Tag Archives: boycotting

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisted: Final thoughts

This blog serial explored aspects of the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. All of the hyperlinks below are to earlier posts in the series. All of the posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. Thanks for supporting #IUCRevisited.

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“I went to Ireland … to learn what I could of the social and economical conditions of the Irish people as affected by the revolutionary forces which are now at work in the country.”
–William Henry Hurlbert

I discovered the digital edition of Ireland Under Coercion several years ago while researching the 1888 Kerry murders of James Fitzmaurice and John Foran. The former was shot at dawn, 31 January 1888, at Lixnaw, as Hurlbert awoke in Dublin for his first full day in Ireland. He mentions the murder several times in the book. Foran was shot in late July, as the first edition of IUC was in production for its August 1888 release.

Period illustration of the murder of James Fitzmaurice, survived by his daughter Nora, which occurred in January 1888 as Hurlbert began his six-month travels in Ireland.

I was intrigued by the book from an American journalist traveling in Ireland during a flare up in the decade-long Land War. Hurlbert’s six-month reporting trip began shortly after the Times of London published its “Parnellism and Crime” series and ended just as a special judicial commission began hearings that largely disproved the newspaper’s allegations. He was in Ireland as the Vatican issued the Papal decree against boycotting and the rent-withholding Plan of Campaign. Tenant evictions continued on several large estates during this period. The rapidly growing number of nationalist newspapers that covered these events, Hurlbert asserted, did so less for domestic consumption than for foreign audiences. Across the Atlantic, the Irish in America played a significant role in their homeland politics as mass emigration continued from Ireland.

Like other journalists who wrote books about their visits to Ireland during this period, Hurlbert described the beauty of the landscape. He also detailed the sights of Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Kilkenny and smaller towns. Today, there is a romantic, late 19th century aura to his travels by rail and jaunting car. One of my favorite passages in the book:

“I pity the traveler of the future here, if he is never to know the delight of traversing these wild and picturesque wastes in such weather as we have had today, on a [jaunting] car, well-balanced by a single pleasant companion, drinking, as he goes, deep draughts of the Atlantic air.”

A rural road in Donegal. Photo by Rita Wilson/Donegal Film Office.

Hurlbert’s main focus was the big issues of the day: Home Rule, boycotting and moonlighting. He interviewed numerous people who shaped the period: Land League leader Michael Davitt; Chief Secretary for Ireland Arthur Balfour; Catholic clergy and tenant activists Father James McFadden of Donegal, Father Patrick White of Clare, and Father Daniel Keller of Cork; Ulster Protestant clergymen and unionist supporters Rev. Dr. “Roaring” Hugh Hanna and Rev. Dr. Richard Rutledge Kane, both in Belfast; physically-challenged Irish aristocrat Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh; and the aging Fenian John O’Leary. 

To be sure, there are challenges to reading Hurlbert’s book. His conservative, pro-landlord, pro-unionist views frequently come across as smug, elitist and–history shows–wrong. He didn’t write the ugliest Irish stereotypes of the day, but they lurk between the lines. Many of his references to Irish and other world history, literature, and the law will be obscure to most modern readers.

Title page from digitized edition of Ireland Under Coercion.

Hurlbert’s 19th century writing style, meandering prose often filled with personal asides and other tangents, is grammatically correct; yet can be cumbersome for 21st century readers who prefer shorter sentences. Too many of the journal-dated sections of the book lack smooth transitions between paragraphs and could have benefited from subheads. Near the end of the book, Hurlbert accommodated the eleventh-hour request from one of his hosts to protect sources by replacing their names or other identifying information with clusters of * * * * *. It’s an unacceptable contrivance for a piece of journalism.

I don’t doubt that Hurlbert’s grave concerns about the outcome of Irish agrarian agitation and nationalist movements were deeply influenced by his experiences of witnessing the terrible American Civil War. Neither do I disagree with the contemporary critics who charged that Ireland Under Coercion was the American expat’s barely-disguised bid to cozy up to the British establishment. The project apparently generated some late-career income for Hurlbert after what appears to have been a comfortable and enjoyable tour of Ireland. He would need it, as his private life was soon caught up in a public scandal.

There is certainly more material in the book than I have been able to explore in the 40 previous posts of this series. I expect to return to this project in the future. For now, however, I’m moving on to other work. Thanks again for supporting Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited. MH

Map of Ireland showing Hurlbert’s 1888 travels.

NOTES: Top quote from page 10 of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American.  

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Pope’s decree

This blog serial explored aspects of the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited

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“…[T]he real issues of to-day [are] between the Church speaking through the papal decree of April 20, 1888, and the National League of Ireland acting through the Plan of Campaign.”
–William Henry Hurlbert

One of the most extraordinary developments of the Irish Land War period unfolded as Hurlbert traveled in the country during the first half of 1888 and published his diary later that year. Pope Leo XIII issued a decree that condemned the “mode of warfare called the Plan of Campaign” and the associated violence of “a form of proscription … known as boycotting.”

Pope Leo XIII

So began “perhaps the worst period in the whole history of Irish relations with the Holy See,” historian Emmet Larkin wrote.

As described in earlier posts of this blog serial, Hurlbert encountered several Catholic priests in Ireland who supported the agrarian agitation of their parishioners. Their bishops either publicly backed these efforts, or refrained from restricting such activism.

The British government quietly lobbied the Holy See to help suppress this aspect of their Ireland problem, as distinct from the Home Rule activism of nationalists in Parliament and the militancy of Irish newspaper editors, often the same people. Envoys from London and Dublin Castle traveled to Rome to dangle the possibility of opening a Catholic university in Ireland, as well as fully restoring diplomatic ties with Westminster for the first time since the founding of the Anglican Church.

In 1887, Leo XIII sent his personal emissary to Ireland to report on the agrarian strife and nationalist efforts. The Irish bishops were well aware of the papal mission, which was discussed during 1 February 1888, ceremonies to lay the foundation stone of St. Patrick’s Church in Rome. They quickly soured on the decree that followed two months later.

Hurlbert raised the decree with several people he met in Ireland. He reported that one unnamed laborer told him many Irish people regarded the decree as “a kind of attack on their liberties, and that they are quite as likely to resit as to obey it.” Another man, a “keen-eyed, hawk-billed, wiry veteran” of the Rising of 1848 quipped: “Hasn’t [the pope] enough, sure, to mind in Rome? … It was some of them Englishmen wheedled it out of him, you may be sure, sir.”

Hurlbert also sat down with Presbyterian clergyman and anti-Catholic agitator Rev. Dr. “Roaring” Hugh Hanna. The churchman “spoke respectfully of the papal decree … but he seems to think it will not command the respect of the masses of the Catholic population, nor be really enforced by the clergy.” Hanna and Hurlbert probably snickered a little about the situation, though that isn’t recorded in the book.

Hurlbert wrote this passage from Belfast on 25 June 1888. A day earlier, the Vatican reinforced its April decree through an encyclical, Saepe Nos, which complained that the message of two months earlier was “grievously perverted by means of forced interpretations.” Rome reminded its Irish readers that the pontiff had “carefully inquired” to “obtain full and reliable knowledge of the state of your affairs, and of the causes of popular discontent.”

In other words, Leo XIII was standing by his original orders against boycotting and the Plan.

Irish nationalists were furious. They demanded separation of church and state, and accused the London government of ” ‘drawing a veil’ over the pope’s eyes in order to succor rackrenting landlords,” historian Lewis Perry Curtis, Jr. has noted. Hurlbert described  the “contemptuous and angry repudiation” of the decree by agrarian activist Michael Davitt.

In a late May 1888, speech at Bray (25 miles south of Dublin), Davitt said:

Irish Catholic laymen are no more bound by the Pope’s ideas or decision outside of purely doctrinal matters than they are by the views or commands of any other foreign potentate; and the day on which they would be cowardly enough to submit to a far worse kind of political subserviency than that against which we are fighting, we would write ourselves down before the self-governed nations of the world as being too slavish in disposition to merit the enjoyment of liberty, and too recreant to the spirit of our ancestors to be worthy of anything else but the contempt of freemen.

As an American, Hurlbert also recounted how Rev. Dr. Edward McGlynn, the New York-born son of Irish immigrants, was excommunicated in 1887 because he supported the land views of socialist Henry George. “It is clear that clerical agitators, high and low, must soon elect between Mr. George, Dr. McGlynn, and Mr. Davitt, and obeying fully the papal decree,” Hurlbert wrote in the 21 September, 1888, Preface of his book.

In the book’s undated Epilogue, he continued:

The papal decree has  gone forth. Those who profess to accept it will be compelled to obey it. Those who reject it, whatever their place in the hierarchy of the Church may be, must sooner or later find themselves where Dr. McGlynn of New York now is. Catholic Ireland can only continue to be Catholic on the conditions of obedience, not formal but real, not in matters indifferent, but in matters vital and important, to the Head of the Catholic Church. (Leo XIII lifted Father McGlynn’s excommunication in 1892.)

As Hurlbert’s book went to press, the Irish hierarchy decided its formal response to the decree. As described by Larkin:

When, in early September, the bishops received yet another letter from the pope’s secretary of state, Cardinal Rampolla, charging that they were wanting both in loyalty and in dutifulness, they had indeed had enough. At their annual general meeting in early October 1888, they decided to send a collective letter to the ope. The letter, which was finally sent off in early December, signed by 28 of the 30 Irish bishops, was exceedingly strong. In effect, they told the pope that they knew more about the situation in Ireland than he did and that they could “not enforce the decree without jeopardizing both his and their own authority in Ireland.” This collective letter obviously had the intended effect on the pope and his advisers, for they ceased to insist that the Bishops take a strong line on the Plan and Boycotting.

For the British government, the decree “was only a scrap of paper so long as the Holy See took no steps to enforce it,” Curtis wrote. One one hand, the decree, combined with enforcement of the 1887 coercion laws and better crops, did help tamp down agrarian violence. On the other hand, “initial enthusiasm” about the decree “soon gave way to discouragement … [because] the effects of the order upon the priesthood were slow to manifest themselves … [but] at least slowed down the momentum of the Plan.”

Period illustration of the Papal Rescript, or decree, by Sir John Tenniel in Punch.

NOTES: From pages vii, xi, 25-27, 31, 365-367, 406, 410-411, and 425 of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. …Pages 3-4 of The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and the Fall of Parnell, 1888-1891, by Emmet Larkin, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979. … Pages 65, 270-277, and 388 of Coercion and Conciliation in Ireland, 1880-1892, by Lewis Perry Curtis, Jr., Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. … Davitt quote from The Nation, June 2, 1888, page 1.

NEXT: Meeting Kavanagh

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

The troubled foundation of St. Patrick’s in Rome, 1888

ROME — The foundation stone of St. Patrick’s Church in the Eternal City was laid during a critical period of Irish history and the eve of a low-point in the country’s relationship with the Vatican.

I stopped by the church, plain by Roman standards, as part of my ongoing project of visiting as many St. Patricks as possible. As it turned out, the church’s foundation date of 1 February 1888 (St. Brigid’s Day) also dovetailed with my interest in Ireland’s late 19th century nationalist struggles and land war.

St. Patrick’s Church, Rome, April 2017. Mosaic of St. Patrick below Celtic cross.

The morning of the foundation ceremony, a delegation of three archbishops, 10 bishops and 300 other pilgrims from Ireland, America and other nations with significant Irish immigrant populations met with Pope Leo XIII. The visitors gave the pope “a magnificent chalice of Irish workmanship,” a photo album of “sights, churches and principal monuments” of Dublin and a nearly £16,000 donation to the Vatican exchequer. The pontiff blessed the trowel to be used in that afternoon’s building site ceremony and handed each of the guests a coin commemorating the 50th anniversary of his priestly ordination.

The pope addressed the group in Latin, according to The Nation, which reproduced his text with an English translation. He assured the visitors that he had viewed Ireland “with paternal care” since the start of his pontificate 10 years earlier.

“We were moved by her many claims upon us, but most of all by the integrity of that Catholic faith which, established by the labors and the zeal of St. Patrick, was preserved by the unconquerable fortitude of your ancestors, and transmitted to you to be guarded as a sacred inheritance,” he said.

The mosaic above the sanctuary is by Rodolfo Villani and depicts St. Patrick converting the High King Laoghaire at Tara, using the shamrock to explain the Trinity. The banner UT CHRISTIANI ITA ET ROMANI SITIS (“Be ye Christians as those of the Roman Church”) — is from the writings of St. Patrick.

The pontiff also briefly discussed the “present state of affairs” in Ireland, noting that a year earlier he dispatched Archbishop Ignatius Persico to investigate the country’s troubles. At the time, tension between Irish tenant farmers and absentee landlords had been stoked by a protest strategy known as the Plan of Campaign, which sought to reduce rents by withholding payments. If tenants got evicted, the Plan called for peer-enforced social ostracism, or boycotting, to prevent others from leasing the land. Some Catholic clergy were tacitly supporting the movement by joining the simultaneous nationalist efforts to secure Irish political autonomy, called home rule.

Persico began his mission to Ireland in 1887 just as the Times of London published a sensational series of stories linking agrarian unrest to Irish leader Charles Steward Parnell. The prelate’s presence generated mixed reactions among the Irish hierarchy, according to their letters to Tobias Kirby, rector of the Pontifical Irish College, Rome, who acted as their representative to the Vatican. In July, Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin wrote that he was “very edified” by Persico’s mission. In September, Rev. J. Hassan of Londonderry said he was “ashamed of the cold reception” some gave the Vatican visitor. In October, Msgr. Bernard O’Reilly of Dublin worried that Persico’s report would be “unfavorable to Ireland” and complained he was “the wrong man to send.” The next day, Rev. M. Mooney of Cahir wrote he was delighted by the “genuine spark of Celtic spirit in his [Persico’s] very tone.”

As if to underscore the troubles in Ireland, boycotted Kerry farmer James Fitzmaurice was gunned down in a widely reported land-related murder a day before the February 1888 foundation ceremony. That may have been on the pope’s mind when he told the Irish delegation he ordered the Persico mission “that we may be aided by his report in ascertaining the actual condition of things, and the steps that in your interest it may be desirable to take.” The pontiff also suggested that he might help ease Ireland’s “difficulties” through his personal diplomacy, just as he diffused anti-Catholic tensions in Germany.

Back in Ireland, however, The Nation noted that there were “wide differences” between the situations in the two countries, and that a similar outcome was unlikely. “The German question was essentially a religious one; the Irish question is an essentially non-religious one. Nor is there in English politics any such commanding personage as Bismarck,” the paper wrote four days later.

Sanctuary statue of St. Patrick. The tabernacle is open because this photo was taken the morning of the Easter Vigil.

About 10 weeks after the St. Patrick’s foundation ceremony, Rome issued a Papal Rescript that condemned the Plan of Campaign and its associated violence and boycotting tactics. While Persico favored grassroots guidance by the Irish bishops, the decree reflected the top-down approach of the Vatican, which at least in part was trying to appease English Catholic elites and the conservative government in London, which soon opened a special commission on “Parnellism and Crime.”

The Irish bishops grumbled that the decree divided their loyalty to the pope with their ministry to the people. The directive also drew a harsh rebuke in the first issue of The Irish Catholic, the latest publishing endeavor of Timothy Daniel Sullivan, a Dublin-based MP who also owned The Nation. “We deplore that the Holy Office has been deceived into accepting as a description of the affairs of Ireland, one without any basis in fact,” the new weekly said in its 5 May editorial.

Two months later, Rome reinforced the rescript with a Papal Encyclical, Saepe Nos, which complained the original decree was “grievously perverted by means of forced interpretations.” The pontiff reminded his Irish readers that he had “carefully inquired” to “obtain full and reliable knowledge of the state of your affairs, and of the causes of popular discontent.” In other words, the Vatican was standing by its original orders against boycotting and the Plan. (In an aside early in the document, the pope wrote: “… within these past few months, when it was resolved to build a church in this city in honor of St. Patrick, the great Apostle of the Irish, We most warmly encouraged the undertaking, and We shall substantially aid it within Our resources.”)

The Irish hierarchy and populace only grew further enraged. By the end of 1888, 28 of 30 Irish bishops signed a letter to the pope stating that they could not enforce the decree without jeopardizing both his and their own authority in Ireland. The following year became “perhaps the worst period in the whole history of Irish relations with the Holy See.” The Irish bishops even balked at Vatican directives to hold special collections to help pay for building St. Patrick’s Church in Rome.

Lack of funds and other delays slowed completion of the church for 23 years. It finally opened on St. Patrick’s Day 1911, “in weather that was raw, and chill, and rainy, much resembling that of spring days in Ireland,” the Freeman’s Journal reported. Eight years after the death of Leo XIII, the Kerry People suggested the late pontiff “encouraged and most generously contributed” to the Irish-connected church. (The Nation folded 11 years earlier, and The Irish Catholic’s archive was not immediately available.)

Most of Ireland’s tenant-landlord disputes had been resolved by 1911, but an even more difficult revolutionary period was just about to begin. With it, there would be a new round of trouble between Irish nationalists and the Holy See.

NOTES in addition to material linked above:

  • Freeman’s Journal, 28 March, 1911, page 5.
  • Kerry People, 8 April 1911, page 9.
  • Larkin, Emmet: The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and the Fall of Parnell, 1888-1891 University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1979. “Worst period” quote on page 3, plus other background.
  • The Nation, 4 February 1888, page 11.
  • The Two Edged Sword.
  • This post was written and published in April 2017. In August 2017, St. Patrick’s became the national church of the United States in Rome.