This Day in Irish History (Death of Oliver Goldsmith, ‘Sublime, Vivid, Versatile’ Writer)

 Apr. 4, 1774— Even friends of Oliver Goldsmith sometimes despaired of his follies, and on his deathbed—after the former medical student took a “fever powder” that only worsened his condition—he was asked by his attending physician whether his mind was at ease.

“No, it is not,” he answered simply.

Hopelessly improvident, despite churning out a near-endless stream of poems, plays, essays, and travel pieces, Goldsmith nevertheless won the affection and admiration of an influential London circle of writers, artists, and actors. In no small measure, the efforts of this grief-stricken group ensured that his best writing would survive amid all the hack journalism that want obliged him to pour out.

I first became aware of Goldsmith in the mid-1970s when watching a PBS broadcast of his rollicking farce She Stoops to Conquer, starting Juliet Mills, Tom Courtenay, Ralph Richardson, and Brian Cox.

That comedy, which made Goldsmith the toast of the London theater scene when it premiered the year before the playwright’s death, was, legend has it, the result of an incident in his own life that gave his friends no end of laughter: he was hoodwinked into believing that a private country home was a local inn, and did not discover the mistake until after he had ordered the head of the household about.

Gullibility may have been the least of his faults. “Eager to shine in company,” summarized New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson in 1960, “he made large, sweeping assertions that had no basis in fact and left other people dazed. In an age that took conversation seriously, he was a notorious rattlebrain.”

Taking careful notes of all of this was James Boswell, who, in his famous biography of Goldsmith’s friend Samuel Johnson, offered this unforgettable mini-portrait:

“His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman. Those who were in any way distinguished, excited envy in him to so ridiculous an excess, that the instances of it are hardly credible. When accompanying two beautiful young ladies with their mother on a tour in France, he was seriously angry that more attention was paid to them than to him; and once at the exhibition of the Fantoccini in London, when those who sat next him observed with what dexterity a puppet was made to toss a pike, he could not bear that it should have such praise, and exclaimed with some warmth, ‘Pshaw! I can do it better myself.’”

That improvidence I alluded to earlier? Much of it derived from Goldsmith’s drinking and gambling—a situation only worsened by his propensity to claim sums for his work that did not match his boasts.

The son of an Anglo-Irish rural Protestant clergyman, Goldsmith may well have felt the need to promote himself in an urban environment like London that was only beginning to warm to Irish transplants, and especially among accomplished friends like Johnson, actor David Kean, and painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Indifferent about his medical studies while attending Trinity in Dublin, he shortly began to cast aside any notions of maintaining his own practice.

In addition to She Stoops to Conquer, Goldsmith’s other most heavily read works are the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and the melancholic poem “The Deserted Village” (1770), which anticipated the Romantic Movement in its tribute to the pastoral mode—or, in this case, a pastoral setting destroyed by the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and by legislation enclosing fields that ended up pushing peasants into cities for survival. 

As I demonstrated in this blog post from last year, he also assailed the "man  of wealth and pride" just as the Industrial Revolution began in earnest in England.

But, as I discovered in researching this, Goldsmith was an accomplished essayist. Although Boswell saw signs of him having “studiously copied the manner of Johnson, though, indeed, upon a smaller scale,” he strove for a more casual writing style than the great man of letters. His notable essays include “A City Night-Piece” and “An Essay on the Theatre.”

In his preface to the 12-volume General History of the World From the Creation to the Present Time (1764), Goldsmith advocated for historians to write as clearly as possible:

“A plan of general history, rendered too extensive, deters us from a study that is, perhaps, of all others, the most useful, by rendering it too laborious; and instead of alluring our curiosity, excites our despair.”

After Goldsmith’s death, Samuel Johnson and some friends received permission to honor him in Westminster Abbey. Johnson’s verses (translated from Latin to English) pay tribute to his friend in this way:

“Of all the passions,
Whether smiles were to be moved or tears,
A powerful yet gentle master;
In genius, sublime, vivid, versatile,
In style, elevated, clear, elegant—
The love of companions,
The fidelity of friends,
And the veneration of readers,
Have by this monument honored the memory.”

This Day in Irish History (Republic of Ireland Act Signed)

Dec. 21, 1948—Twenty-seven years after guerrilla leader Michael Collins signed a treaty with Great Britain that brought Ireland closer to self-government but stopped short of independence, the head of the Irish Free State, President Seán O'Kelly, took the last step by signing into law a bill formally declaring a republic.

Longtime supporters of Irish independence declared the Republic of Ireland Bill had finally removed the last institutional barriers that Great Britain had insisted on in the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

But, as with so many events involving the cause, the implicit promise of the 1840s patriot song “A Nation Once Again”—i.e., one not only free, but fully united with all 32 counties—remained unfulfilled.

In fact, when the diplomatic moves and countermoves of Ireland and Britain concluded several months into 1949, it only solidified the partition between the Catholic-dominated 26 counties in the south and the six Protestant ones in Northern Ireland: what one mordant wit termed, when anti-Treaty forces lay down their arms at the end of the Irish Civil War, “three-quarters of a nation once again.”

This final push towards independence was not the work of Eamon de Valera, the figure who dominated the nation’s politics for four decades, but rather John Costello—who, despite wielding power over two terms in the Forties and Fifties, was correctly labeled “The Forgotten Taoiseach” [Gaelic for “Chief” or “Leader”] by John Bruton, who held that post himself some five decades later.

Why did Costello take this last step, particularly when de Valera had not done so when he had the chance?

Already, “Dev” had cleared so much diplomatic space through his wranglings and faceoffs with Britain.

Most notably, he had used the abdication crisis surrounding King Edward VIII to push through Ireland’s legislative body, the Dáil Eireann, the External Relations Act of 1936, which eliminated the Crown’s role in Irish domestic affairs while retaining its influence in external affairs, including as part of the British Commonwealth.

At the time of the act’s enactment, Costello had already expressed reservations about some of its provisions. (Not without justification: It was a typical study in ambiguity by de Valera.) A decade later, politicians across the political spectrum were perceiving even more issues with adhering to it.

In his address to the Dail on the Republic of Ireland Bill in early December 1948, Costello alluded to the continuing restiveness on the part of old IRA men who had never reconciled themselves either to the Anglo-Irish Treaty or to remaining restrictions on the nation’s self-determination, noting that the new legislation would be in “the interests of peace, order and the end of bitterness between Irishmen.”

And, in a phrase that would echo even louder when used more than 40 years later by Ulster nationalist leader Gerry Adams in calling for IRA disarmament, he hoped to “take the guns out of Irish politics.”

Yet a further motive lurked beneath the surface for Costello. 

De Valera and his Fianna Fail party had reaped political capital by pushing back against the limits set by Britain. As leader of the rival Fine Gael party that formed part of Ireland’s first coalition government, Costello now saw the movement toward a republic as a political opportunity.

Or, as J.J. Lee put the matter in his magisterial history, Ireland, 1912-1985: Politics and Society, Costello “stole Fianna Fail’ s Sunday suit of constitutional clothes. Who were the real republicans now?”

Whether expressed or not, Fine Gael’s rationale for moving ahead was rational. What the media, political insiders, and many ordinary citizens could not understand was why Costello didn’t undertake this sea change in Irish politics while on Irish soil, but instead did so while on a foreign trip originally expected to be inconsequential.

Several explanations have been offered—one easily dismissible, the rest not mutually exclusive. But all of them hark back to the phrase made famous in the 1999 film South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut: i.e., “Blame Canada.”

That other country emerging from British imperial rule had played host to Costello in late summer 1948. One rumor of the time, almost certainly an urban legend, had it that, while drunk, Costello had blurted out his plans to declare a republic.

Another theory has more credence, simply because Costello himself told others at the time and later that he had been “stung”: i.e., subjected to dissing of his country and himself as its representative.

According to Tristin Hopper in Canada’s National Post and Philip Currie’s 2020 history Canada and Ireland, Governor General Earl Alexander of Tunis possessed Ulster unionist roots. Not surprisingly given that background, at a dinner party he’d hosted, the Crown had been toasted but not Costello.

An even worse affront occurred at the party when Costello caught sight of a flower arrangement at Alexander’s table featuring “Roaring Meg,” a replica of a cannon used in defending Derry against Catholics in 1689--the ultimate red flag for Irish nationalists.

Nevertheless, Costello’s September 8 announcement in Canada of a planned change in Ireland’s status more likely resulted from the fact that the Taoiseach was confronting a sudden press leak while in a foreign country—and, in those pre-satellite days, not enough time to convene his Cabinet and assemble a careful response.

Events then took on a momentum of their own, with Costello deciding it was easiest to answer the question honestly at the Ottawa press conference and ram the required enabling legislation through the Dail.

But in reacting on the spot, Costello surprised and annoyed the British government, which had been prematurely celebrating more cordial relations with Ireland than had existed under de Valera.

It bided its time through the fall, even as the Taoiseach guided the legislation into unanimous approval by the Dail, with the republic officially coming into being in April of the following year, on the anniversary of the Easter Rebellion.

Then, in January 1949, the British sprang their own surprise: Northern premier Sir Basil Brook’s call for a general election to be held in Ulster in February. Five days after Brook’s announcement, Costello and his Cabinet decided to fund anti-partition candidates in the Ulster polling.

The decision proved counter-productive, driving Ulster Protestants to circle the wagons against what they saw as absorption by the republic. Ulster’s Unionist Party reaped the same lopsided majority it had achieved at the time of partition in 1921: 40 seats to 12.

The final indignity—and the crushing of any early hope that reunification would occur any time soon—came via British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who, to appease the Unionists, introduced the following provision into the Ireland Act in early May:

“It is hereby declared that Northern Ireland remains part of His Majesty's dominions and of the United Kingdom and it is hereby affirmed that in no event will Northern Ireland or any part thereof cease to be part of His Majesty's dominions and of the United Kingdom without the consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland.”

For the next 50 years, that provision only hardened unionist opposition to any concessions by the British government giving Ireland more of a voice in Ulster. 

As during so much of its recent history, the most fervent believers in a free, self-governing 32-county Ireland had to settle for a half-measure. However overstated, Lee’s scathing assessment of the process is, given the circumstances and outcome, entirely understandable:

“Whatever the merits of proclaiming a republic at that stage, the whole performance of the government, from Costello's Ottawa announcement to the inaugural Easter Sunday parade, seems to have been a shambles from start to finish, perhaps the most inept diplomatic exhibition in the history of the state.”

This Day in Irish History (Downing Street Declaration Offers ‘Framework’ for Ulster Peace Process)

Dec. 15, 1993—The leaders of Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland advanced the fraught peace process in Northern Ireland by signing the Downing Street Declaration, a joint statement of intentions that capped a year when a change in policy on both sides of the Atlantic attempted to dissolve decades of mistrust and violence in the troubled province.

In this “charter for peace and reconciliation," the UK government forswore any "selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland."

At the same time, Ireland agreed that any settlement needed to "respect the democratic dignity and the civil rights and religious liberties of both communities"—not just Catholics who had been pressing for issues like justice, economic gains, and better housing since “The Troubles” broke out in 1969, but also Protestants who feared any agreement that would leave them at a disadvantage.

Above all, both governments pledged to abide by the wish of the majority in any future agreement.

At the time, that was regarded as a concession to the Protestants who had held sway in the province since the 1920s, when a commission to determine the boundary between Ulster and the more republican-dominated region to the south dissolved. Their unsettled work resulted in a de facto gerrymandered Northern Ireland that favored Unionists.

At the time of this partition, Protestants had enjoyed a nearly 2-1 advantage in population over Catholics, based on the 1911 census, and they had retained that edge for decades. But by 1992, higher birth rates for Catholics had left them not far behind Protestants: 42.8 percent versus 38.4 percent.

Now, according to the 2021 census, there are more Catholics than Protestants living in Northern Ireland: 42.3 percent versus 30.5 percent. (A growing 8.2 percent identify as non-Christian religious.) This was a boon welcomed by advocates of Ulster’s unification with Ireland—and a nightmare scenario for those preferring continued association with the United Kingdom.

Although these demographic trends were gathering steam in the 1990s, leaders in Britain, Ireland—and now, the United States—were primarily concerned in the Downing Street negotiations with ending nearly a quarter century of violence between the nationalist Irish Republican Army (IRA) and loyalist paramilitaries that was increasingly exhausting all sides.

On the surface, little seemed to be happening to end the stalemate. But much was happening outside public view, starting with the development of a friendly dialogue over the prior two years between British Prime Minister John Major (left in the photo) and Ireland’s Taoiseach (“Chief” or “Leader”), Albert Reynolds (right).

Neither leader possessed an especially strong hold over either their party or the wider electorate. But both believed, as Major told the House of Commons in his Dec.15 address announcing the agreement, that “we had to make it a personal priority both to seek a permanent end to violence and to establish the basis for a comprehensive and lasting political settlement.”

What they produced was “a framework for peace,” a carefully chosen phrase meant to convey mutual understanding—and a set of principles to guide future diplomacy.

All the same, getting the two governments to agree even on this much would have been well-nigh impossible for the prior 25 years. Even events in the last year before the agreement could have upended everything:

*Whatever warm feelings existing between Major and Reynolds were not replicated between the British leader and Bill Clinton. The Prime Minister had been deeply embarrassed when news leaked in the 1992 campaign that the Home Office had investigated whether as an Oxford student, Clinton had applied for UK citizenship as a means of avoiding military service during the Vietnam War.

*Major could barely command a majority in the House of Commons—and it could all come apart if Ulster’s Unionist MPs thought he was making too many concessions to the nationalists.

*Despite continued denials that it would not deal with the IRA unless it gave up its campaign to drive the British out of Ulster, Major’s government had been forced to admit, in late November 1993, that it had been maintaining back-channel talks with the organization for many years.

*October 1993 was marked by the largest loss of life (27 dead) in Northern Ireland in a single month since 1976, including, most notoriously, nine civilians, all Protestant, and one IRA bomber killed in a bombing on Shankill Road, aimed on faulty intelligence at the leadership of the loyalist paramilitary force, the Ulster Defence Association.

Other factors contributed to the Good Friday Agreement concluded in 1998, including talks between Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, and John Hume, the leader of the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party; Irish-American politicians and lawyers who pushed for justice and peace in Ulster; and more active American facilitation of talks among the parties through President Clinton.

But the Downing Street Declaration created an avenue for paramilitary forces to participate in the political process, and momentum for the IRA to declare its first ceasefire nine months later.

(In light of one massive change in the UK in the last decade, I urge you to read Darren Litter's March 2021 blog post on the role of the European Council in paving the way for the Downing Street Declaration. Given the UK and Irish governments' "sensitivity to leaks and failure to reconcile positions," he argues, two summits held by the council in the fall of 1993 enabled Major and Reynolds to discuss obstacles to compromise "away from the lights" of media gathered in Belfast.)

This Day in Irish History (Brian Moore, Novelist-Screenwriter of Displacement, Born)

Aug. 25, 1921— Brian Moore, whose alienation from his ancestral faith and homeland took the form of a move across the Atlantic and a prodigious stream of novels, short stories and screenplays, was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Like literary hero James Joyce, Moore found history “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Though his father was senior surgeon at the Mater Hospital in Ulster, he was conscious of being a member of a beleaguered minority, the nationalist Catholic community of Northern Ireland. He felt doubly alienated when, at age 10, rebelling against what he saw as stifling church authority, he rejected his faith.

After serving in WWII with British Ministry of War Transport and early in the postwar period with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association, Moore emigrated to Canada, where he worked as a journalist for four years. Along the way, he became a Canadian citizen—a status he did not relinquish even after residing in his last three decades in California.

When he turned his hand to fiction in his mid-thirties, Moore returned, if only in his imagination, to Ireland and what he saw as the repressive conformity and diminished prospects experienced in that  community. His first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1956)—adapted three decades later into a film starring Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins—was inspired by an elderly spinster known to Moore’s family.

It was not a surprise, given the censorship regulations of the time, that the novel was banned for indecency in the Republic. Closer to home, Moore’s devout mother not only griped about its “sex parts,” but cut out any of these before she mailed a copy of the book to one of her daughters, a nun.

From early on, filmmakers sensed the dramatic possibilities of Moore’s novels, with four of them adapted for the screen (most notably, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, starring Robert Shaw). But in 1965, he had a more signature opportunity to make his mark in cinema when Alfred Hitchcock, intrigued by The Feast of Lupercal, contacted him about working on an original screenplay. 

At the time, the reputation of Hitchcock still had magic, as his TV show had only recently left the air and the film Marnie regarded as an interesting failure.

What most people did not realize at the time was that making the latter movie had turned out unexpectedly traumatic for Hitchcock, as he lost interest in making it halfway through when actress Tippi Hedren spurned his advances. The studio that had previously allowed him wide latitude in shooting, Universal, was now making demands on the nature of his next material, including a more pop-oriented musical soundtrack and top box-office stars (Paul Newman and Julie Andrews) not necessarily to his liking.

Under these circumstances, Hitchcock felt more significant pressure than he had in years. According to a 2009 post on the blog Shadowplay, Moore had not felt especially interested in collaborating with the “Master of Suspense” on the screenplay, but his lawyer convinced him that he could use the money.

The team turned out to be a bad match. Moore was dismayed by Hitchcock’s lack of interest in character and the director was displeased by Moore's screenplay Moore. When Hitchcock tried to give screenwriting credits to the two men he turned to for a rewrite, Ted Willis and Keith Waterhouse, Moore took the matter for arbitration to the Writers Guild, which awarded sole credit to the novelist. Because the window of time for using Andrews was limited, Hitchcock had to start filming before he was satisfied with the script, a significant departure from his practice on other films, according to Charlotte Chandler's biography of the director, It's Only a Movie.

The eventual movie, Torn Curtain, a Cold War thriller, turned out to be a mess for everyone concerned. Moore’s comments to the press led him to be disinvited from the set and premiere, and Hitchcock saw his commercial and critical reputation take another hit. About the only benefit, for Moore, was that he did, as his lawyer had told him, now had enough money, this time to move to Malibu, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Moore’s later experiences writing for film and TV, while not as high-profile, were more pleasant, including The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and Black Robe, in which he also acted as executive producer for this adaptation of his historical novel about a young French Jesuit missionary in New France. 

Particularly prescient was his 1973 TV adaptation of his novel Catholics, with a plot—a representative from the Vatican is dispatched to deal with a conservative priest whose intransigence threatens to open up a schism within the Church—that feels like an anticipation of current tensions under Pope Francis.

Altogether, Moore would write 20 novels before he died in Malibu in 1999 from pulmonary fibrosis. Since his death, his books have passed in and out of print here in the U.S., though they have been accorded a better reception in the U.K. His reputation may well endure, however, because he acquired a reputation of a “writer’s writer,” much esteemed by the likes of Graham Greene, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Flanagan, and John Gregory Dunne.

Dunne’s wife and screenwriting partner, Joan Didion, was especially generous in assessing their longtime friend, telling the Los Angeles Times' Tim Rutten:

“Brian truly honored fiction, by his reading of it, by his respect for it, and most of all by the wit and intelligence and power he brought to the writing of it. He understood the craft, the discipline, and he understood equally the discipline required to practice it. He had no patience for the postures and quasi-celebrity of the literary life. Writing was just what he did most days of his life, and he never stopped being thrilled by it, taking risks with it, taking it to the far edge of where he knew it could go.”

This Day in Irish History (Archbishop Plunkett Arrested on Trumped-Up Treason Charges)

December 6, 1679—Six years of living on the run, trying to minister to his flock while dodging English government persecution, came to an end for Oliver Plunket(t), Archbishop of Armagh, when he was arrested and cast into Dublin Castle.

Two trials, 19 months, and countless hours of perjured testimony later, he was put to death in London in an execution not only unique for being the last involving Catholic martyrdom in England but for reaching levels of barbarism not approached since then.

Plunkett was just one of 35 Roman Catholic victims caught up in the “Popish Plot” rocking the British Isles at this time. I touched briefly on his fate, in the larger context of this shameful episode in British jurisprudence, in a post last year, but I thought that a reminder of how he lived and how he dealt with his responsibilities might be in order, now that high Church officials in Ireland and the United States have so dishonored their positions.

Last week’s Irish government report concerning the decades-long coverup of priestly sexual abuse represented a stinging indictment of a hierarchy that not only became accustomed to deference on matters of dogma but also used to lax law enforcement. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat noted, it was also a reminder of a similar state of affairs in Boston, the epicenter of the church-abuse scandal in the United States.

Douthat pointed to the heavy Irish-American base in the Boston archdiocese, its clergy and its hierarchy, and in particular to a far more puritanical strain of Catholicism that obtained in Ireland and Boston than in, for instance, Mediterranean and Latin American cultures.

To be sure, British government intolerance pushed the Irish clergy, by necessity, into accepting help from the conservative Jansenist element in France.

But the Irish and Irish-American culture of deference, I think, took rote in more than just foreign soil. The seeds of this culture might have come from outside the Emerald Isle, but it was watered by her tales of a hierarchy that, no matter how ultraconservative they might appear to us, appeared far different to Irish Catholics of their time.

Think of it in this way: like his clerical counterparts hundreds of years later on his side of the Atlantic and ours, Archbishop Plunkett did not hesitate for one second to exert authority—to crack the whip, if you will. But he was never perceived as lording it over his flock. In the most crucial sense, he not only shared their privations but bore the full brunt of the British attempt to extirpate Roman Catholicism from Ireland, root and branch.

As a follower of the ultramontane movement among Catholic clergy—i.e., the belief that absolute power should be invested in the pope—Plunkett would, at first glance, be an ideal target for those who locate the current troubles in the authoritarian strain in the Church. I don’t think the case can be made with ease, however.

It’s not only because imposing the mindset of today on a culture and events centuries old is problematic. Two other matters loom large in any kind of assessment of his beliefs and administrative style:

1) Upon assuming his position, Plunkett encountered an environment verging on chaos. In the wake of the Cromwellian persecution of the 1640s and 1650s, the Irish Church was a morally lax, disenfranchised, dispirited wreck. Not only was the property-owning class in Ireland eviscerated, but the priesthood had increasingly fallen prey to alcoholism and concubinage. The closure of seminaries under the Cromwellian Protectorate meant that the remaining clergy had a weaker ability to understand and preach the faith. After taking over in 1669, Plunkett set about instituting the reforms of the Council of Trent, meant to stamp out abuses that had opened the way toward Protestantism. Viewed in this light, calling on greater self-discipline from priests might have made for greater institutional control, but it also had the immediate effect of fostering a purer, more enlightened priesthood.

2) Plunkett became the most visible avatar for the persecution once again sweeping across Ireland. The window of tolerance for Catholics following Oliver Cromwell’s death and the ascension of King Charles II didn’t last long. By 1673, Plunkett’s refusal, along with the rest of the hierarchy, to register for possible deportation forced him into hiding—to preach out in the open fields, to sleep out in the cold, never to rest long in any one place for fear of arrest. The people to whom he preached knew that his danger was as great as—and probably exceeded—theirs.

From his arrest to execution, Plunkett’s case was a flagrant abuse of justice and signal cruelty. When the British couldn’t obtain a guilty verdict of treason from an Irish jury because they rightly mistrusted the motives of informers, the first Earl of Shaftesbury instigated a change of venue to England, where such suspicion was not so widespread.

(Incidentally, Shaftesbury, an opportunist of the most shameless kind, was described by historian Thomas Babington Macaulay—hardly sympathetic to Catholics—as follows:

“It is certain that, just before the Restoration, he declared to the regicides that he would be damned, body and soul, rather than suffer a hair of their heads to be hurt, and that, just after the Restoration, he was one of the judges that sentenced them to death. It is certain that he was a principal member of the most profligate administration ever known, and that he was afterwards a principal member of the most profligate Opposition ever known. It is certain that, in power, he did not scruple to violate the great fundamental principles of the Constitution, in order to exalt the Catholics, and that, out of power, he did not scruple to violate every principle of justice, in order to destroy them.”)

In a matter of property rights, a Plunkett decision in favor of Dominicans over Franciscans rankled many in the latter order, and some of them committed perjury against him at his London trial. He was not allowed enough time to transport rebuttal witnesses from Ireland. His conviction and death then became a foregone conclusion.

Just before his execution in July 1681, Plunkett gave a last, moving address to bystanders, many of whom realized by now that a grave miscarriage of justice had taken place. But the archbishop had more trials to endure—an agony that will be familiar to viewers of Braveheart:

* He was strung up by rope, but the hanging stopped just short of death;

* Taken down and revived, he was dragged to the execution table, where his body was stretched taut, then disemboweled;

* Still barely alive, Plunkett was only now decapitated.

* Each of his limbs was then cut off.

Archbishop Plunkett was canonized in 1975. An enemy of corruption within the Church, he would have been appalled by its maintenance today in Ireland; an archbishop who disdained ease and safety, he would loathed the comfortable archbishop's mansion enjoyed in Boston by William Cardinal O’Connell and his successors for decades. By necessity he wielded the authority of his office, but he could not leave his people while they suffered, and he paid with his life for it.

Plunkett's legacy was ruined by men who, three centuries after he lived and died, were more intent on maintaining institutional prerogatives than on taking the gospel to the despised, disenfranchised and dispossessed as he did.

This Day in Irish History (Emmet’s Rebellion)

July 23, 1803—Five years after the United Irishmen failed to rid the Emerald Isle of British influence, one of the uprising’s surviving diehards, Robert Emmet, spearheaded another rising that, like others before and after, led to disaster and death.

But, like a Celtic version of Revolutionary War spy Nathan Hale, Emmet delivered a final statement before the court pronouncing sentence on him that reverberated with patriots long after the bungled sequence of events leading to his demise was largely forgotten.

There’s a good reason why an Irish name is attached to the proposition that whatever can go wrong will go wrong, because for years, Murphy’s Law determined the outcome of all Irish rebellions. So it was in 1803, when Emmet decided to strike a blow against the 1801 Act of Union between Britain and Ireland that had been passed in the wake of the “Year of the French” to bring the island more tightly under British rule.

Seizing Dublin Castle, the seat of British government, he believed, would set off the revolutionary spark that would destroy British rule. It was all set: post-’98 outlaws hiding in the Wicklow Hills had been alerted to expect a signal; the proclamation of the new Irish Republic had been printed.

Then everything fell apart, Murphy’s Law-style:

* One week before the event, an accidental explosion at Emmet’s arms depot set off British alarm bells about the chance for another revolt.

* As soon as the proclamation of the republic came off the presses, British authorities, knowing what to expect, seized it.

* With word of the insurrection largely squelched, Emmet ended up with only 90 men—nowhere near the 2,000 he judged he needed—to capture Dublin Castle.

* As Emmet set out to take the castle anyway, his force, armed only with pikes and blunderbusses—as close to a “pitchfork brigade” as you’re ever going to get, because their hopes of seizing firearms from captured stores rapidly evaporated—became distracted by a coach passing through the streets containing Lord Kilwarden, the Chief Justice. Instead of concentrating on the task at hand, they set upon the judge with their makeshift weapons, leaving him dead in the street and Emmet disgusted by their deterioration into French Revolution-style street rioters.

* The appalled Emmet went into hiding in nearby mountains, but was captured a month later. On September 20, he was hanged, drawn and quartered—the last person to receive this sentence from a British court.

Some historical figures, like George Washington, are less famous for their rhetoric than for their actions. But words can matter, in some instances, just as much. When Emmet was marched before the court to await final judgment, he delivered an address that would be quoted generations hence by Irish revolutionaries, most notably by Patrick Pearse, who revived interest in Emmet in the years leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916.

Over the years, Emmet’s words were quoted ad infinitum to bolster revolutionaries’ sagging spirits. They proved more than equal to the task: “Let no man write my epitaph… When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then let my epitaph be written.”

The name “Emmet” had an equally intriguing afterlife in the United States. Thomas Emmet, Robert’s brother, fled Ireland for the United States with his family. On the boat over, he became acquainted with the American inventor-artist Robert Fulton, who, noticing the artistic talent of Thomas’ daughter Elizabeth, gave her some shipboard pointers. While Thomas Emmet prospered so well in his subsequent legal practice that he became Attorney-General of New York in 1812-13, Elizabeth made use of her burgeoning artistic skills to become a noted portrait pointer, a talent passed down in one form or another to the succeeding four generations of female artists.

If Robert Emmet proved a man of mighty words, so did another descendant: the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright-biographer Robert Emmet Sherwood.

This Day in Irish History (Dublin’s Easter Rising)

April 24, 1916—A mistake-filled operation even before it started, Ireland’s Easter Rising should have ended the same way that the Fenian uprising and other rebellions had in the past—with the cause of independence no further advanced than before.

Instead, the British government, in a war against a German foe it regularly accused of ruthlessness, resorted to such a brutal crackdown that Irish opinion turned decisively from Home Rule to a separate republic.

In the years following Patrick Pearse’s Easter Monday declaration of the republic in front of an astonished, even amused, noontime crowd at Dublin’s General Post Office, patriotic myth-making obscured how much went wrong before and during the uprising by the ragtag band of rebels.

The long litany of errors can be fairly quickly gleaned from reading Tim Pat Coogan’s Eamon De Valera: The Man Who Was Ireland, Terry Golway’s For the Cause of Liberty: A Thousand Years of Ireland’s Heroes, and David Fitzpatrick’s essay in A Military History of Ireland, edited by Thomas Barrett and Keith Jeffrey:* Sir Roger Casement, on a mission to secure arms from Germany, was captured when he stepped ashore from a submarine, just days before the planned revolt.
* The captain of the German boat carrying the arms shipment, the Aud, ordered the boat scuttled after it was intercepted by the British Navy, depriving the rebels of crucial arms and ammunition.
* Austin Stack, who was supposed to handle the arms landing, rushed to the barracks where Casement was supposed to be—only to get arrested himself.
* Eoin MacNeill, commanding the Irish Volunteers, issued an order calling off all maneuvers after learning of Casement’s capture—assuring that, when Patrick Pearse and other rebel leaders decided to go ahead with their plans anyway, they would only have 130 men to guard the approaches to the city rather than the 500 originally envisioned and needed. His countermanding of the uprising order also meant that the rebellion would be confined to central Dublin rather than spread across the country.
* British intelligence had intercepted telegrams between the rebels’ American fundraiser, John Devoy, the German Embassy in Washington, and Berlin, so they knew something was afoot.
* James Connolly, leading the Irish Citizen Army, was so hellbent on staging his own rebellion while the British remained at war with Germany that Pearse and his compatriots in the Irish Republican Brotherhood went along with the idea, figuring that the British would crack down on them anyway before their operations began.
* Connolly, a Marxist, argued—insanely—that Britain’s commitment to capitalism was so total that it would never fire on property in Dublin.
* The chief strategist for the rebels, poet Joseph Mary Plunkett, was fascinated by military history, but had no practical experience whatsoever with tactics or strategy. Moreover, he was in no physical shape to lead anything at the time, having undergone an operation for glandular tuberculosis only days before the uprising. In fact, the only rebel leader with any military experience at all was Connolly.
* The rebels never had a plan for taking Dublin Castle, Britain’s nerve center in the city.
* By establishing headquarters in the General Post Office, the rebels all but guaranteed collateral damage to surrounding civilians, shops, and housing—and a furious reaction by the populace when it became involved in the crossfire.
* Pearse led the rebellion not just with a country divided over independence, but at that point willing to wait for Home Rule.

The combined republican force of a little less than 1,800 stood no chance against the British 20,000. When the smoke cleared and Pearse surrendered five days later, 64 rebels had been killed in action versus 103 killed and 357 wounded for the British. Worse off were the civilians caught in the middle, as 300 ended up dead, hundreds more wounded, and central Dublin a wreck. (The photo accompanying this blog post shows the devastation at the GPO, the rebels’ headquarters.)

Predictably given the carnage that resulted, the civilians initially turned on the rebels who had instigated the rebellion. As the captured rebels were marched off to jail, onlookers jeered “Shoot the traitors!” and “Mad dogs!”

And then the British, ignoring the warning by Irish Parliamentary Party Leader John Redmond that mass executions “might be disastrous in the extreme,” proceeded to do just that. After martial law was declared, more than a hundred rebels were condemned to death.

Executions began on May 3 and included two or three at a time, usually in grisly or arbitrary fashion. Willy Pearse’s principal offense was that he was Patrick’s brother. The TB-ridden Plunkett was married only minutes before he died. Polio-lamed Sean MacDiarmida was given no reprieve. Connolly, his leg shattered in the fighting, had to be carried on a stretcher and propped up in a chair to face the firing squad.

By this time, nine days later, Irish public opinion had swerved so decisively against the British that Prime Minister Herbert Asquith ordered an end to the executions. Not, however, before the occupying forces made two final mistakes. They decided only to imprison a former London clerk who had served as Plunkett’s aide-de-camp.

In another instance, they pondered the choice between executing Connolly and another prisoner. Sir John Maxwell, commander of British forces, asked Judge Evelyn Wylie about the latter, “Is he someone important?”

“No,” Wylie answered. “He is a schoolmaster who was taken at Boland’s Mill.”

Reprieves were granted to the former clerk and former schoolmaster, Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera. They became the Crown’s most implacable enemies in Ireland in the years ahead—and, in the end, tragically, their own as well.

This Day in Irish History (Death of St. Patrick, The Exile Who Became a Saint)

March 17, 461 (or 493)—St. Patrick, the dream-driven missionary who returned to the land where he had been enslaved as a teenager, died, by popular tradition, in mid-March, after having converted the inhabitants of Ireland. The exact year of his death, however, like much else about his life, remains shrouded in misty legend.

The patron saint of Ireland, of course, is credited with driving the snakes out of that country. (Too bad he didn’t finish the job and expel all the lawyers and politicians while he was at it – but, as the proverb goes, “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”) Other traditions about his life exist, too many to be enumerated, let alone commented on. I prefer what we do know about him, which is so remarkable in and of itself that it needs little elaboration from me (though, of course, it’s about to receive it).

As recounted by Thomas Cahill in How the Irish Saved Civilization (which I regard as a decidedly understated title), Patrick, in his Confessio (translated as “Declaration”), became “the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery.'' He was at least a millennium ahead of his time, criticizing publicly an age-old institution that even those proud American products of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, found difficult to do.

Why did Ireland (and, perhaps even more so, Irish America) embrace this saint so deeply? It might have something to do with his description of himself—“I am, then, first of all, countrified, an exile, evidently unlearned, one who is not able to see into the future.” He was one of Christ’s “poor in spirit,” and (though probably born in England or Scotland) the psychological ancestor of the millions driven out of their country by the Great Famine.

I have particular affection for one prayer associated with the missionary: “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”—and especially this passage.

I arise today
Through God's strength to pilot me:
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's way to lie before me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptations of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
Afar and anear,
Alone and in multitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson commemorated the “embattled farmer” that stood against an empire’s might at Concord. Today, when so many lift their Guinness or other libation of choice, I prefer to salute the “embattled farmers” from Counties Clare and Cork who were my ancestors—for withstanding that same empire by clutching to Patrick’s faith, ignoring the small insistent voice of self-interest, self-doubt, injustice, privation, death, and all the other “snares of devils.”

I hope that I have even one-tenth of their mettle—and that I never have occasion to exercise it.