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Before O'Connell died a party with
new political aims had come into existence in Ireland. The movement of
the Young Irelanders, as the intellectual leaders of this party loved
to style themselves, may be said to date from the founding of the Nation
newspaper by three ardent young men, two of them barristers, who under
the elm-trees of the Phoenix Park planned the establishment of a journal
which would, in the words of Stephen Woulfe, "create and foster public
opinion in Ireland and make it racy of the soil." This was in the
spring of 1842. These young men were Charles Gavan Duffy, John Blake Dillon,
and Thomas Davis.[1]
[1] C. Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland (1896), pp. 29, 31.
They belonged to different provinces, and Davis, who was looked upon by
Duffy as their "true leader" was a Protestant, the descendant
of a Cromwellian family on one side and of Anglo-Welshmen on the other.
Davis did not aspire to popular leadership. Timid and dreamy as a boy,
disciplined by thought and study as a youth, he became, not the idol of
the populace, but an inspirer of earnest men. His passion was to restore
to the country its true possessions, its language, history, and literature;
to instil culture of the mind and independent reflection, founded upon,
but not bound by, the material necessities of her national life. "Educate
that you may be free" was the keynote of the new journal,[2] which
was destined to find its way within a year of its existence into nearly
every household in Ireland. It poured out articles of a higher type of
thought and style of writing than had been known in the country or were
then common anywhere. It preached temperance, patience, energy, and resolution;
it denounced crime, pointed out defects in character, industry, agriculture,
and art; and it held up the spirit of the people while it taught them
tolerance and union.
[2] Ibid., p. 53.
In its pages appeared for the first time the ballads and essays of Mangan,
Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Denis Florence MacCarthy, Duffy, and Davis. Their
poems appealed to the people at large, as Moore's settings of old Irish
airs had stirred the more cultured audiences of the concert platform and
the drawing-room. They succeeded beyond expectation. A feeling of true
nationality spread among all classes, uniting the most discordant elements.
The idea of a country "going forward as a brotherhood towards the
attainment of a national object" appealed to men of widely different
standpoints, and kept the people sober and peaceful under all the excitement
of O'Connell's monster meetings. It brought into the ranks of the Repealers
many of the Protestant gentry and representatives of the landlord class
led by William Smith O'Brien, and it induced men of legal standing, like
the future Judge O'Hagan, to join the National movement; men of position
and influence and as averse to extreme measures as O'Connell was himself.
At the date of the founding of the Nation, repeal seemed to be dead.
In the election of 1841 not a single recruit had been made to the party,
except among O'Connell's own relations. The boroughs obediently returned
Whigs and Government officials to power as in the old bad days of landlord
control. O'Connell himself lost his seat for Dublin, in spite of the fifty
repeal meetings that had been held in that city, and he had to seek election
elsewhere. The Government believed that the repeal scare was over. But
the next year municipal reform was conceded, and O'Connell was chosen
as the first Catholic Lord Mayor of Dublin. He discharged the duties with
an efficiency and care which earned him the thanks of the Corporation;
and he left to his successors the honourable compromise that a Catholic
and Protestant should alternate in the office. In the same broad spirit
he desired to win the Protestant and Presbyterian population to the repeal
cause and to give them places on the committee of management.
From 1843 the Repeal Association, which had now had three years of existence,
began to show visible results. The meetings grew larger and the tone of
the speeches more menacing; repeal reading-rooms were established all
over the country, and no less than nine thousand copies of the Nation
were regularly printed and were read in these centres. Lord John Russell,
in the House of Commons (July 28, 1843), predicted that O'Connell would
successfully evade the Convention Act and that "the Lord Lieutenant
would sit powerless in the Castle while the country was ruled from O'Connell's
Conciliation Hall." The monster meetings at Mullaghmast and at Tara
attracted attention far beyond the British Isles. Peel announced that
though he deprecated war, and especially civil war, yet there was no alternative
which he did not think preferable to the dismemberment of the Empire.
The stringent Arms Act which followed and the threats of interference
which caused O'Connell to call off the Clontarf meeting of October 8,
1843, were only preliminaries to the final blow of the Government.
On October 14, O'Connell was arrested on charges of conspiracy and sedition,
and with him Gavan Duffy, editor of the Nation, John Gray of the Freeman,
and others, but they were at once released on bail. The trial did not
come on till early in 1844, when the printed indictment handed to the
court was nearly a hundred yards long, containing forty-three overt acts,
including speeches, attendance at monster meetings, and articles in the
Nation. The most momentous fact was the entire exclusion of Catholics
from a jury that was to try the foremost Catholic in the country, all
those whose names were called being objected to by the Government prosecutor.
It was this which caused Lord Denman afterwards to describe trial by jury
in Ireland as "a mockery, a delusion, and a snare." The packing
of juries in Crown prosecutions against Catholics was notorious, but in
O'Connell's case it attracted more than usual attention No act of rebellion
or "wicked and foul conspiracy," such as had been predicted
by the Attorney-General, was disclosed in the trial. It was admitted that
the Association was legal and that the meetings had been orderly, but
it was argued that they were held for the unlawful purpose of intimidating
the English people and legislature. Conviction followed on February 12,
but sentence was not pronounced until the next term.
O'Connell spent the interval in London, where he was a centre for party
intrigues. He was accorded a respectful hearing in the House of Commons,
but on May 30 he was condemned to a year's imprisonment and a fine of
£2,000, with security for good behaviour. His detention in Richmond
gaol was only nominal, for he was allowed to see and entertain his friends,
and to continue journalistic work. In September the judgment was reversed
in the House of Lords, and O'Connell was released amid scenes of great
excitement. But his mental powers were fast failing, and his temporary
attachment to the idea of the alternative scheme of federation, then becoming
a favourite doctrine with many who despaired of achieving repeal, was
probably only one symptom of enfeebled powers. It confused his adherents
and alienated his friends and, later, he himself discarded it. His policy
of "taking an instalment when he could not get the whole" did
not please the more ardent spirits of his party and led to a fresh breach
with the Young Irelanders, several of whom, John Mitchel in particular,
were gradually tending toward more violent means of attaining their political
ends, especially after the early death in 1845 of Thomas Davis. O'Connell,
on the other hand, allied himself with the Whig administration, under
which several of his followers took office. He died in Genoa on May 15,
1847, in the midst of the awful famine whose dark shadow had been slowly
creeping over his native land during the final years of his sojourn there.
His last words in Parliament, spoken in broken tones hardly audible to
the House, were a warning of what was happening in Ireland. "Ireland
is in your hands, in your power. If you do not save her she cannot save
herself...I predict that a quarter of her population will perish unless
you come to her relief."[3]
[3] Disraeli's account of O'Connell's last appearance in the House; Cusack,
Life of O'Connell, ii, 212.
To the Young Irelanders it seemed that O'Connell, in forsaking repeal
and uniting with the English Government, had sacrificed the cause. The
breach between them and "Old Ireland," as O'Connell styled his
party, was complete. With a man like John O'Connell, the Liberator's son,
who posed as the "Young Liberator" and without any of his father's
talents aspired to succeed to his father's place in the popular favour,
they could have nothing to do. Early in 1846 Duffy had put Mitchel in
temporary control of the Nation while he took a rest for literary purposes,
but he was recalled to office by the recklessness with which Mitchel dealt
alike with financial and public affairs. The tone of the paper became
violent and threatening, and the more stable spirits were alarmed at its
new departure when it began to publish articles which spoke of a blow
that was to be struck at the British Empire, and forewarned the Government
of the purposes to which railways might be put if a hostile use were made
of them.[4] This was Mitchel's answer to the threat of the Government
to dispatch troops to suppress public opinion and declare the repeal movement
high treason.
[4] C. Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres, i, 136, 138, 140-141.
The ethics of rebellion are difficult to formulate; but what is certain
is that for years every constitutional effort had been made, backed by
the opinion of a multitude of people expressed in meetings of enormous
size and supported by that of a large number of the educated classes of
all forms of religious thought, to bring about repeal. They had spoken
alike through the Press and in Parliament. In all cases these constitutionally
formulated utterances had been met by forcible suppression, by the imprisonment
of the leaders, and by the open contempt of Ministers. Coercion Acts rained
upon the country, the Habeas Corpus Act had been suspended almost continuously,
and juries were packed and threatened with punishment if they did not
bring in the required verdict.
In order to enforce this system, every department of local and general
administration, from that of the Lord-Lieutenant, Chief Secretary, and
Lord Chancellor, down to the Customs' Office and Constabulary, had at
their head Englishmen or Scotchmen who had no interest in the country
save to further their own advancement by carrying out the behests of the
Government of the day. Session after session measures had been forced
upon Ireland against the will of her representatives; and those that were
supported by a majority of the Irish members were contemptuously rejected.
Meanwhile the country was going from bad to worse; outrages were increasing,
famine and disease were spreading and the relations of the classes toward
each other were becoming rapidly more embittered. It was such causes as
these that led Sir Samuel Ferguson, a poet and antiquarian and a strong
constitutionalist, to found the Protestant Repeal Association; and such
causes which induced William Smith O'Brien, a Protestant landowner of
ancient Irish lineage, to join the movement, with which up to 1843 he
had declined to identify himself. Eventually, O'Brien became the leader
of the ill-planned and abortive insurrection of 1848. Yet "he was
persuaded that not one man in a thousand among the Repealers desired either
separation from England or a change of sovereign. The demand for repeal
was not the voice of treason, but the language of despair."[5] At
the time that O'Brien made this speech he was not a member of the Repeal
Association. He spoke as a country gentleman anxious to live a quiet life
in his own country and to see the Union made effective for the liberty
and happiness of his people. But three months later he was forced forward
by his position and changing views to join the Association, and his standing
and character speedily made him the second leader in the movement. He
vowed not to taste wine or any intoxicant until the Union was repealed.
[5] Speech in Parliament, July 4, 1843, quoted in Gavan Duffy, Young
Ireland, i, 157-158.
Meanwhile the Young Ireland party was becoming broken into sections by
differences of opinion. Mitchel had adopted the "physical force policy"
announced by James Fintan Lalor; a policy, as one of his associates named
it, of insurrection, without its courage or resources.[6] Other members
of the association, such as Dillon, O'Hagan, McGee, Gavan Duffy, and Meagher
disapproved of these views, but their persuasions could not turn him from
his purpose and he retired from the staff of the Nation and founded the
United Irishman to voice his opinions. Duffy, on the contrary, advocated
the formation of a Parliamentary party independent of any English party
and refusing all alliance with them or any places or favours offered by
the Government. Such a party, he believed, if of adequate capacity and
character, could rule the House of Commons.[7] In after years Parnell
confessed that it was Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's plan of an independent
Opposition that had suggested to him the formation of such a party; but
in his opinion this only became possible after the passing of the Ballot
Act of 1872.[8]
[6] C. Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres (1898), i, 246.
[7] Ibid., i, 249.
[8] Official Report of the Parnell Commission, vol. vii.
But once more, as in Tone's day, affairs in France precipitated action
at home. Louis Philippe had fled to England and a republic had been proclaimed.
Even Gavan Duffy thought the time had come for a union of Old and Young
Irelanders and a "peaceful revolution." He believed it might
be won without a shot being fired,[9] and that the Catholic Church would
move with them. Dillon and Smith O'Brien advocated moderation and an appeal
to the gentry to declare for self-government. Mitchel spoke extravagantly
about a republic and a peasant war, though he had disavowed these doctrines
a short time before.[10] He attracted to his banner the hotheaded young
men of the student class, but beyond vitriolic articles in his weekly
paper, he made no preparations. The people were unorganized, unprepared,
and unarmed, while the Government was ready at all points and the hasty
passing of an Act, called the Treason Felony Act, which made written or
spoken sedition punishable by penal servitude for life, put it into the
power of the authorities to take immediate steps. Mitchel was arrested
on May 13 and Duffy on July 9, 1848, with several of his confederates.
The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended and their journals suppressed. Pushed
on by circumstances, Smith O'Brien rashly attempted a rising in Munster,
but in a short time he was arrested at Thurles, and all was over. O'Brien,
Meagher, and their comrades were sentenced to death, but the sentence
was commuted; Duffy, after five commissions set to try him, walked out
a free man, though in all these cases the jurors were as carefully packed
as in the days before emancipation, and only one single juror of the Catholic
faith was allowed to sit at any of the five separate trials for life.[11]
Mitchel and his companions were sent to Tasmania as convicts, but they
were allowed freedom of action on parole and were, as John O'Leary says
"treated like gentlemen." Some of them were pardoned in 1854
and returned home; others escaped in a vessel sent by sympathizers to
take them off; but Smith O'Brien, from a high sense of honour, refused
to take advantage of the chance of escape by which the others were set
free. Eventually he was pardoned by Queen Victoria and returned to his
old home at Cahirmoyle.
[9] Cahirmoyle Correspondence, Duffy to O'Brien, quoted in Duffy, op.
cit., i, 259n.
[10] Duffy, op. cit., i, 261-262 and note.
[11] See the account of Mitchel's trial in Duffy, Four Years of Irish
History, and of Duffy's own trial in My Life in Two Hemispheres, i, 301-335.
The first work taken in hand by Mitchel on his release was to denounce
and attempt to destroy the excellent work of the Tenant League in Ireland,
and to preach the doctrine that neither land legislation nor Home Rule
should be sought for through Parliament. In the American Civil War he
fought on the side of the Southern slave-owners. Thomas D'Arcy McGee,
the poet, took a nobler line. He was the beneficent protector of the Irish
immigrants into Canada, improving their conditions and urging on them
agricultural settlements and avoidance of the cities. He rose to be Canadian
Minister of Agriculture and Emigration and helped to frame the Federal
Union of the Dominion. His experience of the corruption and tyranny of
mob-rule in the United States led him to reconsider his opinion that democracy
is the highest form of government; consequently, he was accused of forsaking
the National cause, and a Fenian fanatic put an end to McGee's useful
career by assassination. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy spent several years of
a full life in establishing the Tenant League, to arrest the universal
demoralization and endeavour to check evictions. He succeeded in uniting
Ulster with the South in an effort to push forward urgent reforms; and
his Association supported the Tenant-right Bills of Sharman Crawford and
Napier to which reference has already been made.[12]
[12] Duffy, League of the North and South (1886), pp. 387-388.
At the election of 1852, after the resignation of Lord John Russell, a
substantial majority was sent from Ireland pledged to the support of the
Bill, which passed its second reading, but was disavowed by Lord Derby,
the new Prime Minister. The fall of his Ministry quickly followed, to
make way for a Ministry with Lord Aberdeen at its head and Russell as
Leader of the House. But at the moment when all seemed to be going well
a profligate desertion of their own cause by several of the Irish members
most loudly pledged to Tenant Right ended the struggle and shattered the
League. Three leading Members long suspected of insincerity by their compatriots,
went over to the Government they had hitherto denounced, and accepted
office, their example being followed by others. One of them, John Sadlier,
who became a lord of the treasury, was later found to be a forger and
swindler on a gigantic scale, and he ended his life by committing suicide
on Hampstead Heath. Another, Judge Keogh, was made Solicitor-General for
Ireland; later, he presided at the trials of the Fenian prisoners and
pronounced their sentences; he closed a career in which he had made himself
despised and hated by all parties by a miserable death. "It was one
of the most dramatic and disgraceful desertions in political history."[13]
Crawford withdrew his Bill after twenty years of contest, and Dr. McKnight,
the strongest supporter of Tenant-right in Ulster, fell off. The League
was denounced by Mitchel in the American journals and by a considerable
body of the Catholic Bishops and leading clergy, led by the new Primate,
Dr. (afterward Cardinal) Cullen, at home. Twenty-five deserters had gone
over to the Whigs. What was more ominous was that in the by-elections
the country showed its preference for the discredited Members and returned
them and their friends to Parliament. In this universal demoralization
it is no wonder that Gavan Duffy despaired of the people and declared
that "you can do little for a class that will do nothing for themselves."
One of the few bishops who remained independent wrote: "There is
no room for an honest politician in Ireland. All hope with me in Irish
affairs is dead and buried."[14] Gavan Duffy himself served the Irish
cause honourably in another land and rose to a position of responsibility
as Prime Minister of Victoria, Australia.
[13] G. P. MacDonell, in Bryce, Two Centuries of Irish History, p. 448.
[14] Dr. Croke in Duffy's League of the North and South (1886), p. 363.
It would certainly seem that the Irish electors used their newly won privileges
at this time little for the advantage of their country. They were, in
fact, too ignorant and dependent to take any initiative. They were accustomed
to implicit obedience to their landlords' behests, and when a powerful
personality such as O'Connell presented himself, they obeyed him also
with unquestioning fidelity. The appeal of the Young Irelanders, which
was to their reason rather than to their passions, failed to evoke any
warm response; the masses would neither rise with them nor vote for them.
They still clung with a blind devotion to the time-serving representatives
that O'Connell had left behind him. Inclined by tradition to adhere implicitly
to persons rather than to judge of causes, they were helpless in the hands
of plausible agitators. The minds of the Catholic electors were still
further confused by the division of opinion in the ranks of the clergy
brought about by Dr. Cullen's uncompromising hostility to all national
movements and his close association with the Whigs.
It had recently been proved that no Irish election could be won without
the aid of the local clergy, and they had become the active directors
of their flocks in regard to the way they should cast their vote. But
the Primate, who came over with the added dignity of Papal legate, and
who was ultramontane in his views, desired to exclude priests altogether
from politics and to substitute for this the supreme authority of a few
ecclesiastics. A Nationalist paper declared that his policy was: "No
priests in politics, except bishops. No bishops in politics, except archbishops.
No archbishops, except the Apostolic Delegate."[15] His action broke
up the National party and played into the hands of English politicians;
it caused the delay of substantial efforts for reform. "Till all
this be changed," writes Gavan Duffy, in words constantly mis-quoted
and mis-applied, "there seems to be no more hope for the Irish cause
than for the corpse on the dissecting table...The Irish party is reduced
to a handful, the popular organization is deserted by those who created
it, prelates of the Irish Church throng the ranks of our opponents, priest
is arrayed against priest and parish against parish. A shameless political
profligacy is openly defended and applauded...and the ultimate aim for
which I laboured—to give back to Ireland her National existence—is
forgotten or disdained."[16]
[15] Ibid., pp. 376-377.
[16] Ibid., p. 364 n.
From the decay of the Young Ireland movement sprang the far more formidable
Fenian movement. The former had been largely a literary and educational
impulse, appealing to young people who desired to reform their country
from within. "Educate that you may be free." "Liberty does
not reside in institutions, but in habits of thought and action,"
had been its watchwords. But the Fenian leaders had other views and other
modes of action. Meagher and Mitchel were agitating in America among the
Irish emigrants, who had almost universally become American citizens,
believing that in the institutions of the new country they had found the
personal and political liberty they had in vain sought in their own country.
At home, they had been sensible of no social influence and no political
position; but in the States, where they were rapidly rising in numbers,
they found themselves looked upon as a power, their vote courted and conciliated
by rival political bodies, and their interest on behalf of the old land
appealed to by agitators, who passed mysteriously backward and forward
over the Atlantic.
The miserable conditions still existing in Ireland aided these efforts.
Fresh bodies of emigrants, constantly arriving, brought tidings of renewed
famine conditions and of wholesale evictions suffered by friends and neighbours
of former days. Though many of the evictions were owing to the impecunious
state of the landlords, this can hardly be said of the clearances on the
larger estates. In some districts a state of civil war prevailed, and
cruel revenges were practised on both sides. Murders became frequent,
and the murderers were concealed by their neighbours. The conditions under
which the tenants were forced to live on many of the Irish estates gave
the landlord and agent powers over them which were often used mercilessly
against them or their children, and which made existence terrible to the
helpless peasants in some parts of the country. All these things were
watched by the American settlers who had fled from similar conditions
across the ocean and they formed the soil in which revenges flourish.
Even such papers as the Times showed signs of discerning the underlying
causes of the horrors which were now to befall in Ireland. In an article
commenting on the murder of a Mr. Mauleverer, a land agent in Co. Londonderry,
who was shot on May 23, 1850, the writer asks: "If the proprietors
of the soil...recklessly inflict misery, without stint, upon the helpless
and unfortunate peasantry,...if they are to convert the country into a
battlefield for the landlords and process-servers and sheriff's officers
on the one side, and for the furious peasantry and banded assassins on
the other, then we say it is the bounden duty of the Legislature to interfere,
and either to enforce upon the present landlords the duties while it maintains
the rights of property, or to create a new landed proprietary, whose intelligence
and wealth will enable them to secure the peace of society and thus lay
the foundation of national prosperity...In Ireland, murder is too often
a proof of some great social disease...It is the hideous result of some
fearful wrong."[17] This was, in fact, the case, and the Fenian conspiracy
was one outcome of this state of wrong, under which the country had suffered
helplessly and which it had waited in vain for any English or Irish Government
to step in and remedy.
[17] Times, May 30, 1850, quoted in R. Barry O'Brien, Fifty Years of
Concessions to Ireland, ii, 262-264.
The Fenian movement differed from most similar Irish conspiracies in that
it arose without the aid of any single leader of importance to give it
form or direction. It seemed to spring out of the soil, without orators
or writers or men of proved ability to take the guidance of the forces
it aroused. The prosecutions for seditious writing and speaking in and
after "the '48" rising had driven agitation underground and
led to the formation of secret societies in Ireland and America, which
worked in concert. In 1854 a group of men was formed in New York, of whom
the leading spirits were John O'Mahony, the "head-centre" of
the association in America, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and
described by John O'Leary as "the manliest and handsomest man"
he had ever seen, and "the soul of truth and honour"; James
Stephens, a man of great energy and resource; and Jeremiah O'Donovan,
soon to be known by the dreaded name of O'Donovan "Rossa," the
ruthless advocate of secret and violent conspiracy, who had been sentenced
to penal servitude for life by Judge Keogh, but was amnestied, and who
now acted as editor of the United Irishman. Outside of these were men
of a different type, John O'Leary, who had become a Young Irelander through
reading the poems of Thomas Davis; Charles Joseph Kickham, and Thomas
Clarke Luby, the latter a supporter of Smith O'Brien. Together they edited
their organ The Irish People. At the beginning O'Leary says that "a
certain element of the ridiculous seemed to pierce through the whole business,"[18]
but the movement soon became formidable.
[18] J. O'Leary, Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism (1896), i, 101.
On November 23, 1863, at a meeting in Chicago, it was announced as the
policy of the organization known as the Fenian or Irish Revolutionary
Brotherhood, that open war should be made on Great Britain for the establishment
of Irish national freedom, "no enslaved people having ever regained
their independence" unless by efforts deemed "in the enslaver's
sense rebellious and illegal."[19] They drew up a form of oath and
began the work of propaganda in the States and at home. Other associations
of even more pronounced views, such as the Phoenix and the Ancient Order
of Hibernians, were purely American and largely agrarian. Behind all lay
the dark and dread forces of assassination and crime, banded together
under the name of "The Invincibles," to whose initiative the
terrible tragedy of Phoenix Park and many another deed of homicidal frenzy
were afterwards to be traced.
[19] Proceedings of the first National Convention of the Irish Revolutionary
Brotherhood, Chicago, 1863, quoted in R. Barry O'Brien, op. cit., ii,
210-211.
This infamous association was founded while Forster was Chief Secretary.
Its purpose, according to James Carey the informer, once the chief leader,
was to "make history" by killing all the English officials in
Ireland. The earlier associations had been suppressed in Ireland but the
Fenians took their place. The name appealed to old tradition and speedily
became popular. "This is a serious business now," said an English
literary man; "the Irish have got hold of a good name this time;
the Fenians will last." The power of the organization lay largely
in the fact that the management proceeded from only one or two heads,
who alone knew toward what ends it was being directed. Those below knew
only what was told them, and each man had to obey implicitly the member
immediately above him. Thus the whole society was secret, not only to
outside authorities, but to the members themselves.[20] They were not
consulted and knew only vaguely what was going on. But the people were
steadily prepared for insurrection. Irishmen who had fought in the American
War began to arrive in considerable numbers in Ireland and manufactories
of arms were discovered in Dublin.
[20] Justin MacCarthy, A History of our own Times (1880), vol. iv, ch.
liii. pp. 122 seq.; Tynan, History of the Invincibles.
The disbandment of several thousand Irishmen who had been trained to arms
in the Civil War and who had nothing to turn to for a livelihood gave
a great stimulus to the movement. Stephens proclaimed that the flag of
the Irish Republic would be raised in Ireland in the year 1865. With large
numbers of Americans on their side and sympathy shown by the United States
Government, the project seemed not altogether a fantastic one. But the
supporters in New York failed to fulfil their promises and the English
authorities stepped in.
In 1865 Luby and O'Leary were seized and tried,[21] but Stephens escaped
to France. Fresh repressive legislation was launched, the prominent Catholic
clergy as a whole supporting the Government and vigorously denouncing
secret societies and rebellious associations. This practically brought
the efforts in Ireland to an end. An attempt to capture Chester Castle
in February, 1867, came to nothing, and an organized general rising in
March of the same year was a total failure. Considerable interest was
shown in England in the fate of the men brought to trial, and public opinion,
voiced by Bright and John Stuart Mill was enlisted on the side of mercy,
with the result that several sentences were commuted. But the attempt
to rescue the Fenian prisoners Kelly and Deasy from the prison-van in
Manchester, in the course of which a policeman was shot, as it appears
accidentally, and the blowing up of a part of the wall of Clerkenwell
Gaol shortly afterwards in the attempt to rescue other Fenian prisoners,
excited an outburst of feeling in both countries. Three of the five men
tried for complicity in the rescue were executed. They became known as
the "Manchester Martyrs."[22] These attempts directed fresh
attention to Irish affairs and hastened the passing of the Irish Church
Act of 1869 and probably the later legislation relating to land.[23] In
1868 Lord Stanley had declared that "Ireland was the question of
the hour."
[21] Luby, though sentenced to twenty years penal servitude, was released
in 1871 and went to New York; O'Leary returned in 1885. He died in Dublin
in 1907, respected by all parties.
[22] It was in commemoration of these men that T. D. Sullivan wrote the
verses "God Save Ireland." Four passers-by were killed and a
hundred and twenty were wounded in the Clerkenwell explosion.
[23] See Gladstone's speech in the House of Commons, March 30, 1868, and
that of May 31, 1869.
END OF CHAPTER XIX
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