The Fall of the House of Wilde (2 page)

At any rate, Thomas Wilde inherited his father's flair for social elevation, and he married into a family of distinguished roots, the Fynns. Thomas did not marry until he was thirty-six, owing perhaps to the modest livelihood he earned, or to the want of a bride who could satisfy his social ambitions. Either way, he found one in Emily Fynn, the daughter of landed gentry, who grew up on an estate of 2,000 acres that ran along the northern shoreline of Lough Corrib near Cong in County Mayo. For Thomas Wilde, the esteem of the Fynn family – it branched high into scholars (Surridges) and ambassadors (Ouseleys) – would have brought social prestige. That said, obstreperous blood ran in the Fynn family, in their ancestral link to the Gaelic clan of O'Flahertys, whose combat with the invading Normans in 1169 earned them the epithet ‘ferocious', and whose ruined castles still mark the Connemara landscape. These oxymoronic loyalties were passed down the line as a source of pride, signified in the choice of name for the youngest and last of the male brood, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, where identifying with Gaelic chieftains and poets meant scorning Anglo-Saxonism.

In 1798 Emily and Thomas Wilde had their first boy, whom they named Ralph. At a time when surviving childbirth was an achievement, Emily went on to produce four more children: John, born in 1807; Emily and Margaret, whose birth dates were not registered; and after nineteen years of marriage, when Thomas was fifty-five, a son, William, in March 1815. By that time they had installed themselves in Kilkeevin, near Castlerea in County Roscommon, convenient enough to Emily's family estate near Cong, where young William would spend much of his time. Ralph and John both became clergymen and over their lifetime held various posts in England and Ireland.

By his own account, William was raised with the local people for company. The 1820s and the 1830s, during which he grew to adulthood, were not a time to advertise your difference from the locals. Despite the introduction of Catholic emancipation in 1829, which removed many of the remaining restrictions on Roman Catholics, agitation continued, as the ‘land question' caused as much, if not more, protest. Since the reign of Elizabeth I, much of the land had been given to English and Scottish Protestant supporters of the monarch in an attempt to subdue Ireland and rid Britain of Roman Catholicism. Many landowners were absentees, renting their farms to tenants who had no security of tenure. If rent fell into arrears they could be, and were, evicted without compensation. They thus had no incentive to improve their management of the land. Indeed if their improvements made the land more productive, rents would be raised, penalising them for their efforts. The people voiced these grievances with a violence that cast a dark shadow on the region.

A handful of locals of various ages and origins became William's de facto allies during his childhood. He found a dependable friend in Paddy Welsh, who lived in a self-made snug house on the banks of the River Suck in Castlecoote, close to the Wilde home. Paddy Welsh took a great liking to ‘Master Willie', who he described as ‘mighty cute and disquisitive after ould stories and pishogues'. Paddy and his wife, Peggy, would ad-lib freely to entertain the young William, who could not hear tales of witches, ghosts, saints and fairies repeated often enough. Paddy was a figure living for the fun of it; he gave black humour a face and a demeanour. It was a time when the only ‘permitted amusements in Connaught were wakes and funerals'.
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Little wonder, then, that the populace often staged fake funerals to give themselves a chance to drink and carouse. The people had no faith in authority and Paddy spoke to the alienation that beset many of them. Looking back, William put Paddy's charm down to the fact that his old friend embodied the spirit of the age, which, from William's description, was an admixture of fright and irony, of consternation and impudence.

When William wrote his memoir in his late thirties, misleadingly entitled
Irish Popular Superstitions
(1852), he was mindful of the tales peddled by some English travellers in which the Irish peasant was depicted as a halfwit. In the divide between the Irish Protestants who romanticised the folk and those who sneered at them, William had sufficient exposure not to fall into either category. Rather, his memoir describes the sombre realities of a wretched, violent, bandit-ridden hinterland. ‘To Hell or Connaught' was a commonly expressed malediction and, William says, not without justification.
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William was only eight when Paddy died, but the passage of time did nothing to dispel the horror that followed his death. In the mayhem caused by a fall in agricultural prices after the Napoleonic wars, desperate labourers and tenants banded together to stir up rebellion among the local people. They were known as Ribbonmen on account of their colourful garb. They descended on local villages and towns, mutilated stock, attacked landlords and threatened indiscriminately. Violence came naturally to rural Ireland, where frustration born of injustice turned some men into beasts whose ruthless cruelty was only matched by that of the local magistrates, who meted out justice with a savagery more familiar to barbarians in animal skins than officials of the British Empire.

William describes one confrontation, which he says clouded his childhood. Ribbonmen descended on Paddy's snug, took his gun, and forced his son, Michael, to join their planned attack on the police barracks. The police pre-empted the attack and opened fire on the men scattered around the ruins of the old castle. Michael was killed. But death was not punishment enough for what the police understandably assumed was a Ribbonman. The local Connaught magistrates hung Michael's body in the market square as an example to Roscommoners, with the word Ribbonman affixed to a placard on his head. Determined to press home their warnings to the populace, the magistrates then paraded the dead Michael through the district now thronged with onlookers. Some twenty or thirty thousand silent and sullen witnesses lined the streets to watch Michael's body, made to sit erect in a cart with his arms extended and tied to pitchforks in a Christ-like pose. ‘Even neighbours,' William said, ‘scarcely exchanged a greeting' as ‘savage revenge brooded over the mass'. Michael's cart led a procession of horses and carts; tied to each was a Ribbonman stripped to the waist, ready to be flogged at each town through which the cavalcade passed. Military drums kept beat with the floggings in a public display honoured with the presence of ‘the Major', who from atop his ‘open chariot' ordered and directed this primitive ritual. By his side, as William put it, ‘lolled a large, unwieldy person, with bloated face and slavering lip – the ruler of Connaught . . . the great gauger-maker [
sic
] of the west – The Right Honourable. Let us drop the curtain. If this was not Connaught, it was Hell.'
⁴
So wrote William, whose disdain for the law lingered in his children. Having witnessed other such unrestrained exhibitions, William for ever after breathed an air bitter with gunpowder. The very sight of the military, ‘the Redcoats', as he called them, drew from him tart remarks.

Unlike other children of privilege, William was exposed from the first to life's crueller dispensations. Reared in a home where family and medical life merged, William was party to an ambient world of decrepitude. The one-eyed and the lame, the dying and the dead were familiar to William, who sometimes accompanied his father on medical rounds. Did he peer, awestruck, through the windows at treatment or surgery in progress? Even had his eyes stayed shut, his ears would have been open to the moans from the house or cabin. Death was common during the 1820s and 1830s, decades marked by plague, cyclical famine and casualties of sectarian and land strife. In addition, life expectancy was low, even among the aristocracy. Every birth brought a woman to a liminal state, poised between this world and the next. No matter the elaborate theoretical edifice Dr Thomas Wilde would have built, it often did not shield the woman from fatal disaster. Sudden death could whisk an Irishwoman before God for eternal punishment. Hell gaped, its agonies graphically illustrated on the walls of the parish church or recounted by storytellers in edifying detail.

All this was rich pasture for an imaginative boy. The feverish excitement which William in his twenties brought to archaeology can be better understood if we put ourselves in the mind of the young child roaming the west of Ireland, a land strewn with the ruins of racial and religious battles – a Gothic, Romantic playground. There was nourishment to be found all over the land where ancient cairns and stone circles stood saturated with legend and lore. As a child, William had an unfailing informant on ruins and relics in an elderly Catholic priest, known as ‘the Lord Abbot' of Cong, a Father Patrick Prendergast, who lived on land owned by his grandparents at Ballymagibbon. As members of the Order of St Augustine, the canons of Cong had been forced to flee their monastery, and survived thanks to the shelter afforded them by William's ancestors. Fr Pendergast was the last Abbot of Cong, as Rome decided not to appoint a successor.
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The ‘very fine, courteous, white-haired old man' opened William's mind to ancient Ireland for the best part of thirteen years. There were endless relics to show the proprietor's grandson, and endless yarns attached. There was the shrine of St Patrick's tooth, though the old piece of linen, known as the ‘King's Blood', impressed William more. The King's Blood got its name from having been soaked in the gore of the decapitated King Charles in 1649; how it made its way from Whitehall to Cong, William does not tell, though he does tell of its reputed talismanic power: touching it could keep evil at bay. But the abbot had other objects to entice William into his house. Standing in the cupboard of his sitting room was the oaken Cross of Cong, thirty inches high and nineteen wide, commissioned by the King of Ireland, Turlough Mór O'Connor, in the year 1123. William's aesthetic imagination was fired at the sight of this cross, washed in gold, enriched with intricate carvings of grotesque animals and edged with precious stones. The Cross of Cong now stands in the National Museum of Ireland, considered one of its most precious objects.
⁶

Hundreds would travel from the surrounding villages at Christmas and Easter to the Abbey to pay homage to relics, and to hear of their miraculous powers. The spirit of the age, as William's
Irish Popular Superstitions
makes clear, was a blend of magic and religion, of plague and violence.
⁷
The supernatural clung to religion as a corpus of parasitic belief and there was a pronounced magical cast to many of the rituals of popular piety that William witnessed at Ballymagibbon. Though the Church condemned superstition, it is not hard to see why credulous thinking prevailed. In pre-industrial Ireland most people worked on the land and were still illiterate; harvest and Catholic ritual shaped their year, and to keep misfortune away, one prayed in learnt words to high heaven and brought the same mechanical efficiency to sayings and signs to ward off evil.

Closely allied to religious sentiment and ritual expression, the supernatural lived on in Ireland longer than in more industrially advanced countries. It was a land where nature could swallow one in a bog concealed behind a field of flowers, or an outbreak of plague could add fuel to justified anxiety; it is little wonder, then, that terrified imaginations ran wild. Everything in William's childhood was writ larger than life. The devil was also shockingly near in rural Ireland: not metaphorical, but as real as your neighbour. One turned to God, the angels and the fairies to wrest control of the natural world. Praying and casting spells ran into each other, just as magic and science did in the days of the alchemists. Alternatively, home-brewed poteen could blank out existential terror.

Far from depicting his former neighbours as emptily credulous, William showed their world views as consistent and imaginative.

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Like William's, Jane Elgee's ancestors also came from Durham. Her paternal great-grandfather, Charles Elgee, was a bricklayer, who came to Dundalk, County Louth, in the 1730s. Elgee's business expanded enough to undertake the commission of Cumberland Castle. He was, however, less fortunate as a father; he and his wife Alice lost all but one of their eight children. The only surviving child of the marriage, John Elgee, Jane's grandfather, entered the Church as a curate in Wexford. There in 1782 he married a local woman, Jane Waddy. In 1785 she gave birth to their first son, also called Charles, Jane's father.

Reverend John and Jane Elgee raised seven children in the Wexford rectory, whose noble proportions attracted attention. Attention was not altogether welcome during the 1798 Rebellion, when old scores were being settled by Gaels, whose ancestors had lost their land to Protestant settlers. We know from Jane that insurgents seized John, but released him as soon as they recognised him as the rector who looked after the welfare of Catholics in the local prison. John was appointed Archdeacon of Wexford in 1804.

The reverend's son, Charles, left Wexford in 1807 to practise as a solicitor in Dublin. There he met Jane's mother, Sara Kingsbury, said to have been one of Dublin's most eligible young women. Sara had blue blood, her family belonging to the rich in-bred Protestant establishment, and inhabiting the distinguished Lisle House on Molesworth Street. Thomas Kingsbury, Sara's father, was vicar of Kildare and Commissioner of Bankruptcy. His father had been President of the Royal College of Physicians and a friend of writer Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin for over thirty years.

Sara's marriage to Charles Elgee was beset by financial difficulties. Charles proved more resolute in spending than accumulating money, and the Elgees had to move from one house to another, each address less salubrious than the one before. By 1814 Sara must have questioned her choice of husband, as a deed of that year granted Charles £130 from her resources to clear his debts, though only on condition that he agree to relinquish all future entitlement. These circumstances must have prompted Sara to think of leaving Charles, as a deed also set out their financial position, should they separate. At the time, they had two small children, Emily born in 1811 and John in 1812.