The Fall of the House of Wilde (9 page)

Britain's 1848 revolution occurred in Ireland. Government hesitation over what, if any, action to take on the famine infuriated those who thought that a government closer to the ground would not sacrifice people for profit. But the real spur to action was the outbreak of insurrection across Europe. Westminster reacted by moving gunboats down the Liffey and preparing the military for mutiny. The Irish viceroy, Lord Clarendon, pre-emptively arrested some of the leading Young Irelanders for sedition: on 15 May 1848 Smith O'Brien and Meagher were tried but not sentenced, and John Mitchel was tried under the new 1848 Treason Felony Act and declared guilty. When his sentence was announced – fourteen years' deportation – Mitchel turned to the stunned court, and called upon those gathered to take up the baton. ‘The Roman who saw his hand burning to ashes before the tyrant promised that three hundred should follow out his enterprise,' said Mitchel, knowing how to cast himself as part of history.
¹⁸
Mitchel's move, calculated to stir the live embers of insurrection, intoxicated or alarmed – depending on one's persuasion – the crowd. The shock of seeing the Trinity-educated Mitchel, son of an Ulster Unitarian minister, dragged to his cell by the police, heavily manacled, with chains passing from his wrists to his ankles, won Jane's sympathy for the man she had hitherto dubbed Robespierre. ‘Even though I shudder at Mitchel's savage [act?] of revenge,' she told Hilson, ‘yet he was brave, and his conduct at the Bar had something of the old heroic Roman in it and the coldest blood must have glowed to see that man insulted in every way, chained so heavily that he fell from their weight and all because he resisted foreign oppression. I should not wonder if that man comes back some day a Sylla or a Cataline.'
¹⁹
The disproportionate sentence given to Mitchel by the government radicalised Young Ireland.

Smith O'Brien, Meagher and a few Young Irelanders tried to whip up support. But it was the clergy who heard their call. And they reacted by warning their flock against any rebellious action. Most obeyed, while those few insurgents who joined the battle in earnest arrived clad in rags and armed with clubs and pickaxes. The skirmishes that had begun soon died out, and the Young Irelanders sought refuge in the mountains, where they awaited imminent arrest. On 22 July Lord John Russell passed the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, giving the chief governors of Ireland the right to detain until 1 March 1849 anyone suspected of conspiring against Her Majesty's government.

Meanwhile, Jane stepped up her input to the
Nation
, and with each passing article she grew more intemperate. On 8 July 1848, she wrote that a government should be passing laws in the public interest, not denying the people their civil liberties. She continued, ‘If a government stands in the path of that people, and refuses those demands which it was only placed in office to execute (for a government is not organised to control, but to execute a people's will), that government must be overthrown . . . The country, therefore, is now in a position which O'Connell himself avowed would
justify
armed resistance to tyranny, and an armed enforcement of the people's rights.' Young Ireland upheld the use of violence more as defensive tactics than a plausible strategy, believing that it would strengthen their hand in negotiation. Refusing to condemn violence out of hand was more a political ploy against the O'Connellites than a reflection of Young Ireland's bloodthirsty spirit.

Meanwhile, the police spread out across the country, issuing warrants for detention. Duffy was arrested on 15 July under the new Treason Felony Act, and printing presses of opposition papers were threatened. Duffy's cousin and sister-in-law, Margaret Callan, acted as editor of the
Nation
in his absence, and Duffy continued his contributions to the journal from prison. On 22 July 1848, the
Nation
published a poem by Jane, ‘The Challenge to Ireland'. It began with a provocative and goading question, ‘And are there no men in your Fatherland/To confront the tyrant's stormy glare?' to which the answer was – not many.

Not that such a fact bothered Jane. When the opportunity came to write the
Nation'
s editorial, on 29 July 1848, she promised Duffy an article apposite to the occasion. ‘
Jacta Alea Est
' (‘The Die is Cast') is what she produced. Jane wrote the article in the manner of the ancient orators, of Cicero, Livy et al. She unwound the political theory of justice, undoing its knots and paradoxes. The heart of the argument comes in a debate between those who follow the laws of the land and those who follow the laws of the gods. ‘When a government sins against the principles of eternal justice and moral law', then it is one's ‘duty' to act.
²⁰
If a government censors its citizens, denies them common decencies by letting people die of ‘famine and ruin', live ‘a slave's life, and a dog's death', then rebellion is justified.
²¹

When Jane let the impersonal mask slip and her attention turn from the Elysian to the Green fields, she spoke as shrilly as the most rabid demagogue. She insulted just about every faction in the country in a deliberate attempt to goad a population that, in her mind, had become too lily-livered to rebel against the repressive social order. The Irish man acting for the British army was but a paid spy blindly doing his duty, the landlords heartless and crassly materialistic, and the victory of Catholic emancipation utterly irrelevant for a people still enslaved to their masters. Self-interest was all that counted in this corrupt regime, and wrecking the journal seemed a logical extension of Jane's argument. She concluded by giving her fantasy free rein, as though fright of arrest was not drama enough. She spoke the language of Armageddon. As she saw it, Dublin would resemble those cities of antiquity whose inhabitants performed heroic deeds in the knowledge that defeat would mean death. She thus concludes her editorial for the
Nation
.

Oh! That my words could burn like molten metal through your veins, and light up this ancient heroic daring which would make each man of you a Leonidas – each battlefield a Marathon – each pass a Thermopylae . . . Is it so hard a thing to die?
²²

Jane's imagining of dissolution glaringly exposed the disconnection between writing and action, and Ireland's 1848 entered the annals of history as an incoherent conspiracy followed by a rising associated with a ‘cabbage patch' in Tipperary, and not, as Jane imagined, a re-run of Marathon.

There might not have been another affluent bourgeois woman in Ireland courageous and foolhardy enough to bring off this call to action, bestowing upon her impotent self an authority not hers for the taking. By a twist of fate, before ‘
Jacta Alea Est
 ' reached the public, armed police had stormed the
Nation
's office, seized the issue then being printed, smashed up the types, and carried off to Dublin Castle all the documents they could find.

Was Jane's article a dangerous dream? Did she really know what she was fostering? Would her words have sent men out to die for a cause that she herself thought hopeless? She knew it was futile; it is not as if a great nation like Britain would submit to the will of a few idealists. What she said to Hilson about the revolt shows a strange mix of ardour and indifference. It was ‘certain', she said, to occur, but saw it as pointless for ‘[she] could not think an insurrection would ever be successful against the mighty English power'.
²³
If she was conscious of the ludicrous gap between her own grandiloquent verbal flights and the daily world, she was not willing to ditch the rhetoric or, more importantly, see the argument as senseless.

Smith O'Brien, Meagher and other Young Irelanders were arrested in August, convicted of high treason and sentenced to death. Others succeeded in escaping to America. Sensitive to public opinion, Lord John Russell intervened and deftly passed an Act of Parliament permitting him to offer the condemned a choice between death and transportation for life. Inconveniently, the convicted opted for death. The government, with no appetite to have blood on their hands – and blue blood to boot, as Smith O'Brien's father was a baronet – and realising the harmful effect that hanging would have on public morale, overstepped the line they themselves drew, and rushed through yet another Act of Parliament, which allowed the Queen to decide the prisoners' fate. Her Majesty opted for deportation.

Whether Duffy would be sentenced now became the question, and whether Jane's editorial would add to the charges laid against him. Before ‘
Jacta Alea Est
 ' was written, Duffy had been charged with seditious libel. The same issue of the
Nation
had included his call to ‘fight for liberty to live'. Jane was determined to accept responsibility for her article, but Duffy refused to let her appear in the witness box. She tried to influence the proceedings and went in person to see the solicitor general. She told Hilson, ‘[I] denounced myself as author.' She sensed her charm had softened the old judge somewhat and concluded, ‘I think he will not be
violent
on the subject after my visit, I shall have done that much good.'
²⁴

Duffy was fortunate to have the prominent barrister Isaac Butt to defend him. Even so, his trial was a protracted affair, and he remained in prison until 1849. Jane attended every day and on at least one occasion tried to speak from the balcony, but was promptly silenced. The
Daily News
reported on 23 February 1849 that ‘the fair writer of one of the articles in the indictment . . . was not listened to by the court and her voice was drowned by the police crying “Silence”'. Two days previously the
Freeman's Journal
stated: ‘No way of proving the authorship remained but by producing the lady herself upon the table – a course Mr Duffy peremptorily refused to take.'
Saunders's News-letter
of 20 February 1849 wrote of Isaac Butt having in his possession a letter from the author of the articles, ‘assuring [him] that Mr Duffy never saw any of them before they were published; and that he was in prison at the time'. Butt brushed aside Jane's responsibility with a spurious discourse on the family from which the lady sprung. He knew whereof he spoke in upholding her connections, and fortified his plea by reminding the solicitor general that such a respectable family is not to be drawn into such matters. ‘I would not care to give pain to the highly respectable connections of this lady and to herself by placing her in the witness-box, but I ask the Attorney-General, as a man of honour – and a man of honour I believe him to be – he knows the lady as well as I do – to contradict my statement if it is not true.' Butt, with a flash of chauvinist wit, told the jury that ‘
Jacta Alea Est 
' was penned ‘by one of the fair sex – not, perhaps, a very formidable opponent to the whole military power of Great Britain'.

Jane was saved by a bigoted justice system where class, gender and religion mattered more than guilt or innocence. Little wonder Jane came to see herself beyond, or more appropriately, above the law – an attitude Oscar shared. The Old Bailey thought otherwise.

Eventually the charges against Duffy were dropped. The ordeal had truly shaken Jane. She told Hilson, ‘the lesson was useful – I shall never write sedition again. The responsibility is more awful than I imagined or thought of . . . the whole affair has thoroughly unsettled me against politics – our grand Revolution ending in shielding itself with a lady's name . . .'
²⁵
Her activities in 1848 brought Jane an enthusiastic following in Dublin. Her statuesque figure, her proud air, her infectious passion brought her into the public light. She was dubbed Ireland's Madame Roland, like the infamous supporter of the French Revolution, who met her end by the guillotine, an image she relished.

‘
Jacta Alea Est
 ' was perfectly of a piece with Jane's desire for something transcendently fulfilling. ‘Faith is a cause worth armies,' Jane wrote in an essay on the French Revolution. ‘Were people to wait till the chances are apparently in their favour, no great deal would ever be accomplished.' She quoted Goethe for support: ‘What you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness had genius, power and magic in it.'
²⁶

Jane held firm beliefs and would have liked to enter politics had gender not been an obstacle. Bigotry was one of her pet hates and she often wrote that nothing was more damaging to the free play of the mind than binary exclusiveness, and the interference of religion in politics. She was drawn to excess; her poems show the same exuberance. Excitement was all, even if one had, like Napoleon, to pay the consequences. As she put it to Hilson, ‘I want excitement . . . excitement is my genius. I have none without it and Dublin is bleak of the divine inspirer as a polar icefield – I should like to range through life – this orthodox creeping is too tame for me – Ah, this rebellious ambitious nature of mine. I wish I could satiate it with Empires, though a St Helena were the end.'
²⁷

The year 1848 was Jane's 1968, and was partly an existential affair, something she had to do to stamp her individuality on the world. Her rebellion made her independent of family tradition: by being dubbed the ‘Madame Roland of Ireland', she broke out of the Oedipal relationship, broke from daughterhood, and created for herself what she most wanted: an autonomous identity. She stepped into the limelight, and became a public figure. She was established as a paradox: a Protestant nationalist, a bourgeois rebel, a revolutionary who was excessively at ease in the bosom of the Establishment. Jane laughed knowingly at her own contradictions. When shortly afterwards she was received by Lord Aberdeen at Dublin Castle, she told Hilson, ‘Lord Aberdeen smiled very archly as he bent to kiss my cheek, which is the ceremony of presentation. I smiled too and thought of Jacta Alea Est.'
²⁸
Jane never tired of laughing at the Establishment to which she owed her privileges.