The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (32 page)

The Fenian movement was a political and cultural response to the Famine: its membership had begun to absorb both the shock of the 1840s and the altered context of the Ireland that had emerged from the disaster. Moreover, with Irish culture now possessing a vastly increased international dimension, the Fenians understood that they could use this new state of affairs to broadcast their message abroad. Having learned the lessons of the past, meanwhile, Stephens and his supporters were determined to apply them to their new organization. As part of the dedication to the principle of secrecy, small membership cells were formed across the country: each of these was to be a closed circle, with no more than one member of each cell aware of the composition of any other.

This was in many ways an auspicious time for the creation of a new movement. Britain was in a position of unrivalled power, with an empire that encircled the globe and an industrial base that outpaced all rivals, but there were nevertheless signs of ill-preparedness and weakness. The bloody and costly Crimean War had ended in 1856 in a pyrrhic victory for the British, with many of their military leaders exposed as class-bound, incompetent fools. In India, the Mutiny had burst upon the Raj in the spring of 1857. Meanwhile, in Ireland itself there were a good many bored and disaffected young men scattered about the country’s market towns: this was a constituency waiting to be tapped. Economic depression and persistent disaffection at the tenant–landlord relationship, moreover, could only add further to the movement’s appeal, especially as Fenian publications were at pains to connect political independence to the prospect of a new land settlement. Now, surely, was a good time to move.

It was not long before the authorities, both civil and religious, were aware of the potential dangers posed by the Fenians. At Dublin Castle the administration began to use the term in its dispatches, though without having at this point a clear idea of the group’s membership or strategies. More significantly, the Catholic Church, under the powerful and conservative Cardinal Paul Cullen (‘little old Paul Cullen!’ wrote James Joyce. ‘Another apple of God’s eye!’) began to denounce the organization from the pulpit.
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The Church knew a rival when it saw one. In this case, Cullen and his officials were increasingly angered at the note of rebellion and insubordination that emerged from the Fenian phenomenon; and alarmed too by Fenian secularism, by the sense that the movement was offering an alternative model of nationhood to that of the Church itself.

The Catholic Church had by this point begun to assert itself vigorously as a power in the land. Its religious orders were educating the Catholic youth of the country; and the seminary at Maynooth (underpinned by its state grant) was the largest in the world. The golden age of church-building that was underway, meanwhile, is best exemplified in the Pugin-designed St Colman’s Cathedral that rises today above the port of Cobh. The foundation stone was laid (in what was then Queenstown) in 1868: and its soaring neo-Gothic architecture exemplifies the muscular confidence of a Church that conceived of itself now as a power in the land. Cullen’s firm vision was of a Catholic Ireland devoted not to the political revolution imagined by the Fenians, but to a form of devotional revolution that would occupy the heart and souls of a Catholic people and would be led, controlled and directed by their priests.

In contrast to this vision, the cardinal felt, Fenian political agitation filled the people ‘with impractical madness, so that they no longer think about education’ – overall control of which was at all times his particular preoccupation – ‘and the conditions of the poor and…other necessary things’.
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Cullen was particularly repelled by the Fenian cult of secrecy – the very quality that added inevitably to its allure across Ireland. Moreover, the movement also offered much in the way of ceremony, in the form of drills, marches and other theatrical events – and since the Church too was much given to ceremony, it rapidly perceived the danger of another power in the field.

Cullen was right to be alarmed: for if the Church could claim a devoted following, so too could the Fenians. Simultaneously, such parallel organizations as the National Brotherhood of St Patrick, founded in 1861, established dozens of chapters across Ireland and among the Irish communities in Britain, complete with libraries, reading rooms and social opportunities for its members. Stephens and other Fenian leaders naturally had rather more than library provision on their minds, but they were prepared to tolerate such loose fellow organizations because they provided a useful screen that sheltered from view the Fenian movement itself. The founding of the
Irish People
newspaper in 1863, meanwhile, enabled the easy transmission of news and propaganda around the country, and by extension gave a sense of a new movement taking shape.

That movement received a further fillip in 1861 with the stage-managed funeral of Terence MacManus, a Young Irelander who had died in exile in California. The leadership conceived the notion of having MacManus brought home to Ireland for burial – and Stephens duly arranged a gala funeral that caught the public imagination. Some fifty thousand people followed the cortège through central Dublin for burial at Glasnevin – Cullen had refused permission for the funeral to take place in a church – and afterwards membership of the IRB soared: by 1864, there may have been sixty thousand Fenians in Ireland. None of which meant, of course, that any form of military insurrection was likely or even contemplated by the majority of the group’s members; if anything, the note of gaiety, theatricality and excitement probably meant the reverse. Still, Stephens could now point to the successful establishment of a network of sympathizers on home ground. The next step was to cross the Atlantic to advance his vision of an Irish uprising underpinned and supported by a network of international – and specifically American – material support.

At this time, however, such potential support was flowing in other channels. In the course of the American Civil War (1861–5), many American Fenians enlisted in the opposing Union and Confederate armies; and Stephens knew that once the conflict ended he would have to strike before the throngs of soldiers were demobilized and absorbed back into civilian society.
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Such a waiting game was naturally unsatisfactory, and it was for this reason that Stephens spent six months in 1864 on a coast-to-coast speaking tour, selling his notion of armed action as a means of gaining Irish independence, visiting the camps of the Union soldiers and attempting to recruit battle-hardened men to his cause. It was a strategy not without hope: anti-British sentiment thrived among the Irish in America; more significantly still, tensions between Britain and the Union were rising too and war seemed a distinct possibility.

Stephens also never forgot the importance of the theatrical gesture, in America as at home. In particular, his printing of a form of Irish money – he called them ‘Irish Republic’ bonds – sold the notion of Ireland as an independent country and told his followers (by his own estimation, some eighty-five thousand of them in Ireland alone) that their day had come. But he was guilty of over-egging his pudding by exaggerating the possibility of an imminent uprising in Ireland behind which his new American allies could throw their weight. No such uprising was in the offing, and Stephens was encouraging the sort of keyed-up expectations that could not possibly be satisfied.

Still, his strategy at least paid short-term dividends: interest grew and membership lists expanded in America. Such activity inevitably attracted state attention: in Ireland, government intervention came in September 1865 in the form of raids on the offices of the
Irish People
. Stephens himself was arrested, only to escape from jail, slip out of the country and make his way back to the United States – in the process gaining considerable notoriety. On arrival in America, he attempted to unite the local Fenian organization, which had become riven with dissent. The organization sponsored small invasions of Canadian territory in April and May 1866 as a means of boosting morale: one, on the disputed border island of Campo Bello in the Bay of Fundy, was foiled by United States forces; the second was launched on Niagara and repelled by the Canadians themselves. So Stephens’s efforts were to no avail. The raids accomplished nothing, serving only to antagonize Irish–Canadians – who feared, reasonably enough, becoming the target of reprisals in their new home – and to lower Fenian morale still further.
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The two incidents marked but the beginning of twenty years of repeated Fenian skirmishes and raids along the United States–Canada frontier – both in the east and in British Columbia – which soured the relationship between the two countries.

By the spring of 1867, however, a rising at last seemed possible. On 5 March, the Fenians transmitted a goading proclamation to the
Times
, which remained notoriously anti-Irish. ‘Our War,’ ran the statement, ‘is against the aristocratic locusts, whether English or Irish…. Republicans of the entire world, our cause is your cause, avenge yourselves. Herewith we proclaim the Irish Republic.’ The Fenians had by this point already attempted an English-based raid, on an arms depot at Chester in February; and now a further uprising began in Ireland itself. It was doomed from the beginning: in spite of the the organization’s emphasis on secrecy, it had been infiltrated thoroughly by informers, who had kept the government very well abreast of plans. The rising ended rapidly and in disarray.

There were postscripts to this event: in April, a large contingent of soldiers set sail from New York in a ship renamed for the occasion
Erin’s Hope
. The ship was finally tracked down and boarded off the Waterford coast; in the hold officials found five thousand modern rifles, three artillery pieces and a million and a half rounds of ammunition. The overseas connection, then, came to nothing – but Stephens had demonstrated that he understood its potential. He was the first to tap into the United States as a vast pot of material resources, both men and money. He saw that the New World could provide many opportunities for the Irish in Ireland – and hundreds of other organizations since have echoed Stephens’s approach and come to depend on Irish–American support and funds. And in Ireland itself, the Fenian movement had proved to be capable of engaging the support and enthusiasm of a swathe (if not a very broad one) of the population. In London, the
Spectator
was impressed against its will: ‘The mass of the Fenians are, no doubt, dupes, and ridiculous as it may seem that 103 linendraper’s (sic) assistants should have quitted Dublin to declare war on the British Empire, still, there must be in men who risk life and liberty for an idea an element of nobleness.’
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Nobody could be blind to the significance of this failed rising.

It was not in Ireland, however, or even in the United States, that its consequences were first felt – but in Manchester, the population of which had been swollen by thousands of Irish emigrants escaping the Famine. Tom Kelly, who in 1866 had replaced Stephens as formal Fenian leader, was by the following year on the run in England; he was finally arrested in Manchester in mid-September. Fellow Fenians hatched an audacious escape plan: thirty of them ambushed Kelly’s prison van on the way to court, and in the resulting mêlée a policeman was shot and killed. Their plan had succeeded – for Kelly escaped and was never recaptured – but there were far-reaching implications. The British government might have avoided deaths in Ireland during the Fenian uprising, but it felt it must make an example of those operating in England. Those involved in the Manchester ambush were rounded up and put on trial: three of them were found guilty of the policeman’s murder and sentenced to death on 23 November 1867.

At last the Fenians had acquired what previous insurrections had lacked – martyrs to the cause. As their sentences were pronounced, all three men had cried out in chorus: ‘God Save Ireland’. The song that was inspired by this slogan would become one of the most celebrated nationalist anthems, and the case of the Manchester Martyrs became another example of how the British authorities, having managed one crisis with cool efficiency, could go on to create a worse one. Moreover, the Fenians had tapped into the influence that the media could exert on public opinion. The failed Fenian rebellion, which by now was being ridiculed in Ireland itself, was saved on the streets of northern England by British political short-sightedness.

Chapter Nine

The Irish Question

Fenian activity in Ireland and England introduced a note of urgency to the Irish Question: in British political circles, there could be no more dismissal of the fact that a large proportion of the Irish population was chafing under rule from London and that something – even if nobody yet knew quite what – would have to be done to address the situation. In London, the pacification of Ireland was a crucial policy objective of Sir William Ewart Gladstone, whose Liberal Party in 1868 was currently in opposition to Benjamin Disraeli’s Tories but was eyeing power. In Belfast, meanwhile, Ulster’s Protestant political establishment began to monitor with increasing dismay a political landscape that was being refashioned around them.

This was an age of ever-broader parliamentary representation: in 1867, the minority Tory government’s reform bill had extended the franchise to the majority of householders – and in the process had revolutionized the political landscape. So while Gladstone saw the Irish Question as a moral issue to be settled once and for all, he could also perceive the political dividends that might flow from including Ireland’s Catholics in a Liberal-led political movement: in the upcoming election, the fragile Tory administration might be swept away by Irish votes. As a result, his public pronouncements now began to imply that Ireland could henceforth expect much in the way of political attention: if the Liberals were elected to office, he promised, the country’s various issues would be addressed. This was a carefully vague commitment: it remained to be seen what it might actually mean in practice, and whether his words would amount to much more than lip service. Besides, fundamental change in Ireland was not a gift that only the British could bestow; Irish MPs might also have a crucial role to play in fighting for it.