Three Famines (14 page)

The evictions in Ireland were unpopular in Britain, and were condemned by Trevelyan. They were seen as a means for landlords to place the burden of their tenants onto the state, a further proof of landlord selfishness. Among individual landlords who came to the attention of Parliament, the Marquess of Sligo, having previously extended a great
deal of rent tolerance to his tenantry, said in October 1848 that now he would need to evict ruthlessly since he was ‘under the necessity of ejecting or being ejected’. Questions were asked in the House of Commons about the marquess having authorised evictions without appropriate notice being given to the local Board of Guardians, to whose workhouses and proposed soup kitchens many of the evictees would present themselves.

But some landlords would not evict. Lord Sligo chided his cousin and fellow Galway landowner, George Henry Moore, MP, who refused to throw his peasants off his land. Sligo said that without evictions Moore would end up like Sir Samuel O’Malley, on whose estate arrears of rent were such that the court of Chancery took over and evicted three-quarters of the tenants anyhow. Sligo said that in his heart’s belief Sir Samuel ‘had done more to injure and persecute and exterminate the tenants than any man in Mayo’.

Thus, went the argument, immediate and surgical eviction was the lesser of two evils. To what extent the evicting landlords were influenced by political economy, or a belief in the great scythe of Providence, or by Malthusian theory, we do not know. Nor do we know to what extent Sligo’s inversion of thinking – the evictor as the more merciful culler – was the result of a profoundly swallowed moral unease.

The Edgeworth family of Edgeworthtown, County Longford, were sworn non-evictors. Maria Edgeworth, eighty years of age in 1848, was a renowned novelist (author of
Castle Rackrent
,
The Modern Griselda
,
The Absentee
) and the most eminent of the Edgeworth clan. In 1849, she died of heart trouble and was mourned by her tenantry. She, like many of
the Irish gentry, was very interested in properly arranged emigration. Lord Lansdowne of County Kerry, at just over thirty a young treasurer in Lord John Russell’s cabinet, financed a program of well-coordinated emigration, with the majority of his tenants arriving safely at their destinations.

In the diocese of Derry, the Catholic bishop and ninety of his priests passed a series of resolutions in July 1948. They thanked County Derry’s largest proprietors, the London Companies, for their humane treatment. But they attacked the many evicting landlords of nearby Donegal.

Perhaps the most famous evictor was Major Denis Mahon of Strokestown in County Roscommon in Ireland’s midlands. (Strokestown and Mahon’s house are today the site of the Irish Famine Museum.) In 1845, Major Mahon inherited the 200-year-old Mahon estate. The property had more than 13,000 tenants on its 27,000 acres. He employed his cousin, John Ross Mahon, as his agent, and John Ross recommended that Major Mahon evict tenants so that the small farms could be amalgamated into larger ones. On these, solid tenant-farmer Protestants brought in from Scotland could grow grain. For beginning to implement these schemes, Major Mahon paid with his life, for his evictions were an engine of fury as well as of agricultural progress.

To turn his land over to these more profitable and modern forms of agriculture and grazing, he needed space presently taken up by unproductive tenants incapable of paying rent. He began by evicting 1000 people. But, like other landlords,
he knew he could never fully rid his land of them unless they vanished totally, far from the need of his control and compassion, and far from the Irish workhouses, for whose upkeep he had to meet part of the cost. He wanted a depopulated landscape. So he spent £4000 to charter ill-provided ships to take the evicted tenants to Quebec in the summer of 1847. Mahon’s four relatively small vessels were the
Naomi
, the
Virginius
,
Erin’s Queen
and
John Munn.

One of the evicted families was that of James Sheridan. On 5 June 1847, the Sheridan family boarded Mahon’s first chartered ship, the
Naomi
, in Liverpool (to which city Mahon had transported them as deck cargo). Death seemed daily omnipresent on the
Naomi
– 196 people died aboard. Waking in the unspeakable steerage, in which nearly 700 were crowded in an infectious stew, people found the dead beside them. They were committed, unabsolved, into the sea. Only six of the eleven members of the Sheridan family survived the voyage. On landing, survivors were placed on the infamous quarantine island of Grosse Ile in the St Lawrence River. The Sheridan father, James, his daughter, Bridget, and a son, John, all died at sea or in quarantine in the island. Mary Connor Sheridan, the mother, died in the hospital at Grosse Ile in the last week of August 1847. The remaining six Sheridan children, aged between ten and twenty, were sent to the Catholic orphanage in Quebec.

The Mahon arrivals in general were considered to be in such appalling condition that the Canadian Parliament complained to Westminster about it. A half of those who survived the sea voyage died on Grosse Ile in that summer of 1847; more than 600 children were orphaned there. The ships on which Mahon’s evictees travelled had the highest death rate
of any arriving in Canada throughout the summer of 1847, with 511 in total.

Mahon also turned out on the roads 600 families who refused to leave for North America. But he did not do all of it with impunity. On All Souls Day, 2 November 1847, while many of his ‘assisted migrants’ were still expiring in quarantine on Grosse Ile in the now freezing-over St Lawrence, Major Mahon was ambushed on his way home from a meeting of the local Board of Guardians and shot dead. Three weeks later, the Reverend John Lloyd was killed nearby. The chief reason for the killing of the Reverend Lloyd was that he ran, in the words of a priest, a school that was a ‘factory where numbers of famine Protestants are manufactured’. That is, according to the allegation, Lloyd – like a number of evangelicals in Ireland – had used the opportunity of the famine to tempt people to convert to Protestantism on the promise of food, land or both.

Men were arrested for Mahon’s murder, stood trial and were either executed or transported. The two men hanged for the killing were James Commins, a local accurate shot, and Patrick Hasty, owner of a
shebeen
, or unlicensed saloon. Such was the fury the evictions had brought forth that at Hasty’s funeral, tenantry and former tenantry fought for the honour of carrying his coffin. The local parish priest, the Reverend Michael McDermott, declared that Mahon was Nero and that his evictions had led to his murder.

After Mahon’s murder, the authorities declared Roscommon a ‘disturbed area’, and many landowners fled with their families. New and more severe ‘outrage’ legislation was passed and British surveillance of the Irish, and fear of false
accusation among the populace, increased (as the journalist from the
Illustrated London News
described in Chapter 9). The end of evictions and forced emigrations would have been a better start on producing good order, but the phenomenon continued in a robust form. In Ballykilcline near Strokestown, on land managed for Queen Victoria, there had been a long-running rent strike. The tenants had shown their solidarity against the land agents by employing a young lawyer from Dublin, of the kind who would these days be called a ‘human rights advocate’. Nonetheless, with famine’s onset, hundreds of farmers were evicted and ‘emigrated’, the active verb taking on a colour of passivity and acceptance on the part of the emigrated. But at least the Crown paid the tenants’ way to New York.

If the best-known evictor was Denis Mahon, the most scandalous was Lord Palmerston, Henry John Temple, long-term foreign secretary in a series of both Whig and Tory governments, and ultimately prime minister of Great Britain in 1855, at the age of seventy. At the time of the famine, he was still foreign secretary under Lord John Russell. ‘Tenant-right,’ he declared, ‘is landlord wrong.’ He owned lands in Sligo, where his neighbours, Sir Robert and Lady Gore-Booth, also resorted to eviction.

According to the parish priest of Lissadell, Sligo, however, Sir Robert Gore-Booth seems to have had concern for his evicted people. The priest asserted that the emigration of peasants from Gore-Booth’s land was voluntary, and that
the Gore-Booths had made arrangements for their former tenants once they arrived in New Brunswick in Canada. Many declared that no other group of Irish immigrants was so well provided for, both on the emigrant ships and once they arrived in the province. The masters of the vessels that Gore-Booth chartered were instructed, on reaching port, to contact a certain Irish timber merchant in St John, New Brunswick, who had undertaken to give jobs to many of the former tenants. Some were to be sent inland to Frederickton, and others were to be made comfortable in St John itself, lodging at the Gore-Booths’ expense. Yet once the Gore-Booth tenants reached St John, the New Brunswick immigration officers said that even Gore-Booth should be condemned for ‘shovelling out’ his helpless and his sick. Very many of the passengers were a burden on the town council and the government of the province. Still, all this was a faint whisper of the rage that would break out when Palmerston’s tenants began to arrive.

In the summer of 1847, Palmerston, as absentee landlord, ordered or approved of the eviction and involuntary emigration of 2000 tenants. They had been selected by Lord Palmerston’s agent, Joseph Kincaid, who picked ‘those who were the poorest’. Kincaid believed that the emigration would advantage the colonies and that he had the welfare of the cottiers in mind. In fact, like most agents evicting on behalf of landlords, he had probably made selections for forced emigration of the troublemakers first – men who were insubordinate, recalcitrant with rent and sympathetic to the sentiments of Ribbonmen. After that, the evicting process would have moved on to the more innocuous.

Later, in 1851, Kincaid would claim to have given
between £3 and £5 to each of 150 tenant families he evicted in Roscommon on another estate he managed. But it does not seem the Palmerston evictees left with any such largesse. In the summer of 1847, his tenants were sent off in nine ill-provided shiploads to Canada. The
Eliza Liddell
, carrying women, children and the aged, was Palmerston’s first vessel to arrive at St John, and its passengers became an immediate charge on the New Brunswick community. On another, the
Lord Ashburton
, which landed its people at Grosse Ile, 107 people had died on the voyage, 174 of the passengers were near-naked and 87 of them had to be clothed at public expense ‘for decency’s sake’. The
Aeolus
arrived late in the season, when the St Lawrence was already clogged with ice so that, as a destination, Quebec was out of the question. Hence its passengers were landed – when the first snows had already fallen – at the overcrowded St John quarantine station on Partridge Island. The quarantine station doctor asked if anyone was so tame as not to feel indignant at this outrage, and certainly the rest of the New Brunswick community was in a fury at Lord Palmerston’s opportunism and callousness. The Common Council of the city of St John wrote to him stating that they ‘deeply regret that one of Her Majesty’s ministers, the Rt. Hon. Lord Palmerston … should have exposed such a numerous and distressed portion of his tenantry to the severity and privations of a New Brunswick winter … unprovided with the common means of support, with broken down constitutions and almost in a state of nudity.’ They received no response to this protest. Lord Palmerston might have been too busy putting all the pressure he could on the Americans to open their ports to ships such as the ones that had carried
his tenants. In any case, many of the survivors of Palmerston’s evictions and those of other landlords walked away from St John to the American border and across into Maine, some of them dying on this last winter leg of their journey.

From some members of Parliament arose the cry that the government open proceedings for manslaughter against a landlord named Blake and his sons, who had begun evictions without even observing the legal process. Home Secretary Sir George Grey declared that it was impossible to read about these evictees without feelings of considerable pain, but then fantastically argued that if the tenant was treated unjustly by his landlord, he ‘would have a right of civil action’, that is, the right to bring a court case against him. Prime Minister Russell expressed far less qualified rage: ‘The murders of poor cottiers and tenants are horrible to bear, and if we put down assassins, we ought to put down the lynch law of the landlord.’ Russell also had to face and deal with Lord Palmerston and another cabinet minister who was an Irish landlord – Lord Clanricarde, the postmaster-general. If Lord Russell reprimanded them, history does not tell of it.

A great number of those evicted in the winter of 1846–7 found the means to get only as far as Glasgow or Liverpool, travelling on the freezing decks of ships crossing the Irish Sea. Lord Brougham, an amiable progressive – indeed, too progressive to be widely liked – who had, in the 1830s, been involved in the campaign to end slavery, was aware of the arrival of these people. In the process of attacking the Earl
of Lucan and other evicting landlords in the Commons in February 1847, and chastising them for evicting in the middle of the most bitter winter in memory, he noted with alarm a flood of penniless Irish appearing on the British mainland. In the five days before Brougham uttered his protest, 5200 Irish paupers had landed in England, Wales and Scotland. They had no possessions and were in an advanced state of starvation, even while famine fever and cholera raged among them. The growing host of the Irish who arrived in Liverpool were from Mayo, Lord Brougham observed, and, given the behaviour of Mayo landlords such as the Earl of Lucan, their numbers were sure to increase. Brougham did not mention another problem faced by the Irish newcomers – being from Mayo, they would be unaccustomed to urban life, at a loss in the cities of Britain and easy to write off as sub-human.