, 234; Helen F. Mulvey, Thomas Davis and Ireland: A Biographical Study (Washington, dc, 2003), 115, 105, 209, 236–7, 65; John Neylon Molony, A Soul Came into Ireland: Thomas Davis, 1814– 1845: A Biography (Dublin, 1995), 48; Leslie A. Williams, Daniel O’Connell, the British Press and the Irish Famine, ed. William H.A. White (Aldershot, 2003), 73, 79–80, 85–6, 88. Richard Davis, Revolutionary Imperialist: William Smith O’Brien (Dublin, 1998), 157, 181, 208–11; Virginia Crossman, Politics, Law and Order in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Dublin, 1996), 77; Brian Jenkins, Henry Goulburn 1784–1856: A Political Biography (Montreal and Kingston, 1996), 317; Mulvey, Thomas Davis, 139, 150, 176; Kevin B. Nowlan, The Politics of Repeal: A Study in the Relations between Great Britain and Ireland, 1841–50 (London, 1965), 20–86; Ambrose Macaulay, William Crolly: Archbishop of Armagh, 1835–49 (Dublin, 1994), 306–7, 322, 329, 435; Hilary Andrews, The Lion of the West: A Biography of John MacHale (Dublin, 2001), 118–20; Maurice O’Connell, “Young Ireland and the Catholic Clergy in 1844: Contemporary Deceit and Historical Falsehood,” Catholic Historical Review 74 (1988): 199–225. Donald MacKay, Flight from Famine: The Coming of the Irish to Canada (Toronto, 1990), 223, 225; Melissa Fegan, Literature and the Irish Famine 1845– 1919 (Oxford, 2002), 59; Donal Kerr, The Catholic Church and the Famine (Dublin, 1996), 55–6; Donal Kerr, ‘Nation of Beggars’? Priests, People and Politics in Famine Ireland 1846–1852 (Oxford, 1994), 96, 83; Bernard O’Reilly, John MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam, 2 vols (New York, 1890), 1:623, 614; Cormac O Grada, ed., Famine 150 (Dublin, 1997), 156. John Newsinger, “John Mitchel and Irish Nationalism,” Literature and History 6 (1980): 184, 193–4; Leon O Broin, Charles Gavan Duffy, Patriot and Statesman: The Story of Charles Gavan Duffy (1816–1903) (Dublin, 1967), 29–32; Nowlan, Politics of Repeal, 111–14; Thomas Francis Meagher, Speeches on the Legislative Independence of Ireland (New York, 1853), 91; Steven R. Knowlton, “The Quarrel between Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel: Implications for Ireland,” Albion 21 (1989): 582; Graham Walker, “Irish Nationalism and the Uses of History,” Past and Present 126 (1990): 206; Davis, Revolutionary Imperialist, 234–7; Robert Sloan, William Smith O’Brien and the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 (Dublin, 2000), 208. Brendan O’Cathaoir, John Blake Dillon, Young Irelander (Dublin, 1990), 69–71; Davis, Revolutionary Imperialist, 252–5; O Broin, Charles Gavan Duffy, 60; Sloan, William Smith O’Brien, 230.

Notes to pages 13−17

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17 Nowlan, Politics of Repeal, 211–14; O’Cathaoir, John Blake Dillon, 78–9; Sloan, William Smith O’Brien, 257–8, 262, 288–9; Desmond Bowen, Paul Cardinal Cullen and the Shaping of Modern Irish Catholicism (Dublin, 1983), 97; Kerr, ‘Nation of Beggars,’ 58, 73–6, 82–3, 123, 128, 132–40, 144, 151–60; Redmond to Cullen, 5 February 1868, Cullen Correspondence, 1868, 341/1/i, aad; Brendan O’Cathaoir, Famine Diary (Dublin, 1999), 115; Macaulay, William Crolly, 453; Kieran O’Shea, “David Moriarty (1814–77), III: Politics,” Journal of the Kerry Archeological Society 5 (1972): 86–102; Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 97. 18 Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 151, 189; R. Lawton, “Irish Immigration to England and Wales in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Irish Geography 4 (1959): 38; Fergus D’Arcy, “St. Patrick’s Other Island: The Irish Invasion of Britain,” Eire/Ireland 28 (1993): 9; Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Toronto, 1993), 96, 99. 19 Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 144; Kerry A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford, 1985), 313, 340–1. 20 For a succinct account of Irish emigration, see Akenson’s Irish Diaspora; Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 168–70. 21 Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 225–31; Reverend John Hanlon’s The Irish Emigrant Guide for the United States, ed. Edward J. Maguire (New York, 1976), 108–9, 226, 230–1; Neville Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism in Mid-Victorian England (London, 1985), 320. 22 Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 230, 239; Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal, 1982), 62, 82, 86; Reginald Horsman, “Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 387–410; Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, ma, 1981), 58–9, 63–5, 69–70; William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes towards Race in America 1815–59 (Chicago, 1960), 36. 23 Evelleen Richards, “The ‘Moral Anatomy’ of Robert Knox: The Interplay between Biological and Social Thought in Victorian Scientific Naturalism,” Journal of the History of Biology 22 (1989): 377–427; Michael Banton, Race Theories, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1998), 75; Ronald Rainger, “Race, Politics and Science: The Anthropological Society of London in the 1860s,” Victorian Studies 22 (1978): 51–64; Edward G. Lengel, The Irish through British Eyes: Perceptions of Ireland in the Famine Era (Westport, ct, 2002), 12; Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London, 1862), 319–25, 330, 373–4, 378–9; Michael de Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press 1798–1882 (Madison, 2004), 8.

352

Notes to pages 18−21

24 De Nie, Eternal Paddy, 8; L.P. Curtis Jr, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudices in Victorian England (Bridgeport, 1968), 15; Rainger, Victorian Studies 22:64; Christopher Herbert, “Epilogue: Ethnography and Evolution,” Victorian Studies 41 (1998): 491; Vincent P. Pecora, “Arnoldian Ethnology,” Victorian Studies 41 (1998): 355–77; Frederic E. Faverty, Matthew Arnold: The Ethnologist, repr. (New York, 1968), 20, 42, 51, 73, 112–13, 121, 135; Daily Telegraph, 24 January 1867; Lengel, Irish through British Eyes, 119; de Nie, Eternal Paddy, 10; D.G. Paz, “Anti-Catholicism, Anti-Irish Stereotyping, and Anti-Celtic Racism in Mid-Victorian Working Class Periodicals,” Albion 18 (1986): 614–15. 25 Kevin L. Morris, “John Bull and the Scarlet Woman: Charles Kingsley and Anti-Catholicism in Victorian Literature,” Recusant History 23 (1996–97): 210; Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth Century England c. 1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester, 1993), 3–5, 8–13, 247–54; Colm Kiernan, ed., Australia and Ireland 1788–1988: Bicentenary Essays (Dublin, 1988), 81, 84–6; Peter Doyle, “Pope Pius IX and Religious Freedom,” Studies in Church History 21 (1984): 329–41; Richard J. Schiefen, “‘Anglo-Gallicanism’ in Nineteenth Century England,” Catholic Historical Review 63 (1977): 14, 19, 42–3; Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 172, 241. 26 Gerard Connolly, “The Transubstantiation of Myth: Towards a New Popular History of Nineteenth-Century Catholicism in England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984): 80–4, 86–7, 94–6; Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 206; Sheridan Gilley, “English Catholic Charity and the Irish Poor in London, Part II (1840–1870),” Recusant History 11 (1972): 257–9; Lyndon A. Fraser, “The Making of an Ethnic Community: Irish Catholic Immigrants in Nineteenth Century Christchurch,” Journal of Religious History 20 (1996): 218. 27 Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England 1850–1914 (London 1996), 38–9; J. Derek Holmes, More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978), 30, 40, 69, 182; E.R. Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1984), 21, 211–12, 263; for Liberal Catholicism, see Joseph L. Altholz, The Liberal Catholic Movement in England: The ‘Rambler’ and Its Contributions 1846–1864 (London, 1960); J.A. Hilton, Catholic Lancashire: From Reformation to Renewal 1559–1991 (Chichester, 1994), 93; Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 235–6. 28 Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 176–7, 179, 187, 200; Irish Canadian, 30 March 1864. 29 For Lynch’s life and career, see Thomas Gerald John Storz, “John Joseph Lynch Archbishop of Toronto: A Biographical Study of Religious, Political and Social Commitment” (phd diss., University of Guelph, 1980); for clerical

Notes to pages 21−3

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criticism of Lynch’s Irish nationalism, see ibid., 23; Lynch to the Clergy of Ireland Only [1864], ae 06.01, Lynch Papers, aat; Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 186–7. 30 For John Hughes, see Richard Shaw, Dagger John: The Unquiet Life and Times of Archbishop John Hughes of New York (New York, 1977); John R.G. Hassard, Life of John Hughes First Archbishop of New York, repr. (New York, 1969); Lawrence Kehoe, ed., Complete Works of the Most Reverend John Hughes, D.D., Archbishop of New York, 2 vols (New York, 1864); Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 209–11; for the Irish-American press, see William Leonard Joyce, Editors and Ethnicity: A History of the Irish American Press 1848–1883 (New York, 1976), 59, 64, 74–5, 77, 53-4, 84, 60-2; Robert Francis Hueston, The Catholic Press and Nativism 1840–1860 (New York, 1976), 139–40, 309; Sally M. Miller, The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook (New York, 1987), 178–9, 182; Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 207–8. 31 Donald M. MacRaild, ed., The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Dublin, 2000), 135–6; A.E. Hollander and William Kellaway, eds, Studies in London History (London, 1969), 434–5; Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, eds, The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985), 135; W.J. Lowe, The Irish in Mid-Victorian Lancashire: The Shaping of a Working Class Community (New York, 1989), 122; Jennifer Supple, “The Catholic Clergy of Yorkshire, 1850–1900: A Profile,” Northern History 21 (1985): 213–14; Goss to Gerard, 18 August 1865, Goss Letterbooks, lro; Carroll to Cullen, 3 November 1865, 320/4, Cullen Correspondence, aad; Brown to Cullen, 28 May 1863, 340/7/II; Brown to Fortune, 28 January 1867, shr 62, aah; Scott to Hand, 21 April 1843, wd 2, aah; 15 July, wd 9; 15 September, wd 13; 24 August 1844, wd 24; Murdoch to Woodlock, 24 July 1860, wd 78. 32 G.P. Connolly, “Little Brother Be at Peace: The Priest as Holy Man in the Nineteenth Century Ghetto,” Studies in Church History 19 (1982): 191–206; for the immigrant press, see Swift and Gilley, Irish in the Victorian City, 158–78; John Saville, Ernest Jones: Chartist – Selections from the Writings and Speeches of Ernest Jones with Introduction and Notes (London, 1952), 27–8; John Belcham, “‘Freedom and Friendship to Ireland’: Ribbonism in Early Nineteenth Century Liverpool,” International Review of Social History 39 (1994): 34–5, 44; John Belcham, ed., Popular Beliefs, Riot and Labour: Essays in Liverpool History 1790–1940 (Liverpool, 1992), 68–95; Louis R. Bisceglia, “The Threat of Violence: Irish Confederates and Chartists in Liverpool, 1829–1845,” Irish Sword 14 (1981): 207–15; Times (London), 12 December 1848; Manchester Guardian, 16 December 1848.

354

Notes to pages 23−32

33 Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 215–17, 180–1, 210; Arthur G. Doughty, ed., Elgin-Grey Correspondence 1846–1852, 4 vols (Ottawa, 1937), 1:144–5, 149, 265, 2:411. 34 Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 218–21, 249–54, 41, 134–8. 35 Ibid., 255, 257–9, 96; Owen McGee, The IRB : The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Fein (Dublin, 2005), 17; Mansell, Paris between Empires, 307, 391–2. 36 Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 258–60; McGee, IRB , 29. 37 Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 261–2, 257. 38 Ibid., 258, 269–72; Lawrence Frederick Kohl, ed., Irish Green and Union Blue: The Civil War Letters of Peter Welsh (New York, 1986), 102–3. 39 John Augustus O’Shea, Leaves from the Life of a Special Correspondent, 2 vols (London, 1885), 1:101–3; Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 264–8. 40 Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 275–8; Kehoe, Complete Works of Archbishop Hughes, 1:527–8. 41 McGee, IRB , 30; A.M. Sullivan, New Ireland (Dublin, 1878), 338; Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 276–83; for an extended discussion of the National Brotherhood, see Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, eds, The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (Dublin, 1999), 212–35. 42 Jenkins, Irish Nationalism and the British State, 285–6. 43 Ibid.; Swift and Gilley, Irish in the Victorian City, 158–70; Universe, 7 February 1863; Irish Liberator, 14 November 1863; Swift and Gilley, Local Dimension, 234. 44 Goss Pastorals, 24 February 1862, 22 February 1865, 5 February and 28 September 1866, lda; Goss to Turner, 14 August 1865, Goss Letterbooks, lro; Goss to Cullen, 8 March 1862, 17 October 1862. 45 Ryan to Commissioner of Dublin Police, 18 January 1866, Cambridge Papers,Vic. Add. mss e/1, ra; Copy of confidential report by Daniel Ryan, 10 April 1865, fo 5/1334; Unidentified correspondents, 27 April 1865, nli ms 10,492, James Stephens Papers; Irishman, 1 December 1866.

chapter two 1 Report of Sub-Inspector Potter, 4 June 1860, nli ms 7697, Larcom Papers; “Precis of information respecting associations of Irishmen in the United States entertaining designs hostile to the British Government,” June 1861, nli ms 7697; James J Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, eds, The American Civil War through British Eyes: Dispatches from British Diplomats, 3 vols (Kent, oh, 2003–05), 3:112–14; 1:85. 2 Report of the Detective Department, 18 March 1862, d2777/7/1/a/42, proni, Thomas O’Hagan Papers.

Notes to pages 33−6

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3 Oliver P. Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat 1861–75 (New York, 1999), 33; Monsell to O’Hagan, 14 December [1864], nli ms 17,871, Teeling Papers; Peel to Larcom, February 1862, nli ms 7583, Larcom Papers; Larcom to Peel, 13 February 1862; for press reports of Lavelle’s statements, see ms 7723, Larcom Papers; for memoranda of Attorney General, Lord Chancellor, and Home Office, see nli ms 7583. 4 Lawson to Carlisle, 23 March 1863, d2777/7/1/a/80, proni. 5 For a short biography of O’Hagan, see d2777/7/1/a/79, proni; O’Hagan to Lord Lieutenant, draft, [March 1863], d2777/7/1/a/79; O’Hagan to Lord Lieutenant, 26 March 1863, d2777/7/1/a/82; Ambrose Macaulay, Dr. Russell of Maynooth (London, 1983), 30–2, 106. 6 Peel to Carlisle, 26 March 1863, nli ms 11,188, Mayo Papers; Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 37–8; R.V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context (Dublin, 1985), 128; S. Takagami, “The Dublin Fenians, 1858–79” (phd diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 1990), 190; Solicitor General’s Opinion, 22 February 1864, nli ms 7586; O’Hagan to Peel, 24 February [1864], d2777/7/1/a/78, proni; P. Tynan, Irish National Invincibles and Their Times, with a new introduction by Charles Townshend, repr. (New York, 1983), 38. 7 Waddington Minute, 22 September 1865; Mayor of Liverpool to Baring, 26 September 1865, ho 45/7799; Greig to Mayor, 26 September 1865, 352 pol 2/3, Livro; Baring to Wodehouse, 25 September 1865, Eng. c4033, Kimberley mss, Bodl; Illustrated London News, 5 August, 23 September 1865; Bee Hive, 12, 19 August; 2, 9 September 1865; Manchester Guardian, 6, 11, 12, 20 September 1865; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 27 August, 3, 10, 17 September 1865; Michael de Nie, “‘A Medley Mob of Irish-American Plotters and Irish Dupes’: The British Press and Transatlantic Fenianism,” Journal of British Studies 40 (2001): 220–2. 8 Argyll to Dufferin, 18 October 1864, d1071/h/b/c/95/13, Dufferin Papers, proni; Palmerston to Queen, 16 September 1864, d22/11, ra; 19 September, d22/13; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 1–2, 13–16, 20–2, 131, 133, 143; John Powell, ed., Liberal by Principle: The Politics of John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley (London, 1996), 99; Wodehouse to de Grey, 7 December 1864, bl Add. ms 43,522, Ripon Papers; O’Hagan to Monsell, 9 November 1864, nli ms 17,871. 9 Wodehouse to Russell, 27 October 1865, Eng. c4035, Bodl; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 143–4, 146, 13, 131; Wodehouse to de Grey, 7 December 1864, bl Add. ms 43,522. 10 Wodehouse to de Grey, 7 December 1864, bl Add. ms 43,522; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 146, 154, 159–62; Cyril Pearl, The Three Lives of

356

11

12

13

14

15

16

Notes to pages 36−9 Gavan Duffy (Kensington, nsw, 1979), 190; Irish Canadian, 14 June, 19 July 1865; Joseph Denieffe, A Personal Narrative of the I.R.B. (New York, 1904), 93– 4; William D’Arcy, The Fenian Movement in the United States (Washington, dc, 1947), 55–60; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 123. Rose to Cambridge, 30 August 1865, bl Add. ms 42,821, Sir Hugh Rose (Strathnairn) Papers; A.M. Sullivan, New Ireland (New York, 1875), 347, 351; Powell, Liberal by Principle, 106–7; D’Arcy, Fenian Movement, 66–7, 76; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 128–9; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 174, 318; Wodehouse to de Grey, 13, 17 September 1865, bl Add. ms 43,522. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 24 September, 1, 29, 15, 8 October 1865; Virginia Stewart Beveridge, “Popular Journalism and Working Class Attitudes 1854– 1886: A Study of Reynolds’s Newspaper, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, and the Weekly Times” (phd diss., University of London, 1976), 18; Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck, eds, Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison (Aldershot, 1992), 182; Bee Hive, 25 February, 18, 25 March, 1 April, 23, 30 September, 7, 14 October 1865. Wodehouse to Lawson, 8 October 1865, Eng. c4034, Bodl; Powell, Liberal by Principle, 107; Wodehouse to de Grey, 27 September 1865, bl Add. ms 43,522; Lawson to Wodehouse, 18 October 1865, Eng. c4034, Bodl; Wodehouse to Grey, 8 October 1865; Marie-Louise Legg, Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press 1850–1892 (Dublin, 1999), 112; Grey to Wodehouse, 3 March 1866, Eng. c4043, Bodl; Law Officers’ Opinion, 9 March 1866; Wodehouse to Stanley, 14 March 1866; Wodehouse to Grey, 16 April 1866, Eng. c4046, Bodl. John Prest, Lord John Russell (Columbia, sc, 1972), 336, 401–3, 407; Bruce to de Grey, 22 October 1865, bl Add. ms 43,534, Ripon Papers; Arthur Irwin Dasent, John Thadeus Delane: Editor of “The Times”; His Life and Correspondence, 2 vols (New York, 1908), 2:150; Monsell to O’Hagan, 27 October 1865, d2777/9/81/2/10, proni; Bruce to Wodehouse, 10 November 1865, Eng. c4036, Bodl; Monsell to O’Hagan, 3 November [1865], d2777/9/81/2/43, proni. Monsell to O’Hagan, 27 October 1865, d2777/9/81/2/10, proni; Illustrated London News, 17 March 1866; Manchester Guardian, 31 October 1865; Dasent, Delane, 2:159–60; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 184, 311–12; Dasent, Delane, 2:163–4; Wodehouse to Russell, 12 December 1865, pro [na] 30/22/15h, Russell Papers. Wodehouse to Grey, 1 October 1865, Eng. c4033, Bodl; Wodehouse to Rose, 1 October 1865; Wodehouse to Palmerston, 5 October 1865; Wodehouse to Russell, 27 October 1865, Eng. c4035; Frederick to Secretary of Admiralty,

Notes to pages 40−3

17

18

19

20

21

357

1 October 1865, ho 45/7799; Dasent, Delane, 2:143; Wodehouse to de Grey, 5, 8 October 1865, bl Add. ms 43,522; Rose to Haythorne, 4 October 1865, bl Add. ms 42,821, Rose Papers; Wodehouse to Gladstone, 12 November 1865, Eng. c4036, Bodl; Gladstone to Wodehouse, 13 November 1865; Wodehouse to Gladstone, 15 November 1865; Wodehouse to Grey, 11 November, 1865, Eng. c4035. Wodehouse to Grey, 1 October 1865, Eng. c.4033, Bodl; 11 November 1865, Eng. c.4035; Desmond Ryan, The Fenian Chief: A Biography of James Stephens (Dublin, 1967), 213–15; Frederick Moir Bussy, Irish Conspiracies: Recollections of John Mallon and Other Reminiscences (London, 1910), 21; Rose to Cambridge, 28 November 1865, bl Add. ms 42,821, Rose Papers; Sullivan, New Ireland, 362–3; Denieffe, Personal Narrative, 124–5; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 179; Wodehouse to de Grey, 26 November 1865, bl Add. ms 43,522. Ian O’Donnell and Finbar McAuley, eds, Criminal Justice History: Themes and Controversies from Pre-Independence Ireland (Dublin, 2003), 194; Report of the Inspectors General of Prisons in Ireland on the escape of James Stephens, Parliamentary Papers (Parl. Papers), Crime and Punishment; Prisons, 9:9–38; Parliamentary Debates (Parl. Deb.), 3rd ser., 184:35–9; Times (London), 11, 13 January, 2 June 1866; Wodehouse to Larcom, 24 November, 1 December 1865, nli ms 7687; Curzon to Larcom, 30 November 1865, Kilmainham Papers, nli; Bruce to Monsell, 28 November 1865, nli ms 20,682, Emly Papers. Wodehouse to Grey, 26 November 1865, 17 January 1866, bl Add. ms 43,522; Wodehouse to Grey, 12 October 1865, Eng. c4034, Bodl; Peadar MacSuibhne, ed., Paul Cullen and His Contemporaries: With Their Letters from 1820–1902, 2 vols (Kildare, 1962), 2:100; R.W. Kostal, “Rebels in the Dock: The Prosecution of the Dublin Fenians 1865–6,” Eire/Ireland 34 (1999): 76–7n38. Kostal, Eire/Ireland 34:77–9, 85, 88, 93, 90; Marcus Bourke, John O’Leary: A Study in Irish Separatism (Athens, ga, 1967), 99; Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 45; William Keogh Notebooks, m2599, ina; Wodehouse to Russell, 21 November 1865, Eng. c4036, Bodl; Manchester Guardian, 29 November, 13, 15 December 1865; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 19 November, 3 December 1865; Express, 16, 31 January 1866; Fortnightly Review 3 (1865): 366, 631; Times (London), 4 January 1866. Murray to Wodehouse, 30 November 1865, Eng. c4036, Bodl; Wodehouse to Grey, 1 December 1865, Eng. c4037; 13 December, Eng. c4038; Grey to Russell, 14 December 1865, na 30/22/15h, Russell Papers; Rose to Wodehouse, 13, 15 December 1865, Eng. c4038, Bodl; Grey to Wodehouse, 12 December 1865, Eng. c4037; Whitty to Wodehouse, 22 December 1865, Eng. c4039; Manchester Guardian, 21 February 1866; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 181:816–17.

358

Notes to pages 43−6

22 Henderson to Whitty, 9 January 1866, nli ms 7687; Grey to Pope-Hennessy, 15 January 1866, Eng. c4039, Bodl; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 10, 17 December 1865; Manchester Guardian, 10 January, 10 February 1866. 23 P.J. Corish, ed., “Irish College Rome: Kirby Papers,” Archivium Hibernicum 30–1 (1972–74), 30:48–51; Cullen to Spalding, 18 October 1865, 33-0-6, Spalding Papers, aab; 2 December, 33-0-7; MacSuibhne, Paul Cullen and His Contemporaries, 4:190, 1:397–405; Emmet Larkin, Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1860–1870 (Dublin, 1987), 404–6; John Fulton, The Tragedy of Belief: Division, Politics and Belief in Ireland (Oxford, 1991), 54–5; Cullen to Spalding, 2 December 1865, 33-0-7, aab; 6 January 1866, 33-0-8; O’Reilly, John MacHale, 2:545; Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Chicago, 1995), 23; Redmond to Cullen, 14 January 1866, 327/6/II, aad; John Newsinger, Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain (London, 1994), 36–7. 24 Monsell to O’Hagan, 11 September [1865], nli ms 17,871; Steele, Irish Historical Studies 19:256; Leahy to Cullen, 4 February, 327/5/i, aad; Dixon to Cullen, 4 February 1866. 25 T.A Jenkins, ed., The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858–1865, Camden 4th ser. (London, 1990), 145, 172, 195, 317, 329; Monsell to O’Hagan, 19 September [1865], nli ms17,871; Larkin, Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church, 371; Cullen statement to Irish bishops, 27 February 1866, nli m6008, Leahy Papers; Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 29 March 1865, ha 43 t501/293, sro, Hardy Papers; Times (London), 2, 4, 19 January 1866; Manchester Guardian, 15 December 1865; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 17 December 1865; Guardian, 15 December 1865; Express, 31 January 1866. 26 Freeman’s Journal, 1 February 1866; Carlingford Diaries, 30 January 1866, bl Add. ms 63,677; Wodehouse to Gladstone, 12 February 1866, Eng. c4041, Bodl; Fortescue to Gladstone, 10 February 1866, bl Add. ms 44,121, Gladstone Papers; Wodehouse to Gladstone, 12 February 1866, bl Add. ms 44,224. 27 Russell to Cowley, 5 October 1865, Box 196, Lyons Papers, wsro; Russell fragment, n.d. [1866], na 30/22/15h; Gladstone to Fortescue, 13 February 1866, ddsh c/1189 324, Strachie Papers, Somro; Gladstone to Wodehouse, 13 February 1866, Eng. c4041, Bodl; Freeman’s Journal, 7 February 1866. 28 Derby Diaries, 8 February 1866, 920 (15), Derby Papers, Livro, lcl; Ryan, Fenian Chief, 218–26; Archibald to Clarendon, 13 December 1865, fo 5/1335; 24 January 1866, fo 5/1336; Wodehouse to Grey, 10 December 1865, Eng. c4037, Bodl; Times (London), 9, 15, 16, 20 January 1866; Manchester Guardian, 17 January 1866; Wodehouse to Grey, 14 January 1866, d22/18, ra; Derby

Notes to pages 47−9

29

30

31

32

33

359

Diaries, 5 January 1866, 920 (15), Derby Papers, Livro, lcl; Report of William Campbell, 24 January 1866, ho 45/7799. Wodehouse to Russell, 18 January 1866, Eng. c4040, Bodl; Childers to Wodehouse, 19 January 1866; Grey to Wodehouse, 23 January 1866; Dasent, Delane, 2:164; Gladstone to Wodehouse, 14 March 1866, Eng. c4045, Bodl; Wodehouse to Grey, 14 January 1866, d22/18, ra; Wodehouse to Grey, 4 February 1866, Eng. c4040, Bodl; Wodehouse to Grey, 14 February 1866, da22/19, ra; Paper 2705, csorp, nai; Rose to Wodehouse, 13 February 1866, Eng. c4040, Bodl. Wodehouse to Grey, 14 February 1866, d22/27, ra; Wodehouse to Russell, 14 February 1866, na 30/22/16a; Fortescue to Russell, 14 February 1866; C. Grey to Russell, 17 February 1866, d22/31, ra; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 181:658–65, 668–94; Derby Diaries, 17 February 1866, 920 der (15), Livro; Northcote Diary, 17 February 1866, bl Add. ms 50063a, Iddesleigh Papers; John Vincent, ed., A Selection from the Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby (1826–93), between September 1869 and March 1878, Camden 5th ser., vol. 4 (London, 1994), 136. Grey to Wodehouse, 16 February 1866, Eng.c4042, Bodl; Carlingford Diaries, 16, 17 February 1866, bl Add. ms 63677; C. Grey to Russell, 17 February 1866, d22/31, ra; Wodehouse to Grey, 17 February 1866, d22/38; Parl. Papers: Crime and Punishment, 21:66–7; Wodehouse to Grey, 20 February 1866, d22/40, ra; Clarendon to Wodehouse, 15 March 1866, Eng. c4044, Bodl; Wodehouse to Clarendon, 16 March 1866; Clarendon to Wodehouse, 8 April 1866, Eng.c4045; Wodehouse to Clarendon, 13 April 1866; Kimberley to Clarendon, 4 June 1866, Eng.c4048. Spectator, 24 February, 3 March 1866; Manchester Guardian, 20 February 1866; Guardian, 21 February 1866; Times (London), 16, 17, 19 February 1866; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 25 February 1866; Lloyd’s Newspaper, 18 February, 4 March 1866; Monsell to Wodehouse, 28 March [1866], Eng. c4044, Bodl; Wodehouse to Monsell, 1 April 1866, nli ms 19,337, Emly Papers; Illustrated London News, 23 June 1866; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 182:440–2. Wodehouse to Gladstone, 15 March 1866, bl Add. ms 44,244; J.P. Carr to Inspector General, 27 February 1866, ho 45/7799; Times (London), 6 March 1866; Cowley to Clarendon, 25 March 1866, d22/38, ra; Cowley to Clarendon, 27 March 1866, fo 5/1336; Wodehouse to Grey, 28 March 1866, Eng. c4044, Bodl; Clarendon to Wodehouse, 29 March 1866, Eng. c4045; Kimberley to Fortescue, 12 June 1866, Eng. c4048; Fortescue to Kimberley, 14 June 1866; Kimberley to Fortescue, 17 June 1866; Wood to Wodehouse, 14 April 1866, Eng. c4045, Bodl.

360

Notes to pages 49−53

34 Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 184; Kimberley to Fortescue, 1 June 1866, Eng. c4047, Bodl; Wodehouse to de Grey, 25 February, 1866, Eng. c4043; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 182:974, 2020; Times (London), 10 April 1866; Gladstone to Fortescue, 7 April 1866, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Gladstone to Queen, 17 May 1866, b22/54, ra. 35 Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 185–7; Fortescue to Kimberley, 30 May 1866, Eng. c4047, Bodl; Kimberley to Fortescue, 1 June 1866; Bee-Hive, 7, 14 April 1866. 36 Hammond to Lyons, 29 March 1866, Box 187, Lyons Papers, wsro; Clarendon to Lyons, 28 June1866, Box 176, Lyons Papers; Prest, Lord John Russell, 411–14. 37 Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds, Dictionary of National Biography, 23 vols (London, 1908–09), 17:233–40; Brian Robson, ed., Sir Hugh Rose and the Central India Campaign 1858 (Stroud, 2000), xvii–xx, 292; Allan Fea, Recollections of Sixty Years (London, 1927), 124; Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (London, 1978), 380; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 165; Stanley to Disraeli, 22 August, 1866, 920 der (15), 13/2/4, Derby Papers, Livro. 38 Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York, 1994), 176; Robson, Rose and the Central India Campaign, 80, 44, 108, 195, 280–3, 47. 39 Stephen and Lee, Dictionary of National Biography, 17:239; Michael Maclagan, ‘Clemency’ Canning (London, 1962), 248–9; John Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel (New York, 1929), 62; Peter Burroughs, “Crime and Punishment in the British Army, 1815–1870,” English Historical Review 100 (1985): 545–71. 40 Rose to Cambridge, 20 September 1865, bl Add. ms 42,821, Rose Papers; Brownrigg to Larcom, 17 May 1865, nli ms 7771, Larcom Papers; Wodehouse to Hartington, 18 February 1866, 340.250, Devonshire Papers, cha; Peter Karsten, “Irish Soldiers in the British Army, 1792–1922: Suborned or Subordinate,” Journal of Social History 17 (1983–84): 36; Rose to Paget, 23 September 1865, bl Add. ms 43,381, Rose Papers; Rose to Forster, 31 January 1866, Vic. Add. ms e/1, Cambridge Papers, ra; Rose to Wodehouse, 12 February 1866; Rose to Cambridge, 27 March 1866, bl Add. ms 42822. 41 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 7 January 1866; Times (London), 24, 28 February 1866; Manchester Guardian, 27 February 1866; Rose to Cambridge, 20 September 1865, bl Add. ms 42,821, Rose Papers; Wodehouse to de Grey, 27 September 1865, bl Add. ms 43,522, Ripon Papers; Rose to Wodehouse, 18 December 1865, Eng. c4038, Bodl; Wodehouse to Palmerston, 5 October 1865, Eng. c4033; Rose to Cambridge, 3 January 1866, bl Add. ms 42,796, Rose Papers. 42 Cambridge to Rose, 25 January 1866, Vic. Add. mss e/1, ra; Russell to Cambridge, 24 January 1866; Cambridge to de Grey, 10 January 1866; Cambridge to C. Grey, 26 January 1866, d22/23, ra; C. Grey to Cambridge,

Notes to pages 53−8

43

44

45 46

47

48

49 50 51 52

361

28 January 1866, d22/25; Grey to C. Grey, 19 February 1866, d22/37; de Grey to Russell, 23 January 1866, pro 30/22/16a; Karsten, Journal of Social History 17:46. Rose to Cambridge, 3 January 1866, bl Add. ms 42,796, Rose Papers; for the service records of Feilding and Whelan, see wo 25/827/3 and wo 76/130; Wodehouse to de Grey, 27 January 1866, bl Add. ms 43,522, Ripon Papers; de Grey to Wodehouse, 29 January 1866, Eng. c4040, Bodl; Naas to Derby, 31 August 1866, 920 der (14), 155/2, Livro; Rose to Wodehouse, 16 May 1866, bl Add. ms 42,822, Rose Papers; Rose to Military Secretary, 16 May 1866, Kilmainham Papers, nli; Feilding to Naas, 9 September 1866, nli ms 11,189, Mayo Papers; Rose to Cambridge, 27 March 1866, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra. Kimberley to Spencer, 16 May 1872, bl kp70, Spencer Papers; Rose to Wodehouse, 16 May 1866, bl Add. ms 42,822, Rose Papers; Rose to Military Secretary, 16 May 1866, Kilmainham Papers, nli; Takagami, “The Dublin Fenians,” 221; Reports of Superintendent Daniel Ryan, 10, 26 February 1866, ho 45/7799; Wodehouse to de Grey, 27 January 1866, bl Add. ms 43,522, Ripon Papers; Rose to Cambridge, 3, 27 January 1866, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra. Comerford, Fenians in Context, 128; Stephen and Lee, Dictionary of National Biography, 9:328; Times (London), 25 December 1866. De Grey to Wodehouse, 21 October 1865, bl Add. ms 43,522, Ripon Papers; Wodehouse to de Grey, 22, 23 October, 5 November 1865; Curzon to Larcom, 30 November 1865, Kilmainham Papers, nli; Roundell Palmer to Russell, 10 January 1866, Eng. c4039, Bodl; Cambridge to Rose, 5 March 1866, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra; Burroughs, English Historical Review 100:560. Rose to Cambridge, 27 January 1866, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra; de Grey to Cambridge, 31 January 1866; Mowbray to Adjutant General, 13 February 1867, wo 81/116; Headlam to Nugent, 2 July 1866, wo 81/114; Headlam to Mackenzie, 28 June 1866; Hartington to Cambridge, 30 June 1866, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra; Headlam to Rose, 27 March 1866, wo 33/17a/282. Headlam to Cunynghame, 21 June 1866, wo 81/114; Headlam to Military Secretary, 30 June 1866; Strathnairn to Military Secretary, 23 August 1865, ho 45/9329/1946; Archibald to Russell, 14 November 1865, fo 5/1335. Headlam to Rose, 27 March 1866, wo 33/17a/282; for the charge of Justice Fitzgerald, see wo 33/17a/287. Headlam to Rose, 27 March 1866, wo 33/17a/282. Rose to Cambridge, 31 March 1866, Vic. Add. mss e/1, ra; Cambridge to Hartington, 28 March 1866, 340.270, cha; 3 April 1866, 340.273. Hartington to Cambridge, 18 March 1866, Vic. Add. mss e/1, ra; Hartington to Russell, 1 April 1866, 340.272, cha; Russell to Hartington, 31 March 1866, 340.271; Cambridge to Rose, 31 March 1866, Vic. Add. mss e/1, ra;

362

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55 56 57

Notes to pages 58−62 Hartington to Cambridge, 2 April 1866; Russell to Hartington, 3 April 1866, 340.274, cha. Hartington to Cramworth, 3 April 1866, 340.275, cha; Cramworth to Hartington, 4 April 1866, 340.276; Hartington to Cambridge, 10 April 1866, Vic. Add. mss e/1, ra. Cambridge to Rose, 31 March 1866, Vic. Add. mss e/1, ra; Rose to Cambridge, 11 May 1866; Hartington to Cambridge, [14] May 1866; Cambridge to Rose, 15 May 1866; Rose to Kimberley, 1 June 1866, Eng. c4048, Bodl. Feilding to Kimberley, 31 May 1866, Eng. c4047, Bodl. Hartington to Cambridge, 18 May 1866, Vic. Add. mss e/1, ra; Times (London), 5, 14, 15 June 1866. Kimberley to Rose, 17 June 1866, Vic. Add. mss E/1, ra; Rose to Cambridge, 21 June 1866; A.J. Semple, “The Fenian Infiltration of the British Army,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 53 (1974): 156; for the commutation of McCarthy’s death sentence and lengthening terms of penal servitude, see wo 91/44; Mowbray to Galton, 10 August 1866, 6 February 1867; Mowbray to Nugent, 10, 22 August 1866, wo 81/115; Mowbray to Mackenzie, 22 December 1866; Mowbray to Adjutant General, 13 February 1867, wo 81/116; Mowbray to Feilding, 13 August 1867.

chapter three 1 William D’Arcy, The Fenian Movement in the United States (Washington, dc, 1947), 78–81, 110–11, 134–5; P.M. Toner, “The ‘Green Ghost’: Canada’s Last Invasion: Fenians and the Raids,” Eire/Ireland 16 (1981): 33; O’Mahony to Mitchel, 10 November 1865, Box 2/7, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua; Stephens to O’Mahony, 10 February 1866, nli p740, O’Donovan Rossa Papers; Mitchel to O’Mahony, 7 April [1866] and n.d. [spring 1866], Box 2/8, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua. 2 D’Arcy, Fenian Movement in the United States, 88–95; Hereward Senior, Last Invasion of Canada: The Fenian Raids, 1866–1870 (Toronto, 1991), 42–3; McGee to Lynch, 7 March 1866, ae02.11, Lynch Papers, aat; Lynch Circular, 9 March 1866, ae02.12; Thomas Gerald John Stortz, “John Joseph Lynch, Archbishop of Toronto: A Biographical Study of Religious, Political and Social Commitment” (phd diss., University of Guelph, 1980), 224; Harold A. Davis, “The Fenian Raid in New Brunswick,” Canadian Historical Review 36 (1955): 317–31; W.L. Morton, ed., Monck’s Letters and Journals 1863–1868 (Toronto, 1970), 293, 296, 300–1; Jeff Keshen, “Cloak and Dagger: Canada West’s Secret Police, 1864–1867,” Ontario History 79 (1987): 367–8; W.S. Niedhardt, “The

Notes to pages 63−5

3

4

5 6

363

American Government and the Fenian Brotherhood: A Study in Mutual Political Opportunism,” Ontario History 64 (1972): 37. D’Arcy, Fenian Movement in the United States, 145–6, 162–3; W.S. Niedhardt, Fenianism in North America (University Park, 1975), 55, 77–81; Senior, Last Invasion of Canada, 64–5; Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, eds, The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada, 2 vols (Toronto, 1988), 1:528, 530–1, 543; Hereward Senior, “Quebec and the Fenians,” Canadian Historical Review 48 (1967): 32–3; W.S. Niedhardt, “The Fenian Brotherhood in Western Ontario: The Final Years,” Ontario History 60 (1968): 151–2; Toner, Eire/Ireland 16:39– 40; Ged Martin, Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation, 1837–67 (London, 1995), 7, 9, 22, 84, 87, 94, 157, 173–5, 187, 191; McGee to Wodehouse, 25 May 1866, Eng. c4047, Kimberley mss, Bodl; P.M. Toner, ed., New Ireland Remembered: Essays on the Irish in New Brunswick (Fredericton, 1988), 138–43, 145; Senior, Canadian Historical Review 48:32–3; Cardwell to Monck, 1 September 1866, nli 27,020, Monck Papers. Stanley to Carnarvon, 7 July 1866, 920 der (15), 13/2/1, Livro; John Vincent, ed., A Selection from the Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby (1826–93) between September 1869 and March 1878, Camden 5th ser., vol. 4 (London, 1994), 485; W.S. Niedhardt, “The Fenian Trials in the Province of Canada, 1866–7: A Case Study of Law and Politics in Action,” Ontario History 66 (1974): 24; Niedhardt, Fenianism in North America, 94–5; Carnarvon to Monck, 7 July 1866, na 30/6/151, Carnarvon Papers; Monck to Carnarvon, 21, 30 July 1866; Carnarvon to Monck, 7 September 1866; Carnarvon to Derby, 10 September 1866, 920 der (14), 165/5, Livro; Carnarvon to Monck, 22 September 1866, nli 27,020; Cambridge to Derby, 2 September 1866, 920 der (14), 102/7, Livro; Morton, Monck’s Letters and Journals, 308–10; Cardwell to Monck, 1 September 1866, nli 27,020; Monck to Carnarvon, 27 September 1866, na 30/6/151; Carnarvon to Derby, 10 September, 11, 12 October, 22 November 1866, 920 der (14), 163/5, Livro. Niedhardt, Ontario History 66:26–8; Lynch to Macdonald, 29 October 1866, ae02.15, aat; Macdonald to Lynch, 6 November 1866, ae02.16. Stanley to Derby, 10 November 1866, 920 der (15), 13/2/3, Livro; Derby to Lyons, 28 March 1875, Box 180, Lyons Papers, wsro; Derby Diaries, 15 November 1866, 920 der (15), Livro; Niedhardt, Ontario History 66:29–30, 35–6; Arthur Hardinge, The Life of Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, Fourth Earl of Carnarvon, 1831–1890, 3 vols (Oxford, 1925), 1:296; Derby to Queen, 16 November 1866, a35/13, ra; Monck to Carnarvon, 5 November [1866], na 30/6/ 151; Carnarvon to Monck, 23 November 1866; Carnarvon to Monck, 23 November 1866, nli 27,021; Carnarvon Memorandum, 17 January 1867, na 30/6/169; Niedhardt, Fenianism in North America, 107–8.

364

Notes to pages 65−8

7 Bruce to Monck, 16 June 1866, na 30/6/169; Monck to Bruce, 20 June 1866; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 100 (1866): 118–19. 8 Robert Blake, Disraeli (London, 1967), 445–6; Warre to Lyons, 17 September 1866, Box 203, Lyons Papers, wsro; Nancy E. Johnson, ed., The Diary of Gathorne Hardy, Later Lord Cranbrook 1866–1892: Political Selections (Oxford, 1981), xix–xx, 16–17; George Earle Buckle, Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (London, 1916), 4:441–3, 473; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 15 July 1866; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 317; Clarendon to Lyons, 28 June 1866, Box 176, Lyons Papers, wsro; Andrew Lang, Life, Letters, and Diaries of Sir Stafford Northcote, First Earl of Iddesleigh, 2 vols (London, 1890), 1:259–62; Stanley to Derby, 12 October 1866, 920 der (15), 13/2/3, Livro; Illustrated London News, 23 February 1867. 9 Wilbur Devereaux Jones, Lord Derby and Victorian Conservatism (Oxford, 1956), 10, 20–38; K. Theodore Hoppen, Elections, Politics, Society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984), 315; Allen Warren, “Disraeli, the Conservatives, and the Government of Ireland: Part 1, 1837–1868,” Parliamentary History 18 (1999): 53, 49, 52, 62; J.P. Parry, “Disraeli and England,” Historical Journal 43 (2000): 714–15; Dermot Quinn, Patronage and Piety: The Politics of English Roman Catholicism 1850–1900 (London, 1993), 56. 10 Buckle, Disraeli, 4:444; Illustrated London News, 8 September 1866; Times (London), 11 July 1866; Daily Telegraph, 11 February 1867; George W.E. Russell, Portraits of the Seventies (New York, 1916), 254–6; Monsell to O’Hagan, 4 July 1866, d2777/9/81/2/11, O’Hagan Papers, proni; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 19 March 1868, bl Add. ms 42,825, Rose Papers; Northcote Diary, 6 July [1866], bl Add. ms 50,063a, Iddesleigh Papers; Hoppen, Elections, Politics, Society, 294–7; Disraeli to Derby, 27 September 1866, 920 der (14), 146/2, Livro; Naas to Derby, 2 July [1866], 920 der (14), 155/2; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 99; Warren, Parliamentary History 18:62. 11 Derby Diaries, 4 July 1866, 920 der (15), Livro; Northcote Diary, 7 July [1866], bl Add. ms 50,063a; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 100:394, 396; Times (London), 12 April 1866; MacMillan’s Magazine 15 (1866–67): 317, 325; Julia Cartwright, ed., The Journals of Lady Knightly of Fawsley (London, 1915). 12 Derby Diaries, 14 November 1866, 920 der (15), Livro; Anglo-American Times, 11 August 1866; Times (London), 28 December 1866; Spectator, 8 December 1866; Express, 28 December 1866; Illustrated London News, 1 December 1866; Commonwealth, 24 November 1866. 13 Times (London), 11, 12, 16 July 1866; Fraser’s Magazine 73 (1866): 7–13; Fortnightly Review 4 (1866): 288; Manchester Guardian, 27, 28 September 1866; Derby to Queen, 16 November 1866, a35/13, ra; Warren, Parliamentary History 18:54, 62.

Notes to pages 69−72

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14 Times (London), 14 July 1866; Larcom to Naas, n.d. [4 July 1866], nli 7590, Larcom Papers; Naas to Larcom, 22 July 1866; Fortescue to Treasury, 23 March 1866, co 904/9; A.P. Moore-Anderson, Sir Robert Anderson: A Tribute and Memoir (London, 1919), 3, 21; Robert Anderson, Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement (London, 1906), 36–7. 15 Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 184:1912–26, 1958–65, 1940–7, 2078–85; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 21. 16 Abercorn to Derby, 17 September 1866, 920 der (14), 164/3, Livro; Naas to Derby, 920 der (14), 155/2. 17 Manchester Guardian, 31 October 1866; Times (London), 24 January 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 4 November 1866; James E. Thorold Rogers, ed., Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by John Bright, M.P., 2 vols (London, 1868), 1:382–3. 18 Times (London), 2 November 1866; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 4, 11 November 1866; Spectator, 3 November 1866; Illustrated London News, 3 November 1866; Lloyd’s Weekly, 11 November 1866; Bee Hive, 10 November 1866; Manchester Guardian, 12 November 1866; Commonwealth, 10, 24 November 1866. 19 Derby Diaries, 17, 24 November 1866, 920 der (15), Livro; Walpole to Derby, 28 November 1866, 920 der (14) 153/3); D’Arcy, Fenian Movement in the United States, 214; Walpole to Stanley, 27 November 1866; Naas to Stanley, 29 November 1866, 920 der (15) 12/3/2), Livro; de Gernon to Larcom, 12 December 1866, nli 7590. 20 Naas to Abercorn, 15 November 1866, t2451/vr85/2, Abercorn Papers, proni; Naas to Larcom, 16 November 1866, nli 7590; Derby Diaries, 13, 26, 29 November 1866, 920 der (15), Livro; Larcom to Naas, 20, 21 November 1866, nli 11,189, Mayo Papers; Derby to Naas, 26 November 1866; Strathnairn to Naas, 24 November [1866]; Strathnairn to Erne, 16 December 1866, bl Add. ms 42,822; Strathnairn to Abercorn, 27 November 1866; Morris to Naas, 1 December 1866, nli 11,189; Guardian, 28 November, 5 December 1866; Manchester Guardian, 3, 10 December 1866; Christian’s Monthly News, 1 December 1866; Times (London), 26, 27 November 1866; Commonwealth, 1 December 1866; Irishman, 1 December 1866. 21 Stanley to Walpole, 28 November 1866, 920 der (15), 13/2/1, Livro; Walpole to Derby, 4 December 1866, 920 der (14) 153/2; Naas to Oranmore, 2 December 1866, nli 11,189; Pakington to Derby, 5 December 1866, 920 der (14), 141/11, Livro; Frederick to Naas, 3 December 188, nli 11,189; Times (London), 4, 7 December 1866; Naas to Dolling, 3 December 1866, t2541/ vr/85/4, proni; Naas to Derby 9 December 1866, 920 der (14), 155/4, Livro; Hamilton to Abercorn, 3 December 1866, t2541/vr/104, proni.

366

Notes to pages 73−7

22 Derby Diaries, 29 November 1866, 920 der (15), Livro; Naas to Abercorn, 15 November 1866, t2541/vr/85/3, proni; Curzon to Larcom, 1 December 1866, Kilmainham Papers, nli; Cunynghame to Cambridge, 2 December 1866, Vic. Add. ms e/1, Cambridge Papers, ra; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 3, 6 December1866, bl Add. ms 42,796; Strathnairn to Larcom, 6 December 1866, Kilmainham Papers, nli. 23 Naas to Abercorn, 15 November 1866, t2541/vr/85/3, proni; Naas to Strathnairn, 6 December [1866], nli 11,188; Arthur Irwin Dasent, John Thadeus Delane, Editor of “The Times”: His Life and Correspondence, 2 vols (New York, 1908), 2:180. 24 Naas to Abercorn, n.d. [6 December] 1866, t2541/vr/85/1, proni; Derby Diaries, 7 December 1866, 920 der (15); Walpole to Derby, 7, 10 December 1866, 920 der (14), 153/3; Naas to Walpole, 8 December 1866, 920 der (14), 155/4), Livro; Naas to Derby, 9 December 1866. 25 Manchester Guardian, 24 December 1866; Illustrated London News, 22 December 1866; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 26 December 1866, bl Add. ms 42,822; J. Stewart Wood, “Report on Fenianism,” 10 December 1866, nli 11,189; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 22, 28 December 1866, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra. 26 Naas to Derby, 23 December [1866], nli 11,189; Takagami, “Dublin Fenians,” 33; Analyses of prisoners arrested under the suspension of habeas corpus, nli 11,188; Naas to Dunsany, 10 December 1866, nli 11,189; Stanley to Lyons, 31 January 1867, Box 179, Lyons Papers, wsro. 27 Naas to Derby, 23 December [1866], nli 11,189; Walpole to Stanley, 30 October, 7 December 1866, 920 der (15), 12/3/2, Livro; Derby Diaries, 7 December 1866, 920 der (15); Walpole to Derby, 7 December 1866, 920 der (14), 153/3; Naas to Walpole, 8 December 1866, 920 der (14), 155/4; Naas to Derby, 9 December 1866. 28 Abercorn to Derby, 26 December 1866, 920 der (14), 164/3, Livro; Stanley to Lyons, 18 October 1866, Box 179, Lyons Papers, wsro; D’Arcy, Fenian Movement in the United States, 221; James Steele [Stephens] to [Brotherhood], 12 September 1866, Box 2/10, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua. 29 Times (London), 22 December 1866; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 99:78; Monsell to O’Hagan, 4 July [1866], nli 17,871, Teeling Papers; Cullen to Spalding, 10 November 1866, 30-0-9, Spalding Papers, aab; Cullen to Spalding, 22 December 1866, 30-0-10; MacSuibhne, Cullen and His Contemporaries, 4:201–2; Naas to Derby, 14 October 1866, 920 der (14), 155/2, Livro; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 17 October 1866, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 30. 30 O’Neill Daunt to Leahy, 25 December 1866, nli m6008, 1866/47, Leahy Papers; Cullen to Leahy, 2, 4 January 1867, nli m6008, 1867/1–2; O’Neill

Notes to pages 77−80

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

367

Daunt to Leahy, 12, 16 February 1867, nli m6008, 1867/7–8; Cullen to Leahy, 10 December 1866, nli m6008, 1866/45; Naas to Abercorn, 23 January 1867, t2541/vr/85/6, proni; Strathnairn to de Ros, 14 February 1867, bl Add. ms 42,823, Rose Papers; Derby Diaries, 23 January 1867, 920 der (15), Livro; Walpole to Charles Grey, 2 February 1867, b23/15, ra; Naas to Abercorn, 29 January 1867, t2541/vr/85/7, proni. Illustrated London News, 29 December 1866, 31 August, 1 November 1867; Globe (Toronto), 16, 19, 21 January, 4, 5 February 1867; North London News, 5 January, 24 August 1867; Daily Telegraph, 3 January 1867; Shrewsbury Chronicle, 4 January 1867. Hayward to Gladstone, 15 August 1866, bl Add. ms 44,207, Gladstone Papers; Bruce to de Grey, 3 February 1867, bl Add. ms 43,534, Ripon Papers; Daily Telegraph, 8 February 1867; Globe (Toronto), 14 March 1867; Manchester Guardian, 27 February 1867; Halifax to Gladstone, 3 March 1867, bl Add. ms 44,184. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 13, 20 August, 3 September 1866, 27 January, 26 May 1867; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 195; Derby Diaries, 27 January 1867, 920 der (15), Livro; Walpole to Charles Grey, 16 January 1867, b23/2, ra. Edwards to Stanley, 2, 8 January 1867, fo 5/1341; Derby Diaries, 10 January 1867, 920 der (15), Livro; Reports of Head Constable McHale, 1, 7, 8 February 1867, ho 144/1537/1, R. Anderson Papers, na; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 185:5–7, 69, 343. Manchester Guardian, 22, 23, 28 September 1865; John Denvir, The Irish in Britain from Earliest Times to the Fall and Death of Parnell (London, 1892), 186– 8; Greig to Mayor of Liverpool, 26 September, 9 November, 15 December 1865, 352 pol 2/3, Livro; Odo Russell to Clarendon, 22 January 1866, fo 46/ 96a; Ryan to Commissioner of [Dublin] Police, 18 January 1866, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra; O’Farrell to Larcom, 20 March 1866, ho 45/7799; Hugh Cunningham, The Volunteer Force: A Social and Political History 1859–1908 (London, 1975), 5, 8, 20–1, 109–11; Report of Daniel Ryan, 26 February 1866; Waddington to Mayors, 23 July 1866, ho 43/107. Wood to Naas, 15 August 1866, nli 11,189; Walpole to Naas, 23 August 1866; Walpole to Derby, 28 August, 1, 4 September 1866, 920 der (14), 155/2, Livro; Naas to Derby, 28, 31 August, 3, 11 September 1866, 920 der (14), 155/2; Waddington Minute, 12 September 1866, ho 45/7799. Naas to Derby, 24 September 1866, 920 der (14), 153/3, Livro; Margaret Prothero, The History of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard from the Earliest Times until Today (London, 1931), 60; Waddington to Mayor of Liverpool, 15 September 1866, ho 45/7799; Walpole Minute, 22 September

368

38

39

40

41 42 43

44

Notes to pages 81−3 1866; Mayne to Walpole, 28 September 1866; McHale to Wood, 18 October 1866; Ride to Greig, 26 September 1866, 352 pol 2/4, Livro; Mayne to Greig, 27 September 1866, mepo 1/47. Report of Daniel Ryan, 3 January 1867, csop 1867, no. 1456; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 185:343; Fariola to Griffin, 29 March 1867, Box 2/32, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua; Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel, 65; Thomas G. McAllister, Terence Bellew McManus 1811(?)–1861: A Short Biography (Maynooth, 1972), 11. Reports of Richard McHale, 10, 11, 12 February 1867, ho 144/1537/1; Walpole to Derby, 11 February 1867, 920 der (14), 153/4, Livro; extracts from the reports of Head Constable Greig, 10 February 1867; Mayor of Chester to Walpole, 11 February 1867; T. Smith to ho, 11, 13 February 1867, ho 45/7799; Walpole to Naas, 12 February 1867, nli 11,189; Chester Chronicle, 16 February 1867; Daily Telegraph, 7 June 1867; Ride to Greig, 11 February 1867, 352 pol 2/4, Livro; Greig to Watch Committee, 12 February 1867. Shin-Ichi Takagami, “The Fenian Rising in Dublin, March 1867,” Irish Historical Studies 29 (1995): 341–2; Donal J. O’Sullivan, The Irish Constabularies, 1822–1922: A Century of Policing in Ireland (Dingle, 1999), 120–2; Feilding to Naas, 21 February 1867, nli 11,189. Larcom to Naas, 12 February 1867, nli 11,189; Daily Telegraph, 15, 16, 18 February 1867; Manchester Guardian, 23 February 1867. Queen to Derby, 14 February 1867, d22/43, ra; Derby to Queen, 14 February 1867. Larcom to Naas, 12 February 1867, nli 11,189; Daily Telegraph, 15, 16, 18 February 1867; Manchester Guardian, 23 February 1867; Queen to Derby, 14 February 1867, d22/43, ra; Derby to Queen, 14 February 1867; Thomson to Garvock, 22 February 1867, ho 45/7799; Walpole to Naas, 16 February 1867, nli 11,189; Naas to Walpole, 3 March 1867, co 906/13; Belmore to Mayor of Sunderland, 28 February 1867, ho 41/22; Belmore to Mayor of Carlisle, 22 March 1867; Belmore to Cumberland Magistrates, 12 March 1867, ho 43/109. Kelly to Halpin, 12 March 1867, nli p740, O’Donovan Rossa Papers; James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York, 1980), 357–8; Ryan, Fenian Chief, 238–9; Fariola to Griffin, 29 March 1867, Box 2/32, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua; Takagami, Irish Historical Studies 29:342; David Butcher, “Foreign Policies and Middle Class Radicals in Birmingham, 1848–1858,” Midland History 20 (1995): 121, 123; Kelly’s Proclamation, 10 March 1867, nli p740; Erich Strauss, Irish Nationalism and British Democracy (Westport, 1951), 145; Michael Gallagher, “Socialism and the Nationalist Tradition in Ireland, 1798–1918,” Eire/Ireland 12 (1977): 77; David Tribe, President Charles Bradlaugh, M.P. (London, 1971), 98–9; Ira B.

Notes to pages 83−6

45

46

47

48

49

369

Cross, ed., Frank Roney, Irish Rebel and California Labor Leader: An Autobiography (Berkeley, 1931), 118–19; Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, Charles Bradlaugh: A Record of His Life and Work (London, 1908), 253–4; Jack Doughty, The Manchester Outrage – A Fenian Tragedy (Oldham, 2001), 56–7. Manchester Guardian, 2 February 1867; Margot Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge, 1993), 211–12; Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics (London, 1965), 87, 89; Daily Telegraph, 12 February 1867; Newsinger, Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain, 52–3; Kelly to [Gleeson], 19 March 1867, Box 2/32, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua. Derby to Cambridge, 13 February 1867, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra; Globe (Toronto), 7 March, 13 May 1867; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 31–2; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 185:690, 735; Express, 21 February 1867; Daily Telegraph, 20 February, 25, 30 April 1867; Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1867; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 21 February 1867; Naas to Abercorn, 30 April [1867], t2541/vr 85/18, proni; Naas to Derby, 2 March [1867], 920 der (14), 155/4, Livro. Report of Daniel Ryan, 22 February 1867, csorp, 1867, no. 3068, ina; Report of Brownrigg, 27 February 1867, ho 144/1537/1; Takagami, “Dublin Fenians,” 251; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 33; Law Officers’ Opinion, 5 March 1867, Kilmainham Papers, nli; Strathnairn to Abercorn, 4 March 1867, bl Add. ms 42,823, Rose Papers. Takagami, Irish Historical Studies 29:342–5; Kelly to [Gleeson], 19 March 1867, Box 2/32, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua; Fariola to Griffin, 29 March 1867; O’Sullivan, Irish Constabularies, 125–32; Strathnairn to Abercorn, 6 March 1867, bl Add. ms 42,823; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 7 March 1867; Strathnairn to Hartington, 9 March 1867; Strathnairn to Devonshire, 19 March 1867, 340.331, Devonshire Papers, cha; Strathnairn to North, 15 May 1867, bl Add. ms 42,824. Larcom to Naas, 21 March 1867, nli 11,191; Strathnairn to Naas, 10 March 1867, bl Add. ms 42,823; Strathnairn to Adjutant General, 7 March 1867, Kilmainham Papers, nli; Fariola to Griffin, 29 March 1867, Box 2/32, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua; Daily Telegraph, 7 March 1867; Manchester Guardian, 8, 9 March 1867; Spectator, 9 March 1867; Globe (Toronto), 23 March 1867; Strathnairn to Military Secretary, 10 March 1867, Kilmainham Papers, nli; Cambridge to Strathnairn, 14 March 1867, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra; Naas to Abercorn, 25 March [1867], t2541/vr85/12, proni; F. Awdry, A Country Gentleman of the Nineteenth Century: Being a Short Memoir of the Right Honourable Sir William Heathcote 1801–1881 (London, 1906), 155–6; Shannon to Abercorn, 9 March 1867, t2541/vr145, proni.

370

Notes to pages 86−92

50 Walpole to Naas, 9, 11, 12, 13 March 1867, nli 11,189; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 34; Strathnairn to Hartington, 9 March 1867, bl Add. ms 42,823; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 16 March 1867, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra; Economist, 9 March 1867; Spectator, 9 March 1867; Daily Telegraph, 3 May 1867. 51 Strathnairn to Cambridge, 16 March 1867, Vic. Add. ms e/1, ra; O’Shea, Journal of the Kerry Archeological and Historical Society 5:96; Norman, Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 117; Manchester Guardian, 21 February 1867; Alan O’Day, Reactions to Irish Nationalism (London, 1987), 150–1; Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:54. 52 Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 185:734; Tomas O Fiaich, “The Clergy and Fenianism,” Irish Ecclesiastical Record 109 (1968): 90–1; O’Donoghue to Farrell, 16 February 1867, 334/6, Cullen Correspondence, 1867, aad; Redmond to Cullen, 8 March 1867, 334/5/I, Cullen Correspondence, 1867; Daily Telegraph, 18 March 1867; O’Day, Reactions to Irish Nationalism, 151; Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:56–7. 53 Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:56–7; Cullen to Leahy, 14 March 1867, nli m6008, 1867/14–15; Leahy Pastoral, 12 March 1867. 54 Furlong to Cullen, 9 March 1867, 334/4/i, Cullen Correspondence, 1867, aad; Larkin, Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church, xvii; Irishman, 2, 9, 23 March 1867; Irish News, 16, 30 March, 6 April 1867; significantly, PopeHennessy’s comments to an unnamed recipient of 7 October 1867 found their way into the Royal Archives, d22/53; Stewart J. Brown and David M. Miller, eds, Piety and Power in Ireland 1760–1960, Essays in Honour of Emmet Larkin (Belfast, 2000), 38; Daily Telegraph, 21 March 1867; Fraser’s Magazine, July 1867, 125, 121. 55 Dasent, Delane, 2:213; Daily Telegraph, 9 March 1867; Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:56; Cullen to Leahy, [20 April] 1867, nli m6008, 1867/20; Bowen, Paul Cardinal Cullen, 270; Ambrose Macaulay, Patrick Dorrian: Bishop of Down and Connor 1865–85 (Dublin, 1987), 185. 56 Daily Telegraph, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22 March, 3 May 1867; Anglo-American Times, 16 March 1867; Fortnightly Review, n.s., 1 (1867): 498; Universe, 16 March 1867. 57 Times (London), 23 May 1867. 58 Patrick Carroll-Burke, Colonial Discipline: The Making of the Irish Convict System (Dublin, 2000), 203, 230.

chapter four 1 Reports of Daniel Ryan, 8, 29 April, 8, 13, 18 May 1867, ho 144/1537/1, R. Anderson Papers, na; Larcom to Naas, 29 April, n.d.[April], 7, 10, 19 May

Notes to pages 93−6

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1867, nli 11,191, Mayo Papers; Strathnairn to Abercorn, 3, 6, 7 May 1867, bl Add. ms 42,824, Rose Papers; Naas to Larcom, 8 May 1867, nli 7594, Larcom Papers. Ride to Greig, 12 March 1867, 352 pol 2/4, Livro; Greig to Mayne, 12, 13 March 1867; Greig to Mayor of Liverpool, 19 March 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 17 February, 17, 31 March 1867; Daily Telegraph, 15 March 1867; Manchester Guardian, 21 March 1867; Christian’s Monthly News, 1 March 1867; Irish News, 23 March 1867; Yonah Alexander and Alan O’Day, Ireland’s Terrorist Dilemma (Dordrecht, 1986), 51. Larcom to Naas, 2 May 1867, nli 11,191; Naas to Larcom, 8 May 1867, nli 7594; Daily Telegraph, 12 April, 2, 3 May 1867; Times (London), 3, 28 May 1867; Universe, 11 May 1867; Express, 28 May 1867. Daily Telegraph, 10, 17 April, 3, 6, 25 May 1867; English Independent, 3 May 1867; Illustrated London News, 11 May 1867; Manchester Guardian, 7, 17 May 1867; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 12 May 1867; Times (London), 8, 28 May 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 12 May, 30 June 1867. Naas to Abercorn, 4 May [1867], t2541/vr85/20, Abercorn Papers, proni; Manchester Guardian, 7, 27 May 1867; Daily Telegraph, 16, 17, 28 May 1867; Naas to Larcom, 17 May 1867, nli 7594; John Vincent, ed., Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: Journal and Memoirs of Edward Henry, Lord Stanley 1849–1869 (Hassocks, 1978), 309–10. Vincent, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 309–10; Walpole to C. Grey, 27 May 1867, b23/74, ra; Fitzgerald to Naas, 25 May 1867, nli 11,189; Naas to Larcom, 26 May 1867, nli 7594. Daily Telegraph, 25, 27, 28, 29 May 1867; Manchester Guardian, 27 May 1867; Nonconformist, 29 May 1867; A.G. Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, 2 vols (London, 1923), 1:180–1; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 41. Walpole to C. Grey, 27 May 1867, b23/74, ra; Naas to Larcom, 26 May 1867, nli 7594; Globe (Toronto), 17 June 1867; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 203; Johnston, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 41; Chichester Fortescue Diaries, 25, 26, 27 May 1867, bl Add. ms 63,678, Carlingford Papers; Times (London), 27, 28 May 1867; Derby Diaries, 26 May 1867, 920 der (15), Livro; C. Grey to Hardy, 27 May 1867, b23/75, ra. Naas to Larcom, 26, 30 May 1867, nli 7594; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 41; Naas to Abercorn, 28 May [1867], t2541/vr85/20, proni; Leon Litvack and Colin Graham, eds, Ireland and Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 2006), 152; Reports of Daniel Ryan, 27 May 1867, csorp, 1867, no. 9364, and 1 June 1867, ho 144/1537/1; Downshire to Abercorn, 26 May 1867, t2541/vr166, proni; Daily Telegraph, 17 May 1867; Times (London), 8 May, 6 June, 6 July 1867; Guardian, 12, 19 June, 31 July 1867;

372

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Notes to pages 97−9 Nonconformist, 19 June 1867; Vincent, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 311. Derby Diaries, 18, 29, 30 June, 28 July 1867, 920 der (15), Livro; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 43–4; Derby to Queen, 3 July 1867, a36/1, ra; Queen to Derby, 4 July 1867, a36/2; Newcastle Daily Journal, 23 August 1867; Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840–1870 (London, 2003), 207; Northcote to Massey, 10 April 1867, bl Add. ms 50,047, Iddesleigh Papers; Donald C. Richter, Riotous Victorians (London, 1970), 57–9; Globe (Toronto), 23 May 1867; Anthony Taylor, “‘Commons-Stealers,’ ‘Land-Grabbers’ and ‘Jerry-Builders’: Space, Popular Radicalism and the Politics of Public Access in London, 1848–1880,” International Review of Social History 40 (1995): 386; Isabella Walpole to Derby, 8 May 1867, 920 der (14), 154/4, Livro; Disraeli to Queen, 16 August 1867, b23/101, ra; Derby to Queen, 11 May 1867, a35/67, ra; Derby to C. Grey, 15 May 1867, a35/72; Vincent, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 307. Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, xviii–xix, xxiii–xxiv, 39; Alfred E. Gathorne Hardy, ed., Gathorne Hardy, First Earl of Cranbrook: A Memoir with Extracts from His Diary and Correspondence, 2 vols (London, 1910), 1:9, 38, 46, 98, 178; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 86, 500; Spectator, 7 July 1866; T.W. Reid, Cabinet Portraits, Sketches of Statesmen (London, 1872), 48–57; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ed., Brief Biographies of European Public Men (New York, 1875), 264–8. Reid, Cabinet Portraits, 49; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 39; Newcastle Daily Journal, 1, 13 August, 12 September 1867; English Independent, 27 June 1867; London Times, 10 May 1867; Montreal Gazette, 29 June 1867; Daily Telegraph, 22 June 1867. James Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement 1867–1974 (Brighton, 1983), 12; Prothero, Radical Artisans in England and France, 211; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 18 August 1867; Gathorne Hardy, Gathorne Hardy, 1:198; Bright to Gladstone, 31 July 1867, bl Add. ms 44,112, Gladstone Papers; Patricia Hollis, ed., Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London, 1974), 154; John Belchem, Popular Radicalism in NineteenthCentury Britain (London, 1996), 118; Nonconformist, 11 September 1867; L.W.B. Brockliss and David Eastwood, A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles c1750–c1850 (Manchester, 1997), 46; Manchester Guardian, 28 June 1867. Walter L.A. Fielding, “The Murphy Riots: A Victorian Dilemma,” Victorian Studies 19 (1975): 52–5; Manchester Guardian, 15 September 1865; Lloyd’s Weekly, 10 June 1866; R.E. Swift, “Anti-Catholicism and Irish Disturbances: Public Order in Mid-Victorian Wolverhampton,” Midland History 9 (1984): 94–8; Swift and Gilley, Irish in the Victorian City, 192–3; Steven Fielding, Class

Notes to pages 100−3

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18

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and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880–1939 (Buckingham, 1993), 7; Daily Telegraph, 19 June 1867; Spectator, 22 June 1867; Shrewsbury Chronicle, 19 April 1867; Universe, 9 March 1867; Robert Robson, ed., Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark (London, 1967), 133; Christian’s Monthly News, 1 June 1867, 1 June 1868. Universe, 9 March, 6 July 1867; Shrewsbury Chronicle, 21 June 1867; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 29 August 1867; Daily Telegraph, 18, 19, 21 June 1867; John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York, 2000), 76; Times (London), 20 June 1867; Nonconformist, 19 June 1867; Spectator, 22 June 1867; Illustrated London News, 22 June 1867. Swift and Gilley, Irish in the Victorian City, 191–2; Morris to Belmore, 23 February 1867, ho 45/7991; Dixon to Hardy, 18 June 1867; Hardy to Waddington, 29 June 1867; Richter, Riotous Victorians, 38; Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 82; Express, 24 July 1867. Swift and Gilley, Irish in the Victorian City, 191; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, xxiii, 31; Report of Resident Magistrate, Waterford, 14 June 1867; Dublin Police Report, 18 June 1867, ho 144/1537/1; Larcom to Mayo, n.d. [June 1867], 920 der (14), 155/4, Livro; Larcom to Abercorn, 20 June 1867, t2541/vr 168, proni; Larcom to Naas, 23 June 1867, nli 11,191; Stanley to Bruce, 29 June 1867, fo 5/1341; Strathnairn to de Jarnac, 16 August 1867, bl Add. ms 42,824; Cambridge to Pakington, 7 June 1867, 920 der (14) 55, Livro; Order of J. Stewart Wood, 7 December 1867, t2541/vr 180, proni. Daily Telegraph, 4 February, 24, 25 May 1867; Prospectus of the Ireland Society, Reform League Papers, Bishopsgate Library, London; Fortnightly Review, n.s., 2 (1867): 368; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 30 May 1867; Express, 12 January 1867; Lloyd’s Weekly, 14 April 1867. Daily Telegraph, 10 April 1867; Nonconformist, 16 April, 15 May, 12 June 1867; Manchester Guardian, 20 April, 13 May 1867; English Independent and Church Advocate, 10, 23 May, 6 June, 4 July 1867; Gladstone to Gray, 6 September 1867, bl Add. ms 44,413; Chichester Fortescue Diary, 2, 9 January, 9, 12 February, 7 May 1867, bl Add. ms 63,678; Manning to Gladstone, 5 April 1867, bl Add. ms 44,249. Russell to Gladstone, 29 November 1867, bl Add. ms 44,293; Daily Telegraph, 24 June 1867; Manchester Guardian, 26 June 1867; Montreal Gazette, 13 July, 8 August 1867; Shrewsbury Chronicle, 28 June 1867; Cambridge to Pakington, 7 June 1867, 920 der (14) 55, Livro; Strathnairn to Anson, 10 May 1867, bl Add. ms 42,824. Daily Telegraph, 6, 27, 28 August, 13, 20, 31 July, 5 September 1867; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 11 April, 25 July, 8 August 1867; Christian’s Monthly News, 1 May, 2 September 1867; Naas to Derby, 2 March

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Notes to pages 104−6 [1867], 920 der (14), 155/4, Livro; Universe, 20 July 1867; Nonconformist, 31 July, 14 August 1867; Guardian, 11 September 1867; Mayo to Disraeli, 10 September [1867], 90/2, Dep. Hughenden (Disraeli), Bodl. Manchester Guardian, 30 August, 12 September 1867; Times (London), 9 July 1867; Universe, 7, 21 September 1867; Daily Telegraph, 3, 10, 30, 31 August, 4, 5 September 1867; Fortnightly Review, n.s., 2 (1867): 46; Guardian, 4 September 1867; Lloyd’s Weekly News, 15 September 1867; Montreal Gazette, 23 September 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 15 September 1867; Report of Town Inspector of Constabulary, Belfast, 16 September 1867, ho 144/1537/1. Horn to Greig, 7 June 1867, 352 pol 2/4, Livro; Ryan to Commissioner of Police, 18 June 1867, ho 45/7799; Daily Telegraph, 15 July 1867; Spectator, 13 July 1867; Dublin Police Reports, 17 August 1867; Report of Head Constable Welby, 24 August 1867, csorp, 1867, no. 14717, ina; Police Report, 20 August 1867; Anderson Memorandum, 27 August 1867, ho 144/1537/1; Liddell to Mayor of Manchester, 2 September 1867, ho 43/111. Greig to Mayor of Liverpool, 16 August 1867, 352 pol 2/4, Livro; Daniel Ryan Police Report, 23 September 1867, ho 144/1537/1; Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel, 238–40; Doughty, Manchester Outrage, 80–1; John J. Hayes’s account of the Manchester incident, nli 18,028, Devoy Papers; Daily Telegraph, 19 September 1867; Paul Rose, The Manchester Martyrs: The Story of a Fenian Tragedy (London, 1970), 17; Michael Weaver, “The New Science of Police: Crime and the Birmingham Police Force,” Albion 26 (1994): 297; Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830–1870 (Chicago, 1977), 54. Daily Telegraph, 19 September 1867; Manchester Guardian, 18 September 1867; Robert Anderson, Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement (London, 1906), 73–4; Mayo to Hardy, 19 September 1867, nli 11,189; Ferguson to Mayo, 19 September 1867; Mayo to Disraeli, 17 September 1867, 90/2, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Mayne to Mayo, 18 September 1867, mepo 1/47; Doughty, Manchester Outrage, 90. Anderson, Sidelights, 73–4; Ferguson to Mayo, 19 September 1867, nli 11,189; for the remand on 18 September 1867, see nli 7517; Ferguson to Hardy, 18 September 1867, ha 43 t501/270, Hardy Papers, sro; Anderson to Williamson, 16, 17 September 1867, co 906/33. Charles M. De Motte, “The Dark Side of Town: Crime in Manchester and Salford 1815–1875” (phd diss., University of Kansas,1976), 59–66, 80; see the file on William Palin, a81, gmpm; Palin to Watch Committee, [17], 25 October 1866, m9/70/2/2, Letterbooks of the Manchester Watch Committee, mcrl; Reports of Inspectors of Constabulary, House of Commons, 1866, xxxiv: 90; Watch Committee Draft Minutes, 16, 23 November 1865, 5, 26 July 1866,

Notes to pages 107−10

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16 May 1867, m9/70/1/6, mcrl; Report of the Chief Constable, 13 December 1866, Watch Committee Minutes, vol. 7, mcrl. Mayo to Hardy, 19 September 1867, nli 11,189; for John Maybury, see file a6c, gmpm; Daily Telegraph, 26 September 1867. For Charles Brett, see Files a6a, a6b, gmpm; Jerome Caminada, Twenty-Five Years of Detective Life, 2 vols (Manchester, 1895, 1901), 2:v–vi; Palin to Watch Committee, 10 October 1867, Watch Committee Minutes, vol. 7, mcrl; Manchester Guardian, 12 October 1867. Rose, Manchester Martyrs, 31–9; Litvack and Graham, Ireland and Europe, 153; Manchester Guardian, 19, 20 September 1867; John Denvir, The Life Story of an Old Rebel (Shannon, 1972), 96–102; John J. Hayes’s account, nli 18,028; Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel, 240–3. Daily Telegraph, 20, 21, 23 September 1867; Holborn, St. Pancras and Bloomsbury Journal, 28 September 1867; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 26 September 1867; Manchester Guardian, 27 September 1867; Caernarvon and Denbigh Herald, 28 September 1867; Nonconformist, 2 October 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 13 October 1867. Montreal Gazette, 3 October 1867; Martin Hewitt, The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City: Manchester, 1832–67 (Aldershot, 1996), 23; Anglo-American Times, 21 September 1867; Holborn and Bloomsbury Journal, 28 April 1866; Chester Chronicle, 21 September 1867; Manchester Guardian, 18 September, 1 October 1867; Daily Telegraph, 20, 23 September 1867; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 3 October 1867; Nonconformist, 2 October 1867. Cork Examiner, 23 September 1867; Freeman’s Journal, 19, 23 September 1867; Nation, 25 September 1867; Nonconformist, 25 September, 9 October 1867; Guardian, 25 September, 9 October 1867; Daily Telegraph, 24 September, 7, 9 October 1867; Anglo-American Times, 21 September 1867; Illustrated London News, 28 September 1867; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 20 October 1867. Nation, 21 September, 5, 12 October 1867; Daily Telegraph, 20, 23 September 1867; Manchester Guardian, 10 October 1867; Guardian, 25 September 1867; Chester Chronicle, 21 September 1867; Montreal Gazette, 12 October 1867, quoting the Liverpool Mercury; Paul O’Leary, Immigration and Integration: The Irish in Wales, 1798–1922 (Cardiff, 2000), 248; Economist, 12 October 1867; Punch, 28 September 1867. Universe, 19 October 1867; Daily Telegraph, 7, 8, 16 October 1867; Elaine M. McFarland, “A Reality and Yet Impalpable: The Fenian Panic in MidVictorian Scotland,” Scottish Historical Review 77 (1998): 214–15; O’Leary, Immigration and Integration, 248–9; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 10, 24 October 1867; Illustrated London News, 26 October 1867; Manchester Guardian, 1, 16 October 1867; Spectator, 12 October 1867; Newcastle

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Notes to pages 111−13 Daily Journal, 7, 10, 17, 22 October 1867; Pall Mall Gazette, 1 October 1867; Nation, 19 October 1867. Mayo to Disraeli, 22 September 1867, 90/2, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Mayo to Hardy, 19 September 1867, nli 11,189; Watch Committee Minutes, vol. 7, 28 January, 6 February, 19 March 1868, mcrl; McHale to Inspector General, 23 September 1867, csorp, 1867, no. 17108, ina; Mayo to Hardy, 19 September 1867, nli 11,189; Mayo to Disraeli, 22 September 1867, 90/2, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Kinlock to Ferguson, 9 October 1867, ho 45/7799. Hardy to Mayo, 15 October 1867, ho 45/7799; Hardy to Mayo, 21 September 1867, nli 11,189; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 49; Ferguson to Hardy, 4 October 1867, ha 43 t501/270, sro; Ferguson to Mayo, 24 September 1867, nli 11,189; ho Circular, 28 September 1867, ho 45/7799; Ferguson to Northcote, 3 October 1867, ha 43 t501/270; David Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1998), 6; Ferguson to Kinlock, n.d. [October 1867], ho 45/7799. Hardy to Mayo, 30 September 1867, nli 11,189; Mayor of Manchester to Hardy, 26 September 1867, ho 45/7799; Greig to Mayne, 27 September 1867, 352 pol 2/4, Livro; Mayne to Greig, 28 September 1867, mepo 1/47; Entwissell to Rogers, 25 September 1867, nli 11,189. Hardy to Mayo, 21, 30 September 1867, nli 11,189; Stanley to Mayo, 8 October 1867, 920 der (15), 13/2/1, Livro; Queen to Northcote, 2 October 1867, bl Add. ms 50,013; Ferguson to Mayne, 30 September, 3 October 1867, ho 41/20; Ferguson to Hardy, 3 October 1867, ha 43 t501/270, sro. Ferguson to Hardy, 2, 3, 19 October 1867, ha 43 t501/270, sro; ho to Provost of Greenock, 26 October 1867, ho 103/15; Hardy to Liddell, 20 September 1867, ho 45/7799; Liddell to Town Clerks, Bradford and Salford, 23, 24 September 1867, ho 41/20; Ferguson to Kinlock, 11, 15 October 1867, ho 103/15; Ferguson to Chief Constable, Elginshire, 25 October 1867, ho 103/15; Ferguson to Town Clerk, Warrington, 4 November 1867, ho 41/21; Greig to Mayor of Liverpool, 12 October 1867, 352 pol 2/4, Livro; H.J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (Hamden, 1978), 329–33; Howell to Keevil, 10, 12 October 1867, Letterbook 4, George Howell Collection, Bishopsgate Library, London. Guardian, 25 September 1867; Caernarvon and Denbigh Herald, 21 September, 26 October 1867; Punch, 12 October, 30 November 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 20 October 1867; Howell to McEwen, 10 October 1867, Letterbook 4, Howell Collection, Bishopsgate Library; Times (London), 13 June 1867; Beales to Howell, 19, 26 October [1867], Howell Collection, Bishopsgate Library. See Reform League Papers, no. 67, Bishopsgate Library; Howell to Jones, 29 October 1867, Letterbook 4, Howell Collection, Bishopsgate Library; North

Notes to pages 114−19

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London News, 9 November 1867; Council Resolution, 1 November 1867, Reform League Papers, no. 70; Minute Book of Executive Council, 8 November 1867; Bernard Potter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge, 1979), 77-8, 146, 172, 178, 180; Stephens to Moynahan, 2 May 1867, Box 2/32, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua. Mitchel to Moynahan, 28 January 1867, Box 2/9, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua; Ryan, Fenian Chief, 353; Takagami, “Dublin Fenians,” 224; Litvack and Graham, Ireland and Europe, 152; Hardy to Derby, 16 October 1867, 920 der (14), 164/6, Livro; Dublin Police Reports, 31 October 1867, ho 144 1537/1; Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 97; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 53–5. Palin to Mayor of Manchester, 14 October 1867, ho 144 1537/1; Greig to Mayor of Liverpool, 17 October 1867, 352 pol 2/4, Livro; C. Grey to Queen, 17 October 1867, d22/59, ra; Derby to Northcote, 11 October 1867, bl Add. ms 50,014; C. Grey to Queen, 14 October 1867, d22/55, ra; Queen Victoria’s Journal, 14 October 1867, ra; Hardy to Derby, 16 October 1867, 920 der (14), 164/6, Livro. Hardy to Kintare, 14 October 1867, ho 103/15; C. Grey to Queen, 14 October 1867, d22/54, ra; Derby to Hardy, n.d. [November 1867], ha 43 T501/259, sro; Mayne to Ferguson, 14 October 1867, ho 45/7799; C. Grey to Queen, 15 October 1867, d22/56, ra; C. Grey to Hardy, 19 October 1867, bl Add. ms 62,537, Cranbrook Papers. C. Grey to Hardy, 19 October 1867, bl Add. ms 62,537; C. Grey to Derby, 23 October 1867, 920 der (14), 103/7, Livro; C. Grey to Queen, 17 October 1867, d22/58, ra; Daily Telegraph, 4 November 1867; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 51–2; Mayne to Biddulph, 2 November 1867, mepo 1/47. Hardy to Derby, 14, 16 October 1867, 920 der (14), 164/6, Livro; Dublin Police Reports, 15, 17 October 1867, ho 144 1537/1; Liddell to Chief Constable, Lancashire, 22 November 1867, ho 41/21; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 50. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 13 October 1867; Nonconformist, 25 September, 2, 9, 23 October 1867; Newcastle Daily Journal, 23 October 1867.

chapter five 1 Northcote to Fitzgerald, 17 September 1867, bl Add. ms 50,048, Iddesleigh Papers; Derby Diaries, 17, 26 September 1867, 920 der (15), Derby Papers, Livro; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 20 October 1867, bl Add. ms 42,824, Rose Papers; Disraeli to Stanley, 22 September 1867, 920 der (15), 12/3/8, Livro; D’Arcy, Fenian Movement, 266–74, 125n71; Mayo to Stanley, 17, 20,

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8

9 10

Notes to pages 119−23 28 September, 11 October, 17, 18, 21 November 1867, 920 der (15), 12/3/3, Livro. Blakesley to Stanley, 4 August 1867, 920 der (15), 12/2/3, Livro; Nonconformist, 23 October 1867; David Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1998), 52–3; Lord Chancellor to Liddell, 21 September 1867, ho 45/7799; H. Lowry-Corry to Mayo, 23 September 1867, nli 11,189, Mayo Papers; Liddell to Hardy, 21 September 1867, ho 41/20; Queen to Northcote, 2 October 1867, bl Add. ms 50,013; Queen to Derby, 2 October 1867, a36/21, ra; Ferguson to Hardy, 8, 10 October 1867, h43 t501/270, Hardy Papers, sro; Ferguson to Mayor of Manchester, 8 October 1867, ho 40/20; Hardy to Mayo, 30 September 1867, nli 11,189; Ferguson to Northcote, 3 October 1867, ha43 t501/270, sro. Roger Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy: The Home Office and the Treatment of Capital Cases in Victorian Britain (New York, 1992), 57–9, 67, 32–4; Bentley, English Criminal Justice, 8–9. Manchester Guardian, 20, 21 September 1867; Daily Telegraph, 21, 24 September 1867. Manchester Guardian, 21, 23 September 1867; Illustrated London News, 28 September 1867; Daily Telegraph, 27, 28 September 1867; Greig to Mayor of Liverpool, 24 September 1867, 320 pol 2/4, Livro; Ride to Greig, 28 September 1867, 352 pol 2/4; Manchester Guardian, 7 October 1867. For Roberts, see Raymond Challinor, A Radical Lawyer in Victorian England: W. P. Roberts and the Struggle for Workers’ Rights (London, 1990); for Jones, see John Saville, Ernest Jones: Chartist Selections from the Writings and Speeches of Ernest Jones with Introduction and Notes (London, 1952), the quotation from Jones, 218; and Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics 1819–1869 (Oxford, 2003); George Jacob Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life, 2 vols (London, 1892), 1:249; James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson, The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture 1830–60 (London, 1982), 273. Manchester Guardian, 27, 30 September, 1, 3, 4, 7 October 1867; Daily Telegraph, 28 September, 2 October 1867; Nonconformist, 2 October 1867; Challinor, Radical Lawyer, 228–9. Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century, 264–5; Manchester Guardian, 27, 30 September, 1, 3 October 1867; Daily Telegraph, 1, 2, 4 October 1867; Pall Mall Gazette, 1 October 1867. Manchester Guardian, 4, 7, 9 October 1867; Daily Telegraph, 4 October 1867. Manchester Guardian, 5, 9, 10, 14 October 1867; Daily Telegraph, 2, 18 October 1867; Spectator, 12 October 1867; Economist, 12 October 1867; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 31 October 1867; Challinor, Radical

Notes to pages 123−6

11

12

13

14

15 16

379

Lawyer, 233, 230; Newcastle Daily Journal, 11, 14 October 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 29 September 1867; Nation, 5, 12 October 1867; Freeman’s Journal, 17 October 1867; Universe, 28 September, 5, 12 October 1867. For the Irish Executive’s view of the Holborn incident, see nli 7517, Larcom Papers; Ferguson to Northcote, 3 October 1867, ha43 t501/270, sro; Queen Victoria’s Journal, 6 October 1867, ra; Daily Telegraph, 1, 7, 8, 15–17, 23–4, 26 October, 9 November 1867. Daily Telegraph, 1, 24, 26 October 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 13 October 1867; Manchester Guardian, 17 October 1867; Freeman’s Journal, 17, 26 October 1867; Ferguson to Mayor of Manchester, 10, 14, 23, 24 October 1867, ho 41/20. Mayo to Hardy, 10 October [1867], ha43 t501/270, sro; Ferguson to Hardy, 9 October 1867; Ferguson to Mayor of Manchester, 10, 14, 23, 24 October 1867; Taylor, Ernest Jones, 199; Ferguson to Mayor of Liverpool, 10 October 1867, ho 41/20; Report of James Ryan, 10 October 1867, csorp 1867, no.17,801, ina; Derby to Hardy, 15 October 1867, ha43 t501/259, sro; Chief Constable of Lancashire to Hardy, 16 October 1867, csorp 1867, no. 18,609, ina; Ferguson to Chief Constable of Lancashire, 21 October 1867, ho 41/21; Ferguson to Mayne, 19 October 1867; Ferguson to Foster, 10 October 1867, ho 41/20; Daily Telegraph, 21, 28 October 1867; Greig to Mayor of Liverpool, 11 October 1867, 320 pol 2/4, Livro; Devoy’s account of the trial, nli 18,028, Devoy Papers; Manchester Guardian, 26 October 1867. Hardy to Mayo, 24 October 1867, nli 11,188; Daily Telegraph, 1 November 1867; Roberts to Hardy, 21, 23, 25 October 1867, ho 45/7799; Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century, 36–7, 42; J.M. Beattie, “Scales of Justice: Defense Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Law and History Review 9 (1991): 222, 231, 234, 255–6; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 27 October, 3 November 1867; Manchester Guardian, 28 October 1867; New York Times, 11 November 1867; Mayo to Hardy, 30 October 1867, ha43 t501/270, sro; Hardy to Mayo, 31 October 1867, nli 11,189, Ferguson to Roberts, 22, 26, 28 October 1867, ho 41/21. Ferguson to Fowler, 15 October 1867, ho 41/21; Ferguson to Hardy, 25, 19 October 1867, ha43 t501/270, sro; Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, 38–9, 94. Daily Telegraph, 28 October 1867; New York Times, 12 November 1867; Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee, eds, Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 1959), 2:203–4, 13:224; see also H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, vol. 5 (Oxford, 2004), 925–6; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 154:508–10; Daniel Duman, The Judicial Bench in England 1727–1875: The Reshaping of a Professional Elite (London, 1982), 80–1; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 3 November 1867; Cork Examiner, 31 October 1867.

380

Notes to pages 126−30

17 Illustrated London News, 9 November 1867; New York Times, 12 November 1867; David Philips, Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country 1825–1860 (London, 1977), 102–3; Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century, 131–3. 18 Blackburn’s charge to the Grand Jury, 28 October 1867, ts 36/59, na; Manchester Guardian, 29 October 1867; Daily Telegraph, 30 October 1867; John Hostettler, The Politics of Criminal Law Reform in the Nineteenth Century (Chichester, 1992), 92–104; Martin Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England 1830–1914 (London, 1998), 64, 78; Leon Radzinowicz and Roger G. Hood, The History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750, vol. 5 (Oxford, 1990), 661. 19 A.L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim, eds, The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 347; Randall McGowan, “Civilizing Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in England,” Journal of British Studies 33 (1994): 257–82; O’Shea, Leaves from the Life, 2:111; Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840–1870 (London, 2005), 281; Bee Hive, 11 February 1865; Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600– 1987 (Oxford, 1996), 248–9, 254, 259, 305, 326, 329–30; David D. Cooper, The Lesson of the Scaffold (London, 1974), 22; Donald Rumblelow, ‘I Spy Blue’: The Police and Crime in the City of London from Elizabeth I to Victoria (London, 1971) 199; V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), 45, 54. 20 Radzinowicz and Hood, History of English Criminal Law, 5:662–5; Elizabeth Orman Tuttle, The Crusade against Capital Punishment in Great Britain (London, 1961), 18–19; Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 277; Cooper, Lesson of the Scaffold, 158–9; Times (London), 3 May, 4 June 1866; Walpole to Stanley, 12 October 1866, 920 der (15), 12/3/2, Livro; Manchester Guardian, 1 April 1867. 21 Daily Telegraph, 28, 29 October, 9 November 1867; Illustrated London News, 9 November 1867; Taylor, Ernest Jones, 227; Denvir, Life Story of an Old Rebel, 103; Montreal Gazette, 19 December 1867; New York Times, 12 November 1867; J.R. Lewis, The Victorian Bar (London, 1982), 26, 44; Duman, Judicial Bench in England, 12–13. 22 Illustrated London News, 9 November 1867; C.J.W. Allen, The Law of Evidence in Victorian England (Cambridge, 1997), 144–56; Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, 104, 123–4. 23 Illustrated London News, 9 November 1867; Manchester Guardian, 30, 31 October, 1 November 1867; Attorney General’s opening address, ts 36/59; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 3 November 1867.

Notes to pages 130−7

381

24 Illustrated London News, 9 November 1867; Manchester Guardian, 30, 31 October, 1 November 1867; C. Grey to Queen, 31 October 1867, b24/19, ra. 25 Manchester Guardian, 1 November 1867. 26 Ibid.; Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, 338. 27 Manchester Guardian, 1, 2 November 1867; closing addresses of Seymour and O’Brien, ts 36/60; C. Grey to Queen, 31 October 1867, b24/19, ra. 28 Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century, 269; Manchester Guardian, 1 November 1967; Blackburn’s summation, ts 36/60. 29 Daily Telegraph, 4 November 1867; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 7 November 1867; New York Times, 13 November 1867; Manchester Guardian, 2 November 1867; Condon’s statement, ts 36/60; Illustrated London News, 9 November 1867. 30 New York Times, 13 November 1867; Illustrated London News, 9 November 1867; Daily Telegraph, 4 November 1867. 31 New York Times, 13 November 1867; record of the second Manchester trial, ts 36/31; Daily Telegraph, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11 November 1867; Illustrated London News, 30 November 1867. 32 Daily Telegraph, 7, 9 November 1867; Ferguson to Mayors of Liverpool, Manchester, Chester, and Leeds, 14 October 1867, ho 41/20; Dublin Police Report, 24 October 1867, ho 144 1537/1, R. Anderson Papers; Derby Diaries, 7 November 1867, 920 der (15), Livro; Nation, 2, 9 November 1867; Universe, 2, 9, 16 November 1867; Cork Examiner, 4 November 1867; Freeman’s Journal, 1, 4 November 1867. 33 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 3, 10 November 1867; Spectator, 9 November 1867; Minute Book of Executive of Reform League, no. 2, Bishopsgate Library; New York Times, 24 November 1867; Dasent, Delane, 2:217–18; Newcastle Daily Journal, 4 November 1867; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 7 November 1867; Economist, 9 November 1867; Guardian, 6, 20 November 1867; Nonconformist, 6 November 1867; Daily Telegraph, 4, 7 November 1867. 34 Vincent, Disraeli, Derby, and the Conservative Party, 322; Crossman, Politics, Law and Order, 87; Dublin Police Report, 31 October 1867, ho 144 1537/1; Illustrated London News, 9 November 1867; C. Grey to Derby, 3 November 1867, d22/65, ra; C. Grey to Queen, 4 November 1867, d22/66. 35 Derby to Queen, 5 November 1867, a36/29, ra; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 53; Blackburn to Hardy, 6 November 1867, h43 t501/63, sro; Greenwood to Hardy, 6 November 1867, bl Add. ms 62,537, Cranbrook Papers; Daily Telegraph, 14 October 1867; Stanley to C. Grey, 8 November 1867, b24/25, ra. 36 C. Grey to Queen, 10 November 1867, d22/67, ra; C. Grey to Derby, 14 November 1867, 920 der (14) 103/7, Livro; Blackburn to Hardy,

382

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

Notes to pages 137−40 15 November 1867; Ferguson to Palin, 3 March 1868, ho 41/22; Edward O’Meagher Condon to Thomas Condon, 8 November 1867, ho 45/9348/25943. Richard Nobles and David Schiff, Understanding Miscarriages of Justice: Law, the Media, and the Inevitability of Crisis (Oxford, 2000), 42; Rosemary Pattenden, English Criminal Appeals 1844–1994: Appeals against Conviction and Sentence in England and Wales (Oxford, 1996), 7–10, 16–17, 22–3; Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century, 286–91. Blackburn to Hardy, 15, 19 November 1867, ho 45/9348/25943; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 50–1; Radzinowicz and Hood, History of English Criminal Law, 5:677–9; Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, 148–9, 153; Derby to C. Grey, 14 November 1867, d22/69, ra. Hardy Memorandum, 20 November 1867, ho 45/9348/25943; Daily Telegraph, 21 November 1867; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 109:4, 47–8, 98, 114–15, 122; Gladstone to O’Hagan, 12 December 1867, mic 562/26, proni, O’Hagan Papers; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 109:126–8; Disraeli to Queen, 21 November 1867, b24/30, ra; Guardian, 27 November 1867; Kimberly to de Grey, 25 November 1867, bl Add. ms 43,522, Ripon Papers; Chichester Fortescue Diaries, 23 November 1867, bl Add. ms 63,678, Carlingford Papers; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 212. C. Grey to Hardy, 20 November 1867, d22/72, ra; C. Grey to Queen, 20 November 1867, d22/71; Daily Telegraph, 14, 21 November 1867; Freeman’s Journal, 15 November 1867; Liddell to English, 21 November 1867; Liddell to Dodson, 22 November 1867; Liddell to Massey, 25 November 1867, ho 13/109/203–4; for the petitions to the Home Office, see ho 12/175/79440; L.I. Golman and V.E. Kunina, eds, Ireland and the Irish Question: A Collection of the Writings by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (New York, 1972), 118. Daily Telegraph, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 November 1867; Clerkenwell News, 19 November 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 24 November 1867; “Mr. Finlen’s Defence of Himself,” bl Add. ms 44,756, Gladstone Papers; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 24 November 1867; Larcom to Mayo, 20 November 1867, nli 11,191. Daily Telegraph, 22, 23 November 1867; Spectator, 23 November 1867; C. Grey to Queen, 22 November 1867, d22/75, ra; Hardy to Queen, 21 November 1861, d22/73. New York Times, 24 November 1867; Daily Telegraph, 20, 23 November 1867; J. Neill, Historical Account of the Fenian Outrage in Manchester 1867: Trial and Final Scenes (1909), 28, File a6b, gmpm; Chief Constable of Salford to Mayor

Notes to pages 141−4

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

383

(Henry Pochin), 26 November 1867; Pochin to Hardy, 26 November 1867, ho 45/7799. Pochin to Hardy, 26 November 1867, ho 45/7799; Edmund Du Cane, The Punishment and Prevention of Crime (London, 1885), 25; Daily Telegraph, 25 November 1867. Neill, Historical Account of the Fenian Outrage, 29; Newcastle Daily Journal, 27, 28 November 1867; Anglo-American Times, 30 November 1867; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 1 December 1867; Daily Telegraph, 23, 25 November 1867; Guardian, 30 November 1867; Illustrated London News, 30 November 1867; Spectator, 23 November 1867. Daily Telegraph, 25 November 1867; Nonconformist, 27 November 1867; Clerkenwell News, 26 November 1867; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 1 December 1867; Spectator, 30 November 1867. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 1 December 1867; Universe, 30 November 1867; Daily Telegraph, 25, 27 November 1867; Freeman’s Journal, 25 November 1867; Cork Examiner, 25, 26 November 1867; Nation, 30 November 1867; Anglo-American Times, 7 December 1867; Sullivan, New Ireland, 394; Lawrence W. McBride, ed., Images, Icons and the Irish Nationalist Imagination (Dublin, 1999), 18–24; Owen McGee, “‘God Save Ireland’: Manchester-Martyr Demonstrations in Dublin, 1867–1916,” Eire/Ireland 36 (2001): 39–42; Peter Alter, “Symbols of Irish Nationalism,” Studia Hibernica 14 (1974): 14:109–11; T.D., A.M., and D.B. Sullivan, Speeches from the Dock, or Protests of Irish Patriotism, 48th ed., n.d., 274, 241; Alexander and O’Day, Ireland’s Terrorist Dilemma, 15. Daily Telegraph, 2, 3, 10, 11, 12 December 1867; Guardian, 4, 11 December 1867; Nation, 7 December 1867; Mary Leo, “The Influence of the Fenians and Their Press on Public Opinion in Ireland, 1863–70” (mlitt, Trinity College Dublin, 1976), 143–4; Doughty, Manchester Outrage, 220–2. Daily Telegraph, 10, 13 December 1867; Golman and Kunina, Ireland and the Irish Question, 146; Manning to Gladstone, 22 September 1867, bl Add. ms 44,249, Gladstone Papers; Manning to Cullen, 7 October 1867, 334/4/II, Cullen Correspondence, aad; Doud to Cullen, 13 December 1867, 334/6; James Handley, The Irish in Modern Scotland (Cork, 1947), 266; Lynch to Cullen, 16 December 1867, 334/4/III; Universe, 1 February 1868. Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:58–9; Daily Telegraph, 16 October 1967; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 17 October 1867; PopeHennessy Memorandum, 7 October 1867, d22/53, ra. Cullen to Spalding, n.d. [1867], 33-o-1; Cullen to Spalding, 7 December 1867, 33-o-11, Spalding Papers, aab; MacSuibhne, Paul Cullen and His Contemporaries, 4:224; Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:60; E.D. Steele,

384

Notes to pages 145−9

“The Irish Presence in the North of England 1850–1914,” Northern History 12 (1976): 12:231. 52 O Fiaich, Irish Ecclesiastical Record 109:92–4; Daily Telegraph, 18 October, 27, 30 November, 11 December 1867; Cork Examiner, 28 September 1867; Freeman’s Journal, 28 November 1867; Guardian, 11 December 1867; M.J. Egan, Life of Dean O’Brien (Dublin, 1949), 111; Gerald P. Moran, A Radical Priest in Mayo: Fr. Patrick Lavelle: The Rise and Fall of an Irish Nationalist, 1825–86 (Dublin, 1994), 95; Pope-Hennessy Memorandum, 7 October 1867, d22/53, ra; Universe, 14 December 1867. 53 Mayo to Derby, 10, 20 October 1867, 920 der (14) 155/3, Livro; Mayo to Abercorn, 8 December 1867, nli 11,191; Brewster to Mayo, 8 December 1867; Larcom to Mayo, 7 December 1867; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 8, 12 December 1867, bl Add. ms 42,824; Mayo to Derby, 6, 12 December 1867, 920 der (14) 155/4, Livero; Mayo to Disraeli, 13 December 1867, 90/2, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl.

chapter six 1 Fortescue to Gladstone, 10, 14 December 1867, bl Add. ms 44,121, Gladstone Papers; Spectator, 30 November 1867; Newcastle Daily Journal, 6 December 1867. 2 Vincent, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 323–4; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 55–7; Queen Victoria’s Journals, 1 December 1867, ra; Mayne to Ruxton, 7 December 1867, 1/47, mepo; Mayne to Cowell, n.d. [December 1867]; Derby Diaries, 13 December 1867, 920 der (15), Livro; Chichester Fortescue Diary, 10 December 1867, bl Add. ms 63,678, Carlingford Papers; Disraeli to Hardy, 13 December 1867, ha43 t501/266, Hardy Papers, sro; Feilding to Mayo, 11 December 1867, 90/2, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Mayo to Disraeli, 12, 13 December 1867. 3 Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 55; Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel, 347–9; Ferguson to Mayo, 2 November 1867, nli 11,189, Mayo Papers; Dublin Metropolitan Police Report, 15 October 1867, ho 144 1537/1, R. Anderson Papers; Timothy Cavanagh, Scotland Yard Past and Present: Experiences of Thirty-Seven Years (London, 1893), 98; Illustrated London News, 1 July 1876; Daily Telegraph, 2, 9 December 1867; Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London, 1862), 80–1. 4 Charles Knight, ed., London, 6 vols (London, 1842–43), 3:129–46; Henry B. Wheatley, London Past and Present, 3 vols (London, 1891), 1:418–19; Thomas Shepherd, London and its Environs in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols (London, 1910), 1:131–51, 3:197; Walter Besant, London North of the Thames (London,

Notes to pages 149−54

5

6

7 8

9

10

11 12

385

1911), 467; Mary Cosh, An Historical Walk through Clerkenwell (Islington, 1980), 12; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 17 September 1865; Bee Hive, 17 March 1866; Express, 22 February 1866; Hepworth Dixon, The London Prisons (London, 1850), 228. Richard Byrne, Prisons and Punishments in London (London, 1989), 69–70; William J. Pinks, The History of Clerkenwell, 2nd ed. (London, 1880), 185–6; Mayhew and Binny, Criminal Prisons of London, 613–19; Report of Labalmondière, 14 December 1867, ho 12/177/80110; Return of the House of Detention, 1867, ma/rs/1/503, lma; “Regulations … and Rules for the House of Detention at Clerkenwell (1866),” 49–59, ma/g/gen 1212; for the prison’s population on 13 December 1867, see ma/g/cle 2980. Minutes of the Visiting Justices, 7, 14 October, 4, 18, 25 November, 9 December 1867, ma/g/cle 13, lma; 23 December 1867, ma/g/cle 2964– 77; 15 February 1868, ma/g/cle 2980. For Burke’s role in the rescue plot, see Home Office Minute dated 3.2.[18]85, ho 12/177/80110; James Murphy (P. Lynch), Fenian Papers, 373r, ina. Denieffe, Personal Narrative, 108–9; R.G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris, eds, Violence, Terrorism, and Justice (New York, 1991), 64–5; Greig to Mayor of Liverpool, 22 June 1867, 320 pol 2/4, Livro; Tynan, Irish National Invincibles, 167; Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel, 248–9; J.A. Cole, Prince of Spies: Henri Le Caron (London, 1984), 34; Desmond Ryan, The Phoenix Flame: A Study of Fenianism and John Devoy (London, 1937), 191; Report of Inspectors Williamson and Thomson, 31 December 1867, ho 12/177/80110. Manchester Guardian, 14 September 1866; Daily Telegraph, 12, 29 November 1867; North London Advertiser, 19 November 1867; Miller, Cops and Bobbies, 114–17; Phillip Thurmond Smith, Policing Victorian London: Political Policing, Public Order, and the London Metropolitan Police (Westport, 1985), 37, 68; Police Order, 4 December 1865, 7/26, mepo; Waddington to Mayne, 6 September 1865, ho 65/7; Waddington to Receiver, 28 March 1866; Report of Home Office Departmental Committee, 6 May 1868, ho 45/10002/49463/2; Gathorne Hardy, Gathorne Hardy, 1:219. Ryan Report, 11 December 1867, ho 12/177/80110; Labalmondière Report, 13 January 1868; Gernow Report, 17 January 1868; Mayne to Liddell, 27 February 1868; Thomson Report, 13 March 1868; Hardy to Derby, 16 October 1867, 920 der (14), 164/6, Livro; Daily Telegraph, 21 December 1867. See Gernow’s Reports, 16 December 1867, 12 March 1868, ho 12/177/80110; Daily Telegraph, 21, 28 December 1867. Pownall to ho, 13 December 1867, ho 12/177/80110; Minutes of the Visiting Justices, 16 December 1867, ma/g/cle 14, lma; Daily Telegraph, 21 December 1867; Clerkenwell News, 4 January 1868.

386

Notes to pages 155−9

13 Thomson Reports, 14, 16 December 1867, ho 12/177/80110; Gernow Report, 14 December 1867 (but may have been written as late as 2 March 1868); Minutes of the Visiting Justices, 16 December 1867, ma/g/cle 14, lma; Clerkenwell News, 17, 18 December 1867. 14 Clerkenwell News, 14, 16, 23, 31 December 1867, 8 January 1868; Daily Telegraph, 14 December 1867; Gernow Report, 14 December 1867, ho 12/177/80110; Illustrated London News, 15 February 1868; Universe, 21 March 1868; Montreal Gazette, 2 January 1868. 15 Clerkenwell News, 16 December 1867; Hardy to Queen, 14 December 1867, d22/78, ra; Matthews to Corry, 18 December 1867, 54/3, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Lambert to Devon, 14 December 1867, d22/81, ra; Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee, eds, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 11 (Oxford, 1917), 459–60; Lambert to Hardy, mh (Ministry of Health) 32/30, na; Manning to Cullen, 12 October 1867, 327/5/II, Cullen Correspondence, aad; Corry to Disraeli, 14 December 1867, 94/1, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Paget to Corry, 18 December 1867, 54/3, Dep. Hughenden; Berry to Corry, 23 December 1867, 25 January 1868; Hamilton to Lambert and Corry, 5 February 1868. 16 Clerkenwell News, 16, 17, 18 December 1867; Gilley, Recusant History 11:29–31; Besant, London North of the Thames, 489; Clerkenwell News, 3, 10, 27, 31 January, 7, 28 February, 7, 14, 21, 29 March, 4, 11, 18, 25 April, 2, 9 May 1857; Gerald Wayne Olsen, “From Paris to Palace: Working-Class Influences on Anglican Temperance Movements, 1835–1914,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 40 (1989): 238–45; Clerkenwell News, 8 October 1867. 17 For the activities and accounts of the Explosion Relief Fund, see the Letterbook and Minute Book, Finsbury Library; Maguire to Corry, n.d. [January 1868], 54/3, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Clerkenwell News, 8 January 1868. 18 Lambert to Disraeli, 26 December 1867, 54/3, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Lambert to Corry, 28 December 1867; Clerkenwell News, 31 December 1867, 24 January 1868; Explosion Relief Fund Letterbook, 47–61, Finsbury Library; Minute Book, 22 December 1868, Finsbury Library. 19 New York Times, 2 January 1868, 16 December 1867; Daily Telegraph, 14 December 1867; Caernarvon and Denbigh Herald, 28 December 1867; Notting Hill and Bayswater Times, 28 December 1867; Newcastle Daily Journal, 18, 20, 30 December 1867; Stephen R. Bown, A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates and the Making of the Modern World (Toronto, 2005), 52, 61, 66–8. 20 Illustrated London News, 11 November 1865; Daily Telegraph, 18, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 December 1867; Bury Times, 18 January 1868; New York Times, 30 December 1867, 1, 4, 11 January 1868; Express, 1, 2, 4 January 1868; Globe

Notes to pages 159−63

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

387

(Toronto), 2 January 1868; Clerkenwell News, 31 December 1867; Auckland Chronicle, 27 December 1867; Nonconformist, 4 January 1867. Daily Telegraph, 17, 25, 28 December 1867; Newcastle Daily Journal, 24, 26 December 1867; Clerkenwell News, 25, 27 December 1867; New York Times, 28, 29, 30 December 1867, 12, 15, 17 January 1868; Montreal Gazette, 6 January 1868; Nonconformist, 4 January 1868; Illustrated London News, 4 January 1868; Guardian, 18 December 1867. Stanley to Lyons, 16 December 1867, Box 179, Lyons Papers, wsro; Auckland Chronicle, 27 December 1867; Frank Neal, “English-Irish Conflict in the North West of England: Economics, Racism, Anti-Catholic or Simple Xenophobia,” North West Labour History 16 (1989): 21; North London News, 28 December 1867; Montreal Gazette, 17 January 1868; Bury Times, 11 January 1868; New York Times, 31 December 1867; Newcastle Daily Journal, 16 December 1867; Spectator, 4 January 1868; Punch, 28 December 1867; Ashton and Stalybridge Guardian, 18, 25 January, 1 February 1868; Ashton-under-Lyne News, 18 January, 15, 22 February, 7 March 1868; Blackburn Standard, 1, 15 January, 19 February 1868. Express, 24 December 1867, 3, 7, 9, 15, 20 January 1868; New York Times, 3 January 1868; Clerkenwell News, 17, 22 December 1867, 1, 6 January 1868; Daily Telegraph, 13, 15 November, 18, 31 December 1867; Daily News, 27 December 1867; Punch, 4 January 1868; de Nie, Journal of British Studies 40:225–9. Nation, 21, 28 December 1867; Freeman’s Journal, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21 December 1867; Cork Examiner, 21, 23 December 1867, 1, 7, 11, 17 January, 3 February 1868; Irishman, 8 February 1868; New York Times, 11, 12, January 1868; Universe, 11 January 1868; Montreal Gazette, 27 January 1868; Guardian, 1, 8 January 1868; Daily Telegraph, 17, 23, 25, 30 December 1867; Nonconformist, 4 January 1868. Clerkenwell News, 17, 20 December 1867; Daily Telegraph, 18, 21 December 1867; Globe (Toronto), 6 January 1868; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 22 December 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 22 December 1867; Newcastle Daily Journal, 23 December 1867; Holborn, St. Pancras and Bloomsbury Journal, 1 February 1868; Irish Catholic Banner, 29 February 1868; Fraser’s Magazine 77 (1868): 11. Newcastle Daily Journal, 18 December 1867; Nonconformist, 18 December 1867; Daily Telegraph, 14, 18, 20 December 1867; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 19 December 1867; Illustrated London News, 21 December 1867; North London News, 21 December 1867; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 22 December 1867; Holborn, St. Pancras and Bloomsbury Journal, 11 April 1868. Daily Telegraph, 19, 20, 24 December 1867; Illustrated London News, 28 December 1867; Express, 31 December 1867; Howell to Keevil,

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32

33 34

Notes to pages 163−6 19 December [1867], Letterbook 4, Howell Collection, Bishopsgate; Reform League Papers, no. 70, Bishopsgate; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 12 January 1868; Reform League Papers, no. 66, Bishopsgate. Manning to Cullen, 30 December 1867, 334/4/II, Cullen Correspondence, aad; Cullen to Leahy, 1 January 1868, nli M6008, 1868/3, Leahy Papers; O Fiaich, Irish Ecclesiastical Record 109:94; Furlong to Cullen, 26 December 1867, 334/4/I, aad; MacEvilly to Cullen, 27 December 1867; Oliver Moriarty to Larcom, n.d. [December 1867], 920 der (14) 155/4, Livro; MacEvilly to Cullen, 1 January 1868, 334/8/I, aad; Egan, Life of Dean O’Brien, 111; Daily Telegraph, 31 December 1867. Steele, Irish Historical Studies 19:258–9; Gillooly to Cullen, 11 January 1868, 334/8/I, Cullen Correspondence, aad; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 213; McSuibhne, Paul Cullen and His Contemporaries, 4:224; Redmond to Cullen, 5 February 1868, 341/1/I, aad; Universe, 1, 8 February 1868. Nonconformist, 4 January 1868; Ashto- under-Lyne News, 8 February 1868; Montreal Gazette, 6 January 1868; Globe (Toronto), 18 January 1868; Daily Telegraph, 11 March 1867; Spectator, 4, 11 January 1868; Illustrated London News, 4 January 1868; Ashton and Stalybridge Guardian, 11 January 1868. Manchester Guardian, 14 October 1867; Illustrated London News, 28 September 1867; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 13 October 1867; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 26 September, 3, 24 October 1867; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 22, 29 December 1867; Nonconformist, 25 September, 2, 9, 23 October 1867, 11 January 1868; Fortnightly Review, 3 (1868): 93; Newcastle Daily Journal, 27 December 1867; Bury Times, 8 February 1868; Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, February 1868, 168–9; Chester Chronicle, 21 December 1867; Northern Telegraphic News (Aberdeen), 15 January 1868; Caernarvon and Denbigh Herald, 4 January 1868; Holborn, St. Pancras, and Bloomsbury Journal, 28 December 1868. Fane to Lyons, 4 January 1867 (8), Box 178, Lyons Papers, wsro; New York Times, 24, 27 January, 6 February 1868; Montreal Gazette, 9 March 1868; Illustrated London News, 25 January 1868; Spectator, 25 January 1868; Manning to Gladstone, 11 February 1868, bl Add. ms 44,249. Mayo to Stanley, 23 January 1868, 920 der (15), 12/3/4, Livro; Derby Diaries, 17, 19 December 1867, 920 der (15). Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 58–9; Vincent, Disraeli, Derby, and the Conservative Party, 325; Derby to Hardy, 24 December 1867, ha43 t501/259, Hardy Papers, sro; Liddell to Mayne, 18 December 1867, ho 41/21; Hardy to Cambridge, 22, 23, 25 December 1867, Vic. Add. mss e/1, Cambridge

Notes to pages 167−8

35

36

37

38

389

Papers, ra; Cambridge to Hardy, 22 December 1867, ha43 t501/264, sro; Taylor to Hardy, 25 January 1868, ho 45/7799. Metropolitan Police Orders, 16, 20, 22, 25 December 1867, 3 January 1868, mepo 7/30; Liddell to Visiting Justices, Maidstone, 23 December 1867, ho 22/15; Ferguson to War Office, 19 December 1867, ho 41/21; Liddell to Mayne, 16 December 1867; Ferguson to Forster, 19 December 1867; Instructions to Special Constables, n.d. [December 1867]; Ferguson to Mayor of Bristol, 22 December 1867; Ferguson to Thwaites, 23 December 1867; Hardy to Cambridge, 20 December 1867, Vic. Add. mss e/1, ra; Ewart to Ferguson, n.d. [December 1867], ho 45/7799; Baselgette to Liddell, 17 January 1868; Ferguson to water companies, 25 December 1867, ho 41/21; Ferguson to London, Chatham, and Dover Railway, 23 December 1867; Liddell to Elium, 16 December 1867; Ferguson to Chief Constable of Anglesey, 28 December 1867; Ferguson to War Office, 22 December 1867, ho 45/7799; Stolhern to Ewart, 23 December 1867. C. Grey to Hardy, 14 December 1867, d22/78, ra; Queen Victoria’s Journals, 14, 19 December 1867, ra; Daily Telegraph, 17 December 1867; Jenner to Queen, 16 December 1867, d22/84, ra; Monck to Buckingham, 16, 18 [December 1867], bl Add. ms 43,742, Fenian mss; Buckingham to Abercorn, 18 December 1867; Corry to Stanley, 28 December [1867], 920 der (15) 12/3/3, Livro; Derby Diaries, 20 December 1867, 920 der (15); Buckingham to Hardy, 21 December 1867, bl Add. ms 41,860, Fenian mss; Corry to Buckingham, 20 December 1867; Mayne to Biddulph, n.d. [December 1867], mepo 1/47; Mayne to C. Grey, 20 December 1864; C. Grey to Derby, 17 December 1867, 920 der (14) 103/7, Livro; C. Grey to Queen, 19 December 1867, d22/86, ra; John C.G. Rohl, Martin Warren, and David Hunt, Purple Secret: Genes, ‘Madness’ and the Royal Houses of Europe (London, 1998), 162; Queen to Hardy, 20 December 1867, d22/95, ra. Queen to Hardy, 19 December 1867, d22/87, ra; C. Grey to Queen, 23 December 1867, d22/102; Queen to Hardy, 8 January 1868, d23/10; Queen to Fitzroy, 30 December 1867, d22/108; Derby to Hardy, 24, 27 December 1867, ha43 t501/259, sro; C. Grey to Hardy, 30 December 1867, ha43 t501/261; Hardy to Derby, 30 December 1867, 920 der (14), 164/6, Livro; Hardy to Disraeli, 31 December 1861, 98/3 Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Hardy to Derby, 10 January 1868, 920 der (14), 164/7, Livro; London Times, 7 June 1867. Queen to Hardy, 19 December 1867, d22/89, ra; Disraeli to Derby, 16 December 1867, 920 der (14), 146/3, Livro; Hardy to Derby, 16 December 1867, 920 der (14), 164/6; Derby to Queen, 19 December 1867, d22/92, ra; Derby Diaries, 19 December 1867, 920 der (15), Livro.

390

Notes to pages 169−72

39 Derby to Queen, 19 December 1867, d22/92, ra; Treasury Minute, 23 December 1867, ho 12/177/80018; Mayne to Liddell, 7 September 1868; Hardy Minute, 26 December 1867; Ferguson to Mayne, 26 December 1867, ho 65/8; Mayne to Ferguson, 27 January 1868, ho 12/177/80018; Hardy to Buckingham, 26 December 1867, bl Add. ms 41860, Fenian mss; Hardy to Disraeli, 26 December 1867, 98/3, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl. 40 Mayo to Derby, 14 December 1867, 920 der (14), 155/3, Livro; Mayo to Hardy, 19 December 1867, ha43 t501/270, sro; Strathnairn to Grafton, 15 December 1867, bl Add. ms 42,824, Rose Papers; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 19 December 1867; Gathorne Hardy, Gathorne Hardy, 1:222; Disraeli to Derby, 14 December 1867, 920 der (14), 146/3, Livro; Hardy to Disraeli, 26 December 1867, 98/3 Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Mayo to Hardy, n.d. [January], 8, 14 January 1868, 23 December 1867, ha43 t501/270, sro; Hardy to Derby, 5, 10 January 1868, 920 der (14), 164/7, Livro. 41 Disraeli to Derby, 16 December 1867, 920 der (14), 146/3, Livro; Hardy to Disraeli, 15 December 1867, 98/3 Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Mayo to Hardy, 23 December 1867, 14 January 1868, ha43 t501/270, sro; Hardy to Derby, 16 December 1867, 920 der (14), 164/6, Livro; Gathorne Hardy, Gathorne Hardy, 1:219; Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 62, 59; Hardy to Disraeli, 15 January 1868, 98/3 Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; New York Times, 4 January 1868; Hardy to Buckingham, 17 January 1868, bl Add. ms 43,742, Fenian mss; Hammond to Lyons, 24 December 1867, Box 187, Lyons Papers, wsro; Stanley to Lyons, 4 January 1868, Box 179; Lyons to Hammond, 27 December 1867, 3, 9 January 1868; Lyons to Pietri, 5 January 1868; Lyons to Stanley, 22 January 1868, Box 108; Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (New York, 2006), 270; Feilding to Sheffield, 5 January 1868, Box 127, Lyons Papers, wsro; Trelawny to Sheffield, 6 January 1868; Clarke to Sheffield, 4 March 1868; Odo Russell to Lyons, 12 March 1868. 42 Mayo to Hardy, 25 December [1867], ha43 t501/266, sro; Hardy Memorandum, 4 March 1868, ho 45/7799; Rebow to Adderley, 17 December 1867, ho 144/1538/5, R. Anderson Papers, na; Beach to Feilding, 21 April, 11 July 1868; Moore-Anderson, Sir Robert Anderson, 21; Anderson, Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, 78; J.A. Cole, Prince of Spies: Henri Le Caron (London, 1984), 16, 21–7, 30–3; Disraeli to Hardy, 27 December 1867, ha43 t501/266, sro; Hardy to Queen, 20 December 1867, d22/75, ra; Mayo to Hardy, 23 December [1867], ha43 t501/266, sro. 43 See the initiative of the Post Office in deleting names from the mail list, 25 March 1868, ho 45/7799; Liddell to Head Constable of Glasgow, 21 February 1868, ho 103/15; Home Office Circular, 3 February 1868;

Notes to pages 172−7

44 45

46 47

48

49

50

391

Ferguson to Lord Provost of Greenock, 21 March 1868; Liddell to Lord Provost of Edinburgh, 7 January 1868; Ferguson to Chief Constables of Scotland, 22 January 1868; Liddell to Chief Constable of Dumfreeshire, 31 January 1868; Circular to Governor of Detention Gaols, 8 February 1868, ho 41/22; Ferguson to Mayne, 8 February 1868; Mayo to Hardy, 23 December 1867, ha43 t501/270, sro; Home Office Circular, 27 December 1867, ho 45/7799; Home Office Circular, 1 January 1868, ho 41/21. Guardian, 18 December 1867; Daily Telegraph, 18, 19 December 1867. Hardy to Derby, 28 December 1867, 920 der (14), 164/6, Livro; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 20 February 1868, Vic. Add. mss e/1, ra; Daily Telegraph, 31, 18 December 1867; Sullivan, New Ireland, 391–9; Cork Examiner, 24 February 1868. Daily Telegraph, 30 December 1867; O. Moriarty to Mayo, 31 December 1867, nli 11,189; Mayo to Derby, 3 January [1868], 920 der (14), 155/5, Livro. Chelmsford to Hardy, 2 January 1868, nli 11,189; Hardy to Mayo, 2 January 1868; Mayo to Hardy, n.d. [6 January 1868], ha43 t501/270, sro; S.L. Anderson memoranda, 7, 18 January, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22 February 1868, nli 5965, S.L. Anderson Papers; Sullivan, New Ireland, 397–8, 400; AngloAmerican Times, 1 February 1868. Law to Warren, 3 March 1868, nli 11,189; Mayo to Liddell, 23 March 1868; Irish Catholic Banner, 29 February 1868; Irishman, 21 March, 4 April 1868; Richard Pigott, Personal Recollections of an Irish Nationalist Journalist (Dublin, 1882), 288. Silke, Terrorists, Victims and Society, 34; Wodehouse to Grey, 13 March 1866, Eng. c4043, Kimberley Papers, Bodl; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 188; Kimberley to Grey, 5 June 1866, Eng. c4048, Bodl; Kimberley to Clarendon, 4 June 1866; S.L. Anderson memoranda, 8, 16, 20 January, 11, 12, 13 February 1868, nli 5965; Mayo to Derby, 9 January [1868], 920 der (14), 155/3, Livro; Hardy to Queen, 10 January 1868, d23/21, ra; Hardy to Mayo, 10 January 1868, nli 11,189, Mayo Papers; Strathnairn to Feilding, 18 January 1868, bl Add. ms 42824; Larcom to Mayo, 26 February 1868, nli 11,191. 31 December 1867, Derby Diaries, 920 der (15), Livro; Hardy to Disraeli, 27 December 1867, 98/3, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Abercorn to Derby, 3 January 1868, 920 der (14), 164/2, Livro; Strathnairn to Abercorn, 5 January 1868, bl Add. ms 42824; Strathnairn to Campbell, 29 December 1867; Strathnairn to Mayo, 1 January 1868; Mayo to Hardy, 31 December [1867], 6 January 1868, ha43 t501/270, sro; Derby to Hardy, 27 December 1867, 6 January 1868; Derby to Mayo, 6 January 1868, nli 11,189; Hamilton to Mayo, 17 January 1868; Wood to May, 9, 11 February 1868; Mayo to Derby, 10 January 1868, 920 der (14), 155/4, Livro.

392

Notes to pages 177−83

51 Mayo to Abercorn, 27 January 1868, t2451/v85/31, Abercorn Papers, proni; Mayo to Abercorn, 28 January 1868, t2451/v85/32; Larcom to Mayo, 28 January, 28 February, 12, 29 March 1868, nli 11,191; 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18 March, 8 April 1868, nli 5965; Spectator, 28 March 1868; for the security precautions at Mackey’s trial, see nli 7517, Larcom Papers. 52 Johnson, Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 58–9.

chapter seven 1 Liz Curtis, The Cause of Ireland: From the United Irishmen to Partition (Belfast, 1994), 77; Report of the Visiting Justices, 16 December 1867, ma/g/cle 14, lma; Report of Superintendent Gernow, 14 December 1867, ho 12/177/80110; Daily Telegraph, 16, 17, 19, 20 December 1867; Clerkenwell News, 16, 17 December 1867; Bury Times, 11 January 1868; for the despatch of the photographs to Dublin, see nli 11,189, Mayo Papers. 2 Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, 32–3; James Vernon, ed., Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1996), 145n56, 146–7; Daily Telegraph, 18, 21, 28 December 1867; Montreal Gazette, 18 February 1868; Clerkenwell News, 23, 28 December 1867, 16, 18 January 1868; New York Times, 4 January 1868; Illustrated London News, 28 December 1867. 3 Clerkenwell News, 24, 28 December 1867, 18 January 1868; Daily Telegraph, 21, 24, 27 December 1867; Illustrated London News, 28 December 1867. 4 Daily Telegraph, 31 December 1867; Clerkenwell News, 31 December 1867; Ferguson to Feilding, 16 February 1868, Box 127, Lyons Papers, wsro; Memorandum, 30 December 1867, ho 12/177/80110; Dublin Metropolitan Police Report, 28 December 1867, ho 144 1537/1, R. Anderson Papers; J.A. Cole, Prince of Spies: Henri Le Caron (London, 1984), 35; Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel, 248–9; Hardy to Derby, 28 December 1867, 920 der (14) 164/6, Livro; Nonconformist, 4, 11 January 1868; Clerkenwell News, 4, 7, 11, 14 January 1868; Illustrated London News, 11 January 1868. 5 Hardy to Derby, 15 January 1868, 920 der (14), 164/7, Livro; Anderson, Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, 80; ho Memorandum, 17 July 1868, ho 12/177/80119. 6 Deposition of Ross Thomson Munro, 13 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780; Deposition of Alexander McCaul, 14 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780; this later statement is effectively confirmed by a contemporary report by Hardy to Queen, 16 January 1868, d23/24, ra; ho Memorandum, 17 July 1868, ho 12/177/80110; Clerkenwell News, 21 January 1868; Hardy to Derby, 16 January 1868, 920 der (14) 164/7, Livro.

Notes to pages 183−9

393

7 Clerkenwell News, 21 January 1868; New York Times, 21 January 1868. 8 Clerkenwell News, 29 January 1868; Express, 11 February 1868; New York Times, 16 February 1868. 9 Clerkenwell News, 29 January 1868; New York Times, 16 February 1868; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 29 January 1868; Nonconformist, 1 February 1868; Barrett to McManus, 24 January 1868, ho 12/179/81780; Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century, 156; Mayne to Anderson, 27 January 1868, mepo 1/48. 10 For the three voluntary statements by English, 29, 30 January, 3 February 1868, see nli 7517, Larcom Papers. 11 Statements by Nicholas English, nli 7517; Illustrated London News, 15 February 1868; Hardy to Mayo, 14 April 1868, nli 11,189; Greenwood to Hardy, 14 April 1868. 12 Ferguson to Mayor of Birmingham, 25, 28 October 1867, ho 41/21; Ferguson to Mayo, 27 October 1867, nli 11,189; Ferguson to Hardy, 28 October 1867, h43 t501/270, Hardy Papers, sro; Daily Telegraph, 2, 19 December 1867; Rose, Manchester Martyrs, 63; S.L. Anderson to Mayo, 5 December 1867, nli 11,189; Report of Fred Williamson, 21 October 1868, ho 45/9349/25943a. 13 Lush to Hardy, 19 March 1868, ho 45/9349/25943a; Freeman’s Journal, 20 March 1868; New York Times, 18 March 1868; Irish Catholic Banner, 28 March 1868; Universe, 28 March 1868; Blackburn Standard, 25 March 1868. 14 Lush to Hardy, 19 March 1868, ho 45/9349/25943a; Griffiths to Hardy, 20 March 1868; Jones to Hardy, 21 March 1868; Lush to Hardy, 6 October 1868. 15 Report by Williamson, 21 October 1868, ho 45/9349/25943a; Gray to Bruce, 7 July 1870 ho 45/9349/25943a (this file contains the material on Melody, concluding with the newspaper interview). 16 Montreal Gazette, 7, 8, 10 April 1868; Monck to Monsell, 3 June 1868, nli 20,686, Monsell Papers; Globe (Toronto), 18 April, 8, 13 May 1868. 17 Keith Amos, Fenians in Australia 1865–1880 (Kensington, nsw, 1988), 22–3, 27, 29, 34–6, 39–40; Walter McGrath, “The Fenians in Australia,” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archeological Society 93 (1988): 45–54; C.M.H. Clark, A History of Australia, 6 vols (Melbourne, 1963–87), 4:251, 253–4; Delia Birchley, John McEnroe: Colonial Democrat (Blackburn, Victoria, 1986), 245; Edinburgh to Derby, 21 February 1868, 920 der (14), 102/10, Livro; Percival to Belmore, 3 April 1868, d3007/l/1/41, Belmore Papers, proni. 18 Birchley, John McEnroe, 248; Edinburgh to Derby, 21 February 1868, 920 der(14), 102/10, Livro; Creeny to Buchanan, 18 March 1868, Add. mss a/20/1046, ra; Belmore to Buckingham, 16 March 1868, Add. mss a/20/129; extracts from the diary of the Anglican Bishop of Sydney, Add. mss a/20/1045.

394

Notes to pages 190−7

19 Creeny to Buchanan, 18 March 1868, Add. mss a/20/1046, ra; Amos, Fenians in Australia, 45–9. 20 Creeny to Buchanan, 18 March 1868, Add. mss a/20/1046, ra; Edinburgh to Queen, 27 March 1868, Add. mss a/20/1281; Belmore to co, 28 March 1868, d3007/l/1/34, proni; Newry to Delane, 29 March 1868, Add. mss c/24/62, ra. 21 Amos, Fenians in Australia, 59–69; Clark, History of Australia, 4:256–60. 22 Birchley, John McEnroe, 247–8; Belmore to Magenis, 24 March 1868, d3007/ l/1/34, proni; Amos, Fenians in Australia, 71–3; Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 86–7; Belmore to Magenis, 19 April 1868, d3007/l/1/43, proni; Edinburgh to Belmore, 17 July 1868, d3007/l/1/76. 23 Buckingham to Belmore, 1 May 1868, d3007/l/1/56, proni; James Howard Harris, 3rd Earl of Malmesbury, Memoirs of an Ex-Minister: An Autobiography, 2 vols (London, 1884), 2:380; Derby Diaries, 25 April 1868, 920 der (15), Livro; Express, 25, 27 April 1868; Ashton-under-Lyne News, 2 May 1868; Bury Times, 2 May 1868. 24 Spectator, 2 May 1868; Montreal Gazette, 9 May 1868; Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century, 56; Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 87; J.R. Lewis, The Victorian Bar (London, 1982), 66–7; Anthony Mockler, Lions under the Throne (London, 1983), 203–4; Stanley Jackson, The Old Bailey (London, 1978), 57–8. 25 Greenwood to Hardy, 14 April 1868, nli 11,189; Spectator, 18 April 1868; Irish Catholic Banner, 22 February, 28 March 1868; Challinor, A Radical Lawyer in Victorian Britain, 240. 26 Montreal Gazette, 9 May 1868; Express, 22 April 1868. 27 Express, 22 April 1868; Old Bailey Sessions Papers, Sixth Session, 1867–1868, 486–501. 28 Old Bailey Sessions Papers, Sixth Session, 491–541. 29 Hardy to Queen, 2 May 1868, b24/80, ra; Express, 28 April 1868; Nonconformist, 29 April 1868; Northern Telegraphic News (Aberdeen), 2 May 1868; Challinor, A Radical Lawyer in Victorian Britain, 241; Jackson, The Old Bailey, 59. 30 Spectator, 2 May 1868; Lloyd’s Weekly, 3 May 1868; Montreal Gazette, 14, 11 May 1868; Nonconformist, 29 April 1868; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 30 April 1868; Express, 28 April 1868; Universe, 2 May 1868; Cork Examiner, 30 April 1868; Irish Catholic Banner, 2 May 1868. 31 Montreal Gazette, 14 May 1868; Everest to Belmore, 13 May 1868, d3007/ l/1/57, proni; Hardy to Queen, 2 May 1868, b24/80, ra; Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, 148–50, 179; Pattenden, English Criminal Appeals, 21.

Notes to pages 198−206

395

32 Hardy to Liddell, 3 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780; Glasgow Herald, 2 May 1868; Liddell to Editor of the Herald, 4 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780; Liddell to McHoul, 4 May 1868, ho 13/109; McHoul to Hardy, 5 May 1868; Morning Post, 5 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780; Bruce L. Kinzer, England’s Disgrace? J. S. Mill and the Irish Question (Toronto, 2001), 187. 33 Memorial in the matter of Michael Barrett, 7 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780. 34 Cockburn to Hardy, 7 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780; Liddell to Cockburn, 9 May 1868, ho 13/109; Cockburn to Liddell, 9 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780. 35 Bramwell to Liddell, 14 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780. 36 Everest to Belmore, 13 May 1868, d3007/l/1/57, proni; Northern Telegraphic News (Aberdeen), 16 May 1868; Irish Catholic Banner, 9, 16 May 1868; Universe, 16 May 1868; Irishman, 9 May 1868. 37 For the several depositions, see ho 12/179/81780; McCaul to Liddell, 17 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780; Poland to Liddell, 13 May 1868; Liddell to Cockburn, 15, 16 May 1868; Cockburn to Liddell, 16 May 1868. 38 Cockburn to Liddell, 16, 19 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780; Jonas to Everest, 17 May 1868; Lord Chief Justice’s Report, 19 May 1868. 39 Lord Chief Justice’s Report, 19 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780. 40 Liddell to Cockburn, 20 May 1868, ho 13/109; Baker Greene to Hardy, 22, 25 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780. 41 Bramwell to Hardy, 23, 25 May 1868, ho 12/179/81780; Glasgow Police Report, 6 June 1868; McCorry to Hardy, 25 May 1868; Irish Catholic Banner, 23 May 1868; Northern Telegraphic News, 16 May 1868; Lloyd’s Weekly, 31 May 1868; Nonconformist, 27 May 1868; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 28 May 1868; Irishman, 30 May 1868. 42 Stuart J. Reid, Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842–1885 (London, 1905), 131–2; Daily Telegraph, 27 May 1868; Lloyd’s Weekly, 31 May 1868. 43 Express, 26 May 1868; Lloyd’s Weekly, 31 May 1868; Reid, Memoirs of Wemyss Reid, 132; Blackburn Standard, 4 March, 3 June 1868; Cooper, Lesson of the Scaffold, 173–4, 3; Daily Telegraph, 27, 28 May 1868; Gatrell, Hanging Tree, 609, 46. 44 Clerkenwell News, 16, 24 December 1867, 10 January 1868; Daily Telegraph, 16, 23, 30 December 1867; Hardy to Mayo, 9 January 1868, nli 11,189; Hardy to Queen, 9 January 1868, d23/13, ra; Derby Diaries, 21 December 1867, 920 der (15), Livro; New York Times, 10, 14 January 1868. 45 New York Times, 14 January 1868; Illustrated London News, 18 January 1868; Clerkenwell News, 31 January 1868; Universe, 28 March 1868; Old Bailey Sessions Papers, Sixth Session, 1867–68, 542.

396

Notes to pages 207−12

46 Express, 1 May 1868; Old Bailey Sessions Papers, Sixth Session, 542–70; Spectator, 2 May 1868; Diary of Benjamin Moran, 29 April, 1 May 1868, Library of Congress, Washington, dc. 47 Greenwood to Liddell, 14 July 1868, ho 12/177/80110; Anderson Memorandum, 17 July 1868; Larcom to Ferguson, 25 June 1868, co 906/33; Wilson Patten to Liddell, 8 December 1868; Wetherall to Liddell, 10 March 1868. 48 For this definition of terrorism, see R.G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris, eds, Violence, Terrorism, and Justice (New York, 1991), 2; Bown, A Most Damnable Invention, 77; for the Luby quote, see Raymond Gillespie, ed., The Remaking of Modern Ireland 1750–1950: Beckett Prize Essays in Irish History (Dublin, 2004), 185.

chapter eight 1 John Bailey, ed., Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, 2 vols (London, 1927), 2:45; John Stuart Mill, England and Ireland (London, 1868), 21, 26–36; Dufferin to Abercorn, 18 February 1868, vr/199, Abercorn Papers, proni; Edinburgh Review 127:532–3. 2 Manning to Gladstone, 11 February 1868, bl Add. ms 44,249, Gladstone Papers; [Archbishop Manning], Ireland: A Letter to Earl Grey (London, 1868), 4–5, 40–1; Manning to Russell, 23 February 1868, na 30/22/16e, Russell Papers; Manning to Cullen, 14, 19 January 1868, 334/8/II, Cullen Correspondence, aad. 3 Montreal Gazette, 11 March 1868; Quarterly Review 124 (1868): 133–44; Blackwood’s Magazine 103:222, 225–6, 229–30, 241; Disraeli to Queen, 14 February 1868, b24/66, ra; Stanley to Disraeli, 18 February 1868, 920 der (15), 13/2/4, Livro; Richard Shannon, The Age of Disraeli (New York, 1992), 31. 4 New York Times, 9, 12, 16, 23 March 1868; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 215; R.A.J. Walling, ed., The Diaries of John Bright (London, 1930), 314; Cowley to Lyons, 26 February 1868, Box 178, Lyons Papers, wsro. 5 Shannon, Age of Disraeli, 32–3; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 425; Gathorne Hardy, Gathorne Hardy, 1:260–2; Claud Hamilton to Abercorn, 26 February 1868, vr/201, proni; Warren, Parliamentary History, 18:57–9, 63; Paul Smith, “Disraeli’s Politics,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (TRHS ), 5th ser., 37 (1987): 76. 6 Lambert’s “Confidential Memorandum,” 1 March 1868, 39/1, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl.

Notes to pages 213−16

397

7 Disraeli to Queen, 1 March 1868, a37/2, ra; 2 March, a37/5; 4 March, d23/27; Derby Diaries, 2, 3 March 1868, 920 der (15), Livro; Disraeli to Derby, 4 March 1868, 920 der (14), 146/4; Warren, Parliamentary History, 18:63–4. 8 Cullen to Leahy, 29 February 1868, nli m6008, Leahy Papers. 9 Grey to Queen, 5 March 1868, d23/29, ra; Mayo to Disraeli, 3 March [1868], 90/2, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Mayo to Abercorn, 4 March 1868, t2541/ vr85/59, Abercorn Papers, proni; Disraeli to Queen, 6 March 1868, d23/30, ra; Queen to Grey, 7 March 1868, d23/32; Grey to Queen, 7 March 1868, d23/33; Disraeli to Grey, 7 March 1868, d23/34; Queen to Prince of Wales, 9 March 1868, d23/37; Grey to Disraeli, 8 March 1868, 85/1, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Queen Victoria’s Journals, 30 March 1868, ra. 10 Disraeli to Queen, 11 March 1868, d23/41, ra; see the complete text of Mayo’s speech in vr/205, proni. 11 Derby Diaries, 10 March 1868, 920 der (15), Livro; Disraeli to Queen, 11 March 1868, d23/41, ra; Nonconformist, 7, 14 March 1868; Bury Times, 14 March 1868; Cork Examiner, 27, 29 February, 6, 12 March 1868; Freeman’s Journal, 11, 12 March 1868; Universe, 21 March 1868; Express, 11 March 1868; Spectator, 14 March 1868; Globe (Toronto), 30 March 1868; Punch, 21 March 1868. 12 Ryan to Commissioners of Police, 7 March 1868, nli 11,188, Mayo Papers; Leon O’Broin, Fenian Fever: An Anglo-American Dilemma (London, 1971), 213; Percival to Belmore, 3 April 1868, d3007/l/1/41, Belmore Papers, proni; Ferguson to Belmore, 19 May 1868, d3007/l/1/58. 13 Liddell to War Office, 21 March 1868, ho 41/22; Liddell to Forster, 23 March 1868; Liddell to Chief Constable of Hampshire, 23 March 1868; Home Office Circular, 31 March 1868, ho 103/16; Guardian, 29 April 1868; Nonconformist, 14 March 1868; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 12 March 1868; Punch, 1, 8 February 1868; Express, 30 June 1868; Everest to Belmore, 13 May 1868, d3007/l/I/57, proni. 14 Cork Examiner, 18 March 1868; New York Times, 13, 14 March 1868; Disraeli to Queen, 12 March 1868, d23/44, ra; Derby Diaries, 12 March 1868, 920 der (15), Livro; Kinzer, England’s Disgrace? 194–7; Freeman’s Journal, 16 March 1868; Disraeli to Queen, 13 March 1868, d23/45, ra; Rogers, Speeches of John Bright, 1:397, 405–6; Mayo to Abercorn, 14 March [1868], t2541/vr85/69, proni; Derby Diaries, 15 March 1868, 920 der (15), Livro. 15 Russell to Gladstone, 3, 10, 13 January 1868, bl Add. ms 44,294; Gladstone to Russell, 2, 4 January 1868, na 30/22/16e; Glyn to Gladstone, 29 December 1867, bl Add. ms 44,347; Palmer to Gladstone, 3 April 1868, bl Add.

398

16

17

18

19

20 21

Notes to pages 217−19 ms 44,296; Argyll to Gladstone, 21 December 1867, 3 February 1868, bl Add. ms 44,100. Manning to Gladstone, 11, 15 March 1868, bl Add. ms 44,249; Gladstone to Manning, 12 March 1868; Argyll to Gladstone, 21, 24 December 1867, bl Add. ms 44,100; MacColl to Gladstone, 19 September 1866, bl Add. ms 44,242; Moriarty to Monsell, 2 March 1868, bl Add. ms 44,152. Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), 28; P.M.H. Bell, Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales (London, 1969), 40–3, 69, 81; David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of the Empire (Cambridge, 1996), 83; Peter Marsh, ed., Conscience of the Victorian State (Syracuse, 1979), 84, 91, 108, 115; Donald Harmon Akenson, The Church of Ireland: Ecclesiastical Reform and Revolution, 1800–1885 (London, 1971), 232–4; MacColl to Gladstone, 8 May 1867, bl Add. ms 44,242; John D. Fair, “The Irish Disestablishment Conference of 1869,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26 (1975): 380; G.I.T. Machin, “Gladstone and Nonconformity in the 1860s: The Formation of an Alliance,” Historical Journal 17 (1974): 359; Palmer to Gladstone, 3 April 1868, bl Add. ms 44,296; Gladstone to Palmer, 4 April 1868; J.P. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867– 1875 (Cambridge, 1986), 262, 265–9. Chichester Fortescue Diaries, 14, 16, 19, 20, 24, 25 February, 10, 13, 16 March 1868, bl Add. ms 63,679b, Carlingford Papers; J.P. Ellens, Religious Routes to Gladstonian Liberalism: The Church Rate Conflict in England and Wales 1832– 1868 (University Park, 1994), 241, 247, 255; Olive Anderson, “Gladstone’s Abolition of Compulsory Church Rates: A Minor Political Myth and Its Historiographical Career,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 25 (1974): 185–98; Nonconformist, 11 September 1867; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 12 March 1868; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 214; Walling, Diaries of John Bright, 315; Gladstone to Fortescue, 11 December 1867, ddsh/c/1189/324, Strachie Papers, Somro. Derby Diaries, 16 March 1868, 920 der (15), Livro; Freeman’s Journal, 18 March 1868; Stanley to Disraeli, 15 March 1868, 920 der (15), 13/2/4, Livro; Niall Ferguson, The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (London, 1998), 844–5; New York Times, 27 March, 1 April 1868; Disraeli to Queen, 17 March 1868, d23/47, ra; Warren, Parliamentary History, 18:146; Grey to Queen, 18 March 1868, d23/50, ra; Grey to Disraeli, 18 March 1868, 85/1, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Disraeli to Grey, 19 March 1868, d23/51, ra. Disraeli to Cairns, 19 March 1868, “Secret,” na 30/51/1, Cairns Papers. Walling, Diaries of John Bright, 317; New York Times, 24 March 1868; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 216; Nonconformist, 21, 28 March, 8 April 1868; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 2, 9 April 1868; Auckland

Notes to pages 220−3

22

23

24

25

26 27

28

29

399

Chronicle, 10 April 1868; Montreal Gazette, 18 June 1868; Spectator, 21 March 1868; Express, 23 March, 4 June 1868; Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald, 11 April 1868. Nonconformist, 21 March, 8 April 1868; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 26 March 1868; Ashton-under-Lyne News, 28 March 1868; Lloyd’s Weekly, 26 April 1868; Montreal Gazette, 20 May, 18 June 1868; New York Times, 26 April, 16 May 1868; Irishman, 11 April 1868; Irish Catholic Banner, 4 July 1868. New York Times, 18 March 1868; Disraeli to Queen, 20 March 1868, d23/55, ra; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 216; Hardy to Disraeli, 5 April 1868, 98/3, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Disraeli to Queen, 23 March 1868, d23/58, ra. Grey to Queen, 24 March 1868, d23/59, ra; Queen to Disraeli, 24 March 1868, d23/61; New York Times, 28 March 1868; Shannon, Age of Disraeli, 39; Gathorne Hardy, Gathorne Hardy, 1:265; Walling, Diaries of John Bright, 318; Derby Diaries, 30 March 1868, 920 der (15), Livro; Grey to Queen, 25 March 1868, d23/64, ra; Stanley to Whiteside, 31 March 1868, 920 der (15), 13/2/5, Livro. Gathorne Hardy, Gathorne Hardy, 1:265–7; Percival to Belmore, 3 April 1868, d3007/l/1/41, proni; Pakington to Northcote, 5 April 1868, bl Add. ms 50,022, Iddesleigh Papers; New York Times, 4 April 1868; Globe (Toronto), 27 April 1868; Monck to Monsell, 5 April 1868, nli 20,686, Monsell Papers; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 217; Derby Diaries, 3 April 1868, 920 der (15), Livro; Grey to Queen, 31 March 1868, d23/69, ra. Mayo to Leahy, 31 March 1868, 39/1, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Warren, Parliamentary History, 18:147; New York Times, 26 April, 2 May 1868. Queen Victoria’s Journal, 5 April 1868, ra; Globe (Toronto), 1 May 1868; Blackburn Standard, 8 April 1868; Derby Diaries, 29, 30 April 1868, 920 der (15), Livro; Knatchbull-Hugessen to Gladstone, 1 May 1868, bl Add. ms 44,111; New York Times, 1, 17 May 1868. Disraeli to Queen, 20 April 1868, d24/24, ra; Disraeli to Queen, 22 April 1868, d24/29; Disraeli to Queen, 28 April 1868, d24/39; Disraeli to Queen, 1 May 1868, a37/17; Derby Diaries, 2, 4, 5, 10 May 1868, 920 der (15), Livro; Gathorne Hardy, Gathorne Hardy, 1:275–80; C. Grey to Queen, 6 May 1868, d24/46, ra; Mayo to Abercorn, 2 May 1868, t2541/vr85/77, proni; 5 May [1868], t2541/vr85/79; 8 May [1868], t2541/vr85/80; New York Times, 6 May 1868; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 219. Russell to Gladstone, 11 March 1868, bl Add. ms 44,294; New York Times, 18 April, 8, 19, 20, 24 May, 23 June 1868; Gathorne Hardy, Gathorne Hardy, 1:280–1; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 221; Irishman,

400

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33

34

35

36

Notes to pages 224−7 4 July 1868; Queen Victoria’s Journal, 7 April 1868, ra; Disraeli to Queen, 8 May 1868, a37/19, ra. Blackburn Standard, 29 April, 27 May, 3 June 1868; Ashton and Stalybridge Guardian, 18 April, 9 May 1868; Montreal Gazette, 9 May 1868; Guardian, 22 April 1868; Ashton-under-Lyne News, 25 April 1868; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 4 June 1868; New York Times, 5 May 1868; Express, 18, 22 June 1868; Nonconformist, 10 June, 8 July 1868. Kenneth Lunn, ed., Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society 1870–1914 (Folkestone, 1980), 92–3, 78; Nonconformist, 27 May 1868; Express, 18 May 1868; Ashton-under-Lyne News, 23 May 1868; Donald M. MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration: The Irish in Victorian Cumbria (Liverpool, 1998), 178. Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (New Brunswick, nj, 1980), 256–7; MacRaild, Irish Migrants to Modern Britain, 110–11; Lloyd’s Weekly, 7 June 1868; Fortnightly Review, n.s., 4 (1868): 411; Ashton-under-Lyne News, 16 May 1868. Taylor to Hardy, 25 January 1868, ho 45/7991; Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, 260; Smith to Hardy, 25 January 1868, ho 45/8110; John Singleton, “The Virgin Mary and Religious Conflict in Victorian Britain,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43 (1992): 25, 28; Bury Times, 21 May, 4 July 1868; Ashton and Stalybridge Guardian, 18, 25 April, 16 May 1868; Ashton-under-Lyne News, 18 April 1868; Richter, Riotous Victorians, 40–1; Nonconformist, 27 May 1868; Walter L. Arnstein, Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia, 1982), 95–8; T.W. Moody, Davitt and the Irish Revolution 1846–82 (Oxford, 1981), 52–3. Colin Holmes, Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London, 1978), 104; Ashton and Stalybridge Guardian, 16, 23 May, 20 June 1868; Christian’s Monthly News, 1 April 1868; Ashton-under-Lyne News, 23 May 1868. Richter, Riotous Victorians, 39–40; W.L. Arnstein, “The Murphy Riots: A Victorian Dilemma,” Victorian Studies 19 (1975): 19:59–64; Ferguson to Hilary, 27 March 1868, ho 41/22; Denbigh to Hardy, n.d. [April 1868], ho 45/7991; Hardy to Denbigh, 14 April 1868; Ashton-under-Lyne News, 2 May 1868; Liddell to Mayor of Stalybridge, 16 April 1868, ho 41/22; Liddell to Mayor of Ashton, 12, 30 May 1868; Ferguson to Winder, 8 July 1868; Welby to Inspector General (Ireland), 30 August 1868, ho 45/7991. C. Grey to Disraeli, 8 March 1868, 85/1, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Mayo to Abercorn, 11 March [1868], t2541/vr85/68, proni; 14 March [1868], t2541/ vr85/69; Mayo to Liddell, n.d. [April 1868], ha 43 t501/270, sro; Mayo to Disraeli, 20 April [1868], 90/3, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl.

Notes to pages 228−33

401

37 Mayo to Abercorn, 14 March [1868] t2541/vr85/69, proni; O’Broin, Fenian Fever, 234–5; New York Times, 15, 16, 17 April 1868; Mayo to Disraeli, 15 April [1868], 90/2, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Mayo to Hardy, n.d. [15 April 1868], ha 43 t501/270, sro; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 28 March 1868, Vic. Add. ms e/1, Cambridge Papers, ra; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 2, 7, 9 April 1868, bl Add. ms 42,825, Rose Papers. 38 Mayo to Disraeli, 20 April, 15 May [1868], 90/3, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Disraeli to Queen, 15 May 1868, a37/29, ra; Queen to Disraeli, 16 May 1868, a37/30; Cambridge to Queen, 21 April 1868, d24/26, ra; Mayo to Abercorn, 26 April [1868], t2541/vr85/73, proni; Lloyd’s Weekly, 19 April 1868; Punch, 2 May 1868; Freeman’s Journal, 24 April 1868; Globe (Toronto), 11 May 1868; Nonconformist, 22 April 1868. 39 King, The Judgment of Paris, 239; Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840–1870 (London, 2003), 26–7; Express, 18, 24, 28 July 1868; Hamilton to [Prince of Wales], 21 August 1868, d24/58, ra; Nonconformist, 26 August, 9 September 1868; English Independent and Church Advocate, 3, 10 September 1868. 40 De Ros to Abercorn, 20 August 1868, t2541/vr232, proni; Strathnairn to de Jarnac, 20 August 1868, bl Add. ms 42,825; Guardian, 26 August 1868; Nonconformist, 19 August 1868; Bury Times, 22 August 1868. 41 De Ros to Abercorn, 20 August 1868, t2541/vr232, proni; Memoranda, 3, 7 October, 1, 19 November 1868, nli 5965, S.L. Anderson Papers; Disraeli to Cairns, 11 August 1868, na 30/51/1; Hicks Beach to Chief Constable, Lancashire, 1 October 1868, ho 41/23; Express, 5 October 1868; Guardian, 18 November 1868; Buckingham to Belmore, 26 August 1868, d3007/l/85, proni; Mayo to Abercorn, 24 May, 1868, t2541/vr88, proni. 42 Stanley to Disraeli, 17 September 1868, 920 der (15), 13/2/4, Livro; Disraeli to Stanley, 21 September 1868, 920 der (15), 12/3/8; Lifford to Belmore, 28 July 1868, d3007/l/80, proni; Mayo to Disraeli, 18, 30 August, 17 September [1868], 90/3, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Reid, Cabinet Portraits, 104–6; Hanham, Elections and Party Management, 296–7; Memoranda, 30 November 1868, nli 5965. 43 H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1875–1898 (Oxford, 1995), 184.

chapter nine 1 Adderley to Belmore, 30 August 1868, d3007/l/1/86, Belmore Papers, proni; Disraeli to Queen, 21 August 1868, a37/49, ra; 31 August 1868, a37/50; Shannon, Age of Disraeli, 53; Disraeli to Hardy, 8 September 1868,

402

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3

4

5

6

7

Notes to pages 234−6 ha 43 t501/266, Hardy Papers, sro; Corry to Stanley, 22 September 1868, 920 der (15) 12/3/8, Livro. C. Grey to Disraeli, 10 November 1868, a37/64, ra; C. Grey to Queen, 1 October 1868, b24/135, ra; Disraeli to Stanley, 21 August 1868, 920 der (15), 12/3/8, Livro; Derby Diaries, 23 September 1869, 920 der (15); Stanley to Disraeli, 27 September, 11 November 1868, 920 der (15), 13/2/4; Disraeli to Stanley, 10 November 1868, 920 der (15), 12/3/8; Cairns to Disraeli, 17 September 1868, 91/1, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Picard, Victorian London, 40; Montreal Gazette, 13 July 1868. Blackburn Standard, 8, 15 July 1868; Ashton and Stalybridge Guardian, 27 June 1868; Disraeli to Queen, 27 September 1868, a37/56, ra; 28 October 1868, a37/62; Northcote to Queen, 30 October 1868, b24/140, ra; Shannon, Age of Disraeli, 57; Disraeli to Stanley, 21 August 1868, 920 der (15), 12/3/8, Livro; Queen Victoria’s Journal, 27 September, 23 November 1868, ra. Granville to Queen, 13 April 1868, d24/17, ra; H.C.G. Matthew, “Gladstone, Vaticanism and the Question of the East,” Studies in Church History 15 (1978): 428; John Brooke and Mary Sorenson, eds, Prime Ministers’ Papers: W. E. Gladstone III: Autobiographical Memoranda 1845–1866 (London, 1978), 246–8; Manning to Gladstone, 24, 28 March, 8 April 1868, bl Add. ms 44,249, Gladstone Papers; Clarendon to Gladstone, 18 June, 30 November 1868, bl Add. ms 44,133; Granville to Gladstone, 29 August 1868, bl Add. ms 44,165; Christian’s Monthly News, 1 September 1868; Watkin to Gladstone, 4 July 1868, bl Add. ms 44,337; Parry, Democracy and Religion, 272, 276; Brand to Gladstone, 1, 4 August 1868, bl Add. ms 44,194. Gladstone to Fortescue, 5 September 1868, ddsh c/1189/324, Strachie Papers, Somro; Bessborough to Gladstone, 28 October 1868, bl Add. ms 44,416; Argyll to Gladstone, 22, 23 October 1868, bl Add. ms 44,100; Russell to Gladstone, 8 November 1868, bl Add. ms 44,294; Gladstone to Russell, 12, 26 October 1868, na 30/22/16e, Russell Papers; Northcote to Gladstone, 1 November 1868, bl Add. ms 50,014, Iddesleigh Papers. Manning to Gladstone, 19 May 1868, bl Add. ms 44,249; Josef L. Altholz, “The Political Behavior of the English Catholics, 1850–1867,” Journal of British Studies 4 (1964): 102–3; Universe, 30 May, 4 July 1868; Vaughan to Cullen, 27 October 1868, 341/1/i, Cullen Correspondence, 1868, aad; Goss to Cooper, 30 August 1868, Goss Letterbooks, lro; L.W. Brady, T. P. O’Connor and the Liverpool Irish (London, 1983), 36; Jennifer F. Supple, “The Political Attitudes and Activities of Yorkshire Catholics, 1850–1900,” Northern History 22 (1986): 238–9; Fortescue to Gladstone, 29 August 1868, bl Add. ms 44,121. Cullen to Leahy, 25 March 1868, nli m6008, Leahy Papers; Redmond to Cullen, 5 February 1868, 334/1/I, Cullen Correspondence, aad; Cullen to

Notes to pages 237−9

8

9

10

11

403

Spalding, 29 February 1868, 33-0-11, Spalding Papers, aab; Manning to Gladstone, 8 April 1868, bl Add. ms 44,249; O’Day, Reactions to Irish Nationalism, 161; E.R. Norman, Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 1859–1873 (Ithaca, 1965), 268, 347–9; Moriarty to Monsell, 2 March 1868, bl Add. ms 44,152; Gray to Cullen, n.d. [March 1868], 341/2/I; Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:61–4; Bowen, Paul Cardinal Cullen, 194. Mayo to Disraeli, 12 August [1868], 90/3, Dep. Hughenden, Bodl; Strathnairn to Sligo, 13 November 1868, bl Add. ms 42,285, Rose Papers; MacEvilly to Cullen, 21 June, 5 October 1868, 1868, 334/8/I, Cullen Correspondence, 1868, aad; O’Brien to Cullen, 9 November; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 8 October 1868; Strathnairn to Kerrison, 11 November 1868, bl Add. ms 42,285; Strathnairn to Cambridge, 13, 21, 22 November, 5 December 1868; Strathnairn to Abercorn, 24 November 1868; Strathnairn to Countess Fitzwilliam, 24 November 1868; Norman, The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 349, 351; F.S.L. Lyons and R.J. Hawkins, Ireland under the Union: Varieties of Tension (Oxford, 1980), 120–3; O’Day, Reactions to Irish Nationalism, 163. Fortescue to Gladstone, 16 September 1868, bl Add. ms 44,121; Machin, Historical Journal 17:362; Harrison, Before the Socialists, 149, 152–3, 187–92; Hanham, Elections and Party Management, 334–8; Grey to Melly, 26 November 1868, bl Add. ms 44,416; Jones to Howell, 18 November 1868, Howell Collection, Bishopsgate Library; Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics 1819–1869 (Oxford, 2003), 238–9, 243–6, 250–1; North London Advertiser, 11 August, 8 September 1868. Matthew Cragoe, Culture, Politics, and National Identity in Wales 1832–1886 (Oxford, 2004), 20–1, 28, 41–3, 47, 161, 66, 174, 182, 36; Ieuan Gwnynedd Jones, “The Liberation Society and Welsh Politics,” Welsh History Review 1 (1960–63): 193–224; Kenneth Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 21, 23–4. D.W. Bebbington, “Gladstone and the Nonconformists: A Religious Affinity in Politics,” Studies in Church History 18 (1982): 369–82; Glanmor Williams, Merthyr Politics: The Making of a Working Class Tradition (Cardiff, 1966), 48–9, 55–6; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, “Dr. Thomas Price and the Election of 1868 in Merthyr Tydvil: A Study in Nonconformity Politics,” Welsh History Review 2 (1964–65): 147–72, 251–70; Nonconformist, 2 December 1868; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, “The Election of 1868 in Merthyr Tydvil: A Study in the Politics of an Industrial Borough in the Mid-nineteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History 33 (1961): 278, 281, 285; Cragoe, Culture, Politics and National Identity, 32; Jane Morgan, “Denbighshire’s Annus Mirabilis: The Borough and the County Elections of 1868,” Welsh History Review 7 (1974–75): 63–86; Bruce to Monsell, 5 November 1868, nli 20,682, Emly Papers; Bruce to de Grey,

404

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15

16

Notes to pages 239−41 30 October, 18 November 1868, bl Add. ms 43,534, Ripon Papers; Matthew Cragoe, “Welsh Electioneering and the Purpose of Parliament: ‘From Radicalism to Nationalism’ Reconsidered,” Parliamentary History 17 (1998): 118–28; R. Merfyn Jones, “Beyond Identity? The Reconstruction of the Welsh,” Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 338–9. Hartington’s reaction to the early canvass, 24 July 1868, 340.354–67, Devonshire Papers, cha; Brand to Hartington, 15 August 1868, 340.370; Hartington to Devonshire, 21 November 1868, 340.383; Brand to Hartington, 22 November 1868, 340.385; Gladstone to Russell, 26 October 1868, na 30/22/16e; Hornby to Gladstone, 30 October 1868, bl Add. ms 44,416, Gladstone Papers; Billson to Gladstone, 3, 11 November 1868; Milner Gibson to Gladstone, 19, 26 November 1868; Blundell to Gladstone, 25 November 1868; Gladstone to Billson, 28 November 1868; Brand to Gladstone, 28 November 1868, bl Add. ms 44,194; Cardwell to Gladstone, 27 November 1868, bl Add. ms 44,118; Nonconformist, 25 November 1868. R.L. Greenall, “Popular Conservatism in Salford 1868–1886,” Northern History 9 (1972): 131; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 19, 26 November 1868; Bury Times, 5 December 1868; North London Advertiser, 1 December 1868. K. Theodore Hoppen, “The Franchise and Electoral Politics in England and Ireland 1832–1885,” History 70:216; Hanham, Elections and Party Management, 106; Lunn, Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities, 94; Greenall, Northern History 9:127, 130–2, 135; Kirk, Growth of Working Class Reformism, 336–7; Ashtonunder-Lyne News, 28 November 1868; P.F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971), 31, 37; Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, 261; Phillips, Sectarian Spirit, 134–5, 138–9; see also J.C. Lowe, “The Tory Triumph of 1868 in Blackburn and in Lancashire,” Historical Journal 16 (1973): 733–48; John Vincent, “The Effect of the Second Reform Act in Lancashire,” Historical Journal 11 (1968): 84–94; Bright to Gladstone, 27 November 1868, bl Add. ms 44,112. Shannon, Age of Disraeli, 73; Stanley to Derby, 24 November 1868, 920 der (15), 13/2/4, Livro; 28, 30 November 1868, 920 der (15), 13/2/3; Disraeli to Derby, 2 December 1868, 920 der (14), 146/4; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 227. Argyll to Dufferin, 9 December 1868, d1071/h/b/c/95/28, Dufferin Papers, proni; Derby Diaries, 6, 8 December 1868, 920 der (15), Livro; John Brooke and Mary Sorenson, eds, Prime Ministers’ Papers: W. E. Gladstone IV: Autobiographical Memoranda 1868–1894 (London, 1981), 1–5; Gladstone to Hartington, 5 December 1868, 340.386, cha; Granville to Hartington, 5 December 1868, 340.387; Hartington to Devonshire, 7 December 1868,

Notes to pages 242−5

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18

19

20

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340.388; 8 December 1868, 340.390; 26 January 1869, 340.408; 25 February 1869, 340.417; Gladstone to Halifax, 7 December 1868, bl Add. ms 44,184; Halifax to Gladstone, 10, 15, 16 December 1868; Fortescue to Gladstone, [9 December 1868], bl Add. ms 44,121; Parry, Democracy and Religion, 278–9; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 227-8; Bright to Gladstone, 27 November 1868, bl Add. ms 44,112; Walling, Diaries of John Bright, 332; Guardian, 14 December 1868. Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, 2:65; Letters of the Rt. Hon. Henry Austin Bruce G.C.B. Lord Aberdare of Duffryn, 2 vols (Oxford, 1902), 1:1, 220–4, 226–8, 233–4, 251–2, 258; Bruce to de Grey, 5 December 1868, 8 January 1869, bl Add. ms 43,534; Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 145–9; O’Leary, Immigration and Integration, 167–8, 173; Letters of Aberdare, 1:220–4, 226–8, 251–2, 258; Bruce to de Grey, 12 September 1865, bl Add. ms 43,534. Roundell to O’Hagan, 27 September 1869, d2777/9/96/9, O’Hagan Papers, proni; Moriarty to Gladstone, 28 November 1868, bl Add. ms 44,416; Macaulay, Dr. Russell of Maynooth, 275–7; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 228; Litvack and Graham, Ireland and Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 77, 79, 81; Queen to Gladstone, 10 December 1868, a38/4, ra; Gladstone to Queen, 10 December 1868, a38/5; Grey to Queen, 11 December 1868, a38/6. Chichester Fortescue Diaries, 7 December 1868, bl Add. ms 63,679b, Carlingford Papers; Clarendon to Gladstone, 7 December 1868, bl Add. ms 44,133; Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:64; Manchester Guardian, 21 September 1867; John Biggs-Davidson and George Chowdharay-Best, The Cross of St. Patrick: The Catholic Unionist Tradition in Ireland (Bourne End, 1984), 190–1; Spencer to Gladstone, 9 August 1869, bl kp4, Spencer Papers; Clarendon to Gladstone, 7 December 1868, bl Add. ms 44,133; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 229; Chichester Fortescue Diaries, 10 December 1868, bl Add. ms 63,679b; Argyll to Dufferin, 9 December 1868, d1671/h/b/ c/95/28, proni; Peter Gordon, ed., The Red Earl: The Papers of the Fifth Earl Spencer 1835–1910 (Northampton, 1981), 3–9; Granville to Russell, 5 January 1869, na 30/29/79, Granville Papers; Russell, Portraits of the Seventies, 264–6; Guardian, 14 December 1868. Fortescue to Gladstone, 7 January 1869, bl Add. ms 44,121; Fortescue to Spencer, 22 February 1869, bl kp21; Fortescue to Spencer, 12, 14, 15 May 1869, bl kp22; Spencer to Gladstone, 25 May [1869], bl kp4; Monsell to Gladstone, 13 May [1869], nli 17,871, Teeling Papers. Derby Diaries, 28 December 1868, 920 der (15), Livro; Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century, 108; Bury Times, 7 November 1868; C. Grey to

406

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23

24

25

26

27

Notes to pages 245−8 Bruce, 28 December 1868, b24/160, ra; Bruce to C. Grey, 28 December 1868, b24/161. Bruce to C. Grey, 28 December 1868, b24/161, ra; Bruce to Russell, 1 January 1868[9], na 30/22/16e; Bruce to Queen, 2 February 1869, b25/6, ra; Henderson’s appointment, 9 February 1869, ho 45/8747; Henderson’s Police Orders, 15 May, 7 June, 27 July 1869, mepo 7/31; Williamson Memoranda, 6 July 1870, 20 November 1871, mepo 2/134; Howard Memorandum, 20 July 1871; Police Memorandum, 12 September 1877. Radzinowicz and Hood, History of English Criminal Law, 5:114–15, 491, 501; George Rudé, “Protest and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain,” Albion 5 (1973): 12–13; Patricia O’Brien, “Crime and Punishment as Historical Problem,” Journal of Social History 11 (1978): 509; “Report of the Select Committee (Lords) on Prison Discipline,” Parl. Papers 9 (1863): 63; Edinburgh Review 117 (1863): 125, 130–1; Quarterly Review 113 (1863): 146–7, 149. Quarterly Review 30 (1824): 410; Parl. Papers 9 (1863): iv, 20–2, 44–9, 55, 63, 78, 85, 350, 467; H. Heather Tomlinson, “‘Prison Palaces’: A Re-appraisal of Early Victorian Prisons, 1835–77,” Bulletin of Historical Research 51 (1978): 68; Michael Ignatieff, Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (New York, 1978), 175; Picard, Victorian London, 280; Valerie Johnston, Diet in Workhouses and Prisons 1835–1895 (New York, 1985), 45. U.R.Q. Henriques, “The Rise and Decline of the Separate System in Prison Discipline,” Past and Present 54 (1972): 64, 20; William James Forsythe, The Reform of Prisoners 1830–1900 (London, 1987), 8–12, 16–17, 19; Janet Semple, Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary (Oxford, 1993), 34, 130; R.A. Burchell, ed., The End of Anglo-America: Historical Essays in the Study of Cultural Divergence (Manchester, 1991), 98; Anthony Babington, The English Bastille: A History of Newgate Gaol and Prison Conditions in Britain 1188–1902 (London, 1971), 190–1; George Laval Chesterton, Revelations of Prison Life, 3rd ed. rev. (London, 1857), 196–201; Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century, 15. Quarterly Review 30:434–5; Sean McConville, A History of English Prison Administration, Volume 1: 1750–1877 (London, 1981), 122, 136–7, 142, 144, 168; Hepworth Dixon, The London Prisons (London, 1850), 133, 141, 143; Philip Priestly, Victorian Prison Lives: English Prison Biography 1830–1914 (London, 1985), 5; Giles Playfair, The Punitive Obsession: An Unvarnished History of the English Prison System (London, 1971), 31–2, 41; Semple, Bentham’s Prison, 245–7. Picard, Victorian London, 276–7; Dixon, London Prisons, 147–52; Babington, English Bastille, 191–5; John A. Slack, “Deterrence and Reformation in Early

Notes to pages 249−51

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31 32

407

Victorian Social Policy: The Case of Parkhurst Prison, 1838–1864,” Historical Reflections 6 (1979): 393; Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York, 1995), 101; Joseph Adshead, Prisons and Prisoners (London, 1845), 19, 232–6; Allan Brodie, Jane Croom, and James Davis, “Convict Prisons,” Prison Service Journal 121 (1999): 29–33; Playfair, Punitive Obsession, 60, 69; Radzinowicz and Hood, History of English Criminal Law, 5:490–1, 497. Henriques, Past and Present 54:84–7; McConville, History of English Prison Administration, 1:170, 208–9, 216–17; Ian O’Donnell and Finbarr MacAuley, eds, Criminal Justice History: Themes and Controversies from Pre-Independence Ireland (Dublin, 2003), 188–9, 197; J.E. Thomas, The English Prison Officer since 1850: A Study in Conflict (London, 1972), 11, 15–17; Ignatieff, Just Measure of Pain, 188, 203; Henry Heaney, “Ireland’s Penitentiary 1820–1831: An Experiment That Failed,” Studia Hibernica 14 (1974): 28–39; David F. Smith, “Scottish Prisons under the General Board of Directors, 1840–1861,” Albion 15 (1983): 287–312; Playfair, Punitive Obsession, 64–5, 69; Picard, Victorian London, 279; Babington, English Bastille, 202–3; Morris and Rothman, Oxford History of the Prison, 102–3. Edmund Du Cane, The Punishment and Prevention of Crime (London, 1885), 1–2, 154, 163–4, 168; Thomas, English Prison Officer,19; Tomlinson, Bulletin of Historical Research 51:69–70; Forsythe, Reform of Prisoners, 194; Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 108; Playfair, Punitive Obsession, 120–1. Babington, English Bastille, 222–3; Du Cane, Punishment and Prevention, 178– 80; Priestly, Victorian Prison Lives, 29, 131–5; Brodie, Croom, and Davis, Prison Service Journal 12:31; Johnston, Diet in Workhouses and Prisons, 56, 215; “Report of the Directors of Convict Prisons,” Parl. Papers 36 (1867): 7–8, 112; 38 (1870): 132, 237, 11; Commonwealth, 21 July 1866; Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 122–5. See Jean-Claude Vimont, La prison politique en France: Genèse d’un mode d’incarcération spécifique XVIIIe–XXe siècles (Paris, 1993). Barton L. Ingraham, Political Crime in Europe: A Comparative Study of France, Germany, and England (Berkeley, 1979), 25, 91, 115–16, 161, 164; Radzinowicz and Hood, History of English Criminal Law, 5:404–7; Michael von Tangen Page, Prisons, Peace and Terrorism: Penal Policy in the Reduction of Political Violence in Northern Ireland, Italy and the Spanish Basque Country 1968–97 (New York, 1998), 28; Parl. Papers 38 (1840): 615; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 50 (1839): 584; John Saville, Ernest Jones: Chartist Selections from the Writings and Speeches of Ernest Jones with Introduction and Notes (London, 1953), 33–4; Christopher Godfrey, “The Chartist Prisoners, 1839–41,” International Review of Social History 24 (1979): 189–236.

408

Notes to pages 252−7

33 Charles Richard Sanders, gen. ed., Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, 34 vols (Durham, 1970), 23:36, 146, 150; Diary of John Martin, d560, proni; Grey to Dennison, June 1849, co 904/9; Sean McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1848–1922: Theatres of War (London, 2003), 48–70; Blanche M. Touhill, William Smith O’Brien and His Irish Revolutionary Companions in Penal Exile (Columbia, mo, 1981), 62, 65–6, 193, 209. 34 McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 142, 166–7; Wodehouse Memorandum, 13 December 1865, nli 7687, Larcom Papers; Larcom to Waddington, 6 February 1866; Mayo to Liddell, 9 September 1867, ho 45/9329/19451. 35 Gambier to Waddington, 1 September 1866, ho 45/9329/19451; Larcom to Waddington, 11 October 1866; Henderson to Waddington, 29 January, 18 April, 7 May 1866; Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 126–7; Baring to Henderson, 19 March 1866, ho 22/14; Henderson to Liddell, 13 November 1867, ho 45/9329/19461; Fagan to Liddell, 31 August, 4 September 1867; Hardy to Mayo, 15 October 1867, nli 11,189, Mayo Papers; Litvack and Graham, Ireland and Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 153; Amos, Fenians in Australia, 79–86; C.W. Sullivan III, ed., Fenian Diary: Denis B. Cashman on Board the Hougoumont 1867–1868 (Dublin, 2001), 73, 136–7. 36 Irishman, 13, 20 January, 10 February, 23 June, 21 July 1866. 37 Irishman, 10 February 1866; Manchester Guardian, 10 October 1866. 38 Irishman, 3 November 1866; Manchester Guardian, 10 October 1866; Saville, Ernest Jones, 33–4; Commonwealth, 20 October 1866. 39 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 2 June 1867; Daily Telegraph, 27, 28, 30 May, 13, 17 September 1867; Nonconformist, 29 May 1867; Punch, 8 June, 29 September 1867; Mayo to Derby, 26 August 1867, 920 der (14), 155/4, Livro. 40 McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 142; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 250; Waddington to Henderson, 27 September 1866, ho 22/15; McConville, History of English Prison Administration, 1:317–18; Ferguson to C. Mulcahy, 16 October 1867, ho 13/109; Journal of Governor of Portland Prison, 27 October, 2 August, 17 September, 4, 11, 22, 25 November, 20, 21, 25 December 1866, 2, 7, 14 January, 20 February 1867, pcom 2/361. 41 Frank Henderson, ed., Six Years in the Prisons of England by a Merchant (London, 1869), 110–11, 165–6, 212; McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 177; Daily Telegraph, 17 April 1867; Commonwealth, 21 July 1866; Golman and Kunina, Ireland and the Irish Question, 149. 42 Monsell to Walpole, 22 April 1867, ho 45/9329/19461; Parl. Deb., 3rd ser., 185:745, 1954, 1987, 1990; 186:1945–52, 1987–91; Journal of Governor of Portland, 20, 21, 22 May 1867, pcom 2/362. 43 Irish Catholic Banner, 7, 14 March 1868; Irishman, 24 January, 7 March, 18, 25 April, 27 June, 4 July, 12, 26 September, 3,10, 17 October 1868; Freeman’s

Notes to pages 258−63

409

Journal, 7 April 1868; Cork Examiner, 23 March, 25 April 1868; Maurice Johnston, “The Fenian Amnesty Movement 1868–1879” (ma thesis, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, 1980), 20, 83, 85, 91; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 165. 44 Manchester Guardian, 26 June 1867; Lloyd’s Weekly, 17 March 1867; Economist, 12 October 1867; Governor’s Report, Portland, 10 January 1868, Parl. Papers 34 (1867): 607; Journal of Governor of Chatham Prison, 3, 6, 7, 11 March, 20, 25, 27 July, 2, 6, 19, 22, 24, 25 August, 2, 6 September 1868, pcom 2/429; Diary of Benjamin Moran, 3 November 1868, Library of Congress. 45 ho 45/9323/17577.

chapter ten 1 H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (New York, 1988), 168; Clarendon to Odo Russell, 14 December 1868, fo 918/1, Odo Russell Papers; Peter Marsh, ed., The Conscience of the Victorian State (Syracuse, 1979), 83; Diary of Benjamin Moran, 9 December 1868, Library of Congress; Derby to Grey, 27 April 1867, a35/61, ra. 2 Roundell to O’Hagan, 27 September 1869, d2777/9/96/2, proni, O’Hagan Papers; Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874, 192; John Vincent, “Gladstone and Ireland,” Proceedings of the British Academy 6 (1977): 194–8, 200–1; Jenkins, Gladstone, 279–81; Manchester Guardian, 6 April 1866; Lionel A. Tollemache, Talks with Mr. Gladstone (London, 1901), 93; D.M. Schreuder, “Gladstone and Italian Unification, 1848–70: The Making of a Liberal?” English Historical Review 85 (1970): 477, 482–3. 3 Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874, 178; Clarendon to Russell, 26 December 1868, na 30/22/16e, Russell Papers; Clarendon to Odo Russell, 14 December 1868, 11, 25 January 1869, fo 918/1; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 213; Parry, Democracy and Religion, 135–6; Patrick J. O’Farrell, Ireland’s English Question: Anglo-Irish Relations 1534–1970 (London, 1971), 157. 4 Memoranda, 14, 16 December 1868, nli 5965, S.L. Anderson Papers; Fortescue to Spencer, 5 January 1869, bl kp21, Spencer Papers; Maguire to Gladstone, 29 December 1868; Gladstone to Spencer, 1 January 1869, bl kp4; Fenian Return, Fenian Papers, 5246r, nai. 5 Spencer to Sullivan, 3 January 1869, bl kp93; Sullivan to Spencer, 6 January 1869; Spencer to O’Hagan 5, 12 January 1869, mic 562/22, O’Hagan Papers, proni; O’Hagan to Spencer, 9 January 1869; Fortescue to Spencer, 5 January 1869, bl kp21; Spencer Memorandum, 31 January 1869, mic 562/22. 6 Sullivan to Spencer, 5, 6 January 1869, bl kp93; Spencer to Bruce, 1 February 1869, bl kp68; Monsell to Granville, 7 January 1869, ddsh c1189 322,

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12

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Notes to pages 263−7 Strachie Papers, Somro; Spencer Memorandum, 24 January 1869, bl kp95; O’Hagan to Spencer, 3 February 1869, nli 17, 873, Teeling Papers; Dufferin to Argyll, 11 January 1869, d1071/h/b/c/95/30, Dufferin Papers, proni; Dufferin to Russell, 19 January 1869, pro 30/22/16f. Memoranda, 25 January 1869, nli 5966; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 165; Waterford and Galway petitions in support of amnesty, ho 45/9329/19461; Peter H. Merkl, ed., Political Violence and Terror: Motifs and Motivations (Berkeley, 1986), 30; Leo, “Influence of Fenians and Their Press,” 162; Spencer Memorandum, 24 January 1869, bl kp95; Spencer to Bruce, 25 January, 1 February 1869, bl kp68. Fortescue to Bruce, 1 February 1869, bl Add. ms 44,086, Gladstone Papers; Bruce to Spencer, 17, 21, 26 January 1869, bl kp68; Kimberley to Spencer, 12 January, 3 February 1869, bl kp70. Bruce to Spencer, 2 February 1869, bl kp68; Bruce to Fortescue, 28 January, 2 February 1869, ddsh c/1189 322, Somro; Fortescue to Spencer, 3, 10 February 1869, bl kp21; Spencer to Fortescue, 11 February 1869; Fortescue to Spencer, 2 March 1869; Bruce to Spencer, 11 February, 5 March 1869, bl kp68. Nonconformist, 23 September 1868; Granville to Gladstone, 25 November 1868, bl Add. ms 44,165, Gladstone Papers; H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1875– 1898 (Oxford, 1995), 87; Parry, Democracy and Religion, 177; Queen Victoria’s Journal, 13, 30 December 1868, ra. Brooke and Sorenson, W. E. Gladstone III, 4–6; C. Grey to Queen, 11 December 1868, a38/6, ra; Gladstone to Queen, 29 December 1868, a38/20; Gladstone to Russell, 27 December 1868, na 30/22/16e; Chichester Fortescue Diaries, 27, 28, 29 December 1868, bl Add. ms 63,679a, Carlingford Papers; Jenkins, Gladstone, 294–5; Manning to Gladstone, 4 December 1868, bl Add. ms 44,249; J.C. Beckett, “Gladstone, Queen Victoria and the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, 1868–9,” Irish Historical Studies 13 (1962–63): 38–47; Queen to Gladstone, 31 January 1869, d25/9, ra; Queen Victoria’s Journal, 13 December 1868, ra; Ralph Nevill, The Life and Letters of Lady Dorothy Nevill (London, 1919), 161. Gordon, Red Earl, 75; Akenson, Church of Ireland, 238; Gladstone to Fortescue, 5 February 1869, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Cullen to Spalding, 12 December 1868, 33-o-13, Spalding Papers, aab; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 14 January 1869; Clarendon to Gladstone, 16 January 1869, ms Clar. Dep. (Clarendon Papers) c501, Bodl; Clarendon to Odo Russell, 25 January 1869, fo 981/1. Clarendon to Odo Russell, 22 February, 8 March 1869, fo 918/1; Odo Russell to Clarendon, 24 February 1869, ms Clar. Dep. c475, Bodl; Spencer to

Notes to pages 267−71

14 15

16

17

18

19

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Fortescue, 11 February 1869, bl kp21; Fortescue to Spencer, 13 February 1869; Gordon, Red Earl, 76; Cullen to Gladstone, 11 March 1869, bl Add. ms 44,419. Gladstone to Cullen, 13 March 1869, bl Add. ms 44,419; Quinn, Patronage and Piety, 19–20; Quarterly Review 127 (1869): 279; Punch, 3 April 1869. Gladstone to Spencer, 23 April 1869, bl kp4; Northcote to Disraeli, 7 April 1869, bl Add. ms 50,016, Iddesleigh Papers; Disraeli to Cairns, 27 June 1869, na 30/51/1, Cairns Papers; Shannon, Age of Disraeli, 87; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 233; G. Shawe-Lefebre, Baron Eversley, Gladstone and Ireland: The Irish Policy of Parliament from 1850–1894 (London, 1912), 30–1; Punch, 3 April 1869; Cullen to Spalding, 22 May 1869, 36a-e-19, aab; Clarendon to Lyons, 9 June 1869, Box 177, Lyons Papers, wsro. Clarendon to Odo Russell, 22 March 1869, fo 918/1; Kimberley to de Grey, 7 June 1869, bl Add. ms 43,522, Ripon Papers; C. Grey to Archbishop of Canterbury, 4 June 1869, d26/16, ra; Queen to Derby, 7 June 1869, d26/22; Clarendon to Lyons, 5, 30 June, 10, 24 July 1869, Box 177, Lyons Papers, wsro; Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, 2:73; Granville to Queen, 15 June 1869, d26/39, ra; Bell, Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales, 151–5; Brian Jenkins, Sir William Gregory of Coole: The Biography of an Anglo-Irishman (Gerrards Cross, 1986), 189; Cullen to Gladstone, 14 July 1869, bl Add. ms 44,421; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 239; Brooke and Sorenson, W. E. Gladstone IV, 6–16; Eversley, Gladstone and Ireland, 35–8; Quarterly Review 127 (1869): 494–7; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 164; Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel, 4. C. Grey to Gladstone, 26 March 1869, d25/57, ra; Argyll to O’Hagan, 25 March 1869, d2777/9/19/1, O’Hagan Papers, proni; O’Hagan to Spencer, 26 March 1869, mic 562/22, O’Hagan Papers, proni; Fortescue to Spencer, 23 March 1869, bl kp22; Irishman, 5 December 1868; Cork Examiner, 23 January 1869; Spencer to O’Hagan, 5, 12 January 1869, mic 562/22, O’Hagan Papers, proni; Guardian, 5 May 1869; C. Grey to Queen, 3 May 1869, d26/4, ra; Spencer to Fortescue, 29 April 1869, bl kp22; Spencer to Fortescue, 30 April 1869, ddsh c/1189 325, Somro; Gladstone to Queen, 30 April 1869, d25/75, ra; Gladstone to Queen, 1 May 1869, d26/2; Gladstone to Queen, 4 May 1869, d26/5; Gladstone to Queen, 11 May 1869, d26/9. Gladstone to Queen, 11 May 1869, d26/9, ra; Gladstone to Spencer, 28 March 1869, bl kp4; Spencer to Gladstone, 30 March 1869; Spencer to O’Hagan, 1 April 1869, mic 562/22, proni; Gladstone to C. Grey, 28 March 1869, a38/58, ra; Burke to Spencer, 28 July 1869, bl kp99; Gladstone to Queen, 1 May 1869, d26/2 ra. Sullivan to Spencer, 30 March 1869, bl kp93; Spencer to Gladstone, 30 March 1869, bl kp4; Moriarty to Fortescue, 2 April 1869, bl kp22;

412

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Notes to pages 272−4 Fortescue to Spencer, 27 July 1869, bl kp23; Memoranda, 13 March, 6, 27 May, 29 July 1869, nli 5966; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 166; Spencer to Bruce, 16 March 1869, bl kp68; Bruce to Spencer, 19 March, 3 April, 14 May, 4 June 1869; Spencer to Fortescue, 4 May 1869, bl kp22; Fortescue to Spencer, 5 May 1869; Fortescue to Spencer, 27 July 1869, bl kp23. Comerford, Fenians in Context, 170; Spencer to Gladstone, 30 March 1869, d25/59, ra; Maurice Johnston, “The Fenian Amnesty Movement 1868–1879” (ma thesis, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, 1980), 16; McBride, Images, Icons and the Irish Nationalist Imagination, 31; Swift and Gilley, Irish in Britain, 188; O’Leary, Immigration and Integration, 254; Ponsonby to Liddell, 6 March 1869, ho 45/9329/19461; O’Hagan to Spencer, 2 March 1869, mic 562/22, proni; Bruce to Fortescue, 28 January 1869, ddsh c/1189 322, Somro; McConville, History of English Prison Administration, 1:431–2; Radzinowicz and Hood, History of English Criminal Law, 5:527–8; Quarterly Review 127:282; Christian’s Monthly News, 1 October 1868. Matthews to Bruce, 16, 21 April 1869, ho 45/9329/19461; Fortescue to Liddell, 27 April 1869; Devoy’s Petition, n.d. [April] 1869, ho 12/173/78167; Liddell Minute, 1 May 1869; R. Anderson Memorandum, 22 May 1869, ho 45/9329/19461; Liddell to Clifton, 25 May 1869; Du Cane to Bruce, 29 May 1869; Pigott, Personal Recollections, 316–17; Report of Medical Officer, Chatham, House of Commons, 38 (1870): 239. Comerford, Fenians in Context, 170; English Independent and Free Church Advocate, 18 March 1869; Spencer to Fortescue, 15 March 1869, bl kp21; Fortescue to Spencer, 16 March, 13 April 1869, bl kp22; Argyll to Dufferin, 12 January 1869, d1071/h/b/c/95/31, Dufferin Papers, proni; Spencer to Gladstone, 30 March 1869, bl kp4; Spencer to Fortescue, 1 May 1869, bl kp22; Dasent, Delane, 2:240; Argyll to Dufferin, 19 January 1869, d1071/ h/b/c/95/33, proni; Guardian, 5 May 1869; Gladstone to Queen, 30 April 1869, d25/75, ra; C. Grey to Queen, 3 May 1869, d26/4, ra; Spencer to Burke, 31 July 1869, Box 1, Thomas H. Burke Papers, nai; A.C. Murray, “Agrarian Violence and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Ireland: The Myth of Ribbonism,” Irish Economic and Social History 13 (1986): 72. Spencer to Fortescue, 1 May 1869, bl kp22; Strathnairn to Spencer, 23 March 1869, bl Add. ms 42,825, Rose Papers; Spencer to Fortescue, 15 March 1869, bl kp21; Spencer to Burke, 26 July 1869, Box 1, Burke Papers, ina; Burke to Spencer, 28 July 1869, bl kp99; Spencer to Fortescue, 2, 7 May 1869, bl kp93. Spencer to Fortescue, 2, 7 May 1869, bl kp22; Fortescue to Spencer, 29 April, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8 May 1869; Richter, Riotous Victorians, 45–6; Liddell to Clerk to Tynemouth Magistrates, 27, 30 March, 2 April 1869, ho 45/7991;

Notes to pages 275−9

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26

27

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29 30

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Bruce Minute, 2 April 1869; Home Office to Clerks to Sandbach Justices, 29 May 1869. C. Grey to Queen, 23 April 1869, d25/67, ra; Spencer to Sullivan, 15 March 1869, bl kp93; Spencer to Fortescue, 29 April, 1869, bl kp22; Spencer to O’Hagan, 30 April 1869, mic 562/22, proni; Spencer to Fortescue, 1 May 1869, bl kp22; Fortescue to Burke, n.d. [June 1869], Box 1, Burke Papers, ina; Spencer to Burke, 20 June 1869; Spencer to O’Hagan, 19 June 1869, mic 562/22; O’Hagan to Spencer, 21 June 1869; Spencer to Burke, 5, 9, 13 July 1869, Box 1, Burke Papers; Burke to Spencer, 14, 16 July, 29 September 1869, bl kp99. Alexander and O’Day, Ireland’s Terrorist Dilemma, 20; Norman, Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 127; O Fiaich, Irish Ecclesiastical Record 109:94–5; Brady, Interpreting Irish History, 117; Spencer to Gladstone, 30 March 1869, d25/59, ra; Cullen to Monsell, 14, 15 March 1869, nli 19,337, Emly Papers; Cullen to Leahy, 7 April 1869, nli m6009, Leahy Papers; Leahy to Cullen, 4 April 1869, 341/8/I, Cullen Correspondence, aad; Nulty to Cullen, 8 June 1869. O’Hagan to Spencer, 9 March 1869, mic 562/22, proni; Cullen to Leahy, 7 April 1869, nli m6009; Leahy Pastoral, 16 May 1869; Paget to Lyons, 8 January 1868, Box 127, Lyons Papers, wsro; Clarendon to Odo Russell, 19 May 1869, fo 918/1; David W. Bebbington, William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain (Grand Rapids, 1993), 229; Gladstone to Spencer, 28 March 1869, bl kp4; Spencer to Gladstone, 30 March 1869; Clarendon to Odo Russell, 19 April, 17 May, 28 June 1869, fo 918/1; Odo Russell to Clarendon, 5 May 1869, fo 918/4; Odo Russell to Clarendon, 2 June 1869, ms Clar. Dep. c487, Bodl; Fortescue to Spencer, 27 July 1869, bl kp23. Punch, 7 August, 18 September 1869; Gladstone to Granville, 13 September 1869, na 30/29/57, Granville Papers; Clarendon to Gladstone, 4, 8, 11, 19 September 1869, bl Add. ms 44,134; Gladstone to Granville, 14 September 1869, na 30/29/57. Gladstone to Clarendon, 6 October 1869, ms Clar. Dep. c498, Bodl; Spencer to Burke, 3 September, 6 October 1869, Box 1, Burke Papers, ina. Bruce to Du Cane, 26 June 1869, mss Eng. Hist. c647, Du Cane Papers, Bodl; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 170–1; Johnston, “Fenian Amnesty,” 99, 156–7, 159, 166. For the amnesty rallies, see Fenian Papers, 4608r, 4666 r, 4699 r, 4869 r, ina; and Memoranda, 1, 3, 22 August, 5, 12, 19, 26 September, 2, 10, 17, 24 October 1869, nli 5965, S.L. Anderson Papers; Johnston, “Fenian Amnesty,” 201, 210–11.

414

Notes to pages 280−4

32 Spencer to Burke, 29 September 1869, Box 1, Burke Papers, ina; Fortescue to Gladstone, 25 September 1869, bl Add. ms 44,121; Anderson to Larcom, 29 September 1869, nli 7597, Larcom Papers; Report of the Tipperary Amnesty Meeting, 24 October 1869, Fenian Papers, 4869r, ina; Burke to Spencer, 5, 9, 10 October 1869, bl kp99. 33 Spencer to Burke, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 October 1869, Box 1, Burke Papers, ina; Report of the Dublin Amnesty Meeting, 10 October 1869, Fenian Papers, 4699r, ina; Burke to Spencer, 9 October 1869, bl kp99. 34 Maguire to Gladstone, 2 August 1869, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Gladstone to Fortescue, 29 September 1869; Gladstone to Spencer, 30 August, 21, 26 September 1869, bl kp4; Gladstone to Bright, 13 October 1869, bl Add. ms 43,385, Bright Papers; Fortescue to Spencer, 2 October 1869, bl kp23; Gladstone to Spencer, 7 October 1869, bl kp4. 35 Biddulph to Queen, 29 September 1869, d26/115, ra; Biddulph to Gladstone, 29 September 1869, d26/116; Gladstone to Queen, 2 October 1869, d26/118; C. Grey to Queen, 5 October 1869, d26/119; Queen’s Memorandum, 5 October 1869, d26/120; Queen to Gladstone, 15 October 1869, d26/121. 36 Fortescue to Gladstone, 12 October 1869, bl Add. ms 44,121; Burke to Spencer, 7 September 1869, bl kp99. 37 Gladstone to Fortescue, 13, 17, 18 October 1869, bl Add. ms 44,121; Gladstone to Fortescue, 16, 18 October 1869, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Gladstone to Bruce, 19 October 1869, d/d Br. 15, Aberdare Papers, gro; Guardian, 27 October 1869; Gladstone to Butt, 23 October 1869, nli 15,738, Gladstone Papers. 38 Bruce to Spencer, 28 October 1869, bl kp68; Bruce to Gladstone, 17, 23 1869, bl Add. ms 44,086; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 250; Bruce to Fortescue, 26 October 1869, ddsh c/1189 322, Somro; Bruce to C. Grey, 23 October 1869, l25/148, ra; Bruce to Spencer, 23 November 1869, bl kp68; Fortescue to Spencer, 24 April 1869, bl kp22. 39 Spencer to Burke, 7 October 1869, Box 1, Burke Papers, ina; for reports of Fenian disruptions of tenant right meetings, see Fenian Papers, 4855r, 4856r, ina; Guardian, 27 October 1869; for the public statements of priests at amnesty meetings, see the newspaper file in 321/1/I, Cullen Correspondence (Secular Priests), aad; Redmond to Cullen, 21 November 1869, 321/1/II; O Fiaich, Irish Ecclesiastical Record 109:95; Joseph T. Leersen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996), 272; Conroy to Cullen, 26 December 1869, 341/8/III, add.

Notes to pages 287−8

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chapter eleven 1 Owen McGee, The IRB : The Irish Republican Brotherhood, from the Land League to Sinn Fein (Dublin, 2005), 38, 43–4; Spencer to O’Hagan, 10 October 1869, mic 562/33, O’Hagan Papers, proni; Spencer to Gladstone, 3, 5 November 1869, bl Add. ms 44,306, Gladstone Papers; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 168–9; S.L. Anderson to Larcom, 29 September 1869, nli 7597, Larcom Papers; Report by Daniel Ryan, 29 November 1869, Fenian Papers, 5129r, ina; Fortescue to Gladstone, 25, 30 November 1869, bl Add. ms 44,122; Spencer to Bruce, 23 November 1869, bl kp68, Spencer Papers; Report of Inspector General of Constabulary, 1 December 1869, Fenian Papers, 5129r, ina; Memoranda, 9, 27 November 1869, nli 5966, S.L. Anderson Papers; Report of Daniel Ryan, 4 December 1869, Fenian Papers, 5169r, ina. 2 Fenian Papers, 5013r, ina; for mock funerals, see 5021r, 5054r, 5062r; Waterford by-election, 4983r; Thorold to Burke, 19 November 1869, bl kp99; Lismore to Spencer, 23 November 1869, Box 1, Thomas Burke Papers, ina; R. Osborne to Fortescue, 4, 29 November 1869, ddsh c/1189 322, Strachie Papers, Somro; James O’Shea, Priests, Politics and Society in Post-Famine Ireland: A Study of County Tipperary 1850–1891 (Dublin, 1983), 161–5; for celebrations of O’Donovan Rossa’s victory, see Fenian Papers 5072r, 5074r, 5088r, 5092r, ina; for Longford by-election, see 5282r; and Sullivan, New Ireland, 447–52; Spencer to Bruce, 2, 7 December 1869, bl kp68; Bruce to Fortescue, 3 December 1869, ddsh c/1189 322, Somro; Fortescue to Bruce, 12 December 1869, d/d Br. 149/20, Aberdare Papers, gro; R. Osborne to Fortescue, 29 November 1869, ddsh c/1189 322, Somro; Macleod to Burke, 20 December 1869, Box 1, Burke Papers, ina; Spencer to Bruce, n.d. [December 1869], bl kp68. 3 Report of Head Constable Murphy, 24 November 1869, Fenian Papers, 5018r, ina; Bruce to Spencer, 26 November 1869, bl kp68; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 60; for amnesty rallies in Scotland, see Fenian Papers 5084r, 5277r, ina; Ponsonby to wife, 13 January 1870, Add. mss a36/97, ra; Spencer to Bruce, 30 November, 2 December 1869, bl kp68; Bruce to Spencer, 1 December 1869; for Whelan, see csorp 1783, 1869; Bruce to Gladstone, 1 January 1870, bl Add. ms 44,086. 4 Fortescue to Gladstone, 30 November 1869, bl Add. ms 44,122; Spencer to Gladstone, 5 November 1869, bl Add. ms 44,306; Spencer to Bruce, 23 November 1869, bl kp68; Report of the Inspector General, 1 December 1869, Fenian Papers, 5129R, ina; Clarendon to Spencer, 30 November,

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10

11

Notes to pages 289−92 3, 26 December 1869, na 30/29/55, Granville Papers; Granville to Clarendon, 1 December 1869. W.E. Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1994), 189, 161; Gladstone to Fortescue, 26 November 1869, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Gladstone to Bruce, 2 December 1869, d/d Br. 19, Aberdare Papers, gro; Gladstone to Spencer, 4 December 1869, bl kp4; Gladstone to Spencer, 28 December 1869, bl Add. ms 44,306; Spencer to Gladstone, 28 December 1869; Spencer to Gladstone, 20 January 1870; Gordon, Red Earl, 77–8; Gladstone to Queen, 4 December 1869, A39/38, ra; Gladstone to Queen, 7 December 1869, A39/39. Lyons to Odo Russell, 18 January 1868, Box 108, Lyons Papers, wsro; Clarendon to Granville, 30 November 1869, na 30/29/55; Granville to Clarendon, 23, 29 November, 4 December 1869, ms Clar. Dep. c500, Bodl; Clarendon to Odo Russell, 13 December 1869, fo 918/1, Odo Russell Papers; Clarendon to Spencer, 28 November 1869, bl kp70; Spencer to Clarendon, 21 December 1869; Gordon, Red Earl, 79. Fenian Papers, 5126r, ina; Spencer to O’Hagan, 26, 27 December 1869, mic 562/23, proni; Clarendon to C. Grey, 29 January 1870, b25/114, ra; Clarendon to Odo Russell, 8 January 1870, fo 918/2. Clarendon to Odo Russell, 8 January 1870, fo 918/2; Clarendon to Odo Russell, 13 December 1869, fo 918/1; Granville to Clarendon, 4 December 1869, ms Clar. Dep. c500, Bodl; Odo Russell to Clarendon, 7 January 1870, fo 918/4; Cullen to Monsell, 8 November 1869, nli 19,337, Emly Papers; Butler to Monsell, 10 January 1870, nli 20,677, Emly Papers; Conroy to Cullen, 26, 31 December 1869, 341/8/III, Cullen Correspondence, aad; MacSuibhne, Paul Cullen and His Contemporaries, 4:267–71. Odo Russell to Clarendon, 13 January 1870, d27/1, ra; Odo Russell to Clarendon, 21 January 1870, fo 918/4; Odo Russell to Clarendon, 23 January 1870, d27/2, ra; Odo Russell to Clarendon, 7 January 1870, ms Clar. Dep. c487, Bodl; Moriarty to Odo Russell, 24 January 1870, bl kp70; Odo Russell to Clarendon, 24 January 1870, d27/4, ra. Odo Russell to Clarendon, 20 February 1870, fo 918/4; Clarendon to Spencer, 14 January 1870, bl kp70; Clarendon to Queen, 29 January 1870, b25/113, ra; Queen to Gladstone, 31 January 1870, d27/14, ra; Spencer to Clarendon, 31 January 1870, bl kp70; Gladstone to Clarendon, 31 January 1870, ms Clar. Dep. c498, Bodl; Spencer to Gladstone, 2 February 1870, fo 918/3; Clarendon to Odo Russell, 7 February 1870. Fortescue to Spencer, 31 October 1869, bl kp23; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 242, 244; Argyll to Dufferin, 4 December 1869, d1071/h/b/

Notes to pages 293−5

12

13

14

15

16

17

417

c/95/40, Dufferin Papers, proni; Argyll to Granville, 1 December 1869, na 30/29/51. Clarendon to Spencer, 23 December 1869, bl kp70; Queen to Gladstone, 13 December 1869, d26/123, ra; Gladstone Memorandum, 26 January 1870, d27/6; C. Grey to Queen, 27 January 1870, d27/7; Queen to Gladstone, 29 January 1870, d27/10; Dufferin to Argyll, 26 November 1869, d1071/h/ b/c/95/37, proni. Guardian, 17 November 1869; Ray Douglas, Liam Harte, and Jim O’Hara, Drawing Conclusions: A Cartoon History of Anglo-Irish Relations 1798–1998 (Belfast, 1998), 73–4; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 243. Memorandum on Agrarian Crimes in Ireland [13 December 1869], bl Add. ms 44,612; Fortescue to O’Hagan, 24 January 1870, mic 562/26, proni; Fortescue to Spencer, 26 January 1870, bl kp23; Gordon, Red Earl, 79–80; Hartington to Devonshire, 3 February 1870, 340.433, Devonshire Papers, cha; C. Grey to Queen, 5 February 1870, a39/53, ra; Gladstone to Fortescue, 2 February 1870, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Clarendon to Lyons, 15, 18 December 1869, Box 177, Lyons Papers, wsro; Bruce to Spencer, 22 January, 2 February 1870, bl kp68. Hartington to Devonshire, 3 February 1870, 340.433, cha; Spencer to Hartington, 3 February 1870, 340.434; Bruce to Spencer, 2 February 1870, bl kp68; Hartington to Devonshire, 8 February 1870, 340.436, cha; Spencer to Fortescue, 4, 5 February 1870, bl kp23; Fortescue to Spencer, 4, 6, 7 February 1870; Spencer to Wood, 8 February 1870, ddsh c/1189 322, Somro; Wood to Spencer, 9 February 1870. Gladstone to Clarendon, 16 February 1870, ms Clar. Dep. c498, Bodl; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 51; Fortescue to Spencer, 16 February 1870, bl kp24; Fortescue to O’Hagan, 21 February 1870, nli 17,867, Teeling Papers; Spencer to Gladstone, 18 February 1870, bl kp5; Gladstone to Spencer, 17 February 1870; Spencer to Fortescue, 24 February 1870, bl kp24; Spencer to Burke, 18 February 1870, bl kp100; Memoranda, 9, 18, 21 February 1870, nli 5967, S.L. Anderson Papers; Spencer to Clarendon, 18 February 1870, bl kp70. Spencer to Fortescue, 24 February 1870, bl kp24; Parry, Democracy and Religion, 292; Fortescue to Spencer, 26 February 1870, bl kp24; Spencer to Fortescue, 28 February 1870; Fortescue to Spencer, 3 March 1870; T.A. Jenkins, The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny 1868–73, Camden 5th ser., 3 (1994): 377; Gladstone to Bruce, 3 March 1870, d/d Br. 149/34, Aberdare Papers, gro; Spencer to Fortescue, 4 March 1870, bl kp24; Fortescue to Spencer, 4 March 1870; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of

418

18

19

20

21

22

23

Notes to pages 296−8 Wodehouse, 256; Kimberley to Granville, 3 March 1870, na 30/29/55; Gordon, Red Earl, 81–2. Norman, Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 398–9; Fintan Lane, “P. F. Johnson, Nationalism, and Irish Rural Labourers, 1869–82,” Irish Historical Studies 33 (2002): 198; Manning to Gladstone, 5 February, 1 March 1870, bl Add. ms 44,249; Gladstone to Cullen, 6 March 1870; Cullen to Gladstone, 12 March 1870, bl kp5; Spencer to Gladstone, 21 March 1870; Clarendon to Lyons, 12 March 1870, Box 177, Lyons Papers, wsro. Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 246–7; Jenkins, Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 3:384, 386; Legg, Newspapers and Nationalism, 114– 17; Fortescue to Spencer, 11, 13 March 1870, bl kp24; Spencer to Fortescue, 28 March 1870. Norman, Catholic Church in Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 133; O Fiaich, Irish Ecclesiastical Record 109:96; Alexander and O’Day, Terrorism in Ireland, 137; John Newsinger, “Canon and Martial Law: William O’Brien, Catholicism and Irish Nationalism,” Eire/Ireland 16 (1981): 62; Clarendon to Lyons, 19 January 1870, Box 177, Lyons Papers, wsro; Gladstone to Queen, 30 March 1870, d27/39, ra; Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, 83–5. Clarendon to Odo Russell, 1 March 1870, fo 918/3; Gladstone to Manning, 16 April 1870, bl Add. ms 44,249; Martin to Queen, 8 February 1870, d27/14, ra; E.D. Steele, Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant-Right and Nationality 1865–1870 (Cambridge, 1974), 314; Odo Russell to Clarendon, 10 April 1870, ms Clar. Dep. c487, Bodl; Clarendon to Gladstone, 21 April 1870, ms Clar. Dep. c501; Johnston, “Fenian Amnesty,” 248; Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 134. Thompson to Larcom, 18 September 1870, nli 7597; John Kendle, Ireland and the Federal Solution: The Debate over the United Kingdom Constitution 1870–1921 (Montreal, 1989), 11–12; David Thornley, Isaac Butt and Home Rule, repr. (Westport, ct, 1976), 83, 102–3; Alvin Jackson, Home Rule: An Irish History 1800–2000 (London, 2003), 30, 18, 29; Lane, Irish Historical Studies 33:198; Lawrence J. McCaffrey, “Irish Federalism in the 1870s: A Study of Conservative Nationalism,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 52, pt 6 (1962): 3–4; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 57; Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin, 1996), 67–8. Thompson to MacDonnell, 5 July 1870, nli 18490, MacDonnell Papers; Thompson to Larcom, 18 September 1870, nli 7597; 3 June 1870, nli 7597, Larcom Papers; Fortescue to O’Hagan, 3 June 1870, mic 562/26, O’Hagan Papers, proni; Parry, Democracy and Religion, 292; Fortescue to Queen, 9 July 1870, B25/148, ra.

Notes to pages 299−303

419

24 Spencer to O’Hagan, 19 March 1870, d2777/8/103, O’Hagan Papers, proni; Spencer to Fortescue, 18, 19 March 1870, ddsh c/1189 325, Somro; Franks to Burke, 20 March 1870, Box 2, Burke Papers, ina; Burke to Fortescue, 18 April, 5 May 1870, ddsh c/1189 322, Somro; Fortescue to Queen, 9 July 1870, b25/148, ra; Ponsonby to Queen, 10 July 1870, b25/149; Gordon, Red Earl, 83. 25 Spencer to O’Hagan, 19 March 1870, d2777/8/103, proni; Spencer to O’Hagan, 1 April 1870, d2777/8/105; Spencer to O’Hagan, 3 April 1870, d2777/8/106; Spencer to Burke, 26 June, 3 July 1870, Box 2, Burke Papers, ina; Gladstone to Clarendon, 22 April 1870, ms Clar. Dep. c498, Bodl; Jenkins, Sir William Gregory, 190, 194, 197; Jenkins, Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 3:388; John P. Huttman, “Fenians and Farmers: The Merger of the Home-Rule and Owner-Occupancy Movements in Ireland, 1850–1915,” Albion 3 (1971): 185–6; Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism, 52–3; Steele, Irish Land and British Politics, 314–15. 26 O’Hagan to Spencer, 15 March 1870, d2777/8/102, proni; O’Hagan to Spencer, 22 March 1870, d2777/8/104; O’Donovan Rossa to wife, 18 February 1870, File Folder 23, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua; Gladstone to Spencer, 22 February 1870, bl kp5; Spencer to Gladstone, 25 February 1870; Gladstone to Queen, 3 March 1870, a39/65, ra; Gladstone to Bruce, 11 March 1870, d/d Br. 149/35, Aberdare Papers, gro; Report of Commissioners: Treatment of Treason-Felony Convicts in English Prisons, British Parliamentary Papers, Crime and Punishment: Prisons (hereafter BPP Prisons), vol. 21 (Shannon, 1971), 137; Gladstone to Queen, 17 March 1870, a39/70, ra. 27 Sean McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1842–1922: Theatres of War (London, 2003), 196–7; draft letter to proposed commissioners, April 1870, ho 45/9330/19461a. 28 Draft letter to Lyons, 5 December 1870, ho 45/9330/19461a; Treasury to ho, 27 October, 22 November 1870; de Vere to Bruce, 1 August 1870; Bruce Memorandum, 17 October 1870; Devon to Bruce, 14 May 1870; Ollivant to Liddell, 23, 30 May 1870; ho to fo, 30 May 1870, mss Clar. Dep. c499, Bodl; BPP Prisons, 21:108. 29 BPP Prisons, 21:148–52; Bruce Memorandum, n.d. [28 June 1870], ho 45/9330/19461a; McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 199. 30 BPP Prisons, 21:107–13, 202. 31 BPP Prisons, 21:168–75, 179–83, 219–40, 253, 578–82. 32 Luby Recollections, nli 333-3, Thomas Clarke Luby Papers; O’Donovan Rossa to wife, 9 July 1870, Box 2/28, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua; BPP Prisons, 21:375, 438, 281, 286, 310–16, 382, 388–96, 478–88, 507–8, 516–18, 530.

420

Notes to pages 304−9

33 BPP Prisons, 21:115–17, 129–30, 687–704; George Sigerson, Political Prisoners at Home and Abroad (London, 1890), 6–10; George Sigerson, ‘Custodia Honesta’: Treatment of Political Prisoners in Great Britain (London, 1913), 9–12; see also E. Dwyer Gray, The Treatment of Political Prisoners in Ireland (Dublin, 1889). 34 BPP Prisons, 21:117–24. 35 BPP Prisons, 21:132–42. 36 Fortescue to Granville, 29 June 1870, na 30/29/56; Waldegrave to Granville, 1 July 1870; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 250–1; Gordon, Red Earl, 84–5; Gladstone to Granville, 3 December 1870, na 30/29/58; Spencer to Gladstone, 6 June 1870, bl kp5; Gladstone to Spencer, 8 June 1870; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 183. 37 Gordon, Red Earl, 88; Memoranda, 19, 29 June, 15, 19, 24 July 1870, nli 5967; Spencer to Bruce, 2, 20 July 1870, bl kp69; Gladstone to Fortescue, 3, 7 September 1870, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro. 38 Spencer to Gladstone, 13 September 1870, bl kp5; Parry, Democracy and Religion, 317; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 186; Spencer to Fortescue, 28 September 1870, ddsh c/1189 325, Somro; Burke to Spencer, 26, 30 September 1870, bl kp100; O’Hagan to Spencer, 28 September 1870, d2777/8/126, proni; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 253; Kimberley to de Grey, 2 October 1870, bl Add. ms 43,522, Ripon Papers. 39 Gladstone to Fortescue, 7 September 1870, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Downing to Gladstone, 26 October 1870; Gladstone to Fortescue, 28 October 1870, ddsh c/1189 324; Coffey to Fortescue, 2 October 1870; O’Hagan to Spencer, 7 October 1870, d2777/8/128, proni; Spencer to Fortescue, 2 November 1870, ddsh c/1189 324; Gladstone to Fortescue, 5 November 1870; Fortescue to Spencer, 7 November 1870, bl kp25; Gladstone to Granville, 14 October 1870, na 30/29/58; Gladstone to Spencer, 21 November 1870, bl kp5. 40 Fortescue to Spencer, 22 October, 11 November 1870, bl kp25; Du Cane’s observations on the Commission’s Report, n.d., ho 45/9330/19461a; Gladstone to Halifax, 17 November 1870, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Spencer to Gladstone, 25 November 1870, bl kp5; Gladstone to Queen, 11 November 1870, a40/75, ra; Michael von Tangen Page, Prisons, Peace and Terrorism: Penal Policy in the Reduction of Political Violence in Northern Ireland, Italy and the Spanish Basque Country 1968–97 (New York, 1998), 34; Ponsonby to Gladstone, 13 November 1870, a40/77, ra; Gladstone to Queen, 16 November 1870, d27/63, ra. 41 Spencer to Fortescue, 8, 12 November 1870, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Fortescue to Spencer, 11 November 1870, bl kp25; Barry to Fortescue, 10 November 1870, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Spencer to Gladstone,

Notes to pages 310−12

42

43

44

45

46

47

421

25 November 1870, bl kp5; Fortescue to Spencer, 27 November 1870, bl kp25; Gladstone to Spencer, 28 November, 4 December 1870, bl kp5; Spencer to Gladstone, 2 December 1870; Bruce to Spencer, 6 December 1870, bl kp69. Gladstone to Granville, 22 November, 3, 7 December 1870, na 30/29/58; Granville to Gladstone, 8 December 1870; Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England 1830–1902 (Oxford, 1970), 125; Gladstone to Fortescue, 26, 28 November, 9, 12 December 1870, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Gladstone to Bruce, 7 December 1870, d/d Br. 149/40, Aberdare Papers, gro; Guardian, 21 December 1870; Spencer to Gladstone, 19, 21 December 1870, bl kp6; Fortescue to Gladstone, 19 December 1870, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro. Du Cane to Liddell, 23 December 1870, 6, 31 January 1871, ho 45/9329/19461; Gambier to Liddell, 19 January 1871; Deputy Governor to Governor of Chatham Prison, 8 January 1871; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 197; Litvack and Graham, Ireland and Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 154. Parl. Papers, H. C. 1871, 58 (463); H. C. 1874, 54 (493); Gladstone to Bruce, 29 September, 10 October 1871, d/d Br. 149/46, Aberdare Papers, gro; Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, 2:128; James H. Murphy, Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland during the Reign of Queen Victoria (Washington, dc, 2001), 186; Lane, Irish Historical Studies 33:195. Labalmondière to Liddell, 12 August 1873, ho 45/9329/19461; Liddell to Lowe, 3 December 1873, ho 45/9348/25943; Moody, Davitt and the Irish Revolution, 158, 180; Liddell to O’Connor Power, 26 May 1876, ho 45/9329/19461; Cross to Governor of Western Australia, August 1876, ho 45/9330/19461b; Agatha Ramm, ed., Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville 1876–1886, 2 vols (Oxford, 1962), 1:58–9; Wakeford to Liddell, 21 September 1878, ho 45/9348/25943. Bruce to Fortescue, 20 December 1870; Grenfel to Fortescue, 20 December 1870, ddsh C/1189 322, Somro; Gladstone memorandum to Queen, 30 December 1870, a40/92, ra; Granville to Hartington, 23 December 1870, 340.442, cha; Gordon, Red Earl, 88; Patrick Jackson, The Last of the Whigs: A Political Biography of Lord Hartington, Later Eighth Duke of Devonshire (1833– 1908) (Mississauga, 1994), 45; Gladstone to Hartington, 23 December 1870, 340.443, cha; Parry, Democracy and Religion, 296; Hartington to Gladstone, 24 December 1870, 340.444, cha; Hartington to Devonshire, 28 December 1870, 340.448; Gladstone to Hartington, 26 December 1870, 340.445; Hartington to Devonshire, 31 December 1870, 340.451. Granville to Queen, 29 May 1870, Add. a/15/8656, ra; O’Driscoll and Reynolds, Untold Story, 1:37–40; William Baker, Timothy Warren Anglin, 1822– 96: Irish Catholic Canadian (Toronto, 1977), 131; Henry to O’Donovan Rossa, 4 February 1871, Box 2/24, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, cua; D.C. Lyne and

422

48

49

50 51

52

53

54

55

56

Notes to pages 313−17 Peter M. Toner, “Fenianism in Canada 1874–84,” Studia Hibernica 12 (1972): 30–2; Thomas W. Spalding, Martin John Spalding: American Churchman (Washington, dc, 1973), 250; Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 71. Anderson Memorandum, 22 December 1870, ho 144/1538/6, R. Anderson Papers; Spencer to O’Hagan, 24 August 1870, d2777/8/121, proni; Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:65; Spencer to Gladstone, 21 December 1870, bl kp6; Burke to Spencer, 24 December 1870, bl kp100. Daunt to Leahy, 20 December 1870, nli m6009, Leahy Papers; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 191–2; McGee, IRB , 42–3; Thornley, Isaac Butt, 112–15, 117; Monsell to O’Hagan, 18 November [1870], nli 17,871; Gladstone to Fortescue, 19 August 1870, ddsh c/1189 324, Somro; Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:65. Murray, Irish Economic and Social History 13:61; Spencer to Gladstone, 6 February 1871, bl kp6. Hartington to Spencer, 6, 8, 15, 18 February 1871, bl kp28; Jackson, Last of the Whigs, 45; Gladstone to Hartington, 6, 11, 13 February 1871, 340.456, cha; Spencer to O’Hagan, 16 February 1871, d2777/8/146, proni; O’Hagan to Hartington, n.d. [17 February 1871], d2777/9/20/3; Hartington to O’Hagan, 19 February 1871, d2777/9/20/5; Gladstone to Queen, 18 February 1871, a41/19, ra; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 257. Hartington to Spencer, 20, 21, 23, 25, 28 February 1871, bl kp28; Jenkins, Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 3:421–2, 424; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 77; Parry, Democracy and Religion, 318; Gordon, Red Earl, 87. Parry, Democracy and Religion, 319; “Select Committee on Westmeath and Unlawful Combinations,” Parl. Papers, 1871, 13:557–75; Murray, Irish Economic and Social History, 13:64–5; Ponsonby to Queen, 19 April 1871, d27/66, ra; Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 135. Parry, Democracy and Religion, 319; Gladstone to Queen, 22 April 1871, d27/61, ra; Ponsonby to Queen, 23 April 1871, d27/69; Gladstone to Queen, 27 May 1871, d27/73; MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration, 179–83; Hartington to Spencer, 12 April 1871, bl kp28; Murray, Irish Economic and Social History 13:65; Steele, Irish Land and British Politics, 312–13; Gordon, Red Earl, 92. Parl. Papers, 1871, 13:565, 572; Spencer to Bruce, 27 April 1871, bl kp69; Gordon, Red Earl, 92; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 60; Bruce to Spencer, 1 May 1871, bl kp69. Vincent, Derby Diaries, 79–80, 82; Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71, rev. ed. (London, 2002), 396; Biddulph to Queen,

Notes to pages 317−23

57

58

59

60

61

62 63

64

65

423

22 November 1871, a42/74, ra; Henderson to Bruce, 19 June 1871, b26/42, ra; Gordon, Red Earl, 93; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 192; Thornley, Isaac Butt, 116; Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 135; Biddulph to Queen, 25 June 1871, d27/75, ra. Brooke and Sorenson, W. E. Gladstone IV, 17–21; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 261; Biddulph to Queen, 25 June 1871, d27/75, ra; see also d27/77; Gordon, Red Earl, 93. Spencer to Bruce, 21 July 1871, bl kp69; Bruce to Spencer, 29 July 1871; Prince of Wales to Queen, 31 July 1871, d27/86, ra; 3 August 1871, d27/89; Spencer to Queen, 7 August 1871, bl kp1; Gordon, Red Earl, 96. Spencer to Queen, 7 August 1871, bl kp1; Murphy, Abject Loyalty, 183–4; Hartington to Spencer, 8 August 1871, bl kp29; Gordon, Red Earl, 96–7; Gladstone to Queen, 9 August 1871, a42/43, ra; 11 August 1871, a42/46; 17 August 1871, a42/49; Barry to Spencer, 18 August 1871, bl kp95. Queen to Spencer, 5 October 1871, bl kp1; Gladstone to Hartington, 23 September 1872, 340.502, cha; Bessborough to Hartington, 6 October 1872, 340.504; Biddulph to Spencer, 12 November 1872, 340.506; Ponsonby to Gladstone, 11 December 1872, 340.509; Spencer to Biddulph, 17 November 1872, 340.507; Bessborough Memorandum, n.d. [September/October 1872], 340.503; Foster to Hartington, 27 October 1872, 340.505; Gladstone to Hartington, 13 December 1872, 340.508. Comerford, Fenians in Context, 192; Thornley, Isaac Butt, 122–3; Norman, Catholic Church in Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 417–18; Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:65; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 87; Jackson, Home Rule, 29; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 35. Jackson, Home Rule, 28; Vincent, Proceedings of the British Academy, 63:232–6; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 90. Moriarty to Hartington, 10 January 1872, 340.482, cha; Gladstone to Hartington, 14January 1872, 340.479; Moriarty to O’Hagan, 18 February 1872, d2777/8/190, proni; Moriarty to Hartington, 19 January 1872, 340.484, cha; 1 February 1872, 340.491; n.d. [February 1872], 340.492; Kenmare to Hartington, n.d. [February 1872], 340.493; 13 February 1872, 340.493; O’Shea, Journal of the Kerry Archeological and Historical Society 5:102. Jenkins, Sir William Gregory, 215–17; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 194; Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:66–7; Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 136. F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine, rev. ed. (Glasgow, 1978), 150–1; F.S.L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell (London, 1977), 55; E.W. McFarland, John Ferguson 1836–1906: Irish Issues in Scottish Politics (East Linton, 2003), 52, 58,

424

Notes to pages 323−31

60, 63; McGee, IRB , 50–3; D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day, eds, Ireland in Transition, 1867–1921 (London, 2004), 23–4; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 195–6; Jackson, Home Rule, 19–20, 29–32. 66 Thornley, Isaac Butt, 124; Corish, Archivium Hibernicum 30:66; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 273; Argyll to Dufferin, 13 October 1872, d1071/h/b/c/95/61, Dufferin Papers, proni; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 75; Jackson, Last of the Whigs, 47; Hartington to Gladstone, 30 November 1872, 340.476, cha; Gladstone to Hartington, 1 December 1872, 340.515; Shannon, Gladstone, 2:122–3; Matthew, Gladstone, 198–9. 67 Eversley, Gladstone and Ireland, 55–6; Gordon, Red Earl, 102–5; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 274–5; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 132–3, 167; John Brooke and Mary Sorenson, eds, Prime Ministers’ Papers: W. E. Gladstone, vol. 1 (London 1971), 98; Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874, 199; Jackson, Last of the Whigs, 49; Argyll to Dufferin, 17 March 1874, d1071/h/b/c/95/62, proni. 68 Argyll to Dufferin, 17 March 1874, d1071/h/b/c/95/62, proni; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 160; Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 285; Newsinger, Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain, 74–6; D.G. Boyce, The Irish Question and British Politics 1868–1986 (London, 1988), 24–5; T.M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of My Day, 2 vols (London, 1928), 1:33, 35.

chapter twelve 1 John Wolffe, God and Great Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London, 1994), 18. 2 Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 143–4, 146, 150; Kevin Collins, Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916 (Dublin, 2002), 16; Queen Victoria’s Journals, 6 August 1848, ra. 3 Collins, Catholic Churchmen and Celtic Revival, 16–17; Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 155, 145, 148, 151. 4 Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 151–2; Newsinger, Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain, 86–7. 5 Jeffrey Archer, “Constitutionalism and Violence: The Case of Ireland,” in Alan O’Day, ed., Dimensions of Irish Terrorism (Dartmouth, 1993), 124; Fathali M. Moghaddam and Anthony J. Marsella, eds, Understanding Terrorism: Psychological Roots, Consequences, and Interventions (Washington, dc, 2004), 108–11, 13; Silke, Terrorists, Victims and Society, 39–40, 44; Yonah Alexander and Alan O’Day, eds, Ireland’s Terrorist Dilemma (Dordrecht, 1986), 16. 6 Alexander and O’Day, Ireland’s Terrorist Dilemma, 57; Conor Gearty, Terror, pbk ed. (London, 1992), 1, 22; Patrick Quinlivan and Paul Rose, The Fenians

Notes to pages 332−43

7

8

9 10

11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

425

in England 1865–1872: A Sense of Insecurity (London, 1982), 167; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 60; Igor Primoratz, ed., Terrorism: The Philosophical Issue (New York, 2004), 22; Newsinger, Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain, 88; K.R.M. Short, The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain (Atlantic Highlands, 1979), 262–3; Tom Corfe, The Phoenix Park Murders: Conflict, Compromise and Tragedy in Ireland, 1879–1882 (London, 1968), 141; Ben Saul, Defining Terrorism in International Law (Oxford, 2006), 70. Michael J. Cunningham, British Government Policy in Northern Ireland 1969– 89: Its Nature and Execution (Manchester, 1991), 113–14; Paddy Hillyard, Suspect Community: People’s Experience of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts in Britain (London, 1993), 13. Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain 1790–1988 (London, 1989), 98; O’Day, Dimensions of Irish Terrorism, 326; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 60. Ramm, Political Correspondence of Gladstone and Granville 1876–1886, 2:28. Cindy R. Webb, P.H. Liotta, Thomas Sherlock, and Ruth Bargolies Beitler, The Fight for Legitimacy: Democracy v Terrorism (Westport, ct, 2006), ix; Jonathan Stevenson, Counter-Terrorism: Containment and Beyond (Oxford, 2004), 108–8, 8; Cunningham, British Government Policy in Northern Ireland, 41; O’Day, Dimensions of Irish Terrorism, 342; Saul, Defining Terrorism in International Law, 24, 20; Alexander and O’Day, Ireland’s Terrorist Dilemma, 13. Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 212; Michael Von Tangen Page, Prisons, Peace, and Terrorism: Penal Policy in the Reduction of Political Violence in Northern Ireland, Italy and the Spanish Basque Country, 1968–97 (New York, 1998), 8, 27. Tangen Page, Prisons, Peace and Terrorism, 45, 53, 57–64; Peter Taylor, Brits: The War against the IRA (London, 2001), 227–40; Alexander and O’Day, Ireland’s Terrorist Dilemma, 13. Hillyard, Suspect Community, 2. Cunningham, British Government Policy in Northern Ireland, 112–17, 152; Hillyard, Suspect Community, 4–5, 69, 264. Hawkins and Powell, Journal of Wodehouse, 318; De Nie, Eternal Paddy, 178–9. Fortescue to O’Hagan, 3 June 1870, mic 562/26, O’Hagan Papers, proni. De Nie, Eternal Paddy, 196. Hillyard, Suspect Community, 263; Globe and Mail (Toronto), 15 November 2007. Spencer to O’Hagan, 23 March 1871, d2777/8/152, O’Hagan Papers, proni; Cunningham, British Government Policy in Northern Ireland, 67–9.

426

Note to page 344

20 Newsinger, Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain, 73; Quinlivan and Rose, Fenians in England, 161; James H. Murphy, Ireland: A Social, Cultural and Literary History, 1798–1891 (Dublin, 2003), 113, 120; Pigott, Personal Recollections, 319, 313–15; for the Pigott offer, see anonymous correspondent (whose handwriting was remarkably similar to Pigott’s), 4 March 1872, ho 144 1538/8, R. Anderson Papers; Vincent, Derby Diaries, 57.

Index

Abercorn, marquis of, 73–4, 87, 94, 103, 213, 228, 230–1; background, 66 agrarian disturbances, 263, 269, 273, 278, 289, 293, 318; in Westmeath, 314–16, 342 agrarian secret societies, x, 9, 15, 274; Ribbonmen, 22, 26, 164, 274, 293, 295, 314–15; and connection to Fenianism, 316 Allen, Jeremiah, 179–80, 194–5, 199 Allen, William, 120, 122–3, 128, 131–2, 135–7; sentenced to death, 133; public execution of, 140–1 American Civil War, 34; and Fenianism, 26, 31; legitimization of violence, 26 Amnesty Association, 278, 286, 301 Amnesty Committee, 257, 271, 278 amnesty movement, 257, 261, 263–4, 271, 275, 278–84, 287, 291, 299–300, 306–7 Anderson, Robert, 104–5, 171, 187, 272, 333; background, 69; and intelligence gathering, 171–2; and special knowledge of Fenianism, 69 Anglo-Saxonism, 10, 16–17, 19, 68, 164, 237

anti-Catholicism, 6, 18–19, 38, 100, 225, 227, 338 anti-Irish violence, 109, 122, 159–60, 166, 175, 225–7 Argyll, duke of, 261, 292–3 assassination circle (shooting circle), xiii, 92, 96, 113–14, 123, 165, 175 Australia, 14–16, 188–91, 227, 245, 269, 295; and Catholic Irish, 18; and Fenianism, 189–92; and transportation of Fenians, 252–3, 257, 262, 310–11 Barrett, Michael (Willy Jackson), 150, 182–5, 193–6, 198, 201–2, 330, 340; convicted of murder, 196; criticism of verdict, 196–7; demands for investigation of alibi, 196–7; public execution of, 204–5; investigation of alibi, 197–200, 208; judge’s report, 204 Beach, Thomas (Henri Le Caron), 171, 334 Belmore, Lord, 189; governor of New South Wales, 189–91 Birmingham, 99, 103, 107, 338; sectarian riot, 100; mock funerals, 143

428

Index

Blackburn, Colin (judge), 125, 128–31, 133, 138; background, 126; charge to jury, 126–7; denies referral to Court of Crown Cases Reserved, 138; final trial report, 136–7; interim report, 135–6; summing up, 132 Blackstone, William, 4, 7 Bourke, Thomas, 93–4, 96, 133, 135, 262; convicted of treason, 93; sentenced to death, 95; sentence commuted, 95 Bradlaugh, Charles, 83, 139, 317; and Fenian proclamation, 83; and republicanism, 83 Bramwell, Baron (judge), 192, 197, 201, 206–7; unofficial report on Clerkenwell trial, 199 Brett, Charles, 108, 110, 115, 119, 122–3, 131–3, 190, 310–11, 339; background, 107; coroner’s inquest on, 120; funeral of, 120 Bright, John, 47, 50, 70–1, 83, 103, 224–5, 240, 294, 312, 344; challenges verdict in Clerkenwell trial, 198, 204; and opposition to capital punishment, 94; and reform in Ireland, 98; and Reform Bill, 98 Bruce, Henry Austin, 238, 271–2, 278, 288, 293; and Fenian amnesty, 263, 309; appointed home secretary, 241–2; and reorganization of Metropolitan Police, 244–9; and treatment of Fenian prisoners, 271–2, 283 Burke, Ricard, 149–50, 169, 183, 185–6, 305, 330; background, 148; arrest of, 148; plan of escape from prison, 151, 185; and rescue of Kelly, 107; trial and sentence, 205–7

Burke, Thomas, xiii, 275, 281, 331; and Fenian amnesty, 280–1; appointed Irish undersecretary, 244 Butt, Isaac, 278, 301, 322, 344; and amnesty agitation, 310; and Fenianism, 344; and Home Rule, 298, 319, 322; returned for Limerick City, 319 Cairns, Hugh (later lord), 211, 213, 233 Calcraft, William (public hangman), 127, 141 Cambridge, duke of, 52–4, 228; and courts martial, 57–8; fear of Fenian attacks, 93 capital punishment, 110; and definition of capital murder, 127–8; opposition to, 94–5; and political offenders, 63–4, 94–5, 336; for terrorists, 161; agitation for commutation of sentences, 139–40; and royal commission, 127 Carnarvon, Lord, 63–4 Casey, Joseph, 148–9, 152, 169, 179, 183; sent for trial, 205; case withdrawn, 206 Catholic Church, 19–20, 60, 89; in Britain, 22; British North America, 20–1; in the United States, 21; and national parishes, 20–1; and Irish nationalism, 20–1; and right of rebellion, 27, 32; and papal condemnation of Fenianism, 291; and papal infallibility, 297 Catholic clergy, 8, 52; and rising of 1848, 13; and politics, 9, 35, 164, 237, 313, 317, 321, 326; and Galway election petition, 321–2; and Irish nationalism, 20, 22, 28, 32, 44, 87,

Index 173, 284, 326; and Fenianism, 76, 163, 289–90, 315, 326; and Manchester executions, 143–4; and resistance to papal condemnation of Fenianism, 296–7; and Fenian amnesty, 275, 279, 284; and Home Rule, 313, 319, 323 Catholic hierarchy, 8, 11, 44–5, 75–6, 102, 328; in the United States, 19, 21; and Fenianism, 44, 88–9, 163; and papal condemnation of, 290–1; and Fenian amnesty, 275, 291; and Manchester executions, 143–4; and denominational education, 76, 266; and land bill, 291, 295; and suppression of newspapers, 291; and general election of 1868, 236–7; and Home Rule, 319 Catholic Irish, x, 8–11, 14–15, 44; emigration of, 20–1; in Britain, 29, 109; and enclave consciousness, 15–16, 18–19, 22 Catholic University, 44, 228, 236; and royal charter, 44, 68, 144, 212, 217, 231, 236 Cavendish, Lord Frederick, xiii, 209, 331 Chester Castle, x, 23, 81, 329, 334; planned Fenian raid, 81–2 Christian Brothers, 20, 279, 328 Church of Ireland, 37–8, 44–5, 103, 212, 214, 216–17, 264, 326; public agitation concerning, 223–4; reform of, 38, 102, 219; and general election of 1868, 234–7; and disestablishment, 45, 49, 65, 68, 101, 117, 209, 217, 236, 266–7, 284; and Tory response to church bill, 267–9 Clan na Gael, 312, 322–3, 331

429

Clarendon, Lord, 48–50, 67, 293, 295, 305; views of the Irish, 261; and Catholic hierarchy, 266, 276; and land reform, 277, 288, 292, 294; and papal declaration against Fenianism, 289, 291 Clerkenwell Explosion Relief Fund, 157–8 Clerkenwell Green, 139–40, 142 Clerkenwell House of Detention, x, 149, 152, 179, 329; history of, 149; security measures, 153–4; bombing of, x, xiii, 154, 169, 175, 334, 338; casualties and damage, 155; immediate government response, 155–6 Cluseret, Gustave-Paul, 84–5, 104, 171; background, 82; political radicalism, 82–3 Cockburn, Alexander (lord chief justice), 192, 206; background, 192; summing up at Clerkenwell trial, 195–6; trial notes, 198; trial report, 201–2; recommends respite, 198; recommends Barrett be given exceptional opportunity, 203–4 Codd, Captain, 152; governor of House of Detention, 149; concern for security, 150, 153; difficulties with Mayne, 150, 153–4; warned of escape plan, 153 Commonwealth, 68, 71 concurrent endowment (levelling up), 45, 76, 91, 102, 117, 210, 212, 235, 268; rejection by Catholic hierarchy, 210, 268 Condon, Edward Meagher, 118, 121, 126, 128, 131, 137, 310–11; Fenian commander in Manchester, 104; and Kelly rescue, 107; arrest of, 108;

430

Index

sentenced to death, 133; sentence commuted, 136 Condon, Patrick (Godfrey Massey), 94, 133, 149, 200, 206–7; and 1867 rising, 84–5; turns Queen’s evidence, 92; payment, 207 Conservatives. See Tories constructive murder, 127–8, 137, 146, 195; controversy over, 127 Cork Examiner, 14, 174, 253, 257 coroner’s inquests, 119; on Sergeant Brett, 120, 122; on Clerkenwell victims, 161, 179–80 Corydon, John, 78, 92, 105, 107, 114, 123, 149, 177, 186, 206, 334; warning of raid on Chester Castle, 81; warning of 1867 rising, 84; payment, 207 counter-insurgency, 43, 45, 96, 177; amnesty as instrument of, 263 counterterrorism, xiv, 43, 112, 115–16, 161, 166, 178, 215, 331, 332–6; and Metropolitan Plan, 166–7, 171 Court of Crown Cases Reserved, 137–8 Crimean War, 4, 35, 51 Cullen, Paul (archbishop of Dublin and cardinal), 28, 41, 76, 86–7, 89, 102, 213, 228, 243, 293, 327, 335, 341; and Catholic University, 44–5, 68, 323; suspicion of British, 89, 266; and flaming pastorals, 144, 164; and disestablishment of Church of Ireland, 266–8; and general election of 1868, 236; and rising of 1867, 88; and Fenianism, 43, 76, 87–8, 164, 289, 327; and National Association, 217; bans mock funerals and Requiem Masses, 144; and Fenian amnesty, 275–7; favours suspension

of habeas corpus, 296; and Limerick manifesto, 163; and Home Rule, 319 Daily Telegraph, 90, 93, 109, 205 Davis, Thomas, 10–11 Deasy, Timothy, 106–7, 111, 125, 131–2, 138; arrested in Manchester, 105; rescued, 108 denominational education, 212, 216, 236, 266, 277, 311, 313, 323 Derby, 14th earl of, 84, 95, 97, 114, 148, 166, 210, 230, 268; and antiCatholicism, 66; forms government, 65–6, 70–1, 74; and reform in Ireland, 68; and Fenians, 82, 176; and 1867 rising, 86 Desmond, Timothy, 179–81, 193–4, 195, 199; acquitted of murder, 196, 204 Desmond, William, 180–5, 193–4, 197–8, 204; acquitted of murder, 196 detective police, 6–7, 53, 71, 80, 106, 111, 151–2, 178, 244, 333 Devon Commission, 300–5, 307, 343; impact of report, 308 Devoy, John, 25, 272, 310, 331; and Clan na Gael, 312 Disraeli, Benjamin, xiii, 65–8, 74, 95, 98, 105, 145, 165, 171, 218, 220, 228, 231, 298, 324; character, 66, 210–11; and Catholicism, 66; and Ireland, 66, 90; and Reform Bill, 98, 113; and Clerkenwell bombing, 155–6; and anti-Fenian measures, 166; forms government, 211; Irish policy of, 211–14; relations with queen, 213, 221; and defence of Church of Ireland, 211, 219; and General Election of 1868, 233–4, 237, 240–1; exploitation of Protestant sentiment, 221–2

Index Dolan, Patrick, 94, 96; convicted of treason, 93 Dublin Castle, 39, 69, 72, 75, 85, 316 Du Cane, Edmund, 272, 302 Dufferin, Lord, 209, 243–4, 263, 293 Duffy, Gavan, 15, 36, 191, 251; and Nation, 10 Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, 38, 297; proposed repeal, 212 Edinburgh, duke of (Prince Alfred), 190–1, 331; character, 78; attempted assassination of, 189 Edinburgh Review, 7, 9, 209, 246 English, Nicholas, 180–1, 183, 193–5, 197; and three voluntary statements, 184–5, 202; their exclusion from court, 185–6, 193, 197; acquitted of murder, 196 Feilding, Percy, 55, 59, 150, 215, 288, 333; background, 53; as hunter of military Fenians, 53; commands special investigative unit, 148, 151, 168–71, 215; and hostility of Mayne, 169–70; Paris operations, 170–1, 200; intelligence gathering, 171–2 Fenian Brotherhood, xii, 34, 70, 133, 215, 271, 312, 328, 332; and Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, xiii, 25–8, 30, 36–7, 39, 92, 101, 322, 326; police infiltration of, 53; American wing, xiv, 25, 30–1, 36, 46; and raids into British North America, 46, 48, 61–3; activities in Britain, 79, 104, 271; and 1867 risings, 81–2, 84–5; and reorganization, 286, 288, 298; and intervention in by-elections, 287 Fenianism, ix, x, xiii, 29–30, 36, 43, 45, 48, 69, 75, 101, 117, 177, 293; in

431

Britain, 80, 101, 112, 115, 118; and rejection of constitutionalism, x, 28, 329; and seduction of soldiers, 47, 57; and insurgency, xiii, 46–7; and terrorism, xi, xii, 110, 114, 116, 148, 165, 171, 175, 177, 208, 286, 329–30; and redress of Irish grievances, 164, 219–20 Fenian trials. See rule of law Ferguson, James, 105–6, 112 Fitzgerald, John (judge), 41–2; on corroborative testimony, 56; and reasonable doubt, 56 Fortescue, Chichester, 38, 45, 49, 83, 138, 141, 235–6, 242–3, 275, 279, 283, 287, 292–5, 299, 305, 315; background, 38; as chief secretary, 38–9; reappointed, 241, 244; and disestablishment, 265; and agrarian disturbances, 273; and Fenian amnesty, 262–3; and treatment of Fenian prisoners, 282; and report of Devon Commission, 308; and decision to release prisoners, 309; appointed to Board of Trade, 311 Fowler, Robinson, 119–21, 125; recommends pardon for Maguire, 136 general election: (1868), 233–40, 259, 337; (1874), 324 Gladstone, William Ewart, 38–9, 46, 102, 210, 217, 239, 241, 259, 283, 313, 324, 334–5, 342, 344; character, 260; and Liberal leadership, 78, 98, 102; and Church of Ireland, 102, 164, 217–20, 222, 233, 235, 264; and Fenianism, 69, 289; and Manchester martyrs, 138, 162; and general election (1868), 233–40; forms government, 241–4; Irish policy, 162, 165,

432

Index

218, 229, 232, 241, 260–1, 269, 288, 291–2, 319, 335; and cautious approach to, 216, 218; and Cabinet divisions on, 261; and land reform, 280–1, 294; and Fenian amnesty, 280–1, 307–9; resists suspension of habeas corpus, 282, 293, 295; and royal residence in Ireland, 306, 317–18; and Home Rule, 320 Glasgow, 93, 111, 193, 201; and Fenianism, 79; and Home Rule, 322 Glasgow Free Press, 22, 29, 104 Gospel Garibaldi. See Murphy, William Granville, Earl, 288, 290, 294, 305, 309, 311 Great Famine, 8, 11–13, 16, 20–1, 23, 32, 38, 241 Greene, Baker, 196, 198, 200, 203–4 Habeas Corpus Act, xiii, 3, 5, 74, 76, 79, 105, 115, 117, 166, 295; suspensions of, 12, 33, 47–9, 60–1, 69, 83, 90, 101, 150, 175, 263, 337–8, 342; suspension in Canada, 63; proposed suspension in Britain, 168, 178; proposed suspension in Ireland, 274, 282, 285, 289, 294, 299, 314–16 Hardy, Gathorne, 112, 114, 119, 125, 134, 148, 155, 165, 168, 170–1, 182–3, 220, 315; background, 97; character, 97; conservatism, 97–8; as home secretary, 98; and the gathering of intelligence, 111, 116; surveillance of Fenians, 116; and arming of police, 112; and strengthening of Metropolitan Police, 152; and its structure, 169; and the ending of public executions, 128; and Manchester trials, 135–6, 138, 187–8; and petitions for clemency, 139; and

Clerkenwell trials, 193, 197, 200; and defence of Church of Ireland, 211, 221, 267 Hartington, marquis of, 239, 241, 243, 292, 294–5, 321, 323; and military Fenians, 58; appointed chief secretary, 311–12; and Ribbon violence, 314–15 Headlam, Thomas: background, 54; as judge advocate general, 54–60; and rule of law, 54–60, 342 Henderson, Edmund, 272, 334; background, 245; appointed commissioner of Metropolitan Police, 245; augments detective force, 245 Holborn incident, 111–12, 123, 181, 185; collapse of case, 123 Home Office, 34, 48, 79, 97, 99–101, 104–5, 111–12, 114, 116, 125, 335, 340; efforts to silence Murphy, 226– 7, 274, 338; selection of judges, 125; protection of witnesses, 125; confidence in Fenianism collapsing, 215 Home Rule movement, 278, 314–15, 319–22, 324, 341; and Home Government Association, 297–8, 313, 319, 322; and Home Rule League, 322, 324; and Home Rule Confederation, 322 Horse Guards, 57, 73–4 Howell, George, 112–13 Hughes, John (bishop, later archbishop, of New York): character, 21; Irish nationalism of, 21, 23, 27 Hyde Park, 97–8; mock funerals, 142; amnesty rally, 283 Irish Americans, xiii, 31, 34, 296; and residential clustering, 15–16; and

Index politics, 15; and nationalism, 23, 26, 39, 46, 48, 312 Irish Catholic Banner, 193, 195, 200 Irish Confederation, 12–13, 22–3, 121; and Confederate clubs, 23 Irish Constabulary (Royal after 1867), 47, 72, 79, 333; ill-equipped, 72; fortification of barracks, 101; British criticism of, 176 Irish Executive, 7, 9, 13, 27, 31, 34–5, 59; Irish domination of, 214; and royal visits to Ireland, 213; and illiberal measures, 75, 90; release of detainees, 90; and 1867 rising, 86, 92; and mock funerals, 145–6; exclusion of Nicholas English’s statements from court, 185, 193; and Fenian amnesty, 307 Irishman, 29–31, 37, 88, 96, 172–3, 175, 188, 220, 223, 253, 257, 272, 275, 283– 4, 287, 299, 328, 336, 341; and radical nationalism, 29, 295; and criticism of Manchester verdicts, 134; and of executions, 143 Irish nationalism, ix, xii, 8–13, 20–1, 52, 67, 70, 164, 326 Irish People, 28–9, 33–4, 41–2, 44, 79, 114, 150, 327–9, 341; suppression of, 36–7, 39, 60–1 Irish Protestants, 8–9, 11, 20, 46, 68, 76 Jones, Ernest, 22, 103, 120, 128, 134, 139, 206, 237, 254; background, 121; and Radical politics, 121; visits Ireland, 103 Justice, Anne, 179–80, 193–5, 199; Fenian sympathies of, 197; acquitted of murder, 194 Karslake, John, 129–32, 138

433

Kelly, Thomas, 40, 78, 82, 86, 92, 96, 104, 107, 114, 116, 125, 128, 131–2, 138, 141, 185–6; becomes Fenian chief, 75; approaches British Radicals, 83; and rising of 1867, 85; arrested, 105; rescued, 108; threatens reprisals, 135, 175, 331 Keogh, William (judge), 40–1; reaffirms principle of liberal state, 41; and Galway election petition, 322 Kerry, Fenian rising, 81–2 Kickham, Charles, 25, 252, 256, 262, 287, 313, 335 Kimberley, earl of, 50, 69, 74, 138, 219, 241, 293, 295, 305, 324, 333; and views of Irish, 261; and Fenianism, 69; supports Manchester executions, 139; fears of repeal of Union, 163; and Fenian amnesty, 263–4, 309; opposes Home Rule, 320. See also Wodehouse Knox, Robert, 17–18; and scientific racism, 16–17 Labalmondière, Douglas, 154, 245; assistant commissioner, 151–2 Lambert, John: background, 155–6; and Clerkenwell temporary relief, 155–6; and Irish policy, 211–12 land reform, 117, 212, 214, 216, 230, 277, 284, 292; (1866), 46, 49, 83; and Fenian amnesty, 280; and Cabinet divisions on tenant right, 288, 292; land bill (1870), 292, 294, 317; and tenant dissatisfaction with, 295 Larcom, Thomas, 35–6, 49, 69–71, 85, 92, 177, 231, 309; background, 32; as undersecretary, 32 Larkin, Michael, 120, 122, 128, 132–3, 136–7; public execution of, 140–1

434

Index

Lavelle, Patrick, 22, 32, 60, 87, 145, 161, 284, 290, 327–8; and radical nationalism, 22, 28, 32, 284; vice-president of National Brotherhood of St Patrick, 28–9; and Home Rule, 297 Lawton, James, 36; as solicitor general of Ireland, 33–4; as attorney general, 36 Leahy, Patrick (archbishop of Cashel), 44, 88, 213, 289; and Fenian amnesty, 275 Liberals, 4, 35, 38, 44, 46, 49–50, 65, 67, 77–8, 93, 95, 108, 237, 335; and Church of Ireland, 217–18, 220, 231– 3; and denominational education, 216–17; reluctance to introduce confidence motion, 223; and general election (1868), 237–40 Liberal state, ix, xiv, 4, 10, 23, 32–3, 36–7, 41, 47–8, 50, 60, 64, 91, 99–101, 208, 280, 332, 337, 343; concept of, 3; and liberal freedoms, 3–5, 16, 32, 34, 41, 60, 99, 116, 174, 216, 341; and political prisoners, 43, 343; and Irish anomaly, 172–4, 178, 214, 316, 340–2 Liberation Society, 44, 117, 217–18, 237–8 Limerick manifesto, 163, 165 Liverpool, 30, 34, 42, 72, 80, 110; and Fenianism, 34, 78–80, 92, 104, 270 Lomasney, William Mackey, xiii, 177, 331 Lowe, Robert, 49–50, 235, 261, 292, 296; opposes Reform Bill, 50; opposes Fenian amnesty, 264 Luby, Thomas Clarke, xiii, 25–6, 41–2, 114, 252, 262, 310, 330, 335, 343 Lush, Mr Justice, 186–7

Lynch, John Joseph (bishop of Toronto), 20, 61, 64; and Irish nationalism, 20–1 Lyons, Dr Robert, 300, 305; investigates French treatment of political prisoners, 301, 304 McCafferty, John, xiii, 78, 81, 96, 114, 331; and Chester incident, 81–2; arrest of, 81; convicted of treason, 93 McCorry, Peter, 195, 200, 204 Macdonald, John A., 62–4; and liberal state, 63–4 McEvilly, John (bishop of Galway), 163, 237, 313 McGee, Thomas Darcy, 15, 36, 62, 312, 331; murder of, 188 MacHale, John (archbishop of Tuam), 11, 43, 143–4, 163, 237–8, 290–1, 327 Maguire, John Francis, 14, 69, 138, 213–14, 315, 341; and Cork Examiner, 14, 253; and Fenian amnesty, 257, 261, 263, 272, 280, 307 Maguire, Robert, 156; background, 156–7; incumbent of St James’s, 156; and Explosion Relief Fund, 157 Maguire, Thomas, 126, 128, 131–2; sentenced to death, 133; criticism of verdict, 134; judges’ doubts, 135–6; pardoned, 139 Manchester, 30, 81, 186, 215, 238, 333; and Fenianism, 79–80, 104; and Fenian convention, 104; reorganization of police, 106; rescue of Kelly and Deasy, 107–8, 334; severe criticism of police, 108, 110 Manchester Guardian, 71, 102, 125 Manchester martyrs, 142–3, 161, 163, 271, 287, 336, 338

Index Manning, Henry (archbishop of Westminster), 67, 163, 165, 210, 216– 17, 234, 291; opposition to Italian nationalism, 68; and disestablishment of Church of Ireland, 210 Martin, John, 28, 31, 251, 278, 287; and mock funerals, 143; prosecution of, 172–3; constitutional nationalist, 31; and Home Rule, 297, 313 Mayne, Richard, 155, 161, 182, 244, 333; as commissioner of Metropolitan Police, 6, 79, 105, 148– 50, 154; opponent of detection, 79, 151–2, 169; criticism of, 151; calls for removal of, 169, 215 Mayo, earl of, 105, 110, 114, 118, 127, 173, 213, 227–8, 230–1, 331–2; and national policing, 110; and mock funerals, 145–6; target of assassination, 176; and royal residence in Ireland, 228. See also Naas Mellor, John (judge), 125, 129, 131–3; background, 126; and Maguire’s conviction, 136; and denial of referral of Manchester convictions, 138 Melody, Patrick, 186–8, 206, 310–11 Merthyr Tydfil, 172, 238–40 Metropolitan Police, 86, 115, 205, 316, 330, 333; drilling, 116; arming, 166; loss of public confidence in, 151, 215; criticism of, 161; calls for reorganization, 244–5; strengthening of, 168–9, 215, 333; and Detective Department, 169, 244 Mill, John Stuart, 7, 47, 83, 216, 263; and Irish policy, 209, 218 Mitchel, John, xii, 11–13, 25, 44, 251, 323, 329; and anglophobia, 24; as

435

Fenian agent in Paris, 61; and terrorism, 114 mock funerals, 142–5, 173, 271, 287, 341; discouraged by British bishops, 143; banning of, 145; prosecutions of leaders, 172 Monck, Lord, 62–4, 169, 230; and reform in Ireland, 65; and Fenianism, 65, 167, 188 Monsell, William, 242–3; and Fenian amnesty, 262–3 Moriarty, David (bishop of Kerry), 87, 89, 270–1, 289–91, 320–1; and concurrent endowment, 102; censure of Fenians, 86–7; and Manchester martyrs, 144; and general election (1868), 236 Mountjoy prison, 40, 42, 48, 96, 186 Mullany, Patrick, 180–1, 183–5, 196, 201–2, 207; turns Queen’s evidence, 182–3, 193–5, 198 Murphy, James (James Stewart), 181–2, 184–5, 194, 198, 200, 202; Fenian commander in Scotland, 104, 150; and Clerkenwell bombing, 151 Murphy, William (Gospel Garibaldi), 100–1, 103, 109, 224–5, 239, 274, 338; background, 99; and antiCatholicism, 99, 160; and The Confessional Unmasked, 99, 100, 226; and freedom of speech, 226–7 Mutiny Act, 55, 59 Napoleon III, 5, 113, 170, 250 Naas, Lord, 67, 69, 70–2, 75, 82, 87, 96, 103; character and background, 67; as chief secretary, 67; difficulties with Strathnairn, 73–4; and tenant reform, 76, 83–4, 89; and Fenianism,

436

Index

70; and release of political detainees, 77; and 1867 rising, 85–6; opposes executions, 94–5. See also Mayo Nation, 10–12, 15, 28, 37, 109, 173, 175, 272; criticism of Manchester verdicts, 134, 142; criticism of British press, 161 National Brotherhood of St Patrick, 28–31, 166, 327–8; Fenian front, 28 Nonconformists, 44, 102, 117, 217–19, 234–6, 238–9, 259, 323; and Church of Ireland, 217, 268 O’Brien, Michael (Gould), 107, 118, 122, 128, 131, 135–7; sentenced to death, 133; public execution of, 140–1 O’Brien, Richard (dean of Limerick), 27, 144, 163, 237, 290; and Home Rule, 297 O’Brien, Sergeant-at-law, 128–32, 137 O’Brien, William Smith, 13, 24, 313 O’Connell, Daniel, 8–11, 15, 24, 66, 145, 254, 278, 326 O’Donovan Rossa, Jeremiah, xiii, 26–7, 41–2, 262, 300, 303–4, 306, 310, 331, 335–7; manager of Irish People, 28, 41; as political prisoner, 255–6, 272, 278; and Tipperary by-election, 287; and Clan na Gael, 312 O’Farrell, Henry, 189; background, 189–90; mental instability of, 190–1; and Fenian conspiracy, 189–90, 192; conviction and execution of, 191–2 O’Hagan, Thomas, 242, 262, 275, 290; admiration of, 243; background, 33; as Irish attorney general, 32; defender of liberal state, 33–4; appointed Irish lord chancellor, 243;

and suspension of habeas corpus, 314; and Fenian amnesty, 307 O’Keefe, John, 180–1, 193, 204 O’Leary, John, 25, 42, 257, 262, 310 O’Mahony, John, 25–6, 62, 326; and Fenian Brotherhood, 25, 61; relations with Stephens, 25–6, 61 O’Neil, James, 182–4, 195, 198 Orange Order, 35, 43, 46, 66, 76, 103, 145, 164, 225, 227, 237, 239, 274–5, 293, 298, 341 Palmerston, Lord, 35, 37–8, 54, 113, 192, 198 Paris, 44, 49, 61, 84, 170–1, 178, 182, 200, 203, 230, 329, 334; and Commune, 84, 259, 317 Party Processions Act, 103, 145, 172, 274, 298, 341; adapted to mock funerals, 145 Peace Preservation Acts (Bill), 47, 294, 296, 298–300, 306, 315–16, 341 Peel, Robert, 10–11, 145; and police reform, 6 Peel, Robert (son), 32, 49; as chief secretary, 32–3; unpopularity of, 35, 38 Phoenix Park, xiii, 72, 101, 318, 331, 341 Phoenix Societies, x, 26, 31, 42, 68, 172, 300, 336 Pigott, Richard, 37, 173, 190, 272, 299, 341, 344; and seditious libel, 174, 216 Poland, Henry, 125, 129; investigates Barrett alibi, 200 police reform, 110–11, 161, 245; arming of police, 112, 116, 230 political detainees, 70, 74, 77; treatment of, 48–9, 70; release of, 77, 79, 90, 227

Index political prisoners, x, 43, 103; transfers to Britain, 42, 103; inconsistent treatment of, 43, 48, 250–8, 272–3, 336, 343; criminalization of Fenians, 249, 254, 258, 310, 336; criticism of treatment, 253, 257, 272, 300, 336–7; suggestions of milder treatment, 282–3; rejection of separate prison, 287; Knox-Pollock investigation, 256–7, 300–1; Devon Commission, 300–5, 307; amnesty, 308–11; Cabinet divisions over, 308. See also prisons Pope-Hennessy, James, 43, 88, 145; on Catholic clergy and Fenianism, 88; and political prisoners, 253–4 preliminary hearings, 119; of Manchester rescuers, 119–21, 123–4; of Clerkenwell accused, 180–5; of Burke and Casey, 205 Prevention of Terrorism Acts, xi, xiii, 332, 338 prisons: and Directorate, 248, 252, 258, 272, 305; and demands for harsher penal regime, 246; rigours of, 249– 50; investigations of discipline and penal servitude, 246–7; and Parkhurst, 248; and Pentonville, 42–3, 247–9, 255–6; and Millbank, 158, 166, 169, 176, 179, 247–9, 255–6, 287; and public works prisons: Chatham, 248, 258, 287; Dartmoor, 248; Portland, 96, 188, 248, 255–6, 258, 272; Portsmouth, 248; Woking, 248, 256 public executions, 127; of Manchester martyrs, 140–1; response of Irish communities, 141–2; of Barrett, 204–5 Punch, 17, 110, 214, 229, 277, 293; and ethnic tensions, 160

437

Radicals, 4, 47–8, 78, 83–4, 89, 108, 113, 237–8; approached by Kelly, 83 Reform Bill: (1866), 45, 50, 77; (1867), 15, 84, 96, 98–9, 213, 219, 224, 337 Reform League, 37, 83, 97, 103, 112, 118, 134, 139, 237, 338; president’s denunciation of violence, 113; and Irish sympathies of, 112, 162; alleged Fenian sympathies, 113; and Clerkenwell explosion, 162 Repeal Association, 9–12, 22–3, 326 Republicanism, 34, 68, 123, 165, 317; Irish, x, xi, xii, 68, 80, 165, 344; Irish American, 34 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 36, 123, 126, 254 Richmond Bridewell, 39–40, 49, 75, 343 Roberts, William Prowting, 120, 125, 128, 139, 193, 237; background, 121; and Radical politics, 121; as briefing solicitor in Fenian trials, 121, 125 Rose, Hugh, 39, 42, 47–8, 53–4, 57, 59, 72; background, 50–1; and Fenianism, 52, 54, 60; and capital punishment, 51–2, 54. See also Strathnairn rule of law, 5, 60, 117, 188, 206–7, 339–41, 343; and courts martial, 57–60; Fenian trials in Ireland, 41–2, 92–3, 118; Fenian trials in Canada, 63–4; Manchester trials, 119–39, 186– 8; Clerkenwell trial, 188, 192–6; criticism of verdicts, 196–7; investigation of Barrett alibi, 197–200, 203; trial of Burke and Casey, 206–7 Russell, Lord John (earl), 12, 37–8, 45–8, 60, 78, 98, 216, 245; and Fenianism, 46–7; and concurrent endowment, 102, 210 Russell, Odo, 171, 266, 290–1, 297

438

Index

Ryan, Daniel, 53, 79–80, 91–2, 104, 175, 227, 270, 333–4; warning of rising, 84; warns of assassination circle, 92; detailed warning of Burke escape plan, 152 Salford, 93, 104; and New Bailey Prison, 124, 140, 144 scientific racism, 16–18 sectarianism, 6, 9, 18, 39, 43, 99, 140, 189, 220, 222, 274–5 Seward, William Henry, 31, 64, 118 Seymour, Digby, 128, 130–2, 137; seeks referral to Court Crown Cases Reserved, 138; and Irish address of loyalty, 160 special commissions, 86, 119, 122–3, 125, 146 special constables, 72, 166, 178 Spectator, 164–5 Spencer, Earl, 243, 270, 284, 293–4, 298–300, 316, 324, 342; background, 244; appointed lord lieutenant, 243; and royal residence in Ireland, 306, 318–19; and agrarian disturbances, 273; and Fenian amnesty, 262–4, 308–9; and papal condemnation of Fenianism, 291 Stanley, Lord (later 15th earl of Derby), 63–4, 67, 74, 91, 97, 170, 298, 324; background, 65; opposes execution of 1867 rebels, 94, 96; and Irish policy, 165, 221 Stephens, James, xii, 24–7, 29–30, 36, 39–40, 49, 55, 60–1, 69, 70–1, 74, 82, 279, 326, 329, 343; character, 26; and revolutionary nationalism, 24–6; founds Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, 25; and subversion of

military, 29; autocratic conduct, 26; and the United States, 25–6 Strathnairn, Lord, 72, 74, 83–4, 86, 92, 101, 118, 173, 177, 230, 237; conflict with civilian authorities, 73; and 1867 risings, 85; and concurrent endowment, 102. See also Rose, Hugh Sullivan, A.M., 28, 172, 190, 272, 278, 341, 343; prosecutions of, 173–4; conviction, 174, 216 tenant right, 37, 65, 76, 83–4, 278, 284, 288, 292 terrorism, xiv, xv, 9, 133, 148, 282, 313, 329, 330; definitions of, x, xi, xii; fears of Fenian terror, 158–9, 165–6, 175–6, 330; criminalization of, xiv, 146 The O’Donoghue, 32, 198 Thompson, William Pherson (Daniel Darragh), 186–8, 206 Thomson, James, 152–3, 161, 245; and arrest of Ricard Burke, 148 Times (London), 3–4, 6, 16, 38, 49, 59, 73, 89–90, 94–5, 108, 190, 212, 229, 261, 296, 300, 316; and William Murphy, 100; and ethnic tensions, 160 Tories (Conservatives), 4, 11, 35, 47, 50–1, 89, 95, 98, 140, 324; minority government, 63, 65, 67, 76–8, 95–6, 116; and parliamentary reform, 78, 112; and Irish policy, 68, 210, 231; and relations with Catholic hierarchy, 76; and Fenian terror, 116; and defence of Church of Ireland, 231, 234; and general election (1868), 234; (1874), 324

Index Treason Felony Act, 12, 95, 118, 177, 180–1, 191, 253 ultramontanism, 18, 29, 217, 293 Union of Great Britain and Ireland, 8, 9, 15, 20, 24, 68, 209, 229, 234, 329. See also Repeal Association; Home Rule movement Vaughan, James, 180–1, 193–4, 207 Victoria, Queen, 27, 57–8, 65–6, 192, 213, 218, 223, 233, 293; aversion to public engagements, 76, 306, 319; threats against, 114–16, 148, 165, 167; uncooperative attitude of, 167–8; urges strengthening of police, 112; supports execution of Manchester rescuers, 136; opposes Fenian amnesty, 281; and Church of Ireland, 220, 265, 268; opposition to royal residence in Ireland, 213, 227–8, 306, 317–19; political distrust of Gladstone, 265 Volunteer Rifle Corps, 80, 122, 215, 332, 335; and Fenian enlistment in, 79 Waldegrave, Frances Countess, 38–9, 241 Wales, 219, 229; and general election (1868), 238–9

439

Wales, prince of, 148, 165, 213, 236; character and reputation, 78, 306, 317, 319; and visits to Ireland, 227–9, 317–18 Walpole, Spencer, 70, 72, 74–5, 78–9, 82, 96, 255–6; character, 66; and rule of law, 82; opposes execution of 1867 rebels, 94; resignation as home secretary, 97 Wetherall, Edward, 244; as Irish undersecretary, 231 Whelan, William, 274, 288, 294; background, 53; military detective, 53; member of special anti-Fenian unit, 170 Whigs, 4, 8, 12, 65, 98, 112, 220, 223 Williamson, Adolphus Frederick, 80, 105–6, 110, 130, 182, 187–8, 245; background, 80 Wilson-Patten, John, 231, 315; background, 231 Wodehouse, Lord, 38–9, 40–2, 45–7, 49–50, 52, 58–9, 175; background, 34–5; appointed lord lieutenant, 35; liberal principles of, 35, 37, 39; and Fenianism, 36, 48; and transfer of prisoners, 42. See also Kimberley Young Ireland, 10–12, 14, 25, 27, 36, 81, 326; and 1848 rising, 13, 22–4, 47, 73, 94, 313