New Lease on Life: Landlords, Tenants, and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada 9780773564282

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A New Lease on Life

McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History Donald Harman Akenson, Editor

1 Irish Migrants in the Canadas A New Approach Bruce S. Elliott 2 Critical Years in Immigration Canada and Australia Compared Freda Hawkins (Second edition, 1991)

10 Vancouver's Chinatown Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980 Kay J. Anderson 11 Best Left as Indians Native-White Relations in the Yukon Territory, 1840-1973 Ken Coates

3 Italians in Toronto Development of a National Identity, 1875-1935 John E. Zucchi

12 Such Hardworking People Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto Franca lacovetta

4 Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folk Songs Essays in Honour of the Sesquicentennial of the Birth of Kr. Barons Vaira Vikis-Freibergs

13 The Little Slaves of the Harp Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York John E. Zucchi

5 Johan Schr0der's Travels in Canada, 1863 Orm 0verland 6 Class, Ethnicity, and Social Inequality Christopher McAll 7 The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict The Maori, the British, and the New Zealand Wars James Belich 8 White Canada Forever Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia W. Peter Ward (Second edition, 1990) 9 The People of Glengarry Highlanders in Transition, 1745-1820 Marianne McLean

14 The Light of Nature and the Law of God Antislavery in Ontario, 1833-1877 Allen P. Stouffer 15 Drum Songs Glimpses of Dene History Kerry Abel 16 Louis Rosenberg Canada's Jews Edited by Morton Weinfeld 17 A New Lease on Life Landlords, Tenants, and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada Catharine Anne Wilson

A New Lease on Life Landlords, Tenants, and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada CATHARINE ANNE WILSON

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1994 ISBN 0-7735-1117-2 Legal deposit first quarter 1994 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec

@ Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funds have also been received from Multiculturalism Canada and from the College of Arts, University of Guelph, and the Vice President of Research, University of Guelph.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Wilson, Catharine Anne, 1958A new lease on life: landlords, tenants and immigrants in Ireland and Canada (McGill-Queen's studies in ethnic history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1117-2

i. Irish - Ontario - Amherst Island - History igth century. 2. Immigrants - Ontario - Amherst Island - History - igth century. 3. Landlord and tenant - Ontario - History - igth century. 4. Landlord and tenant - Ireland - History - igth century. 5. Land tenure - Ontario - Amherst Island - History igth century. 6. Land settlement - Ontario Amherst Island - History - igth century. 7. Down (Northern Ireland) - Emigration and immigration - History i9th century. 8. Amherst Island (Ont.) - Emigration and immigration - History - igth century. I. Title. II. Series. HD1331.C3W45 1993 97i-3'59 €93-090333-1

This book was typeset by Typo Litho Composition Inc. in 10/12 Palatino.

To my parents

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Contents

Maps ix Tables xi Illustrations xiii Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction 3 PART ONE: LANDLORDS 1 Lord Mount Cashell: An Improving and Evangelical Landlord 13 2 His Lordship's Adventure Abroad 46 3 The Famine and His Lordship's Demise 78 4 Major Maxwell's Irish Estates: A New Kind of Management 92 5 Major Maxwell's Estate on Amherst Island 118 PART TWO: TENANTS

6 The Ards Peninsula 139 7 The Emigrants and Their Settlement on Amherst Island 174 8 What It Meant To Be a Tenant on Amherst Island 205

viii Contents Conclusion 224 Appendix: Amherst Island Immigrant Families from the Ards 229 Notes 237 A Note on Sources 287 Index 299

Maps

1 Amherst Island in Relation to the Mainland 59 2 State of Amherst Island Property in 1835 and 1855 75 3 State of Amherst Island Property in 1855 and 1895 134 4 The Ards Peninsula in Relation to the Rest of Ireland 141 5 The United Parish of St Andrews, 1810 142 6 Townlands in the United Parish of St Andrews 178 7 Ordnance Survey of the Parish of Inishargy, c.1858-60 190 8 Amherst Island, 1860 191 9 Occupiers of Land on Amherst Island, 1878 218

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Tables

1 The Moore Family 15 2 Leases on Mount Cashell's Antrim Estate 29 3 The Perceval Maxwells 95 4 The Moores 97 5 Estate Administration in 1870 106 6 Demesne Administration

109

7 Emigrants from the Ards Peninsula to Amherst Island 181 8 A Comparison of Average Farm Size, Land Use, and Livestock in 1851 192 9 Island Tenant and Freehold Households, 1827-1911 207 10 Birthplace and Religion for Island Tenants and Freeholders, 1861 207 11 Date of Arrival on the Island for Tenants and Freeholders Listed in 1861 208 12 Age Distributions of Tenant and Freehold Household Heads in 1861 208 13 Average Farm Size and Land Use on Amherst Island, 1861 210 14 Average Productivity of Island Tenant and Freehold Farms, 1861 211

xii Tables

15 Average Value of Island Tenant and Freehold Farms, 1861-62 211 16 Average Livestock Owned by Island Tenants and Freeholders, 1861-62 212 17 Average Value of Surplus Production per Tenant Household, 1861-62 213 18 Island Rents and Land Prices, 1823-1900 214 19 Tenant Right on Amherst Island, 1843-86 215 20 Island Tenants Who Stayed or Left Between 1835-55 and 1855-71 217

Illustrations

1 The young Stephen Moore, third earl of Mount Cashell 14 2 Galgorm Castle 17 3 Stephen Moore, third earl of Mount Cashell 20 4 Moore Park 22 5 The drawing-room at Moore Park 23 6 Major Robert Perceval Maxwell 96 7 Finnebrogue 98 8 Interior of Finnebrogue 99 9 Spencer Perceval 104 10 Major Robert Perceval Maxwell 119 11 "Lane at the Cedars, Amherst Island" 125 12 "Perceval's Place in His Time" 129 13 William Henry Moutray 130 14 "Farnham"

131

15 Ards landscape 144 16 Mount Stewart 148 17 Merchants and Farmers in Portaferry 152 18 Vignettes in Portaferry 154

xiv Illustrations 19 Boat-building at Portaferry

156

20 Labouring class in Portaferry 157 21 "Flowering" on the Ards 161 22 Jane Filson 177 23 Ballyhalbert 180 24

Portaferry Quay 183

25

"Hickories," Amherst Island 187

26 "The Boathouse," Amherst Island 188 27 Samuel Glenn 194 28 Glenn Home, Lower Main St, Ballywalter 219 29 Glenn Home, Amherst Island 220 30 The Millers, Amherst Island 221 31 The Reids, Amherst Island 222 32 The Flemings, Amherst Island 223

Acknowledgments

Gratitude is extended to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their financial support during my dissertation preparation and their help in publishing this book. Additional funding from the College of Arts and vice-president of Research, University of Guelph, is gratefully acknowledged. I would also like to thank the staff of the following institutions for their co-operation: the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, the Ulster Historical Foundation, the Upper Ards Historical Society, the South Eastern Education and Library Board, Queen's University Archives, and the Lennox and Addington County Museum. To the people of Amherst Island and the Ards Peninsula, to my genealogical correspondents, and particularly to John and Sally Maxwell, I extend a warm thank-you for their interest in my work and for their generosity in sharing treasured documents and memories. Special thanks go to my fellow researchers at the Institute of Irish Studies for creating such a stimulating academic - and friendly - environment during my year in Belfast. I would also like to express gratitude to Suzanne Smith, Jean Wilson, and Matthew Sutton for their help in typing and proofreading. A very special thanks is extended to Don Akenson who has been the source of much inspiration and sound advice, and who through his own high standards has provided me with an excellent example. Likewise the constructive criticism of Jamie Snell, Marvin Mclnnis, and Bruce Elliott was extremely useful throughout the revision process. For their unfaltering support, I lovingly acknowledge Matthew, Tom, and Daisy, and my family. Finally, I thank God for Charlie, my newborn son, for presenting me with fresh challenges and "a new lease on life."

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A New Lease on Life

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Introduction

This is a transatlantic adventure of a transatlantic people. It is the history of two sets of individuals whose aspirations, opportunities, and destinies spanned the broad Atlantic. Essentially, it is an examination of immigrants on two interrelated levels: those of landlord and tenant. Part One is a study of landlordism on both sides of the ocean. It is a reconstruction of the family circumstances and estate management of two landlords, Stephen Moore, third earl of Mount Cashell, and Major Robert Perceval Maxwell. They each owned large estates in the north and the south of Ireland, and an estate in the province of Upper Canada (Ontario) known as Amherst Island. Their experiences shed light on several questions. For example, how did estate management change over time, and did it differ in the north and the south of Ireland? Why did these landlords buy land overseas? Once in the New World, where Old World problems of overpopulation, long leases, and middlemen did not exist, what form did the landlord-tenant relationship take? Was this an opportunity for landlords to start afresh, or did the traditions and financial circumstances of their Irish estates influence tenancy arrangements in the New World? Part Two is a study of tenants on both sides of the ocean. It follows over one hundred families who migrated between 1820 and 1860 from the Ards Peninsula in County Down, Ireland, to Amherst Island, where they rented land from Mount Cashell and Maxwell. Their experiences reveal what life was like in the United Parish of St Andrews, why they emigrated, why they rented on Amherst Island, and what it meant socially and economically to be a tenant in the New World, where most farmers were freeholders. Following the same individuals through their lives and across the ocean is the

4 A New Lease on Life

most promising way to recapture the immigrant experience, and it provides an excellent opportunity to reconsider the cliches about the Old World and proceed with a more accurate comparison of life in both places, for both landlord and tenant. This study might be considered unusual for two reasons. In the first place, the people traced moved from a peninsula on the northeast coast of Ireland to an island in Lake Ontario. Neither community was typical of its mainland country, and it is not apparent if being surrounded by water made locals different from mainlanders. It is readily apparent, though, that the movement of people from the Ards Peninsula to Amherst Island was typical of nineteenth-century migration. These families chose their destination in a fashion common to many immigrants: they migrated to an environment in which they could employ their traditional mixture of the skills associated with a coastal economy, such as farming, fishing, sailing, and shipbuilding. The study might also seem unusual since these Irish tenants left their landlords on the Ards Peninsula and rented land on Amherst Island from another set of Irish landlords. Foreign absentee proprietors in Upper Canada were, after all, rather unusual. Landlords and tenants, however, were quite common. Thus we have an opportunity to further our understanding of not only the circumstances surrounding migration and adaptation but also the landlord-tenant relationship. Germane to this study of migration is the ongoing debate over the history of Irish immigration to Canada, and the new emphasis on comparative history. Immigration history has broadened in recent years to encompass detailed cross-cultural comparative analysis. * It is no longer satisfactory to study immigrants and their adaptation to a new environment without an equally thorough analysis of their community of departure. Migration was clearly not a one-time exchange but an ongoing process that influenced events in both the New World and the Old World, which were themselves diverse and changing. Likewise, our understanding of Irish migration to Canada is varied and continually being rewritten. The Irish in Canada, like those in the United States, have often been characterized as Roman Catholic Famine refugees who, once in Canada, never had the disposition, capital, or skills to establish themselves on the land and formed instead an urban working-class ghetto. Since 1982, Donald H. Akenson and other historians have challenged this stereotype.2 We now know that the majority of Irish immigrants in mid-century Canada arrived prior to the Famine and were Protestant and rural-based. The case presented here chronicles the success of the Protestant Irish on the land.

5

Introduction

This study also modifies to some degree the stereotype of the "Ulster Scot" or "Scotch-Irish" immigrant.3 Unlike the image of the emotional, fatalistic, communal Catholic Irish who viewed immigration as exile and doom, the image of the Scotch-Irish immigrant has characterized them as dour, self-assertive, and rational individualists. They are depicted as "energetic adventurers, ruthless landgrabbers, and a highly speculative, grasping, rural middle-class," always on the edge of the frontier and always moving away from European influence, social inequality, and the rule of the privileged class. In short, they are considered to have been "frontiersmen par excellence," "God's frontiersmen."4 This characterization, first created in the frontier of colonial America, has been carried over to nineteenthcentury Upper Canada by scholars studying the rural Irish. Their reliance on land records and the geographic relationship of families and land has tended to exaggerate the individualism and materialism of the Protestant Irish.5 The common experience of migration and settlement, and the complex relationships between people within the community, have not received the same attention.6 For the families in this study, economic incentive was the prime motivating factor in emigration, but familial and local loyalties were just as important, and sometimes more so, as individual gain. They left Ireland as much to provide a secure environment in which to establish the next generation as to better themselves . They travelled as families, not individuals. Moreover, they came amidst a larger kin-and-community network. Group solidarity promoted success in Canada as credit, jobs, shelter, and emotional support could all be had within the community of one's friends and relatives. Instead of being independent freeholders always moving farther away from European influence, they chose to rent land from absentee Irish landowners in a township close to good markets and where they could employ their traditional skills. Once they reached the point at which they could afford to buy land, they preferred to be tenants amongst a community of kinfolk rather than be freeholders elsewhere. Even after Amherst Island was completely settled and it became necessary to relocate, families travelled to secondary settlements in groups, thereby repeating the process of kinand-community migration over again twenty or thirty years later. These families were clearly not the stereotypical Scotch-Irish frontiersmen but much more cautious, familial, and communal. In many respects these people shared in the experiences and immigrant culture of millions of nineteenth-century migrants, not just from Ireland but from the British Isles and Europe. They left from proto-industrialized rural areas, where supplementary income, es-

6 A New Lease on Life

pecially from linen, was in jeopardy, and where commercialized farming was resulting in an extremely unequal distribution of land. Small farmers, artisans, and agricultural labourers who had previously managed with a small plot of land and the additional income from labour and crafts found that their margin of security was narrowing. Concerned primarily about family survival, they were willing to do whatever was necessary to meet changing economic realities, even if this meant migrating. From Switzerland, Scotland, Holland, Scandinavia, and Germany, young families left with a modest amount of capital for America. Soon tight clusters of transplanted villages emerged. In the countryside and the city, kin and neighbourhood provided credit, shelter, advice, and moral support during the setting-up stage, and for decades thereafter a high degree of intermarriage and religious and geographical distinctiveness continued to sustain community life.7 The landed class also looked upon the New World as a means to secure their families' futures. Facing financial difficulties and unable to enact the improvements he wanted on his Irish estates, Stephen Moore, third earl of Mount Cashell, purchased Canadian property to secure his family's fortune. He hoped to create a profitable estate on Amherst Island, but the Irish Famine bankrupted him and he was forced to sell his Canadian property. Major Robert Perceval Maxwell, who subsequently purchased the Island, used the income it produced to survive the Irish Land War, one of the most difficult periods in the history of Irish landlordism. Historians generally have had an ingrained animosity towards landlordism. Landlords, whether in the Old or New World, are depicted as a fraudulent power elite who frustrated and downgraded an oppressed tenant class. The corollary to this characterization of landlords is the worship of the freeholding yeomanry. Both are compelling images that have been buttressed by social theorists and by persistent folk traditions of tenant-landlord hatred in the Old World and of freehold culture in the New World.8 In Ireland, a country colonized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and dominated by Protestant landlords by the eighteenth century, tenants naturally perpetuated the belief that their landlords were alien usurpers and profligate spendthrifts. The Famine and the Land War of the nineteenth century did nothing to recast this image. In fact, the nineteenth century was rife with an anti-landlordism propagated by politicians and documented by government inquiries. Tenancy has likewise been harshly criticized in North America, where it has usually been depicted as a malfunction - a result of poorly conceived and administered government land policies that allowed land to fall

7 Introduction

into the hands of avaricious speculators. The monopoly of land was viewed as detrimental to local development and national pride, and as undemocratic. Renting, it was thought, blighted individual initiative and enterprise and was vastly inferior to freehold tenure. Tenants were associated with poor agriculture, the rural lower class, and those most likely to be uprooted in hard times.9 Not all scholars, however, agree with this depiction of landlordism and tenancy. Since the 19605, Irish historians, inspired by new techniques of analysis and the availability of estate papers, have challenged the traditional image of landlordism in nineteenth-century Ireland. They have showed convincingly that rents were not high, that evictions and agrarian crime were infrequent, and that landlordism fell victim to the polemics of land-agitators and British politicians eager to change the Irish situation without really understanding it.10 Meanwhile, North American scholars have re-examined tenancy. They argue that it was not anachronistic in the New World but relevant when probed from the viewpoint of the economic objectives of both landlord and tenant.11 Far from preventing community development, landlords or speculators in the American Midwest brought capital into a region and made credit available to farmers when no other institutions existed. Tenancy, moreover, made economic sense as a means of checking out a place upon arrival before buying, of cashing in on good crop prices with a minimum of outlay, and of saving money which could be put towards machinery or cattle. As such, it operated as an agricultural ladder and was associated, therefore, with youth and recent-immigrant status; one climbed the ladder from farmer's son or immigrant to labourer, to tenant, to owner, as one acquired skills and capital.12 Nor were tenants necessarily an oppressed class. Studies of tenancy in Ontario and Prince Edward Island reveal that tenancy was associated with the most expensive, productive soil and capital-intensive agriculture.13 In the American Midwest tenants were as well off as owners concerning the value of their produce, farm, and horses, and tenancy and transiency were not synonymous.14 While revisionists in Ireland and America have done much to reveal the biases of previous historians and the complexity of the landlord-tenant relationship, it remains a controversial issue. At the heart of the debate lie fundamentally different perceptions of the world. On the one hand, scholars who adhere to a Marxist framework view the landlord-tenant relationship as akin to that of capitalist and proletarian. According to their view, ownership of the means of production (in this case, land) structured the relationship of exploitation.15 While tenants had access to the land and tools neces-

8 A New Lease on Life

sary for the realization of their labour, they did not own the land outright and had to hand over a portion of their production to the ruling class. Marxists argue that tenants could not accumulate capital, and that the landlord class used the fruits of their tenants' labour to increase their own political and economic power so as to extract a larger share of the wealth of society than was warranted by their entrepreneurial contribution.l6 On the other hand, political economists find less exploitation. The landlord and tenant entered the market-place and, owing to the laws of supply and demand, left with their just share. Both parties embarked upon the terms of the rental contract freely, the terms and duration having been established in advance. Rent is viewed as an expense of doing business, a charge for the temporary use of land and buildings that would otherwise need to be purchased. Neither ideological framework is entirely adequate. It would be absurd to ignore the clash of interests inherent in tenancy and the changing leverage that each party brought to the bargaining table, yet the relationship was more qualified than that of exploiter and exploited. Some of the debate continues because of a failure to appreciate the concept of ownership. Historians who believe that landlordism was rapacious and that freehold tenure was a panacea often do not understand who actually had ownership. Lawyers and philosophers know that no such thing as absolute ownership exists. The question is not one of ownership but of who has the "greatest interest" in the property.17 The classic example is the distinction between a freeholder and a leaseholder with a long lease of, for instance, one hundred years. One could say both are owners: the first of a freehold, the second of a lease. Indeed, franchise law in Ireland recognized this, since a person having a lease for the length of one life or more was called a freeholder and considered to have a great enough interest in property to vote. In the case of a long lease, both tenant and landlord were owners, but of different things. On the Ards Peninsula and Amherst Island, the tenant had rights to the use, management, possession, income, security, capital, and, on occasion, transmissibility of the property. The landlord had rights to the rent and to the legal title to take back the land after the lease expired. "Tenant right," which was the tenants' right to sell their improvements or remaining lease, was perhaps the most valuable interest that tenants had in their property and the most important aspect of the landlord-tenant relationship. On Mount Cashell's and Maxwell's Irish estates, peaceful relations between landlord and tenant were integrally related to the existence and security of tenant right. Whether tenant right was tolerated or prohibited was a deter-

9

Introduction

mining factor in how content tenant families were on the Ards, in when and how they could afford to emigrate, and in why they chose to rent on Amherst Island. Where tenants could sell their interest, they could get as much for it as the value assigned to full and absolute possession, known as fee simple. Tenant right therefore was an important way to store capital that could be drawn on in times of need. When this privilege was encroached upon by landlords, disgruntled tenants on the Ards sold their diminishing interest in the land and used the money to emigrate. Once in Upper Canada, a major incentive to rent instead of buy land was the money to be made from escalating tenant-right values. Landlords gave tenants a large interest in their property in the early stages of settlement so that the proprietors' land would be cleared and settled, and thus rise in value. Tenants were able to capture much of this unearned profit by selling their tenant right and using the money to rent better farms elsewhere, or buy. As such they became the "owners" of land, as most people understand it. How much power was wielded by the landlord or tenant was as qualified as their ownership. The leverage that either party could command within a given place and time was determined by the economic situation, meaning the availability of land, capital, and labour; the legalities of tenancy, especially distraint and eviction; and the ideology of landlord-tenant relations (for example, the landlord's sense of responsibility to his tenants, and the tenant's deference towards his superior). The role that tenancy was intended to play in the plans of landlords and tenants was also an influential factor. In Ireland, tenanted estates were the basis of Lord Mount Cashell's and Major Maxwell's family continuity, influence, and wealth. The Amherst Island estate had less of a dynastic role. Mount Cashell and Maxwell viewed the Island as a speculative investment and tenants as a necessary resource. The Canadian and Irish estates were, therefore, managed with different objectives in mind. From the tenant's perspective, too, renting in Canada was seen in a different light. Whereas Irish tenants had no opportunity to be entirely free of landlords and viewed tenancy as a way of life, Canadian tenants viewed renting as a temporary stage en route to purchasing land of their own. The curtain goes up on this human drama at a time when landed families throughout the British Isles were experiencing financial embarrassment, dwindling political privileges, and the breakdown of landlord-tenant relations. Rent arrears and reductions, made necessary by the economic depression following the Napoleonic Wars, substantially curtailed estate income, leaving the landed class in a

10 A New Lease on Life

weakened position. Landlord-tenant relations were also changing as long leases, middlemen, and tensions between Roman Catholics and Protestants distanced landlords from their tenants and prevented them from expressing a positive role in tenurial affairs. Meanwhile, the political atmosphere was not sympathetic to their plight. In the eighteenth century Anglo-Irish landlords had been able to defend their own interests in a Dublin-based Irish Parliament; with the Act of Union, however, they became an unorganized group of peers in the British House of Lords, unable to take a united position on Irish issues, let alone those affecting their own interests. Constitutional changes further weakened their political hegemony, as property lost some of its political power and the masses gained representation, first in Parliament and later in city and borough corporations. The cumulative effect of these changes was that the class known as the "Ascendancy" was becoming the "Descendancy."l8

PART ONE

Landlords

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CHAPTER ONE

Lord Mount Cashell: An Improving and Evangelical Landlord

It sometimes appears that the landed classes did very little to prevent their slide into decay and obsolescence. Their story is most often told as one of constant resistance to change and of delaying action in the House of Lords. They are blamed for doing little to address the changing state of landlord-tenant relations or to stimulate local development. It is said that they were unwilling or indifferent to the possibilities that the new age presented; in short, that they maintained a tired political and economic position.* While there is an element of truth in this analysis, the landed classes were not devoid of innovation and initiative. The imaginative, daring, and somewhat pompous Stephen Moore, third earl of Mount Cashell, was driven jointly by the evangelical creed and the spirit of improvement to gain greater control over his estate affairs. In the process, he adopted some aspects of modern management, experimented with agricultural improvements and economic development, and attempted to convert his Roman Catholic tenantry to Protestantism. Each of these initiatives was aimed at improving conditions amongst his tenantry and regaining an active role in shaping tenurial relations. Lord Mount Cashell (the title being derived from the Rock of Cashell, which had been part of the family estates) was born on 20 August 1792 to Stephen Moore, second earl of Mount Cashell, and Margaret, eldest daughter of Robert King, earl of Kingston. The Moore family was descended from Thomas de Moore, who accompanied William the Conqueror into England and fought in the Battle of Hastings as one of the principal commanders. The Moores first appeared in Ireland during the reign of King James I when Richard Moore immigrated and established himself at Clonmel, County Tipperary. Richard's son, Stephen Moore, purchased forty thou-

14 Landlords

The young Stephen Moore, third earl of Mount Cashell. Thomas U. Sadlier, ed., An Irish Peer on the Continent (1801-03) (London: Williams and Norgate 1920).

15 Lord Mount Cashell Table 1 The Moore Family Richard Moore d.1690 Stephen Moore d.1703 Richard Moore Stephen Moore d.1766 Stephen Moore d.1790 1st Earl Mount Cashell Stephen Moore 1770-1822 2nd Earl Mount Cashell I Stephen Moore 1792-1883 3rd Earl Mount Cashell = Anna Wyse 1

Stephen 4th Earl 1825-?

i Charles 5th Earl 1826-?

i Geqrge Francis 1832-?

Jane 18201907

i Helena Adelaide 1823-?

i Anna Maria Isabella

i Catherine Louisa 7-1886

sand acres in Counties Cork and Waterford in 1684 and became the first of a line of Stephens to reside at "Moore Park," Kilworth. The young third earl, subject of this study, received his early education on the Continent and in 1812 took an MA from Trinity College, Cambridge. At the age of twenty-seven, he married Anna Maria, daughter of Mr Samuel Wyss of Berne, Switzerland. Three years later, on 27 October 1822, he succeeded his father as the third earl of Mount Cashell. When Mount Cashell succeeded to his father's estates in 1822, the landed gentry participated in a hierarchy of social and political leadership based on land ownership. The most influential men possessed large estates of over six thousand acres. Mount Cashell's properties lay mainly in Counties Cork and Tipperary in the south, and County Antrim in the north. Together they comprised over sixty thousand statute acres. In addition, he held miscellaneous properties in Counties Waterford, Limerick, Dublin, and Kildare.2 In County Cork his property was largely in the Barony of Condons and Clangibbon, comprising 5,961 acres scattered throughout several townlands in and around the parish of Kilworth,

16 Landlords

including the town of Kilworth and the one-thousand-acre demesne and Georgian mansion known as "Moore Park." It was a troubled estate. Most tenants had long leases and, anxious to profit, had sublet their farms to numerous cottiers. Overcrowded and impoverished, families found the situation even worse when the dairying and provision trades, the most important income-earning sectors of Cork agriculture, declined. Tenants depended on growing wheat and grazing cattle in the lush Puncheon River valley, and those living in the mountain areas depended on the sale of butter and calves. By the 18303, however, prices for agricultural products had fallen to 30 to 40 percent below wartime levels, and the town of Kilworth was also in decline.3 Formerly an important resting place for travellers between Cork and Dublin, Kilworth lost influence to the neighbouring town of Fermoy when the Bianconi coach route was removed and a new road was built west of the village.4 Nevertheless, the population continued to increase. The vast majority of people could neither read nor write and lived in small cabins frequently made with mud walls and thatched roofs, with scarcely any furniture. In the absence of bog, fuel was scarce, and with tattered clothes and only potatoes and sour milk for daily sustenance, life was increasingly uncomfortable. Fortunately, for half of the labouring population regular employment was still available in agriculture or the corn and flax-dressing mills. Those with irregular employment were able to sustain themselves by taking shelter in the town or collecting manure in exchange for small plots of potato land. The economic situation in Kilworth, however, was not as bad as that in West Cork or Tipperary.5 Mount Cashell's Tipperary estate was comprised of 6,383 acres of scattered townlands in the Baronies of Middlethird, Ikerrin, Slievardagh, and Eliogarty. Here increasing population and decreasing employment opportunities translated into miserable living conditions. In the parish of Hore Abbey, for example, the population increased by nearly 19 percent between 1830 and 1840. It was common throughout the baronies to find two families crowded into one cabin with only straw mats for beds. Agrarian disturbances were much more frequent than in County Cork, partly because labourers faced greater difficulty in getting potato land at reasonable rent since most of the land was used for grazing cattle. Most observers agreed that conditions in Tipperary had worsened since 1815.6 Mount Cashell's largest estate was in County Antrim in the Baronies of Lower Toome and Lower Antrim. It consisted of 48,629 statute acres in the countryside surrounding Ballymena and included the towns of Kells and Cullybackey, plus the i6o-acre de-

17 Lord Mount Cashell

Galgorm Castle was built in 1696 and was surrounded by a fortified enclosure. All of the roof, joists, floors, and wainscotting were of Irish oak. Dublin Penny Journal 2, no. 104 (28 June 1834).

mesne and castle called "Galgorm." In contrast to the tenants of Mount Cashell's southern properties, the vast majority of whom were Roman Catholic, largely illiterate, and dependent on agricultural pursuits, his tenants in County Antrim were Protestant, literate, and engaged in the linen industry.7 They were less likely than their southern counterparts to be at the mercy of middlemen, and conacre and agrarian disturbances were almost unknown.8 Rents were nearly half the rate they were in County Cork, but then the land was not as suited to agriculture as it was there.

i8 Landlords With farms of mostly mountain, bog, and light, gravelly soil, tenants chose to spin yarn and weave linen and to ignore agriculture. Indeed, south Antrim was able to transform itself successfully into factory-based employment in the 18403 and therefore weather the crisis in the linen industry that affected so much of Ulster in the early nineteenth century. As late as 1846, linen was "extensively and successfully prosecuted" by Mount Cashell's tenants, with Ballymena being the principal market town.9 Even so, the condition of the poorer classes was declining as the population continued to increase and regular employment was increasingly difficult to find. Many weavers had to resort to farm labour to make ends meet; those unable to secure employment were sometimes forced to spend their savings or sell their furniture. The poor of Antrim, however, were not as miserable as their southern counterparts. Their furniture might have been scarce and their clothing poor, but they lived more comfortably in houses of stone and lime, had salted herring to augment their diet, and rarely had to crowd two families into one dwelling.10 The manner in which Mount Cashell managed these properties in the north and south of Ireland differed greatly. Being absent from the north, he designed his estate policy to minimize administrative duties but also encourage improving tenants by rewarding them with good rental terms. Mount Cashell, and more specifically his resident agent, earned the reputation of being honourable men whose tradition of low rents, infrequent evictions, lenience, and tolerance of tenant right guaranteed their tenants' security and potential prosperity. Indeed, generous rental terms that allowed tenants to amass capital could be said to be his main form of improvement. As proof of how pleased tenants were with the tenurial policy, incoming tenants were willing to pay a very high price for the right to reside on his estate. Since most tenants were Protestant, landlordtenant relations were eased. On his southern estates, where he resided, the earl personally implemented a variety of schemes to solve what he believed were major problems. His southern tenants were largely Catholic, poor, frequently in arrears, and unable to earn additional income from the linen industry. To improve the situation, Mount Cashell adopted some of the new management strategies: he hired solicitor-agents and tried to put an end to middlemen, subletting, and subdivision. To encourage good agriculture, he fixed rents at a level that allowed the tenant three-quarters of the return on the product of his labour. He experimented in reclaiming waste lands to reduce overcrowding, in establishing flax mills to stimulate local enterprise, and in deepen-

19 Lord Mount Cashell

ing water routes to expand local markets. Believing that Catholicism was at the root of their poverty and ignorance, he sponsored Protestant schools and churches with the aim of morally educating his tenantry so that they would be honest, frugal, and able to pay their rent. In comparison with his predecessors, Mount Cashell was the more sober, enterprising, responsible, and humane landlord of the nineteenth century. The Illustrated London News described him as having "very studious yet energetic habits of mind" and a memory that was "extremely retentive."11 An enlightened man inspired by the desire for improvement, he read and admired the work of Adam Smith and other political economists. He was not, however, a sophisticated administrator bent on profit. In fact, he was a poor administrator; his administration lacked centralization and proper supervision. Instead of hiring a chief agent to run the estate efficiently, Mount Cashell attempted to fill the position himself while spending most of his energy dabbling in agricultural improvements, carrying out his political duties, converting his tenants to Protestantism, and maintaining a reputation as a connoisseur and scholar. He never appeared to consider his estate as a unit of production or management and worthy of more scrutiny. Many of the earl's attempts at improving efficiency were in vain, for although Mount Cashell had legal authority, his tenants had numerous ways of getting around his new regulations. Moreover, his personal involvement in estate management did not always lead to good landlord-tenant relations; in fact, his absenteeism from his northern estate was perhaps a blessing. His application of the evangelical creed to estate affairs in the south, intended to produce solvency and social harmony, had the opposite effect. His Catholic tenants were embittered, and any success his other improvements might have reaped were overshadowed by the consequences of his proselytizing. In all these activities, prestige and honour seem to have been as important or even more so than profit to His Lordship. While his concern for society's ills and his own personal conviction were sincere and unrelenting, a certain pomposity and desire for notoriety marked his personality. Matthias Hendley, agent for a neighbouring landlord in County Cork, complained that Mount Cashell was too fond of pontificating at every function and was "miserably tedious in his delivery" of speeches.12 The Freeholder of Cork, admittedly a slander-rag, accused Mount Cashell of an "overweening desire for notoriety."13 Across the ocean, Henry C.R. Becher, an Ontario lawyer whose candid remarks always contained some insight, de-

2o Landlords

Stephen Moore, third earl of Mount Cashell. London Illustrated News, 27 October 1883.

21 Lord Mount Cashell

scribed Mount Cashell as a "troublesome client, rather amusing as a guest at first, but in the main a bore."14 Perhaps it is not surprising that as his career advanced his zeal for reform lessened. He began his political career with great bravado in 1826 by advocating the emancipation of Roman Catholics, but he soon abandoned this for other liberal causes, such as the reform of the Church of Ireland, assisted emigration, and government intervention into matters of moral regeneration. As his financial problems mounted, however, his zeal for reform lessened, and he became a notorious defender of the status quo and spokesman for the Anglo-Irish landed classes. His position reflected the defensive stance the Protestant Ascendancy was taking with the rise of Daniel O'Connell, Roman Catholic emancipation, and repeal of the Union. He became a leading Tory in County Cork, vice-president of the Brunswick Club, and sat in the House of Lords from 1826 to 1881 as a representative Irish peer and die-hard conservative. MOST IMPORTANT TO Mount Cashell was the role of property in maintaining the family fortune and honour for his and future generations. As landlord, he became a "trustee" of the family property and thus, out of estate revenue, was responsible for keeping the family in style and for maintaining their social and political privileges. Central to his property was the mansion and demesne farm. The "Big House," to use the local term, was not just a dwelling place, it was a symbol of his family's power, status, and sense of permanence. "Moore Park," outside the town of Kilworth, was the chief residence of the Moore family and well known for its fine woods and adorned lawns. Full cellars, open doors, lots of whiskey for the labourers, and hospitality on a lavish scale maintained the honour of the family. Horse-races and hunts were held at Moore Park, and a ballroom graced one of the wings. Above its beauty towered the ruins of Cloghleagh Castle, ancient seat of the Condons, a symbol of previous families who had lived as bold feudal chiefs. Further on, overhanging the River Puncheon, was the picturesque Swiss Cottage that Mount Cashell had built for his wife and used later as a summer-house. A well-stocked deer park completed the picture of elegant country living, and the whole thousand-acre demesne was framed by a stone wall twelve feet high and seven miles long.15 The real reputation of his estate, however, rested not upon the grandeur of the Big House but upon the success or failure of the landlord-tenant relationship. The rent roll was, after all, his main source of estate income, and a discontented tenantry could sub-

22 Landlords

Moore Park was considered a rather plain house, but its grounds were memorable as Mount Cashell had imported many pines, Himalayan firs, and other ornamental trees. J.R. O'Flanagan, The Blackwater in Munster (London: A. Spottiswoode 1844), 63.

stantially curtail landlord income by refusing to pay their rent. Furthermore, a rebellious tenantry could blight a landlord's public image. In its simplest form, the landlord-tenant relationship was a reciprocal one consisting of rights and duties on both sides. These rights and duties were defined by law and by custom. By law, the landlord-tenant relationship consisted of what Alexander Richey in The Irish Land Laws (1881) called a "vast and undigested mass of statutes and legal decisions, piled up without any leading principle or definite idea."16 Based on the English law of tenure, Irish tenurial law developed from old feudal customs. One did not "own" the land but had the "right of possession." The tenant held land from his lord, who in turn held it from the king. Each in turn held the land in return for services. By the early nineteenth century, services had become rent charges. Unlike in England, where the landlord was a

23 Lord Mount Cashell

The drawing-room at Moore Park as it was furnished by Charles William Moore, the fifth earl of Mount Cashell. The Gentlewoman 313 (23 October 1897): 543.

24 Landlords quasi-partner in agricultural production, investing capital in fences, drainage, farmhouses, and cottages, in Ireland the relationship had become a mercantile transaction in which the landlord was simply a receiver of rent.17 Tenants agreed to pay Mount Cashell a specified rent, and if it was not paid, he was entitled to repossess the property. The "custom" of landlord-tenant relations was more exacting of landlords and could vary from place to place. Absentee landlords could perhaps get away with collecting rents only, but for a resident landlord, such as Mount Cashell, the social pressure from tenants and the neighbouring gentry class itself was such that, as Lord Downshire stated, the "rights of the landlord are never exercised without due attention to the duties which the possession of property implies."18 For example, a good landlord was not too strict in exacting rents, especially in hard times; he understood and sympathized with his tenants' problems and disasters; he appreciated and encouraged their efforts to improve; and he championed them against interference from other landlords, clergy, or government officers. A good tenant paid his rent on time; kept the covenants of the lease; improved his farm; and did not quarrel with the neighbours or landlord. In its ideal form, the relationship vacillated between the hierarchical model of the family unit and the model of mutual co-operation. J. Beasely described it in The Duties and Privileges of the Landowners, Occupiers and Cultivators of the Soil (London, 1860) as an "Agricultural Family" comprised of the landlord, agent, tenant farmer, and labourers. At its head, the landlord had the paternal role of providing guidance and protection, which went beyond purely tenurial arrangements to cover all aspects of life.19 A reporter for the Downpatrick Recorder in 1852 described the relationship as that "between employer and employed - long may there be kindness on the one hand and gratitude on the other, and friendly attachment cementing both."20 Others embracing the ideal of mutual co-operation stressed that "landowners and landholders must stand or fall together, sink or float in the same ship."21 The backbone of a well-run estate was an energetic, efficient administrative system. Landowners owing their station in life to biology and not innate ability might be expected to lack good business sense, but this was not always true. Many prided themselves on being scientific administrators, while others hired efficient agents to do the job. Since the number of tenants per acre was much larger on Irish estates than on their English counterparts, administration in Ireland was more important and a much greater task. Because of this, an elaborate system of accurate accounting, central supervi-

25 Lord Mount Cashell

sion, and management hierarchy evolved in the early part of the nineteenth century in Ireland - one that was implemented only much later in England.22 This interest in business had by midcentury turned some spendthrift landlords into prudent, practical businessmen who held income maximization as a priority. Certainly the tightly run central administrative systems of Arthur Hill, third marquess of Downshire; Francis Russell, seventh duke of Bedford; and William Cavendish, seventh duke of Devonshire, Mount Cashell's neighbour, displayed this rational approach to estate matters.23 The same could be said of Robert Perceval Maxwell, Mount Cashell's second cousin, who had a chief agent, sub-agents, bailiffs, clerks, and an array of solicitors each with specialized tasks. But it could not be said of Mount Cashell. Mount Cashell's administrative hierarchy was a simple one of agent, clerk, and solicitor. Mount Cashell lacked a chief agent who would have been responsible for the management of all estates and could have provided responsible, energetic, centralized management. Instead he had one agent for his Antrim property and another for his Cork-Tipperary property. These men were responsible for the day-to-day supervision of the tenantry. They selected tenants, negotiated leases, received rents, supervised the maintenance and improvement of the property, settled disputes between tenants, sat as magistrates, and represented Mount Cashell if he was absent from Poor Law or grand jury meetings.24 His Lordship paid them a salary and provided the option of a house or 5 percent commission on the sums collected in rents and arrears. The agents reported to Mount Cashell, who filled the role of chief agent but was too busy with political and religious affairs to scrutinize their activities. Mount Cashell's agents in the north and south were his most important employees. Lord Dufferin put it very succinctly when he stated, "When a landlord picked an agent he was making the second most important choice in his life, as only the choice of a wife was more important."25 Mr. George Joy was agent for the Antrim estate from 1809 to 1847, as his father and grandfather had been before him. Joy had considerable property himself in Counties Antrim and Wicklow and was considered to be a gentleman.26 Such men as Joy were deemed to be ideal agents in the eighteenth century. As local men, they had a thorough knowledge of the area. Moreover, as men from the upper-middle class, forming a dynastic agency themselves, they could identify with the cherished priorities of their employers: namely, family continuity, influence, and honour. George Joy looked after eight hundred tenants and forty-nine thousand acres with only a clerk to help him. Joy had the diplomatic and difficult job of advising, sheltering, and tolerating his master

26 Landlords

while maintaining an abject language and posture. He knew that "Please Your Honour" and "Please Your Honour's Honour" had to be repeated at the beginning and end of every supplicatory sentence. Mr Joy's respect for his master, however, was tempered by his sympathy for the tenants. Joy, not Mount Cashell, was a major reason for the relatively peaceful landlord-tenant relations on his northern estate. Joy was not the stereotypical agent who ground down the poor and wrung money out of the tenants. In fact he was constantly allowing arrears to mount up and begging Mount Cashell not to raise the rents. Joy knew the subtle workings of landlordtenant relations. He knew, for example, that the tenants would be contented and co-operative if they could obtain a good sum for their tenant right, and that this depended largely on having a landlord who did not raise the rents. Mount Cashell, residing in the south of Ireland, was unaware of or indifferent to such subtleties. He made Joy's job difficult by his constant borrowing on the estate and continual pressure for revenue.27 Finally in 1847, Mount Cashell fired Joy for refusing to press tenants for arrears. In his final correspondence with Mount Cashell, Joy wrote that he was "well satisfied to be relieved of an agency the very responsible duties of which I have filled to the best of my abilities not only for your lordship's advantage but also for that of your tenants."28 The trend at the time was towards solicitor-agents, men of supposedly unimpeachable character who had the ability to handle large sums of money and legal matters. When George Joy left his position as Antrim agent, Mount Cashell chose a solicitor-agent to replace him. Unfortunately, His Lordship was a poor judge of character. In the early 18405, Mount Cashell had taken on Alfred Cleverly and Michael Bourke, a firm of solicitors in Fermoy near Cork, as his southern agents. By the 18503 he had three tiers of solicitors: a local agent-solicitor, a Dublin attorney, and a London-based attorney to handle suits in Chancery.29 The Reverend Horatio Townsend, observing Cork in 1815, complained that agents who were solicitors, while they could look after an estate's land and law affairs, were often too busy with professional cares to attend to tenants' needs or improvements, and only showed up to collect the rents, settle lands, and get fees. Moreover, he believed that landlords placed total confidence in these "professionals" and never knew that extortion of money and goods was part of their business practice.30 Mount Cashell himself was ten years in the dark. In 1854 he finally saw the light and fired Bourke, claiming that Bourke's mismanagement and failure to collect back rents had cost him £6,500.31 Alfred Cleverly was even bolder. Apparently pleased with Cleverly's management of legal affairs in Cork, Mount Cashell hired

27 Lord Mount Cashell

him as his Antrim agent in 1847, saying later that he had done so because "amongst the many thousands of my acquaintances and my friends, there are some I can trust in small things, a few in large, but there is no one I would with perfect confidence entrust with everything that I possess but yourself."32 Thereupon, the aptly named Cleverly set up office in Ballymena and immediately proceeded to embezzle £24,000 and destroy the accounts. He took Mount Cashell's carriages and horses. Instead of forwarding His Lordship's plate, trinkets, and gold snuff-boxes to Cork as Mount Cashell requested, he sold them to a pawnshop in Dublin and pocketed the proceeds. He even made away with Mount Cashell's yacht. It is hard to imagine this amount of extortion occurring had Mount Cashell been present in the north, more familiar with his estate affairs, and not so entirely trusting of Cleverly. By his own poor management he had created opportunities for Cleverly, and he apparently had no system of checks and supervision whereby Cleverly would have been accountable. Unfortunately for the earl, Cleverly's scheming did not end in Antrim but extended into Mount Cashell's estate in the south and across the ocean to his Canadian property. The result was disastrous. Although Mount Cashell was not a good administrator, his leases, rents, and covenants were conducive to good landlord-tenant relations. Several rental options existed, the main ones being for a term of years, yearly, and at-will. Amongst those held for a term of years, the perpetuity lease, or lease held for three lives was the longest and most secure. A lease for one life, two lives, or three lives ended once all the people named in the lease were dead. Most often the children of the tenant, the local gentry, or the monarchy were named as this ensured the longest term of occupancy during which time the rent was unaltered. Thus a lease for three lives generally lasted over fifty years, a lease for two lives lasted about thirty-one years, and a lease for one life lasted about twenty-one years. The inclusion of a life in a lease qualified the tenant to vote as a forty-shilling freeholder. Since this vote was usually at the disposal of the landlord, landlords willingly granted leases for lives in the eighteenth century. After the Napoleonic Wars, granting leases for lives declined; even leases for one or two lives were rarely granted, and expired leases were not renewed. The reasons for the decline of the long lease are many. Long leases generally benefited the tenant and disadvantaged the landlord. In fact, a lease for lives differed from the outright sale of land only insofar as the rent remained annually due, and on the death of the tenant each of the three named lives had to be renewed by the payment of a fine. Otherwise, the tenant was virtually independent

28

Landlords

of the landlord for the term of the lease; he could sublet and subdivide his land, and because the rent was fixed he could reap the benefits from any improvements he made. From a landlord's perspective, long leases were a way of attracting tenants when they were hard to find, reducing the turnover, and cutting costs. But long leases reduced the landlord's actual control over his property. He could not prevent subdivision, nor the overcrowding and pauperization of his tenantry, and he was unable to take advantage of high agricultural prices by raising the rents. For a while, landlords continued to give one-life or twenty-one-year leases. However, after 1829, with the disenfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholder, leases gave way to yearly tenancies (those for a term of one year) and atwill tenancies (in which tenants had no lease but held their land "at the will" of their landlord). The substitution of at-wills for long leases has traditionally been viewed as proof of the increasing vulnerability of the tenant and the growing power and arrogance of the landlord on the eve of the Famine. Other historians, however, argue that while leases for lives were no longer offered, so many unexpired leases existed that at mid-century most tenants still had long, secure leases.33 What is clear, however, is that the system of leasing was dependent on so many factors of a local nature that it could differ substantially from estate to estate, and even within a single estate. Changing rental agreements on Mount Cashell's Antrim estate provide an interesting case.34 There, long leases continued to be given and even increased in number up to 1847. Where at-will tenancies existed, they did so not because the landlord refused leases but because the tenants actually preferred at-wills. Prior to Mount Cashell's succession to the Moore property, most leases on his Antrim and Cork estates were for three lives. Like most improving landlords, he granted leases for one life or twenty-one years, and even in the 18405, when other landlords were phasing out this policy, he continued to offer leases for twenty-nine and thirty years.35 The Devon Commission, an inquiry into the law and practices of landholding in Ireland (1843-45), found, however, that on both his Cork and Antrim estates, tenants were not much inclined to take leases and preferred yearly tenancies.36 This was particularly true while the repeal of the Corn Laws was being debated, leaving agricultural prices and the future of farming uncertain. The coming of hard times for both landlord and tenant changed this. On 16 December 1845, agent George Joy begged Mount Cashell to come to Antrim and supervise the granting of leases. The tenants could not make their rent payments without borrowing money and for

29 Lord Mount Cashell Table 2 Leases on Mount Cashell's Antrim Estate Rental Agreements signed 1724-1822 Leases for three lives with lives still existing Perpetuity leases Leases for three lives and renewable forever Three lives plus 31 years Deed of fee farm

224 14 8 1 1

Rental Agreements signed after 1822 One-life leases signed in 1824 Leases for 29 years from Nov. 1845, dated 2 Mar. 1846 Leases for 29 years from Nov. 1846, dated 20 Oct. 1846 Yearly At-will Miscellaneous

18 414 60 60 8 11

TOTAL

819

Source: Sale Catalogue, White Estate, PRONI, D.1911/6/4/2.

this they needed leases to pledge as security.37 Mount Cashell was also in trouble financially, and no doubt rumours were circulating that his Antrim property might be sold. In such a case all arrears would have to be paid up, and so granting leases to tenants that they might borrow to pay their debts met Mount Cashell's needs, too. Furthermore, new leases at higher rents increased his annual rent roll and hence the sale price of the estate. For the tenants, long leases now meant protection from a new landlord's possible rent increase or changes to the tenurial policy. As Mr. Brown, a tenant on fifteen acres in Kildrum, explained: "If Mr Joy and Lord Mount Cashell were to live, and I was to live, I should not care to have a lease; but Lord Mount Cashell may be gathered to his fathers, and Mr Joy may die, and another Pharaoh may arise, who knew not Joseph, and we may be put under other circumstances "38 Mount Cashell's financial troubles also suggested to the tenants a possible end to his policy of "moderate, and, in numerous instances, exceedingly low Rental." It is not surprising, therefore, that in March 1846, 414 tenants took out leases for thirty years, and later in October another 60 signed leases for twenty-nine years. Thus, on the eve of the Famine, Mount Cashell's rental structure on his Antrim estate was as illustrated in Table 2. From a purely organizational viewpoint, this form of long, medium, and short tenancies offered Mount Cashell a great deal of flex-

30 Landlords

ibility. Tenancies would always be ending and new adjustments in rentals occurring. In fact, the seventh duke of Bedford, renowned for his economical and enterprising management, had purposefully implemented a similar system of varied tenancies on his English estate.39 At the same time, this kaleidoscope of rental agreements, and the fact that 92 percent of all tenures were for twenty-nine years or longer, certainly alienated him from the land and prevented systematic and successful management. One-third of these tenures actually had a debilitating effect on his proprietorial income, since they were old leases whose rents were fixed in the years 1724 to 1822. Judging whether Mount Cashell's rents were fair is very difficult given the controversial nature of the subject and the conflicting aims of the two interested parties. What was a modest rent to His Lordship was exorbitant to the tenant; what seemed mutually advantageous at the time of the agreement could at a later date seem unfair to either party. The fairness of rents depended on their comparison with neighbouring estates, the method of arriving at a rent price, and the lenience allowed in collecting them. The entire problem was complicated by the geographic proximity of yearly tenants to leaseholders. The former's rents were evaluated each year according to current prices; the latter's rents could be set for three lives and underrated by as much 50 percent. The profile of rent movement in Ireland was by its very nature a source of grievance. In Britain, the prevalence of short leases meant that rents moved upwards or downwards at a relatively even pace. In Ireland, because of the existence of long leases, rent movement has been described as "not dissimilar to that of a flight of steps, periods of little movement alternating with periods of substantial increase."40 For example, when low agricultural prices set in after 1815, Mount Cashell was forced to give rent abatements of 50 percent on his Cork estate.41 At the opposite extreme, when old leases ended on Mount Cashell's Antrim property in 1837-47, rents increased by as much as four to five times overnight.42 From the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, when prices for agricultural produce dropped and tenants fell in arrears, rent levels throughout Ireland generally declined. The 18305 afforded some recovery, but this was later lost in the years immediately preceeding the Famine. During the Famine itself, the total rent received by Irish landlords fell from £12 million in 1845 to £8.5 million in 1851 and did not recover to its pre-Famine level until the i87os.43 Generalizations about rent levels are difficult because at any one time rent varied from holding to holding depending on the productivity of the soil, the price of produce raised, and the closeness to markets. Over

31 Lord Mount Cashell

time, trends in rent levels varied depending on the financial situation of the landlord, the timing of local catastrophes, the changing lease structure, the existence of other rent-related fees, and the manner of arriving at a rent price. Moreover, a big difference often existed between the rent levied and how much was actually collected, or in other words, the rental value of the property and the actual rental income. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rents were decided upon at a public auction where tenure went to the highest bidder. The system abounded with problems, the most obvious being that tenants often were not able to pay the rents agreed to and thus fell in arrears. On Mount Cashell's Antrim property, like most wellrun estates, rents were not decided upon at a public auction but set by a professional surveyor.44 The valuation took place when the lease ended and was set according to the productivity of the soil, produce prices, and the amount necessary to allow a tenant some profit yet satisfy the landlord. As a result, amongst the leases contracted in 1846 rents ranged from 6s to £3.4.9 per statute acre, depending on the location, quality of the soil, and buildings on the property.45 On Mount Cashell's southern estates, the earl took a personal interest in this matter and in 1844 recommended his method of setting rents to the Devon Commission, that it might be used throughout Ireland. His inspiration came from reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, in which Smith proposed that the value of produce from the land be divided so that the tenant would keep two-thirds and pay one-third to the landlord as rent. Mount Cashell, however, sided with more contemporary political economists who felt, given the increase in taxes and charges, that the landlord should receive only one-quarter of the proceeds from the land. His system was simple enough. He calculated the volume of produce from the average rotation of crops for three years: first year potatoes, second year wheat, third year oats. Then he graded the land according to quality, estimated what it was capable of producing for three years and the average crop prices over that time, and finally he took this total and divided it by four to get the rent. The result was a span of rents from first-class land rated at £2.3.4 to sixth-class land rated at £0.7.10. Mount Cashell proudly proclaimed that his system was not only fair, as the landlord received his right and the tenant was not too hard-pressed, but also lessened the controversial nature of fixing rents.46 On Mount Cashell's estates the rent was collected six months after it was due, the May rent being paid in November and the November

32 Landlords

rent being paid the following May. The first step in recovering rent arrears was distraint of the tenant's crops or stock, and if this failed, Mount Cashell could proceed into the courts under the process of recovering debt, or eviction. On his Antrim estate, distraint was sometimes resorted to but evictions rarely occurred. The absence of legal actions was largely due to the untiring efforts of agent George Joy and his sensitivity to tenants in arrears. Joy wrote to Mount Cashell in 1839, lamenting that, for the first time in fifteen years, he had to evict a tenant for not paying five-and-a-half-years' rent.47 In 1844, he testified before the Devon Commission that during his thirty years as agent he had evicted only five tenants from the eight hundred on his Antrim estates, and each case had been solely owing to non-payment of rent.48 In County Cork, where Mount Cashell resided, the same could not be said. A list of civil bill evictions for the year 1835 showed that His Lordship had proceeded against thirtysix tenants for arrears, ranging from a trifling six shillings to fortyfive pounds.49 Besides establishing the rent to be paid, a lease contained several covenants outlining the landlord's privileges and the tenant's responsibility for maintaining the property. In England and North America at this time, covenants in a lease could be quite extensive, outlining, among other things, where to grind wheat and how many acres of crops to sow. In Ireland, covenants were largely confined to the more basic aspects of protecting a landlord's interest in his property, such as the prompt payment of rent, the maintenance of the property, the preservation of game, timber, and turbary (place where turf for fuel was dug) for the landlord, and the prohibition of subletting or subdivision. Mount Cashell's leases stipulated that tenants were to make repairs, and if they did not the landlord had the right to add the repair costs to the rent or distrain the tenant. As strict and authoritarian as this sounds, in actual practice it was largely ineffective. Generally, too much weight is given to the fact of the legal document and its enforcers and not enough to the resourcefulness of the tenant who, although he had no power in a legal sense, had endless means of getting around such covenants. Practical and moral restraints also limited the powers of a landlord, and hence it is not surprising that Mount Cashell admitted to the Devon Commission that, despite such covenants, he had not been strict about their enforcement.5° Covenants were hard to supervise, especially when one had a large tenantry and a small staff of administrators. A great deal of destruction occurred on Mount Cashell's estate over which he had no control. For example, he estimated that he lost £300 a year by the

33 Lord Mount Cashell

tenants sending their children into his woods to steal young trees with which to fasten their thatch. No magistrate would fine a child, and the tenants knew this. Worse still was the habit of racking and destroying the land before a lease expired. Tenants did this supposing that if the land was very poor the landlord would relet it to them at a low rent, and knowing that if they then manured the land it would improve again in a few years. Mount Cashell's new leases, drawn up in 1846 for Antrim, attempted to prevent this destruction by stipulating that a tenant or his heirs could not dig or plough more acres in the four years preceeding the termination of the lease than he had used previously.51 It is doubtful if this made much difference. An action could be brought against a tenant, but to what avail? Mount Cashell explained his restraint in bringing tenants on his Cork estate to court on the fact that the tenants were so poor that if he took them to court he was only further pauperizing them, so that they would be unable to pay their expenses, and he would be responsible for even greater legal costs.52 Preventing subletting, subdividing, and joint tenancies was an equally frustrating experience. Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that Mount Cashell's Cork leases were printed just when the act to prevent subletting was passed, and therefore he had not included a subletting clause. A few years later, to his chagrin, the act was repealed. Subdivision, subletting, and joint tenancies posed a number of problems as farms became too small, the population became pauperized, arrears rose, property was destroyed, and poor rates soared. In his Antrim leases of 1846, he made certain to include the clause that the tenant could not "sell, alien, mortgage or dispose of the property" without his consent. But this was also ineffective. George Joy wrote, in his usual state of agitation, that there was scarcely a tenant on the estate who did not have cottiers.53 Moreover, cottiers were given no tenant right and therefore had no interest in maintaining or improving the property. Tenant right was a very complex phenomenon. In its simplest form, it was money paid to an outgoing tenant by either the incoming tenant or, in the case of eviction, by the landlord. Just what the payment signified is far from simple and varied from place to place. Tenant right could be the market price for the right to peaceful possession and protection, or it could be based on factors easier to evaluate in monetary terms. For instance, tenant right could be the price paid for the remaining years in a lease that gave the incoming tenant a guaranteed and constant rental until the lease expired. In this case, the incoming tenant was paying for the profits expected from produce if prices increased while rents remained the same. More con-

34 Landlords

cretely, tenant right was often considered to be the unexhausted value of a tenant's improvements, his manured fields, his crops-infield, and any fences, buildings, or other movables in which he had invested capital. In later years, when tenant right became an issue of public debate, the Land League and others defined it as the "Three Fs": fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale. In essence, this meant that a tenant was guaranteed peaceful possession of his property until default of rent, full compensation for any improvements made, rents that were fairly evaluated, and the right to sell his tenant right to the highest bidder. None of these definitions is entirely sufficient. Tenant right was sometimes sold where no improvements had occurred, and for prices near the fee simple of the property itself. To understand it fully, its origins must be examined. In Ulster, the system was believed to have arisen in plantation times, when landlords with unimproved, underpopulated estates offered tenants an interest in the property if they settled it and made improvements. The landlord, reluctant to leave the land vacant when tenants moved, allowed the outgoing family to sell their interest to an incoming family. As the years passed and these estates grew more crowded, landlords stopped offering long leases and extended tenant right to families who became yearly tenants. In this situation, tenant right ensured occupancy as long as a tenant paid the rent, plus compensation for improvements.54 The process of development, however, varied from place to place. On some estates landlords promoted tenant right as a way of retrieving arrears. A defaulting tenant was allowed to sell his tenant right to the highest bidder, and the landlord was first in line to recover the dues owed him. Perhaps the most widespread and satisfying explanation of the development of tenant right has to do with the relationship between rising prices and long leases. Here it is clear exactly what was being sold and how the price was reached. Towards the end of the eighteenth century and until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, long leases with fixed rents were common. In parts of Ireland, especially Ulster, where the linen industry flourished, it was not uncommon to find that rising agricultural prices and incomes from linen soon raised the actual value of the land far beyond the rent paid. With competition for land, a tenant could capitalize on this "uncollected rent" and auction it to the highest bidder. Any increase in real rents, therefore, could reduce and even extinguish the "uncollected rent" or tenant right. The whole phenomenon, in short, reveals much about the landlord-tenant relationship. On the one hand, tenant right caused a lot of tension between the two parties. When landlords forbade or limited the use of tenant right, the practice simply moved under-

35 Lord Mount Cashell

ground and was carried out in secrecy. When rising rents and declining agricultural prices lessened the value of tenant right, tenants united and used intimidation to defend it, as the tenant right movements in the 18405 and the Land War of 1879 testify. On the other hand, what is most remarkable about tenant right is that it often reflected a high degree of co-operation between landlord and tenant, since landlords generally knew there was a limit beyond which rent increases would cut into tenant right and arouse protest.55 It is not surprising that tenant right flourished on Mount Cashell's Antrim estate. There, long leases and fixed rents existed, and the linen industry augmented farm incomes. It was estimated in 1847 that, owing to the number of unexpired leases, Mount Cashell's rental was as much as 50 percent lower than the real value of his property.56 Tenant right was the difference between the real value of the property and the rent charged. Yet tenant right encompassed something else, too. When one of Mount Cashell's tenants was asked to define it for the Devon Commission, he responded: "A great deal depends upon the character of the landlord. For instance ... the high standing of the tenant-right is mainly owing to the great confidence that the tenantry have in his unbending integrity and his honour."5? Besides low rents, the value of tenant right depended on the security and assurance that the landlord's policy of low rents, infrequent evictions, and tenant right would continue. Mount Cashell tolerated tenant right when it was money exchanged between tenants, but when it became a landlord-paid compensation for improvements and thus an expense to him, as outlined in William Sharman-Crawford's bill, Mount Cashell had no use for it. He denied that tenants had ever had the right to receive compensation for improvements from him on his estates. The law of tenure, after all, decreed that all improvements became part of the property, and implicit in this was the notion that the tenant should receive no compensation. He resented the new policy, which "raised unfounded expectations among the tenants" whose original leases had made no such allowance. One case particularly annoyed him. A new tenant had purchased the tenant right and interest in the unexpired part of a lease for three lives from the outgoing tenant. When the lease expired and the tenant decided to leave, he demanded that Mount Cashell pay him his purchase money plus compensation for improvements. In effect, he was asking Mount Cashell, who had never paid tenant right, to now pay it in two forms. Mount Cashell took the tenant to court.58 According to the law of tenure, neither landlord nor tenant was responsible for improvements, and leases usually left the matter unsettled. Compared to English landlords, the proportion of total in-

36 Landlords

come an Irish proprietor spent on improvements was small. English landlords paid for two-thirds of the cost of new buildings, fences, etc., and one-quarter of the cost of repairs. An estimated 29 percent of an English landlord's total income went towards expenses of this nature, which directly benefited the tenant and which did not include mills, parks, or other forms of estate infrastructure.59 In comparison, a study of fifteen Irish estates from 1850 to 1875 showed that only one-third of the proprietors spent from 8 to 10 percent on improvements, and fully one-third spent nothing at all.60 What emerges is the simple fact that Irish landlords spent very little on improvements, partly because some felt landlord-tenant violence made Ireland a risky environment, and partly because high population densities made estate management a much more costly affair than it was in England. Small plots under fifteen acres were not deemed worth improving. Long leases with fixed rents also had the effect of shifting the incentive for improvement from the landlord, who would see no return for several years, to the tenant. With a long lease, the tenant had the opportunity to amass capital, since rents remained fixed and produce prices might rise. Moreover, tenant right ensured that the tenant would receive some recompense for his efforts when the incoming tenant purchased his interest. So, under these circumstances, why would a landlord indulge in financing improvements? He could not raise the rents to share in the returns, and he had already helped indirectly through his policy of long leases. Indeed, Mount Cashell may have made his greatest contribution to improvement through such indirect incentives as long leases, tenant right, low rents, and abatements in rents. These concessions increased a tenant's capital and secured his occupancy two necessary prerequisites to tenant investment. William Maguire has argued that the third marquess of Downshire's greatest contribution to his tenants' standard of living was his efficient administration and abatements in rent. The first marquess of Dufferin spent a total of £9,175 between 1848 and 1857 on rent abatements and uncollected arrears.61 Amongst his contemporaries, Mount Cashell gained the reputation of being an improving landlord. On his Antrim estate, long leases, low rents, and tenant right were Mount Cashell's chief means of encouraging his tenants to better their farms. This was sensible for an absentee landlord, since more direct forms of improvement would have called for more administrative involvement than his already overworked agent, George Joy, could possibly have managed. (Mount Cashell also imported purebred stock from England and Scotland to upgrade his tenants' herds.)62

37 Lord Mount Cashell

On the Cork estate, where Mount Cashell resided, he saw areas needing attention and took a more active role in directing affairs. There, subdivision had reached its limit and the people were very poor. Agricultural societies all over Ireland preached the value of drainage to improve poor land, and Mount Cashell adopted this as a way to offer his tenants more potato ground, with the hope of collecting arrears as a result. Improving landlords usually paid a proportion of the cost of draining the land, or gave tenants so many pounds per acre and charged them 5 percent interest, the capital never being repaid.63 In contrast, Mount Cashell reclaimed forty acres at his own expense for eight pounds per acre. He then let this land at a very low rent of one shilling per acre when it was worth nine times that much. At this rate, he claimed, the tenants were able to cultivate an additional one acre per year and build houses on it.64 Mount Cashell also attempted to purchase a large quantity of glass to improve the tenants' dwellings, which often had only a small hole for ventilation.65 Besides trying to improve their local standard of living, he tried to upgrade local agricultural practices by co-founding the Fermoy Union Agricultural Society. By 1844,only f°ur years after its inception, the society boasted that local agricultural methods had improved, citing as one example the Scotch plough, which was replacing the Irish plough.66 Public prestige also motivated Mount Cashell to engage in civic enterprise that would boost the economy, and churches, schools, and parks, which would enrich and civilize. In fact, agricultural improvements in Britain during the golden age of agriculture (1842-61) brought a return of only 2.3 percent to British proprietors, which was poor compared to other forms of investment.67 Not surprisingly, it was civic enterprise, whose social rewards exceeded any monetary gain, to which landlords devoted most money and attention. On his Cork estate, Mount Cashell stimulated local industry and trade. In the early 18305 he established some flax-dressing mills in Kilworth for the employment of the poor, and the Glandalane Corn Mills.68 In 1846, he chaired the board to establish a permanent naval station and construct slips and dry-docks at Cobh, a nearby coastal village.69 In 1842 he and Sir Richard Musgrave embarked on the project of increasing trade on the River Blackwater, which ran through the town of Fermoy and their estates.70 Their plan was to provide local employment and make it easier for tenants to pay their rents. Improving navigation on the Blackwater would not only extend local markets, it would allow the farmer a better price for his produce, raise the value of landlords' property, and lower the costs

38 Landlords

of imported household goods and farm machinery for both landlord and tenant. In these enterprises Mount Cashell was also fulfilling his responsibility to the state. In return for the privileges the king conferred upon the landed class, landlords were to build upon the capability of the nation's soil and the infrastructure of the economy as a whole. Landlords, more importantly, were to ensure that the population under their control was content and loyal. This required more than sympathetic and astute management. The evangelical, William Wilberforce, expressed his respect for the landlord who "lives on his property in the country, improving his land, executing the duties of the magistracy, exercising hospitality and diffusing comfort and order and decorum and moral improvement and last though not least... religion too, throughout the circles greater or smaller which he fills... . For in fact your country gentlemen are the nerves and ligature of your political body and they enable you to enforce laws which could not be executed by the mere power of government and often preserve the public peace better than a regiment of soldiers."71 Such a stand was advocated by others who were less philosophical and religious in their outlook but more experienced in the daily affairs of estate management. Lord Dufferin's improvements, from liming his tenants' homes to cultivating parks, were done to create an atmosphere in which "enlightenment was disseminated to the rude tenantry and labourers."72 It is quite likely that he and Mount Cashell envisioned themselves following the example of the seventh duke of Bedford, an improving English landlord who prided himself on being inspired by the concept of social leadership, scientific yet paternal.73 Mount Cashell believed moral guidance and social leadership were essential to the operation of a well-run estate. In particular, religion was the dominant force influencing both his estate management and his political and private life. Even as a child, he craved the philosophical and emotional experience of the deeply religious. As a student in his early teens, at the Franciscan College of St Isidors, Rome, he had nearly converted to Catholicism.74 When he returned home, his religious enthusiasm found an outlet in the evangelical revival sweeping Ireland. Following closely behind the bloodshed and repression of the 17905, and coinciding with the passions aroused by Daniel O'Connell's political agitation, the revival began in 1799 in the Methodist Church. By 1810, evangelicalism had established stongholds in Dublin, Armagh, and Sligo.75 In the next fifty years it profoundly affected all Protestant denominations, including the Church of Ireland. In Ulster it was identified with orthodox trinitar-

39 Lord Mount Cashell

ianism, emphasizing correct doctrine and the rights of the Church. In the rest of Protestant Ireland it was associated with an eagerness to proselytize, an interest in social improvement, and, most importantly, personal salvation. ?6 As a reaction to the formal and unemotional piety of the eighteenth century, the new evangelicalism offered a personal, experiential religion, which stressed the depravity of individual man and preached personal salvation through faith alone. Evangelicalism greatly influenced Mount Cashell's personal and family lifestyle. The stereotypical image of a profligate aristocracy found no playground here. The evangelical spirit was one of personal devotion, uncompromising piety, charity, duty, and selfreproach. When the Reverend Henry Cooke, famed Ulster orator and leading evangelical in the Presbyterian Church, was invited to Moore Park to convalesce during the summer of 1826, he found "a family deeply imbued with the principle of a living Christianity ... I have seldom met their equals. Such gentleness; such simplicity; such love of Christ; such teachable spirits; such unfeigned humility; and zeal to do good; such cheerfulness."77 Mount Cashell was renowned for his theological knowledge and his fondness for quoting from tomes of religious philosophy and history. Even when the duties of the House of Lords interrupted his daily religious routine, he could be found in the early hours of the morning intently reading the Sacred Volume.78 Mount Cashell's family was not alone in its piety. While much has been written about the spread of Methodism and evangelical Presbyterianism amongst the working class, the evangelical creed appealed to the landed class as well. In fact, landlords were the driving force behind the movement in Ireland, giving it organizational leadership, finances, and prestige. In addition to its promise of personal salvation, evangelicalism appealed to the gentry as a way to defend their privileged position. As such, evangelical polemics acquired a role beyond the purely spiritual and became an integral part of political and social conservatism. This brand of social conservatism found a willing audience in an era when radical politics, secularism, and industrialization struck at the backbone of the gentry's power - the Established Church, local politics, and, later, landlordism itself.79 The evangelical creed taught that contemporary problems required a moral solution, not a political one. It claimed that man's condition was based on his own personal depravity, and only through moral regeneration, not political or social reforms, could he be saved. In particular, secular problems were seen as a consequence of allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church.

40 Landlords

Evangelicals firmly believed that the Roman Catholic priesthood kept tenants poor, ignorant, superstitious, and untrustworthy. For the personal salvation of the tenant and the social harmony of the estate only one solution existed, and that was conversion to Protestantism. Only religious education in the Protestant faith would lead to social improvement and political loyalty.80 Thus landlords also found the evangelical creed attractive because it gave them a positive role in society and provided them with a morally acceptable reason to intervene in their tenants' lives. Landlords all over Ireland were stirred to action by the new creed: they preached, established new churches, distributed Bibles and tracts, and held public debates on controversial aspects of doctrine. William Drogo Montagu, the seventh duke of Manchester; Robert Jocelyn, the third earl of Roden; Richard Wingfield, the fifth Viscount Powerscourt; John Maxwell, the fifth Baron Farnham; and Henry Maxwell, the seventh Baron Farnham, were all well-known evangelicals.81 As political emotions grew more fevered and the number of religious conversions grew, they went about God's work with an excitement and optimism approaching millenarianism. Lord Mount Cashell's private and public life reflected the general breakdown of understanding between religions and the growth of aggressive Protestantism. When he began his political career in 1825, he supported Roman Catholic emancipation.82 Then, in his first year in the House of Lords, he changed his mind on emancipation and became an outright supporter of the Protestant cause. Several other Protestant landlords experienced the same change of heart when political and religious tensions increased after emancipation was introduced into Parliament in 1825. In Mount Cashell's home county of Cork, Tory landlords abandoned their proemancipation stand as they faced the Rockite campaign of violence (an anti-Protestant, agrarian protest movement), Roman Catholic millenarianism, and an increasingly self-confident urban Roman Catholic middle class.83 They began to fear that Roman Catholic emancipation could be a threat to Protestant power. Their confidence was badly shaken in 1826 when Catholic freeholders revolted against landlord control in Counties Monaghan and Cavan. In Waterford, next to Mount Cashell's home county of Cork, Daniel O'Connell himself won the 1826 county election over Lord George Beresford.84 Everywhere, the popular success of O'Connell and his anti-tithe legislation after 1826 were warnings of how Roman Catholic political rights could undermine Protestant political and social power. Uneasy, and sensing that something had to be done, Mount Cashell and other Protestants formed the Cork Brunswick

41 Lord Mount Cashell

Constitutional Club in 1827, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the Protestant constitution and to the mobilization of the masses against Roman Catholicism. In the spring of that year, Mount Cashell was the guest speaker at their anniversary dinner in Cork City. The following January he became the club's vicepresident.85 Along with other ultra-tories such as Lord Farnham and Lord Clancarty, Mount Cashell also defended Protestant supremacy in the House of Lords. He feared that to enfranchise Roman Catholics would "prove offensive to the Almighty."86 According to His Lordship, Catholics carried on a "system of bullying" to silence Protestants, and nuns went into the homes of poor Protestants and tried to convert them.87 He predicted that as Roman Catholics acquired political power, they would establish Popery, dissolve the Union, and allow "the mob to pass most objectionable bylaws," eradicating Protestant schools and turning public buildings into nunneries and Roman Catholic chapels.88 Roman Catholicism, moreover, was in conflict with the principles of a Protestant state because Roman Catholics could never be bound by oaths to the state, being bound instead to the Pope and his councils. In short, Mount Cashell argued that popish influence would destroy civil liberty, increase Ireland's problems, and endanger the constitution in the realm of Church and State. Mount Cashell was particularly concerned about the corrupt state of the Church of Ireland. He believed that if the Church was not reformed by its own adherents, it would fall victim to interference from Roman Catholics. Only days after the Emancipation Act he delivered his first speech on the subject.89 He was one of the first laymen to call other laymen together to discuss the Church's problems, suggest reform, and then publicize their grievances, through the press and petitions, to the King. He felt the Church had left its original principles and become a tool of the corrupt. He, therefore, pressed for more spiritual zeal and efficient organization: more clergy; smaller parishes; better salaries; an end to patronage appointments, lavish living, and immorality.90 After several attempts, he and others were finally successful in getting a national assembly of bishops and clergy to assemble in 1833 to discuss reform.91 In these activities Mount Cashell was taking a bold step, for although evangelicals represented a very extreme wing in the Church at the time, not until after disestablishment did they become a majority. The Tory Cork Chronicle attacked his lay meetings as improper and irreverent.92 The Constitution reported that "Liberality" rejoiced in his work, which echoed Benthamism and Utilitarianism.93 Meanwhile,

42

Landlords

Mount Cashell wrote Lord Farnham: "If we could affect the moderate reform in our discipline which I have shown the necessity of, certain I am that the Popery would receive a blow which she little calculates on."94 When the parliamentary session came to a close, the Catholic challenge had to be confronted on the home front. Lord Mount Cashell's activities there were justified by his evangelical creed and by the Tory philosophy of a trust inherent in landed society to extend cultivation. According to evangelicals, the task of civilizing was simply that of Protestantizing. Involving himself in various evangelical societies, Mount Cashell - alongside other important landlords, such as the third earl of Roden, the seventh Lord Farnham, Gosford, Lifford, Lorton, de Vesci, Anneseley, and Caledon - participated in an effective network of Protestant influence. Mount Cashell was chairman in 1829 of the Cork branch of the London Hibernian Society, whose extensive education system based on the ministry of the gospel and distribution of Bibles and tracts made it one of the most influential religious agencies in Ireland.95 He was also a member of the Irish Society for Promoting the Education of the Native Irish Through the Medium of their Own Language, which greatly alarmed Roman Catholic leaders with its proselytizing potential.96 The work of God was integrated into daily matters of estate management, too. Landlords found the evangelical creed attractive because it gave them a positive role in society. Long leases, middlemen, and non-agricultural employment had distanced them from their tenants. The growing tension between Protestants and Roman Catholics had further undermined and loosened the feudal relationship of service and protection. Evangelicalism provided a rationale for rectifying the situation. In other words, their new objective was the promotion of spiritual renewal and social harmony in order to restore the bond between landlord and tenant.97 No less important was the belief that a morally educated tenantry was inseparable from a content, honest, well-fed and -clad tenantry who could and would willingly pay the rent. In the mind of Mount Cashell and other evangelical landlords, the idea of a religious, moral, and educated tenantry became inseparable from that of a Protestant tenantry. On Lord Farnham's and the Duke of Manchester's estates, proselytism took the highly organized form of the "moral agent," whose job it was to inspect tenants' morality, convert them to Protestantism, and, in cases of moral degeneracy, evict them.98 On Mount Cashell's estates, proselytizing was less systematic (which is not surprising given his ineptitude as an administrator) but it nevertheless occurred. In common with

43 Lord Mount Cashell

other evangelical landlords, he sponsored Protestant schools and religious facilities. In Kilworth parish, which was 94 percent Roman Catholic, Mount Cashell and Lady Mount Cashell sponsored no fewer than three Protestant parochial schools." Mount Cashell's servants, whether Protestant or Romanist, had to attend morning and evening prayers in Moore Park, where His Lordship read chapters from the Old and New Testaments, explaining passages as he went along. In addition, he held regular Bible meetings in Fermoy for the general public. Amidst rising political and religious tension, evangelicals throughout the major towns and cities challenged Roman Catholics to doctrinal debates. Mount Cashell invited the Reverend Mr Cooke to Fermoy, where he preached a series of sermons lasting five to six hours each to audiences of over three hundred persons.100 The following year, His Lordship participated in a public debate at the Fermoy Court House, which ended in a semi-riotous scene. Undeterred, he wrote long letters to the press for several months afterwards on the authority of the priesthood and the right of private judgment, in which he bombarded his readers with his interpretation of the Bible and learned works on Christianity.101 The whole process of preaching, persuasion, and example was to "awaken a spirit of enquiry" in the minds of his "bigoted and superstitious" tenantry. Applauding Mount Cashell's efforts, the Protestants of Fermoy honoured him by proclaiming that "His Lordship is among the excellent few, who have not deserted their native country ... who are not ashamed to be actual Christians who have courage enough to lead publicly as well as privately a religious life ... and who do not think it beneath the duty of the highest and proudest of the land, to exert their most ardent offices in reclaiming the rude and lawless, and bringing them within the pale of civilization."102 Mount Cashell believed he was making an impression on his Roman Catholic audiences and with confidence wrote Cooke in the summer of 1827 that "Everyday curiosity and a spirit of inquiry increases. The priest is visibly losing his influence, and even the very lowest orders begin to think for themselves."103 He was so convinced that mass conversions would shortly occur that he petitioned the government to provide public sustenance for Roman Catholic priests who would convert to Protestantism.104. HOWEVER MEAGRE OR MISPLACED Mount Cashell's attempts at improvement may seem in retrospect, his dedication to improving society was sincere. Inspired by the concept of social leadership scientific, yet paternal and Christian - he embraced many of the op-

44 Landlords

portunities the new age offered as he attempted to regain control over tenurial affairs and maintain a positive role in society. As with other evangelicals, though, Mount Cashell probably created more tension than converts. It is quite possible that Mount Cashell's absence from his northern estate might actually have been beneficial; instead of becoming personally involved in improving their quality of life, he worked through his agent, who sympathized with his tenants, gave them long leases, allowed them tenant right, and did not meddle in their religious affairs. Mount Cashell's religious activities were particularly irritating in the south, where his tenants were largely Catholic. It is quite likely that any positive results from his attempts to improve living conditions or promote industry, by establishing flax mills and deepening the Blackwater River, were outweighed in the minds of his tenants by his religious interference. Local Catholic priests were alarmed at his proselytizing. They denounced Mount Cashell's Bible Society meetings in the summer of 1826 and refused to sign his subscriptions delineating religious articles. In retaliation, Mount Cashell circulated letters amongst the people themselves. The following summer, priests denied the sacraments to tenants who attended his prayer meetings.105 Grievances finally came to a head in early February 1828. At the close of a Reformation meeting in Fermoy, held to thank His Lordship for his zeal in promoting the Protestant cause, fighting broke out between Catholics and soldiers who had been summoned by Mount Cashell to keep order. As Mount Cashell pulled away, "the ruffian mob" assaulted his carriage with mud, and his agent reportedly drove violently through the crowds, whipping them away from his side. Tempers ran high. The Freeholder carried Catholic comments on the incident: "Let your tenants, my Lord, have their little holdings at a rate that may enable them to live like human beings... and then, though the populace may be as adverse to your proselytizing system as ever, they will not treat your person with contempt nor your equipage with violence. Be no longer known as, the LORD OF THE HALF TURKEY, as the grinder of the faces of the poor, as the husband of the Fermoy vegetable woman ... your Lordship's tenantry are as wretched, or in many instances, more so than the tenantry of any less biblical Landlord in Ireland, they never can be induced to believe, that he who is so careless of their corporal wants, can be very anxious about their spiritual welfare ... great revolutions in religion were never made amongst an oppressed and starving people, by Apostles who rolled in wealth and luxury."106 Hostility continued into the following year. Priests tried inciting

45 Lord Mount Cashell

riots at religious meetings, hoping that the meetings would be suppressed.107 Laymen resorted to other expressions of their displeasure. In the summer of 1829, Mr Lucas, Mount Cashell's agent, was assaulted by three men while riding by His Lordship's wood. The victim retreated with fourteen slug holes in his coat, two through his pantaloons, and some lodged in his horse.108 When the parish priest later canvassed Mount Cashell for money to build a new Catholic church directly across from the main gate of Moore Park, he was turned from the door with harsh words, confirming in the minds of the Catholic tenants the accusation made after the Fermoy riot that "the gates of Moore Park are high and seldom turn on their hinges—"109 Local tradition claims that "the priest turned and gazed on the fine house and before leaving told the Earl that the grass would grow on the site of the house and that the Mount Cashell line would be no more."110 The prediction was a curious one. But for the moment Mount Cashell simply had his main gate dismantled and moved farther up the road.

CHAPTER TWO

His Lordship's Adventure Abroad

In the 18305 and early 18408, Lord Mount Cashell purchased 21,107 acres of land in Upper Canada with a view to colonization. The estate he planned on Amherst Island was his chance to develop in Canada the sort of estate he wanted in Ireland - one that was Protestant and profitable. On his Irish estates, Mount Cashell was constrained by encumbrances, by long leases at low rents, and by hostile Roman Catholic tenants. In Canada, he could start afresh and do it right. He saw it as his "magnificent and fruitful Island," his "Promise of Eden."1 Lord Mount Cashell's Canadian estates are of interest because they provide an unusual opportunity to observe the transplantation of the Old World tenurial system to the North American frontier. In many ways, his situation in Canada - taking over the management of an already existing and occupied estate - was remarkably similar to that in Ireland. To some extent, Mount Cashell's Canadian estates appeared to be a replication of those in Counties Antrim and Cork. But the landlord-tenant relationship on the frontier was different. Land in Canada was readily available to the settler, not only to rent but also to buy. Tenants were consequently hard to find and harder to keep. Some aspects of Irish estate management could be duplicated on the frontier, but modifications and innovations were necessary or frustration and failure were bound to follow. The result was a change in the landlord-tenant relationship that was usually to the benefit of the tenant and to the disadvantage of the landlord. A foreign absentee landlord had other forces with which to contend. Landlords and speculators, regardless of how well they managed their property, were never appreciated for long in Canada. Originally, the Tory government of Upper Canada had wanted to create a landlord class. They were convinced that a strong and loyal

47 His Lordship's Adventure Abroad

gentry was essential for maintaining a peaceful colonial population; had this existed in the Thirteen Colonies, they argued, the American Revolution would not have occurred. With this in mind, the government deliberately set out to create a loyal aristocracy by granting large acreages to Loyalist officers and gentlemen, by limiting grants to common settlers, and by reserving land to support an Established Church. The attempt to create a loyal aristocracy, while ultimately unsuccessful, left a legacy of well-propertied people. By the 18205, however, complaints were increasingly voiced about these privileged persons. They were criticized for their monopoly of the best land, for holding back development, and for profiting from the improvements that others made on neighbouring properties. American settlers in Upper Canada, familiar with a more egalitarian system of small holdings, were particularly irritated. By 1824, together with the Reform Party, they succeeded in imposing a "wild land tax" on undeveloped speculative holdings. Land speculators, particularly those controlling government-owned clergy reserves, were a major political issue until 1854, when the clergy reserves were secularized.2 Given such conditions in Upper Canada, it is not surprising that a number of attempts to transplant a landed elite to Canada failed. It has been too easy, however, for historians to dismiss these misfortunes as inevitable. After all, how could the Old World landlordtenant system exist on an egalitarian frontier where freehold reigned supreme? Thus the Laird of McNab's settlement in Renfrew County was deemed unsuccessful because he was unprepared to confront the egalitarian and democratic ways of the New World. Landlords in eighteenth-century Prince Edward Island were described as an anachronistic group in a country where freehold was the norm, and even Lord Mount Cashell's experiment on Amherst Island was described as a disaster because the Old World system of leasehold had little attraction in a society of freeholders.3 Actually, the situation was never this simple. Tenancy was common on the frontier, precisely because it had economic relevance. In-depth studies of colonization ventures, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, show that success or failure depended upon a much more tangible set of factors than a culture of landholding.4 A proprietor needed adequate capital. He and his agents had to exhibit zeal, energy, ability, and personal involvement. A suitable entry into the colonial political scene was beneficial. Equally important was the property itself - its location, quality of soil, and accessibility to markets. The size of the community's population, its demographic and occupational structure, were also significant.

48

Landlords

Ultimately, however, the settlers themselves were instrumental in the outcome, since their ethnic and religious mix could be crucial to the peacefulness of the community. Mount Cashell's adventure as a frontier landlord reveals the complexities involved and illustrates how landlords' aspirations were actually limited in the New World. Mount Cashell's decision to invest substantial amounts of capital in a colonial endeavour did not arise out of a passing whim. It was based on conditions at home that increased his desire to colonize and on conditions in Upper Canada that made it favourable for settlement. Since the mid-seventeenth century, the number of tenants on Irish estates had been increasing at a phenomenal rate. Landlords, such as Mount Cashell, had little or no control over the process because tenants holding long leases contracted during the eighteenth century were free to subdivide their land amongst their growing families, thus creating an ever-growing number of tenant households on smaller plots of land. With the collapse of prices for agricultural produce at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, tenants could no longer afford to pay their rents, even though these had not been raised for years. Unable to extract rents from a starving peasantry, many landlords believed their estates would collapse in largescale destitution. To make matters worse, the threat loomed that, with the implementation of the Irish Poor Law, landlords would become legally responsible for relieving the poor on their estates. The situation pointed to the necessity of removing large numbers of tenants from estates. But what would the displaced do and where would they go? Employment opportunities were poor in the cities. During the 18205, Mount Cashell and other improving landlords reclaimed waste land, but this was not sufficient in itself to accommodate the surplus population. By 1826, a general emigration scheme was being discussed. Not surprisingly, the strongest advocates of emigration were the improving landlords. Inspired by arguments of the classical economists, they believed the only way to solve the problem of a population that was outstripping resources was to follow the English model of capitalist agriculture.5 The number of tenants had to be reduced and farm acreages expanded before a wealthier tenant class could develop. The displaced population was to be cared for through public employment, poor relief, and organized emigration. Colonization could in this way be seen as part of the concern to revitalize Irish society and part of the upswing of the "spirit of improvement" throughout the British Isles. One stumbling-block remained - who would pay the cost of sending Irish tenants overseas and getting them established on the land? Edward Gibbon Wakefield, one of the first proponents of "scientific"

49 His Lordship's Adventure Abroad

principles of colonization, was renowned for his idea of financing emigration from an overpopulated Mother Country through the sale of colonial lands. Rather than freely granting colonial lands to would-be settlers, he urged that land should be sold at a fixed price and the proceeds used to assist immigration. In 1831 his views were applied to New South Wales and later New Zealand. In Canada he met with less success. While he influenced the colonial government to end free grants, his idea of using land sales to assist immigration never became popular. A Colonial Land and Emigration Board was established in 1840, whereupon three land companies were approached to aid immigration with proceeds from land sales, but their responses were unenthusiastic.6 Neither did the British government do much to aid Irish immigration to Canada. Parliament believed that unassisted immigration was the best policy, as the voyage to Canada was inexpensive and money spent to assist immigrants might be wasted if settlers moved on to the United States. In 1823 and 1825 the British government sponsored an emigration experiment, headed by Peter Robinson, that was deemed an expensive failure. Until the Poor Law Relief Acts of 1838 and 1847, which empowered Poor Law guardians to borrow on security of rates in order to assist paupers in travelling to the colonies, the government had not taken any steps towards systemizing emigration. During that period, what the government refused to do, private individuals did. Landlords all over Ireland assisted emigration by providing passage money. The Poor Law Report of 1833 recorded that landlords had given emigrants direct assistance in forty-seven parishes; in twentythree parishes, emigration was financed by public subscription, raised presumably by the gentry class.7 In County Londonderry, the London Company, a group of landlords, was especially active in forwarding emigrants. The greatest assistance, however, occurred in Cork, Queen's, and Kilkenny counties where, as one example, the Luggacurrens estate in Queen's County paid the entire passage money for two hundred families in 1821. Between 1826 and 1889, an estimated eighty thousand tenants received assistance from landlords to emigrate.8 The schemes were usually carried out in a humane manner, but at heart they were an act of business, not philanthropy. The ultimate aim was to increase the productivity of Irish land and thereby ensure a stable, if not increasing, rental income. Frequently, only those whose removal would further consolidation of land were given assistance. Among the major landlords who sponsored emigration, some saw in the great flow of tenants to North America an opportu-

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