Markievicz: A Most Outrageous Rebel

By Lindie Naughton

Countess Constance Markievicz - one of the most remarkable women in Irish history - was a revolutionary, a socialist and a feminist, as well as an artist and writer. A natural leader, "Madame," as she was known to thousands of Dubliners, took an active part in the 1916 Rising and was one of the few leaders to escape execution. Instead, she spent an arduous year in an English prison, surrounded by murderers, prostitutes and thieves. Later, during another stretch in prison, she would make history as the first woman elected to the British Houses of Parliament, and momentous event that is due to receive widespread commemoration at the time of its centenary in December 2018. Lindie Naughton's compelling biography sheds light on all facets of Markievicz's life - her privileged upbringing in County Sligo, her adventures as an art student in London and Paris, her marriage to an improbable Polish count, her political education, her several prison terms, and her emergence as one of the pivotal figures in early 20th century Britain and Ireland. Constance Markievicz, a woman with a huge heart, battled all her adult life to establish an Irish republic based on co-operation and equality for all. Her message is as relevant today as it was a century ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Release date: Sep 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785370847

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Prologue

On

Sunday, 30 April 1916, with the six-day Irish rebellion that became known as the Easter Rising almost over, a nurse called Elizabeth Farrell was driven to Grafton Street in Dublin by a British army officer. From there, she walked to the Royal College of Surgeons on St Stephen’s Green carrying a white flag and a surrender order.

Farrell went to the side door of the college and, when it opened, she asked for Commandant Mallin. Since he was sleeping, Farrell gave the surrender order to Countess Markievicz, his second-in-command and one of only two female officers in the Irish Citizen Army.

‘Surrender? We’ll never surrender!’ said the Countess, before waking Mallin. Despite her fighting words, there was no alternative but to surrender and so Mallin and Markievicz led the small group of exhausted rebels out of the college and on to the street, where they surrendered to Captain de Courcy Wheeler of the Kings’ Royal Rifle Corps. After smartly saluting the captain, Constance kissed her revolver before handing it over.

De Courcy Wheeler offered Constance transport to Dublin Castle, which she refused, preferring to march with Mallin and her comrades down Grafton Street and into Dame Street. By now, crowds were lining the streets, with many waving Union Jacks and celebrating the end of the six days of misery they had endured during an insurrection that had devastated their city.

On 4 May, Constance was tried for her part in the Rebellion and sentenced to be shot, a sentence that was commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds of her sex. By then, the swiftness and savagery of the British response to the insurrection was changing public opinion and the rebels were on their way to becoming revered as martyrs for the Irish cause.

After women were finally given the vote in 1918, Constance – from Holloway prison – would become the first woman in Britain or Ireland to be elected to the House of Commons and, later, only the second female cabinet minister anywhere in the world. In 1926, realising that the political posturings that followed 1916 were leading nowhere, she became a founding member of Fianna Fáil, supporting her friend Éamon de Valera.

She had come a long from way from her origins as a privileged member of the landlord class in Sligo, rejecting not only the ‘black English blood’ that ran through her veins, but throwing off the conventions of her class and her sex.

As any Jane Austen reader knows, a woman’s success or failure in life was entirely dependent on whether she found herself a husband, and any husband, however ugly or old, was better than none. The fight for women’s equality began with the arrival of convenient birth control. With her life no longer circumscribed by continuous child-bearing, women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had the time and energy to begin the fight for their rights to a proper education, for work and for the vote.

It would be a long, hard battle, and it is far from over today. Women in the public eye were viewed with suspicion. They were attention-seekers, derided as shrill and even hysterical. Their views could not be trusted, because – as everyone knew – women were flighty, unreliable and inconsistent.

That, certainly, was how Markievicz was seen. Begrudgers, such as Seán O’Casey, berated her for playing the revolutionary. Others, like James Connolly and Patrick Pearse, recognised her brilliance as an organiser and motivator. Her outstanding contribution to the fight for Irish freedom was the Fianna – a boy’s brigade formed with the specific purpose of training boys to take arms against the English. By the time of the Easter Rising, these boys were disciplined and organised young men, trained in the use of arms. Had the Fianna not been formed in 1909, there would have been no Volunteers in 1913 and no Rising in 1916, Pearse later said.

Ordinary Dubliners saw Constance for what she was – an immensely open-hearted and generous woman – and she won their lasting respect. When the woman they affectionately called ‘Madame’ died in 1927, they gave her one of the biggest funerals ever seen in Dublin. ‘Official’ Ireland stayed away.

She had died, officially of appendicitis, at the relatively early age of fifty-nine, worn out by too many hard battles and a succession of arduous jail stretches. Although she had famously avoided execution and lived for eleven years after the terrible events of 1916, she gave up her life for her country, as surely as her friends James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Tom Clarke and Francis Sheehy Skeffington.

Her vision of a kinder, better society, where all men and women were equal, where resources and wealth were shared, where no one starved or died of the cold, and where all children were cherished remains a worthy aspiration.

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CHAPTER ONE

Alien Class, Alien Race

When

Countess Markievicz was sentenced to death for her part in the 1916 Rebellion in Ireland, she risked putting half of Debrett’s into mourning – or so said her husband. Her social awareness, her generosity and her kindness were firmly rooted not only in her privileged background but in her native County Sligo. All her life she cursed the drop of ‘black English blood’ that ran through her veins. She was never to forget the great wrongs her ancestors had committed against the native Irish and, from the age of forty, making amends became her life’s work.

Her family had come to Ireland in Cromwellian times but, by the 1860s, when Constance Gore-Booth was born, its great days were numbered, along with those of the Ascendancy class in Ireland. At a time of rapid industrialisation and mechanisation, the Irish economy was stagnating and, since the Act of Union in 1800; it was closely tied to a rapacious British economy that saw Ireland purely as a market to be exploited.

When cheap manufactured goods from Britain flooded into Ireland, thousands of craftsmen, particularly textile workers, were left without work. At the same time, rural workers were hit hard by the rapid advances in agricultural machinery, which made farming less labour-intensive. With work scarce, those living on the land could barely feed their families, much less pay their rent or leave anything to their children. Unlike the rest of the United Kingdom, Ireland had few big industrial centres outside Belfast and Dublin and, with nowhere else to go, these two cities became magnets for impoverished families desperate for work. This situation was not helped by a growing population; with early marriage and large families the norm, the Irish population increased by 75 per cent between 1780 and 1821.

Even before the Great Famine of the mid-1840s, Irish men, women and children were starving; in some areas, infant mortality was a staggering 50 per cent. The steady stream of emigration began and, in the thirty years between 1815 and 1845, nearly a million Irish emigrants – twice the total for the preceding two hundred years – packed up their meagre possessions and went in search of the better life that newspaper articles and advertising promised in countries such as the USA, Canada and Australia. Later on, the land wars took their toll and, like other land-owners, the Gore-Booths had to work hard to make the estate pay. It was a troubled country to which the infant Constance returned after her birth in London in 1868; her grandfather’s cousin, Captain King, had been murdered during that year’s election campaign and Lissadell, the family home, was turned into a fortress, with windows sandbagged and guns mounted on the roof.

Sligo was solidly unionist, with a high proportion of Protestants in its population and four military barracks. Loyalists controlled business and commerce, forming the Sligo Association as early as 1688. William Butler Yeats described Sligo, home to his mother’s people, the Pollexfens, as a place where ‘everyone despised nationalists and Catholics’. When jobs were advertised, notices often baldly stated that ‘No Catholics need apply’. Meetings of the local Orange Order branch were held in Lissadell House.

You saw the landlords in their big demesnes, mostly of Norman or Saxon stock, walled in and aloof, an alien class, sprung from an alien race; then there were the prosperous farmers, mostly Protestants and with Scotch names, settled in snug farmsteads among the rich undulating hills and valleys, while hidden away among rocks on the bleak mountainsides, or soaking in the slime and ooze of the boglands or beside the Atlantic shore, where the grass is blasted yellow by the salt west wind, you find the dispossessed people of the old Gaelic race in their miserable cabins.

So wrote Constance in a 1923 article for Éire newspaper.

Her ancestors, the Gore family, had come to Ireland during the seventeenth century in the aftermath of the Nine Years’ War. When the English made their first major push to dominate Ireland, Sir Paul Gore, a successful soldier of fortune, was part of a cavalry troop led by the Earl of Essex, and was granted land in Donegal and at Ardtarmon on the shores of Drumcliff Bay, about two miles west of the present Lissadell House. The name Lissadill or Lissadell referred to the O’Daly hereditary poets, who had lived in the area since the twelfth century; the full name in Irish is Lios an Daill ui Dálaigh, meaning ‘O’Daly’s Court of the Blind’. Reminders of more ancient times included a round tower and carved high cross from the monastery founded by St Columcille in 574 at Drumcliff. The estate amounted to 32,000 acres spread over forty townlands in the parishes of Drumcliff and Rossinver.

In 1711, a marriage between Nathaniel Gore and Letitia Booth brought with it considerable estates in Manchester and Salford belonging to the Booth family. With this marriage, the Sligo family added ‘Booth’ to its surname. Constance may have inherited her vivacity from her wild and wilful great-great-grandmother. Legend has it that Letitia plunged to her death along with her coachman when she forced him to drive around the rim of the Derk of Knocklane, a fearsome semi-circular chasm with a sheer drop into the Atlantic Ocean about 200 metres below, located above the Yellow Strand about six kilometres to the west of the current Lissadell House. The wailing sound visitors hear over the chasm is reputed to be that of Letitia, the Banshee Bawn.

Around this time, Ardtarmon Castle burned down and the original Lissadell House was built close to the location of its current, more recent replacement. Robert Gore-Booth, Constance’s grandfather, was born in the original house on 25 August 1805 and, though still a boy, succeeded his father in 1814. At the age of twenty-one, he took over the estate at Lissadell, which was in bad shape. A tall man with a red beard, Robert was a Cambridge graduate who enjoyed the finer things in life, including gardening and playing his Stradivari cello, as well as hunting with horse and hound. He had become interested in architecture while travelling abroad and was determined to upgrade the Lissadell estate, using the income from the family holdings in England.

By 1833, he had doubled the size of the estate by acquiring land twenty miles to the south of Lissadell (including the town of Ballymote) for £130,000. This land was used for cattle grazing. Annual income from about 1,000 tenant farmers amounted to £15,000, which meant Sir Robert was considerably wealthier than most of his neighbours. About 300 of his tenants paid £4 a year each for a few acres of poor land, from which they scratched a paltry existence. The average yearly wage at the time for a farm labourer was between £15 and £18. Typically, any cash a tenant acquired went towards paying the rent, often to an absentee landlord living abroad in some splendour.

After the Act of Union abolished the regional parliament, the large estates did well, but little changed for the ordinary Irish and both the native Irish and the country’s administrators became passive and lethargic. The Industrial Revolution barely touched Ireland, although towards the end of the nineteenth century Belfast and the surrounding areas were allowed to develop heavy industry providing it did not interfere with profits on the larger island. For the majority, still living off the land, survival was a struggle and the dominance of the potato in the diet, favoured because it could feed an entire family from a small plot, was storing up problems for the future.

Between 1834 and 1835, Sir Robert began work on building a new and more splendid house at Lissadell. When, four months after coming into his inheritance, he had married Caroline King, daughter of Viscount Lorton, he received a marriage portion of £10,000, which he decided to put towards a new house. His wife died in childbirth soon after, but Sir Robert remained closely linked to the King family, with his sister Anne marrying Robert King in 1829. He had much admired the neo-classical style of Rockingham, his father-in-law Viscount Lorton’s home, overlooking Lough Key in Boyle, County Roscommon, which had been designed by John Nash.

In 1830, Sir Robert remarried; his bride was Caroline Goold, a renowned beauty. After the wedding, he commissioned the London architect Francis Goodwin to come up with a design for a new house; Goodwin had designed the town halls of Manchester and Salford. With the building works underway, Sir Robert and his wife embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe, collecting seventeenth-century Italian paintings and other items they would use to furnish their new home.

The house, two storeys over a basement with forty-eight rooms, was the last house built in Ireland in the Greek revival style. Standing at the end of a long avenue, its box-like exterior was relieved by a bay window the height of the building on its south side. Three large windows on each floor gave magnificent views of Knocknarea, the legendary burial place of Maeve, Queen of Connacht. Other rooms looked out on Sligo Bay and Ben Bulben. On the north facade was an unusual porte cochère entrance, large enough for vehicles to pass through; this Goodwin thought necessary because of the exposed position of the house.

Building materials included limestone from Ballysadare, the setting of Yeats’s ‘Salley Gardens’. Black Kilkenny marble was used for the floors, columns and staircase in the entrance hall, while ornate, Egyptian-style chimneypieces of Italian marble added grandeur to the other principal rooms. Family rooms were positioned on either side of a long gallery, supported by thick pillars and lit from above; the gallery contained an organ and Sir Robert’s art collection. Lighting for the house came from a local gasholder – Lissadell was the first house in Ireland lit by its own gas supply. In the basement, the servants’ quarters included a butler’s pantry, kitchen, bakery, wine cellar and china room, as well as sleeping quarters for the butler, the housekeeper and the maids. There was, however, no smoking room; Sir Robert abhorred the habit.

The setting was idyllic, as Constance recognised:

Behind the gray barrack-like house, ranges of mountains lay like a great row of sphinxes against the sky and shut us out from Ireland. Trees and glades sloped down to the bay, across which Knocknareagh rose, crowned by the great queen’s cairn. The bay slipped into the Atlantic, somewhere behind black cliffs, and the Atlantic was the end of the world. Brave fishing boats tempted the outskirts. But there it lay, impassable, unfathomable, incomprehensible, beyond might be Heaven or Tír na nÓg, for the farther away your eyes pierced the more it glittered and dazzled and broke up into coloured lights and blue mysteries.

Sir Robert maintained the family tradition of living in Ireland, and the rents he collected went back into the estate. As a working farm requiring energetic management and a big staff, Lissadell bustled with life. Because horse riding was so important to the estate’s management, Sir Robert built a riding school for his children and it was here that the infant Constance had her first riding lessons. Inspired by his travels, Sir Robert introduced many new ideas and innovations, such as the planting of hardy grasses near the seashore to save the land from the pummeling of the Atlantic Ocean. He experimented with harvesting oysters and used the vast quantities of seaweed that grew on the coast to help enrich the soil.

From the time he took over Lissadell, Sir Robert showed an acute awareness of the problems caused by the sizes of the leases taken out by his tenants; they were extremely small, for the most part, which made it difficult for tenants to survive and for him to collect a decent rent. The Irish tradition of subdividing land among the sons in a family exacerbated this problem. On his Boyle estate, Viscount Lorton, father of his first wife, had begun offering leases of no less than sixteen acres. Following his lead, Sir Robert started encouraging his bigger tenants to increase their holdings, a move that, at the very least, caused some misunderstanding, since he was under no obligation to look after the evicted tenants.

Compared to some of his neighbours, Sir Robert was considered a ‘good’ landlord, committed to the local community and serving as magistrate, grand juror and lieutenant of the county before his election as an MP following the Great Famine. His tenants were encouraged to drain their land, while slates were provided for roofs and timber for new houses. Each year, before 1 April, all tenants were required to whitewash their houses. Improvements were financed by a £4,000 loan fund from which tenants could borrow at a favourable rate.

For this reason, the controversy that arose following his acquisition of 8,780 acres in 1833 at the ‘Seven Cartrons’ in the townland of Ballygilgan, east of Lissadell, is somewhat surprising. Sir Robert was continuing his father’s work in expanding the demesne. He had planted 52,100 trees within the demesne and had closed an old public road on the perimeter of the estate, replacing it with a new public road farther north and west. When he acquired the large estate in Ballymote, he funded this purchase, like that of Ballygilgan, with the sale and mortgage of family property in Manchester.

At the time, the British colonies of Australia, South Africa and Canada, as well as the United States, were attempting to attract settlers from Britain and Ireland. The big ports of Liverpool, London and Glasgow and smaller ones at Limerick, Waterford, Dublin and Belfast never had it so busy, with good reason. Like many other landlords, Sir Robert considered emigration a possible solution to the chronic shortage of land and, following the famine of 1831, arranged for fifty-two families to emigrate to Quebec in Canada, most of them leaving holdings of no more than two acres. He paid each person £2 for disturbance, £4 for every acre of good land they left, and sea passage to Canada. His aim was to increase all holdings to at least five acres, just enough to sustain a family and provide him with a rent. He was to pay compensation of £196.58.04 to tenants for ‘giving up possession’ in 1834, and again in 1835. The few families opting to stay at home were given land elsewhere. He paid £273 in passage money to America in 1839 and a further £148 in 1841, as well as providing thousands of pounds to provision the ships.

The alternative version of the story suggests that about one hundred families were summarily cleared from their homes, mostly by Sir Robert’s agent, Captain George Dodwell, who had a reputation for ruthless evictions and chicanery. For those who chose to emigrate, a ship called the Pomano was – allegedly – chartered; the boat was not registered on any list and was in poor condition. It sank long before reaching its destination and all aboard were lost. A ballad was composed about the disaster.

The story of the Pomano remains controversial, especially since the stories about the disaster were collected many years after the alleged shipwreck. In the period 1833 to 1834, many ships sailed from Sligo Bay and Ballyshannon; a brig called the Zephyr made several voyages, as did another called Britannia. A registered ship called the Pomona sailed from London on 4 April 1834 and arrived in Quebec on 11 May; it – or a ship with a similar name – made regular journeys across the Atlantic after that, most notably one from Sligo to Quebec on 31 May 1839. The name Pomano and variations such as Pomono and Pomone were popular ships’ names and it could be that the Pomano story has become confused with the tragic story of the Pomona, which set sail for the USA from Liverpool on 27 April 1859 with 373 passengers and thirty-five crew on board, many of them from the Sligo area. Battling gale-force winds in the Irish Sea, it hit the Blackwater Bank off Wexford and quickly sank. Hundreds of bodies were washed ashore over the next few days and, of the 400 or so on board, only twenty-three survived. It remains the sixth worst shipping disaster to have occurred in Irish waters.

Compared to others, the Gore-Booths responded well when Ireland was devastated by the Great Famine of the mid-1840s. Sir Robert’s wife Caroline became a familiar figure locally, riding out on her pony with panniers filled with food. The British Liberal government had failed to take decisive action, blaming the widespread starvation on the irresponsibility and selfishness of the local landlords. Yet, under a clause enacted by the British government, tenants who owned more than a quarter acre of land were not eligible for relief.

Between 1845 and 1851, the population of Ireland dropped from about eight million to just over six million. A million died and many more left in a wave of mass emigration, mostly for North America. By the time of the Easter Rising in 1916, some twenty million Americans counted themselves as Irish.

During this terrible time, Sir Robert and his family fed their remaining tenants as best they could. With the help of his ship-owning brother, Henry, Sir Robert was credited with importing Indian corn directly from America in 1847 at a cost of almost £35,000; it is also alleged that he mortgaged the Lissadell estate for £50,000 to help with famine relief. However, these claims are disputed. The records show that the £50,000 from the mortgage went not on famine relief but to pay off the balance of the Ballymote purchase, leaving the estate debt-free; Sir Robert argued that this allowed him to continue with famine relief schemes and work programmes. The Indian corn he imported was a commercial transaction: he bought it for £13 to £14 per ton and sold it for £15 to £16 per ton.

Sir Robert was alleged to have made more clearances from the September of 1849, with the eviction of thirty families from Lissadell. When they returned to the broken-down walls for shelter, they were arrested and brought before the magistrate at Teesan Court just outside Sligo town, and released only when they agreed to leave the land. Between 1847 and 1851, over 30,000 people emigrated through Sligo port. Allegations of forced emigration would continue to haunt Sir Robert, who was forced to defend himself before a House of Lords Select Committee in 1848. In his notes for this hearing, he recorded that ‘eighteen families got farms on my estate elsewhere and many others were offered land at Ballintrillick but preferred going to America’. In 1847, he had sponsored the emigration of about a thousand to North America, which some have seen as ‘dumping’ the problem on the colonies. One of the ships used was the Æolus, owned by his brother Henry, who was importing Canadian timber to Scotland at the time.

A report from the Government Emigration Agent at St John, New Brunswick, paints a stark picture. Of the large number of those who arrived on the Æolus, 500 of them ‘exported by their landlord Sir Robert Gore-Booth’ would become ‘a public charge, from their inability to work, and utter destitution’. The agent was not impressed: ‘… this shovelling of helpless paupers, without any provision for them here, if continued, will inflict very serious injury on this colony’. He recommended that the treatment of the passengers ‘should, without delay, be noticed and condemned’. Not everyone agreed with this harsh judgement. In a note of thanks from passengers on the Æolus who had safely arrived in St John, Sir Robert is described as ‘always kind to his tenants’.

The Famine proved a turning point in Anglo-Irish relations. A landlord class that considered itself the representatives of the hated Crown could hardly expect loyalty from its Irish tenants. They had not helped their cause by distancing themselves from their communities, shipping their boys off to public schools in England and their daughters to the London court where, with luck, they would acquire an English husband. Most ignored Irish culture and history and spoke with a peculiar ‘West British’ accent all their own.

After the famine eased, a sadly shrunken population found it easier to survive. With good prices paid for farm animals and dairy products, rents became easier to pay. In 1850, Sir Robert was elected to the House of Commons and he held the seat until his death in 1876, buying 7 Buckingham Gate, close to Buckingham Palace, as his London residence. Despite the campaign of vilification when he stood for re-election in 1852, he topped the poll, assuring the Sligo electors of his support for tenants’ rights. He had an undistinguished record at Westminster, with only five mentions in Hansard over twenty-six years in the Commons; his interests were always more local.

By 1871, his second son, Henry, born in 1843, had taken over the management of the Lissadell estate following the death of Sir Robert’s land agent. He would inherit the estate when Sir Robert died in 1876. On 29 October 1861, Robert, the older brother and heir, had died aged thirty. There are two accounts of his death: one that he succumbed in Madeira from the after-effects of fighting with the 4th Light Dragoons in the Crimean War; the second that he died in a boating accident near his home. Earlier, in September 1848, Robert had narrowly escaped death after a boating accident on Drumcliff Bay, in which Sir Robert’s brother-in-law Francis Goold had drowned; these two incidents may have become confused. What appears to be true is that he left a young wife who stayed on at Lissadell until her second marriage.

On 27 April 1867, Henry married Georgina Mary Hill of Tickhill Castle in Yorkshire, a granddaughter of the Earl of Scarborough. Through this marriage, the Gore-Booths developed family links with Baron Bolton, the Earl of Bradford, the Marquess of Zetland and the Duke of Westminster.

A year later, on 30 April 1868, Constance Georgine was born at 7 Buckingham Gate, the family’s London home. She was followed by a son, Josslyn, in February 1869 and by Eva in 1870. In 1874, a third daughter, Mabel, was born and, in 1878, a second son, Mordaunt.

After taking over the management of the estate, Henry had introduced accounts and book-keeping practices unusual for the time, as well as setting out a fair table of rents. The rents he charged were below those recommended by Griffith’s valuation; his tenants paid between twelve and fifteen shillings an acre. This compared to the forty shillings – plus extra for the right to gather seaweed – charged by the neighbouring Ballyconnell estate. Many of the tenants supplemented their income by working on the Lissadell farm, in the wood or garden. In the days when few people travelled far, Lissadell was the centre of their universe and it was to Sir Henry that they came when they needed advice on family problems, on finalising wills or on marriage settlements. When lightning struck the roof of the nearby Maugherow Catholic church, Sir Henry paid for the repairs.

Despite his dedication to the estate, Sir Henry, like his father before him, was frustrated by the small size of the holdings, which could barely feed the families living on them. He escaped these day-to-day frustrations of running the estate as often as he could, leaving it in the capable hands of his wife, Lady Georgina. Sir Henry was a keen amateur scientist, explorer and sailor, having developed an interest in boats when he used to sail around Sligo Bay with his older brother Robert in a yacht called Minna. Thomas Kilgallon, who later gained a formidable reputation as butler at Lissadell, had joined the staff at the estate and helped the brothers repair and maintain the boat. While at home, Sir Henry loved to hunt, shoot and fish and had even ventured farther, spending three summers sailing and fishing in the icy waters of the Arctic as a young man. In 1873, he sailed with a friend as far north as Spitsbergen, the traditional starting point for expeditions to the North Pole and, in 1879, he joined Captain A.H. Markham on the Norwegian schooner Isbjorn for a journey around the Barents and Kara Seas, an area then opening up for the first time. For this voyage, Sir Henry received the thanks of the Royal Geographical Society.

With Thomas Kilgallon, Sir Henry would sail his own forty-foot ketch, the Kara, on a voyage to rescue a friend, Benjamin Leigh Smith, who was marooned in Franz Josef Land in 1882. The Kara was purpose-built for the Arctic with stout cross-beams and steel plates to help it withstand the pressure of the shifting ice floes. After sailing from Tromso in Norway on 4 July, they found Smith alive and well at the Matochkin Shar where the ice had crushed his ship.

Despite the best efforts of his wife – who had an artificial lake built at Lissadell to provide him with fish – Sir Henry would continue to voyage for the next fifteen years. Packed into glass cases in Lissadell were the souvenirs of those adventures: a variety of birds, a great salmon, a bear that had nearly killed Kilgallon, walrus tusks and the skull of a bottle-nosed whale. Constance grew up with these souvenirs and, according to her stepson Staskou, regarded her father as the ‘beau idéal’.

Although a man of great energy, Sir Henry was no politician. In spite of this, he dutifully played his part in the local community, serving on juries, presiding over the annual agricultural show and spending many years on the board of guardians for Sligo. He was happy to accept the status quo. In the gilded world of the Anglo-Irish, it was the unscrupulous landlords who gave the system a bad name; the system itself was neither questioned nor discussed.

In the winter of 1879, when Constance was twelve, famine returned to Ireland after thirty years and many starving tenants were evicted. Sir Henry reduced rents and, with his wife and the three older children, he visited all his tenants, providing food, clothing and even hay for bedding. If any tenants were forced into the workhouse, he would keep their cabins safe for them. He maintained that this was all he could do and stated that there were only six evictions at Lissadell, all of them of ‘idlers who would neither work nor pay’. His attitude may have been paternalistic, but his children, especially the older three, grew up with a solid sense of their obligations to society. Still, times were changing.

Earlier in 1879, in neighbouring County Mayo, Michael Davitt had begun a campaign for land reform that would result in the Irish National Land League. In that year alone, over 6,000 tenants were evicted from their homes; a year later the figure stood at 10,457 and, in the four years following, 23,000 were forced from their homes. Protesters inevitably ended up in jail.

The Land League, led by Charles Stewart Parnell, a charismatic young Protestant landlord from County Wicklow, held its first conference in October 1879. The Land League’s aims were simple: they would defend tenants threatened with eviction and would force the government to subsidise tenant buy-outs of their land. They would organise and create a fuss – a philosophy later embraced wholeheartedly by Constance Gore-Booth.

The Land League’s first meeting in County Sligo took place at Gurteen, part of the Gore-Booth estate, on 2 November 1879 and attracted 8,000 men and women. Michael Davitt was one of the speakers, along with James Daly, a newspaper owner, and James Boyce, a barrister. All three were subsequently arrested for sedition. ‘The Gurteen Three’ returned to Sligo on 25 November for their trial, when all charges were dropped.

In the land war of 1879 to 1892, the tenant farmers of Ireland, resentful of their ‘foreign’ landlords, showed their defiance for the first time. A new word was added to the English language when Captain Boycott of Lough Mask House, County Mayo, was ostracised for his opposition to the Land League. At times, the agitation erupted into violence and outrage, with ordinary law ceasing to function; the occasional estate agent or landlord was shot. Even Sir Henry, who, as a ‘good’ landlord, was invited to attend a Land League ‘Monster Meeting’ in Ballymote in 1880, received threatening letters from one of the many secret societies that flourished at the time.

The Land League, like Sinn Féin later on, set up its own courts and government and, with Davitt preaching that women should take over while men were in jail, the Ladies’ Land League was founded, with his sister, Anna Parnell, as secretary. When the Land Act was finally passed in the House of Commons in 1881, it guaranteed the three Fs: fair rent, fixity of tenure and freedom of sale. That was not enough for Charles Parnell and the Land League and they opposed the bill on the grounds that Irish tenants should not have to pay rent to foreign-based, absentee landowners. Parnell was arrested and the Land League declared a rent strike, with Anna and the Ladies’ Land League helping keep the organisation active. For the first time, women became involved in public life, attending mass meetings and taking over from their fathers, brothers and husbands. This was often to the mortification of the men, who feared ridicule for their reliance on mere women. Under the Coercion Act, Parnell and other leaders were arrested in October 1881, and both the Land League and the Ladies’ Land League were banned. The women were arrested under statutes designed to curb prostitution, one of the few existing laws relating to women.

British political leaders had realised that the landlord system could no longer be defended and, under the Kilmainham Treaty of March 1882, which was agreed between the British Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, and Parnell, prisoners were released and the agitation came to an end. The more moderate Irish National League was founded without a women’s section. By then, Sir Henry was remarking that his tenants were less trustworthy and also less friendly. Yet at Lissadell, in January 1887, a meeting of Sir Henry’s tenants decided to go on paying rent to the estate since ‘Sir Henry always held at heart the welfare of the people’.

The troubles were by no means over. After Parnell was released, Lord Frederick Cavendish was sent to Ireland as Chief Secretary to inaugurate what everyone hoped would be a new period of peaceful co-operation. On 6 May 1882, the day of his arrival, while walking in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Cavendish and his under-secretary, Thomas Henry Burke, were murdered by members of ‘The Invincibles’, a radical splinter group from the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Although Parnell condemned the murders, Gladstone immediately passed a new Coercion Act. Three days later, despite much opposition, he brought in the Arrears Bill that allowed tenants of land worth less than £30 a year to cancel their arrears. The number of agrarian crimes dropped.

Parnell saw the ending of landlordism as a step towards the overthrow of English rule in Ireland. In the general election of 1885, the Irish National League won every seat except East Ulster and Dublin University. When re-elected, Gladstone, recognising ‘the fixed desire of the nation’, put forward the first Home Rule Bill in 1886. It was greeted with howls of disapproval by the Conservatives, as well as by the aristocratic landlords of the Liberal Party, who saw it as a betrayal of the British Empire.

The bill was defeated and Gladstone lost office in the ensuing general election, the first to be fought in Britain on the Home Rule question and a turning point in Britain’s relations with Ireland. Supporting Home Rule did not help the Liberal cause – in the next twenty years, the Liberals