Recollections of Aubrey De Vere

Front matter

RECOLEECTIONS-

OF

AUBREY DE VERE

CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD AND BoyHoop If. - Youru - III. Poems or my YoutrH — 1832-42

IV. Op Times anp NEw.

V. My Sisrer’s MaArrRIAGE — 1835 VI. ADVENTURES IN SWITZERLAND — 1839 . VII. Earty YEARS IN ENGLAND — 1841-45 VIII. Travets wirH Sir Henry TAYLOR AND HIS WIFE, CHIEFLY IN ITALY — 1843-44 IX. A SHorr Tour IN SCOTLAND IN 1845.

X. 1844-45 : $ : XI. My Faruer’s DEATH IN 1846. My MOorTHER’s IN 1856 Sey ae tat XII. Tue Great Irish FAMINE — 1846-50 XIII. CarpinaL NEWMAN .

XIV. REMINISCENCES OF CARDINAL MANNING XV. My Susmission TO THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH XVI. PoxrricaL CHANGES WITNESSED BETWEEN 1848 AND

XVII.

1895 Sian inne heirs he Some oF My Porms: THEIR AIMS AND OBJECTS

255 288

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CHAPTER. I CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD

Rural Dances at the Avenue Gate — Duels the favourite Irish Sport — My Grandfather’s Ways — He made his Son, when only five years old, a Captain in a Regiment of Volunteers which he had raised — The condition of the Poor was that of a merry misery — A large Emigration wisely assisted by the State was the necessary Preliminary to serious Improvement — Neither English Statesmen nor Irish Proprietors saw this in time — My Father was strongly in Favour of “ Catholic Emancipation,” and in his Politics generally a “ Liberal Tory” or “ Canningite ” — A Summer on the Shannon — A Residence in England from 1821 to 1824 — Richmond Hill — The Sunsets from its Terrace — Ham House and its Groves — My Father’s early Dramas — Our first Tutor, William St. George Pelissier — Pleasant Christmases at Adare— Adventure on Knockfierna, or the Hill of the Fairies.

Y earliest recollections are of our Irish home, Curragh Chase, and I always see it bathed as in summer sunshine. It was not once, however, as itis now. At the bottom of the lawn there now spreads a lake, but at that time it was rich meadow land, divided by a slender stream, with fair green hills beyond. The pleasure ground now blends insensibly with the lawns and woods; but it had then a wall around it, which, as my father’s old friend and schoolfellow, the then Sir Thomas Acland, said on visiting us, when both had left youth behind, gave it a look of monastic seclusion. It was then divided into four grassy spaces, I as smooth as velvet, and bright with many a flower-bed. I can still see the deer park, and the deer bounding from brake to brake of low-spreading oak and birch; the gathering of the poor on Sunday evenings at the gates of the long ash avenue for their rural dance; and the gay, though half bashful, confidence with which some rosy peasant girl would advance, and drop a court’sy before one of our party, or some visitor at the “big house,” that court’sy being an invitation to dance. There was also a little open space in the woods in which the neighbours danced; nor have I yet forgotten the vexation with which I found myself once snatched up and carried home to bed by one of those ‘‘ merry maids whose tresses tossed in light,” and who lost little time in returning to the revel.

It was a time at which opposites of all sorts oddly combined. The country gentlemen were then looked up to as so many little princes, and the poor would have gladly adopted them as chiefs, like those of old, had they cared to accept that position; yet there was great familiarity in the intercourse of classes. It was all strangely mixed with simplicity of life. My grandmother drove about the park with her four greys and an outrider, while my father, with whom she lived, had his four blacks and an outrider; yet dinner, which was at five o’clock, would have been far from satisfactory to a diner-out of the present day. What a stranger would have thought ostentation was often a necessity, for the roads were often carried over high hills. I well remember my grandmother’s beautiful but melancholy black eyes, her ways at once authoritative and affectionate, and the reverence with which she was regarded by all. Nor have I forgotten her good-night to us children: “God bless you, child, and make a good man of you”; nor the loud laugh once when the youngest of us, not to be outdone in civility, responded, “ God bless you, grandmother, and make a good woman of you.”

We cared less for my grandfather, for though Curragh Chase, his chief residence, had always been our home, he lived much elsewhere. He was regarded as a man of remarkable ability, which he seldom turned to serious purpose. That ability was early marked, and Lord Shelburne, then high in office, when on a visit at our house, was so much struck by the boy that he turned to his father, and said: ‘Place that boy in my hands! I will give him a political education, get him into Parliament on his coming of age, and he will turn out a great man.” The offer, however, was not accepted, and accordingly the boy was brought up to be an Irish squire, at a time when England may have “expected every man to do his duty,” but Ireland expected every man to do, possibly, some other man’s duty, but, in any case, whatever amused him — ride well, stand by a friend, say good things and fight duels.

In those days a duel was the most mirthful of pastimes, and in Dublin there still remains a tradition of two lawyers, —one the biggest, and the other the smallest, man in Irish society —who met in the Phcenix Park, just after sunrise, to indulge in that amusement. As they approached each other, the big man set his glass to his eye, and exclaimed: “But where is my honourable opponent? For I really cannot see him.”

“‘ What’s-that he’s saying?” demanded the little man.

“T just remarked,” replied the big man, “ that I am so large that if you miss me, you are like the man who, when he took aim at the parish church, never succeeded in hitting the parish.”

“What is that big ‘Golumbus’ of a man babbling about?” was his small antagonist’s rejoinder. “That I can’t miss him and he cannot see me? Let his second get a bit of white chalk, and draw my exact size and shape on that huge carcass of his; and any bullet of mine that hits outside that white line shall not count.”

My grandfather had no taste for duels. At a great public dinner, among the “healths” proposed was that of Lord Castlereagh, to whom my grandfather, then a member of the Irish Parliament, was known to have a special aversion. All looked toward his seat, wondering how he would meet the dilemma; for the refusal to drink to a toast could then be expiated only by a duel. The glasses filled, he was the first to rise; he lifted his own and said: “Here’s to the health of my Lord Castlereagh!” adding with a significant expression of face, “the Lord be troublesome to him!”

My grandfather always gave the sagest advice to a friend, but generally acted himself from whim. Once when walking in a London street, he passed a room in which an auction was going on, and, attracted by the noise, entered it. The property set up for auction was | the Island of.Lundy in the Bristol Channel. He knew nothing whatsoever about it, but when the auctioneer proclaimed that it had never paid either tax or tithe, that it acknowledged neither King nor Parliament, nor law civil or ecclesiastical, and that its proprietor was pope and emperor at once in his own scanty domain, he made a bid, and the island was knocked down to him. It turned out a good speculation. It paid its cost by the sale of rabbits; and whenever its purchaser chanced to have picked a quarrel with England and Ireland at the same time, it was a hermitage to which he could always retire and meditate. He planted there a small Irish colony, and drew up for it a very compendious code, including a quaint law of divorce in case of matrimonial disputes. In money matters he was adventurous and unlucky. He lost about 415,000 by cards, and then renounced them. He is said to have also lost about half the family property through some trivial offence given to his father. In other matters he was more fortunate. During the war he raised two regiments consisting of the sons of farmers, his own tenants and those of his neighbours, and bestowed a captain’s commission on his only son, then a boy of five. I remember my father describing the pride with which he strutted about in his scarlet uniform, when the general rode out to review these regiments. ‘“ But where is the captain?” exclaimed the veteran. ‘‘ Here I am,” shouted the child. “ But, my little man, you are too young to fight!” ‘Not at all,’ was the answer; “let the French land, and” — waving his sword in the air — “I will cut off their heads!” Alas! the hard-hearted Englishman “ disbanded the cap- > tain,” as the poor people described his act, and the youthful warrior lost for ever the opportunity of humbling that “Corsican adventurer,” who had called England a “ nation of shopkeepers,” and affirmed that the lions on her stan-. dard were only leopards.

My grandfather was the most popular of our country gentlemen, because he had a great love for the poor, and always helped them at a pinch. A very old tenant once told me many stories illustrating this side of his character. Here is one of them. A young man was tried for murder, having killed a member of a rival faction in a faction-fight. The judge, reluctant to sentence him to death, on account of his youth, turned to him and said: “Is there any one in court who could speak as to your character?” The youth looked round the court, and then said sadly: “ There is no man here, my lord, that I know.” At that my grandfather chanced to walk into the grand-jury gallery. He saw at once how matters stood. He called out, “ You are a queer boy that don’t know a friend when you see him!” The boy was quick-witted; he answered, “ Oh, then, ’tis myself that is proud to see your honour here this day!” “Well,” said the judge, “Sir Vere, since you know that boy, will you tell us what you know of him?” “TI will, my lord,” said my grandfather, “ and what I can tell you is this — that from the very first day that ever I saw him to this minute, I never knew anything of him that was not very good.” The old tenant ended his tale by striking his hands together and exclaiming, ‘And he never to have clapped his eye upon the boy till that minute!” The boy escaped being hanged. Such traits make a man popular in Ireland; and it is said that at his funeral the keening (funeral wail) for many a mile was such as had rarely been heard. Not long ago I came upon a letter from an English minister of the day, informing him that the patent for his peerage, an English one, was ready. It seems, however, that at the last moment he changed his mind and declined it. Possibly there was some one to whom “he would not give so much satisfaction” as that of seeing him take a peerage.

CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD if

The poorer class in those days seldom wore shoes or stockings. That they did not count a hardship. On the contrary, they found these appendages irksome; and ata later time often carried their shoes in their hands till near atown. Many of their houses were but hovels without chimneys or windows. The real patience, or rather cheerfulness, with which such hardships were borne, should be recollected by such as justly complain of more recent violences committed in retaliation for imaginary wrongs. _ At that time the mass of the people spoke Irish, not English, habitually. They did not read; and if they had read they would have found no publications that preached Jacobinism. They were faithful, notwithstanding, to their political traditions. No one could keep an orange lily in the garden, though planted by known enemies of the Orange party. It was sure to be thrown over the wall, while we were informed that there were some “bad mimbers” in the neighbourhood whom no vigilance could keep from stealing. We had at one time an excellent gardener, but he was an Orangeman from the “Black North.” He had brought with him a large blunderbuss for the pacification of the South; and he boasted much of its capabilities. One night a number of men with blackened faces burst open the window of his bedroom, which was on the ground floor. The family were then in England, except two young lady relatives. One of them hid in a garret, the other made her appearance on the field of action, attended only by two maids, without fear and without cause for fear. The men listened to her rebuke with respect, and spared the life of the Orange gardener, after making him, however, swear to return forthwith to the

North. They took away his blunderbuss, but a few days later wrote a letter stating that it would be found under a particular tree; and there it was found.

The extreme poverty here described will suggest the thought that the proprietor class had been very remiss in the discharge of their duties. This charge would be only partly true. They did not feel that poverty as much as they ought to have felt it; but neither did the Irish poor themselves, in ordinary times. The penal laws were still sufficiently recent to live on in their consequences; and one of these was, as Edmund Burke affirmed, a legislative mandate, “Thou shalt not improve.’ In _ prohibiting property to the mass of the people they had proscribed industry; but they could not prevent early marriages; and the consequence was that between the huge population and the scanty means of support there existed no proportion. The problem had become too vast to be solved by any efforts of individual proprietors, had they been ever so dutiful, able, and wealthy. The farms were too small for scientific cultivation; and if they had been consolidated, multitudes must have been deprived of all support. The farms were not, it is true, laid out for cultivation at the landlord’s cost, asin England; but if they had been, wherever competition for land existed, those improvements must have been paid for by a rent proportionately increased, as in England. Neither the proprietor nor tenant possessed the capital necessary for such improvements, but the poor man’s capital was his labour, and the system which grew up in Ireland was the best at that time, not only for the landlord, but even more for the tenant, because he had thus his earnings at once as a farmer and as alabourer.

Again, the labourer’s pay was deplorably low; but the work given for it was proportionately low. That arrangement also grew naturally out of the circumstances of the country. If the rate of wages had been higher, the labour would then have been unproductive; and half the labourers must have been thrown out of employment, since even at a low rate of wages there was not work for the labourer for more than half the week. The low rate of wages simply distributed a small labour-fund among a large number of half-labourers. A philanthropist who doubled the rate of wages would only have increased the evil in the long run: for he would have drawn in upon a small neighbourhood a double population with an artificial and therefore ephemeral support. Eventually the Irish population, wholly unemployed during a large portion of the year, was reckoned at two millions. A remedy for all this was indeed most necessary, but it did not rest with the individual proprietor, but largely with the State also. It must have begun with a system of State-aided emigration to the colonies, where aids, both before and after their arrival, should have been provided for the early settlers. The work would have been costly, but “these are heroic works and worthy kings.” Ireland had early done what unaided energy could do in the way of emigration; but the effort was wholly insufficient, while also attended by needless suffering and a scant reward at best. Such State aid was a debt of honour on the part of the State; but the impulse thus given to the growth of her colonies, and the extension of her markets, would have eventually repaid that cost, a large proportion of which might have been justly charged upon the Irish property thus rendered capable of indefinite improvement. The land-laws in Ireland would have worked as they did in England when the pre-condition had been fulfilled, — that is, a state of things substantially similar in the two countries. But this would have demanded assisted emigration, and such aid to industrial enterprises at home as the legislation of past times had rendered necessary. _

The disproportion between the vast population and the slender means for their support continued to increase year by year. I remember hearing, in my boyhood, my father frequently lamenting the blindness of statesmen who paid no serious attention to it. His political predictions generally turned out true. ‘We sit in a boat the gunwale of which is nearly level with the water,” he used to say. ‘ How will it be when the waves rise?” The waves rose in the famine of 1847-50 and his words recurred to me. They would have been heard often and far if he had had a parliamentary career. Unluckily he stumbled at its threshold. He stood as a candidate for his county at the election of, I think, 1820. At that time, to represent a county was a great distinction, and one sometimes sought from lower motives. My father stood for his county because he wished to benefit his country. But he stood a week too late; and the clouds of letters sent daily to the post were often answered by regrets that the votes of the writers had not been asked until they had been promised to another.

Elections then lasted for a fortnight in Ireland, and were times of fierce excitement, though politics had little to do with it. My father was strongly in favour of Catholic Emancipation, and was popular among the poor.

CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD II

He was popular also among the country gentlemen. Every day the excitement increased. I can also remember being frightened by hearing that if my father were beaten it would be by the votes of “dead men” —that meant, of deceased freeholders whose names remained accidentally on the registry lists, and who were personated by impostors. One of these impostors had but a few years before won his niche in the temple of local fame. He had voted, but saw no reason why he should not vote a second time if he could do so without detection. Accordingly he left the court, had his head shaved, substituted a red wig for his own black hair, and got three of the most prominent teeth in his upper jaw knocked out. He then returned to the court, and, recognized by none, voted for the rival candidate, with whom he had made his bargain!

In the case of my father’s election the contest lasted long. At last it was decided after an odd fashion. A country gentleman with whom my father had always been on the friendliest terms, and who had waited for the last day of the polling in order to impart a more _ emphatic character to his proceeding, rode into Limerick at the head of his numerous tenantry, and voted against him! Between the two there had never been a coolness, but many years before he had had a quarrel with my father’s uncle, the Earl of Limerick; he had vowed revenge, and the opportunity had come. My father was a man of great magnanimity, and never resented injuries. Somebody once said of him, “ Others forgive injuries, but he entirely forgets them, and that very soon.” His conduct to the friend who had thus deprived him of a political career illustrated the old saying, “It takes two to quarrel.” The intercourse between the families continued as before. Our vindictive neighbour was a friendly man when not crossed, one of high breeding and great abilities; though, being, like most Irish gentlemen, without ambition, he never turned them to account. I remember seeing him walk up and down our library years afterward, with his hands locked together behind his back, his head bent low before him, and his long white hair streaming back over his shoulders, and hearing him say: “Tt is a great thing to be able to look back on a long life; and record, as I can, that never once did any man injure me but sooner or later I had my revenge.’”’ What he thus recorded he certainly regarded as a merit. An evil tradition had generated a “false conscience.” He was like an Indian chief who had never forsaken a friend, or complained of a pang, or left a scalp on the head of an enemy of his tribe.

This disastrous vindictiveness is often found in races whose, sympathies are no less keen, but who have only half emerged from an early stage of civilisation; and it may’ then be combined with the most sensitive heart, and the strongest spirit of self-sacrifice. It is the barbaric element surviving in a society in which the Christian element may also be strong in many hearts, but into which the conventional ingredient of civilisation has not yet entered. In Ireland the faction fights, then so common, witnessed to the intensity of a perverted fidelity. They were regarded as a just retribution, avenging a wrong inflicted perhaps a century before. Neither the civil nor the ecclesiastical power could restrain them.

I remember a good old priest describing one of these faction fights to me. When the day appointed for the terrible yearly rite had arrived, the two factions met at the place usually set apart for it, and stood face to face with a considerable space between them. The priest -rode along the line, dismounted, knelt down, lifted his hands, and solemnly adjured both factions in the name of God, to depart, and not imbrue their native land with the blood of brothers. They thanked him with great reverence, and then requested him as he had acquitted himself of his duty, to take his departure. He mounted and rode to the top of an adjoining hill, on which was stationed a considerable body of cavalry and _ several magistrates, one of whom, a venerable old man, beckoned him to his carriage window, and said to him with great agitation, ‘Sir, this is a dreadful sight!” “I pitied him,” said the priest to me, “and desired him not to take on in that way, since there was no help for it.” Then the two factions raised a great shout, and met in the middle space; the next moment the cavalry charged down the hill, and rode right over both.

I remember a touching incident in connection with the faction fights. While the agitation for repeal was going on, O’Connell, both on religious and political grounds, made a great attempt to put them down, for he was quite sincere in his frequent assertion that “he who commits a crime is the enemy of his country.” With the aid of the Catholic clergy he induced the rival factions in many parts of Ireland to meet at their parish church, renounce their ancient enmities, and shake hands. A relative of mine then travelling through the country observed a great crowd around a village church. He got out of his carriage, and entered the church. It was a “reconciliation” meeting. Two old grey-haired men, leaders of two rival factions, advanced slowly, with several halts, from the opposite ends of the church to the middle, stood there silent, face to face, and at last shook hands. The next moment one of them dashed _ himself down on the stone pavement, and cried aloud, “O my son, my murdered son! I have clasped the hand that shed the last drop of thy blood!”

The earliest political event which I remember is the death of King George III. We children were all great loyalists; on this occasion we were put into mourning, and I believe that our grief on that occasion was very real, though not very lasting. Soon afterward we migrated to Mount Treachard, the residence of my maternal grandmother, on the banks of the Shannon. Many a day was spent sailing in a little open boat, with three masts and four sails, now by the ivied cliff and fair wooded shores of Cahircon, now among the islands at the mouth of the Fergus, now beneath the heathy hills that overhang Foynes. I well recollect my father’s characteristic remark on the far nobler view we should have had, if only on one of those hills there had chanced to stand another castle like ‘ Shania,” a ruined keep of the Desmonds, which crowned an eminence a few miles inland. He pointed also to Knock-Patrick, and told us how from its summit Ireland’s great apostle had sent his benediction over all the lands to the south and west. Sometimes we made our way down the river, past Glin, Tarbert, and Kilrush, and saw near its mouth the island of Scattery, the lonely hermitage of St. Senanus, and the long line of Ballibunion’s cliffs, with their submarine palace of caves, the sound of which, after a storm, was heard, in a strong west wind, thirty miles off. I have never since felt anything like that terrible sense of loneliness which penetrated my whole being on the evening of our arrival, when I was left for an hour alone, and looked westward over “the spacious Shannon spreading like a sea” and diversified only by a few black-sailed turf-boats far apart.

The next year we went to England. We travelled in a very large old family coach with our own four black horses. It took us four days to reach Dublin, and twice as many more to reach London. On the second evening, at Maryborough, we were informed that we should have an interesting sight the next morning at breakfast, as a man was then to be hanged on a platform just opposite our windows. We started accordingly an hour earlier than had been intended. Steamboats were then in a very early stage of their existence, and seven hours were dolorously spent before we landed at’ Holyhead. The slow rate at which we travelled showed us, however, many fair sights which the traveller now misses.

I remember vividly the interest with which we saw King George IV., drawn by six cream-coloured horses, in his state coach, with the Duke of York beside him, and the Duke of Wellington opposite, on the occasion of a dissolution of Parliament. I remember no less, as in duty bound, our French governess, who told me, then eight years old, that I should never forget her, because she had taught me to write. She had, I believe, but one fault, namely, that, though not pretty, her manners were so perfect, and she was at once so brilliant and so “spiritual” that at evening parties she attracted more attention than any other lady in the room. She was an ardent Bonapartist, and her sister had married a brother of the Emperor Napoleon. At one time there was on a visit to us a young French lady, an equally ardent Legitimist, and I used to hear people marvel at the skill with which, in their passages-of-arms, the two politicians united the extreme of politeness with sarcastic bitterness.

During our residence in London my father published his first drama, “Julian the Apostate,” and also his second, “The Duke of Mercia,” both of which were highly. praised in the periodicals, though neither had a large circulation. One of these critiques affirmed that “ Julian the Apostate” was a drama of a higher order than any which Lord Byron had given to the world; and I have reason to hope that that critique was written by Hartley Coleridge, then a young man. No poet was then popular except Byron, who must have deprived the world of as much poetry as he ever produced. I remember asking my father whether Byron or Scott was the greater man, and his answering, ‘Scott, because he is as great, and he is a good man also.”

We passed a delightful summer on Richmond Hill, in a house then adjoining the “Star and Garter.” We daily watched the sunsets from Richmond Terrace, with the Thames, reddened but glassy still, winding away among leagues of rich lowlands, ‘‘a haunt of ancient peace”; the hedgerow trees crowding so closely together at a distance, that the rich pasture-lands and stately homes embosomed in them seemed destined to be reabsorbed into the primeval forest which still waged a peaceful war with that “sweet enemy,” modern civili-_ sation. Still more charming to my imagination were the long avenues and solemn groves of Ham House, within whose inclosure the venerable mansion looked content to stand half hidden and guarded by its grim iron gates. I did not associate it with the historical events which it records, but with a German fairy tale about a witch whose delight was to entice young lovers into her forest, then change them into birds, and hang them up in the cages that lined the corridors of her palace prison. Every year I revisit those scenes, and wonder at the recollection that our parents, with whom we first enjoyed them, seemed then to us to be elderly persons. On the contrary, they were young. They had married at eighteen and seventeen.