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The Preacher and the Prelate. Patricia Byrne
Читать онлайн.Название The Preacher and the Prelate
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isbn 9781785371707
Автор произведения Patricia Byrne
Издательство Ingram
Famine and cholera were sweeping across the western counties, the public roads were crowded with thousands toiling for a wretched pittance of six or seven pence worth of meal for an entire family, while women and children thronged into depots seeking provisions. How could hundreds in Ballina cry out for food while, at the same time, the town was busy with the bustle of corn traders, and the public road crowded with vehicles bearing away food for export? It was a scandal, fumed the cleric, ‘a famine in the midst of plenty’.1
In the three decades since the formation of the Union, Britain had flourished: it was a time of growth, industrialisation, capitalism, free trade and urbanisation, and Irish agriculture fed this economic expansion with a remarkable increase in Irish food exports. But Ireland itself was becoming progressively more chaotic: the population swelled, potato cultivation intensified, and farm holdings fragmented into a patchwork of plots with the chronic subdivision of small holdings. In the west, the decline in living standards for many ‘was both dangerous and rapid’, with a large subsistence underclass virtually dependent on a single crop: the potato.2
The Mayo Constitution newspaper reported that there was a ‘mass of human misery to be found throughout a vast district of the west of Ireland’. For whole communities around Clew Bay there were ‘no potatoes, no oatmeal, a failure of fisheries, no price to be got for kelp, no public or private markets for goods, no means of earning daily wages, no resident gentry landlords, no food but seaweed, and the small fishes that can be picked up along the strand’.3
In the midst of this chaos, Edward Nangle headed west on a relief mission.
***
The Atlantic waves tossed the boat dangerously close to the cliffs.
The clergyman crept from his berth on the Nottingham steamer, his stomach churning, as the sea frothed all around in a sheet of white foam.4 It was near sunset, on a Wednesday evening in July 1831, and the sky glowed red like a hot furnace. He struggled to keep his footing on deck as the storm winds gusted furiously and the gigantic cliffs on Achill Island’s western coast loomed overhead on the boat’s lee side – Croaghaun, where the power of the Atlantic waves had chiselled away the rock face. This was Edward Nangle’s first sighting of Achill Island in its wild and terrifying magnificence.
His pregnant wife, Eliza, was sheltered below deck, perhaps regretting her decision to travel as her body convulsed with sea sickness. Her thoughts must often have turned to their one-year-old daughter, Frances, left behind in Dublin in the care of her family. She had shown a steely determination in accompanying and supporting her husband, a single-mindedness and selflessness that would be a feature of their married life. The boat carried a cargo of Indian meal to provide some relief for the communities of the west in their dire need.
The Nottingham creaked and groaned at every seam as she plunged into successive gullies between the waves and Croaghaun cliffs. As one fearful surge of Atlantic waters succeeded the next, it must have seemed as if the steamer would never again rise from the depths. Edward watched Captain Biddy stalking the deck, knowing he had a calculation to make: should he protect the vessel by throwing some of the cargo of meal overboard or hold tight in the hope of reaching the calmer waters of Clew Bay? The captain waited, never once leaving the steamer’s deck as the red sky faded on the western horizon.
When Edward and Eliza married three years earlier, he was still in recovery after the earlier disintegration of his health in County Cavan. In hindsight, their early married years at Elm Cottage, Monkstown, must have appeared idyllic, with pleasant musical evenings and violin renditions of Haydn and Mozart by Edward at their Dublin cottage. It would be a short-lived period of tranquillity in their married life.
There is a sense that an artist’s soul struggled beneath the surface of Edward’s personality, with glimmers of an enthusiastic musician, an eager watercolourist, a writer of soaring lyrical prose and a man awestruck by nature’s beauty. This aesthetic would reveal a deficit on his part in later years with little evident appreciation of the native culture of the people he ministered to in contrast, for instance, to Christopher Anderson’s regard for the native Celtic culture.
A watercolour, possibly by Edward, of Eliza with two of their daughters a few years into their marriage shows her looking downwards in a diffident, reserved way, the image reflecting the norms for the virtuous woman of the times. Her husband described her as a woman of ‘few words’, a trait that contrasted with his own tendency towards extravagant verbal propensity as words poured in torrents from his mouth and pen.5 These differing temperaments would become a factor in their diverging responses to future adverse circumstances. It was as if his verbal fluency acted as a type of therapy for Edward in times of stress, while Eliza’s taciturn disposition caused her to bury accumulating suffering deep within.
Mercifully, at about ten o’clock, the tension on the Nottingham broke as the steamer rounded Achill’s southern tip into Clew Bay with the wind at its stern and the waters finally smooth. The vessel anchored within a couple of miles of Westport where the passengers got some welcome rest. They awoke to calm waters amidst the scenic surroundings of Clew Bay with its multitude of islands. Leaning over the gunwale, Edward gazed out at the sharp-summited Croagh Patrick on the southern coast of the bay: the holy mountain, imposing and resplendent as it jutted towards the heavens. Edward reflected on his Catholic countrymen who, year after year, lacerated their limbs on the mountain in pilgrimages of self-inflicted torture. He felt only sorrow for their moral condition, reflecting the thoughts of one Christopher Anderson, ‘without a vernacular literature, without books, without schools, and without the ministration of the divine work in their native language’.6 He would bend every fibre of his being towards changing their lot.
William Baker Stoney, the rector of the nearby Newport parish, boarded the Nottingham in Westport and claimed some Indian meal for his parishioners. The famine distress in the area was acute, he told the visitors, and nowhere was more afflicted than Achill Island. He invited Edward and Eliza to his home as guests. Already, Edward was setting his sights on the remote place where he would implement his evangelical vision. He would travel to Achill without delay.
***
What was wrong with Ireland? Why was the country collapsing? Why was the condition of the people so appalling and disorderly in contrast to that of the English? A thoughtful, dark-haired, delicate-looking French nobleman was determined to find the answer and his conclusions would differ from those of Edward Nangle. What he found in Ireland and the west was deep-seated and intractable.
One August day in the 1830s, the young aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville arrived at Newport, about twenty miles from Achill, where Edward and Eliza Nangle were William Stoney’s guests. The Frenchman was on a six-week visit to Ireland with his friend, Gustave de Beaumont, to examine the worrying conditions in the country about which he had read much. He was already an experienced traveller with a scholarly reputation, the first parts of his voluminous study into the American political system having been published. A central concern of his intellectual life was the manner in which societies made the transition from an aristocratic to a democratic society, and he was well placed to offer a dispassionate view on the Irish situation.
He was depressed by the state of Ireland: ‘a collection of misery such as I did not imagine existed in the world’, a nation ‘divided in the most violent way between two parties which are altogether religious and political’. The language of the Dublin aristocracy alarmed him with their description of the common people as savages, reducing them to something less than human. As for the ordinary people, he was likewise shocked at their pervasive contempt for their aristocracy and landlords. It was a divided society at war with itself.
In Newport, Alexis and Gustave reached a one-storey house at the side of a meadow facing the town’s quay.