Thomas Davis; the memoirs of an Irish patriot, 1840-1846

Dedication

I dedicate this memoir to Englishmen and Irishmen who honestly doubt the desire or the capacity of Ireland for self-government.

They will judge whether the man depicted in the memoir and his associates did not seek a worthy and practicable end by honourable and commensurate means.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

V. The Eecreations of a Patriot. 1843 ... ... 160

VII. Conflicts with O'Connell. 1845 ... ... 256

Chapter I

There are readers to whom the name of Thomas Davis will sound strange, but to the wide circle to whom it is familiar it represents a unique type of patriotism and integrity. If the educated Irishmen of to-day, of all classes and parties, were required to name the man who came nearest their ideal of an Irish patriot, no one born in the century now drawing to a close would combine so many suffrages as Davis. He has been dead nearly half a century, and no memoir of him has hitherto been published. To write his life was a task which more than one of his early friends desired to undertake. But when he died they were engaged for the most part in exhausting public labours, and before he was half a dozen j'ears in his grave many of those who knew him best were scattered to the ends of the earth by political disaster. When they rallied, some years later, the design was not forgotten, but his family were of opinion that the time had not yet come when his posthumous papers might properly be published. Now, at length, when all the necessary materials are available, only two or three of his comrades survive ; and with their cordial encouragement and assistance I hasten to take up the longdeferred work, lest death should deprive me, too, of the happiness of depicting the best man I have ever known.

Thomas Davis was born in Mallow, county Cork, on the 14th of October, 1814. When he came into the world Ireland was a garrison, in the same sense that Calcutta or Gibraltar is a garrison to-day. The native population, who were universally Catholics, amounted to between six and seven millions, but none of them under the existing law could occupy any office of authority in their native country. The town where he was born was a type of a system which existed, slightly modified by local circumstances, in every town in the island. There was some form of municipal government, but the administrators were exclusively Protestants. There was an Established Church, maintained at the common cost of the whole population, for a minority of less than one in a dozen, and more profusely endowed than any establishment in Christendom. The only schools supported or recognized by the state were under exclusively Protestant management. Justice was administered in courts in which the entire official staff were of the favoured creed. And the recognized test of what was called " loyalty " was the determination to perpetuate this system, to support Protestant ascendancy in the Church, the executive government, the magistracy and the municipalities. Ireland was represented by a hundred members in the parliament of London, but only Protestants could be

1838.] TUB STUDENT. 3

chosen, and, though votes had been conferred upon Catholics twenty years earlier, the rural electors were tenants at will, who voted under orders of their landlord or his agent. The Irish nobility with half a dozen exceptions lived in England, and the resident gently and professional classes led gay convivial lives, with little thought of politics beyond the necessary precautions to keep the populace quiet. A few prosperous Catholics, in the mercantile or professional classes in Dublin, demanded civil and religious liberty from time to time ; but the Protestants who sympathized with them were scarcely more numerous than the Indian officials to-day who would manumit the Hindoo.

Davis belonged by birth to the minority who enjoyed the monopoly of property and power. His father, James Thomas Davis, was a surgeon in the Eoyal Artillery, and served in the Peninsular War, with the rank of Inspector of Hospitals. His mother, Mary Atkins, descended from a good Anglo-Irish family, which traced back its line to the great Norman House of Howard, and — what Davis loved better, to remember — to the great Celtic House of 0' Sullivan Beare. I found among his papers this fragment of a letter, in his own handwriting, which probably tells all the reader will care to know on the subject : —

" My father was a gentleman of Welsh blood, but his family had been so long settled in England that they were, and considered themselves, English. He held a commission in the English army. I am descended on my mother's side from a C'romwellian settler whose descendants, though they occasionally intermarried with Irish families, continued Protestants, and in the English interest, and suffered for it in 1688. I myself was brought up High Tory and an Episcopalian Protestant, and if I am no longer a Tory it is from conviction, for all those nearest and clearest to me are so still. Forgive this bit of biography. It cannot arise from egotism in an anonymous writer, but I want you [to understand my position]." *

This mixture of Celtic and Norman blood is an amalgam which has nourished noble fruit. Nearly a hundred years earlier, a father of Anglo-Norman descent and a mother of pure Celtic strain reared a son who ranks with Bacon and Milton in the intellectual hierarchy of these islands, and a majority of the most noted Irishmen are of the same mixed race as Edmund Burke.

Davis was born after his father's death, the youngest of four children, of whom a brother and sister survive. When he was four years of age the family removed to Dublin, living at Warrington Place till 1830, and afterwards at 61 (now 67), Lower Bagot Street, where the survivors still reside. His birthplace was a garden of traditional and historical romance, but he left Mallow so early that it would be fanciful to speak of boyish impressions at an age when he was scarcely breeched. He was educated at the noted school of Mr. Mongan, Lower Mount Street, and in 1831 entered Trinity College. As a

* "He was, genealogists affirm, a man of old and honourable descent, both on tlic maternal and paternal side. His mother's family was a branch of the Atkins of Firville, in the county Cork, sharing also the blood of the O'Sullivans. His great grandfather, Sir Jonathan Atkius, of Givensdale, in Yorkshire, was Governor of Guernsey in the seventeenth century, and left, by his fust wife, Mary (daughter of Sic Richard Howard, of Neworth Castle, Cumberland, the sister of the first Earl of Carlisle), three sons, the second of whom settled at Fountainville, county Cork, and was the maternal ancestor of Davis. His father, James Thomas Davis, was the representative of a Buckinghamshire family originally from Wales" ("Young Ireland," chap, iii.).

From a family genealogy I learn that Richard Atkins married Anne, only daughter of the ( ('Sullivan Beare (she was born in 1712 and died in 1756), ami by her left John Atkins, who married Mary, second daughter of Robert Atkins of Fountainville, and had two sons and four daughters, the fourth of whom was mother of Thomas Davis.

child he was feeble and delicate, for which the anxiety his mother suffered at his father's premature death will probably account ; and in youth he was subject to frequent fits of despondency — less an individual trait, I fancy, than an ordinary result of the poetic temperament. But when he became a student of Trinity all symptoms of debility had disappeared ; he was fond of long walking excursions, and entered almost immediately on the systematic study which needs a solid reserve of vigour to sustain. His boyhood passed as the boyhood of poets and thinkers is apt to pass. He was silent, thoughtful, and self-absorbed. We hear, without surprise, that the boisterous spirits of schoolboys oppressed him, and that he took slight pleasure in their sports ; for that is the common lot of his class. So little is known with certainty of that period, that I must borrow from a former book the few particulars I was able to gather from his contemporaries : —

" One of his kinswomen, then resident in Melbourne, who judged him as the good people judged who mistook the young swan for an ugly duck, assured me that he was a dull child. He could scarcely be taught his letters, and she often heard the schoolboy stuttering through ' My Name is Norval ' in a way that was pitiable to see. When he had grown up, if you asked him the day of the month, the odds were he could not tell 3rou. He never was any good at handball or hurling, and knew no more than a fool how to take care of the little money his father left him. She saw him more than once in tears listening to a common country fellow playing old airs on a fiddle, or sitting in a drawing-room as if he were in a dream when other young people were enjoying themselves ; which facts I doubt not are authentic, though the narrator somewhat mistook their significance. Milton, in painting his own inspired youth, has left a picture which will be true for ever of the class of which he was a chief: —

" ' When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing; all my mind was set

(j MEMOIR OF THOMAS DAVIS. [1831-

Serione to leavn and know; and thence to do What might be public good: myself I thought Born to that end — born to promote all truth, All righteous things.' " *

" lie was not a precocious hoy," said another contemporary ; " he did not speak often or willingly, hut an observer who marked how readily the beads of perspiration gathered on his brow would understand that there were forces at work under the surface."

He lived a life of day-dreams, for the most part, — the first and most subtle discipline of a boy of genius. He has told us himself the subject of his reveries.

" What thoughts were mine in early youth ! Like some old Irish song, Brimful of love, and life, and truth, My spirit gushed along.

" I hoped to right my native isle, I hoped a soldier's fame, I hoped to rest in woman's smile, And win a minstrel's name."

When he entered college, in his seventeenth year, we do not pass at once from obscurity to light ; many of his fellow-students and some of his teachers are still living, but they have nothing to tell of that era, except that he was habitually self-absorbed and a prodigious reader. For four or five years he hibernated among his books, slowly gathering knowledge and silently framing opinions. From his casual talk he was regarded as a Benthamite, a dumb questioner of authority, discontented with many things established, but not likely to prove a formidable opponent. In 1830, when he was keeping his last term as a law student in London, one of his early friends saw with amazement silent tears fall down his cheeks at some

* "Young Ireland," chap. iii.

1833.] TEE STUDENT. 7

generous allusion to the Irish character on the stage — a sensibility he was far from expecting in the supposed Utilitarian.

Though Trinity College was a fortress of Protestant ascendancy, the amphitheatre where young athletes were trained to defend the Established Church, the land code, and the exclusive magistracy and municipalities, it has always reared passionate Nationalists. There is scarcely a man distinguished as an opponent of British supremacy, from Jonathan Swift to Isaac Butt, who was not educated in that institution. In 1793 two of its graduates, Thomas Emmet and Wolfe Tone, first taught nakedly the doctrine, that the essential basis of Irish liberty was peace and brotherhood among Protestants and Catholics. Since Catholic emancipation was conceded, Charles Boyton, a fellow of the University, with a remarkable gift of popular eloquence, made some discursive attempts to revive the impossible nationality of Flood and Charlemont — a nationality from which the bulk of the nation was excluded. And when Davis matriculated, there was a little knot of generous Protestants in college who talked to each other the old doctrine of Tone and Emmet — -Ireland, not for a sect or a social caste, but for the whole Irish people. Thomas Wallis, a college tutor, Torrens McCullagh, a young barrister of great colloquial powers, and Francis Kearney, a student, who died before he was called to the Bar, were the leading spirits in this connection. For a time these young men barely knew Davis, and I learned from the survivors that they misunderstood him so completely that one of the set fixed upon him a nickname implying contented mediocrity. They always insisted that his nature had not then awakened ; that lie was still slow, laborious, and'tame ; and that there was no hint in his conversation of the fountain of thought and passion soon to overflow, or of the indomitable will masked under habitual silence.

That his fellow-students misjudged Davis's natural endowments became plain enough to themselves in the end ; but I think they misjudged as seriously the condition of his mind when they knew him first. His writings, when he came to write, furnish evidence difficult to resist that his voluminous studies were guided by a purpose from an early period. While the young men about him were dreaming, as the goal of life, to win the great seal or episcopal lawn, this silent student had a rarer and more daring ambition. He resolved to be the servant of his country, as the great men of old who touched his heart had been. If he devoured history, and the historical romance and drama which light up the past, and pondered on the codes, annals, and memoirs, the speculations of economists and moralists, who disclose the laws which govern human conduct, it was that he might not be an unprofitable servant. The foundations of character are laid in boyhood and youth ; and in his verses, where we rua}' most confidently seek the secrets of a poet's heart, he tells us how early the hope of serving Ireland began : "when boyhood's fire was in his blood" he read of Leonidas and Thermopylae, and how Horatius and his comrades held the Sublician Bridge, and prayed that he too might be worthy to do some gallant deed for his country.

" And from that time, through wildest woe, That hope has shone, a far light ;

Nor could love's brightest summer glow Outshine that solemn starlight :

" It seemed to watch above my head In forum, field, and fane ; Its angel voice sang round my bed, ' A Nation once again.' "

He sat down before the chaos of Irish annals confused by honest ignorance and distorted by industrious malice, determined to understand the story of his native country. So far as we know there was no friendly hand to lead him through this pathless thicket. Fortunate is the youth who has a guide fit to make plain the difficult and to light the obscure places of his study. But is he not stronger and more sure-footed in the end who has made his way over the impediments and through the darkness by his native force ? This silent arduous labour was a discipline for life, and laid the foundations of a consummate man. In his little den in college, apart from the babble of local politics, he studied the Irish problem in the abstract. He saw in the island all the natural capacity and resources for self-government. Nature had furnished the first conditions and essential equipments for a great emporium of commercial enterprise to this land of multitudinous rivers and harbours, lying between two continents. The native race had proved their capacity in early civilization and early commerce, and by workmanship of marvellous beauty, before the base jealousy of a stronger neighbour had brought them to ruin. Their exiles in later times had won distinction in war, diplomacy, and the art of government, and there was no reason to fear that the native sap had dried up. The people were generous, pious and romantic, vigilant husbandmen and skilled artisans, and would be fortified by the mettle of harder races; for the Ireland he dreamed of restoring was one in which native-born men, of whatever origin, should unite as Irishmen, as the Briton, the Angle, the Dane, the Norman, and the Netherlander had united in England. It was in this spirit he approached the Irish Tory : —

" We have no curse for you or yours,

But Friendship's ready grasp, And Faith to stand by you and yours

Unto our latest gasp — To stand by you against all foes,

Howe'er, or whence they come, With traitor arts, or bribes, or blows,

From England, France, or Eome.

" What matter that at different shrines

We pray unto one God — What matter that at different times

Your fathers won this sod — In fortune and in name we're bound

By stronger links than steel ; And neither can be safe nor sound

But in the other's weal."

A man of genius commonly attributes an inordinate importance to the mind which gave his own the first impulse towards action at a critical period of development. Very often it is a mind inferior to his own, hut he is slow to perceive and loth to acknowledge this fact. Coleridge had such a feeling towards Bowhs and Landor towards Southey, and Davis had certainly such a feeling towards Wallis. Wallis's position among his associates bore a not remote resemblance to that of Coleridge among the Lake Poets. He projected on a prodigious scale, but he made no attempt to perform what he projected. A thinker who does not work is not necessarily a wasted force.

His talk was full of new, startling, and often audacious truths ; he had the gift of inspiring thought and awakening feeling, and, like his great exemplar, he considered his function exhausted when he had exhorted a man to do some good work, without any intention of setting him the example. One of his halfscoffing admirers used to say that if you could work miracles or were willing to try, and ready to be bullied for having failed, Wallis had a fascinating series of prodigies at your service. But to the serious mind of Davis these wild coruscations were like the electric current smiting the dusky coil of wire. They kindled his faculties for action, and inflamed his slumbering imagination. The apparently impossible did not frighten him ; he felt within himself the will and capacity to perform what were prodigies and miracles to scoffing men of the world. In Cardinal Newman's fascinating confessions there is nothing more touching than his admission of important truths learned, or salutary impressions received, from some friends in the work which he was born and appointed to perform. And Davis rejoiced to exaggerate his obligations to Wallis. Wallis frankly accepted the hypothesis that he was the firebearer. Long after Davis's death, he wrote to me —

" Tou must consider all the experience I have had for the ten years or so that I was ' Professor of Things in general and Patriotism in particular,' in a garret in T.C.D. If I, and surely it was I that did it (his exorbitantly extravagant praise of me showed it), if I loosed the tenacious phlegm that clogged Davis's nature and hid his powers from himself and the world — if I kept Torrens McCullagh for several years from deflecting into the Whig parabola, which was his natural tendency — and if I changed John Dillon from a Whig and Utilitai'ian to a Nationalist and a popular leader — I must have expended rather a serious amount of magnetic force in the task, to say nothing of the scores of others that I mesmerized with less success, or less remarkable results. Don't think I am boasting, for I am rather ashamed than otherwise, both of the plentiful nonsense I used to talk, and of the foibles of human nature that make dreams and illusions more potent over it than the daylight of mature reason."

Torrens McCullagh was at this time the model of a handsome accomplished young Irishman. He had just begun to practise at the Bar, but posed as the jocund, good-humoured cynic who despised any success which might be won in that prosaic pursuit ; a man destined, one might surmise, to go triumphantly to the world's end, but whose career has been considerably shorter. He had established a Dublin University Review, which had a brief existence ; and, somewhat later, the Citizen, a monthly magazine in which he and his friends taught an enlightened national Whiggery such as they considered befitting the citizens of a free state.

In the society of these young men and their friends the knowledge Davis had gathered got classified by friendly discussion, and opinions which were in solution became crystallized. But he had as yet done nothing by which he could be estimated.

" Truth to say," says Wallis, " much of the early misconception of his character was his own fault. He learned much; suffered much, 1 have no doubt; felt and sympathized much ; and hoped and enjoyed abundantly; but he had not yet learned to rely cm himself. His powers were like the nucleus of an embryo star, uncompressed, unpurified, flickering and indistinct. . . . The result was, that during his college course, and for some years after, while ho was very generally liked, he had, unless perhaps, with some who knew him intimately, but a moderate reputation for high ability of any kind. In his twenty-fifth year, as I remember— that is, in the spring of 1839 — he first began to break out of this. His opinions began to have weight, and his character and influence to unfold themselves in a variety of ways."

A debating society is the natural training school of ambitious students, but at this time there was no such society in the University, and an extern Historical Society, composed chiefly of college students, which had done good service in its day had recently ceased to meet. The first College Historical Society had been founded in 1770, when Edmund Burke was a student, and had met within the walls for nearty a generation. Lord Avonmore, Temple Emmet, Thomas Addis Emmet, and Wolfe Tone were among the members. It had troubles with the authorities, which never looked with much favour on these unlicensed seminaries, but in 1792, after an interval of sluggishness, it was remodelled under a new name. Plunket, Bushe, John Shears, Peter Burrows, and, later, Robert Emmet were among the members ; but new troubles with the authorities on political questions arose, and the society had to quit the college, and meet in the city. With the disasters of 1798 it disappeared altogether. In the memoir of Richard Sheil, he speaks of a College Historical Society in which Magee and North were his competitors, but there are no records of it. In 1829-1830, when the Catholic contest and the Reform movement kindled public spirit anew, there was a new societj^ meeting outside the college, in which Isaac Butt and Torrens McCullagh were leaders, and Joseph Lefanu, William Keogh, Wilson Gray, James O'Hea, Thomas Wallis, Thomas MacNevin and Joseph Pollock, son of a notable anti-Union pamphleteer, and John Lalor, afterwards known in London as a writer in the Morning Chronicle and author of "Money and Morals," were distinguished members. In the beginning of 1839 a new society was projected, and it was understood that the provost and fellows were disposed to sanction its establishment on the original basis. But the most thoughtful of the students were of opinion that it would be more useful and independent as an extern society. The sanction of the authorities would involve them in a certain responsibility which might be exercised so jealously as to create ill will between the teachers and the pupils. Contemporary politics could not be effectually excluded by any statute, for to debate the past in Irish history was to debate the cause of the present. And a debating society without freedom of speech would be not only useless but injurious. At a meeting at Francis Kearney's chambers, 27 College, on the 29th of March, 1839, a new College Historical Society was founded. The original members consisted of ten Conservatives and ten Liberals ; there was as yet no talk of Nationalists. The third name in the list was that of Thomas Davis, the preceding ones being John Thomas Ball, since Lord Chancellor of Ireland, ; and Joseph Lefanu, afterwards distinguished as a popular novelist.*

Addresses were delivered at the opening of the society's session in November, and at the close in June. And Davis who became auditor, equivalent to president, delivered the closing address in June, 1840.

It was in the Historical Society that he made the acquaintance of a man to whom, in later years, he was accustomed to open his whole mind and heart. Daniel Owen Maddyn was then a law student pre-

* "You have been appointed, by mutual nomination of Conservatives and Liberals, an original member of the new Historical Society. The preliminary meeting will be held to-morrow (Thursday), at Mr. Kearney's chambers, 27 Cullege, at three o'clock p.m. precisely " (Wallis to Davis, March 13, 1839).

paring for a call to the Bar, but more disposed to philosophical and literary studies, into which he got finally drawn as the business of his life. He knew Davis wdiiie he was still undervalued by his associates, and understood him better than the majority. Forty years ago, when I first meditated writing this memoir, Maddyn sent me as a contribution to it his recollections of Davis at this period, and his impression of the young men among whom he lived. And since his death, his kinsman, Denny Lane, has given me the correspondence which, during the entire period of his public career, Davis maintained with Maddyn.*

" I first knew Thomas Davis in the early part of the year 1838. I had been just then made a member of the King's Inns, and Davis had been a short time previously called to the Bar.

"Though not entitled to be admitted a member of the College Historical Society, by the kindness of Messrs. Lawsonf (then auditor) and Hodder I was enrolled amongst its members, a circumstance which led to my acquaintance with Davis. He had, a short time previously, published a hasty, but in many respects an ably written pamphlet on 'The Eeform of the House of Lords' — a subject which, in those palmy days of Whig-Kadicali.sm, attracted much attention. I remember buying the pamphlet in Westmorland Street, and feeling curious to know who the author was. I was told by one of the collegians that it was by Davis. ' And who was Davis ? ' ' Oh ! he was an odd sort of man, of immense reading.' I heard him alluded to in the Historical Society, and I found that he had a confirmed reputation for most extensive and varied reading. One evening, seated by the side of Thomas MacNevin, I saw a short thickset young man, wrapped in a fearnought coat, shamble into the room, and speak in a tone between jest and earnest to several of the members. ' That,' said Mac-

* Author of the " Age of Pitt and Fox," " Leaders of Opinion," and some other notable books. He spelt his name originally Madden, but in later years adopted the other form in his books and correspondence. The paper is dated Feimoy, March 3, 1847, and has for title " Recollections of Thomas Davis, by his frk-nd, Daniel Owen Madden," and for mottoes "Haecmiminisse juvalut," " Of him you know his merits such, I cannot say — you hear — too much" (Elegy on Sidney).

t The late Judge Lawsou.

1G MEMOIR OF THOMAS DAVIS. [1831-

Nevin, 'is Davis.' 'What! was it he wrote the pamphlet on Peerage Reform ? ' ' Ay, yonder you behold the cataract that is to sweep away the House of Lords.' There was something about Davis which I liked at first sight. There was a frank honesty about his face, and I liked his large well-opened eyes.

"The Historical Society was at that time tolerably well sustained. It had undergone so many changes since its foundation, that it had been a different kind of institution at various periods. In 1838 it used to assemble at Eadley's Hotel, in a large room upstairs. A temporary bar was placed across the room, inside of which were the members, who used to muster to the number of thirty or thereabouts, and have an audience of visitors double that number. The only members that had obtained decided reputation as good ready speakers and effective debaters were Messrs. Butt and James O'Hea, the former of whom had ceased to attend the society at this period. Amongst other prominent speakers in those .lavs were Messrs. Torrens McCullagh,* Joseph Pollock, f James Anthony Lawson ; } John Thomas Ball, Thomas Wallis,|| William Keogh, AV. Conway Dobbs, the Messrs. Roberts, F.T.C.D., Jellett, now P.T.C.D., and various other members of the University. The style of speaking was vicious in the extreme, showy, declamatory, and vehement. The arts of elocution were little studied. Fluency and vehemence were the objects aimed at. To astound, not to persuade, the audience, was the aim of nine-tenths of the speakers. It was necessarily, therefore, a bad school of eloquence, and was suited to produce only platform speakers. §